I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies. My posture is consciously congruent to the shape of my hard chair.
This is a cold room in University Administration, wood-walled, Remington-hung, double-windowed against the November heat,
insulated from Administrative sounds by the reception area outside, at which Uncle Charles, Mr. deLint and I were lately received.
I am in here.
Three faces have resolved into place above summer-weight sportcoats and half-Windsors across a polished pine conference
table shiny with the spidered light of an Arizona noon. These are three Deans — of Admissions, Academic Affairs, Athletic
Affairs. I do not know which face belongs to whom.
I believe I appear neutral, maybe even pleasant, though I've been coached to err on the side of neutrality and not attempt what
would feel to me like a pleasant expression or smile.
I have committed to crossing my legs I hope carefully, ankle on knee, hands together in the lap of my slacks. My fingers are
mated into a mirrored series of what manifests, to me, as the letter X. The interview room's other personnel include: the
University's Director of Composition, its varsity tennis coach, and Academy prorector Mr. A. deLint. C.T. is beside me; the others
sit, stand and stand, respectively, at the periphery of my focus. The tennis coach jingles pocket-change. There is something
vaguely digestive about the room's odor. The high-traction sole of my complimentary Nike sneaker runs parallel to the wobbling
loafer of my mother's half-brother, here in his capacity as Headmaster, sitting in the chair to what I hope is my immediate right,
also facing Deans.
The Dean at left, a lean yellowish man whose fixed smile nevertheless has the impermanent quality of something stamped
into uncooperative material, is a personality-type I've come lately to appreciate, the type who delays need of any response from
me by relating my side of the story for me, to me. Passed a packet of computer-sheets by the shaggy lion of a Dean at center, he is
speaking more or less to these pages, smiling down.
'You are Harold Incandenza, eighteen, date of secondary-school graduation approximately one month from now, attending the
Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, Massachusetts, a boarding school, where you reside.' His reading glasses are rectangular, courtshaped, the sidelines at top and bottom. 'You are, according to Coach White and Dean [unintelligible], a regionally, nationally,
and continentally ranked junior tennis player, a potential O.N.A.N.C.A.A. athlete of substantial promise, recruited by Coach
White via correspondence with Dr. Tavis here commencing .. . February of this year.' The top page is removed and brought
around neatly to the bottom of the sheaf, at intervals. 'You have been in residence at the Enfield Tennis Academy since age
seven.’
I am debating whether to risk scratching the right side of my jaw, where there is a wen.
'Coach White informs our offices that he holds the Enfield Tennis Academy's program and achievements in high regard, that
the University of Arizona tennis squad has profited from the prior matriculation of several former E.T.A. alumni, one of whom
was one Mr. Aubrey F. deLint, who appears also to be with you here today. Coach White and his staff have given us —’
The yellow administrator's usage is on the whole undistinguished, though I have to admit he's made himself understood. The
Director of Composition seems to have more than the normal number of eyebrows. The Dean at right is looking at my face a bit
strangely.
Uncle Charles is saying that though he can anticipate that the Deans might be predisposed to weigh what he avers as coming
from his possible appearance as a kind of cheerleader for E.T.A., he can assure the assembled Deans that all this is true, and that
the Academy has presently in residence no fewer than a third of the continent's top thirty juniors, in age brackets all across the
board, and that I here, who go by 'Hal,' usually, am 'right up there among the very cream.' Right and center Deans smile
professionally; the heads of deLint and the coach incline as the Dean at left clears his throat:
'— belief that you could well make, even as a freshman, a real contribution to this University's varsity tennis program. We are
pleased,' he either says or reads, removing a page, 'that a competition of some major sort here has brought you down and given us
the chance to sit down and chat together about your application and potential recruitment and matriculation and scholarship.’
'I've been asked to add that Hal here is seeded third, Boys' 18-and-Under Singles, in the prestigious WhataBurger Southwest
Junior Invitational out at the Randolph Tennis Center —' says what I infer is Athletic Affairs, his cocked head showing a freckled
scalp.
'Out at Randolph Park, near the outstanding El Con Marriott,' C.T. inserts, 'a venue the whole contingent's been vocal about
finding absolutely top-hole thus far, which —’
'Just so, Chuck, and that according to Chuck here Hal has already justified his seed, he's reached the semifinals as of this
morning's apparently impressive win, and that he'll be playing out at the Center again tomorrow, against the winner of a
quarterfinal game tonight, and so will be playing tomorrow at I believe scheduled for 0830 —’
'Try to get under way before the godawful heat out there. Though of course a dry heat.’
'— and has apparently already qualified for this winter's Continental Indoors, up in Edmonton, Kirk tells me —' cocking
further to look up and left at the varsity coach, whose smile's teeth are radiant against a violent sunburn — 'Which is something
indeed.' He smiles, looking at me. 'Did we get all that right Hal.’
C.T. has crossed his arms casually; their triceps' flesh is webbed with mottle in the air-conditioned sunlight. 'You sure did.
Bill.' He smiles. The two halves of his mustache never quite match. 'And let me say if I may that Hal's excited, excited to be
invited for the third year running to the Invitational again, to be back here in a community he has real affection for, to visit with
your alumni and coaching staff, to have already justified his high seed in this week's not unstiff competition, to as they say still be
in it without the fat woman in the Viking hat having sung, so to speak, but of course most of all to have a chance to meet you
gentlemen and have a look at the facilities here. Everything here is absolutely top-slot, from what he's seen.’
There is a silence. DeLint shifts his back against the room's panelling and recenters his weight. My uncle beams and 
straightens a straight watchband. 62.5% of the room's faces are directed my way, pleasantly expectant. My chest bumps like a
dryer with shoes in it. I compose what I project will be seen as a smile. I turn this way and that, slightly, sort of directing the
expression to everyone in the room.
There is a new silence. The yellow Dean's eyebrows go circumflex. The two other Deans look to the Director of Composition.
The tennis coach has moved to stand at the broad window, feeling at the back of his crewcut. Uncle Charles strokes the forearm
above his watch. Sharp curved palm-shadows move slightly over the pine table's shine, the one head's shadow a black moon.
'Is Hal all right, Chuck?' Athletic Affairs asks. 'Hal just seemed to ... well, grimace. Is he in pain? Are you in pain, son?’
'Hal's right as rain,' smiles my uncle, soothing the air with a casual hand. 'Just a bit of a let's call it maybe a facial tic, slightly,
at all the adrenaline of being here on your impressive campus, justifying his seed so far without dropping a set, receiving that
official written offer of not only waivers but a living allowance from Coach White here, on Pac 10 letterhead, being ready in all
probability to sign a National Letter of Intent right here and now this very day, he's indicated to me.' C.T. looks to me, his look
horribly mild. I do the safe thing, relaxing every muscle in my face, emptying out all expression. I stare carefully into the
Kekuléan knot of the middle Dean's necktie.
My silent response to the expectant silence begins to affect the air of the room, the bits of dust and sportcoat-lint stirred
around by the AC's vents dancing jaggedly in the slanted plane of windowlight, the air over the table like the sparkling space just
above a fresh-poured seltzer. The coach, in a slight accent neither British nor Australian, is telling C.T. that the whole applicationinterface process, while usually just a pleasant formality, is probably best accentuated by letting the applicant speak up for
himself. Right and center Deans have inclined together in soft conference, forming a kind of tepee of skin and hair. I presume it's
probably facilitate that the tennis coach mistook for accentuate, though accelerate, while clunkier than facilitate, is from a phonetic
perspective more sensible, as a mistake. The Dean with the flat yellow face has leaned forward, his lips drawn back from his teeth
in what I see as concern. His hands come together on the conference table's surface. His own fingers look like they mate as my
own four-X series dissolves and I hold tight to the sides of my chair.
We need candidly to chat re potential problems with my application, they and I, he is beginning to say. He makes a reference
to candor and its value.
'The issues my office faces with the application materials on file from you, Hal, involve some test scores.' He glances down at
a colorful sheet of standardized scores in the trench his arms have made. 'The Admissions staff is looking at standardized test
scores from you that are, as I'm sure you know and can explain, are, shall we say ... subnormal.' I'm to explain.
It's clear that this really pretty sincere yellow Dean at left is Admissions. And surely the little aviarian figure at right is
Athletics, then, because the facial creases of the shaggy middle Dean are now pursed in a kind of distanced affront, an I'm-eatingsomething-that-makes-me-really-appreciate-the-presence-of-whatever-I'm-drinking-along-with-it look that spells professionally
Academic reservations. An uncomplicated loyalty to standards, then, at center. My uncle looks to Athletics as if puzzled. He shifts
slightly in his chair.
The incongruity between Admissions's hand- and face-color is almost wild. '—verbal scores that are just quite a bit closer to
zero than we're comfortable with, as against a secondary-school transcript from the institution where both your mother and her
brother are administrators —' reading directly out of the sheaf inside his arms' ellipse — 'that this past year, yes, has fallen off a
bit, but by the word I mean "fallen off" to outstanding from three previous years of frankly incredible.’
'Off the charts.’
'Most institutions do not even have grades of A with multiple pluses after it,' says the Director of Composition, his expression
impossible to interpret.
'This kind of ... how shall I put it... incongruity,' Admissions says, his expression frank and concerned, 'I've got to tell you
sends up a red flag of potential concern during the admissions process.’
'We thus invite you to explain the appearance of incongruity if not outright shenanigans.' Students has a tiny piping voice
that's absurd coming out of a face this big.
'Surely by incredible you meant very very very impressive, as opposed to literally quote "incredible," surely,' says C.T.,
seeming to watch the coach at the window massaging the back of his neck. The huge window gives out on nothing more than
dazzling sunlight and cracked earth with heat-shimmers over it.
'Then there is before us the matter of not the required two but nine separate application essays, some of which of nearly
monograph-length, each without exception being —' different sheet — 'the adjective various evalua-tors used was quote "stellar"
—’
Dir. of Comp.: 'I made in my assessment deliberate use of lapidary and effete.’
'— but in areas and with titles, I'm sure you recall quite well, Hal: "Neoclassical Assumptions in Contemporary Prescriptive
Grammar," "The Implications of Post-Fourier Transformations for a Holographically Mimetic Cinema," "The Emergence of
Heroic Stasis in Broadcast Entertainment" —’
' "Montague Grammar and the Semantics of Physical Modality"?’
' "A Man Who Began to Suspect He Was Made of Glass"?’
' "Tertiary Symbolism in Justinian Erotica"?’
Now showing broad expanses of recessed gum. 'Suffice to say that there's some frank and candid concern about the recipient
of these unfortunate test scores, though perhaps explainable test scores, being these essays' sole individual author.’
'I'm not sure Hal's sure just what's being implied here,' my uncle says. The Dean at center is fingering his lapels as he
interprets distasteful computed data.
'What the University is saying here is that from a strictly academic point of view there are admission problems that Hal needs
to try to help us iron out. A matriculant's first role at the University is and must be as a student. We couldn't admit a student we
have reason to suspect can't cut the mustard, no matter how much of an asset he might be on the field.’
'Dean Sawyer means the court, of course, Chuck,' Athletic Affairs says, head severely cocked so he's including the White
person behind him in the address somehow. 'Not to mention O.N.A.N.C.A.A. regulations and investigators always snuffling
around for some sort of whiff of the smell of impropriety.’ 
The varsity tennis coach looks at his own watch.
'Assuming these board scores are accurate reflectors of true capacity in this case,' Academic Affairs says, his high voice
serious and sotto, still looking at the file before him as if it were a plate of something bad, Til tell you right now my opinion is it
wouldn't be fair. It wouldn't be fair to the other applicants. Wouldn't be fair to the University community.' He looks at me. 'And
it'd be especially unfair to Hal himself. Admitting a boy we see as simply an athletic asset would amount to just using that boy.
We're under myriad scrutiny to make sure we're not using anybody. Your board results, son, indicate that we could be accused of
using you.’
Uncle Charles is asking Coach White to ask the Dean of Athletic Affairs whether the weather over scores would be as heavy
if I were, say, a revenue-raising football prodigy. The familiar panic at feeling misperceived is rising, and my chest bumps and
thuds. I expend energy on remaining utterly silent in my chair, empty, my eyes two great pale zeros. People have promised to get
me through this.
Uncle C.T., though, has the pinched look of the cornered. His voice takes on an odd timbre when he's cornered, as if he were
shouting as he receded. 'Hal's grades at E.T.A., which is I should stress an Academy, not simply a camp or factory, accredited by
both the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the North American Sports Academy Association, it's focused on the total needs of
the player and student, founded by a towering intellectual figure whom I hardly need name, here, and based by him on the
rigorous Oxbridge Quadrivium-Trivium curricular model, a school fully staffed and equipped, by a fully certified staff, should
show that my nephew here can cut just about any Pac 10 mustard that needs cutting, and that —’
DeLint is moving toward the tennis coach, who is shaking his head.
'— would be able to see a distinct flavor of minor-sport prejudice about this whole thing,' C.T. says, crossing and recrossing
his legs as I listen, composed and staring.
The room's carbonated silence is now hostile. T think it's time to let the actual applicant himself speak out on his own behalf,'
Academic Affairs says very quietly. 'This seems somehow impossible with you here, sir.’
Athletics smiles tiredly under a hand that massages the bridge of his nose. 'Maybe you'd excuse us for a moment and wait
outside, Chuck.’
'Coach White could accompany Mr. Tavis and his associate out to reception,' the yellow Dean says, smiling into my
unfocused eyes.
'— led to believe this had all been ironed out in advance, from the —' C.T. is saying as he and deLint are shown to the door.
The tennis coach extends a hypertrophied arm. Athletics says 'We're all friends and colleagues here.’
This is not working out. It strikes me that exit signs would look to a native speaker of Latin like red-lit signs that say HE
leaves. I would yield to the urge to bolt for the door ahead of them if I could know that bolting for the door is what the men in this
room would see. DeLint is murmuring something to the tennis coach. Sounds of keyboards, phone consoles as the door is briefly
opened, then firmly shut. I am alone among administrative heads.
'— offense intended to anyone,' Athletic Affairs is saying, his sportcoat tan and his necktie insigniated in tiny print — 'beyond
just physical abilities out there in play, which believe me we respect, want, believe me.’
'— question about it we wouldn't be so anxious to chat with you directly, see?’
'— that we've known in processing several prior applications through Coach White's office that the Enfield School is
operated, however impressively, by close relations of first your brother, who I can still remember the way White's predecessor
Maury Klamkin wooed that kid, so that grades' objectivity can be all too easily called into question —’
'By whomsoever's calling — N.A.A.U.P., ill-willed Pac 10 programs, O.N.A.N.C.A.A. —’
The essays are old ones, yes, but they are mine; de moi. But they are, yes, old, not quite on the application's instructed subject
of Most Meaningful Educational Experience Ever. If I'd done you one from the last year, it would look to you like some sort of
infant's random stabs on a keyboard, and to you, who use whomsoever as a subject. And in this new smaller company, the
Director of Composition seems abruptly to have actuated, emerged as both the Alpha of the pack here and way more effeminate
than he'd seemed at first, standing hip-shot with a hand on his waist, walking with a roll to his shoulders, jingling change as he
pulls up his pants as he slides into the chair still warm from C.T.'s bottom, crossing his legs in a way that inclines him well into
my personal space, so that I can see multiple eyebrow-tics and capillary webs in the oysters below his eyes and smell fabricsoftener and the remains of a breath-mint turned sour.
'. . . a bright, solid, but very shy boy, we know about your being very shy, Kirk White's told us what your athletically built if
rather stand-offish younger instructor told him,' the Director says softly, cupping what I feel to be a hand over my sportcoat's
biceps (surely not), 'who simply needs to swallow hard and trust and tell his side of the story to these gentlemen who bear no
maliciousness none at all but are doing our jobs and trying to look out for everyone's interests at the same time.’
I can picture deLint and White sitting with their elbows on their knees in the defecatory posture of all athletes at rest, deLint
staring at his huge thumbs, while C.T. in the reception area paces in a tight ellipse, speaking into his portable phone. I have been
coached for this like a Don before a RICO hearing. A neutral and affectless silence. The sort of all-defensive game Schtitt used to
have me play: the best defense: let everything bounce off you; do nothing. I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made
could be what you hear.
Athletics with his head out from under his wing: '— to avoid admission procedures that could be seen as primarily athleticsoriented. It could be a mess, son.’
'Bill means the appearance, not necessarily the real true facts of the matter, which you alone can fill in,' says the Director of
Composition.
'— the appearance of the high athletic ranking, the subnormal scores, the over-academic essays, the incredible grades
vortexing out of what could be seen as a nepotistic situation.’
The yellow Dean has leaned so far forward that his tie is going to have a horizontal dent from the table-edge, his face sallow
and kindly and no-shit-whatever:
'Look here, Mr. Incandenza, Hal, please just explain to me why we couldn't be accused of using you, son. Why nobody could 
come and say to us, why, look here, University of Arizona, here you are using a boy for just his body, a boy so shy and withdrawn
he won't speak up for himself, a jock with doctored marks and a store-bought application.’
The Brewster's-Angle light of the tabletop appears as a rose flush behind my closed lids. I cannot make myself understood. 'I
am not just a jock,' I say slowly. Distinctly. 'My transcript for the last year might have been dickied a bit, maybe, but that was to
get me over a rough spot. The grades prior to that are de moi.' My eyes are closed; the room is silent. 'I cannot make myself
understood, now.' I am speaking slowly and distinctly. 'Call it something I ate.’
It's funny what you don't recall. Our first home, in the suburb of Weston, which I barely remember — my eldest brother Orin
says he can remember being in the home's backyard with our mother in the early spring, helping the Moms till some sort of garden
out of the cold yard. March or early April. The garden's area was a rough rectangle laid out with Popsicle sticks and twine. Orin
was removing rocks and hard clods from the Moms's path as she worked the rented Rototiller, a wheelbarrow-shaped, gas-driven
thing that roared and snorted and bucked and he remembers seemed to propel the Moms rather than vice versa, the Moms very tall
and having to stoop painfully to hold on, her feet leaving drunken prints in the tilled earth. He remembers that in the middle of the
tilling I came tear-assing out the door and into the backyard wearing some sort of fuzzy red Pooh-wear, crying, holding out
something he said was really unpleasant-looking in my upturned palm. He says I was around five and crying and was vividly red
in the cold spring air. I was saying something over and over; he couldn't make it out until our mother saw me and shut down the
tiller, ears ringing, and came over to see what I was holding out. This turned out to have been a large patch of mold — Orin posits
from some dark corner of the Weston home's basement, which was warm from the furnace and flooded every spring. The patch
itself he describes as horrific: darkly green, glossy, vaguely hirsute, speckled with parasitic fungal points of yellow, orange, red.
Worse, they could see that the patch looked oddly incomplete, gnawed-on; and some of the nauseous stuff was smeared around
my open mouth. 'I ate this,' was what I was saying. I held the patch out to the Moms, who had her contacts out for the dirty work,
and at first, bending way down, saw only her crying child, hand out, proffering; and in that most maternal of reflexes she, who
feared and loathed more than anything spoilage and filth, reached to take whatever her baby held out — as in how many used
heavy Kleenex, spit-back candies, wads of chewed-out gum in how many theaters, airports, backseats, tournament lounges? O.
stood there, he says, hefting a cold clod, playing with the Velcro on his puffy coat, watching as the Moms, bent way down to me,
hand reaching, her lowering face with its presbyopic squint, suddenly stopped, froze, beginning to I.D. what it was I held out,
countenancing evidence of oral contact with same. He remembers her face as past describing. Her outstretched hand, still
Rototrembling, hung in the air before mine.
'I ate this,' I said.
'Pardon me?’
O. says he can only remember (sic) saying something caustic as he lim-boed a crick out of his back. He says he must have felt
a terrible impending anxiety. The Moms refused ever even to go into the damp basement. I had stopped crying, he remembers, and
simply stood there, the size and shape of a hydrant, in red PJ's with attached feet, holding out the mold, seriously, like the report of
some kind of audit.
O. says his memory diverges at this point, probably as a result of anxiety. In his first memory, the Moms's path around the
yard is a broad circle of hysteria:
'God!' she calls out.
'Help! My son ate this!' she yells in Orin's second and more fleshed-out recollection, yelling it over and over, holding the
speckled patch aloft in a pincer of fingers, running around and around the garden's rectangle while O. gaped at his first real sight
of adult hysteria. Suburban neighbors' heads appeared in windows and over the fences, looking. O. remembers me tripping over
the garden's laid-out twine, getting up dirty, crying, trying to follow.
'God! Help! My son ate this! Help!' she kept yelling, running a tight pattern just inside the square of string; and my brother
Orin remembers noting how even in hysterical trauma her flight-lines were plumb, her footprints Native-American-straight, her
turns, inside the ideogram of string, crisp and martial, crying 'My son ate this! Help!' and lapping me twice before the memory
recedes.
'My application's not bought,' I am telling them, calling into the darkness of the red cave that opens out before closed eyes. 'I
am not just a boy who plays tennis. I have an intricate history. Experiences and feelings. I'm complex.
'I read,' I say. 'I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out
spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it." My instincts concerning syntax and
mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with due respect.
'But it transcends the mechanics. I'm not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could,
if you'd let me, talk and talk. Let's talk about anything. I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated. I
believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist. I believe Hobbes is just Rousseau in a dark mirror. I believe, with
Hegel, that transcendence is absorption. I could interface you guys right under the table,' I say. 'I'm not just a creãtus,
manufactured, conditioned, bred for a function.’
I open my eyes. 'Please don't think I don't care.’
I look out. Directed my way is horror. I rise from the chair. I see jowls sagging, eyebrows high on trembling foreheads,
cheeks bright-white. The chair recedes below me.
'Sweet mother of Christ,' the Director says.
T'm fine,' I tell them, standing. From the yellow Dean's expression, there's a brutal wind blowing from my direction.
Academics' face has gone instantly old. Eight eyes have become blank discs that stare at whatever they see.
'Good God,' whispers Athletics.
'Please don't worry,' I say. 'I can explain.' I soothe the air with a casual hand.
Both my arms are pinioned from behind by the Director of Comp., who wrestles me roughly down, on me with all his weight.
I taste floor.
'What's wrong?’
I say 'Nothing is wrong.’ 
'It's all right! I'm here!' the Director is calling into my ear.
'Get help!' cries a Dean.
My forehead is pressed into parquet I never knew could be so cold. I am arrested. I try to be perceived as limp and pliable.
My face is mashed flat; Comp.'s weight makes it hard to breathe.
'Try to listen,' I say very slowly, muffled by the floor.
'What in God's name are those . . .,' one Dean cries shrilly, '. . . those sounds?’
There are clicks of a phone console's buttons, shoes' heels moving, pivoting, a sheaf of flimsy pages falling.
'God!’
'Help!’
The door's base opens at the left periphery: a wedge of halogen hall-light, white sneakers and a scuffed Nunn Bush. 'Let him
up!' That's deLint.
'There is nothing wrong,' I say slowly to the floor. Tm in here.’
I'm raised by the crutches of my underarms, shaken toward what he must see as calm by a purple-faced Director: 'Get a grip,
son!’
DeLint at the big man's arm: 'Stop it!’
'I am not what you see and hear.’
Distant sirens. A crude half nelson. Forms at the door. A young Hispanic woman holds her palm against her mouth, looking.
'I'm not,' I say.
You have to love old-fashioned men's rooms: the citrus scent of deodorant disks in the long porcelain trough; the stalls with
wooden doors in frames of cool marble; these thin sinks in rows, basins supported by rickety alphabets of exposed plumbing;
mirrors over metal shelves; behind all the voices the slight sound of a ceaseless trickle, inflated by echo against wet porcelain and
a cold tile floor whose mosaic pattern looks almost Islamic at this close range.
The disorder I've caused revolves all around. I've been half-dragged, still pinioned, through a loose mob of Administrative
people by the Comp. Director — who appears to have thought variously that I am having a seizure (prying open my mouth to
check for a throat clear of tongue), that I am somehow choking (a textbook Heimlich that left me whooping), that I am
psychotically out of control (various postures and grips designed to transfer that control to him) — while about us roil deLint,
trying to restrain the Director's restraint of me, the varsity tennis coach restraining deLint, my mother's half-brother speaking in
rapid combinations of polysyllables to the trio of Deans, who variously gasp, wring hands, loosen neckties, waggle digits in C.T.'s
face, and make pases with sheafs of now-pretty-clearly-superfluous application forms.
I am rolled over supine on the geometric tile. I am concentrating docilely on the question why U.S. restrooms always appear
to us as infirmaries for public distress, the place to regain control. My head is cradled in a knelt Director's lap, which is soft, my
face being swabbed with dusty-brown institutional paper towels he received from some hand out of the crowd overhead, staring
with all the blankness I can summon into his jowls' small pocks, worst at the blurred jaw-line, of scarring from long-ago acne.
Uncle Charles, a truly unparalleled slinger of shit, is laying down an enfilade of same, trying to mollify men who seem way more
in need of a good brow-mopping than I.
'He's fine,' he keeps saying. 'Look at him, calm as can be, lying there.’
'You didn't see what happened in there,' a hunched Dean responds through a face webbed with fingers.
'Excited, is all he gets, sometimes, an excitable kid, impressed with —’
'But the sounds he made.’
'Undescribable.’
'Like an animal.’
'Subanimalistic noises and sounds.’
'Nor let's not forget the gestures.’
'Have you ever gotten help for this boy Dr. Tavis?’
'Like some sort of animal with something in its mouth.’
'This boy is damaged.’
'Like a stick of butter being hit with a mallet.’
'A writhing animal with a knife in its eye.’
'What were you possibly about, trying to enroll this —’
'And his arms.’
'You didn't see it, Tavis. His arms were —’
'Flailing. This sort of awful reaching drumming wriggle. Waggling,' the group looking briefly at someone outside my sight
trying to demonstrate something.
'Like a time-lapse, a flutter of some sort of awful ... growth.’
'Sounded most of all like a drowning goat. A goat, drowning in something viscous.’
'This strangled series of bleats and —’
'Yes they waggled.’
'So suddenly a bit of excited waggling's a crime, now?’
'You, sir, are in trouble. You are in trouble.’
'His face. As if he was strangling. Burning. I believe I've seen a vision of hell.’
'He has some trouble communicating, he's communicatively challenged, no one's denying that.’
'The boy needs care.’
'Instead of caring for the boy you send him here to enroll, compete?’
'Hal?’
'You have not in your most dreadful fantasies dreamt of the amount of trouble you have bought yourself, Dr. so-called
Headmaster, educator.’ 
'. . . were given to understand this was all just a formality. You took him aback, is all. Shy —’
'And you, White. You sought to recruit him!’
'— and terribly impressed and excited, in there, without us, his support system, whom you asked to leave, which if you'd —’
'I'd only seen him play. On court he's gorgeous. Possibly a genius. We had no idea. The brother's in the bloody NFL for God's
sake. Here's a top player, we thought, with Southwest roots. His stats were off the chart. We watched him through the whole
WhataBurger last fall. Not a waggle or a noise. We were watching ballet out there, a mate remarked, after.’
'Damn right you were watching ballet out there, White. This boy is a balletic athlete, a player.’
'Some kind of athletic savant then. Balletic compensation for deep problems which you sir choose to disguise by muzzling the
boy in there.' An expensive pair of Brazilian espadrilles goes by on the left and enters a stall, and the espadrilles come around and
face me. The urinal trickles behind the voices' small echoes.
'— haps we'll just be on our way,' C.T. is saying.
'The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.’
'— think you could pass off a damaged applicant, fabricate credentials and shunt him through a kangaroo-interview and inject
him into all the rigors of college life?’
'Hal here functions, you ass. Given a supportive situation. He's fine when he's by himself. Yes he has some trouble with
excitability in conversation. Did you once hear him try to deny that?’
'We witnessed something only marginally mammalian in there, sir.’
'Like hell. Have a look. How's the excitable little guy doing down there, Aubrey, does it look to you?’
'You, sir, are quite possibly ill. This affair is not concluded.’
'What ambulance? Don't you guys listen? I'm telling you there's —’
'Hal? Hal?’
'Dope him up, seek to act as his mouthpiece, muzzling, and now he lies there catatonic, staring.’
The crackle of deLint's knees. 'Hal?’
'— inflate this publicly in any distorted way. The Academy has distinguished alumni, litigators at counsel. Hal here is
provably competent. Credentials out the bazoo, Bill. The boy reads like a vacuum. Digests things.’
I simply lie there, listening, smelling the paper towel, watching an es-padrille pivot.
'There's more to life than sitting there interfacing, it might be a newsflash to you.’
And who could not love that special and leonine roar of a public toilet?
Not for nothing did Orin say that people outdoors down here just scuttle in vectors from air conditioning to air conditioning.
The sun is a hammer. I can feel one side of my face start to cook. The blue sky is glossy and fat with heat, a few thin cirri sheared
to blown strands like hair at the rims. The traffic is nothing like Boston. The stretcher is the special type, with restraining straps at
the extremities. The same Aubrey deLint I'd dismissed for years as a 2-D martinet knelt gurneyside to squeeze my restrained hand
and say 'Just hang in there, Buckaroo,' before moving back into the administrative fray at the ambulance's doors. It is a special
ambulance, dispatched from I'd rather not dwell on where, with not only paramedics but some kind of psychiatric M.D. on board.
The medics lift gently and are handy with straps. The M.D., his back up against the ambulance's side, has both hands up in
dispassionate mediation between the Deans and C.T., who keeps stabbing skyward with his cellular's antenna as if it were a sabre,
outraged that I'm being needlessly ambulanced off to some Emergency Room against my will and interests. The issue whether the
damaged even have interested wills is shallowly hashed out as some sort of ultra-mach fighter too high overhead to hear slices the
sky from south to north. The M.D. has both hands up and is patting the air to signify dispassion. He has a big blue jaw. At the only
other emergency room I have ever been in, almost exactly one year back, the psychiatric stretcher was wheeled in and then parked
beside the waiting-room chairs. These chairs were molded orange plastic; three of them down the row were occupied by different
people all of whom were holding empty prescription bottles and perspiring freely. This would have been bad enough, but in the
end chair, right up next to the strap-secured head of my stretcher, was a T-shirted woman with barnwood skin and a trucker's cap
and a bad starboard list who began to tell me, lying there restrained and immobile, about how she had seemingly overnight
suffered a sudden and anomalous gigantism in her right breast, which she referred to as a titty; she had an almost parodic
Québecois accent and described the 'titty's' presenting history and possible diagnoses for almost twenty minutes before I was
rolled away. The jet's movement and trail seem incisionish, as if white meat behind the blue were exposed and widening in the
wake of the blade. I once saw the word KNIFE finger-written on the steamed mirror of a nonpublic bathroom. I have become an
infantophile. I am forced to roll my closed eyes either up or to the side to keep the red cave from bursting into flames from the
sunlight. The street's passing traffic is constant and seems to go 'Hush, hush, hush.' The sun, if your fluttering eye catches it even
slightly, gives you the blue and red floaters a flashbulb gives you. 'Why not? Why not? Why not not, then, if the best reasoning
you can contrive is why not?' C.T.'s voice, receding with outrage. Only the gallant stabs of his antenna are now visible, just inside
my sight's right frame. I will be conveyed to an Emergency Room of some kind, where I will be detained as long as I do not
respond to questions, and then, when I do respond to questions, I will be sedated; so it will be inversion of standard travel, the
ambulance and ER: I'll make the journey first, then depart. I think very briefly of the late Cosgrove Watt. I think of the
hypophalangial Grief-Therapist. I think of the Moms, alphabetizing cans of soup in the cabinet over the microwave. Of Himself's
umbrella hung by its handle from the edge of the mail table just inside the Headmaster's House's foyer. The bad ankle hasn't ached
once this whole year. I think of John N. R. Wayne, who would have won this year's WhataBurger, standing watch in a mask as
Donald Gately and I dig up my father's head. There's very little doubt that Wayne would have won. And Venus Williams owns a
ranch outside Green Valley; she may well attend the 18's Boys' and Girls' finals. I will be out in plenty of time for tomorrow's
semi; I trust Uncle Charles. Tonight's winner is almost sure to be Dymphna, sixteen but with a birthday two weeks under the 15
April deadline; and Dymphna will still be tired tomorrow at 0830, while I, sedated, will have slept like a graven image. I have
never before faced Dymphna in tournament play, nor played with the sonic balls the blind require, but I watched him barely
dispatch Petropolis Kahn in the Round of 16, and I know he is mine. It will start in the E.R., at the intake desk if C.T.'s late in
following the ambulance, or in the green-tiled room after the room with the invasive-digital machines; or, given this special M.D.-
supplied ambulance, maybe on the ride itself: some blue-jawed M.D. scrubbed to an antiseptic glow with his name sewn in 
cursive on his white coat's breast pocket and a quality desk-set pen, wanting gurneyside Q&A, etiology and diagnosis by Socratic
method, ordered and point-by-point. There are, by the O.E.D. VI's count, nineteen nonarchaic synonyms for unresponsive, of
which nine are Latinate and four Saxonic. I will play either Stice or Polep in Sunday's final. Maybe in front of Venus Williams. It
will be someone blue-collar and unlicensed, though, inevitably — a nurse's aide with quick-bit nails, a hospital security guy, a
tired Cuban orderly who addresses me as jou — who will, looking down in the middle of some kind of bustled task, catch what he
sees as my eye and ask So yo then man what's your story?
YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
Where was the woman who said she'd come. She said she would come. Erdedy thought she'd have come by now. He sat and
thought. He was in the living room. When he started waiting one window was full of yellow light and cast a shadow of light
across the floor and he was still sitting waiting as that shadow began to fade and was intersected by a brightening shadow from a
different wall's window. There was an insect on one of the steel shelves that held his audio equipment. The insect kept going in
and out of one of the holes on the girders that the shelves fit into. The insect was dark and had a shiny case. He kept looking over
at it. Once or twice he started to get up to go over closer to look at it, but he was afraid that if he came closer and saw it closer he
would kill it, and he was afraid to kill it. He did not use the phone to call the woman who'd promised to come because if he tied up
the line and if it happened to be the time when maybe she was trying to call him he was afraid she would hear the busy signal and
think him disinterested and get angry and maybe take what she'd promised him somewhere else.
She had promised to get him a fifth of a kilogram of marijuana, 200 grams of unusually good marijuana, for $1250 U.S. He
had tried to stop smoking marijuana maybe 70 or 80 times before. Before this woman knew him. She did not know he had tried to
stop. He always lasted a week, or two weeks, or maybe two days, and then he'd think and decide to have some in his home one
more last time. One last final time he'd search out someone new, someone he hadn't already told that he had to stop smoking dope
and please under no circumstances should they procure him any dope. It had to be a third party, because he'd told every dealer he
knew to cut him off. And the third party had to be someone all-new, because each time he got some he knew this time had to be
the last time, and so told them, asked them, as a favor, never to get him any more, ever. And he never asked a person again once
he'd told them this, because he was proud, and also kind, and wouldn't put anyone in that kind of contradictory position. Also he
considered himself creepy when it came to dope, and he was afraid that others would see that he was creepy about it as well. He
sat and thought and waited in an uneven X of light through two different windows. Once or twice he looked at the phone. The
insect had disappeared back into the hole in the steel girder a shelf fit into.
She'd promised to come at one certain time, and it was past that time. Finally he gave in and called her number, using just
audio, and it rang several times, and he was afraid of how much time he was taking tying up the line and he got her audio
answering device, the message had a snatch of ironic pop music and her voice and a male voice together saying we'll call you
back, and the 'we' made them sound like a couple, the man was a handsome black man who was in law school, she designed sets,
and he didn't leave a message because he didn't want her to know how much now he felt like he needed it. He had been very
casual about the whole thing. She said she knew a guy just over the river in Allston who sold high-resin dope in moderate bulk,
and he'd yawned and said well, maybe, well, hey, why not, sure, special occasion, I haven't bought any in I don't know how long.
She said he lived in a trailer and had a harelip and kept snakes and had no phone, and was basically just not what you'd call a
pleasant or attractive person at all, but the guy in Allston frequently sold dope to theater people in Cambridge, and had a devoted
following. He said he was trying to even remember when was the last time he'd bought any, it had been so long. He said he
guessed he'd have her get a decent amount, he said he'd had some friends call him in the recent past and ask if he could get them
some. He had this thing where he'd frequently say he was getting dope mostly for friends. Then if the woman didn't have it when
she said she'd have it for him and he became anxious about it he could tell the woman that it was his friends who were becoming
anxious, and he was sorry to bother the woman about something so casual but his friends were anxious and bothering him about it
and he just wanted to know what he could maybe tell them. He was caught in the middle, is how he would represent it. He could
say his friends had given him their money and were now anxious and exerting pressure, calling and bothering him. This tactic was
not possible with this woman who'd said she'd come with it because he hadn't yet given her the $1250. She would not let him. She
was well off. Her family was well off, she'd said to explain how her condominium was as nice as it was when she worked
designing sets for a Cambridge theater company that seemed to do only German plays, dark smeary sets. She didn't care much
about the money, she said she'd cover the cost herself when she got out to the Allston Spur to see whether the guy was at home in
the trailer as she was certain he would be this particular afternoon, and he could just reimburse her when she brought it to him.
This arrangement, very casual, made him anxious, so he'd been even more casual and said sure, fine, whatever. Thinking back, he
was sure he'd said whatever, which in retrospect worried him because it might have sounded as if he didn't care at all, not at all, so
little that it wouldn't matter if she forgot to get it or call, and once he'd made the decision to have marijuana in his home one more
time it mattered a lot. It mattered a lot. He'd been too casual with the woman, he should have made her take $1250 from him up
front, claiming politeness, claiming he didn't want to inconvenience her financially over something so trivial and casual. Money
created a sense of obligation, and he should have wanted the woman to feel obliged to do what she'd said, once what she'd said
she'd do had set him off inside. Once he'd been set off inside, it mattered so much that he was somehow afraid to show how much
it mattered. Once he had asked her to get it, he was committed to several courses of action. The insect on the shelf was back. It
didn't seem to do anything. It just came out of the hole in the girder onto the edge of the steel shelf and sat there. After a while it
would disappear back into the hole in the girder, and he was pretty sure it didn't do anything in there either. He felt similar to the
insect inside the girder his shelf was connected to, but was not sure just how he was similar. Once he'd decided to own marijuana
one more last time, he was committed to several courses of action. He had to modem in to the agency and say that there was an
emergency and that he was posting an e-note on a colleague's TP asking her to cover his calls for the rest of the week because he'd
be out of contact for several days due to this emergency. He had to put an audio message on his answering device saying that
starting that afternoon he was going to be unreachable for several days. He had to clean his bedroom, because once he had dope he
would not leave his bedroom except to go to the refrigerator and the bathroom, and even then the trips would be very quick. He 
had to throw out all his beer and liquor, because if he drank alcohol and smoked dope at the same time he would get dizzy and ill,
and if he had alcohol in the house he could not be relied on not to drink it once he started smoking dope. He'd had to do some
shopping. He'd had to lay in supplies. Now just one of the insect's antennae was protruding from the hole in the girder. It
protruded, but it did not move. He had had to buy soda, Oreos, bread, sandwich meat, mayonnaise, tomatoes, M&M's, Almost
Home cookies, ice cream, a Pepperidge Farm frozen chocolate cake, and four cans of canned chocolate frosting to be eaten with a
large spoon. He'd had to log an order to rent film cartridges from the Inter-Lace entertainment outlet. He'd had to buy antacids for
the discomfort that eating all he would eat would cause him late at night. He'd had to buy a new bong, because each time he
finished what simply had to be his last bulk-quantity of marijuana he decided that that was it, he was through, he didn't even like it
anymore, this was it, no more hiding, no more imposing on his colleagues and putting different messages on his answering device
and moving his car away from his condominium and closing his windows and curtains and blinds and living in quick vectors
between his bedroom's InterLace teleputer's films and his refrigerator and his toilet, and he would take the bong he'd used and
throw it away wrapped in several plastic shopping bags. His refrigerator made its own ice in little cloudy crescent blocks and he
loved it, when he had dope in his home he always drank a great deal of cold soda and ice water. His tongue almost swelled at just
the thought. He looked at the phone and the clock. He looked at the windows but not at the foliage and blacktop driveway beyond
the windows. He had already vacuumed his Venetian blinds and curtains, everything was ready to be shut down. Once the woman
who said she'd come had come, he would shut the whole system down. It occurred to him that he would disappear into a hole in a
girder inside him that supported something else inside him. He was unsure what the thing inside him was and was unprepared to
commit himself to the course of action that would be required to explore the question. It was now almost three hours past the time
when the woman had said she would come. A counselor, Randi, with an i, with a mustache like a Mountie, had told him in the
outpatient treatment program he'd gone through two years ago that he seemed insufficiently committed to the course of action that
would be required to remove substances from his lifestyle. He'd had to buy a new bong at Bogart's in Porter Square, Cambridge
because whenever he finished the last of the substances on hand he always threw out all his bongs and pipes, screens and tubes
and rolling papers and roach clips, lighters and Visine and Pepto-Bismol and cookies and frosting, to eliminate all future
temptation. He always felt a sense of optimism and firm resolve after he'd discarded the materials. He'd bought the new bong and
laid in fresh supplies this morning, getting back home with everything well before the woman had said she would come. He
thought of the new bong and new little packet of round brass screens in the Bogart's bag on his kitchen table in the sunlit kitchen
and could not remember what color this new bong was. The last one had been orange, the one before that a dusky rose color that
had turned muddy at the bottom from resin in just four days. He could not remember the color of this new last and final bong. He
considered getting up to check the color of the bong he'd be using but decided that obsessive checking and convulsive movements
could compromise the atmosphere of casual calm he needed to maintain while he waited, protruding but not moving, for the
woman he'd met at a design session for his agency's small campaign for her small theater company's new Wedekind festival, while
he waited for this woman, with whom he'd had intercourse twice, to honor her casual promise. He tried to decide whether the
woman was pretty. Another thing he laid in when he'd committed himself to one last marijuana vacation was petroleum jelly.
When he smoked marijuana he tended to masturbate a great deal, whether or not there were opportunities for intercourse, opting
when he smoked for masturbation over intercourse, and the petroleum jelly kept him from returning to normal function all tender
and sore. He was also hesitant to get up and check the color of his bong because he would have to pass right by the telephone
console to get to the kitchen, and he didn't want to be tempted to call the woman who'd said she would come again because he felt
creepy about bothering her about something he'd represented as so casual, and was afraid that several audio hang-ups on her
answering device would look even creepier, and also he felt anxious about maybe tying up the line at just the moment when she
called, as she certainly would. He decided to get Call Waiting added to his audio phone service for a nominal extra charge, then
remembered that since this was positively the last time he would or even could indulge what Randi, with an i, had called an
addiction every bit as rapacious as pure alcoholism, there would be no real need for Call Waiting, since a situation like the present
one could never arise again. This line of thinking almost caused him to become angry. To ensure the composure with which he sat
waiting in light in his chair he focused his senses on his surroundings. No part of the insect he'd seen was now visible. The clicks
of his portable clock were really composed of three smaller clicks, signifying he supposed preparation, movement, and
readjustment. He began to grow disgusted with himself for waiting so anxiously for the promised arrival of something that had
stopped being fun anyway. He didn't even know why he liked it anymore. It made his mouth dry and his eyes dry and red and his
face sag, and he hated it when his face sagged, it was as if all the integrity of all the muscles in his face was eroded by marijuana,
and he got terribly self-conscious about the fact that his face was sagging, and had long ago forbidden himself to smoke dope
around anyone else. He didn't even know what its draw was anymore. He couldn't even be around anyone else if he'd smoked
marijuana that same day, it made him so self-conscious. And the dope often gave him a painful case of pleurisy if he smoked it for
more than two straight days of heavy continuous smoking in front of the Inter-Lace viewer in his bedroom. It made his thoughts
jut out crazily in jagged directions and made him stare raptly like an unbright child at entertainment cartridges — when he laid in
film cartridges for a vacation with marijuana, he favored cartridges in which a lot of things blew up and crashed into each other,
which he was sure an unpleasant-fact specialist like Randi would point out had implications that were not good. He pulled his
necktie down smooth while he gathered his intellect, will, self-knowledge, and conviction and determined that when this latest
woman came as she surely would this would simply be his very last marijuana debauch. He'd simply smoke so much so fast that it
would be so unpleasant and the memory of it so repulsive that once he'd consumed it and gotten it out of his home and his life as
quickly as possible he would never want to do it again. He would make it his business to create a really bad set of debauched
associations with the stuff in his memory. The dope scared him. It made him afraid. It wasn't that he was afraid of the dope, it was
that smoking it made him afraid of everything else. It had long since stopped being a release or relief or fun. This last time, he
would smoke the whole 200 grams—120 grams cleaned, destemmed — in four days, over an ounce a day, all in tight heavy
economical one-hitters off a quality virgin bong, an incredible, insane amount per day, he'd make it a mission, treating it like a
penance and behavior-modification regimen all at once, he'd smoke his way through thirty high-grade grams a day, starting the
moment he woke up and used ice water to detach his tongue from the roof of his mouth and took an antacid — averaging out to
200 or 300 heavy bong-hits per day, an insane and deliberately unpleasant amount, and he'd make it a mission to smoke it continu-
ously, even though if the marijuana was as good as the woman claimed he'd do five hits and then not want to take the trouble to
load and one-hit any more for at least an hour. But he would force himself to do it anyway. He would smoke it all even if he didn't
want it. Even if it started to make him dizzy and ill. He would use discipline and persistence and will and make the whole
experience so unpleasant, so debased and debauched and unpleasant, that his behavior would be henceforward modified, he'd
never even want to do it again because the memory of the insane four days to come would be so firmly, terribly emblazoned in his
memory. He'd cure himself by excess. He predicted that the woman, when she came, might want to smoke some of the 200 grams
with him, hang out, hole up, listen to some of his impressive collection of Tito Puente recordings, and probably have intercourse.
He had never once had actual intercourse on marijuana. Frankly, the idea repelled him. Two dry mouths bumping at each other,
trying to kiss, his selfconscious thoughts twisting around on themselves like a snake on a stick while he bucked and snorted dryly
above her, his swollen eyes red and his face sagging so that its slack folds maybe touched, limply, the folds of her own loose
sagging face is it sloshed back and forth on his pillow, its mouth working dryly. The thought was repellent. He decided he'd have
her toss him what she'd promised to bring, and then would from a distance toss back to her the $1250 U.S. in large bills and tell
her not to let the door hit her on the butt on the way out. He'd say ass instead of butt. He'd be so rude and unpleasant to her that the
memory of his lack of basic decency and of her tight offended face would be a further disincentive ever, in the future, to risk
calling her and repeating the course of action he had now committed himself to.
He had never been so anxious for the arrival of a woman he did not want to see. He remembered clearly the last woman he'd
involved in his trying just one more vacation with dope and drawn blinds. The last woman had been something called an
appropriation artist, which seemed to mean that she copied and embellished other art and then sold it through a prestigious
Marlborough Street gallery. She had an artistic manifesto that involved radical feminist themes. He'd let her give him one of her
smaller paintings, which covered half the wall over his bed and was of a famous film actress whose name he always had a hard
time recalling and a less famous film actor, the two of them entwined in a scene from a well-known old film, a romantic scene, an
embrace, copied from a film history textbook and much enlarged and made stilted, and with obscenities scrawled all over it in
bright red letters. The last woman had been sexy but not pretty, as the woman he now didn't want to see but was waiting anxiously
for was pretty in a faded withered Cambridge way that made her seem pretty but not sexy. The appropriation artist had been led to
believe that he was a former speed addict, intravenous addiction to methamphetamine hydrochloride1 is what he remembered
telling that one, he had even described the awful taste of hydro-chloride in the addict's mouth immediately after injection, he had
researched the subject carefully. She had been further led to believe that marijuana kept him from using the drug with which he
really had a problem, and so that if he seemed anxious to get some once she'd offered to get him some it was only because he was
heroically holding out against much darker deeper more addictive urges and he needed her to help him. He couldn't quite
remember when or how she'd been given all these impressions. He had not sat down and outright bold-faced lied to her, it had
been more of an impression he'd conveyed and nurtured and allowed to gather its own life and force. The insect was now entirely
visible. It was on the shelf that held his digital equalizer. The insect might never actually have retreated all the way back into the
hole in the shelf's girder. What looked like its reemergence might just have been a change in his attention or the two windows'
light or the visual context of his surroundings. The girder protruded from the wall and was a triangle of dull steel with holes for
shelves to fit into. The metal shelves that held his audio equipment were painted a dark industrial green and were originally made
for holding canned goods. They were designed to be extra kitchen shelves. The insect sat inside its dark shiny case with an
immobility that seemed like the gathering of a force, it sat like the hull of a vehicle from which the engine had been for the
moment removed. It was dark and had a shiny case and antennae that protruded but did not move. He had to use the bathroom. His
last piece of contact from the appropriation artist, with whom he had had intercourse, and who during intercourse had sprayed
some sort of perfume up into the air from a mister she held in her left hand as she lay beneath him making a wide variety of
sounds and spraying perfume up into the air, so that he felt the cold mist of it settling on his back and shoulders and was chilled
and repelled, his last piece of contact after he'd gone into hiding with the marijuana she'd gotten for him had been a card she'd
mailed that was a pastiche photo of a doormat of coarse green plastic grass with WELCOME on it and next to it a flattering
publicity photo of the appropriation artist from her Back Bay gallery, and between them an unequal sign, which was an equal sign
with a diagonal slash across it, and also an obscenity he had assumed was directed at him magisculed in red grease pencil along
the bottom, with multiple exclamation points. She had been offended because he had seen her every day for ten days, then when
she'd finally obtained 50 grams of genetically enhanced hydroponic marijuana for him he had said that she'd saved his life and he
was grateful and the friends for whom he'd promised to get some were grateful and she had to go right now because he had an
appointment and had to take off, but that he would doubtless be calling her later that day, and they had shared a moist kiss, and
she had said she could feel his heart pounding right through his suit coat, and she had driven away in her rusty unmuffled car, and
he had gone and moved his own car to an underground garage several blocks away, and had run back and drawn the clean blinds
and curtains, and changed the audio message on his answering device to one that described an emergency departure from town,
and had drawn and locked his bedroom blinds, and had taken the new rose-colored bong out of its Bogart's bag, and was not seen
for three days, and ignored over two dozen audio messages and protocols and e-notes expressing concern over his message's
emergency, and had never contacted her again. He had hoped she would assume he had succumbed again to methamphetamine
hydrochloride and was sparing her the agony of his descent back into the hell of chemical dependence. What it really was was that
he had again decided those 50 grams of resin-soaked dope, which had been so potent that on the second day it had given him an
anxiety attack so paralyzing that he had gone to the bathroom in a Tufts University commemorative ceramic stein to avoid leaving
his bedroom, represented his very last debauch ever with dope, and that he had to cut himself off from all possible future sources
of temptation and supply, and this surely included the appropriation artist, who had come with the stuff at precisely the time she'd
promised, he recalled. From the street outside came the sound of a dumpster being emptied into an E.W.D. land barge. His shame
at what she might on the other hand perceive as his slimy phallocentric conduct toward her made it easier for him to avoid her, as
well. Though not shame, really. More like being uncomfortable at the thought of it. He had had to launder his bedding twice to get
the smell of the perfume out. He went into the bathroom to use the bathroom, making it a point to look neither at the insect visible
on the shelf to his left nor at the telephone console on its lacquer workstation to the right. He was committed to touching neither.
Where was the woman who had said she'd come. The new bong in the Bogart's bag was orange, meaning he might have 
misremembered the bong before it as orange. It was a rich autumnal orange that lightened to more of a citrus orange when its
plastic cylinder was held up to the late-afternoon light of the window over the kitchen sink. The metal of its stem and bowl was
rough stainless steel, the kind with a grain, unpretty and all business. The bong was half a meter tall and had a weighted base
covered in soft false suede. Its orange plastic was thick and the carb on the side opposite the stem had been raggedly cut so that
rough shards of plastic protruded from the little hole and might well hurt his thumb when he smoked, which he decided to
consider just part of the penance he would undertake after the woman had come and gone. He left the door to the bathroom open
so that he would be sure to hear the telephone when it sounded or the buzzer to the front doors of his condominium complex when
it sounded. In the bathroom his throat suddenly closed and he wept hard for two or three seconds before the weeping stopped
abruptly and he could not get it to start again. It was now over four hours since the time the woman had casually committed to
come. Was he in the bathroom or in his chair near the window and near his telephone console and the insect and the window that
had admitted a straight rectangular bar of light when he began to wait. The light through this window was coming at an angle
more and more oblique. Its shadow had become a parallelogram. The light through the southwest window was straight and
reddening. He had thought he needed to use the bathroom but was unable to. He tried putting a whole stack of film cartridges into
the dock of the disc-drive and then turning on the huge teleputer in his bedroom. He could see the piece of appropriation art in the
mirror above the TP. He lowered the volume all the way and pointed the remote device at the TP like some sort of weapon. He sat
on the edge of his bed with his elbows on his knees and scanned the stack of cartridges. Each cartridge in the dock dropped on
command and began to engage the drive with an insectile click and whir, and he scanned it. But he was unable to distract himself
with the TP because he was unable to stay with any one entertainment cartridge for more than a few seconds. The moment he
recognized what exactly was on one cartridge he had a strong anxious feeling that there was something more entertaining on
another cartridge and that he was potentially missing it. He realized that he would have plenty of time to enjoy all the cartridges,
and realized intellectually that the feeling of deprived panic over missing something made no sense. The viewer hung on the wall,
half again as large as the piece of feminist art. He scanned cartridges for some time. The telephone console sounded during this
interval of anxious scanning. He was up and moving back out toward it before the first ring was completed, flooded with either
excitement or relief, the TP's remote device still in his hand, but it was only a friend and colleague calling, and when he heard the
voice that was not the woman who had promised to bring what he'd committed the next several days to banishing from his life
forever he was almost sick with disappointment, with a great deal of mistaken adrenaline now shining and ringing in his system,
and he got off the line with the colleague to clear the line and keep it available for the woman so fast that he was sure his
colleague perceived him as either angry with him or just plain rude. He was further upset at the thought that his answering the
telephone this late in the day did not jibe with the emergency message about being unreachable that would be on his answering
device if the colleague called back after the woman had come and gone and he'd shut the whole system of his life down, and he
was standing over the telephone console trying to decide whether the risk of the colleague or someone else from the agency
calling back was sufficient to justify changing the audio message on the answering device to describe an emergency departure this
evening instead of this afternoon, but he decided he felt that since the woman had definitely committed to coming, his leaving the
message unchanged would be a gesture of fidelity to her commitment, and might somehow in some oblique way strengthen that
commitment. The E.W.D. land barge was emptying dumpsters all up and down the street. He returned to his chair near the
window. The disk drive and TP viewer were still on in his bedroom and he could see through the angle of the bedroom's doorway
the lights from the high-definition screen blink and shift from one primary color to another in the dim room, and for a while he
killed time casually by trying to imagine what entertaining scenes on the unwatched viewer the changing colors and intensities
might signify. The chair faced the room instead of the window. Reading while waiting for marijuana was out of the question. He
considered masturbating but did not. He didn't reject the idea so much as not react to it and watch as it floated away. He thought
very broadly of desires and ideas being watched but not acted upon, he thought of impulses being starved of expression and drying
out and floating dryly away, and felt on some level that this had something to do with him and his circumstances and what, if this
grueling final debauch he'd committed himself to didn't somehow resolve the problem, would surely have to be called his
problem, but he could not even begin to try to see how the image of desiccated impulses floating dryly related to either him or the
insect, which had retreated back into its hole in the angled girder, because at this precise time his telephone and his intercom to the
front door's buzzer both sounded at the same time, both loud and tortured and so abrupt they sounded yanked through a very small
hole into the great balloon of colored silence he sat in, waiting, and he moved first toward the telephone console, then over toward
his intercom module, then convulsively back toward the sounding phone, and then tried somehow to move toward both at once,
finally, so that he stood splay-legged, arms wildly out as if something's been flung, splayed, entombed between the two sounds,
without a thought in his head.
1 APRIL — YEAR OF THE TUCKS MEDICATED PAD
'All I know is my dad said to come here.’
'Come right in. You'll see a chair to your immediate left.’
'So I'm here.’
'That's just fine. Seven-Up? Maybe some lemon soda?’
'I guess not, thanks. I'm just here, is all, and I'm kind of wondering why my dad sent me down, you know. Your door there
doesn't have anything on it, and I was just at the dentist last week, and so I'm wondering why I'm here, exactly, is all. That's why
I'm not sitting down yet.’
'You're how old, Hal, fourteen?’
Til be eleven in June. Are you a dentist? Is this like a dental consult?’
'You're here to converse.’
'Converse?’
'Yes. Pardon me while I key in this age-correction. Your father had listed you as fourteen, for some reason.’
'Converse as in with you?’ 
'You're here to converse with me, Hal, yes. I'm almost going to have to implore you to have a lemon soda. Your mouth is
making those dry sticky inadequate-saliva sounds.’
'Dr. Zegarelli says that's one reason for all the caries, is that I have low salivary output.’
'Those dry sticky salivaless sounds which can be death to a good conversation.’
'But I rode my bike all the way up here against the wind just to converse with you? Is the conversation supposed to start with
me asking why?’
Til begin by asking if you know the meaning of implore, Hal.’
'Probably I'll go ahead and take a Seven-Up, then, if you're going to implore.’
Til ask you again whether you know implore, young sir.’
'Young sir?’
'You're wearing that bow tie, after all. Isn't that rather an invitation to a young sir?’
'Implore's a regular verb, transitive: to call upon, or for, in supplication; to pray to, or for, earnestly; to beseech; to entreat.
Weak synonym: urge. Strong synonym: beg. Etymology unmixed: from Latin implorare, im meaning in, plorare meaning in this
context to cry aloud. O.E.D. Condensed Volume Six page 1387 column twelve and a little bit of thirteen.’
'Good lord she didn't exaggerate did she?’
'I tend to get beat up, sometimes, at the Academy, for stuff like that. Does this bear on why I'm here? That I'm a continentally
ranked junior tennis player who can also recite great chunks of the dictionary, verbatim, at will, and tends to get beat up, and
wears a bow tie? Are you like a specialist for gifted kids? Does this mean they think I'm gifted?’
SPFFFT. 'Here you are. Drink up.’
'Thanks. SHULGSHULGSPAHHH . . . Whew. Ah.’
'You were thirsty.’
'So then if I sit down you'll fill me in?’
'. . . professional conversationalist knows his mucous membranes, after all.’
'I might have to burp a little bit in a second, from the soda. I'm alerting you ahead of time.’
'Hal, you are here because I am a professional conversationalist, and your father has made an appointment with me, for you,
to converse.’
'MYURP. Excuse me.’
Tap tap tap tap.
'SHULGSPAHHH.’
Tap tap tap tap.
'You're a professional conversationalist?’
T am, yes, as I believe I just stated, a professional conversationalist.’
'Don't start looking at your watch, as if I'm taking up valuable time of yours. If Himself made the appointment and paid for it
the time's supposed to be mine, right? Not yours. And then but what's that supposed to mean, "professional conversationalist"? A
conversationalist is just one who converses much. You actually charge a fee to converse much?’
'A conversationalist is also one who, I'm sure you'll recall, "excels in That's Webster's Seventh. That's not the O.E.D.’
Tap tap.
'I'm an O.E.D. man, Doctor. If that's what you are. Are you a doctor? Do you have a doctorate? Most people like to put their
diplomas up, I notice, if they have credentials. And Webster's Seventh isn't even up-to-date. Webster's Eighth amends to "one who
converses with much enthusiasm."
'Another Seven-Up?’
'Is Himself still having this hallucination I never speak? Is that why he put the Moms up to having me bike up here? Himself
is my dad. We call him Himself. As in quote "the man Himself." As it were. We call my mother the Moms. My brother coined the
term. I understand this isn't unusual. I understand most more or less normal families address each other internally by means of pet
names and terms and monikers. Don't even think about asking me what my little internal moniker is.’
Tap tap tap.
'But Himself hallucinates, sometimes, lately, you ought to be apprised, was the thrust. I'm wondering why the Moms let him
send me pedalling up here uphill against the wind when I've got a challenge match at 3:00 to converse with an enthusiast with a
blank door and no diplomas anywhere in view.’
'I, in my small way, would like to think it had as much to do with me as with you. That my reputation preceded me.’
'Isn't that usually a pejorative clause?’
'I am wonderful fun to talk to. I'm a consummate professional. People leave my parlor in states. You are here. It's
conversation-time. Shall we discuss Byzantine erotica?’
'How did you know I was interested in Byzantine erotica?’
'You seem persistently to confuse me with someone who merely hangs out a shingle with the word Conversationalist on it,
and this operation with a fly-by-night one strung together with chewing gum and twine. You think I have no support staff?
Researchers at my beck? You think we don't delve full-bore into the psyches of those for whom we've made appointments to
converse? You don't think this fully accredited limited partnership would have an interest in obtaining data on what informs and
stimulates our con-versees?’
'I know only one person who'd ever use full-bore in casual conversation.’
'There is nothing casual about a professional conversationalist and staff. We delve. We obtain, and then some. Young sir.’
'Okay, Alexandrian or Constantinian?’
'You think we haven't thoroughly researched your own connection with the whole current intra-Provincial crisis in southern
Quebec?’
'What intra-Provincial crisis in southern Quebec? I thought you wanted to talk racy mosaics.’
'This is an upscale district of a vital North American metropolis, Hal. Standards here are upscale, and high. A professional 
conversationalist flat-out full-bore delves. Do you for one moment think that a professional plier of the trade of conversation
would fail to probe beak-deep into your family's sordid liaison with the pan-Canadian Resistance's notorious M. DuPlessis and his
malevolent but allegedly irresistible amanuensis-cum-operative, Luria P---------?’
'Listen, are you okay?’
'Do you?’
'I'm ten for Pete's sake. I think maybe your appointment calendar's squares got juggled. I'm the potentially gifted ten-year-old
tennis and lexical prodigy whose mom's a continental mover and shaker in the prescriptive-grammar academic world and whose
dad's a towering figure in optical and avant-garde film circles and single-handedly founded the Enfield Tennis Academy but
drinks Wild Turkey at like 5:00 A.M. and pitches over sideways during dawn drills, on the courts, some days, and some days
presents with delusions about people's mouths moving but nothing coming out. I'm not even up to/yet, in the condensed O.E.D.,
much less Quebec or malevolent Lurias.’
'. .. of the fact that photos of the aforementioned . . . liaison being leaked to Der Spiegel resulted in the bizarre deaths of both
an Ottawan paparazzo and a Bavarian international-affairs editor, of an alpenstock through the abdomen and an ill-swallowed
cocktail onion, respectively?’
'I just finished jew's-ear. I'm just starting on jew's-harp and the general theory of oral lyres. I've never even skied.’
'That you could dare to imagine we'd fail conversationally to countenance certain weekly shall we say maternal ...
assignations with a certain unnamed bisexual bassoonist in the Albertan Secret Guard's tactical-bands unit?’
'Gee, is that the exit over there I see?’
'. . . that your blithe inattention to your own dear grammatical mother's cavortings with not one not two but over thirty Near
Eastern medical attaches . . . ?’
'Would it be rude to tell you your mustache is askew?’
'. .. that her introduction of esoteric mnemonic steroids, stereo-chemically not dissimilar to your father's own daily
hypodermic "mega-vitamin" supplement derived from a certain organic testosterone-regeneration compound distilled by the Jivaro
shamen of the South-Central L.A. basin, into your innocent-looking bowl of morning Ralston....’
'As a matter of fact I'll go ahead and tell you your whole face is kind of running, sort of, if you want to check. Your nose is
pointing at your lap.’
'That your quote-unquote "complimentary" Dunlop widebody tennis racquets' super-secret-formulaic composition materials
of high-modulus-graphite-reinforced polycarbonate polybutylene resin are organochemically identical I say again identical to the
gyroscopic balance sensor and mise-en-scène appropriation card and priapistic-entertainment cartridge implanted in your very
own towering father's anaplastic cerebrum after his cruel series of detoxifications and convolution-smoothings and gastrectomy
and prostatectomy and pancreatectomy and phalluctomy . . .’
Tap tap. 'SHULGSPAHH.’
'. .. could possibly escape the combined investigative attention of. .. ?’
'And it strikes me I've definitely seen that argyle sweater-vest before. That's Himself's special Interdependence-Daycelebratory-dinner argyle sweater-vest, that he makes a point of never having cleaned. I know those stains. I was there for that clot
of veal marsala right there. Is this whole appointment a date-connected thing? Is this April Fools, Dad, or do I need to call the
Moms and C.T.?’
'... who requires only daily evidence that you speak? That you recognize the occasional vista beyond your own generous
Mondragonoid nose's fleshy tip?’
'You rented a whole office and face for this, but leave your old unmistakable sweater-vest on? And how'd you even get down
here before me, with the Mercury up on blocks after you . . . did you fool C.T. into giving you the keys to a functional car?’
'Who used to pray daily for the day his own dear late father would sit, cough, open that bloody issue of the Tucson Citizen,
and not turn that newspaper into the room's fifth wall? And who after all this light and noise has apparently spawned the same
silence?’
'...’
'Who's lived his whole ruddy bloody cruddy life in five-walled rooms?' 'Dad, I've got a duly scheduled challenge match with
Schacht in like twelve minutes, wind at my downhill back or no. I've got this oral-lyrologist who's going to be outside Brighton
Best Savings wearing a predesignated necktie at straight-up five. I have to mow his lawn for a month for this interview. I can't just
sit here watching you think I'm mute while your fake nose points at the floor. And are you hearing me talking, Dad? It speaks. It
accepts soda and defines implore and converses with you.’
'Praying for just one conversation, amateur or no, that does not end in terror? That does not end like all the others: you
staring, me swallowing?’
'Son?’
'...’
'Son?’
9 MAY — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
Another way fathers impact sons is that sons, once their voices have changed in puberty, invariably answer the telephone with
the same locutions and intonations as their fathers. This holds true regardless of whether the fathers are still alive.
Because he left his dormitory room before 0600 for dawn drills and often didn't get back there until after supper, packing his
book bag and knapsack and gear bag for the whole day, together with selecting his best-strung racquets — it all took Hal some
time. Plus he usually collected and packed and selected in the dark, and with stealth, because his brother Mario was usually still
asleep in the other bed. Mario didn't drill and couldn't play, and needed all the sleep he could get.
Hal held his complimentary gear bag and was putting different pairs of sweats to his face, trying to find the cleanest pair by
smell, when the telephone console sounded. Mario thrashed and sat up in bed, a small hunched shape with a big head against the 
gray light of the window. Hal got to the console on the second ring and had the transparent phone's antenna out by the third.
His way of answering the phone sounded like 'Mmmyellow.’
'I want to tell you,' the voice on the phone said. 'My head is filled with things to say.’
Hal held three pairs of E.T.A. sweatpants in the hand that didn't hold the phone. He saw his older brother succumb to gravity
and fall back limp against the pillows. Mario often sat up and fell back still asleep.
'I don't mind,' Hal said softly. 'I could wait forever.’
'That's what you think,' the voice said. The connection was cut. It had been Orin.
'Hey Hal?’
The light in the room was a creepy gray, a kind of nonlight. Hal could hear Brandt laughing at something Kenkle had said, off
down the hall, and the clank of their janitorial buckets. The person on the phone had been O.
'Hey Hal?' Mario was awake. It took four pillows to support Mario's oversized skull. His voice came from the tangled
bedding. 'Is it still dark out, or is it me?’
'Go back to sleep. It isn't even six.' Hal put the good leg into the sweatpants first.
'Who was it?’
Shoving three coverless Dunlop widebodies into the gear bag and zipping the bag partway up so the handles had room to stick
out. Carrying all three bags back over to the console to deactivate the ringer on the phone. He said, 'No one you know, I don't
think.’
YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
Though only one-half ethnic Arab and a Canadian by birth and residence, the medical attache is nevertheless once again
under Saudi diplomatic immunity, this time as special ear-nose-throat consultant to the personal physician of Prince Q---------, the
Saudi Minister of Home Entertainment, here on northeastern U.S.A. soil with his legation to cut another mammoth deal with
InterLace TelEntertainment. The medical attache turns thirty-seven tomorrow, Thursday, 2 April in the North American lunar
Y.D.A.U. The legation finds the promotional subsidy of the North American calendar hilariously vulgar. To say nothing of the
arresting image of the idolatrous West's most famous and self-congratulating idol, the colossal Libertine Statue, wearing some
type of enormous adult-design diaper, a hilariously apposite image popular in the news photos of so many international journals.
The attache's medical practice being normally divided between Montreal and the Rub' al Khali, it is his first trip back to
U.S.A. soil since completing his residency eight years ago. His duties here involve migrating with the Prince and his retinue
between InterLace's two hubs of manufacture and dissemination in Phoenix, Arizona U.S.A. and Boston, Massachusetts U.S.A.,
respectively, offering expert E.N.T. assistance to the personal physician of Prince Q---------. The medical attache's particular
expertise is the maxillofacial consequences of imbalances in intestinal flora. Prince Q---------(as would anyone who refuses to eat
pretty much anything but Töblerone) suffers chronically from Candida albicans, with attendant susceptibilities to monilial sinusitis
and thrush, the yeasty sores and sinal im-pactions of which require almost daily drainage in the cold and damp of early-spring
Boston, U.S.A. A veritable artist, possessed of a deftness nonpareil with cotton swab and evacuation-hypo, the medical attache is
known among the shrinking upper classes of petro-Arab nations as the DeBakey of maxillofacial yeast, his staggering fee-scale as
wholly ad valorem.
Saudi consulting fees, in particular, are somewhere just past obscene, but the medical attache's duties on this trip are
personally draining and sort of nauseous, and when he arrives back at the sumptuous apartments he had his wife sublet in districts
far from the legation's normal Back Bay and Scotts-dale digs, at the day's end, he needs unwinding in the very worst way. A more
than averagely devout follower of the North American sufism promulgated in his childhood by Pir Valayat, the medical attache
partakes of neither kif nor distilled spirits, and must unwind without chemical aid. When he arrives home after evening prayers, he
wants to look upon a spicy and 100% shari'a-halal dinner piping hot and arranged and steaming pleasantly on its attachable tray,
he wants his bib ironed and laid out by the tray at the ready, and he wants the living room's teleputer booted and warmed up and
the evening's entertainment cartridges already selected and arranged and lined up in dock ready for remote insertion into the
viewer's drive. He reclines before the viewer in his special electronic recliner, and his black-veiled, ethnically Arab wife
wordlessly attends him, loosening any constric-tive clothing, adjusting the room's lighting, fitting the complexly molded dinner
tray over his head so that his shoulders support the tray and allow it to project into space just below his chin, that he may enjoy his
hot dinner without having to remove his eyes from whatever entertainment is up and playing. He has a narrow imperial-style
beard which his wife also attends and keeps free of detritus from the tray just below. The medical attache sits and watches and eats
and watches, unwinding by visible degrees, until the angles of his body in the chair and his head on his neck indicate that he has
passed into sleep, at which point his special electronic recliner can be made automatically to recline to full horizontal, and
luxuriant silk-analog bedding emerges flowingly from long slots in the appliance's sides; and, unless his wife is inconsiderate and
clumsy with the recliner's remote hand-held controls, the medical attache is permitted to ease effortlessly from unwound
spectation into a fully relaxed night's sleep, still right there in the recumbent recliner, the TP set to run a recursive loop of lowvolume surf and light rain on broad green leaves.
Except, that is, for Wednesday nights, which in Boston are permitted to be his wife's Arab Women's Advanced League tennis
night with the other legation wives and companions at the plush Mount Auburn Club in West Watertown, on which nights she is
not around wordlessly to attend him, since Wednesday is the U.S.A. weekday on which fresh Töblerone hits Boston,
Massachusetts U.S.A.'s Newbury Street's import-confectioners' shelves, and the Saudi Minister of Home Entertainment's inability
to control his appetites for Wednesday Töblerone often requires the medical attache to remain in personal attendance all evening
on the bulk-rented fourteenth floor of the Back Bay Hilton, juggling tongue-depressors and cotton swabs, nystatin and ibuprofen
and stiptics and antibiotic thrush salves, rehabilitating the mucous membranes of the dyspeptic and distressed and often (but not
always) penitent and appreciative Saudi Prince Q---------.
So on 1 April, Y.D.A.U., when the medical attache is (it is alleged) insufficiently deft with a Q-Tip on an ulcerated sinal
necrosis and is subjected at just 1800h. to a fit of febrile thrushive pique from the florally imbalanced Minister of Home 
Entertainment, and is by high-volume fiat replaced at the royal bedside by the Prince's personal physician, who's summoned by
beeper from the Hilton's sauna, and when the damp personal physician pats the medical attache on the shoulder and tells him to
pay the pique no mind, that it's just the yeast talking, but to just head on home and unwind and for once make a well-deserved
early Wednesday evening of it, and but so when the attache does get home, at like 1840h., his spacious Boston apartments are
empty, the living room lights undimmed, dinner unheated and the attachable tray still in the dishwasher and — worst — of course
no entertainment cartridges have been obtained from the Boylston St. InterLace outlet where the medical attache's wife, like all
the veiled wives and companions of the Prince's legatees, has a complimentary goodwill account. And even if he weren't far too
exhausted and tightly wound to venture back into the damp urban night to pick up entertainment cartridges, the medical attache
realizes that his wife has, as always on Wednesdays, taken the car with the diplomatic-immunity license plates, without which
your thinking alien wouldn't even dream of trying to park publicly at night in Boston, Massachusetts U.S.A.
The medical attache's unwinding-options are thus severely constricted. The living room's lavish TP receives also the
spontaneous disseminations of the InterLace Subscription Pulse-Matrix, but the procedures for ordering specific spontaneous
pulses from the service are so technologically and cryp-tographically complex that the attache has always left the whole business
to his wife. On this Wednesday night, trying buttons and abbreviations almost at random, the attache is able to summon up only
live U.S.A. professional sports — which he has always found brutish and repellent — Texaco Oil Company-sponsored opera —
which the attache has seen today more than enough of the human uvula thank you very much — a redisseminated episode of the
popular afternoon InterLace children's program 'Mr. Bouncety-Bounce' — which the attache thinks for a moment might be a
documentary on bipolar mood disorders until he catches on and thumbs the selection-panel hastily — and a redisseminated session
of the scantily clad variable-impact early-A.M. 'Fit Forever' home-aerobics series of the InterLace aerobics-guru Ms. Tawni
Kondo, the scantily clad and splay-limbed immodesty of which threatens the devout medical attache with the possibility of impure
thoughts.
The only entertainment cartridges anywhere in the apartment, a foul-tempered search reveals, are those which have arrived in
Wednesday's U.S.A. postal delivery, left on the sideboard in the living room along with personal and professional faxes and mail
the medical attache declines to read until it's been pre-scanned by his wife for relevant interest to himself.
The sideboard is against the wall opposite the room's electronic recliner under a triptych of high-quality Byzantine erotica.
The padded cartridge-mailers with their distinctive rectangular bulge are mixed haphazardly in with the less entertaining mail.
Searching for something to unwind with, the medical attache tears the different padded mailers open along their designated
perforations. There is an O.N.A.N.M.A. Specialty Service film on actinomycete-class antibiotics and irritable bowel syndrome.
There is 1 April Y.D. A.U.'s CBC/PATHÉ North American News Summary 40-minute cartridge, available daily by a wife's autosubscription and either transmitted to TP by unrecordable InterLace pulse or express-posted on a single-play ROM self-erasing
disk. There is the Arabic-language video edition of April's Self magazine for the attache's wife, Nass's cover's model chastely
swathed and veiled. There is a plain brown and irritatingly untitled cartridge-case in a featureless white three-day standard U.S.A.
First Class padded cartridge-mailer. The padded mailer is postmarked suburban Phoenix area in Arizona U.S.A., and the returnaddress box has only the term 'HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!,' with a small drawn crude face, smiling, in ballpoint ink, instead of a
return address or incorporated logo. Though by birth and residence a native of Quebec, where the language of discourse is not
English, the medical attache knows quite well that the English word anniversary does not mean the same as birthday. And the
medical attache and his veiled wife were united in the eyes of God and Prophet not in April but in October, four years prior, in the
Rub'al Khali. Adding to the padded mailer's confusion is the fact that anything from Prince Q---------'s legation in Phoenix,
Arizona U.S.A. would carry a diplomatic seal instead of routine O.N.A.N. postage. The medical attache, in sum, feels tightly
wound and badly underappreciated and is prepared in advance to be irritated by the item inside, which is merely a standard black
entertainment cartridge, but is wholly unlabelled and not in any sort of colorful or informative or inviting cartridge-case, and has
only another of these vapid U.S.A.-type circular smiling heads embossed upon it where the registration- and duration-codes are
supposed to be embossed. The medical attache is puzzled by the cryptic mailer and face and case and unlabelled entertainment,
and preliminarily irritated by the amount of time he's had to spend upright at the sideboard attending to mail, which is not his task.
The sole reason he does not throw the unlabelled cartridge in the wastecan or put it aside for his wife to preview for relevance is
because there are such woefully slim entertainment-pickings on his wife's irritating Americanized tennis-league evening away
from her place at home. The attache will pop the cartridge in and scan just enough of its contents to determine whether it is
irritating or of an irrelevant nature and not entertaining or engaging in any way. He will heat the prepared halal lamb and spicy
halal garnish in the microwave oven until piping-hot, arrange it attractively on his tray, preview the first few moments of the
puzzling and/or irritating or possibly mysteriously blank entertainment cartridge first, then unwind with the news summary, then
perhaps have a quick unlibidinous look at Nðss's spring line of sexless black devout-women's-wear, then will insert the recursive
surf-and-rain cartridge and make a well-deserved early Wednesday evening of it, hoping only that his wife will not return from her
tennis league in her perspiration-dampened black ankle-length tennis ensemble and remove his dinner tray from his sleeping neck
in a clumsy or undeft fashion that will awaken him, potentially.
When he settles in with the tray and cartridge, the TP's viewer's digital display reads 1927h.
YEAR OF THE TRIAL-SIZE DOVE BAR
Wardine say her momma aint treat her right. Reginald he come round to my blacktop at my building where me and Delores
Epps jump double dutch and he say, Clenette, Wardine be down at my crib cry say her momma aint treat her right, and I go on
with Reginald to his building where he live at, and Wardine be sit deep far back in a closet in Reginald crib, and she be cry.
Reginald gone lift Wardine out the closet and me with him crying and I be rub on the wet all over Wardine face and Reginald be
so careful when he take off all her shirts she got on, tell Wardine to let me see. Wardine back all beat up and cut up. Big stripes of
cut all up and down Wardine back, pink stripes and around the stripes the skin like the skin on folks lips be like. Sick down in my
insides to look at it. Wardine be cry. Reginald say Wardine say her momma aint treat her right. Say her momma beat Wardine
with a hanger. Say Wardine momma man Roy Tony be want to lie down with Wardine. Be give Wardine candy and 5s. Be stand 
in her way in Wardine face and he aint let her pass without he all the time touching her. Reginald say Wardine say Roy Tony at
night when Wardine momma at work he come in to the mattresses where Wardine and William and Shantell and Roy the baby
sleep at, and he stand there in the dark, high, and say quiet things at her, and breathe. Wardine momma say Wardine tempt Roy
Tony into Sin. Wardine say she say Wardine try to take away Roy Tony into Evil and Sin with her young tight self. She beat
Wardine back with hangers out the closet. My momma say Wardine momma not right in her head. My momma scared of Roy
Tony. Wardine be cry. Reginald he down and beg for War-dine tell Reginald momma how Wardine momma treat Wardine.
Reginald say he Love his Wardine. Say he Love but aint never before this time could understand why Wardine wont lie down
with him like girls do their man. Say Wardine aint never let Reginald take off her shirts until tonight she come to Reginald crib in
his building and be cry, she let Reginald take off her shirts to see how Wardine momma beat Wardine because Roy Tony.
Reginald Love his Wardine. Wardine be like to die of scared. She say no to Reginald beg. She say, if she go to Reginald momma,
then Reginald momma go to Wardine momma, then Wardine momma think Wardine be lie down with Reginald. Wardine say her
momma say Wardine let a man lie down before she sixteen and she beat Wardine to death. Reginald say he aint no way going to
let that happen to Wardine.
Roy Tony kill Dolores Epps brother Columbus Epps at the Brighton Projects four years gone. Roy Tony on Parole. Wardine
say he show War-dine he got some thing on his ankle send radio signals to Parole that he still here in Brighton. Roy Tony cant be
leave Brighton. Roy Tony brother be Wardine father. He gone. Reginald try to hush Wardine but he can not stop Wardine cry.
Wardine look like crazy she so scared. She say she kill herself if me or Reginald tell our mommas. She say, Clenette, you my half
Sister, I am beg that you do not tell you momma on my momma and Roy Tony. Reginald tell Wardine to hush herself and lie
down quiet. He put Shedd Spread out the kitchen on Wardine cuts on her back. He run his finger with grease so careful down pink
lines of her getting beat with a hanger. Wardine say she do not feel nothing in her back ever since spring. She lie stomach on
Reginald floor and say she aint got no feeling in her skin of her back. When Reginald gone to get the water she asks me the truth,
how bad is her back look when Reginald look at it. Is she still pretty, she cry.
I aint tell my momma on Wardine and Reginald and Wardine momma and Roy Tony. My momma scared of Roy Tony. My
momma be the lady Roy Tony kill Columbus Epps over, four years gone, in the Brighton Projects, for Love.
But I know Reginald tell. Reginald say he gone die before Wardine momma beat Wardine again. He say he take his self up to
Roy Tony and say him to not mess with Wardine or breathe by her mattress at night. He say he take his self on down to the
playground at the Brighton Projects where Roy Tony do business and he go to Roy Tony man to man and he make Roy Tony
make it all right.
But I think Roy Tony gone kill Reginald if Reginald go. I think Roy Tony gone kill Reginald, and then Wardine momma beat
Wardine to death with a hanger. And then nobody know except me. And I am gone have a child.
In the eighth American-educational grade, Bruce Green fell dreadfully in love with a classmate who had the unlikely name of
Mildred Bonk. The name was unlikely because if ever an eighth-grader looked like a Daphne Christianson or a Kimberly St.-
Simone or something like that, it was Mildred Bonk. She was the kind of fatally pretty and nubile wraithlike figure who glides
through the sweaty junior-high corridors of every nocturnal emitter's dreamscape. Hair that Green had heard described by an overwrought teacher as 'flaxen'; a body which the fickle angel of puberty — the same angel who didn't even seem to know Bruce
Green's zip code — had visited, kissed, and already left, back in sixth; legs which not even orange Keds with purple-glitterencrusted laces could make unserious. Shy, iridescent, coltish, pelvically anfractuous, amply busted, given to diffident movements
of hand brushing flaxen hair from front of dear creamy forehead, movements which drove Bruce Green up a private tree. A vision
in a sundress and silly shoes. Mildred L. Bonk.
And then but by tenth grade, in one of those queer when-did-that-happen metamorphoses, Mildred Bonk had become an
imposing member of the frightening Winchester High School set that smoked full-strength Marl-boros in the alley between Senior
and Junior halls and that left school altogether at lunchtime, driving away in loud low-slung cars to drink beer and smoke dope,
driving around with sound-systems of illegal wattage, using Visine and Clorets, etc. She was one of them. She chewed gum (or
worse) in the cafeteria, her dear diffident face now a bored mask of Attitude, her flaxen locks now teased and gelled into what
looked for all the world like the consequence of a finger stuck into an electric socket. Bruce Green saved up for a low-slung old
car and practiced Attitude on the aunt who'd taken him in. He developed a will.
And, by the year of what would have been graduation, Bruce Green was way more bored, imposing, and frightening than
even Mildred Bonk, and he and Mildred Bonk and tiny incontinent Harriet Bonk-Green lived just off the Allston Spur in a shiny
housetrailer with another frightening couple and with Tommy Doocey, the infamous harelipped pot-and-sundries dealer who kept
several large snakes in unclean uncovered aquaria, which smelled, which Tommy Doocey didn't notice because his upper lip
completely covered his nostrils and all he could smell was lip. Mildred Bonk got high in the afternoon and watched serialcartridges, and Bruce Green had a steady job at Leisure Time Ice, and for a while life was more or less one big party.
YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
'Hal?’
'...’
...Hey Hal?’
'Yes Mario?’
'Are you asleep?’
'Booboo, we've been over this. I can't be asleep if we're talking.’
'That's what I thought.’
'Happy to reassure you.’
'Boy were you on today. Boy did you ever make that guy look sick. When he hit that one down the line and you got it and fell
down and hit that drop-volley Pemulis said the guy looked like he was going to be sick all over the net, he said.’
'Boo, I kicked a kid's ass is all. End of story. I don't think it's good to rehash it when I've kicked somebody's ass. It's like a 
dignity thing. I think we should just let it sort of lie in state, quietly. Speaking of which.’
'Hey Hal?’
'...’
'Hey Hal?’
'It's late, Mario. It's sleepy-time. Close your eyes and think fuzzy thoughts.’
'That's what the Moms always says, too.’
'Always worked for me, Boo.’
'You think I think fuzzy thoughts all the time. You let me room with you because you feel sorry for me.’
'Booboo I'm not even going to dignify that. I'll regard it as like a warning sign. You always get petulant when you don't get
enough sleep. And here we are seeing petulance already on the western horizon, right here.’
'When I asked if you were asleep I was going to ask if you felt like you believed in God, today, out there, when you were so
on, making that guy look sick.’
'This again?’
'...’
'Really don't think midnight in a totally dark room with me so tired my hair hurts and drills in six short hours is the time and
place to get into this, Mario.’
'You ask me this once a week.’
'You never say, is why.’
'So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with God, Boo. I'll say God seems to have a
kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death.
I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I, Boo.’
'You're talking about since Himself passed away.’
'See? You never say.' 'I do too say. I just did.’
'I just didn't happen to say what you wanted to hear, Booboo, is all.’
'...’
'There's a difference.’
'I don't get how you couldn't feel like you believed, today, out there. It was so right there. You moved like you totally
believed.’
'...’
'How do you feel inside, not?’
'Mario, you and I are mysterious to each other. We countenance each other from either side of some unbridgeable difference
on this issue. Let's lie very quietly and ponder this.’
'Hal?’
'...’
'Hey Hal?’
'I'm going to propose that I tell you a joke, Boo, on the condition that afterward you shush and let me sleep.’
'Is it a good one?’
'Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic, and a dyslexic.’
'I give.’
'You get somebody who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.’
'That's a good one!’
'Shush.’
'Hey Hal? What's an insomniac?’
'Somebody who rooms with you, kid, that's for sure.’
'Hey Hal?’
'How come the Moms never cried when Himself passed away? I cried, and you, even C.T. cried. I saw him personally cry.’
'...’
''You listened to Tosca over and over and cried and said you were sad.
We all were.’
'...’
'Hey Hal, did the Moms seem like she got happier after Himself passed away, to you?’
'...’
'It seems like she got happier. She seems even taller. She stopped travelling everywhere all the time for this and that thing.
The corporate-grammar thing. The library-protest thing.’
'Now she never goes anywhere, Boo. Now she's got the Headmaster's House and her office and the tunnel in between, and
never leaves the grounds. She's a worse workaholic than she ever was. And more obsessive-compulsive. When's the last time you
saw a dust-mote in that house?’
'Hey Hal?’
'Now she's just an agoraphobic workaholic and obsessive-compulsive. This strikes you as happification?’
'Her eyes are better. They don't seem as sunk in. They look better. She laughs at C.T. way more than she laughed at Himself.
She laughs from lower down inside. She laughs more. Her jokes she tells are better ones than yours, even, now, a lot of the time.’
'...’
'How come she never got sad?’
'She did get sad, Booboo. She just got sad in her way instead of yours and mine. She got sad, I'm pretty sure.’
'Hal?’
'You remember how the staff lowered the flag to half-mast out front by the portcullis here after it happened? Do you 
remember that? And it goes to half-mast every year at Convocation? Remember the flag, Boo?’
'Hey Hal?’
'Don't cry, Booboo. Remember the flag only halfway up the pole? Booboo, there are two ways to lower a flag to half-mast.
Are you listening? Because no shit I really have to sleep here in a second. So listen — one way to lower the flag to half-mast is
just to lower the flag. There's another way though. You can also just raise the pole. You can raise the pole to like twice its original
height. You get me? You understand what I mean, Mario?’
'Hal?’
'She's plenty sad, I bet.’
At 2OlOh. on 1 April Y.D.A.U., the medical attache is still watching the unlabelled entertainment cartridge.
OCTOBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
For Orin Incandenza, #, morning is the soul's night. The day's worst time, psychically. He cranks the condo's AC way down at
night and still most mornings wakes up soaked, fetally curled, entombed in that kind of psychic darkness where you're dreading
whatever you think of.
Hal Incandenza's brother Orin wakes up alone at 0730h. amid a damp scent of Ambush and on the other side's dented pillow a
note with phone # and vital data in a loopy schoolgirlish hand. There's also Ambush on the note. His side of the bed is soaked.
Orin makes honey-toast, standing barefoot at the kitchen counter, wearing briefs and an old Academy sweatshirt with the
arms cut off, squeezing honey from the head of a plastic bear. The floor's so cold it hurts his feet, but the double-pane window
over the sink is hot to the touch: the beastly metro Phoenix October A.M. heat just outside.
Home with the team, no matter how high the AC or how thin the sheet, Orin wakes with his own impression sweated darkly
into the bed beneath him, slowly drying all day to a white salty outline just slightly off from the week's other faint dried outlines,
so his fetal-shaped fossilized image is fanned out across his side of the bed like a deck of cards, just overlapping, like an acid trail
or timed exposure.
The heat just past the glass doors tightens his scalp. He takes breakfast out to a white iron table by the condo complex's
central pool and tries to eat it there, in the heat, the coffee not steaming or cooling. He sits there in dumb animal pain. He has a
mustache of sweat. A bright beach ball floats and bumps against one side of the pool. The sun like a sneaky keyhole view of hell.
No one else out here. The complex is a ring with the pool and deck and Jacuzzi in the center. Heat shimmers off the deck like
fumes from fuel. There's that mirage thing where the extreme heat makes the dry deck look wet with fuel. Orin can hear cartridgeviewers going from behind closed windows, that aerobics show every morning, and also someone playing an organ, and the older
woman who won't ever smile back at him in the apartment next to his doing operatic scales, muffled by drapes and sun-curtains
and double panes. The Jacuzzi chugs and foams.
The note from last night's Subject is on violet bond once folded and with a circle of darker violet dead-center where the
subject's perfume-spritzer had hit it. The only interesting thing about the script, but also depressing, is that every single circle —
o's, d's, p's, the #s 6 and 8 — is darkened in, while the i's are dotted not with circles but with tiny little Valentine hearts, which are
not darkened in. Orin reads the note while he eats toast that's mainly an excuse for the honey. He uses his smaller right arm to eat
and drink. His oversized left arm and big left leg remain at rest at all times in the morning.
A breeze sends the beach ball skating all the way across the blue pool to the other side, and Orin watches its noiseless glide.
The white iron tables have no umbrellas, and you can tell where the sun is without looking; you can feel right where it is on your
body and project from there. The ball moves tentatively back out toward the middle of the pool and then stays there, not even
bobbing. The same small breezes make the rotted palms along the condominium complex's stone walls rustle and click, and a
couple of fronds detach and spiral down, hitting the deck with a slap. All the plants out here are malevolent, heavy and sharp. The
parts of the palms above the fronds are tufted in sick stuff like coconut-hair. Roaches and other things live in the trees. Rats,
maybe. Loathsome high-altitude critters of all kinds. All the plants either spiny or meaty. Cacti in queer tortured shapes. The tops
of the palms like Rod Stewart's hair, from days gone by.
Orin returned with the team from the Chicago game two nights ago, redeye. He knows that he and the place-kicker are the
only two starters who are not still in terrible pain, physically, from the beating.
The day before they left — so like five days ago — Orin was out by himself in the Jacuzzi by the pool late in the day, caring
for the leg, sitting in the radiant heat and bloody late-day light with the leg in the Jacuzzi, absently squeezing the tennis ball he
still absently squeezes out of habit. Watching the Jacuzzi funnel and bubble and foam around the leg. And out of nowhere a bird
had all of a sudden fallen into the Jacuzzi. With a flat matter-of-fact plop. Out of nowhere. Out of the wide empty sky. Nothing
overhung the Jacuzzi but sky. The bird seemed to have just had a coronary or something in flight and died and fallen out of the
empty sky and landed dead in the Jacuzzi, right by the leg. He brought his sunglasses down onto the bridge of his nose with a
finger and looked at it. It was an undistinguished kind of bird. Not a predator. Like a wren, maybe. It seems like no way could it
have been a good sign. The dead bird bobbed and barrel-rolled in the foam, sucked under one second and reappearing the next,
creating an illusion of continued flight. Orin had inherited none of the Moms's phobias about disorder, hygiene. (Not crazy about
bugs though — roaches.) But he'd just sat there squeezing the ball, looking at the bird, without a conscious thought in his head. By
the next morning, waking up, curled and entombed, it seemed like it had to have been a bad sign, though.
Orin now always gets the shower so hot it's to where he can just barely stand it. The condo's whole bathroom is done in this
kind of minty yellow tile he didn't choose, maybe chosen by the free safety who lived here before the Cardinals sent New Orleans
the free safety, two reserve guards and cash for Orin Incandenza, punter.
And no matter how many times he has the Terminex people out, there are still the enormous roaches that come out of the
bathroom drains. Sewer roaches, according to Terminex. Blattaria implacablus or something. Really huge roaches. Armoredvehicle-type bugs. Totally black, with Kevlar-type cases, the works. And fearless, raised in the Hobbesian sewers down there.
Boston's and New Orleans's little brown roaches were bad enough, but you could at least come in and turn on a light and they'd
run for their lives. These Southwest sewer roaches you turn on the light and they just look up at you from the tile like: 'You got a
problem?' Orin stomped on one of them, only once, that had come hellishly up out of the drain in the shower when he was in
there, showering, going out naked and putting shoes on and coming in and trying to conventionally squash it, and the result was
explosive. There's still material from that one time in the tile-grouting. It seems unremovable. Roach-innards. Sickening.
Throwing the shoes away was preferable to looking at the sole to clean it. Now he keeps big glass tumblers in the bathroom and
when he turns on the light and sees a roach he puts a glass down over it, trapping it. After a couple days the glass is all steamed up
and the roach has asphyxiated messlessly and Orin discards both the roach and the tumbler in separate sealed Ziplocs in the
dumpster complex by the golf course up the street.
The yellow tile floor of the bathroom is sometimes a little obstacle course of glasses with huge roaches dying inside, stoically,
just sitting there, the glasses gradually steaming up with roach-dioxide. The whole thing makes Orin sick. Now he figures the
hotter the shower's water, the less chance any small armored vehicle is going to feel like coming out of the drain while he's in
there.
Sometimes they're in the bowl of the toilet first thing in the A.M., dog-paddling, trying to get to the side and climb up. He's
also not crazy about spiders, though more like unconsciously; he's never come anyplace close to the conscious horror Himself had
somehow developed about the South-west's black widows and their chaotic webs — the widows are all over the place, both here
and Tucson, spottable on all but the coldest nights, their dusty webs without any kind of pattern, clotting just about any rightangled place that's dim or out of the way. Terminex's toxins are more effective on the widows. Orin has them out monthly; he's on
like a subscription plan over at Terminex.
Orin's special conscious horror, besides heights and the early morning, is roaches. There'd been parts of metro Boston near the
Bay he'd refused to go to, as a child. Roaches give him the howling fantods. The parishes around N.O. had been having a spate or
outbreak of a certain Latin-origin breed of sinister tropical flying roaches, that were small and timid but could fucking fly, and that
kept being found swarming on New Orleans infants, at night, in their cribs, especially infants in like tenements or squalor, and that
reportedly fed on the mucus in the babies' eyes, some special sort of optical-mucus — the stuff of fucking nightmares, mobile
flying roaches that wanted to get at your eyes, as an infant — and were reportedly blinding them; par-ents'd come in in the ghastly
A.M.-tenement light and find their infants blind, like a dozen blinded infants that last summer; and it was during this spate or
nightmarish outbreak, plus July flooding that sent over a dozen nightmarish dead bodies from a hilltop graveyard sliding all grayblue down the incline Orin and two teammates had their townhouse on, in suburban Chalmette, shedding limbs and innards all the
way down the hillside's mud and one even one morning coming to rest against the post of their roadside mailbox, when Orin came
out for the morning paper, that Orin had had his agent put out the trade feelers. And so to the glass canyons and merciless light of
metro Phoenix, in a kind of desiccated circle, near the Tucson of his own father's desiccated youth.
It's the mornings after the spider-and-heights dreams that are the most painful, that it takes sometimes three coffees and two
showers and sometimes a run to loosen the grip on his soul's throat; and these post-dream mornings are even worse if he wakes
unalone, if the previous night's Subject is still there, wanting to twitter, or to cuddle and, like, spoon, asking what exactly is the
story with the foggy inverted tumblers on the bathroom floor, commenting on his night-sweats, clattering around in the kitchen,
making kippers or bacon or something even more hideous and unhoneyed he's supposed to eat with post-coital male gusto, the
ones who have this thing about they call it Feeding My Man, wanting a man who can barely keep down A.M. honey-toast to eat
with male gusto, elbows out and shovelling, making little noises. Even when alone, able to uncurl alone and sit slowly up and
wring out the sheet and go to the bathroom, these darkest mornings start days that Orin can't even bring himself for hours to think
about how he'll get through the day. These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light — the soul's
certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it
will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.
So now his own eye-mucus is secure, in the Desert Southwest; but the bad dreams have gotten worse since the trade to this
blasted area Himself himself had fled, long ago, as an unhappy youngster.
As a nod to Orin's own unhappy youth, all the dreams seem to open briefly with some sort of competitive-tennis situation.
Last night's had started with a wide-angle shot of Orin on a Har-Tru court, waiting to receive serve from someone vague, some
Academy person — Ross Reat maybe, or good old M. Bain, or gray-toothed Walt Flechette, now a teaching pro in the Carolinas
— when the dream's screen tightens on him and abruptly dissolves to the blank dark rose color of eyes closed against bright light,
and there's the ghastly feeling of being submerged and not knowing which way to head for the surface and air, and after some
interval the dream's Orin struggles up from this kind of visual suffocation to find his mother's head, Mrs. Avril M. T.
Incandenza's, the Moms's disconnected head attached face-to-face to his own fine head, strapped tight to his face somehow by a
wrap-around system of VS HiPro top-shelf lamb-gut string from his Academy racquet's own face. So that no matter how
frantically Orin tries to move his head or shake it side to side or twist up his face or roll his eyes he's still staring at, into, and
somehow through his mother's face. As if the Moms's head was some sort of overtight helmet Orin can't wrestle his way out of.2
In the dream, it's understandably vital to Orin that he disengage his head from the phylacteryish bind of his mother's disembodied
head, and he cannot. Last night's Subject's note indicates that at some point last night Orin had clutched her head with both hands
and tried to sort of stiff-arm her, though not in an ungentle or complaining way (the note, not the stiff-arm). The apparent
amputation of the Moms's head from the rest of the Moms appears in the dream to be clean and surgically neat: there is no
evidence of a stump or any kind of nubbin of neck, even, and it is as if the base of the round pretty head had been sealed, and also
sort of rounded off, so that her head is a large living ball, a globe with a face, attached to his own head's face.
The Subject after Bain's sister but before the one just before this one, with the Ambush scent and the hearts over i's, the
previous Subject had been a sallowly pretty Arizona State developmental psychology grad student with two kids and outrageous
alimony and penchants for sharp jewelry, refrigerated chocolate, InterLace educational cartridges, and professional athletes who
thrashed in their sleep. Not real bright — she thought the figure he'd trace without thinking on her bare flank after sex was the
numeral 8, to give you an idea. Their last morning together, right before he'd mailed her child an expensive toy and then had his
phone number changed, he'd awakened from a night of horror-show dreams — woke up with an abrupt fetal spasm, unrefreshed
and benighted of soul, his eyes wobbling and his wet silhouette on the bottom sheet like a coroner's chalk outline — he woke to
find the Subject up and sitting up against the reading pillow, wearing his sleeveless Academy sweatshirt and sipping hazelnut
espresso and watching, on the cartridge-viewing system that occupied half the bedroom's south wall, something horrific called
'INTERLACE EDUCATIONAL CARTRIDGES IN CONJUNCTION WITH CBC EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMMING 
MATRIX PRESENTS SCHIZOPHRENIA: MIND OR BODY?' and had had to lie there, moist and paralyzed, curled fetal on his
own sweat-shadow, and watch on the viewer a pale young guy about Hal's age, with copper stubble and a red cowlick and flat
blank affectless black doll's eyes, stare into space stage-left while a brisk Albertan voiceover explained that Fenton here was a
dyed-in-the-wool paranoid schizophrenic who believed that radioactive fluids were invading his skull and that hugely complex
high-tech-type machines had been specially designed and programmed to pursue him without cease until they caught him and
made brutal sport of him and buried him alive. It was an old late-millennial CBC public-interest Canadian news documentary,
digitally sharpened and redisseminated under the Inter-Lace imprimatur — InterLace could get kind of seedy and low-rent during
early-morning off-hours, in terms of Spontaneous Disseminations.
And so but since the old CBC documentary's thesis was turning out pretty clearly to be SCHIZOPHRENIA: BODY, the
voiceover evinced great clipped good cheer as it explained that well, yes, poor old Fenton here was more or less hopeless as an
extra-institutional functioning unit, but that, on the up-side, science could at least give his existence some sort of meaning by
studying him very carefully to help learn how schizophrenia manifested itself in the human body's brain . . . that, in other words,
with the aid of cutting-edge Positron-Emission Topography or 'P.E.T.' technology (since supplanted wholly by Invasive Digitals,
Orin hears the developmental psychology graduate student mutter to herself, watching rapt over her cup, unaware that Orin's
paralytically awake), they could scan and study how different parts of poor old Fenton's dysfunctional brain emitted positrons in a
whole different topography than your average hale and hearty nondelusional God-fearing Alber-tan's brain, advancing science by
injecting test-subject Fenton here with a special blood-brain-barrier-penetrating radioactive dye and then sticking him in the
rotating body-sized receptacle of a P.E.T. Scanner — on the viewer, it's an enormous gray-metal machine that looks like
something co-designed by James Cameron and Fritz Lang, and now have a look at this Fenton fellow's eyes as he starts to get the
gist of what the voiceover's saying — and in a terse old Public-TV cut they now showed subject Fenton in five-point canvas restraints whipping his copper-haired head from side to side as guys in mint-green surgical masks and caps inject him with
radioactive fluids through a turkey-baster-sized syringe, then good old Fenton's eyes bugging out in total foreseen horror as he's
rolled toward the huge gray P.E.T. device and slid like an unrisen loaf into the thing's open maw until only his decay-colored
sneakers are in view, and the body-sized receptacle rotates the test-subject counterclockwise, with brutal speed, so that the old
sneakers point up and then left and then down and then right and then up, faster and faster, the machine's blurps and tweets not
even coming close to covering Fenton's entombed howls as his worst delusional fears came true in digital stereo and you could
hear the last surviving bits of his functional dye-permeated mind being screamed out of him for all time as the viewer digitally
superimposed an image of Fenton's ember-red and neutron-blue brain in the lower-right corner, where InterLace's Time/Temp
functions usually appear, and the brisk voiceover gave capsule histories of first paranoid schizophrenia and then P.E.T. With Orin
lying there slit-eyed, wet and neuralgic with A.M. dread, wishing the Subject would put her own clothes and sharp jewelry on and
take the rest of her Töblerone out of the freezer and go, so he could go to the bathroom and get yesterday's asphyxiated roaches
into an E.W.D. dumpster before the dumpsters all filled for the day, and decide what kind of expensive present to mail the
Subject's kid.
And then the matter of the dead bird, out of nowhere.
And then news of pressure from the AZ Cardinal administration to cooperate with some sort of insipid-type personalityprofile series of interviews with some profiler from Moment magazine, with personal backgroundish questions to be answered in
some blandly sincere team-PR way, the unexamined stress of which drives him to start calling Hallie again, reopen that whole
Pandora's box of worms.
Orin also shaves in the shower, face red with heat, wreathed in steam, by feel, shaving upward, with south-to-north strokes, as
he was taught.
YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
Here's Hal Incandenza, age seventeen, with his little brass one-hitter, getting covertly high in the Enfield Tennis Academy's
underground Pump Room and exhaling palely into an industrial exhaust fan. It's the sad little interval after afternoon matches and
conditioning but before the Academy's communal supper. Hal is by himself down here and nobody knows where he is or what
he's doing.
Hal likes to get high in secret, but a bigger secret is that he's as attached to the secrecy as he is to getting high.
A one-hitter, sort of like a long FDR-type cigarette holder whose end is packed with a pinch of good dope, gets hot and is
hard on the mouth — the brass ones especially — but one-hitters have the advantage of efficiency: every particle of ignited pot
gets inhaled; there's none of the incidental secondhand-type smoke from a party bowl's big load, and Hal can take every iota way
down deep and hold his breath forever, so that even his exhalations are no more than slightly pale and sick-sweet-smelling.
Total utilization of available resources = lack of publicly detectable waste.
The Academy's tennis courts' Lung's Pump Room is underground and accessible only by tunnel. E.T.A. is abundantly,
embranchingly tunnelled. This is by design.
Plus one-hitters are small, which is good, because let's face it, anything you use to smoke high-resin dope with is going to
stink. A bong is big, and its stink is going to be like commensurately big, plus you have the foul bong-water to deal with. Pipes are
smaller and at least portable, but they always come with only a multi-hit party bowl that disperses nonutilized smoke over a wide
area. A one-hitter can be wastelessly employed, then allowed to cool, wrapped in two baggies and then further wrapped and sealed
in a Ziploc and then enclosed in two sport-socks in a gear bag along with the lighter and eyedrops and mint-pellets and the little
film-case of dope itself, and it's highly portable and odor-free and basically totally covert.
As far as Hal knows, colleagues Michael Pemulis, Jim Struck, Bridget C.
Boone, Jim Troeltsch, Ted Schacht, Trevor Axford, and possibly Kyle D. Coyle and Tall Paul Shaw, and remotely possibly
Frannie Unwin, all know Hal gets regularly covertly high. It's also not impossible that Bernadette Longley knows, actually; and of
course the unpleasant K. Freer always has suspicions of all kinds. And Hal's brother Mario knows a thing or two. But that's it, in
terms of public knowledge. And but even though Pemulis and Struck and Boone and Troeltsch and Axford and occasionally (in a 
sort of medicinal or touristic way) Slice and Schacht all are known to get high also, Hal has actually gotten actively high only with
Pemulis, on the rare occasions he's gotten high with anybody else, as in in person, which he avoids. He'd forgot: Ortho ('The
Darkness') Slice, of Partridge KS, knows; and Hal's oldest brother, Orin, mysteriously, even long-distance, seems to know more
than he's coming right out and saying, unless Hal's reading more into some of the phone-comments than are there.
Hal's mother, Mrs. Avril Incandenza, and her adoptive brother Dr. Charles Tavis, the current E.T.A. Headmaster, both know
Hal drinks alcohol sometimes, like on weekend nights with Troeltsch or maybe Axford down the hill at clubs on Commonwealth
Ave.; The Unexamined Life has its notorious Blind Bouncer night every Friday where they card you on the Honor System. Mrs.
Avril Incandenza isn't crazy about the idea of Hal drinking, mostly because of the way his father had drunk, when alive, and
reportedly his father's own father before him, in AZ and CA; but Hal's academic precocity, and especially his late competitive
success on the junior circuit, make it clear that he's able to handle whatever modest amounts she's pretty sure he consumes —
there's no way someone can seriously abuse a substance and perform at top scholarly and athletic levels, the E.T.A. psychcounselor Dr. Rusk assures her, especially the high-level-athletic part — and Avril feels it's important that a concerned but unsmothering single parent know when to let go somewhat and let the two high-functioning of her three sons make their own
possible mistakes and learn from their own valid experience, no matter how much the secret worry about mistakes tears her
gizzard out, the mother's. And Charles supports whatever personal decisions she makes in conscience about her children. And God
knows she'd rather have Hal having a few glasses of beer every so often than absorbing God alone knows what sort of esoteric
designer compounds with reptilian Michael Pemulis and trail-of-slime-leaving James Struck, both of whom give Avril a howling
case of the maternal fantods. And ultimately, she's told Drs. Rusk and Tavis, she'd rather have Hal abide in the security of the
knowledge that his mother trusts him, that she's trusting and supportive and doesn't judge or gizzard-tear or wring her fine hands
over his having for instance a glass of Canadian ale with friends every now and again, and so works tremendously hard to hide her
maternal dread of his possibly ever drinking like James himself or James's father, all so that Hal might enjoy the security of
feeling that he can be up-front with her about issues like drinking and not feel he has to hide anything from her under any
circumstances.
Dr. Tavis and Dolores Rusk have privately discussed the fact that not least among the phobic stressors Avril suffers so
uncomplainingly with is a black phobic dread of hiding or secrecy in all possible forms with respect to her sons.
Avril and C. T. know nothing about Hal's penchants for high-resin Bob Hope and underground absorption, which fact Hal
obviously likes a lot, on some level, though he's never given much thought to why. To why he likes it so much.
E.T.A.'s hilltop grounds are traversable by tunnel. Avril I., for example, who never leaves the grounds anymore, rarely travels
above ground, willing to hunch to take the off-tunnels between Headmaster's House and her office next to Charles Tavis's in the
Community and Administration Bldg., a pink-bricked white-pillared neo-Georgian thing that Hal's brother Mario says looks like a
cube that has swallowed a ball too big for its stomach.3 Two sets of elevators and one of stairs run between the lobby, reception
area, and administrative offices on Comm.-Ad.'s first floor and the weight room, sauna, and locker/shower areas on the sublevel
below it. One large tunnel of elephant-colored cement leads from just off the boys' showers to the mammoth laundry room below
the West Courts, and two smaller tunnels radiate from the sauna area south and east to the subbasements of the smaller,
spherocubular, pro to-Georgian buildings (housing classrooms and subdor-mitories B and D); these two basements and smaller
tunnels often serve as student storage space and hallways between various prorectors'4 private rooms. Then two even smaller
tunnels, navigable by any adult willing to assume a kind of knuckle-dragging simian posture, in turn connect each of the
subbasements to the former optical and film-development facilities of Leith and Ogilvie and the late Dr. James O. Incandenza
(now deceased) below and just west of the Headmaster's House (from which facilities there's also a fair-diametered tunnel that
goes straight to the lowest level of the Community and Administration Bldg., but its functions have gradually changed over four
years, and it's now too full of exposed wiring and hot-water pipes and heating ducts to be really passable) and to the offices of the
Physical Plant, almost directly beneath the center row of E.T.A. outdoor tennis courts, which offices and custodial lounge are in
turn connected to E.T.A.'s Lung-Storage and -Pump Rooms via a pargeted tunnel hastily constructed by the TesTar Ail-Weather
Inflatable Structures Corp., which together with the folks over at ATHSCME Industrial Air Displacement Devices erects and
services the inflatable dendriurethane dome, known as the Lung, that covers the middle row of courts for the winter indoor season.
The crude little rough-sided tunnel between Plant and Pump is traversable only via all-fours-type crawling and is essentially
unknown to staff and Administration, popular only with the Academy's smaller kids' Tunnel Club, as well as with certain
adolescents with strong secret incentive to crawl on all fours.
The Lung-Storage Room is basically impassable from March through November because it's full of intricately folded
dendriurethane Lung-material and dismantled sections of flexible ducting and fan-blades, etc. The Pump Room is right next to it,
though you have to crawl back out into the tunnel to get to it. On the engineering diagrams the Pump Room's maybe about twenty
meters directly beneath the centermost courts in the middle row of courts, and looks like a kind of spider hanging upside-down —
an unfenestrated oval chamber with six man-sized curved ducts radiating up and out to exit points on the grounds above. And the
Pump Room has six radial openings, one for each upcurving duct: three two-meter vents with huge turbine-bladed exhaust fans
bolted into their grilles and three more 2M's with reversed ATHSCME intake fans that allow air from the ground above to be
sucked down and around the room and up into the three exhaust vents. The Pump Room is essentially like a pulmonary organ, or
the epicenter of a massive six-vectored wind tunnel, and when activated roars like a banshee that's slammed its hand in a door,
though the P.R.'s in full legit operation only when the Lung is up, usually November-March. The intake fans pullground-level
winter air down into and around the room and through the three exhaust fans and up the outtake ducts into networks of pneumatic
tubing in the Lung's sides and dome: it's the pressure of the moving air that keeps the fragile Lung inflated.
When the courts' Lung is down and stored, Hal will descend and walk and then hunch his way in to make sure nobody's in the
Physical Plant quarters, then he'll hunch and crawl to the P.R., gear bag in his teeth, and activate just one of the big exhaust fans
and get secretly high and exhale palely through its blades into the vent, so that any possible odor is blown through an outtake duct
and expelled through a grille'd hole on the west side of the West Courts, a threaded hole, with a flange, where brisk white-suited
ATHSCME guys will attach some of the Lung's arterial pneumatic tubing at some point soon when Schtitt et al. on Staff decide
the real weather has moved past enduring for outdoor tennis. 
During winter months, when any expelled odor would get ducted up into the Lung and hang there conspicuous, Hal mostly
goes into a remote sub-dormitory lavatory and climbs onto a toilet in a stall and exhales into the grille of one of the little exhaust
fans in the ceiling; but this routine lacks a certain intricate subterranean covert drama. It's another reason why Hal dreads
Interdependence Day and the approach of the WhataBurger classic and Thanksgiving and unendurable weather, and the erection
of the Lung.
Recreational drugs are more or less traditional at any U.S. secondary school, maybe because of the unprecedented tensions:
post-latency and puberty and angst and impending adulthood, etc. To help manage the intra-psychic storms, etc. Since the place's
inception, there's always been a certain percentage of the high-caliber adolescent players at E.T.A. who manage their internal
weathers chemically. Much of this is good clean temporary fun; but a traditionally smaller and harder-core set tends to rely on
personal chemistry to manage E.T.A.'s special demands — dexedríne or low-volt methedrine55 before matches and
benzodiazapenes66 to come back down after matches, with Mudslides or Blue Flames at some understanding Comm. Ave.
nightspot77 or beers and bongs in some discreet Academy corner at night to short-circuit the up-and-down cycle, mushrooms or X
or something from the Mild Designer class88 — or maybe occasionally a little Black Star,99 whenever there's a match- and
demand-free weekend, to basically short out the whole motherboard and blow out all the circuits and slowly recover and be almost
neurologically reborn and start the gradual cycle all over again .. . this circular routine, if your basic wiring's OK to begin with,
can work surprisingly well throughout adolescence and sometimes into one's like early twenties, before it starts to creep up on
you.
But so some E.T.A.s — not just Hal Incandenza by any means — are involved with recreational substances, is the point. Like
who isn't, at some life-stage, in the U.S.A. and Interdependent regions, in these troubled times, for the most part. Though a decent
percentage of E.T.A. students aren't at all. I.e. involved. Some persons can give themselves away to an ambitious pursuit and have
that be all the giving-themselves-away-to-something they need to do. Though sometimes this changes as the players get older and
the pursuit more stress-fraught. American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give
themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.
An enrolled student-athlete's use of alcohol or illicit chemicals is cause for immediate expulsion, according to E.T.A.'s
admissions catalogue. But the E.T.A. staff tends to have a lot more important stuff on its plate than policing kids who've already
given themselves away to an ambitious competitive pursuit. The administrative attitude under first James Incandenza and then
Charles Tavis is, like, why would anybody who wanted to compromise his faculties chemically even come here, to E.T.A., where
the whole point is to stress and stretch your faculties along multiple vectors.1010 And since it's the alumni prorectors who have
the most direct supervisory contact with the kids, and since most of the prorectors themselves are depressed or traumatized about
not making it into the Show and having to come back to E.T.A. and live in decent but subterranean rooms off the tunnels and
work as assistant coaches and teach laughable elective classes — which is what the eight E.T.A. prorectors do, when they're not
off playing Satellite tournaments or trying to make it through the qualifying rounds of some serious-money event — and so they're
morose and low on morale, and feel bad about themselves, often, as a rule, and so also not all that surprisingly tend to get high
now and then themselves, though in a less covert or exuberant fashion than the hard-core students' chemical cadre, but so given all
this it's not hard to see why internal drug-enforcement at E.T.A. tends to be flaccid. The other nice thing about the Pump Room is
the way it's connected by tunnel to the prorectors' rows of housing units, which means men's rooms, which means Hal can crawl,
hunch, and tiptoe into an unoccupied men's room and brush his teeth with his portable Oral-B and wash his face and apply
eyedrops and Old Spice and a plug of wintergreen Kodiak and then saunter back to the sauna area and ascend to ground level
looking and smelling right as rain, because when he gets high he develops a powerful obsession with having nobody — not even
the neurochemical cadre — know he's high. This obsession is almost irresistible in its force. The amount of organization and
toiletry-lugging he has to do to get secretly high in front of a subterranean outtake vent in the pre-supper gap would make a lesser
man quail. Hal has no idea why this is, or whence, this obsession with the secrecy of it. He broods on it abstractly sometimes,
when high: this No-One-Must-Know thing. It's not fear per se, fear of discovery. Beyond that it all gets too abstract and twined up
to lead to anything, Hal's brooding. Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels
certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say
for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.
At 0015h., 2 April, the medical attache's wife is just leaving the Mount Auburn Total Fitness Center, having played five sixgame pro-sets in her little Mideast-diplomatic-wife-tennis-circle's weekly round-robin, then hung around the special Silver-KeyMembers' Lounge with the other ladies, unwrapping her face and hair and playing Narjees1111 and all smoking kif and making
extremely delicate and oblique fun of their husbands' sexual idiosyncrasies, laughing softly with their hands over their mouths.
The medical attache, at their apartment, is still viewing the unlabelled cartridge, which he has rewound to the beginning several
times and then configured for a recursive loop. He sits there, attached to a congealed supper, watching, at 0020h., having now wet
both his pants and the special recliner.
Eighteen in May, Mario Incandenza's designated function around Enfield Tennis Academy is filmic: sometimes during A.M.
drills or P.M. matches he'll be assigned by Coach Schtitt et al. to set up an old camcorder or whatever video stuff's to hand on a
tripod and record a certain area of court, videotaping different kids' strokes, footwork, certain tics and hitches in serves or running
volleys, so the staff can show the tapes to the kids instructionally, letting the kids see on the screen exactly what a coach or
prorector's talking about. The reason being it's a lot easier to fix something if you can see it.
AUTUMN — YEAR OF DAIRY PRODUCTS FROM THE AMERICAN HEARTLAND
Drug addicts driven to crime to finance their drug addiction are not often inclined toward violent crime. Violence requires all
different kinds of energy, and most drug addicts like to expend their energy not on their professional crime but on what their
professional crime lets them afford. Drug addicts are often burglars, therefore. One reason why the home of someone whose home
has been burglarized feels violated and unclean is that there have probably been drug addicts in there. Don Gately was a twentyseven-year-old oral narcotics addict (favoring Demerol and Talwin1212), and a more or less professional burglar; and he was, 
himself, unclean and violated. But he was a gifted burglar, when he burgled — though the size of a young dinosaur, with a
massive and almost perfectly square head he used to amuse his friends when drunk by letting them open and close elevator doors
on, he was, at his professional zenith, smart, sneaky, quiet, quick, possessed of good taste and reliable transportation — with a
kind of ferocious jolliness in his attitude toward his livelihood.
As an active drug addict, Gately was distinguished by his ferocious and jolly elan. He kept his big square chin up and his
smile wide, but he bowed neither toward nor away from any man. He took zero in the way of shit and was a cheery but implacable
exponent of the Don't-Get-Mad-Get-Even school. Like for instance once, after he'd done a really unpleasant three-month bit in
Revere Holding on nothing more than a remorseless North Shore Assistant District Attorney's circumstantial suspicion, finally
getting out after 92 days when his P.D. got the charges dismissed on a right-to-speedy brief, Gately and a trusted associate1313
paid a semiprofessional visit to the private home of this Assistant D.A. whose zeal and warrant had cost Gately a nasty impromptu
detox on the floor of his little holding-cell. Also a believer in the Revenge-Is-Tastier-Chilled dictum, Gately had waited patiently
until the 'Eye On People' section of the Globe mentioned the A.D.A. and his wife's presence at some celebrity charity sailing thing
out in Mar-blehead. Gately and the associate went that night to the A.D.A.'s private home in the upscale Wonderland Valley
section of Revere, killed the power to the home with a straight shunt in the meter's inflow, then clipped just the ground wire on the
home's pricey HBT alarm, so that the alarm'd sound after ten or so minutes and create the impression that the perps had somehow
bungled the alarm and been scared off in the middle of the act. Later that night, when Revere's and Marblehead's Finest
summoned them home, the A.D.A. and his wife found themselves minus a coin collection and two antique shotguns and nothing
more. Quite a few other valuables were stacked on the floor of the living room off the foyer like the perps hadn't had time to get
them out of the house. Everything else in the burglarized home looked undisturbed. The A.D.A. was a jaded pro: he walked
around touching the brim of his hat1414 and reconstructed probable events: the perps looked like they'd bungled disabling the
alarm all the way and had got scared off by the thing's siren when the alarm's pricey HBT alternate ground kicked in at 300 v. The
A.D.A. soothed his wife's sense of violation and uncleanliness. He calmly insisted on sleeping there in their home that very night;
no hotel: it was like crucial to get right back on the emotional horse, in cases like this, he insisted. And then the next day the
A.D.A. worked out the insurance and reported the shotguns to a buddy at A.T.F.1515 and his wife calmed down and life went on.
About a month later, an envelope arrived in the A.D.A.'s home's exquisite wrought-iron mailbox. In the envelope were a
standard American Dental Association glossy brochure on the importance of daily oral hygiene — available at like any dentist's
office anywhere — and two high-pixel Polaroid snapshots, one of big Don Gately and one of his associate, each in a Halloween
mask denoting a clown's great good professional cheer, each with his pants down and bent over and each with the enhanced-focus
handle of one of the couple's toothbrushes protruding from his bottom.
Don Gately had sense enough never to work the North Shore again after that. But he ended up in hideous trouble anyway,
A.D.A.-wise. It was either bad luck or kismet or so forth. It was because of a cold, a plain old human rhinovirus. And not even
Don Gately's cold, is what made him finally stop and question his kismet.
The thing started out looking like tit on a tray, burglary-wise. A beautiful neo-Georgian home in a wildly upscale part of
Brookline was set nicely back from an unlit pseudo-rural road, had a chintzy SentryCo alarm system that fed, idiotically enough,
on a whole separate 330 v AC 90 Hz cable with its own meter, didn't seem to be on anything like a regular P.M.-patrol route, and
had, at its rear, flimsily tasteful French doors surrounded by dense and thorn-free deciduous shrubbery and blocked off from the
garage's halogen floods by a private E.W.D.-issue upscale dumpster. It was in short a real cock-tease of a home, burglary-wise, for
a drug addict. And Don Gately straight-shunted the alarm's meter and, with an associate,1616 broke and entered and crept around
on huge cat feet.
Except unfortunately the owner of the house turned out to be still home, even though both of his cars and the rest of his
family were gone. The little guy was asleep sick in bed upstairs in acetate pajamas with a hot water bottle on his chest and half a
glass of OJ and a bottle of NyQuil1717 and a foreign book and copies of International Affairs and Interdependent Affairs and a
pair of thick specs and an industrial-size box of Kleenex on the bedside table and an empty vaporizer barely humming at the foot
of the bed, and the guy was to say the least nonplussed to wake up and see high-filter flashlights crisscrossing over the unlit
bedroom walls and bureau and teak chiffonnier as Gately and associate scanned for a wall-safe, which surprisingly like 90% of
people with wall-safes conceal in their master bedroom behind some sort of land- or seascape painting. People turned out so
identical in certain root domestic particulars it made Gately feel strange sometimes, like he was in possession of certain overlarge
private facts to which no man should be entitled. Gately had a way stickier conscience about the possession of some of these large
particular facts than he did about making off with other people's personal merchandise. But then all of a sudden in mid-silentsearch for a safe here's this upscale homeowner turning out to be home with a nasty head-cold while his family's out on a two-car
foliage-tour in what's left of the Berkshires, writhing groggily and Ny-Quilized around on the bed and making honking adenoidal
sounds and asking what in bloody hell is the meaning of this, except he's saying it in Québecois French, which means to these
thuggish U.S. drug addicts in Halloween-clowns' masks exactly nothing, he's sitting up in bed, a little and older-type homeowner
with a football-shaped head and gray van Dyke and eyes you can tell are used to corrective lenses as he switches on the bright
bedside lamp. Gately could easily have screwed out of there and never looked back; but here indeed, in the lamplight, is a
seascape over next to the chiffonnier, and the associate has a quick peek and reports that the safe behind it is to laugh at, it can be
opened with harsh language, almost; and oral narcotics addicts tend to operate on an extremely rigid physical schedule of need and
satisfaction, and Gately is at this moment firmly in the need part of the schedule; and so D. W. Gately disastrously decides to go
ahead and allow a nonviolent burglary to become in effect a robbery — which the operative legal difference involves either
violence or the coercive threat of same — and Gately draws himself up to his full menacing height and shines his flashlight in the
little homeowner's rheumy eyes and addresses him the way menacing criminals speak in popular entertainment — d's for th's, various apocopes, and so on — and takes hold of the guy's ear and conducts him down to a kitchen chair and binds his arms and legs
to the chair with electrical cords neatly clipped from refrigerator and can-opener and M. Cafe-brand Automatic Café-au-LaitMaker, binds him just short of gan-grenously tight, because he's hoping the Berkshire foliage is prime and the guy's going to be
soloing in this chair for a good stretch of time, and Gately starts looking through the kitchen's drawers for the silverware — not
the good-silver-for-company silverware; that was in a calfskin case underneath some neatly folded old spare Christmas wrapping 
in a stunning hardwood-with-ivory-inlay chest of drawers in the living room, where over 90% of upscale people's good silver is
always hidden, and has already been promoted and is piled1818 just off the foyer — but just the regular old everyday flatware
silverware, because the vast bulk of homeowners keep their dish towels two drawers below their everyday-silverware drawer, and
God's made no better call-for-help-stifling gag in the world than a good old oily-smelling fake-linen dish towel; and the bound guy
in the cords on the chair suddenly snaps to the implications of what Gately's looking for and is struggling and saying: Do not gag
me, I have a terrible cold, my nose she is a brick of the snot, I have not the power to breathe through the nose, for the love of God
please do not gag my mouth; and as a gesture of goodwill the homeowner tells Gately, who's rummaging, the combination of the
bedroom's seascape safe, except in French numbers, which together with the honking adenoidal inflection the guy's grippe gives
his speech doesn't even sound like human speech to Gately, and but also the guy tells Gately there are some antique pre-Britishtakeover Québecois gold coins in a calfskin purse taped to the back of an undistinguished Impressionist landscape in the living
room. But everything the Canadian homeowner says means no more to poor old Don Gately, whistling a jolly tune and trying to
look menacing in his clown's mask, than the cries of, say, North Shore gulls or inland grackles; and sure enough the towels are
two drawers under the spoons, and here comes Gately across the kitchen looking like a sort of Bozo from hell, and the Québecer
guy's mouth goes oval with horror, and into that mouth goes a balled-up, faintly greasy-smelling kitchen towel, and across the
guy's cheeks and over the dome of protruding linen goes some fine-quality fibrous strapping tape from the drawer under the
decommissioned phone — why does everybody keep the serious mailing supplies in the drawer nearest the kitchen phone? — and
Don Gately and associate finish their swift and with-the-best-of-intentions nonviolent business of stripping the Brookline home as
bare as a post-feral-hamster meadow, and they relock the front door and hit the unlit road in Gately's reliable and doublemufflered 4x4. And the bound, wheezing, acetate-clad Canadian — the right-hand man to probably the most infamous antiO.N.A.N. organizer north of the Great Concavity, the lieutenant and trouble-shooting trusted adviser who selflessly volunteered to
move with his family to the savagely American area of metro Boston to act as liaison between and general leash-holder for the
half-dozen or so malevolent and mutually antagonistic groups of Québecer Separatists and Albertan ultra-rightists united only in
their fanatical conviction that the U.S.A.'s Experialistic 'gift' or 'return' of the so-calledly 'Reconfigured' Great Convexity to its
northern neighbor and O.N.A.N. ally constituted an intolerable blow to Canadian sovereignty, honor, and hygiene — this
homeowner, unquestionably a V.I.P., although admittedly rather a covert V.I.P., or probably more accurately a 'P./.T.,'1919 in
French, this meek-looking Canadian-terrorism-coordinator — bound to his chair, thoroughly gagged, sitting there, alone, under
cold fluorescent kitchen lights,2020 the rhinovirally afflicted man, gagged with skill and quality materials — the guy, having
worked so hard to partially clear one clotted nasal passage that he tore intercostal ligaments in his ribs, soon found even that
pinprick of air blocked off by mucus's implacable lava-like flow once again, and so has to tear more ligaments trying to breach the
other nostril, and so on; and after an hour of struggle and flames in his chest and blood on his lips and the white kitchen towel
from trying frantically to tongue the towel out past the tape, which is quality tape, and after hopes skyrocketing when the doorbell
rings and then hopes blackly dashed when the person at the door, a young woman with a clipboard and chewing gum who's offering promotional coupons good for Happy Holidays discounts on memberships of six months or more at a string of Boston non-UV
tanning salons, shrugs in her parka and makes a mark on the clipboard and blithely retreats down the long driveway to the pseudorural road, an hour of this or more, finally the Québecois P.I.T., after unspeakable agony — slow suffocation, mucoidal or no,
being no day at the Montreal Tulip-Fest — at the height of which agony, hearing his head's pulse as receding thunder and
watching his vision's circle shrink as a red aperture around his sight rotates steadily in from the edges, at the height of which he
could think only, despite the pain and panic, of what a truly dumb and silly way this was, after all this time, to die, a thought
which the towel and tape denied expression via the rueful grin with which the best men meet the dumbest ends — this Guillaume
DuPlessis passed bluely from this life, and sat there, in the kitchen chair, 250 clicks due east of some really spectacular autumn
foliage, for almost two nights and days, his posture getting more and more military as rigor mortis set in, with his bare feet
looking like purple loaves of bread, from the lividity; and when Brookline's Finest were finally summoned and got him unbound
from the coldly lit chair, they had to carry him out as if he were still seated, so militarily comme-il-faut had his limbs and spine
hardened. And poor old Don Gately, whose professional habit of killing power with straight shunts to a meter's inflow was pretty
much a signature M.O., and who had, of course, a special place in the heart of a remorseless Revere A.D.A. with judicial clout
throughout Boston's three counties and beyond, an of course particularly remorseless A.D.A., as of late, whose wife now needed
Valium even just to floss, and was patiently awaiting his chance, the A.D.A. was, coldly biding his time, being a patient Get-Even
and Cold-Dish man just like Don Gately, who was, through no will to energy-consuming violence on his part, in the sort of a hell
of a deep-shit mess that can turn a man's life right around.
Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment: InterLace Telentertainment, 932/1864 R.I.S.C. power-TPs w/ or w/o console,
Pink2, post-Primestar D.S.S. dissemination, menus and icons, pixel-free Internet Fax, tri- and quad-modems w/ adjustable baud,
Dissemination-Grids, screens so high-def you might as well be there, cost-effective videophonic conferencing, internal Froxx CDROM, electronic couture, all-in-one consoles, Yushityu nanoprocessors, laser chromotography, Virtual-capable media-cards,
fiberoptic pulse, digital encoding, killer apps; carpal neuralgia, phosphenic migraine, gluteal hyperadiposity, lumbar stressae.
3 NOVEMBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
Rm. 204, Subdormitory B: Jim Troeltsch, age seventeen, hometown Nar-berth PA, current Enfield Tennis Academy rank in
Boys' 18's #8, which puts him at #2 Singles on the 18's B-team, has been taken ill. Again. It came on as he was suiting up warmly
for the B-squad's O745h. drills. A cartridge of a round-of-16 match from September's U.S. Open had been on the small room
viewer with the sound all the way down as usual and Troeltsch'd been straightening the straps on his jock, idly calling the match's
action into his fist, when it came on. The illness. It came out of nowhere. His breathing all of a sudden started hurting the back of
his throat. Then that overfull heat in various cranial meatus. Then he sneezed and the stuff he sneezed out was thick and doughy. It
came on ultra-fast and out of the pre-drill blue. He's back in bed now, supine, watching the match's fourth set but not calling the
action. The viewer's right under Pemulis's poster of the paranoid king2121 that you can't escape looking at if you want to look at
the viewer. Clotted Kleenex litter the floor around his bed's wastebasket. The bedside table is littered with both OTC and 
prescription expectorants and pertussives and analgesics and Vitamin-C megaspansules and one bottle of Benadryl and one of
Seldane,2222 only the Seldane bottle actually contains several Tenuate 75-mg. capsules Troeltsch has incrementally promoted
from Pemulis's part of the room and has, rather ingeniously he thinks, stashed in bold plain sight in a bedside pill bottle where the
Peemster would never think to check. Troeltsch is the sort that can feel his own forehead and detect fever. It's definitely a
rhinovirus, the sudden severe kind. He speculated on if yesterday when Graham Rader pretended to sneeze on J. Troeltsch's lunchtray at the milk-dispenser at lunch if Rader might have really sneezed and only pretended to pretend, transferring virulent rhinoviri
to Troeltsch's delicate mu-cosa. He feverishly mentally calls down various cosmic retributions on Rader. Neither of Troeltsch's
roommates is here. Ted Schacht is getting the knee's first of several whirlpools for the day. Pemulis has geared up and left for
0745 drills. Troeltsch offered Pemulis rights to his breakfast to fill up his vaporizer for him and call the first-shift nurse for 'yet
more' Seldane nuclear-grade antihistamine and a dextromethorphan nebulizer and a written excuse from A.M. drills. He lies there
sweating freely, watching digitally recorded professional tennis, too worried about his throat to feel loquacious enough to call the
action. Seldane is not supposed to make you drowsy but he feels weak and unpleasantly drowsy. He can barely make a fist. He's
sweaty. Nausea/vomiting like not an impossibility by any means. He cannot believe how fast it came on, the illness. The vaporizer
seethes and burps, and all four of the room's windows weep against the outside cold. There are the sad tiny distant-champagnecork sounds of scores of balls being hit down at the East Courts. Troeltsch drifts at a level just above sleep. Enormous ATHSCME
displacement fans far up north at the wall and border's distant roar and the outdoor voices and pock of cold balls create a kind of
sound-carpet below the digestive sounds of the vaporizer and the squeak of Troeltsch's bedsprings as he thrashes and twitches in a
moist half-sleep. He has heavy German eyebrows and big-knuckled hands. It's one of those unpleasant opioid feverish half-sleep
states, more a fugue-state than a sleep-state, less a floating than like being cast adrift on rough seas, tossed mightily in and out of
this half-sleep where your mind's still working and you can ask yourself whether you're asleep even as you dream. And any
dreams you do have seem ragged at the edges, gnawed on, incomplete.
It's literally 'daydreaming,' sick, the kind of incomplete fugue you awaken from with a sort of psychic clunk, struggling up to
sit upright, convinced there's someone unauthorized in the dorm room with you. Falling back sick on his circle-stained pillow,
staring straight up into the prolix folds of the Turkish blanketish thing Pemulis and Schacht had Krazy-Glued to the ceiling's
corners, which billows, hanging, so its folds form a terrain, like with valleys and shadows.
I am coming to see that the sensation of the worst nightmares, a sensation that can be felt asleep or awake, is identical to those
worst dreams' form itself: the sudden intra-dream realization that the nightmares' very essence and center has been with you all
along, even awake: it's just been . .. overlooked; and then that horrific interval between realizing what you've overlooked and
turning your head to look back at what's been right there all along, the whole time.... Your first nightmare away from home and
folks, your first night at the Academy, it was there all along: The dream is that you awaken from a deep sleep, wake up suddenly
damp and panicked and are overwhelmed with the sudden feeling that there is a distillation of total evil in this dark strange
subdorm room with you, that evil's essence and center is right here, in this room, right now. And is for you alone. None of the
other little boys in the room are awake; the bunk above yours sags dead, motionless; no one moves; no one else in the room feels
the presence of something radically evil; none thrash or sit damply up; no one else cries out: whatever it is is not evil for them.
The flashlight your mother name-tagged with masking tape and packed for you special pans around the institutional room: the
drop-ceiling, the gray striped mattress and bulged grid of bunksprings above you, the two other bunkbeds another matte gray that
won't return light, the piles of books and compact disks and tapes and tennis gear; your disk of white light trembling like the moon
on water as it plays over the identical bureaus, the recessions of closet and room's front door, door's frame's bolections; the cone of
light pans over fixtures, the lumpy jumbles of sleeping boys' shadows on the snuff-white walls, the two rag throw-rugs' ovals on
the hardwood floor, black lines of baseboards' reglets, the cracks in the Venetian blinds that ooze the violet nonlight of a night
with snow and just a hook of moon; the flashlight with your name in maternal cursive plays over every cm. of the walls, the
rheostats, CD, Inter-Lace poster of Tawni Kondo, phone console, desks' TPs, the face in the floor, posters of pros, the onionskin
yellow of the desklamps' shades, the ceiling-panels' patterns of pinholes, the grid of upper bunk's springs, recession of closet and
door, boys wrapped in blankets, slight crack like a creek's course in the eastward ceiling discernible now, maple reglet border at
seam of ceiling and walls north and south no floor has a face your flashlight showed but didn't no never did see its eyes' pupils set
sideways and tapered like a cat's its eyebrows' \ / and horrid toothy smile leering right at your light all the time you've been
scanning oh mother a face in the floor mother oh and your flashlight's beam stabs jaggedly back for the overlooked face misses it
overcorrects then centers on what you'd felt but had seen without seeing, just now, as you'd so carefully panned the light and
looked, a face in the floor there all the time but unfelt by all others and unseen by you until you knew just as you felt it didn't
belong and was evil: Evil.
And then its mouth opens at your light.
And then you wake like that, quivering like a struck drum, lying there awake and quivering, summoning courage and spit, roll
to the right just as in the dream for the nametagged flashlight on the floor by the bed just in case, lie there on your shank and side,
shining the light all over, just as in the dream. Lie there panning, looking, all ribs and elbows and dilated eyes. The awake floor is
littered with gear and dirty clothes, blond hardwood with sealed seams, two throw-rugs, the bare waxed wood shiny in the
windows' snowlight, the floor neutral, faceless, you cannot see any face in the floor, awake, lying there, faceless, blank, dilated,
playing beam over floor again and again, not sure all night forever unsure you're not missing something that's right there: you lie
there, awake and almost twelve, believing with all your might.
AS OF YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
The Enfield Tennis Academy has been in accredited operation for three pre-Subsidized years and then eight Subsidized years,
first under the direction of Dr. James Incandenza and then under the administration of his half-brother-in-law Charles Tavis, Ed.D.
James Orin Incandenza — the only child of a former top U.S. jr. tennis player and then promising young pre-Method actor who,
during the interval of J. O. Incandenza's early formative years, had become a disrespected and largely unemployable actor, driven
back to his native Tucson AZ and dividing his remaining energies between stints as a tennis pro at ranch-type resorts and then 
short-run productions at something called the Desert Beat Theater Project, the father, a dipsomania-cal tragedian progressively
crippled by obsessions with death by spider-bite and by stage fright and with a bitterness of ambiguous origin but consuming
intensity toward the Method school of professional acting and its more promising exponents, a father who somewhere around the
nadir of his professional fortunes apparently decided to go down to his Raid-sprayed basement workshop and build a promising
junior athlete the way other fathers might restore vintage autos or build ships inside bottles, or like refinish chairs, etc. — James
Incandenza proved a withdrawn but compliant student of the game and soon a gifted jr. player — tall, bespectacled, domineering
at net — who used tennis scholarships to finance, on his own, private secondary and then higher education at places just about as
far away from the U.S. Southwest as one could get without drowning. The United States government's prestigious O.N.R.2323
financed his doctorate in optical physics, fulfilling something of a childhood dream. His strategic value, during the Federal
interval G. Ford-early G. Bush, as more or less the top applied-geometrical-optics man in the O.N.R. and S.A.C., designing
neutron-scattering reflectors for thermo-strategic weapons systems, then in the Atomic Energy Commission — where his
development of gamma-refractive indices for lithium-anodized lenses and panels is commonly regarded as one of the big halfdozen discoveries that made possible cold annular fusion and approximate energy-independence for the U.S. and its various allies
and protectorates — his optical acumen translated, after an early retirement from the public sector, into a patented fortune in
rearview mirrors, light-sensitive eyewear, holographic birthday and Xmas greeting cartridges, vid-eophonic Tableaux,
homolosine-cartography software, nonfluorescent public-lighting systems and film-equipment; then, in the optative retirement
from hard science that building and opening a U.S.T.A.-accredited and ped-agogically experimental tennis academy apparently
represented for him, into 'après-garde' experimental- and conceptual-film work too far either ahead of or behind its time, possibly,
to be much appreciated at the time of his death in the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar — although a lot of it (the experimentaland conceptual-film work) was admittedly just plain pretentious and unengaging and bad, and probably not helped at all by the
man's very gradual spiral into the crippling dipsomania of his late father.2424
The tall, ungainly, socially challenged and hard-drinking Dr. Incandenza's May-December2525 marriage to one of the few
bona fide bombshell-type females in North American academia, the extremely tall and high-strung but also extremely pretty and
gainly and teetotalling and classy Dr. Avril Mondragon, the only female academic ever to hold the Macdonald Chair in
Prescriptive Usage at the Royal Victoria College of McGill University, whom Incandenza'd met at a U. Toronto conference on
Reflective vs. Reflexive Systems, was rendered even more romantic by the bureaucratic tribulations involved in obtaining an Exitand then an Entrance-Visa, to say nothing of a Green Card, for even a U.S.-spoused Professor Mondragon whose involvement,
however demonstrably nonviolent, with certain members of the Québecois-Separatist Left while in graduate school had placed her
name on the R.C.M.P.'s notorious 'Personnes a Qui On Doit Surveiller Attentivement' List. The birth of the Incandenzas' first
child, Orin, had been at least partly a legal maneuver.
It is known that, during the last five years of his life, Dr. James O. Incan-denza liquidated his assets and patent-licenses, ceded
control over most of the Enfield Tennis Academy's operations to his wife's half-brother — a former engineer most recently
employed in Amateur Sports Administration at Throppinghamshire Provincial College, New Brunswick, Canada — and devoted
his unimpaired hours almost exclusively to the production of documentaries, technically recondite art films, and mordantly
obscure and obsessive dramatic cartridges, leaving behind a substantial (given the late age at which he bloomed, creatively)
number of completed films and cartridges, some of which have earned a small academic following for their technical feck and for
a pathos that was somehow both surreally abstract and CNS-rendingly melodramatic at the same time.
Professor James O. Incandenza, Jr.'s untimely suicide at fifty-four was held a great loss in at least three worlds. President J.
Gentle (EC.), acting on behalf of the U.S.D.D.'s O.N.R. and O.N.A.N.'s post-annular A.E.C., conferred a posthumous citation and
conveyed his condolences by classified ARPA-NET Electronic Mail. Incandenza's burial in Quebec's L'Islet County was twice
delayed by annular hyperfloration cycles. Cornell University Press announced plans for a festschrift. Certain leading young quote
'après-garde' and 'anticonfluential' filmmakers employed, in their output for the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, certain oblique
visual gestures — most involving the chiaroscuro lamping and custom-lens effects for which Incandenza's distinctive deep focus
was known — that paid the sort of deep-insider's elegaic tribute no audience could be expected to notice. An interview with Incandenza was posthumously included in a book on the genesis of annulation. And those of E.T.A.'s junior players whose
hypertrophied arms could fit inside them wore black bands on court for almost a year.
DENVER CO, 1 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
'I hate this!' Orin yells out to whoever glides near. He doesn't loop or spiral like the showboats; he sort of tacks, the gliding
equivalent of snow-plowing, unspectacular and aiming to get it over ASAP and intact. The fake red wings' nylon clatters in an
updraft; ill-glued feathers keep peeling off and rising. The updraft is the oxides from Mile-High's thousands of open mouths. Far
and away the loudest stadium anyplace. He feels like a dick. The beak makes it hard to breathe and see. Two reserve ends do some
kind of combined barrel-roll thing. The worst is the moment right before they make the jump off the stadium's rim. Hands in the
top rows reaching and clutching. People laughing. The Interlace cameras panning and tightening; Orin knows too well the light on
the side that means Zoom. Once they're out over the field the voices melt and merge into oxides and updraft. The left guard is
soaring up instead of down. A couple beaks and a claw fall off somebody and go pinwheeling down toward the green. Orin tacks
grimly back and forth. He's among those who steadfastly refuse to whistle or squawk. Bonus or no. The stadium loudspeaker's a
steely gargle. You can never hear it clearly even on the ground.
The sad old ex-QB who now just holds on place-kicks falls in beside Orin's slow back-and-forth about 100 meters over the
40. He's one of the token females, his beak blunter and wings' red nongarish.
'Hate and loathe this with a clusterfucking passion, Clayt!’
The holder tries to make a resigned wing-gesture and is almost blown into Orin's pinfeathers. 'Almost down! Enjoy the ride!
Yo — cleavage-check in 22G, just by the —' and then lost in the roar as the first player touches down and sheds the red-feathered
promotional apparatus. You have to scream to even be heard. At some point it starts sounding like the crowd's roaring at its own
roar, a doubling-back quality like something'll blow. One of the Broncos in the rear end of a costume takes a header at midfield so 
it looks like the thing's ass went flying off. Orin has told no Cardinal, not even the team's counselor and visualization-therapist,
about his morbid fear of heights and high-altitude descent.
'I punt! I'm paid to punt long, high, well, and always! Making me do personal interviews on my personal side's bad enough!
But this crosses every line! Why do we stand for this! I'm an athlete! I'm not a freak-show performer! Nobody mentioned flying at
the trade-table. In New Orleans it was just robes and halos and once a season a zither. But just once a season. This is fucking
awful!’
'Could be worse!’
Spiralling down toward the line of X's and the bill-capped guys that help strip the wings off, runty potbellied volunteer frontoffice-connected guys who always smirk in a way you couldn't quite level the accusation.
'I'm paid to punt!’
'It's worse in Philly! ... had fucking water-drops in Seattle for three seaso—’
'Please Lord, spare the Leg,' Orin whispers each time just before touchdown.
'. .. of how you could be an Oiler! You could be a Brown.’
The organopsychedelic muscimole, an isoxazole-alkaloid derived from Amanita muscaria, a.k.a. the fly agaric mushroom —
by no means, Michael Pemulis emphasizes, to be confused with phalloides or verna or certain other kill-you-dead species of North
America's Amanita genus, as the little kids sit there Indian-style on the Viewing Room floor, glassy-eyed and trying not to yawn
— goes by the structural moniker 5-aminomethyl-3-isoxazolol, requires about like maybe ten to twenty oral mg. per ingestion,
making it two to three times as potent as psilocybin, and frequently results in the following alterations in consciousness (not
reading or referring to notes in any way): a kind of semi-sleep-like trance with visions, elation, sensations of physical lightness
and increased strength, heightened sensual perceptions, synesthesia, and favorable distortions in body-image. This is supposed to
be a pre-dinner 'Big Buddy' powwow, where the littler kids receive general big-brotherly-type support and counsel from an
upperclass-man. Pemulis sometimes treats his group's powwows like a kind of colloquium, sharing personal findings and interests.
The viewer's on Read from the room's laptop, and the screen's got block-capitaled METHOXYLATED BASES FOR
PHENYLKYLAMINE MANIPULATION on it, and underneath some stuff that might as well be Greek to the Little Buds. Two of
the kids squeeze tennis balls; two rock and bob Hasidically to stay alert; one has a hat with a pair of fake antennae made of tightcoiled spring. More or less revered by the aboriginal tribes of what's now southern Quebec and the Great Concavity, Pemulis tells
them, the fly agaric 'shroom was both loved and hated for its powerful but not always unless carefully titrated pleasant psychospiritual effects. A boy probes at his own navel with great interest. Another pretends to fall over.
Some of the more marginal players start in as early as maybe twelve, I'm sorry to say, particularly 'drines before matches and
then enkephaline2626 after, which can generate a whole vicious circle of individual neurochemis-try; but I myself, having taken
certain vows early on concerning fathers and differences, didn't even get downwind of my first bit of Bob Hope2727 until fifteen,
more like nearly sixteen, when Bridget Boone, in whose room a lot of the 16 and Unders used to congregate before lights-out,
invited me to consider a couple of late-night bongs, as a kind of psychodysleptic Sominex, to help me sleep, perhaps, finally, all
the way through a really unpleasant dream that had been recurring nightly and waking me up in medias for weeks and was
beginning to grind me down and to cause some slight deterioration in performance and rank. Low-grade synthetic Bob or not, the
bongs worked like a charm.
In this dream, which every now and then still recurs, I am standing publicly at the baseline of a gargantuan tennis court. I'm in
a competitive match, clearly: there are spectators, officials. The court is about the size of a football field, though, maybe, it seems.
It's hard to tell. But mainly the court's complex. The lines that bound and define play are on this court as complex and convolved
as a sculpture of string. There are lines going every which way, and they run oblique or meet and form relationships and boxes
and rivers and tributaries and systems inside systems: lines, corners, alleys, and angles deliquesce into a blur at the horizon of the
distant net. I stand there tentatively. The whole thing is almost too involved to try to take in all at once. It's simply huge. And it's
public. A silent crowd resolves itself at what may be the court's periphery, dressed in summer's citrus colors, motionless and
highly attentive. A battalion of linesmen stand blandly alert in their blazers and safari hats, hands folded over their slacks' flies.
High overhead, near what might be a net-post, the umpire, blue-blazered, wired for amplification in his tall high-chair, whispers
Play. The crowd is a tableau, motionless and attentive. I twirl my stick in my hand and bounce a fresh yellow ball and try to figure
out where in all that mess of lines I'm supposed to direct service. I can make out in the stands stage-left the white sun-umbrella of
the Moms; her height raises the white umbrella above her neighbors; she sits in her small circle of shadow, hair white and legs
crossed and a delicate fist upraised and tight in total unconditional support.
The umpire whispers Please Play.
We sort of play. But it's all hypothetical, somehow. Even the 'we' is theory: I never get quite to see the distant opponent, for
all the apparatus of the game.
YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
Doctors tend to enter the arenas of their profession's practice with a brisk good cheer that they have to then stop and try to
mute a bit when the arena they're entering is a hospital's fifth floor, a psych ward, where brisk good cheer would amount to a kind
of gloating. This is why doctors on psych wards so often wear a vaguely fake frown of puzzled concentration, if and when you see
them in fifth-floor halls. And this is why a hospital M.D. — who's usually hale and pink-cheeked and poreless, and who almost
always smells unusually clean and good — approaches any psych patient under his care with a professional manner somewhere
between bland and deep, a distant but sincere concern that's divided evenly between the patient's subjective discomfort and the
hard facts of the case.
The doctor who poked his fine head just inside her hot room's open door and knocked maybe a little too gently on the metal
jamb found Kate Gom-pert lying on her side on the slim hard bed in blue jeans and a sleeveless blouse with her knees drawn up to 
her abdomen and her fingers laced around her knees. Something almost too overt about the pathos of the posture: this exact
position was illustrated in some melancholic Watteau-era print on the frontispiece to Yevtuschenko's Field Guide to Clinical
States. Kate Gompert wore dark-blue boating sneakers without socks or laces. Half her face obscured by the either green or yellow
case on the plastic pillow, her hair so long-unwashed it had separated into discrete shiny strands, and black bangs lay like a cell's
glossy bars across the visible half of the forehead. The psych ward smelled faintly of disinfectant and the Community Lounge's
cigarette smoke, the sour odor of medical waste awaiting collection with also that perpetual slight ammoniac tang of urine, and
there was the double bing of the elevator and the always faraway sound of the intercom paging some M.D., and some high-volume
cursing from a manic in the pink Quiet Room at the other end of the psych-ward hall from the Community Lounge. Kate
Gompert's room also smelled of singed dust from the heat-vent, also of the over-sweet perfume worn by the young mental health
staffer who sat in a chair at the foot of the girl's bed, chewing blue gum and viewing a soundless ROM cartridge on a ward-issue
laptop. Kate Gompert was on Specials, which meant Suicide-Watch, which meant that the girl had at some point betrayed both
Ideation and Intent, which meant she had to be watched right up close by a staffer twenty-four hours a day until the supervising
M.D. called off the Specials. Staffers rotated Specials-duty every hour, ostensibly so that whoever was on duty was always fresh
and keenly observant, but really because simply sitting there at the foot of a bed looking at somebody who was in so much psychic
pain she wanted to commit suicide was incredibly depressing and boring and unpleasant, so they spread the odious duty out as thin
as they possibly could, the staffers. They were not technically supposed to read, do paperwork, view CD-ROMs, do personal
grooming, or in any way divert their attention from the patient on Specials, on-duty. The patient Ms. Gompert seemed both to be
fighting for breath and to be breathing rapidly enough to induce hypocapnia; the doctor could not be expected not also to notice
that she had fairly large breasts that rose and fell rapidly inside the circle of arms with which she hugged her knees. The girl's
eyes, which were dull, had registered his appearance in the doorway, but they didn't seem to track as he came toward the bed. The
staffer was also employing an emery board. The doctor told the staffer that he was going to need a few moments alone with Ms.
Gompert. It is a sort of requirement that a doctor whenever possible be reading or at least looking down at something on his
clipboard when addressing a subordinate, so the doctor was looking studiously at the patient's Intake and the sheaf of charts and
records Med-Netted over from trauma and psych wards in some other city hospitals. Gompert, Katherine A., 21, Newton MA.
Data-clerical in a Wellesley Hills real estate office. Fourth hospitalization in three years, all clinical depression, unipolar. One
series of electro-convulsive treatments out at Newton-Wellesley Hospital two years back. On Prozac for a short time, then Zoloft,
most recently Parnate with a lithium kicker. Two previous suicide attempts, the second just this past summer. Bi-Valium
discontinued two years, Xanax discontinued one year — an admitted history of abusing prescribed meds. Depressions unipolar,
fairly classic, characterized by acute dysphoria, anxiety w/panic, diurnal listlessness/agitation patterns, Ideation w/w/o Intent. First
attempt a CO-episode, garage's automobile had stalled before lethal hemotoxicity achieved. Then last year's attempt — no scarring
now visible, her wrists' vascular nodes obscured by the insides of the knees she held. She continued to stare at the doorway where
he'd first appeared. This latest attempt a straightforward meds O.D. Admitted via the E.R. three nights past. Two days on
ventilation after a Pump & Purge. Hypertensive crisis on the second day from metabolic retox — she must have taken a hell of a
lot of meds — the I.C.U. charge nurse had beeped the chaplain, so the retox must have been bad. Almost died twice this time,
Katherine Ann Gompert. Third day spent on 2-West for observation, Li-brium reluctantly administered for a B.P. that was all over
the map. Now here on 5, his present arena. B.P. stable as of the last four readings. Next vitals at 1300h.
The attempt had been serious, a real attempt. This girl had not been futzing around. A bona fide clinical admit right out of
Yevtuschenko or Dretske. Over half the admits to psych wards are things like cheerleaders who swallow two bottles of Mydol
over a high-school breakup or gray lonely asexual depressing people rendered inconsolable by the death of a pet. The cathartic
trauma of actually going in somewhere officially Psych-, some understanding nods, some bare indication somebody gives half a
damn — they rally, back out they go. Three determined attempts and a course of shock spelled no such case here. The doctor's
interior state was somewhere between trepidation and excitement, which manifested outwardly as a sort of blandly deep puzzled
concern.
The doctor said Hi and that he wanted to ascertain for sure that she was Katherine Gompert, as they hadn't met before up till
now.
'That's me,' in a bit of a bitter singsong. Her voice was oddly lit-up for one who lay fetal, dead-eyed, w/o facial affect.
The doctor said could she tell him a little bit about why she's here with them right now? Can she remember back to what
happened?
She took an even deeper breath. She was attempting to communicate boredom or irritation. 'I took a hundred-ten Parnate,
about thirty Lithonate capsules, some old Zoloft. I took everything I had in the world.’
'You really must have wanted to hurt yourself, then, it seems.’
'They said downstairs the Parnate made me black out. It did a blood pressure thing. My mother heard noises upstairs and
found me she said down on my side chewing the rug in my room. My room's shag-carpeted. She said I was on the floor flushed
red and all wet like when I was a newborn; she said she thought at first she hallucinated me as a newborn again. On my side all
red and wet.’
'A hypertensive crisis will do that. It means your blood pressure was high enough to have killed you. Sertraline in
combination with an MAOI2828 will kill you, in enough quantities. And with the toxicity of that much lithium besides, I'd say
you're pretty lucky to be here right now.’
'My mother sometimes thinks she's hallucinating.’
'Sertraline, by the way, is the Zoloft you kept instead of discarding as instructed when changing medications.’
'She says I chewed a big hole out of the carpet. But who can say.’
The doctor chose his second-finest pen from the array in his white coat's breast pocket and made some sort of note on Kate
Gompert's new chart for this particular psych ward. Crowded in among his pocket's pens was the rubber head of a diagnostic
plexor. He asked Kate if she could tell him why she had wanted to hurt herself. Had she been angry at herself. At someone else.
Had she ceased to feel as though her life had meaning to it. Had she heard anything like voices suggesting that she hurt herself.
There was no audible response. The girl's breathing had slowed to just rapid. The doctor took an early clinical gamble and 
asked Kate whether it might not be easier if she rolled over and sat up so that they could speak with each other more normally,
face to face.
'I am sitting up.’
The doctor's pen was poised. His slow nod was studious, blandly puzzled-seeming. 'You mean to say you feel right now as if
your body is already in a sitting-up position?’
She rolled an eye up at him for a long moment, sighed meaningfully, and rolled and rose. Katherine Ann Gompert probably
felt that here was yet another psych-ward M.D. with zero sense of humor. This was probably because she did not understand the
strict methodological limits that dictated how literal he, a doctor, had to be with the admits on the psych ward. Nor that jokes and
sarcasm were here usually too pregnant and fertile with clinical significance not to be taken seriously: sarcasm and jokes were
often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them. The doctor
— who by the way wasn't an M.D. yet but a resident, here on a twelve-week psych rotation — indulged this clinical reverie while
the patient made an elaborate show of getting the thin pillow out from under her and leaning it up the tall way against the bare
wall behind the bed and slumping back against it, her arms crossed over her breasts. The doctor decided that her open display of
irritation with him could signify either a positive thing or nothing at all.
Kate Gompert stared at a point over the man's left shoulder. 'I wasn't trying to hurt myself. I was trying to kill myself. There's
a difference.’
The doctor asked whether she could try to explain what she felt the difference was between those two things.
The delay that preceded her reply was only marginally longer than the pause in a regular civilian conversation. The doctor
had no ideas about what this observation might indicate.
'Do you guys see different kinds of suicides?’
The resident made no attempt to ask Kate Gompert what she meant. She used one finger to remove some material from the
corner of her mouth.
'I think there must be probably different types of suicides. I'm not one of the self-hating ones. The type of like "I'm shit and
the world'd be better off without poor me" type that says that but also imagines what everybody'll say at their funeral. I've met
types like that on wards. Poor-me-I-hate-me-punish-me-come-to-my-funeral. Then they show you a 20 X 25 glossy of their dead
cat. It's all self-pity bullshit. It's bullshit. I didn't have any special grudges. I didn't fail an exam or get dumped by anybody. All
these types. Hurt themselves.' Still that intriguing, unsettling combination of blank facial masking and conventionally animated
vocal tone. The doctor's small nods were designed to appear not as responses but as invitations to continue, what Dretske called
Momentumizers.
'I didn't want to especially hurt myself. Or like punish. I don't hate myself. I just wanted out. I didn't want to play anymore is
all.’
'Play,' nodding in confirmation, making small quick notes.
'I wanted to just stop being conscious. I'm a whole different type. I wanted to stop feeling this way. If I could have just put
myself in a really long coma I would have done that. Or given myself shock I would have done that. Instead.’
The doctor was writing with great industry.
'The last thing more I'd want is hurt. I just didn't want to feel this way anymore. I don't... I didn't believe this feeling would
ever go away. I don't. I still don't. I'd rather feel nothing than this.’
The doctor's eyes appeared keenly interested in an abstract way. They looked severely magnified behind his attractive but
thick glasses, the frames of which were steel. Patients on other floors during other rotations had sometimes complained that they
sometimes felt like something in a jar he was studying intently through all that thick glass. He was saying 'This feeling of wanting
to stop feeling by dying, then, is —’
The way she suddenly shook her head was vehement, exasperated. 'The feeling is why I want to. The feeling is the reason I
want to die. I'm here because I want to die. That's why I'm in a room without windows and with cages over the lightbulbs and no
lock on the toilet door. Why they took my shoelaces and my belt. But I notice they don't take away the feeling do they.’
'Is the feeling you're explaining something you've experienced in your other depressions, then, Katherine?’
The patient didn't respond right away. She slid her foot out of her shoes and touched one bare foot with the toes of the other
foot. Her eyes tracked this activity. The conversation seemed to have helped her focus. Like most clinically depressed patients, she
appeared to function better in focused activity than in stasis. Their normal paralyzed stasis allowed these patients' own minds to
chew them apart. But it was always a titanic struggle to get them to do anything to help them focus. Most residents found the fifth
floor a depressing place to do a rotation.
'What I'm trying to ask, I think, is whether this feeling you're communicating is the feeling you associate with your
depression.’
Her gaze moved off. 'That's what you guys want to call it, I guess.’
The doctor clicked his pen slowly a few times and explained that he's more interested here in what she would choose to call
the feeling, since it was her feeling.
The resumed study of the movement of her feet. 'When people call it that I always get pissed off because I always think
depression sounds like you just get like really sad, you get quiet and melancholy and just like sit quietly by the window sighing or
just lying around. A state of not caring about anything. A kind of blue kind of peaceful state.' She seemed to the doctor decidedly
more animated now, even as she seemed unable to meet his eyes. Her respiration had sped back up. The doctor recalled classic
hyperventila-tory episodes being characterized by carpopedal spasms, and reminded himself to monitor the patient's hands and
feet carefully during the interview for any signs of tetanic contraction, in which case the prescribed therapy would be I.V. calcium
in a saline percentage he would need quickly to look up.
'Well this' — she gestured at herself— 'isn't a state. This is a feeling. I feel it all over. In my arms and legs.’
'That would include your carp—your hands and feet?’
'All over. My head, throat, butt. In my stomach. It's all over everywhere. I don't know what I could call it. It's like I can't get
enough outside it to call it anything. It's like horror more than sadness. It's more like horror. It's like something horrible is about to 
happen, the most horrible thing you can imagine — no, worse than you can imagine because there's the feeling that there's
something you have to do right away to stop it but you don't know what it is you have to do, and then it's happening, too, the
whole horrible time, it's about to happen and also it's happening, all at the same time.’
'So you'd say anxiety is a big part of your depressions.’
It was now not clear whether she was responding to the doctor or not. 'Everything gets horrible. Everything you see gets ugly.
Lurid is the word. Doctor Carton said lurid, one time. That's the right word for it. And everything sounds harsh, spiny and harshsounding, like every sound you hear all of a sudden has teeth. And smelling like I smell bad even after I just got out of the shower.
It's like what's the point of washing if everything smells like I need another shower.’
The doctor looked intrigued rather than concerned for a moment as he wrote all this down. He preferred handwritten notes to
a laptop because he felt M.D.s who typed into their laps during clinical interviews gave a cold impression.
Kate Gompert's face writhed for a moment while the doctor was writing. 'I fear this feeling more than I fear anything, man.
More than pain, or my mom dying, or environmental toxicity. Anything.’
'Fear is a major part of anxiety,' the doctor confirmed.
Katherine Gompert seemed to come out of her dark reverie for a moment. She stared full-frontal at the doctor for several
seconds, and the doctor, who'd had all discomfort at being stared at by patients trained right out of him when he'd rotated through
the paralysis/-plegia wards upstairs, was able to look directly back at her with a kind of bland compassion, the expression of
someone who was compassionate but was not, of course, feeling what she was feeling, and who honored her subjective feelings
by not even trying to pretend that he was. Sharing them. The young woman's expression, in turn, revealed that she had decided to
take what amounted for her to her own gamble, this early in a therapeutic relationship. The abstract resolve on her face now
duplicated what had been on the doctor's face when he'd taken the gamble of asking her to sit up straight.
'Listen,' she said. 'Have you ever felt sick? I mean nauseous, like you knew you were going to throw up?’
The doctor made a gesture like Well sure.
'But that's just in your stomach,' Kate Gompert said. 'It's a horrible feeling but it's just in your stomach. That's why the term is
"sick to your stomach." ' She was back to looking intently at her lower carpopedals. 'What I told Dr. Garton is OK but imagine if
you felt that way all over, inside. All through you. Like every cell and every atom or brain-cell or whatever was so nauseous it
wanted to throw up, but it couldn't, and you felt that way all the time, and you're sure, you're positive the feeling will never go
away, you're going to spend the rest of your natural life feeling like this.’
The doctor wrote down something much too brief to correspond directly to what she'd said. He was nodding both while he
wrote and when he looked up. 'And yet this nauseated feeling has come and gone for you in the past, it's passed eventually during
prior depressions, Katherine, has it not?’
'But when you're in the feeling you forget. The feeling feels like it's always been there and will always be there, and you
forget. It's like this whole filter drops down over the whole way you think about everything, a couple weeks after —’
They sat and looked at each other. The doctor felt some combination of intense clinical excitement and anxiety about perhaps
saying the wrong thing at such a crucial juncture and fouling up. His last name was needle-pointed in yellow braid on the left
breast of the white coat he was required to wear. 'I'm sorry? A couple weeks after— ?’
He waited for seven breaths.
'I want shock,' she said finally. 'Isn't part of this whole concerned kindness deal that you're supposed to ask me how I think
you can be of help? Cause I've been through this before. You haven't asked what I want. Isn't it? Well how about either give me
ECT2929 again, or give me my belt back. Because I can't stand feeling like this another second, and the seconds keep coming on
and on.’
'Well,' the doctor said slowly, nodding to indicate he had heard the feelings the young woman was expressing, 'Well, I'm
happy to discuss treatment options with you, Katherine. But I have to say right now I'm curious about what you started it sounded
like to me to maybe start to indicate what might have occurred, something, two weeks ago to make you feel these feelings now.
Would you be comfortable talking to me about it?’
'Either ECT or you could just sedate me for a month. You could do that. All I'd need is I think a month at the outside. Like a
controlled coma. You could do that, if you guys want to help.’
The doctor gazed at her with a patience she was meant to see.
And she gave him back a frightening smile, a smile empty of all affect, as if someone had contracted her circumorals with a
thigmotactic electrode. The teeth of the smile evidenced a clinical depressive's classic inattention to oral hygiene.
She said 'I was thinking I was about to say you'll think I'm crazy if I tell you. But then I remembered where I am.' She made a
small sound that was supposed to be laughter; it did sound jagged, dentate.
'I was going to say I've thought sometimes before like the feeling maybe had to do with Hope.’
'Hope.’
Her arms had been crossed over her breasts the whole time, and though the room was overheated the patient rubbed each
palm continually over her upper arms, behavior one associates with chill. The position and movement shielded her inner arms
from view. The doctor's eyebrows had gone synclinal from puzzlement without his awareness.
'Bob.’
'Bob.' The doctor was anxious that his failure to have any idea what the girl was referring to would betray itself and
accentuate her feelings of loneliness and psychic pain. Classic unipolars were usually tormented by the conviction that no one else
could hear or understand them when they tried to communicate. Hence jokes, sarcasm, the psychopathology of unconscious armrubbing.
Kate Gompert's head was rolling like a blind person's. 'Jesus what am I doing here. Bob Hope. Dope. Sinse. Stick. Grass.
Smoke.' She made a quick duBois-gesture with thumb and finger held to rounded lips. The dealers down where I buy it some of
them make you call it Bob Hope when you call, in case anybody's accessed the line. You're supposed to ask is Bob in town. And if
they have some they say "Hope springs eternal," usually. It's like a code. One kid makes you ask him to please commit a crime.
The dealers that stay around any length of time tend to be on the paranoid side. As if it would fool anybody who knew enough to
bother to access the band on the call.' She seemed decidedly more animated. 'And one particular guy with snakes in a tank in a
trailer in Allston, he —’
'So drugs, then, you're saying you feel may be a factor,' the doctor interrupted.
The depressed young woman's face emptied once more. She engaged briefly in something the staffers on Specials called the
Thousand-Meter Stare.
'Not "drugs," ' she said slowly. The doctor smelled shame in the room, sour and uremic. Her face had become distantly pained
now.
The girl said: 'Stopping.’
The doctor felt comfortable saying once again that he was not sure he understood what she was trying to share with him.
She now went through a series of expressions that made it clinically impossible for the doctor to determine whether or not she
was entirely sincere. She looked either pained or trying somehow to suppress hilarity. She said 'I don't know if you'll believe me.
I'm worried you'll think I'm crazy. I have this thing with pot.’
'Meaning marijuana.’
The doctor was oddly sure that Kate Gompert pretended to sniff instead of engaging in a real sniff. 'Marijuana. Most people
think of marijuana as just some minor substance, I know, just like this natural plant that happens to make you feel good the way
poison oak makes you itch, and if you say you're in trouble with Hope — people'll just laugh. Because there's much worse drugs
out there. Believe me I know.’
'I'm not laughing at you, Katherine,' the doctor said, and meant it.
'But I love it so much. Sometimes it's like the center of my life. It does something to me, I know, that's not good, and I got
told point-blank not to smoke, on the Parnate, because Dr. Garton said no one knew what certain combinations do yet and it'd be
roulette. But after a while I always think to myself it's been a while and things will be different somehow this time if I do, even on
the Parnate, so I do again, I start again. I'll start out doing just like a couple of hits off a duBois after work, to get me through
dinner, because dinner with my mother and me is — well, but and pretty soon after a while I'm in my room with the fan pointed
out the window all night, doing one-hitters and exhaling at the fan, to kill the smell, and I make her say I'm not there if anybody
calls, and I lie about what I'm doing in there all night even if she doesn't ask, sometimes she asks and sometimes she doesn't. And
then after a while I'm smoking joints at work, at breaks, going in the bathroom and standing on the toilet and blowing it out the
window, there's this tiny window up high with the glass frosted and all filthy and cobwebby, and I hate having my face up next to
it, but if I clean it off I'm afraid Mrs. Diggs or somebody will be able to tell somebody's been doing something up around the
window, standing there in high heels on the rim of the toilet, brushing my teeth all the time and using up Collyrium3030 by the
bottleful and switching the console to audio and always needing more water before I answer the console because my mouth's too
dry to talk, especially on the Parnate, the Parnate makes my mouth dry anyways. And pretty soon I'm totally paranoid they know
I'm stoned, at work, sitting there in the office, high, reeking and I'm the only one that can't tell I reek, I'm like so obsessed with Do
They Know, Can They Tell, and then after a while I'm having my mother call in sick for me so I can stay home after she goes in to
work and have the whole place to myself with nobody to worry about Do They Know, and smoke out the fan, and spray Lysol all
over and stir Ginger's litter box around so the whole place reeks of Ginger, and smoke and draw and watch terrible daytime stuff
on the TP because I don't want my mother to see any cartridge-orders on days I'm supposed to be in bed sick, I start to get obsessed with Does She Know. I'm getting more and more miserable and fed up with myself for smoking so much, this is after a
couple weeks of it, is all, and I start getting high and thinking about nothing except how I have to quit smoking all this Bob so I
can get back to work and start saying I'm here when people call, so I can start living some kind of damn life instead of just sitting
around in pajamas pretending I'm sick like a third-grader and smoking and watching TP again, and so after I've smoked the last of
whatever I've got I always say No More, This Is It, and I throw out my papers and my one-hitter, I've probably thrown about fifty
one-hitters in dumpsters, including some nice wood and brass ones, including a couple from Brazil, the land-barge guys must go
through our sector's dumpster once a day looking to get another good one-hitter. And anyways I quit. I do stop. I get sick of it, I
don't like what it does to me. And I go back to work and work my fanny off, to make up for the last couple weeks and get a leg up
on like building momentum for a whole new start, you know?’
The young woman's face and eyes were going through a number of ranges of affective configurations, with all of them
seeming inexplicably at gut-level somehow blank and maybe not entirely sincere.
'And so,' she said, 'but then I quit. And a couple of weeks after I've smoked a lot and finally stopped and quit and gone back to
really living, after a couple of weeks this feeling always starts creeping in, just creeping in a little at the edges at first, like first
thing in the morning when I get up, or waiting for the T to go home, after work, for supper. And I try to deny it, the feeling, ignore
it, because I fear it more than anything.’
'The feeling you're describing, that starts creeping in.’
Kate Gompert finally took a real breath. 'And then but no matter what I do it gets worse and worse, it's there more and more,
this filter drops down, and the feeling makes the fear of the feeling way worse, and after a couple weeks it's there all the time, the
feeling, and I'm totally inside it, I'm in it and everything has to pass through it to get in, and I don't want to smoke any Bob, and I
don't want to work, or go out, or read, or watch TP, or go out, or stay in, or either do anything or not do anything, I don't want
anything except for the feeling to go away. But it doesn't. Part of the feeling is being like willing to do anything to make it go
away. Understand that. Anything. Do you understand? It's not wanting to hurt myself it's wanting to not hurt.’
The doctor hadn't even pretended to try to take notes on all this. He couldn't keep himself from trying to determine whether
the ambient blank insincerity the patient seemed to project during what appeared, clinically, to be a significant gamble and move
toward trust and self-revealing was in fact projected by the patient or was somehow counter-transferred or -projected onto the
patient from the doctor's own psyche out of some sort of anxiety over the critical therapeutic possibilities her revelation of concern
over drug-use might represent. The time this thinking required looked like sober and thoughtful consideration of what Kate
Gompert said. She was again gazing at her feet's interactions with the empty boating sneakers, her face moving between
expressions associated with grief and suffering. None of the clinical literature the doctor had read for his psych rotation suggested
any relation between unipolar episodes and withdrawal from cannabinoids. 
'So this has happened in the past, prior to your other hospitalizations, then, Katherine.’
Her face, foreshortened by its downward angle, was working in the spread, writhing configurations of weeping, but no tears
emerged. 'I just want you to shock me. Just get me out of this. I'll do anything you want.’
'Have you explored this possible connection between your cannabis use and your depressions with your regular therapist,
Katherine?’
She did not respond directly as such. Her associations began to loosen, in the doctor's opinion, as her face continued to work
dryly.
'I had shock before and it got me out of this. Straps. Nurses with their sneakers in little green bags. Anti-saliva injections.
Rubber thing for your tongue. General. Just some headaches. I didn't mind it at all. I know everybody thinks it's horrible. That old
cartridge, Nichols and the big Indian. Distortion. They give you a general here, right? They put you under. It's not that bad. I'll go
willingly.’
The doctor was summarizing her choice of treatment-option, as was her right, on her chart. He had extremely good
penmanship for a doctor. He put her get me out of this in quotation marks. He was adding his own post-assessment question, Then
what?, when Kate Gompert began weeping for real.
And just before Ol45h. on 2 April Y.D.A.U., his wife arrived back home and uncovered her hair and came in and saw the
Near Eastern medical attache and his face and tray and eyes and the soiled condition of his special recliner, and rushed to his side
crying his name aloud, touching his head, trying to get a response, failing to get any response to her, he still staring straight ahead;
and eventually and naturally she — noting that the expression on his rictus of a face nevertheless appeared very positive, ecstatic,
even, you could say — she eventually and naturally turning her head and following his line of sight to the cartridge-viewer.
Gerhardt Schtitt, Head Coach and Athletic Director at the Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield MA, was wooed fiercely by
E.T.A. Headmaster Dr. James Incandenza, just about begged to come on board the moment the Academy's hilltop was shaved flat
and the place was up and running. Incandenza had decided he was going to bring Schtitt on board or bust — this even though
Schtitt had then just lately been asked to resign from the staff of a Nick Bollettieri camp in Sarasota because of a really
unfortunate incident involving a riding crop.
By now, though, pretty much everybody now at E.T.A. feels as though stories about Schtitt's whole corporal-punitive thing
must have been pumped up out of all sane proportion, because even though Schtitt still does favor those high and shiny black
boots, and yes the epaulets, still, and now a weatherman's telescoping pointer that's a clear stand-in for the now-forbidden old
riding crop, he has, Schtitt, at near what must be seventy, mellowed to the sort of elder-statesman point where he's become mostly
a dispenser of abstractions rather than discipline, a philosopher instead of a king. His felt presence is here mostly verbal; the
weatherman's pointer has not made corrective contact with even one athletic bottom in Schtitt's whole nine years at E.T.A.
Still, although he now has all these Lebensgefährtins3131 and prorectors to administer most of the necessary little characterbuilding cruelties, Schtitt does like his occasional bit of fun, still.
So but when Schtitt dons the leather helmet and goggles and revs up the old F.R.G.-era BMW cycle and trails the sweating
E.T.A. squads up the Comm. Ave. hills into East Newton on their P.M. conditioning runs, making judicious use of his pea-shooter
to discourage straggling sluggards, it's usually eighteen-year-old Mario Incandenza who gets to ride along in the sidecar, carefully
braced and strapped, the wind blowing his thin hair straight back off his oversized head, beaming and waving his claw at people
he knows. It's possibly odd that the leptosomatic Mario I., so damaged he can't even grip a stick, much less flail at a moving ball
with one, is the one kid at E.T.A. whose company Schtitt seeks out, is in fact pretty much the one person with whom Schtitt
speaks candidly, lets his pedagogical hair down. He's not close to his prorectors, particularly, Schtitt, and treats Aubrey deLint and
Mary Esther Thode with a formality that's almost parodic. But often of a warm evening sometimes Mario and Coach Schtitt will
find themselves out alone under the East Courts' canvas pavilion or the towering copper beech west of Comm.-Ad., or at one of
the initial-scarred redwood picnic tables off the path out behind the Headmaster's House where Mario's mother and uncle live,
Schtitt savoring a post-prandial pipe, Mario enjoying the smells of the calliopsis alongside the grounds' quincunx paths, the
sweetish pines and the briers' yeasty musk coming up from the hillside's slopes. And he actually likes the sulphury odor of
Schtitt's obscure Austrian blend. Schtitt talks, Mario listens, generally. Mario is basically a born listener. One of the positives to
being visibly damaged is that people can sometimes forget you're there, even when they're interfacing with you. You almost get to
eavesdrop. It's almost like they're like: If nobody's really in there, there's nothing to be shy about. That's why bullshit often tends
to drop away around damaged listeners, deep beliefs revealed, diary-type private reveries indulged out loud; and, listening, the
beaming and brady-kinetic boy gets to forge an interpersonal connection he knows only he can truly feel, here.
Schtitt has the sort of creepy wiriness of old men who still exercise vigorously. He has surprised blue eyes and a vivid white
crewcut of the sort that looks virile and good on men who have lost a lot of hair anyway. And skin so clean-sheet-white it almost
glows; an evident immunity to the sun's UV; in pine-shaded twilight he is almost glowingly white, as if cut from the stuff of
moons. He has a way of focusing his whole self's concentration very narrowly, adjusting his legs' spread for the varicoceles and
curling one arm over the other and sort of drawing himself in around the pipe he attends to. Mario can sit motionless for really
long periods. When Schtitt exhales pipe-smoke in different geometric shapes they both seem to study intently, when Schtitt
exhales he makes little sounds variant in plosivity between P and B.
'Am realizing whole myth of efficiency and no waste that is making this continent of countries we are in.' He exhales. 'You
know myths?’
'Is that like a story?’
'Ach. A made-up story. For some children. An efficiency of Euclid only: flat. For flat children. Straight ahead! Plow ahead!
Go! This is myth.’
'There aren't any flat children, really.’
'This myth of the competition and bestness we fight for you players here: this myth: they assume here always the efficient
way is to plow in straight, go! The story that the shortest way between two places is the straight line, yes?’
'Yes?’
Schtitt can use the stem of the pipe to point, for emphasis: 'But what then when something is in the way when you go between 
places, no? Plow ahead: go: collide: kabong.’
'Willikers!’
'Where is their straight shortest then, yes? Where is the efficiently quickly straight of Euclid then, yes? And how many two
places are there without there is something in the way between them, if you go?’
It can be entertaining to watch the evening pines' mosquitoes light and feed deeply on luminous Schtitt, who is oblivious. The
smoke doesn't keep them away.
'When I am boyish, training to compete for best, our training facilities on a sign, very largely painted, stated WE ARE WHAT
WE WALK BETWEEN.’
'Gosh.’
It's a tradition, one stemming maybe from Wimbledon's All-England locker rooms' tympana, that every big-time tennis
academy has its own special traditional motto on the wall in the locker rooms, some special aphoristic nugget that's supposed to
describe and inform what the academy's philosophy's all about. After Mario's father Dr. Incandenza passed away, the new
Headmaster, Dr. Charles Tavis, a Canadian citizen, either Mrs. Incandenza's half-brother or adoptive brother, depending on the
version, C.T. had taken down Incandenza's founding motto — TE OCCIDERE POSSUNT SED TE EDERE NON POSSUNT
NEFAS EST3232 — and had replaced it with the rather more upbeat THE MAN WHO KNOWS HIS LIMITATIONS HAS
NONE.
Mario is an enormous fan of Gerhardt Schtitt, whom most of the other E.T.A. kids regard as probably bats, and as w/o doubt
mind-looseningly discursive, and show the old pundit even token respect mostly because Schtitt still personally oversees the daily
drill-assignments and can, if aggrieved, have Thode and deLint make them extremely uncomfortable more or less at will, out there
in A.M. practice.
One of the reasons the late James Incandenza had been so terribly high on bringing Schtitt to E.T.A. was that Schtitt, like the
founder himself (who'd come back to tennis, and later film, from a background in hard-core-math-based optical science), was that
Schtitt approached competitive tennis more like a pure mathematician than a technician. Most jr.-tennis coaches are basically
technicians, hands-on practical straight-ahead problem-solving statistical-data wonks, with maybe added knacks for short-haul
psychology and motivational speaking. The point about not crunching serious stats is that Schtitt had clued Incandenza in, all the
way back at a B.S. 19893333 U.S.T.A. convention on photoelectric line-judging, that he, Schtitt, knew real tennis was really about
not the blend of statistical order and expansive potential that the game's technicians revered, but in fact the opposite — not-order,
limit, the places where things broke down, fragmented into beauty. That real tennis was no more reducible to delimited factors or
probability curves than chess or boxing, the two games of which it's a hybrid. In short, Schtitt and the tall A.E.G.-optics man (i.e.
Incandenza), whose fierce flat serve-and-haul-ass-to-the-net approach to the game had carried him through M.I.T. on a full ride w/
stipend, and whose consulting report on high-speed photoelectric tracking the U.S.T.A. mucky-mucks found dense past all
comprehending, found themselves totally simpatico on tennis's exemption from stats-tracking regression. Were he now still
among the living, Dr. Incandenza would now describe tennis in the paradoxical terms of what's now called 'Extra-Linear
Dynamics.'3434 And Schtitt, whose knowledge of formal math is probably about equivalent to that of a Taiwanese kindergartner,
nevertheless seemed to know what Hopman and van der Meer and Bollettieri seemed not to know: that locating beauty and art and
magic and improvement and keys to excellence and victory in the prolix flux of match play is not a fractal matter of reducing
chaos to pattern. Seemed intuitively to sense that it was a matter not of reduction at all, but — perversely — of expansion, the
aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic growth — each well-shot ball admitting of n possible responses, n2 possible responses
to those responses, and on into what Incandenza would articulate to anyone who shared both his backgrounds as a Cantorian3535
continuum of infinities of possible move and response, Cantorian and beautiful because wfoliating, contained, this diagnate
infinity of infinities of choice and execution, mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained, bounded by the talent and
imagination of self and opponent, bent in on itself by the containing boundaries of skill and imagination that brought one player
finally down, that kept both from winning, that made it, finally, a game, these boundaries of self.
'You mean like the baselines are boundaries?' Mario tries to ask.
'Lieber Gott nein,' with a plosive disgusted sound. Schtitt likes best of all smoke-shapes to try to blow rings, and is kind of
lousy at it, blowing mostly wobbly lavender hot dogs, which Mario finds delightful.
The thing with Schtitt: like most Europeans of his generation, anchored from infancy to certain permanent values which —
yes, OK, granted — may, admittedly, have a whiff of proto-fascist potential about them, but which do, nevertheless (the values),
anchor nicely the soul and course of a life — Old World patriarchal stuff like honor and discipline and fidelity to some larger unit
— Gerhardt Schtitt does not so much dislike the modern O.N.A.N.ite U.S. of A. as find it hilarious and frightening at the same
time. Probably mostly just alien. This should not be rendered in exposition like this, but Mario Incandenza has a severely limited
range of verbatim recall. Schtitt was educated in pre-Unification Gymnasium under the rather Kanto-Hegelian idea that jr.
athletics was basically just training for citizenship, that jr. athletics was about learning to sacrifice the hot narrow imperatives of
the Self — the needs, the desires, the fears, the multiform cravings of the individual appetitive will — to the larger imperatives of
a team (OK, the State) and a set of delimiting rules (OK, the Law). It sounds almost frighteningly simple-minded, though not to
Mario, across the redwood table, listening. By learning, in palestra, the virtues that pay off directly in competitive games, the welldisciplined boy begins assembling the more abstract, gratification-delaying skills necessary for being a 'team player' in a larger
arena: the even more subtly diffracted moral chaos of full-service citizenship in a State. Except Schtitt says Ach, but who can
imagine this training serving its purpose in an experialist and waste-exporting nation that's forgotten privation and hardship and
the discipline which hardship teaches by requiring? A U.S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of
sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of
straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness:
The happy pleasure of the person alone, yes?’
'Except why do you let deLint tie Pemulís and Shaw's shoes to the lines, if the lines aren't boundaries?’
'Without there is something bigger. Nothing to contain and give the meaning. Lonely. Verstiegenheit.'3636
'Bless you.’ 
'Any something. The what: this is more unimportant than that there is something.’
Schtitt one time was telling Mario, as they respectively walked and tottered down Comm. Ave. eastward into Allston to see
about getting a gourmet ice cream someplace along there, that when he was Mario's age — or maybe more like Hal's age,
whatever — he (Schtitt) had once fallen in love with a tree, a willow that from a certain humid twilit perspective had looked like a
mysterious woman aswirl with gauze, this certain tree in the public Platz of some West German town whose name sounded to
Mario like the sound of somebody strangling. Schtitt reported being seriously smitten with the tree:
'I went daily to there, to be with the tree.’
They respectively walked and tottered, ice-cream-bound, Mario moving like the one of them who was truly old, mind off his
stride because he was trying to think hard about what Schtitt believed. Mario's thinking-hard expression resembles what for
another person would be the sort of comically distorted face made to amuse an infant. He was trying to think how to articulate
some reasonable form of a question like: But then how does this surrender-the-personal-individual-wants-to-the-larger-State-orbeloved-tree-or-something stuff work in a deliberately individual sport like competitive junior tennis, where it's just you v. one
other guy?
And then also, again, still, what are those boundaries, if they're not baselines, that contain and direct its infinite expansion
inward, that make tennis like chess on the run, beautiful and infinitely dense?
Schtitt's thrust, and his one great irresistible attraction in the eyes of Mario's late father: The true opponent, the enfolding
boundary, is the player himself. Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out
terms. The competing boy on the net's other side: he is not the foe: he is more the partner in the dance. He is the what is the word
excuse or occasion for meeting the self. As you are his occasion. Tennis's beauty's infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete
with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits:
transcend: improve: win. Which is why tennis is an essentially tragic enterprise, to improve and grow as a serious junior, with
ambitions. You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic
and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and
mourned, over and over again.
Mario thinks of a steel pole raised to double its designed height and clips his shoulder on the green steel edge of a dumpster,
pirouetting halfway to the cement before Schtitt darts in to catch him, and it almost looks like they're doing a dance-floor dip as
Schtitt says this game the players are all at E.T.A. to learn, this infinite system of decisions and angles and lines Mario's brothers
worked so brutishly hard to master: junior athletics is but one facet of the real gem: life's endless war against the self you cannot
live without.
Schtitt then falls into the sort of silence of someone who's enjoying mentally rewinding and replaying what he just came up
with. Mario thinks hard again. He's trying to think of how to articulate something like: But then is battling and vanquishing the
self the same as destroying yourself? Is that like saying life is pro-death? Three passing Allstonian street-kids mock and make fun
of Mario's appearance behind the pair's backs. Some of Mario's thinking-faces are almost orgasmic: fluttery and slack. And then
but so what's the difference between tennis and suicide, life and death, the game and its own end?
It's always Schtitt who ends up experimenting with some exotic icecream flavor, when they arrive. Mario always chickens out
and opts for good old basic chocolate when the moment of decision at the counter comes. Thinking along the lines of like Better
the flavor you know for sure you already love.
'And so. No different, maybe,' Schtitt concedes, sitting up straight on a waffle-seated aluminum chair with Mario beneath an
askew umbrella that makes the flimsy little table it's rooted to shake and clank in the sidewalk's breeze. 'Maybe no different, so,'
biting hard into his tricolored cone. He feels at the side of his white jaw, where there's some sort of red welt, it looks like. 'Not
different' — looking out into the Ave.'s raised median at the Green Line train rattling past downhill — 'except the chance to play.'
He brightens in preparation to laugh in his startling German roar, saying 'No? Yes? The chance to play, yes?' And Mario loses a
dollop of chocolate down his chin, because he has this involuntary thing where he laughs whenever anyone else does, and Schtitt
is finding what he has just said very amusing indeed.
YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
There is no jolly irony in Tiny Ewell's name. He is tiny, an elf-sized U.S. male. His feet barely reach the floor of the taxi. He
is seated, being driven east into the grim three-decker districts of East Watertown, west of Boston proper. A rehabilitative staffer
wearing custodial whites under a bombardier's jacket sits beside Tiny Ewell, big arms crossed and staring placid as a cow at the
intricately creased back of the cabbie's neck. The window Tiny is next to has a sticker that thanks him in advance for not smoking.
Tiny Ewell wears no winter gear over a jacket and tie that don't quite go together and stares out his window with unplacid
intensity at the same district he grew up in. He normally takes involved routes to avoid Watertown. His jacket a 26S, his slacks a
26/24, his shirt one of the shirts his wife had so considerately packed for him to bring into the hospital detox and hang on hangers
that won't leave the rod. As with all Tiny Ewell's business shirts, only the front and cuffs are ironed. He wears size 6 Florsheim
wingtips that gleam nicely except for one big incongruous scuff-mark of white from where he'd kicked at his front door when he'd
returned home just before dawn from an extremely important get-together with potential clients to find that his wife had had the
locks changed and filed a restraining order and would communicate with him only by notes passed through the mail-slot below the
white door's black brass (the brass had been painted black) knocker. When Tiny leans down and wipes at the scuff-mark with a
slim thumb it only pales and smears. It is Tiny's first time out of Happy Slippers since his second day at the detox. They took
away his Florsheims after 24 abstinent hours had passed and he started to perhaps D.T. a little. He'd kept noticing mice scurrying
around his room, mice as in rodents, vermin, and when he lodged a complaint and demanded the room be fumigated at once and
then began running around hunched and pounding with the heel of a hand-held Florsheim at the mice as they continued to ooze
through the room's electrical outlets and scurry repulsively about, eventually a gentle-faced nurse flanked by large men in
custodial whites negotiated a trade of shoes for Librium, predicting that the mild sedative would fumigate what really needed to be
fumigated. They gave him slippers of green foam-rubber with smiley-faces embossed on the tops. The detox's in-patients are 
encouraged to call these Happy Slippers. The staff refer to the footwear in private as 'pisscatchers.' It is Tiny Ewell's first day out
of rubber slippers and ass-exposing detox pajamas and striped cotton robe in two weeks. The early-November day is foggy and
colorless. The sky and the street are the same color. The trees look skeletal. There is bright wet wadded litter all along the seams
of street and curb. The houses are skinny three-deckers, mashed together, wharf-gray w/ salt-white trim, madonnas in the yards,
bowlegged dogs hurling themselves against the fencing. Some schoolboys in knee-pads and skallycaps are playing street hockey
on a passing school's cement playground. Except none of the boys seems to be moving. The trees' bony fingers make spell-casting
gestures in the wind as they pass. East Watertown is the obvious straight-line easement between St. Mel's detox and the halfway
house's Enfield, and Ewell's insurance is paying for the cab. With his small round shape and bit of white goatee and a violent flush
that could pass for health of some jolly sort, Tiny Ewell looks like a radically downscaled Burl Ives, the late Burl Ives as an
impossible bearded child. Tiny looks out the window at the rose window of the church next to the school playground where the
boys are playing/not playing. The rose window is not illuminated from either side.
The man who for the last three days has been Tiny Ewell's roommate at St. Mel's Hospital's detoxification unit sits in a blue
plastic straight-back chair in front of his and Ewell's room's window's air conditioner, watching it. The air conditioner hums and
gushes, and the man gazes with rapt intensity into its screen of horizontal vents. The air conditioner's cord is thick and white and
leads into a three-prong outlet with black heel-marks on the wall all around it. The November room is around 12° C. The man
turns the air conditioner's dial from setting #4 to setting #5. The curtains above it shake and billow around the window. The man's
face falls into and out of amused expressions as he watches the air conditioner. He sits in the blue chair with a trembling
Styrofoam cup of coffee and a paper plate of brownies into which he taps ashes from the cigarettes whose smoke the air
conditioner blows straight back over his head. The cigarette smoke is starting to pile up against the wall behind him, and to ooze
and run chilled down the wall and form a sort of cloud-bank near the floor. The man's raptly amused profile appears in the mirror
on the wall beside the dresser the two in-patients share. The man, like Tiny Ewell, has the rouged-corpse look that attends detox
from late-stage alcoholism. The man is in addition a burnt-yellow beneath his flush, from chronic hepatitis. The mirror he appears
in is treated with shatterproof Lucite polymers. The man leans carefully forward with the plate of brownies in his lap and changes
the setting on the air conditioner from 5 to 3 and then to 7, then 8, scanning the screen of gushing vents. He finally turns the
selector's dial all the way around to 9. The air conditioner roars and blows his long hair straight back, and his beard blows back
over his shoulder, ashes fly and swirl around from his plate of brownies, plus crumbs, and his rodney's tip glows cherry and gives
sparks. He is deeply engaged by whatever he sees on 9. He gives Tiny Ewell the screaming meemies, Ewell has complained. He
wears pisscatchers, a striped cotton St. Mel's robe, and a pair of glasses missing one lens. He has been watching the air conditioner
all day. His face produces the little smiles and grimaces of a person who's being thoroughly entertained.
When the big black rehabilitative staffer placed Tiny Ewell in the taxi and then squeezed in and told the cabbie they wanted
Unit #6 in the Enfield Marine VA Hospital Complex just off Commonwealth Ave. in Enfield, the cabbie, whose photo was on the
Mass. Livery License taped to the glove compartment, the cabbie, looking back and down at little Tiny Ewell's neat white beard
and ruddy complexion and sharp threads, had scratched under his skallycap and asked if he was sick or something.
Tiny Ewell had said, 'So it would seem.’
By mid-afternoon on 2 April Y.D.A.U.: the Near Eastern medical attache; his devout wife; the Saudi Prince Q---------'s
personal physician's personal assistant, who'd been sent over to see why the medical attache hadn't appeared at the Back Bay
Hilton in the a.m. and then hadn't answered his beeper's page; the personal physician himself, who'd come to see why his personal
assistant hadn't come back; two Embassy security guards w/ sidearms, who'd been dispatched by a candidiatic, heartily pissed-off
Prince Q---------; and two neatly groomed Seventh Day Adventist pamphleteers who'd seen human heads through the living room
window and found the front door unlocked and come in with all good spiritual intentions — all were watching the recursive loop
the medical attache had rigged on the TP's viewer the night before, sitting and standing there very still and attentive, looking not
one bit distressed or in any way displeased, even though the room smelled very bad indeed.
30 APRIL — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
He sat alone above the desert, redly backlit and framed in shale, watching very yellow payloaders crawl over the beaten dirt
of some U.S.A. construction site several km. to the southeast. The outcropping's height allowed him, Marathe, to look out over
most of U.S.A. area code 6026. His shadow did not yet reach the downtown regions of the city Tucson; not yet quite. Of sounds in
the arid hush were only a faint and occasional hot wind, the blurred sound of the wings of sometimes an insect, some tentative
trickling of loosened grit and small stones moving farther down the upslope behind.
And as well the sunset over the foothills and mountains behind him: such a difference from the watery and somehow sad
spring sunsets of southwestern Quebec's Papineau regions, where his wife had need of care. This (the sunset) more resembled an
explosion. It took place above and behind him, and he turned some of the time to regard it: it (the sunset) was swollen and
perfectly round, and large, radiating knives of light when he squinted. It hung and trembled slightly like a viscous drop about to
fall. It hung just above the peaks of the Tortolita foothills behind him (Marathe), and slowly was sinking.
Marathe sat alone and blanket-lapped in his customized fauteuil de roll-ent3737on a kind of outcropping or shelf about
halfway up, waiting, amusing himself with his shadow. As the lowering light from behind came at an angle more and more acute,
Goethe's well-known 'Bröckengespensf phenomenon3838 enlarged and distended his seated shadow far out overland, so that the
spokes of his chair's rear wheels cast over two whole counties below gigantic asterisk-shadows, whose fine black radial lines he
could cause to move by playing slightly with the wheels' rubber rims; and his head's shadow brought to much of the suburb West
Tucson a premature dusk.
He appeared to remain concentrated on his huge shadow-play as gravel and then also breath sounded from the steep hillside
back above him, grit and dirty stones cascading onto the outcropping and gushing past his chair and off the front lip, and then the
unmistakable yelp of an individual's impact with a cactus somewhere up behind. But Marathe, he had all the time without turning
watched the other man's clumsy sliding descent's own mammoth shadow, cast as far east as the Rincon range just past the city
Tucson, and could see the shadow rush in west toward his own as Unspecified Services' M. Hugh Steeply descended, falling twice 
and cursing in U.S.A. English, until the shadow collapsed nearly into Marathe's monstrous own. Another yelp took place as the
Unspecified Services field-operative's fall and slide the last several meters carried him upon his bottom down onto the outcropping
and then nearly all the way out and off it, Marathe having to release the machine pistol under his blanket to grab Steeply's bare
arm and halt this sliding. Steeply's skirt was pulled obscenely up and his hosiery full of runs and stubs of thorns. The operative sat
at Marathe's feet, glowing redly in the backlight, legs hanging over the shelf's edge, breathing with difficulty.
Marathe smiled and released the operative's arm. 'Stealth becomes you,' he said.
'Go shit in your chapeau,' Steeply wheezed, bring up his legs to survey the hosiery's damage.
They spoke for the most part U.S.A. English when they met like this, covertly, in the field. M. Fortier3939 had wished
Marathe to require that they interface always in Québecois French, as for a small symbolic concession to the A.F.R. on the part of
the Office of Unspecified Services, which the Québecois Sepératiste Left referred to always as B.S.S., the 'Bureau des Services
sans Spécificité.’
Marathe watched a column of shadow spread again out east over the desert's floor as Steeply got a hand under himself and
rose, a huge and well-fed figure tottering on heels. The two men sent together a strange Bröckengespenst-shndow out toward the
city Tucson, a shadow round and radial at the base and jagged at the top, from Steeply's wig becoming uncombed in his descent.
Steeply's gigantic prosthetic breasts pointed in wildly different directions now, one nearly at the empty sky. The matte curtain of
sunset's true dusk-shadow was moving itself very slowly in across the Rin-cons and Sonora desert east of the city Tucson, still
many km. from obscuring their own large shadow.
But once Marathe had committed not just to pretend to betray his Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents in order to secure advanced
medical care for the medical needs of his wife, but to in truth do this — betray, perfidiously: now pretending only to M. Fortier
and his A.F.R. superiors that he was merely pretending to feed some betraying information to B.S.S.4040 — once this decision,
Marathe was without all power, served now at the pleasures of the power of Steeply and the B.S.S. of Hugh Steeply: and now they
spoke mostly the U.S.A. English of Steeply's preference.
In fact, Steeply's Québecois was better than Marathe's English, but c'était la guerre, as one says.
Marathe sniffed slightly. 'Thus, so, we now are both here.' He wore a windbreaker and did not perspire.
Steeply's eyes were luridly made up. The rear area of his dress was dirty. Some of his makeup had started to run. He was
forming a type of salute to shade his eyes and looking upward behind them at what remained of the explosive and trembling sun.
'How in God's name did you get up here?’
Marathe slowly shrugged. As usual, he appeared to Steeply as if he were half-asleep. He ignored the question and said only,
shrugging, 'My time is finite.’
Steeply had also with him a woman's handbag or purse. 'And the wife?' he said, gazing upward as yet. 'How's the wife doing?’
'Holding her own weight, thank you,' Marathe said. His tone of his voice betrayed nothing. 'And so thus what is it your
Offices believe they wish to know?’
Steeply tottered on a leg as he removed one shoe and poured from it grit.
'Nothing terribly surprising. A bit of razzle-dazzle up northeast in your so-called Ops-area, certainly you heard.’
Marathe sniffed. A large odor of inexpensive and high-alcohol perfume came not from Steeply's person but from his handbag,
which failed to complement his shoes. Marathe said, 'Dazzle?’
'As in a civilian-type individual receives a certain item. Don't tell me this is news to you guys. Not on InterLace pulse, this
item. Arrives via normal physical mail. We're sure you heard, Rémy. A cartridge-copy of a certain let's call it between ourselves
"the Entertainment." As in in the mail, without warning or motive. Out of the blue.’
'From somewhere blue?’
The B.S.S. operative had perspired also through his rouge, and his mascara had melted to become whorish. 'A person with no
political value to anybody except that the Saudi Ministry of Entertainment made one the hell of a shrill stink.’
'The medical attache, the specialist of digesting, you refer to.' Marathe shrugged again in that maddening Francophone way
that can mean several things. 'Your offices wish to ask was the Entertainment's cartridge disseminated through our mechanisms?’
'Don't let's waste your finite time, ami old friend,' Steeply said. 'The mischief happens to occur in metropolitan Boston. Postal
codes route the package through the desert Southwest, and we know your dissemination-scheme's routing mechanism is proposed
for somewhere between Phoenix and the border down here.' Steeply had worked hard at feminizing his expressions and gesturing.
'It would be a bit starry-eyed of O.U.S. not to think of your distinguished cell, no?’
Beneath Marathe's windbreaker was a sportshirt whose breast pocket was filled with many pens. He said: 'Us, we don't have
the information on even casualties. From this blue dazzle you speak of.’
Steeply was trying to extract something stubborn from inside his other shoe. 'Upwards of twenty, Rémy. Out of commission
altogether. The attache and his wife, the wife a Saudi citizen. Four more raggers, all with embassy cards. Couple neighbors or
something. The rest mostly police before word got to a level they could stop police from going in before they killed the power.’
'Local police forces. Gendarmes.’
'The local constabulary.’
'The minions of the law of the land.’
'The local constabulary were shall we say unprepared for an Entertainment like this.' Steeply even removed and replaced his
pumps in the upright-on-one-leg-bringing-other-foot-up-behind-his-bottom way of a feminine U.S.A. woman. But he appeared
huge and bloated as a woman, not merely unattractive but inducing something like sexual despair. He said, 'The attaché had
diplomatic status, Rémy. Mideast. Saudi. Said to be close to minor members of the royal family.’
Marathe sniffed hard, as if congested of the nose. 'A puzzling,' he said.
'But also a compatriot of yours. Canadian citizenship. Born in Ottawa, to Arab emigres. Visa lists a residence in Montreal.’
'And Services Without Specificity wishes maybe to ask were there below-the-surface connections that make the individual
not such a civilian, unconnected. To ask of us would the A.F.R. wish to make of him the example.’
Steeply was removing dirt from his bottom, swatting himself on the bottom. He stood more or less directly over Marathe.
Marathe sniffed. 'We have neither digestive medicals nor diplomatic entourages on any lists for action. You have personally seen 
A.F.R.'s initial lists. Nor in particular Montreal civilians. We have, as one will say, larger seafood to cook.’
Steeply was looking out over the desert and city, also, as he swatted at himself. He seemed to have noticed the gespenstphenomenon of his own shadow. Marathe for some reason pretended again to sniff the nose. The wind was moderate and constant
and of about the temperature of a U.S.A. clothes-dryer set on Low. It made the shrill whistling sounds. Also sounds of the blowing
grit. Weeds-of-tumbling like enormous hairballs rolled often across the Interstate Highway of I-10 far below. Their specular
perspective, the reddening light on vast tan stone and the oncoming curtain of dusk, the further elongation of their monstrous
agnate shadows: all was almost mesmerizing. Neither man seemed able to look at anything but the vista below. Marathe could
simultaneously speak in English and think in French. The desert was the tawny color of the hide of the lion. Their speaking
without looking at one another, facing both the same direction — this gave their conversing an air of careless intimacy, as of old
friends at the cartridge-viewer together, or a long-married couple. Marathe thought this as he opened and closed his upheld hand,
making over the city Tucson a huge and black blossom open itself and close itself.
And Steeply raised his bare arms and held them out and crossed them, maybe as if signalling for distant aid; this made X's
and pedentive V's over much in the city Tucson. 'Still, Rémy, but born in the hated-by-you Ottawa, this civilian attache, and
connected to a major buyer of trans-grid entertainment. And follow-up out of the Boston offices reports possible indications of the
victim's prior possible involvement with the widow of the auteur we both know was responsible for the Entertainment in the first
place. The samizdat.’
'Prior?’
Steeply produced from his handbag Belgian cigarettes of a many-mm. and habitually female type. 'Film director's wife'd
taught out at Brandeis where the victim'd done his residency. The husband was on board over at A.E.C., and different agencies'
background checks indicated the wife was fucking just about everything with a pulse.' With the slight pause of which Steeply
could excel: 'Particularly a Canadian pulse.’
'Involvement of sexuality is what you are meaning, then, not politics.’
Steeply said, 'This wife herself a Québecer, Rémy, from L'Islet county — Chief Tine says three years spent on Ottawa's
"Personnes Qui On Doit" list. There's such a thing as political sex.’
'I have said to you all we know. Civilians as individual warnings to O.N.A.N. are not our desire. This is known by you.'
Marathe's eyes looked nearly closed. 'And your tits, they have become cock-eyed, I will tell you. Services Without Specificity,
they have given you ridiculous tits, and now they point differently.’
Steeply looked down at himself. One of the false breasts (surely false: surely they would not go as far as the hormonal,
Marathe thought) nearly touched the chins of Steeply when his looking down produced his double chins. 'I was asked to secure
personal verification, is all,' he said. 'My general sense at the Office is the brass consider the whole incident a stumper. There're
theories and countertheories. There are even antitheories positing error, mistaken identity, sick hoax.' His shrugging, with his
hands on the prosthesis, appeared not at all Gallic. 'Still: twenty-three human beings lost for all time: that'd be some hoax, no?’
Marathe sniffed. 'Asked to verify by our mutual M. Tine? How you call him: "Rod, a God"?’
(Rodney Tine, Sr., Chief of Unspecified Services, acknowledged architect of O.N.A.N. and continental Reconfiguration, who
held the ear of the White House of U.S.A., and whose stenographer had long doubled as the steno-grapher-cum-jeune-fille-deVendredi of M. DuPlessis, former asst. coordinator of the pan-Canadian Resistance, and whose passionate, ill-disguised
attachment (Tine's) to this double-amaneunsis — one Mile. Luria Perec, of Lamartine, county L'Islet, Quebec — gave rise to these
questions of the high-level loyalties of Tine, whether he 'doubled'4141 for Quebec out of the love for Luria or 'tripled' the
loyalties, pretending only to divulge secrets while secretly maintaining his U.S.A. fealty against the pull of an irresistible love, it
was said.)
'The, Rémy.' It was clear that Steeply could not fix his breasts' directions without pulling down severely his décolletage,
which he was shy to do. He produced from his handbag sunglasses and put on the sunglasses. They were embellished with
rhinestones and looked absurd. 'Rod the God.’
Marathe forced himself to say nothing of their appearance. Steeply tried with several matches to light a cigarette in the wind.
The encroachment of true dusk began to erase his wig's chaotic shadow. Electric lights began to twinkle in the Rincon foothills
east of the city. Steeply tried somewhat to cup his body around the match, for shelter for the flame.
It's a herd of feral hamsters, a major herd, thundering across the yellow plains of the southern reaches of the Great Concavity
in what used to be Vermont, raising dust that forms a uremíc-hued cloud with somatic shapes interpretable from as far away as
Boston and Montreal. The herd is descended from two domestic hamsters set free by a Watertown NY boy at the beginning of the
Experialist migration in the subsidized Year of the Whopper. The boy now attends college in Champaign IL and has forgotten that
his hamsters were named Ward and June.
The noise of the herd is tornadic, locomotival. The expression on the hamsters' whiskered faces is businesslike and
implacable — it's that implacable-herd expression. They thunder eastward across pedalferrous terrain that today is fallow,
denuded. To the east, dimmed by the fulvous cloud the hamsters send up, is the vivid verdant ragged outline of the annularly
overfertilized forests of what used to be central Maine.
All these territories are now property of Canada.
With respect to a herd of this size, please exercise the sort of common sense that come to think of it would keep your thinking
man out of the southwest Concavity anyway. Feral hamsters are not pets. They mean business. Wide berth advised. Carry nothing
even remotely vegetablish if in the path of a feral herd. If in the path of such a herd, move quickly and calmly in a direction
perpendicular to their own. If American, north not advisable. Move south, calmly and in all haste, toward some border metropolis
— Rome NNY or Glens Falls NNY or Beverly MA, say, or those bordered points between them at which the giant protective
ATHSCME fans atop the hugely convex protective walls of anodized Lucite hold off the drooling and piss-colored bank of
teratogenic Concavity clouds and move the bank well back, north, away, jaggedly, over your protected head.
The heavy-tongued English of Steeply was even more difficult to understand with a cigarette in the mouth. He said, 'And
you'll of course report this little interface of you and me right back to Fortier.’
Marathe shrugged. ' 'n sûr.’ 
Steeply got it lit. He was a large and soft man, some type of brutal-U.S.-contact-sport athlete now become fat. He appeared to
Marathe to look less like a woman than a twisted parody of womanhood. Electrolysis had caused patches of tiny red pimples along
his jowls and upper lip. He also held his elbow out, the arm holding the match for lighting, which is how no woman lights a
cigarette, who is used to breasts and keeps the lighting elbow in. Also Steeply teetered ungracefully on his pumps' heels on the
stone's uneven surface. He never for a moment turned his back completely at Marathe as he stood on the lip of the outcropping.
And Marathe had his chair's wheels' clamps now locked down tight and a firm grip on the machine pistol's pebbled grip. Steeply's
purse was small and glossy black, and the sunglasses he wore had womanly frames with small false jewels at the temples. Marathe believed that something in Steeply enjoyed his grotesque appearance and craved the humiliation of the field-disguises his
B.S.S. superiors requested of him.
Steeply now looked at him, in probability, behind the dark glasses. 'And also that I just right now asked you if you'd report it,
and that you said bien sûr?’
Marathe's laugh had this misfortune to sound false and overhearty, whether or not sincere. He made a mustache of his finger,
pretending for some reason to stifle a need to sneeze. 'You verify this because of why?’
Steeply scratched under the hem of his blonde wig with (stupidly, dangerously) the thumb of his hand that held the cigarette.
'Well you are already tripling, Rémy, aren't you? Or would it be quadrupling. We know Fortier and the A.F.R. know you're here
with me now.’
'But do my brothers on wheels know that you are knowing this, that they have sent me to pretend I double?’
Marathe's sidearm, a Sterling UL35 9 mm machine pistol with a Mag Na Port silencer, did not have a safety. Its fat and
texture-of-pebbles grip was hot from Marathe's palm, and in turn caused Marathe's palm to perspire beneath the blanket. From
Steeply there merely was silence.
Marathe said: '. . . have I merely pretended to pretend to pretend to betray.'4242
And the desert U.S.A.'s light had become now sad, more than half the round sun gone behind the Tortolitas. Only now the
chair's wheels and Steeply's thick legs cast shadows below the dusk-line, and these shadows were becoming squat and retreating
back up toward the two men.
Steeply did a brief pretend-Charleston, playing with his legs' shadows. 'Nothing personal. You know that. It's the obsessive
caution. Who was it — who once said we get paid to drive ourselves crazy, the caution thing? You guys and Tine — your
DuPlessis always suspected he tried to hold back on the information he passed sexually to Luria.’
Marathe shrugged hard. 'And abruptly M. DuPlessis has now passed away from life. Under circumstances of almost
ridiculous suspicion.' Again with the false-sounding laugh. 'An inept burglary and grippe indeed.’
Both men were silent. Steeply's left arm had on it a nasty mesquite scratch, Marathe could observe.
Marathe finally glanced at his watch, its dial illuminated in his body's shadow. Both men's shadows were now climbing the
steep incline, returning up to them. 'Me, I think that we go about our affairs in a more simple manner than your B.S.S. office. If M.
Tine's betrayal were incomplete, we of Quebec would be aware.’
'Because of Luria.’
Marathe pretended to fuss with his blanket, rearranging it. 'But yes. The caution. Luria would be aware.’
Steeply stepped gingerly up to the edge and tossed out his cigarette's stub. The wind caught the stub and it soared slightly
upward from his hand, moving east. Both men were silent until the butt fell and hit the dark mountainside off below them, a tiny
bloom of orange. Their silence then became contemplative. Something tight in the air between them loosened. Marathe no longer
felt the sun on his skull. Dusk settled about them. Steeply had found his triceps' scratch and twisted the flesh of his arm to examine
it, his rouged lips rounded with concern.
YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
Tuesday, 3 November, Enfield Tennis Academy: a.m. drills, shower, eat, class, lab, class, class, eat, prescriptive-grammar
exam, lab/class, conditioning run, p.m. drills, play challenge match, play challenge match, upper-body circuits in weight room,
sauna, shower, slump to locker-room floor w/ other players.
'. . . to even realize what they're sitting there feeling is unhappiness? Or to even feel it in the first place?’
1640h.: the Comm.-Ad. Bldg.'s males' locker room is full of clean upper-classmen in towels after p.m. matches, the players'
hair wet-combed and shining with Barbicide. Pemulis uses the comb's big-toothed end to get that wide-furrowed look that kids
from Allston favor. Hal's own hair tends to look wet-combed even when it's dry.
'So,' Jim Troeltsch says, looking around. 'So what do you think?’
Pemulis lowers himself to the floor by the sinks, leaning up against the cabinet where they keep all the disinfectants. He has
this way of looking warily to either side of him before he says anything. 'Was there like a central point to all that, Troeltsch?’
'The exam was talking about the syntax of Tolstoy's sentence, not about real unhappy families,' Hal says quietly.
John Wayne, as do most Canadians, lifts one leg slightly to fart, like the fart was some kind of task, standing at his locker,
waiting for his feet to get dry enough to put on socks.
There is a silence. Showerheads dribble on tile. Steam hangs. Distant ghastly sounds from T. Schacht over in one of the stalls
off the showers. Everyone stares into the middle distance, stunned with fatigue. Michael Pemulis, who can stand about ten
seconds of communal silence tops, clear his throat deeply and sends a loogie up and back into the sink behind him. The plate
mirrors caught part of its quivering flight, Hal sees. Hal closes his eyes.
'Tired,' someone exhales.
Ortho Stice and John ('N.R.') Wayne seem less fatigued than detached; they have the really top player's way of shutting the
whole neural net down for brief periods, staring at the space they took up, hooded in silence, removed, for a moment, from the
connectedness of all events.
'Right then,' Troeltsch says. 'Pop quiz. Pop test-question. Most crucial difference, for Leith tomorrow, between your historical
broadcast TV set and a cartridge-capable TP.’ 
Disney R. Leith teaches E.T.A.'s History of Entertainment I and II as well as certain high-level esoteric Optics things you
needed Permission of Inst. to get into.
'The Cathodeluminescent Panel. No cathode gun. No phosphenic screen. Two to the screen's diagonal width in cm. lines of
resolution, total.’
'You mean a high-def. viewer in general, or a specifically TP-component viewer?’
'No analogs,' Struck says.
'No snow, no faint weird like ghostly double next to UHF images, no vertical roll when planes fly over.’
'Analogs v. digitals.’
'You referring to broadcast as in network versus a TP, or network-plus-cable versus a TP?’
'Did cable TV use analogs? What, like pre-fiber phones?’
'It's the digitals. Leith has that word he uses for the shift from analogs to digitals. That word he uses about eleven times an
hour.’
'What did pre-fiber phones use, exactly?’
'The old tin-can-and-string principle.' "Seminal." He keeps saying it. "Seminal, seminal."
'The biggest advance in home communications since the phone he says.’
'In home entertainment since the TV itself.’
'Leith might say the Write-Capable CD, for entertainment.’
'He's hard to pin down if you get him on entertainment qua entertainment.’
'The Diz'll say use your own judgment,' Pemulis says. 'Axford took it last year. He wants an argument made. He'll skewer you
if you treat it like there's an obvious answer.’
'Plus there's the InterLace de-digitizer instead of an antenna, with a TP,' Jim Struck says, squeezing at something behind his
ear. Graham ('Yard-guard') Rader is checking his underarm for more hair. Freer and Shaw might be asleep.
Stice has pulled his towel down slightly and is fingering the deep red abdominal stripe a jock's waistband leaves. 'Boys, I ever
become president, the first thing to go's elastic.’
Troeltsch pretends to shuffle cards. 'Next item. Next like flash-card. Define acutance. Anybody?’
'A measure of resolution directly proportional to the resolved ratio of a given pulse's digital code,' Hal says.
'The Incster has the last word once again,' says Struck. Which invites a chorus:
The Halster.’
'Halorama.’
'Halation.’
'Halation,' Rader says. 'A halo-shaped exposure-pattern around light sources seen on chemical film at low speed.’
'That most angelic of distortions.’
Struck says 'We'll be like vying for the seats all around Inc tomorrow.' Hal shuts his eyes: he can see the page of text right
there, all highlighted, all yellowed up.
'He can scan the page, rotate it, fold the corner down and clean under his nails with it, all mentally.’
'Leave him alone,' Pemulis says.
Freer opens his eyes. 'Do a dictionary-page for us, man, Inc.’
Stice says 'Leave him be.’
It's all only half-nasty. Hal is placid about getting his balls smacked around; they all are. He does his share of chops-busting.
Some of the littler kids who take their showers after the upperclassmen are hanging around listening. Hal sits on the floor,
quiescent, chin on his chest, just thinking it's nice finally to breathe and get enough air.
The temperature had fallen with the sun. Marathe listened to the cooler evening wind roll across the incline and desert floor.
Marathe could sense or feel many million floral pores begin slowly to open, hopeful of dew. The American Steeply produced
small exhalations between his teeth as he examined his scratch of the arm. Only one or two remaining tips of the digitate spikes of
the radial blades of the sun found crevices between the Tortolitas' peaks and probed at the roof of the sky. There were the slight
and dry locationless rustlings of small living things that wish to come out at night, emerging. The sky was violet.
Everyone in the locker room's got a towel around his waist like a kilt. Everyone except Stice has a white E.T.A. towel; Stice
uses his own sort of trademark towels, black ones. After a silence Stice shoots some air out through his nose. Jim Struck picks
liberally at his face and neck. There are one or two sighs. Peter Beak and Evan Ingersoll and Kent Blott, twelve, eleven, ten, are
up sitting on the blond-wood benches that run in front of the lockers' rows, sitting there in towels, elbows on knees, not taking
part. So is Zoltan Csikzentmihalyi, who's sixteen but speaks very little English. Idris Arslanian, new this year, ethnically vague,
fourteen, all feet and teeth, is a shadowy lurking presence just outside the locker-room door, poking the non-Caucasoid snout in
occasionally and then withdrawing, terribly shy. Each E.T.A. player in 18-and-Unders has like four to six 14-and-Unders kids he's
supposed to keep his more experienced wing over, look out for. The more the E.T.A. administration trusts you, the younger and
more generally clueless the little kids in your charge. Charles Tavis instituted the practice and calls it the Big Buddy System in the
literature he sends new kids' parents. So the parents can feel their kid's not getting lost in the institutional shuffle. Beak, Blott, and
Arslanian are all in Hal's Big Buddy group for Y.D.A.U. He also in effect has Ingersoll, having traded Todd ('Postal-Weight')
Possalthwaite to Axford off the books for Ingersoll, because Trevor Axford found he so despised the Ingersoll kid for some
unanalyzable reason that he was struggling against a horrible compulsion to put Inger-soll's little fingers into the gap by the hinges
of an open door and then very slowly close the door, and came to Hal almost in tears, Axford had. Though technically Ingersoll is
still Axford's and Possalthwaite Hal's. Possalthwaite, the great lobber, has a weird young-old face and little wet lips that lapse into
a sucking reflex under stress. In theory, a Big Buddy's somewhere between an R.A. and a prorector. He's there to answer
questions, ease bumpy transitions, show ropes, act as liaison with Tony Nwangi and Tex Watson and the other prorectors
specializing in little kids. Be somebody they can come to off the record. A shoulder to climb up on a footstool and cry on. If a 16-
and-Under gets made a Big Buddy it's kind of an honor; it means they think you're going places. When there's no tournament or
travel, etc., Big Buddies get together with their quar-to-sextet in small-group private twice a week, in the interval between P.M. 
challenge matches and dinner, usually after saunas and showers and a few minutes of sitting slumped around the locker room
sucking air. Sometimes Hal sits with his Little Buddies at dinner and eats with them. Not often, however. The savvier Big Buddies
don't get too overly close with their L.B. ephebes, don't let them forget about the unbridgeable gaps of experience and ability and
general status that separate ephebes from upperclassmen who've hung in and stuck it out at E.T.A. for years and years. Gives them
more to look up to. The savvy Big Buddy doesn't rush in or tread heavy; he holds his own ground and lets the suppliants realize
when they need his help and come to him. You have to know when to tread in and take an active hand and when to hang back and
let the littler kids learn from the personal experience they'll have to learn from, inevitably, if they want to be able to hang. Every
year, the biggest source of attrition, besides graduating 18s, is 13-15s who've had enough and just can't hang. This happens; the
administration accepts it; not everyone's cut out for what's required of you here. Though C.T. makes his administrative assistant
Lateral Alice Moore drive the prorectors bats trying to ferret out data on littler kids' psychic states, so he can forecast probable
burnouts and attritive defections, so he'll know how many slots he and Admissions'll have to offer Incomings for the next term.
Big Buddies are in a tricky position, requested to keep the prorectors generally informed about who among their charges seems
shaky in terms of resolve, capacity for suffering and stress, physical punishment, homesickness, deep fatigue, but at the same time
wanting to remain a trustworthy confidential shoulder and wing for their Little Buddies' most private and delicate issues.
Though he, too, has to struggle with a strange urge to be cruel to Inger-soll, who reminds him of someone he dislikes but can't
quite place, Hal on the whole rather likes being a Big B. He likes being there to come to, and likes delivering little unpretentious
minilectures on tennis theory and E.T.A. pedagogy and tradition, and getting to be kind in a way that costs him nothing.
Sometimes he finds out he believes something that he doesn't even know he believed until it exits his mouth in front of five
anxious little hairless plump trusting clueless faces. The twice-weekly (more like once-weekly, as things usually pan out) group
interfaces with his quintet are unpleasant only after a particularly bad p.m. session on the courts, when he's tired and on edge and
would far rather go off by himself and do secret stuff in underground ventilated private.
Jim Troeltsch feels at his glands. John Wayne is of the sock-and-a-shoe, sock-and-a-shoe school.
'Tired,' Ortho Slice again sighs. He pronounces it 'tard.' To a man, now, the upperclassmen are down slumped on the locker
room's blue crush carpet, their legs straight out in front of them, toes pointing out at that distinctive morgue-angle, their backs up
against the blue steel of the lockers, careful to avoid the six sharp little louvered antimildew vents at each locker's base. All of
them look a bit silly naked because of their tennis tans: legs and arms the deep sienna of a quality catcher's mitt, from the summer,
the tan just now this late starting to fade, but feet and ankles of toadbelly-white, the white of the grave, with chests and shoulders
and upper arms more like off-white — the players can sit shirtless in the stands at tournaments when they're not playing and get at
least a bit of thoracic sun. The faces are the worst, maybe, most red and shiny, some still deep-peeling from three straight weeks of
outdoor tournaments in August-September. Besides Hal, who's atavistically dark-complected anyway, the ones here with the least
bad piebald coloring are the players who can tolerate spraying themselves down with Lemon Pledge before outdoor play. It turns
out Lemon Pledge, when it's applied in pre-play stasis and allowed to dry to a thin crust, is a phenomenal sunscreen, UV-rating
like 40+, and the only stuff anywhere that can survive a three-set sweat. No one knows what jr. player at what academy found this
out about Pledge, years back, or how: rather bizarre discovery-circumstances are envisioned. The smell of sweat-wet Pledge out
on the court makes some of the more delicately constituted kids sick, though. Others feel sunscreen of any kind to be
unconscionably pussified, like white visors or on-court sunglasses. So most of the E.T.A. upperclassmen have these vivid shoeand-shirt tans that give them the classic look of bodies hastily assembled from different bodies' parts, especially when you throw
in the heavily muscled legs and usually shallow chests and the two arms of different sizes.
'Tard tard tard,' Stice says.
Group empathy is expressed via sighs, further slumping, small spastic gestures of exhaustion, the soft clanks of skulls' backs
against the lockers' thin steel.
'My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I'm so tired.’
'I'm waiting til the last possible second to even breathe. I'm not expanding the cage till driven by necessity of air.’
'So tired it's out of tired's word-range,' Pemulis says. 'Tired just doesn't do it.’
'Exhausted, shot, depleted,' says Jim Struck, grinding at his closed eye with the heel of his hand. 'Cashed. Totalled.’
'Look.' Pemulis pointing at Struck. 'It's trying to think.’
'A moving thing to see.’
'Beat. Worn the heck out.’
'Worn the fuck-all out is more like.’
'Wrung dry. Whacked. Tuckered out. More dead than alive.’
'None even come close, the words.’
'Word-inflation,' Stice says, rubbing at his crewcut so his forehead wrinkles and clears. 'Bigger and better. Good greater
greatest totally great. Hyperbolic and hyperbolicker. Like grade-inflation.’
'Should be so lucky,' says Struck, who's been on academic probation since fifteen.
Stice is from a part of southwest Kansas that might as well be Oklahoma. He makes the companies that give him clothes and
gear give him all black clothes and gear, and his E.T.A. cognomen is 'The Darkness.’
Hal raises his eyebrows at Stice and smiles. 'Hyperbolicker?’
'My daddy as a boy, he'd have said "tuckered out'"ll do just fine.’
'Whereas here we are sitting here needing whole new words and terms.’
'Phrases and clauses and models and structures,' Troeltsch says, referring again to a prescriptive exam everyone but Hal
wishes now to forget. 'We need an inflation-generative grammar.’
Keith Freer makes a motion as if taking his unit out of his towel and holding it out at Troeltsch: 'Generate this.’
'Need a whole new syntax for fatigue on days like this,' Struck says. 'E.T.A.'s best minds on the problem. Whole thesauruses
digested, analyzed.' Makes a sarcastic motion. 'Hal?’
One semion that still works fine is holding your fist up and cranking at it with the other hand so the finger you're giving
somebody goes up like a drawbridge. Though of course Hal's mocking himself at the same time. Everybody agrees it speaks 
volumes. Idris Arslanian's shoes and incisors appear briefly in the doorway's steam, then withdraw. Everyone's reflection is sort of
cubist in the walls' shiny tiling. The name handed down paternally from an Umbrian five generations past and now much diluted
by N.E. Yankee, a great-grandmother with Pima-tribe Indian S.W. blood, and Canadian cross-breeding, Hal is the only extant
Incandenza who looks in any way ethnic. His late father had been as a young man darkly tall, high flat Pima-tribe cheekbones and
very black hair Brylcreemed back so tight there'd been a kind of enforced widow's peak. Himself had looked ethnic, but he isn't
extant. Hal is sleek, sort of radiantly dark, almost otterish, only slightly tall, eyes blue but darkly so, and unburnable even w/o
sunscreen, his untanned feet the color of weak tea, his nose ever unpeeling but slightly shiny. His sleekness isn't oily so much as
moist, milky; Hal worries secretly that he looks half-feminine. His parents' pregnancies must have been all-out chro-mosomatic
war: Hal's eldest brother Orin had got the Moms's Anglo-Nordo-Canadian phenotype, the deep-socketed and lighter-blue eyes, the
faultless posture and incredible flexibility (Orin was the only male anybody at E.T.A.'d ever heard of who could do a fully splayed
cheerleader-type split), the rounder and more protrusive zygomatics.
Hal's next-oldest brother Mario doesn't seem to resemble much of anyone they know.
On most of the nontravel days that he doesn't Big Buddy with his charges, Hal will wait till most everybody's busy in the
sauna and shower and stow his sticks in his locker and stroll casually down the cement steps into E.T.A.'s system of tunnels and
chambers. He has some way he can casually drift off and have quite a while go by before anyone even notices his absence. He'll
often stroll casually back into the locker room just as people are slumped on the floor in towels discussing fatigue, carrying his
gear bag and substantially altered in mood, and go in when most of the littler kids are in there peeling Pledge-husks off their limbs
and taking their turn showering, and shower, using one of the kids' shampoo out of a bottle shaped like a cartoon character, then
hike the head back and apply Visine in a Schacht-free stall, gargle and brush and floss and dress, usually not even needing to
comb his hair. He carries Visine AC, mint-flavored floss, and a traveller's toothbrush in a pocket of his Dunlop gear bag. Ted
Schacht, big into oral hygiene, regards Hal's bag's floss and brush as an example to them all.
'So tired it's like I'm almost high.’
'But not pleasantly high,' Troeltsch says.
'It'd be a pleasanter tiredness-high if I didn't have to wait till fucking 1900 to start all this studyin',' Stice says.
'You'd think Schtitt could at least not turn up the juice the week before midterms.’
'You'd think that the coaches and the teachers could try and get together on their scheduling.’
'It'd be like a pleasant fatigue if I could just go up after dinner and hunker on down with the mind in neutral and watch
something uncomplex.’
'Not have to worry about prescriptive forms or acutance.’
'Kick back.’
'Watch something with chase scenes and lots of stuff blowing up all over the place.’
'Relax, do bongs, kick back, look at lingerie catalogues, eat granola with a great big wooden spoon,' Struck says wistfully.
'Get laid.’
'Just get one night off to like R and R.’
'Slip on the old environmental suit and listen to some atonal jazz.’
'Have sex. Get laid.’
'Bump uglies. Do the nasty. Haul ashes.’
'Find me one of them Northeast Oklahoma drive-in burger-stand waitresses with the great big huge titties.’
'Those enormous pink-white French-painting tits that sort of like tumble out.’
'One of those wooden spoons so big you can barely get your mouth around it.’
'Just one night to relax and indulge.’
Pemulis belts out two quick verses of Johnny Mathis's 'Chances Are,' left over from the shower, then subsides to examine
something on his left thigh. Shaw has a spit-bubble going, growing to such exceptional size for just spit that half the room watches
until it finally goes at the same moment Pemulis breaks off.
Evan Ingersoll says 'We get off Saturday for Interdependence Day Eve, though, the board said.’
Several upperclass heads are cocked up at Ingersoll. Pemulis makes a bulge in his cheek with his tongue and moves it around.
'Flubbaflubba': Stice makes his jowls fly around.
'We get off classes is all. Drills and challenges go merrily on, deLint says,' Freer points out.
'But no drills Sunday, before the Gala.’
'But still matches.’
Every jr. player presently in this room is ranked in the top 64 continen-tally, except Pemulis, Yardley and Blott.
There'd be clear evidence that T. Schacht's still in one of the toilet stalls off the showers even if Hal couldn't see the tip of one
of Schacht's enormous purple shower thongs under the door of the stall right by where the shower-area entryway cuts into his line
of sight. Something humble, placid even, about inert feet under stall doors. The defecatory posture is an accepting posture, it
occurs to him. Head down, elbows on knees, the fingers laced together between the knees. Some hunched timeless millennial type
of waiting, almost religious. Luther's shoes on the floor beneath the chamber pot, placid, possibly made of wood, Luther's 16thcentury shoes, awaiting epiphany. The mute quiescent suffering of generations of salesmen in the stalls of train-station Johns,
heads down, fingers laced, shined shoes inert, awaiting the acid gush. Women's slippers, centurions' dusty sandals, dock-workers'
hobnailed boots, Popes' slippers. All waiting, pointing straight ahead, slightly tapping. Huge shaggy-browed men in skins hunched
just past the firelight's circle with wadded leaves in one hand, waiting. Schacht suffered from Crohn's Disease,4343 a bequest
from his ulcerative-colitic dad, and had to take carminative medication with every meal, and took a lot of guff about his digestive
troubles, and had developed of all things arthritic gout, too, somehow, because of the Crohn's Disease, which had settled in his
right knee and caused him terrible pain on the court.
Freer's and Tall Paul Shaw's racquets fall off the bench with a clatter, and Beak and Blott move fast to pick them up and stack
them back on the bench, Beak one-handed because the other hand is keeping his towel fastened.
'Because so that was let's see,' Struck says. 
Pemulis loves to sing around tile.
Struck's hitting his palm with a finger for either emphasis or ordinal counting. 'Close to let's call it an hour run for the Asquads, an hour-fifteen drills, two matches back to back.’
'I only played one,' Troeltsch injects. 'Had a measurable fever in the a.m., deLint said to throttle down today.’
'Folks that went three sets only played one match, Spodek and Kent for an instance,' Stice says.
'Funny how Troeltsch how his health always seems to rally when A.M. drills get out,' Freer says.
'— like conservatively two hours for the matches. Conservatively. Then half an hour on the machines under fucking Loach's
beady browns, sitting there with the clipboard. That's let's call it five hours of vigorous nonstop straight-out motion.’
'Sustained and strenuous exertion.’
'Schtitt's determinated this year we ain't singing no silly songs at Port Washington.’
John Wayne hasn't said one word this whole time. The contents of his locker are neat and organized. He always buttons his
shirt all the way up to the top button as if he were going to put on a tie, which he doesn't even own. IngersolPs also getting dressed
out of his underclassman's small square locker.
Stice says 'Except they seem to forget we're still in our puberty.’
Ingersoll is a kid seemingly wholly devoid of eyebrows, as far as Hal can see.
'Speak for yourself, Darkness.’
'I'm saying how stressing the pubertyizing skeleton like this, it's real short-sighted.' Stice's voice rises.' 'm I supposed to do
when I'm twenty and in the Show playing nonstop and I'm skeletally stressed and injury-proned?’
'Dark's right.’
A curled bit of cloudy old Pledge-husk and a green thread from a strip of GauzeTex wrap are complexly entwined in the blue
fibers of the carpet near Hal's left ankle, which ankle is faintly swollen and has a blue tinge. He keeps flexing the ankle whenever
it occurs to him to. Struck and Troeltsch spar briefly with open hands, feinting and bobbing their heads, both still seated on the
floor. Hal, Stice, Troeltsch, Struck, Rader, and Beak are all rhythmically squeezing tennis balls with their racquet-hands, as per
Academy mandate. Struck's shoulders and neck have furious purple inflammations; Hal had also noticed a boil on the inside of
Schacht's thigh, when Ted'd sat down. Hal's face's reflection just fits inside one of the wall-tiles opposite, and then if he moves his
head slowly the face distends and comes back together with an optical twang in the next tile. That post-shower community feeling
is dissipating. Even Evan Ingersoll looks quickly at his watch and clears his throat. Wayne and Shaw have dressed and left; Freer,
a major Pledge-devotee, is at his hair in the mirror, Pemulis also rising now to get away from Freer's feet and legs. Freer's eyes
have a protrusive wideness to them that the Axhandle says makes Freer always look like he's getting shocked or throttled.
And time in the p.m. locker room seems of limitless depth; they've all been just here before, just like this, and will be again
tomorrow. The light saddening outside, a grief felt in the bones, a sharpness to the edge of the lengthening shadows.
T'm thinking it's Tavis,' Freer says to them all in the mirror. 'Where there's excess work and suffering can fucking Tavis be far
behind.’
'No, it's Schtitt,' Hal says.
'Schtitt was short a few wickets out of the old croquet set long before he got hold of us, men,' Pemulis says.
'Peemster and Hal.’
'Halation and Pemurama.’
Freer purses his little lips and expels air like he's blowing out a match, blowing some tiny grooming-remnant off the big
mirror's glass. 'Schtitt just does what he's told like a good Nazi.’
'What the hail is that supposed to mean?' asks a Stice who's well known for asking How High Sir when Schtitt says Jump,
now feeling at the carpet around him for something to throw at Freer. Ingersoll tosses Stice a woppsed-up towel, trying to be
helpful, but Slice's eyes are on Freer's in the glass, and the towel hits him on the head and sits there, on his head. The room's
emotions seem to be inverting themselves every couple seconds. There's half-cruel laughter at Stice as Hal struggles to his feet,
rising in careful stages, putting most of his weight on the good ankle. Hal's towel falls off as he does his combination. Struck says
something that's lost in the roar of a high-pressure toilet.
The feminized American stood at a slight angle to Marathe upon the outcropping. He stared out at the dusk-shadow they were
now inside, and as well the increasingly complicated twinkle of the U.S.A. city Tucson, seeming slackly transfixed, Steeply, in the
way vistas too large for the eye to contain transfix persons in a kind of torpid spectation.
Marathe seemed on the edge of sleep.
Even the voice of Steeply had a different timbre inside the shadow. 'They say it's a great and maybe even timeless love, Rod
Tine's for your Luria person.’
Marathe grunted, shifting slightly in the chair.
Steeply said 'The sort that gets sung about, the kind people die for and then get immortalized in song. You got your ballads,
your operas. Tristan and Isolde. Lancelot and what's-her-name. Agamemnon and Helen, Dante and Beatrice.’
Marathe's drowsy smile continued upward to become a wince. 'Narcissus and Echo. Kierkegaard and Regina. Kafka and that
poor girl afraid to go to the postbox for the mail.’
'Interesting choice of example here, the mailbox.' Steeply pretended to chuckle.
Marathe came alert. Take off your wig and be shitting inside it, Hugh Steeply B.S.S. And the ignorance of you appalls me.
Agamemnon had no relation with this queen. Menelaus was husband, him of Sparta. And you mean Paris. Helen and Paris. He of
Troy.’
Steeply seemed amused in the idiotic way: 'Paris and Helen, the face that launched vessels. The horse: the gift which was not
a gift. The anonymous gift brought to the door. The sack of Troy from inside.’
Marathe rose slightly on his stumps in the chair, showing some emotions at this Steeply. 'I am seated here appalled at the
naïveté of history of your nation. Paris and Helen were the excuse of the war. All the Greek states in addition to the Sparta of
Menelaus attacked Troy because Troy controlled the Dardanelles and charged the ruinous tolls for passage through, which the
Greeks, who would like very dearly the easy sea passage for trade with the Oriental East, resented with fury. It was for commerce, 
this war. The one-quotes "love" one-does-not-quote of Paris for Helen merely was the excuse.’
Steeply, genius of interviewing, sometimes affected more than usual idiocy with Marathe, which he knew baited Marathe.
'Everything reduces itself to politics for you guys. Wasn't that whole war just a song? Did that war even really take place, that
anybody knows of?’
'The point is that what launches vessels of war is the state and community and its interests,' Marathe said without heat, tiredly.
'You only wish to enjoy to pretend for yourself that the love of one woman could do this, launch so many vessels of alliance.’
Steeply was stroking the perimeters of the mesquite-scratch, which made his shrug appear awkward. 'I don't think I'd be so
sure. Those around Rod the God say the man would die twice for her. Say he wouldn't have to even think about it. Not just that
he'd let the whole of O.N.A.N. come down, if it came to that. But'd die.’
Marathe sniffed. 'Twice.’
'Without even having to pause and think,' Steeply said, stroking at his lip's electrolysistic rash in a ruminative fashion. 'It's the
reason most of us think he's still there, why he's still got President Gentle's ear. Divided loyalties are one thing. But if he does it
for love — well then you've got a kind of tragic element that transcends the political, wouldn't you say?' Steeply smiled broadly
down at Marathe.
Marathe's own betrayal of A.F.R.: for medical care for the conditions of his wife; for (Steeply might imagine to think) love of
a person, a woman. 'Tragic saying as if Rodney Tine of Nonspecificity were not responsible for choosing it, as the insane are not
responsible,' said Marathe quietly.
Steeply now was smiling even more broadly. 'It has a kind of tragic quality, timeless, musical, that how could Gentle resist?’
Marathe's tone now became derisive despite his legendary sangfroid in matters of technical interviews: 'These sentiments
from a person who allows them to place him in the field as an enormous girl with tits at the cock-eyed angle, now discoursing on
tragic love.’
Steeply, impassive and slackly ruminative, picked at the lipstick of the corner of his mouth with a littlest finger, removing
some grain of grit, gazing out from their shelf of stone. 'But sure. The fanatically patriotic Wheelchair Assassins of southern
Quebec scorn this type of interpersonal sentiment between people.' Looking now down at Marathe. 'No? Even though it's just this
that has brought you Tine, yours for Luria to command, should it ever come to that?’
Marathe had settled back on his bottom in the chair. 'Your U.S.A. word for fanatic, "fanatic," do they teach you it comes from
the Latin for "temple"? It is meaning, literally, "worshipper at the temple."
'Oh Jesus now here we go again,' Steeply said.
'As, if you will give the permission, does this love you speak of, M. Tine's grand love. It means only the attachment. Tine is
attached, fanatically. Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with
faith.’
Steeply made motions of weary familiarity. 'Herrrrrre we go.’
Marathe ignored this. 'Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. only pretend you do not know.
Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What
you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change,
leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.’
'How are your wife and kids doing, up there, by the way?’
'You U.S.A.'s do not seem to believe you may each choose what to die for. Love of a woman, the sexual, it bends back in on
the self, makes you narrow, maybe crazy. Choose with care. Love of your nation, your country and people, it enlarges the heart.
Something bigger than the self.’
Steeply laid a hand between his misdirected breasts: 'Ohh . . . Can-ada.. ..’
Marathe leaned again forward on his stumps. 'Make amusement all you wish. But choose with care. You are what you love.
No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice. You, M. Hugh Steeply: you
would die without thinking for what?’
The A.F.R.'s extensive file on Steeply included mention of his recent divorce. Marathe already had informed Steeply of the
existence of this file. He wondered how badly Steeply doubted what he reported, Marathe, or whether he assumed its truth simply.
Though the persona of him changed, Steeply's car for all field assignments was this green sedan subsidized by a painful ad for
aspirin upon its side — the file knew this stupidity — Marathe was sure the sedan with its aspirin advertisement was somewhere
below them, unseen. The fanatically beloved car of M. Hugh Steeply. Steeply was watching or gazing at the darkness of the desert
floor. He did not respond. His expression of boredom could be real or tactical, either of these.
Marathe said, 'This, is it not the choice of the most supreme importance? Who teaches your U.S.A. children how to choose
their temple? What to love enough not to think two times?’
'This from a man who —’
Marathe was willing that his voice not rise. 'For this choice determines all else. No? All other of our you say free choices
follow from this: what is our temple. What is the temple, thus, for U.S.A.'s? What is it, when you fear that you must protect them
from themselves, if wicked Québecers conspire to bring the Entertainment into their warm homes?’
Steeply's face had assumed the openly twisted sneering expression which he knew well Québecers found repellent on
Americans. 'But you assume it's always choice, conscious, decision. This isn't just a little naïve, Rémy? You sit down with your
little accountant's ledger and soberly decide what to love? Always?’
'The alternatives are —’
'What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love?
without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?’
Marathe's sniff held disdain. 'Then in such a case your temple is self and sentiment. Then in such an instance you are a fanatic
of desire, a slave to your individual subjective narrow self's sentiments; a citizen of nothing. You become a citizen of nothing.
You are by yourself and alone, kneeling to yourself.’
A silence ensued this. 
Marathe shifted in his chair. 'In a case such as this you become the slave who believes he is free. The most pathetic of
bondage. Not tragic. No songs. You believe you would die twice for another but in truth would die only for your alone self, its
sentiment.’
Another silence ensued. Steeply, who had made his early career with Unspecified Services conducting technical
interviews,4444 used silent pauses as integral parts of his techniques of interface. Here it defused Marathe. Marathe felt the ironies
of his position. One strap of Steeply's prostheses' brassiere had slipped into view below his shoulder, where it cut deeply into his
flesh of the upper arm. The air smelled faintly of creosote, but much less strongly smelling than the ties of train tracks, which
Marathe had smelled at close range. Steeply's back was broad and soft. Marathe eventually said:
'You in such a case have nothing. You stand on nothing. Nothing of ground or rock beneath your feet. You fall; you blow
here and there. How does one say: "tragically, unvoluntarily, lost."
Another silence ensued. Steeply farted mildly. Marathe shrugged. The B.S.S. Field Operative Steeply may not have been truly
sneering. The city Tucson's lume appeared a bleached and ghostly white in the unhumid air. Crepuscular animals rustled and
perhaps scuttled. Dense and unbeautiful spider webs of the poisonous U.S.A. species of spider Black Widow were beneath the
shelf and the incline's other outcroppíngs. And when the wind hit certain angles in the mountainside it moaned. Marathe thought
of his victory over the train that had taken his legs.4545 He attempted in English to sing:
' "Ob Say, Land of the Free." ‘
And they both could feel this queer dry night-desert chill descend with the moon's gibbous rise — a powdery wind down
below making dust to shift and cactus needles whistle, the sky's stars adjusting to the color of low flame — but were themselves
not yet chilled, even Steeply's sleeveless dress: he and Marathe stood and sat in the form-fitting astral spacesuit of warmth their
own radiant heat produced. This is what happens in dry night climes, Marathe was learning. His dying wife had never once left
southwestern Quebec. Les Assassins des Fauteuils Roulents' remote embryonic dissemina-tory Ops base down here in Southwest
U.S.A. seemed to him like the surface of the moon: four corrugated Quonsets and kiln-baked earth and air that swam and
shimmered like the area behind jet engines. Empty and dirty-windowed rooms, doorknobs hot to touch and hell-stench inside the
empty rooms.
Steeply was continuing saying nothing while he tamped down another of his long Belgian cigarettes. Marathe continued to
hum the U.S.A. song, all over the map in terms of key.
3 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U.
'Because none of them really meant any of it,' Hal tells Kent Blott. 'The end-of-the-day hatred of all the work is just part of
the work. You think Schtitt and deLint don't know we're going to sit in there together after showers and bitch? It's all planned out.
The bitchers and moaners in there are just doing what's expected.’
'But I look at these guys that've been here six, seven years, eight years, still suffering, hurt, beat up, so tired, just like I feel
tired and suffer, I feel this what, dread, this dread, I see seven or eight years of unhappiness every day and day after day of
tiredness and stress and suffering stretching ahead, and for what, for a chance at a like a pro career that I'm starting to get this
dready feeling a career in the Show means even more suffering, if I'm skele-tally stressed from all the grueling here by the time I
get there.’
Blott's on his back on the shag carpet — all five of them are — stretched out splay-limbed with their heads up supported on
double-width velourish throw-pillows on the floor of V.R.6, one of the three little Viewing Rooms on the second floor of the
Comm.-Ad. Bldg., two flights up from the locker rooms and three from the main tunnel's mouth. The room's new cartridge-viewer
is huge and almost painfully high-definition; it hangs flat on the north wall like a large painting; it runs off a refrigerated chip; the
room's got no TP or phone-console; it's very specialized, just a player and viewer, and tapes; the cartridge-player sits on the
second shelf of a small bookcase beneath the viewer; the other shelves and several other cases are full of match-cartridges,
motivational and visualization cartridges — InterLace, Tat-suoka, Yushityu, SyberVision. The 300-track wire from the cartridgeplayer up to the lower-right corner of the wall-hung viewer is so thin it looks like a crack in the wall's white paint. Viewing
Rooms are windowless and the air from the vent is stale. Though when the viewer's on it looks like the room has a window.
Hal's put on an undemanding visualization-type cartridge, as he usually does for a Big Buddy group-interface when they're all
tired. He's killed the volume, so you can't hear the reinforcing mantra, but the picture is bright and bell-clear. It's like the picture
almost leaps out at you. A graying and somewhat ravaged-looking Stan Smith in anachronistic white is at a court's baseline hitting
textbook forehands, over and over again, the same stroke, his back sort of osteoporotically hunched but his form immaculate, his
footwork textbook and effortless — the frictionless pivot and back-set of weight, the anachronistic Wilson wood stick back and
pointing straight to the fence behind him, the fluid transfer of weight to the front foot as the ball comes in, the contact at waistlevel and just out front, the front leg's muscles bunching up as the back leg's settle, eyes glued to the yellow ball in the center of
his strings' stencilled W — E.T.A. kids are conditioned to watch not just the ball but the ball's rotating seams, to read the spin
coming in — the front knee dipping slightly down under bulging quads as the weight flows more forward, the back foot up almost
en-pointe on the gleaming sneaker's unscuffed toe, the no-nonsense flourishless follow-through so the stick ends up just in front of
his gaunt face — Smith's cheeks have hollowed as he's aged, his face has collapsed at the sides, his eyes seem to bulge from the
cheekbones that protrude as he inhales after impact, he looks desiccated, aged in hot light, performing the same motions over and
over, for decades, his other hand floating up gently to grasp the stick's throat out in front of the face so he's flowed back into the
Ready Stance all over again. No wasted motion, egoless strokes, no flourishes or tics or excesses of wrist. Over and over, each
forehand melting into the next, a loop, it's hypnotizing, it's supposed to be. The soundtrack says 'Don't Think Just See Don't Know
Just Flow' over and over, if you turn it up. You're supposed to pretend it's you on the bell-clear screen with the fluid and egoless
strokes. You're supposed to disappear into the loop and then carry that disappearance out with you, to play. The kids're lying there
limp and splayed, supine, jaws slack, eyes wide and dim, a relaxed exhausted warmth — the flooring beneath the shag is gently
heated. Peter Beak is asleep with his eyes open, a queer talent E.T.A. seems to instill in the younger ones. Orin had been able to
sleep with his eyes open at the dinner table, too, at home.
Hal's fingers, long and light brown and still slightly sticky from tincture of benzoin,4646 are laced behind his upraised head
on the pillow, cupping his own skull, watching Stan Smith, eyes heavy too. 'You feel as though you'll be going through the exact 
same sort of suffering at seventeen you suffer now, here, Kent?’
Kent Blott has colored shoelaces on his sneakers with 'Mr.-Bouncety-Bounce-Program'-brand bow-biters, which Hal finds
extraordinarily artless and young.
Peter Beak snores softly, a small spit-bubble protruding and receding.
'But Blott surely you've considered this: Why are they all still here, then, if it's so awful every day?’
'Not every day,' Blott says. 'But pretty often it's awful.’
'They're here because they want the Show when they get out,' Ingersoll sniffs and says. The Show meaning the A.T.P. Tour,
travel and cash prizes and endorsements and appearance fees, match-highlights in video mags, action photos in glossy print-mags.
'But they know and we know one very top junior in twenty even gets all the way to the Show. Much less survives there long.
The rest slog around on the satellite tours or regional tours or get soft as club pros. Or become lawyers or academics like everyone
else,' Hal says softly.
'Then they stay and suffer to get a scholarship. A college ride. A white cardigan with a letter. Girl coeds keen on lettermen.’
'Kent, except for Wayne and Pemulis not one guy in there needs any kind of scholarship. Pemulis'll get a full ride anywhere
he wants, just on test-scores. Slice's aunts'll send him anywhere even if he doesn't want to play. And Wayne's headed for the
Show, he'll never do more than a year in the O.N.A.N.C.A.A.'s.' Blott's father, a cutting-edge E.N.T. oncologist, flew all over the
world removing tumors from wealthy mucous membranes; Blott has a trust fund. 'None of that's the point and you guys know it.’
'They love the game, you're going to say.’
Stan Smith has switched to backhands.
'They sure must love something, Ingersoll, but how about for a second I say that's not Kent's point either. Kent's point's the
misery in that room just now. K.B., I've taken part in essentially that same bitter bitchy kind of session hundreds of times with
those same guys after bad P.M.s. In the showers, in the sauna, at dinner.’
'Very much bitching also in the lavatories,' Arslanian says.
Hal unsticks his hair from his fingers. Arslanian always has a queer faint hot-doggish smell about him. 'The point is it's
ritualistic. The bitching and moaning. Even assuming they feel the way they say when they get together, the point is notice we
were all sitting there all feeling the same way together.’
'The point is togetherness?’
'Shouldn't there be violas for this part, Hal, if this is the point?’
'Ingersoll, I —’
Beak's cold-weather adenoids wake him periodically, and he gurgles and his eyes roll up briefly before they level out and he
settles back, seeming to stare.
Hal creatively visualizes that Smith's velvety backhand is him slo-mo slapping Evan Ingersoll into the opposite wall.
Ingersoll's parents founded the Rhode Island version of the service where you order groceries by TP and teenagers in fleets of
station wagons bring them out to you, instead of supermarkets. 'What the point is is that we'd all just spent three hours playing
challenges against each other in scrotum-tightening cold, assailing each other, trying to take away each other's spots on the squads.
Trying to defend them against each other's assaults. The system's got inequality as an axiom. We know where we stand entirely in
relation to one another. John Wayne's over me, and I'm over Struck and Shaw, who two years back were both over me but under
Troeltsch and Schacht, and now are over Troeltsch who as of today is over Freer who's substantially over Schacht, who can't beat
anyone in the room except Pemulis since his knee and Crohn's Disease got so much worse, and is barely hanging on in terms of
ranking, and is showing incredible balls just hanging on. Freer beat me 4 and 2 in the quarters of the U.S. Clays two summers ago,
and now he's on the B-squad and five slots below me, six slots if Troeltsch can still beat him when they play again after that
illness-default.’
'I am over Blott. I am over Ingersoll,' Idris Arslanian nods.
'Well Blott's just ten, Idris. And you're under Chu, who's on an odd year and is under Possalthwaite. And Blott's under Beak
and Ingersoll simply by virtue of age-division.’
'I know just where I stand at all times,' muses Ingersoll.
SyberVision edits its visualization sequences with a melt-filter so Stan Smith's follow-through loops seamlessly into his
backswing for the exact same next stroke; the transitions are gauzy and dreamlike. Hal struggles to hike himself up onto his
elbows:
'We're all on each other's food chain. All of us. It's an individual sport. Welcome to the meaning of individual. We're each
deeply alone here. It's what we all have in common, this aloneness.’
'E Unibus Pluram,'' Ingersoll muses.
Hal looks from face to face. Ingersoll's face is completely devoid of eyebrows and is round and dustily freckled, not unlike a
Mrs. Clarke pancake. 'So how can we also be together? How can we be friends? How can Ingersoll root for Arslanian in Idris's
singles at the Port Washington thing when if Idris loses Ingersoll gets to challenge for his spot again?’
'I do not require his root, for I am ready.' Arslanian bares canines.
'Well that's the whole point. How can we be friends? Even if we all live and eat and shower and play together, how can we
keep from being 136 deeply alone people all jammed together?’
'You're talking about community. This is a community-spiel.’
'I think alienation,' Arslanian says, rolling the profile over to signify he's talking to Ingersoll. 'Existential individuality,
frequently referred to in the West. Solipsism.' His upper lip goes up and down over his teeth.
Hal says, 'In a nutshell, what we're talking about here is loneliness.’
Blott looks about ready to cry. Beak's palsied eyes and little limb-spasms signify a troubling dream. Blott rubs his nose
furiously with the heel of his hand.
'I miss my dog,' Ingersoll concedes.
'Ah.' Hal rolls onto one elbow to hike a finger into the air. 'Ah. But then so notice the instant group-cohesion that formed itself
around all the pissing and moaning down there why don't you. Blott. You, Kent. This was your question. The what looks like 
sadism, the skeletal stress, the fatigue. The suffering unites us. They want to let us sit around and bitch. Together. After a bad
P.M. set we all, however briefly, get to feel we have a common enemy. This is their gift to us. Their medicine. Nothing brings you
together like a common enemy.’
'Mr. deLint.’
'Dr. Tavis. Schtitt.’
'DeLint. Watson. Nwangi. Thode. All Schtitt's henchmen and henchwo-men.’
'I hate them!' Blott cries out.
'And you've been here this long and you still think this hatred's an accident?’
'Purchase a clue Kent Blott!' Arslanian says.
'The large and economy-size clue, Blott,' Ingersoll chimes.
Beak sits up and says 'God no not with pliers!' and collapses back again, again with the spit-bubble.
Hal is pretending incredulity. 'You guys haven't noticed yet the way Schtitt's whole staff gets progressively more foultempered and sadistic as an important competitive week comes up?’
Ingersoll up on one elbow at Blott. 'The Port Washington meet. I.D. Day. The Tucson WhataBurger the week after. They
want us in absolute top shape, Blott.’
Hal lies back and lets Smith's ballet de se loosen his facial muscles again, staring. 'Shit, Ingersoll, we're all in top shape
already. That's not it. That's the least of it. We're off the charts, shape-wise.’
Ingersoll: 'The average North American kid can't even do one pull-up, according to Nwangi.’
Arslanian points down at his own chest. 'Twenty-eight pull-ups.’
'The point,' Hal says softly, 'is that it's not about the physical anymore, men. The physical stuff's just pro forma. It's the heads
they're working on here, boys. Day and year in and out. A whole program. It'll help your attitude to look for evidence of design.
They always give us something to hate, really hate together, as big stuff looms. The dreaded May drills during finals before the
summer tour. The post-Christmas crackdown before Australia. The November freezathon, the snot-fest, the delay in upping the
Lung and getting us under cover. A common enemy. / may despise K. B. Freer, or' (can't quite resist) 'Evan Ingersoll, or Jennie
Bash. But we despise Schtitt's men, the double matches on top of runs, the insensitivity to exams, the repetition, the stress. The
loneliness. But we get together and bitch, all of a sudden we're giving something group expression. A community voice.
Community, Evan. Oh they're cunning. They give themselves up to our dislike, calculate our breaking points and aim for just over
them, then send us into the locker room with an unstructured forty-five before Big Buddy sessions. Accident? Random
happenstance? You guys ever see evidence of the tiniest lack of coolly calculated structure around here?’
'The structure's what I hate the most of all,' Ingersoll says.
'They know what's going on,' Blott says, bouncing a little on his tailbone. 'They want us to get together and complain.’
'Oh they're cunning,' Ingersoll says.
Hal curls himself a bit on one elbow to put in a small plug of Kodíak. He can't tell whether Ingersoll's being insolent. He lies
there very slack, visualizing Smith pounding overheads down onto Ingersoll's skull. Hal some weeks back had acquiesced to
Lyle's diagnosis that Hal finds Ingersoll — this smart soft caustic kid, with a big soft eyebrowless face and unwrinkled thumbjoints, with the runty, cuddled look of a Mama's boy from way back, a quick intelligence he squanders on an insatiable need to
advance some impression of himself — that the kid so repels Hal because Hal sees in the kid certain parts of himself he can't or
won't accept. None of this ever occurs to Hal when Ingersoll's in the room. He wishes him ill.
Blott and Arslanian are looking at him. 'Are you OK?’
'He is tired,' Arslanian says.
Ingersoll drums idly on his own ribcage.
Hal usually gets secretly high so regularly these days this year that if by dinnertime he hasn't gotten high yet that day his
mouth begins to fill with spit — some rebound effect from B. Hope's desiccating action — and his eyes start to water as if he's just
yawned. The smokeless tobacco started almost as an excuse to spit, sometimes. Hal's struck by the fact that he really for the most
part believes what he's said about loneliness and the structured need for a we here; and this, together with the Ingersoll-repulsion
and spit-flood, makes him uncomfortable again, brooding uncomfortably for a moment on why he gets off on the secrecy of
getting high in secret more than on the getting high itself, possibly. He always gets the feeling there's some clue to it on the tip of
his tongue, some mute and inaccessible part of the cortex, and then he always feels vaguely sick, scanning for it. The other thing
that happens if he doesn't do one-hitters sometime before dinner is he feels slightly sick to his stomach, and it's hard to eat enough
at dinner, and then later when he does go off and get off he gets ravenous, and goes out to Father & Son Market for candy, or else
floods his eyes with Murine and heads down to the Headmaster's House for another late dinner with C.T. and the Moms, and eats
like such a feral animal that the Moms says it does something instinctively maternal in her heart good to see him pack it away, but
then he wakes before dawn with awful indigestion.
'So the suffering gets less lonely,' Blott prompts him.
Two curves down the hall in V.R.5, where the viewer's on the south wall and doesn't get turned on, the Canadian John
Wayne's got LaMont Chu and 'Sleepy T.P.' Peterson and Kieran McKenna and Brian van Vleck.
'He's talking about developing the concept of tennis mastery,' Chu tells the other three. They're on the floor Indian-style,
Wayne standing with his back against the door, rotating his head to stretch the neck. 'His point is that progress towards genuine
Show-caliber mastery is slow, frustrating. Humbling. A question of less talent than temperament.’
'Is this right Mr. Wayne?’
Chu says '... that because you proceed toward mastery through a series of plateaus, so there's like radical improvement up to a
certain plateau and then what looks like a stall, on the plateau, with the only way to get off one of the plateaus and climb up to the
next one up ahead is with a whole lot of frustrating mindless repetitive practice and patience and hanging in there.’
'Plateaux,' Wayne says, looking at the ceiling and pushing the back of his head isometrically against the door. 'With an X.
Plateaux.’
The inactive viewer's screen is the color of way out over the Atlantic looking straight down on a cold day. Chu's cross-legged 
posture is textbook. 'What John's saying is the types who don't hang in there and slog on the patient road toward mastery are
basically three. Types. You've got what he calls your Despairing type, who's fine as long as he's in the quick-improvement stage
before a plateau, but then he hits a plateau and sees himself seem to stall, not getting better as fast or even seeming to get a little
worse, and this type gives in to frustration and despair, because he hasn't got the humbleness and patience to hang in there and
slog, and he can't stand the time he has to put in on plateaux, and what happens?’
'Geronímo!' the other kids yell, not quite in sync.
'He bails, right,' Chu says. He refers to index cards. Wayne's head makes the door rattle slightly. Chu says, 'Then you've got
your Obsessive type, J.W. says, so eager to plateau-hop he doesn't even know the word patient, much less bumble or slog, when
he gets stalled at a plateau he tries to like will and force himself off it, by sheer force of work and drill and will and practice,
drilling and obsessively honing and working more and more, as in frantically, and he overdoes it and gets hurt, and pretty soon
he's all chronically messed up with injuries, and he hobbles around on the court still obsessively overworking, until finally he's
hardly even able to walk or swing, and his ranking plummets, until finally one P.M. there's a little knock on his door and it's
deLint, here for a little chat about your progress here at E.T.A.’
'Banzai! El Bailo! See ya!’
'Then what John considers maybe the worst type, because it can cunningly masquerade as patience and humble frustration.
You've got the Complacent type, who improves radically until he hits a plateau, and is content with the radical improvement he's
made to get to the plateau, and doesn't mind staying at the plateau because it's comfortable and familiar, and he doesn't worry
about getting off it, and pretty soon you find he's designed a whole game around compensating for the weaknesses and chinks in
the armor the given plateau represents in his game, still — his whole game is based on this plateau now. And little by little, guys
he used to beat start beating him, locating the chinks of the plateau, and his rank starts to slide, but he'll say he doesn't care, he
says he's in it for the love of the game, and he always smiles but there gets to be something sort of tight and hangdog about his
smile, and he always smiles and is real nice to everybody and real good to have around but he keeps staying where he is while
other guys hop plateaux, and he gets beat more and more, but he's content. Until one day there's a quiet knock at the door.’
'It's DeLint!’
'A quiet chat!’
'Geronzai!’
Van Vleck looks up at Wayne, who's now turned away with his hands against the door frame, shoving, one leg back,
stretching the right calf. 'This is your advice, Mr. Wayne sir? This isn't Chu palming himself off as you again?’
They all want to know how Wayne does it, #2 continentally in 18's at just seventeen, and very likely #1 after the
WhataBurger and already getting calls from ProServ agents Tavis has Lateral Alice Moore screen. Wayne's the most sought-after
Big Buddy at E.T.A. You have to apply for Wayne as Buddy by random drawing.
LaMont Chu and T. P. Peterson are sending van Vleck optical daggers as Wayne turns around to stretch a hip-flexor and says
he's said pretty much all he has to say.
'Todder, I admire your savvy, I admire a kid's certain worldly skepticism, no matter how misplaced it is here. So even though
it fucks me on the odds, so there's now like practically no way I can come out square,' M. Pemulis says in V.R.2, subdorm C,
sitting on the very edge of the divan with a few feet of beige shag between him and his four kids, all cross-legged on cushions; he
says, Til reward your worldly skepticism this once by letting you try it with only two, so like I've got just two cards here, and I
hold them up, one in each hand....' He stops abruptly, knocks his temple with the heel of a hand that holds a Jack. 'Whoa, what am
I thinking. We all gotta put in our fiveski here first.’
Otis P. Lord clears his throat: 'The ante.’
'Or it's called the pot,' says Todd Possalthwaite, laying a five on the little pile.
'Jaysus I'm thinking, sweet Jaysus what am I getting into with these kids that speak the lingo like veteran Jersey-shore
croupiers. I got to be missing a widget or something, 't the fuck, though, you know what I'm saying? So Todd man you choose just
one of the cards, we got the clubby Jack and the spade Queen here, and you choose . . . and so down they go both of them facedown, and I like swirl them around on the floor a little, not shuffle but swirl so they're in plain view the whole time, and you
follllllowwwwwwww the card you chose, around and around, which like with three cards maybe I've got some chance you lose
track but with two? With just two?’
Ted Schacht in V.R.3 at his giant plasticene oral demonstrator, the huge dental mock-up, white planks of teeth and obscene
pink gums, twine-size floss anchored around both wrists:
'The vital thing here gentlemen being not the force or how often you rotate to particulate-free floss but the motion, see, a soft
sawing motion, gently up and down both ancipitals of the enamel' — demonstrating down the side of a bicuspid big as the kids'
heads, the plasticene gum-stuff yielding with sick sucking sounds, Schacht's five kids all either glazed-looking or glued to their
watch's second-hand — 'and then here's the key, here's the thing so few people understand: down below the ostensible gumline
into the basal recessions at either side of the gingival mound that obtrudes between the teeth, down below, where your most
pernicious particulates hide and breed.’
Troeltsch holds court in his, Pemulis and Schacht's room in Subdorm C, supinely upright against both of his and one of
Schacht's pillows, the vaporizer chugging, one of his kids holding Kleenex at the ready.
'Boys, what it is is I'll tell you it's repetition. First last always. It's hearing the same motivational stuff over and over till sheer
repetitive weight makes it sink down into the gut. It's making the same pivots and lunges and strokes over and over and over
again, at you boys's age it's reps for their own sake, putting results on the back burner, why they never give anybody the boot for
insufficient progress under fourteen, it's repetitive movements and motions for their own sake, over and over until the accretive
weight of the reps sinks the movements themselves down under your like consciousness into the more nether regions, through
repetition they sink and soak into the hardware, the C.P.S. The machine-language. The autonomical part that makes you breathe
and sweat. It's no accident they say you Eat, Sleep, Breathe tennis here. These are autonomical. Accretive means accumulating,
through sheer mindless repeated motions. The machine-language of the muscles. Until you can do it without thinking about it,
play. At like fourteen, give and take, they figure here. Just do it. Forget about is there a point, of course there's no point. The point 
of repetition is there is no point. Wait until it soaks into the hardware and then see the way this frees up your head. A whole
shitload of head-space you don't need for the mechanics anymore, after they've sunk in. Now the mechanics are wired in.
Hardwired in. This frees the head in the remarkablest ways. Just wait. You start thinking a whole different way now, playing. The
court might as well be inside you. The ball stops being a ball. The ball starts being something that you just know ought to be in the
air, spinning. This is when they start getting on you about concentration. Right now of course you have to concentrate, there's no
choice, it's not wired down into the language yet, you have to think about it every time you do it. But wait till fourteen or fifteen.
Then they see you as being at one of the like crucial plateaus. Fifteen, tops. Then the concentration and character shit starts. Then
they really come after you. This is the crucial plateau where character starts to matter. Focus, self-consciousness, the chattering
head, the cackling voices, the choking-issue, fear versus whatever isn't fear, self-image, doubts, reluctances, little tight-lipped
cold-footed men inside your mind, cackling about fear and doubt, chinks in the mental armor. Now these start to matter. Thirteen
at the earliest. Staff looks at a range of thirteen to fifteen. Also the age of manhood-rituals in various cultures. Think about it.
Until then, repetition. Until then you might as well be machines, here, is their view. You're just going through the motions. Think
about the phrase: Going Through The Motions. Wiring them into the motherboard. You guys don't know how good you've got it
right now.’
James Albrecht Lockley Struck Jr. of Orinda CA prefers one long Q&A-type interface, with V.R.8's viewer playing ambient
stuff against relaxation-vistas of surf, shimmering ponds, fields of nodding wheat.
'Time for about maybe two more, me droogies.’
'Say it's close and the guy starts kertwanging you. Balls are way in and he's calling them out. You can't believe the flagrancy
of it.’
'Implicit this is a no-linesman situation, Traub, you're saying.’
Creepily-blue-eyed Audern Tallat-Kelpsa chimes in: 'This is early rounds. The kind they give you only two balls. Honor
systems. All of a sudden there he is kertwanging on you. It happens.’
'I know it happens.’
Traub says, 'Whether he's outright kertwanging or just head-fucking you. Do you start kertwanging back? Tit for tat? What do
you do?’
'Do we assume there's a crowd.’
'Early round. Remote court. No witnesses. You're on your own out there. Do you kertwang back.’
'You do not kertwang back. You play the calls, not a word, keep smiling. If you still win, you'll have grown inside as a
person.’
'If you lose?’
'If you lose, you do something private and unpleasant to his water-jug right before his next round.’
A couple of the kids have notebooks and studious nods. Struck is a prized tactician, very formal in B.B. group-sessions,
something scholarly and detached about him his charges often revere.
'We can discuss private water-jug unpleasantness on Friday,' Struck says, looking at his watch.
A hand raised by the violently cross-eyed Carl Whale, age thirteen. Acknowledgment from Struck.
'Say you have to fart.’
'You're serious, Mobes, aren't you.’
'Jim sir, say you're playing out there, and suddenly you have to fart. It feels like one of those real hot nasty pressurized ones.’
'I get the picture.’
Now some empathic murmurs, exchanged looks. Josh Gopnik is nodding very intensely. Struck stands very straight to the
right of the viewer, hands behind his back like an Oxford don.
'I mean the kind that's real urgent.' Whale looks briefly around him. 'But that it's not impossible it's actually a need to go to the
bathroom, instead, masquerading as a fart.’
Now five heads are nodding, pained, urgent: clearly a vexing sub-14 issue. Struck examines a cuticle.
'Meaning defecate is what you mean, then, Mobes. Go to the bathroom.’
Gopnik looks up. 'Carl's saying the kind where you don't know what to do. What if you think you have to fart but it's really
that you have to shit?’
'As in it's a competitive situation, it's not a situation where you can go bearing down and forcing and see what happens.’
'So out of caution you don't,' Gopnik says.
'—fart,' Philip Traub says.
'But then you've denied yourself an urgent fart, and you're running around trying to compete with a terrible hot nasty
uncomfortable fart riding around the court inside you.’
Two levels down, Ortho Stice and his brood: the little libraryish circle of soft chairs and lamps in the warm foyer off the front
door to subdorm C:
'And what he says he says it's about more than tennis, mein kinder. Mein kinder, well it sort of means my family. He eyeballs
me right square in the eye and says it's about how to reach down into parts of yourself you didn't know were there and get down in
there and live inside these parts. And the only way to get to them: sacrifice. Suffer. Deny. What are you willing to give. You'll
hear him ask it if you're privileged to ever get an interface. The call could come at anytime: the man wants a mano-to-mano
interface. You'll hear him say it over and over. What have you got to give. What are you willing to part with. I see you're looking a
little pale there, Wagen-knecht. Is this scary you bet your little pink personal asses it's scary. It's the big time. He'll tell you straight
the fuck out. It's about discipline and sacrifice and honor to something way bigger than your personal ass. He'll mention America.
He'll talk patriotism and don't think he won't. He'll talk about it's patriotic play that's the high road to the thing. He's not American
but I tell you straight out right here he makes me proud to be American. Mein kinder. He'll say it's how to learn to be a good
American during a time, boys, when America isn't good its own self.’
There's a long pause. The front door is newer than the wood around it.
'I'd chew fiberglass for that old man.’ 
The only reason the Buddies in V.R.8 can hear the little burst of applause from the foyer is because Struck won't hesitate to
pause and consider silently as long as he has to. To the kids the pauses spell dignity and integrity and the still-water depth of a guy
with nine years in at three different academies, and who has to shave daily. He exhales a slow breath through rounded lips,
looking off up at the ceiling's guilloche border.
'Mobes, if it's me: I let it ride.’
'You let it out come what may?’
'A la contraire. I let it ride around inside all day if I have to. I make an iron rule: nothing escapes my bottom during play. Not
a toot or a whistle. If I play hunched over I play hunched over. I take the discomfort in the name of dignified caution, and when
it's especially bad I look up at sky between points and I say to the sky Thank You Sir may I have another. Thank You Sir may I
have another.’
Gopnik and Tallat-Kelpsa are writing this down.
Struck says, 'That's if I want to hang for the long haul.’
'One side of the gingival mound, then up over the apex and down over the other side of the gingival mound, using you should
cultivate a certain amount of touch with the string.’
'Now the big question of character is do we let a fluke of a probably one-in-a-hundred lapse in concentration make us throw
up our faggy hands and go dragging characterlessly back to our dens to lick the whimpering wounds, or do we narrow our eyes
and put out the chin and say Pemulis we say we say Pemulis, Double or Nothing, when the odds remain so almost crazily stacked
in our favor today.’
'So they do it on purpose?' Beak is asking. 'Try to make us hate them?’
Limits and rituals. It's almost time for communal dinner. Sometimes Mrs. Clarke in the kitchen lets Mario ring a triangle with
a steel ladle while she rolls back the dining-room doors. They make the servers wear hairnets and little Ob/Gynish gloves. Hal
could take out the plug and nip down into the tunnels, maybe not even all the way down into the Pump Room. Be only twenty
minutes late. He's thinking in an abstract absent way about limits and rituals, listening to Blott give Beak his aperçu. Like as in is
there a clear line, a quantifiable difference between need and just strong desire. He has to sit up to spit in the wastebasket. There is
a twinge in a tooth on his mouth's left side.
MARIO INCANDENZA'S FIRST AND ONLY EVEN REMOTELY ROMANTIC EXPERIENCE, THUS FAR
In mid-October Y.D.A.U., Hal had invited Mario for a post-prandial stroll, and they were strolling the E.T.A. grounds
between the West Courts and the hillside's tree-line, Hal with his gear bag. Mario could sense that Hal wanted to be able to go off
by himself briefly, so he contrived (Mario did) to be very interested in some sort of leaf-and-twig ensemble off the path, and let
Hal sort of melt away down the path. The whole area running along the tree-line and the thickets of like shrubbery and stickery
bushes and heaven knew what all was covered with fallen leaves that were dry but had not yet quite all the way lost their color.
The leaves were underfoot. Mario kind of tottered from tree to tree, pausing at each tree to rest. It was @ 1900h., not yet true
twilight, but the only thing left of the sunset was a snout just over Newton, and the places under long shadows were cold, and a
certain kind of melancholy sadness was insinuating itself into the grounds' light. The staggered lamps by the paths hadn't come on
yet, however.
A lovely scent of illegally burned leaves wafting up from East Newton mixed with the foody smells from the ventilator
turbines out of the back of the dining hall. Two gulls were in one place in the air over the dumpsters over by the rear parking lot.
Leaves crackled underfoot. The sound of Mario walking in dry leaves was like: crackle crackle crackle stop; crackle crackle
crackle stop.
An Empire Waste Displacement displacement vehicle whistled past overhead, rising in the start of its arc, its one blue alertlight atwinkle.
He was around where the tree-line bulged herniatically out toward the end of the West Courts' fencing. From deeper inside
the thickets on the lip of the hillside came a tremendous crackling and thrashing of underbrush and trailing willow-branches, and
who should heave into unexpected view but the U.S.S. Millicent Kent, a sixteen-year-old out of Montclair NJ, #1 Singles on the
Girls 16's-A squad and two hundred kilos if she was a kilo. Southpaw, one-hander off the backhand side, a serve Donnie Stott
likes to clock with radar, and chart. Mario's filmed the U.S.S. Millicent Kent for staff-analysis on several occasions. They
exchange hearty Hi's. One of only a couple female E.T.A.s with visible veins in her forearms, object of a fiercely-wagered-on
bench-press challenge against Schacht, Freer, and Pe-tropolis Kahn that M. Pemulis had organized last spring, in which she'd
topped Kahn and Freer refused to show and Schacht finally beat her but doffed his cap. Out for a staff-ordered weightmanagement post-dinner stroll, squeezing Penn 5's in both hands, in E.T.A. sweat pants and with an enormous violet bow either
Scotch-taped or glued to the blunt rounded top of her hair. She told Mario she'd just seen the strangest thing farther back deeper in
the thickets off the lip. Her hair was tall and rounded off in the shape of a kind of pill, not unlike a papal hat or a British
constable's tall hat. Mario said the bow looked terrific, and what a surprise to come face to face like this out here in the chill dusk.
Bridget Boone had said the U.S.S. Milli-cent Kent's coiffure looked like a missile protruding from its silo in preparation for
launch. The last of the sun's snout was setting just over the tip of the U.S.S. Millicent's hair, which was almost osseously hardlooking, composed of dense woven nests of reticulate fibers like a dry loofa sponge, which she said over the summer a home-perm
had misfired and left her hair a system of reticulate nests, and was only now loosening up enough even to attach a bow to. Mario
said that well the bow set her off to a T, was all he had to say on the matter. (He hadn't literally said 'chill dusk.') The U.S.S.M.K.
said she'd been amusing herself beating her way through one of the brambly thickets Mrs. Incandenza had — when she'd still
spent time outdoors at all — planted to discourage part-time employees from short-cutting up the hillside to E.T.A., and had come
upon a Husky Vl-brand telescoping tripod, new and dully silvery-looking and set up on its three legs, right in the middle of the
thicket. For no visible reason and with no footprints or visible evidence of path-beating anywhere around except the U.S.S.
Millicent's own. The U.S.S. Millicent Kent stowed a tennis ball in each hip pocket and took Mario's claw and said here to walk
this way and she'd show him real quick, and get his like feedback on the issue, and plus have a witness when they got back and 
she told people about it. Mario said the Husky VI came with its own pan head and cable release. With the girl supporting him with
one hand and beating an easement through the brush with the other they proceeded deeper into the thicket on the lip. The outdoor
light was now the same hue as U.S.S.M.K.'s hairbow. She said she swore to God it was around here someplace. Mario said his late
dad had used a somewhat less snazzy IV-model Husky back in his early days of making art-films, when he also used a homemade
dolly and sandbags and halogen spots instead of kliegs. Several different species and types of birds were twittering.
The U.S.S. Millicent Kent told Mario that off the record she'd always felt he had the longest lushest prettiest lashes of any boy
on two continents, three if you counted Australia. Mario thanked her kindly, calling her Ma'am and trying to fake a Southern
accent.
The U.S.S. Millicent Kent said she wasn't sure what were her old footprints from finding the thicket with the tripod and what
were their more recent footprints from trying to find the old footprints, and that she was worried because it was starting to get dark
and they might not be able to find it and then Mario wouldn't believe she'd seen something as batshit-sounding as a gleaming
silvery tripod all set up for no reason in the middle of nowheresville.
Mario said he was pretty sure that Australia was a continent. Walking, he came up to around the bottom of U.S.S. Millicent's
ribcage.
Mario heard crackling and thrashing from some other thicket nearby but was certain it wasn't Hal, since Hal very rarely made
a lot of motion-noise either outside or in-.
The U.S.S. Millicent Kent told Mario that though she was an admittedly great player, w/ an overwhelming haul-ass-up-to-thenet-and-loom-over-it-like-a-titan game in the Betty Stove/Venus Williams power-game tradition, and headed for an almost
limitless future in the Show, she'd confide in him in private out here that she'd never really loved competitive tennis, that her real
love and passion was modern interpretive dance, at which she admittedly had less unconsciously native gifts and talents to bring
to bear, but which she loved, and had spent just about all her off-court time as a little girl practicing in a leotard in front of a
double-width mirror in her room at home in suburban Montclair NJ, but that tennis was what she had limitless talent at and got
emotional strokes and tuition-waiver boarding-school offers in, and that she'd been desperate to get into a boarding school. Mario
asked if she could recall if the Husky-VI tripod had been the TL one with waffle-gridded rubber tips on the legs and a 360° pan
head or the SL one with unwaffled tips and only a 180° pan head that swiveled in an arc instead of a full circle. The U.S.S.
Millicent revealed that she'd accepted a scholarship to E.T.A. at age nine for the sole reason of getting away from her father. She
referred to her father as her Old Man, which you can just tell she capitalizes. Her mother had left home when the U.S.S. Millicent
was only five, running off very abruptly with a man sent by what had then been called Con-Edison to do a free home-energyefficiency assessment. It had been six years since she'd laid an eyeball on her Old Man, but to the best of her recall he was almost
three meters tall and morbidly obese, which had been why every mirror and bathtub in the house had been double-width. One
older sister who'd been deeply involved in synchronized swimming had got pregnant and married in high school soon after her
mother's departure.
All this time there's been more crackling and crashing off up the hillside. Mario has trouble on any kind of declined grade.
Some sort of bird's sitting in the top branch of a little tree and looking at them without saying anything. Mario thinks suddenly of a
joke he remembers hearing Michael Pemulis tell:
'If two people get married in West Virginia and then pull up stakes and move to Massachusetts and then if they decide they
want to get a divorce, what's the biggest problem getting a divorce?’
The U.S.S.M.K. says her other older sister had at just fifteen joined the Ice Capades of all things, and was in the back-up-like
chorus where the biggest artistic challenge was not bumping into people and either falling or making them fall.
'Getting a divorce from your sister, because in West Virginia Pemulis said a lot of people who get married are brother and
sister.’
'Hold my hand.’
'He was only joking, though.’
By now the light was about the same color as the ash and clinkers in the bottom of a Weber Grill. The U.S.S. Millicent Kent
was leading them in a set of slightly diminishing circles. Then, she said, at age eight she came home early from after-school drills
at the U.S.T.A. Jr. Facility in Passaic NJ looking forward to slipping into the old leotard and getting in some modern interpretive
dancing up in her room, only to come home suddenly and find her father wearing her leotard. Which needless to say didn't fit very
well. And with the small front portion of his huge bare feet squeezed into a pair of strapless pumps Mrs. Kent had left behind in
her haste. In the dining room he'd moved all the furniture over to the side of, in front of the really wide mirror, in a grotesquely
tiny and bulging violet leotard, capering. Mario says violet's really the U.S.S. Millicent's color. She says that was the exact creepy
word for it: capering. Pirouetting and rondelling. Simpering, as well. The crotch of her leotard looked like a slingshot, it was so
deformed. He hadn't heard her come in. U.S.S. Millicent asked Mario if he'd ever seen a girl's yin-yang before. Obscene mottled
hirsute flesh had pooched and spilled out over every centimeter of the leotard's perimeter, she recalled. She'd had a voluptuous
figure even at eight, she told Mario, but the Old Man was in a whole different-sized ballpark altogether. Mario kept saying Golly
Ned, all he could think of to say. His flesh jiggled and bounced as he capered. It was repellent, she said. There was no sign of a
Husky VI or any other model of tripod in any of the thickets and boscages. Her literal term for it was 'yin-yang.' But her Old Man
wasn't just a cross-dressing transves-tite, she said; it turned out they always had to be a relative's female clothes. She said she
always used to wonder why her sisters' one-pieces and figure-skating skirts always looked so askewly baggy and elastic-shot,
since the sisters didn't exactly wear tiny little malnourished sizes themselves. The Old Man didn't hear her come in and he capered
and jetéed for several more minutes until she happened to catch his simpering eye in the mirror, she said. That's when she knew
she had to get away, she said. And Mario's own old man's Admissions lady had called out of the blue that very evening, she said.
Like it had been fate. Serendipity. Kismet.
'Yin-yang,' Mario offered, nodding. The U.S.S. Millicent's hand was large and hot and at the level of sogginess of a bathmat
that's been used several times in a row in quick succession.
Her second-oldest sister, many years later, had informed the U.S.S.M.K. that the first time anybody'd had any inklings about
the Old Man was an episode when the older sister was very small and Mrs. K. had sewed her a special costume complete with 
gold-lame bow & arrow for playing Cupid in the school Valentine's Day pageant, and the sister's school had got out early one day
after an asbestos scare and she'd come unexpectedly home and found the Old Man in the basement rumpus room in tiny wings and
hideously distended diaper striking a pose from a rather well-known Titian oil in the Met's High Renaissance Wing, and had
struggled with denial and own-perceptions-doubting for quite some time thereafter, until a hysterical episode during rehearsals for
an Ice Capades Valentine's Day number brought all the feelings surging up and broke the denial, and the Ice Capades' Employee
Assistance Office counselling staff helped her start to work it all through.
At which point U.S.S. Míllícent stopped them in an unprickly thicket of what later turned out to be poison sumac and turned
with a strange glint in the one eye that wasn't in pine-shadow and crushed Mario's large head to the area just below her breasts and
said she needed to confess that Mario's eyelashes and vest with extendable police lock he used for staying upright in one place had
for quite some time now driven her right around the bend with sensual feeling. What Mario perceived as a sudden radical drop in
the prevailing temperature was in fact the U.S.S. Millicent Kent's sexual stimulation sucking tremendous quantities of ambient
energy out of the air surrounding them. Mario's face was so squashed against the U.S.S. Millicent's thorax that he had to contort
his mouth way out to the left to breathe. U.S.S.M.K.'s hairbow became detached and fluttered down through Mario's sightline like
a giant crazed violet moth. U.S.S.M.K. was trying to undo Mario's corduroys but was frustrated by the complex system of snaps
and fasteners at the bottom of his police lock's Velcro vest, which overlapped his trouser's own fasteners, and Mario tried to
reconfigure his mouth somehow to both breathe and warn the U.S.S.M.K. that he was incredibly ticklish in the area of the
bellybutton and directly below. He could now start to hear his brother Hal somewhere to the above and east, calling Mario's name
at a moderate volume. The U.S.S. Millicent Kent was saying there was no way Mario could be any more nervous than she was
about what was happening between them. It's true that the sounds of Mario sucking air out of a severely leftward-contorted mouth
could have been interpretable as the heavy breathing of sexual stimulation. It was when the U.S.S. Millicent wrapped one arm
around his shoulder for leverage and forced her other hand up under the hem of the tight vest and then down inside the trousers
and briefs, rooting for a penis, that Mario became so ticklish that he began to double up, clearing his face of U.S.S. Millicent's
front and laughing out loud in such a distinctive high-pitched way that Hal had no trouble beelining right upon them,
compromised though his navigational systems were after fifteen or so secret minutes alone in the fragrant pines. Mario later said it
was just like when there was a word on the tip of your tongue that try as you might you can't remember until the exact second you
stop trying, and in it pops, right into your head: it was when the three of them were walking together back up the hillside toward
the tree-line's lip, not trying to do anything but get back to Comm.-Ad. by the most direct route in the dark, that they stumbled
upon the cinematic tripod, a dully glinting TL waffle-tipped Husky, in the middle of what wasn't such a very tall or thick thicket at
all.
30 APRIL — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
Steeply said 'Choosing Boston as your Ops center, after all, which to us signifies: the place of the supposed Entertainment's
origin.’
Marathe made a gesture of being willing to take time and play along, if Steeply wished it. 'But also the city Boston U.S.A. has
logic. Your closest city to the Convexity. Closest therefore to Quebec. Within as you say the distance of spit.' His wheelchair
squeaked very slightly whenever he moved. An automobile horn somewhere between the city and themselves blew a sustained
blast. It grew always colder down on the desert floor; they could feel this. He felt gratitude for his windbreaker.
Steeply flicked some ashes from his cigarette with a coarse thumb-gesture that was not yet feminine. 'But we're not any more
sure that they actually do have copies. Also, does this quote "anti"-Entertainment the film's director supposedly made to counter
the lethality: does it really also exist; this really could be some sort of game for you and the F.L.Q.,4747 to hold out the promise of
the anti-Entertainment as a chip for concessions. As some kind of remedy or antidote.’
'Of this anti-film that antidotes the seduction of the Entertainment we have no evidence except craziness of rumors.’
Steeply used a technical interviewer's device of pretending to occupy himself with small physical chores of preening and
hygiene, delaying, to have Marathe elaborate himself more fully. The lights of the city Tucson with their movements and
twinkling made a globe of light such as on ceilings at les salles de danser in Val d'Or, Quebec. Marathe's wife was dying slowly of
ventricular restenosis.4848 He thought: die twice.
Marathe said: 'And also why do they never send you into the field as yourself, Steeply? This is to say in appearance. The last
time you were — what is it I hope to say — a Negro, for almost one year, no?’
U.S.A. persons' shrugs are always as if trying to lift a heavy thing. 'Haitian,' Steeply said. 'I was Haitian. Some negroid
tendencies in the persona, maybe.' Marathe listened to Steeply be silent. A U.S.A. coyote sounds more like a high-strung dog. The
automobile's horn continued, sounding to the men forlorn and somehow nautical out below in the dark. The feminine manner to
examine the fingernails was to raise the whole hand's back into view instead of malely curling the nails in over the upturned palm;
Marathe recalled knowing this from a very young age. Steeply would pick at the corners of his lip, then for an interval change to
examining the fingernails. His silences seemed always comfortable and contained. He was a competent operative. More cold air
came, odd eddied breezes up in over the shelf from the desert's floor, puffs of sudden air as if from the turning of a volume's
pages. His bare arms had the plucked-chicken look of chilled and bare skin in his grotesque sleeveless dress. Marathe had not been
aware of when during the falling of night Steeply had removed the absurd sunglasses, but decided the exact moment of this did
not matter for reporting every word and gesture back to M. Fortier. Again the coyote, and also another farther off, perhaps to
answer. The sounds were like that of a domestic dog being given low voltage. Les Assassins' M. Fortier and M. Broullîme and
some others of his comrades-on-wheels believed Rémy Marathe to be eidetic, near-perfect in recall and detail. Marathe, who could
remember several incidents of crucial observations he had failed to later recall, knew this was not true.
30 APRIL — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
Several times also Marathe called U.S.A. to Steeply 'Your walled nation' or 'Your murated nation.’ 
An oiled guru sits in yogic full lotus in Spandex and tank top. He's maybe forty. He's in full lotus on top of the towel
dispenser just above the shoulder-pull station in the weight room of the Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield MA. Saucers of muscle
protrude from him and run together so that he looks almost crustacean. His head gleams, his hair jet-black and extravagantly
feathered. His smile could sell things. Nobody knows where he comes from or why's he's allowed to stay, but he's always in there,
sitting yogic about a meter off the rubberized floor of the weight room. His tank top says TRANSCEND in silkscreen; on the back
it's got DEUS PRO-VIDEBIT in Day-Glo orange. It's always the same tank top. Sometimes the color of the Spandex leggings
changes.
This guru lives off the sweat of others. Literally. The fluids and salts and fatty acids. He's like a beloved nut. He's an E.T.A.
institution. You do like maybe some sets of benches, some leg-curls, inclined abs, crunches, work up a good hot shellac of sweat;
then, if you let him lick your arms and forehead, he'll pass on to you some little nugget of fitness-guru wisdom. His big one for a
long time was: 'And the Lord said: Let not the weight thou wouldst pull to thyself exceed thine own weight.' His advice on
conditioning and injury-prevention tends to be pretty solid, is the consensus. His tongue is little and rough but feels good, like a
kitty's. It isn't like a faggy or sexual thing. Some of the girls let him, too. He's harmless as they come. He supposedly went way
back with Dr. Incandenza, the Academy's founder, in the past.
Some of the newer kids think he's a creep and want him out of there. What kind of guru wears Spandex and lives off others'
perspiration? they complain. God only knows what he does in there when the weight room's closed at night, they say.
Sometimes the newer kids who won't even let him near them come in and set the resistance on the shoulder-pull at a weight
greater than their own weight. The guru on the towel dispenser just sits there and smiles and doesn't say anything. They hunker,
then, and grimace, and try to pull the bar down, but, like, lo: the overweighted shoulder-pull becomes a chin-up. Up they go, their
own bodies, toward the bar they're trying to pull down. Everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of a man who finds
himself rising toward what he wants to pull down to himself. And I like how the guru on the towel dispenser doesn't laugh at
them, or even shake his head sagely on its big brown neck. He just smiles, hiding his tongue. He's like a baby. Everything he sees
hits him and sinks without bubbles. He just sits there. I want to be like that. Able to just sit all quiet and pull life toward me, one
forehead at a time. His name is supposedly Lyle.
It was yrstruly and C and Poor Tony that crewed that day and everything like that. The AM were wicked bright and us a bit
sick however we scored our wake ups boosting some items at a sidewalk sale in the Harvard Squar where it were warm upping
and the snow coming off onnings and then later Poor Tony ran across an old Patty citizen type of his old aquaintance from like the
Cape and Poor Tony got over and pretended like he would give a blow job On The House and we got the citizen to get in his ride
with us and crewed on him good and we got enough $ off the Patty type to get straightened out for true all day and crewed on him
hard and C wanted we should elemonade the Patty's map for keeps and everything like that and take his ride to this understanding
slope strip shop he knows in Chinatown but Poor Tony turns white as a shit and said by no means and put up an arguement and
everything like that and we just left the type there in his vehicle off Mem Dr we broke the jaw for insentive not to eat no cheese
and C insisted and was not 2Bdenied and took off one ear which there was a mess and everything like that and then C throws the
ear away after in a dumster so yrstrulys' like so what was the exact pernt to that like. The dumster was with the dumsters out by
Steves' donuts in the Enfield Squar. We go back to the Brighton Projects to cop and Roy Tony was always there on his bench in
the Playground in late AM but now all the Project Nigers was awake and out in the Playground and it was tense but it was day
time and everything like that and we cop half a bundle from Roy Tony and we go down to the library at Copley where we stash
our personnel works when we crewed and went into the mensroom where there was severel works on the floor allready that early
and got straight in the stall and C and yrstruly had a beef about who shot three and who got two and we made Poor Tony give us
up his third bag and then but we had to cop for that nite and tomorrow AM still which was XMas and had to cop in advance, its' a
never ending strugle its' a full time job to stay straight and there is no vacation for XMas at anytime. Its' a fucking bitch of a life
dont' let any body get over on you diffrent. And back we go to the Harvard Squar however on arrival Poor Tony wanted he should
hang for lunch time with his red leather fags in the Bow&Arrow and pretty much I can tolerate fags when alone but together
yrstruly I cant' fucking stand fags and yrstruly and C said fuck this shit and we screwed out and go up to the Central Squar where
it was cool offing and the onnings re freezing and everything like that and snowing and boosted NyQuil at the CVS Drug where
we go to the mop aile and employ a mophandle in tilting the mirror over the NyQuil aile and boosted NyQuil in Cs' coat and got
messed up on NyQuil and scored a bookbag off a foran slope studn type kid on the Redline platform but it only had books and
disks and the diskcase was fucking plastic and into a dumster with it it goes but also at this time we come up and run into Kely
Vinoy that was working her corner by the dumster by Cheap-O records in the Squar by the email place and shes' dopesick having
a conversession with Eckwus and an other man and Eckwus said he said Stokely Darkstar just got freetested again at the Fenway
and confirmed a big Boot 8.8 hes' got the Virus for sure and Purpleboy said he said Dark-star said how if he was going down he
didnt' give a shit and wasnt' going to give a shit if he gave some others the Virus thru trancemission and the Word was out&about
dont' share Stokely Darkstars' works dont' use works off Stokely Darkstar no matter how sick you are even if your' dyng for it get
other works. Like C said any thing would count in your mind when your' sick and had copped and was minus works and Darkstar
had works. We all every crew with heads left have personnel works for only ourselves that we use except blownout old hose like
Kely and Purpleboy there Man takes there $ and there works and Hes' the only one can give them there shots and keep Kely just
this side of dopesick 24-7 for insentive for her to make him more $ and everything like that, theres' nothing wurse than a Pimp and
Boston Pimps are the wurst there' 10X wurse than NYC Pimps that are supperst to be so hartless in NYC where yrstruly petaled
ass in the Columbus Squar for a time of my youth like Stokely Darkstar before departing for green pastures, and we had a
conversession but were' coming down and it was getting dark and snowing for a White XMas and if we didnt' crew before like
2200 Roy Tonys' Nigers would be too drunk to keep them from beefing with us and thered' be a beef and everything like that if we
go to cop after 2200 and who needs a grief so back we Redline to the Harvard Squar and all the foran studns are in the bars and we
locate Poor Tony smoking hash with fags back of Au Bon Pain and say lets roll a foran studn stuck here for XMas in the bars and
cop before 2200 and so we all go on the ice from the frozen melted snow to the Bow&Arrow in the Squar with Poor Tony and 
Lolasister and Susan T. Cheese who I fucking cant' stand and got in there and made Susan T. Cheese buy beers and we wait and
no studns are leaving alone to roll but a older type individual who any body could see is no studn but is legless on shots alone at
the bar fucking shatered slumped over is getting ready to depart for green pastures and Poor Tony tells Lolasister to screw she
crews with Poor Tony some times but not if its' wet work and with Cs' involvement its' always wet work, and yrstruly I inform
Susan T. Cheese she new better than not to screw as well and the older individual de parts shatered and holding onto walls in a
hiclass and promising coat for the possibility of $ and pernts his old nose this way and that and everything like that thru the
Bow&Arrow window C wipes the steam off, and has a conversession with a Santaclaus ringing a big bell for the kettle and were'
like Jesus its' a never ending strugle to wait and cop but after awhile finally after stifing the Santaclaus we watch he picks a
direction finally at last up Mass Ave toward the Central Squar on foot, and Poor Tony beats it around the block to get up in front
of him around the block on the ice in his fucking heels and feather snake around his neck and gets him some how Poor Tony
always knows how over to the dumsters' alley by Bay Bank off Sherman St, and yrstruly and C crew on the individual and roll
him and C messes up his older map to a large degree and we leave him in no condition to eat cheese in a snow drift of materil
under the dumster, and C again wants to siphon out a vehicle on Mass Av and set him on fire but he has 400 $ on his person and
then some and a coat with a fury collar and a watch we realy scored and C even gosofar to take the non studns' shoes which they
dont' fit, and in the dumster they go.
And but so but back we go to the Brighton Projects but its' post 2200 its’
too late Roy Tony hasnt' got his pissboys out hes' not open for comerce and yet it is like a Niger Convenssion in the
Playground of the Brighton Projects with there glass pipes and there Crown Royal in purple bags and everything like that in the
Playground of the Projects and if they smell were' holding this kindof $ amounts they will crew on us in numbers there' animals at
nite with there purple velvet bags and p-dope and Redi Rok crack, one large Niger in a Patriots hat has a hart incident and
downhegoes on the black top by the swing set right in front of us and none of his brothers unquot gosofar to do any thing he lays
there there' animals at nite and we screw out with rickytick speed from the Brighton Projects, and we converse. And Poor Tony
wants to just go over the line to the Enfield Squar and try and just cop p-dope from Delphina down by the Empire hangers or else
what else hang with the fags at Steves' donuts and hear who else is holding weight in Enfield or Allston and everything like that,
but Delphinas' p is from bunk the Word is out&about that its' all Manitol and kwai9 you might as well fucking cop XLax or
Schweppes and C dopeslaps Poor Tony and C wants to Redline down to Chinatown but Poor Tony turns white as a shit and says
Chinatowns' too dear in $ and everything like that, even for like bundles, Dr. Wo is 200 $ but atleast its' always good and but we
have 400 $ and then some and C pernts out we can fucking well afford Wos' well known exellent skeet for once at XMas and Poor
Tony stamps a hiheel and says but how weve' got enough $ to stay straight and get Lolasister straight for XMas and all lay up and
not have to never ending strugle at XMas and two or more days after that if we dont' blow it on XMas Eve in Chinatown instead
of waiting which is a good pernt but when has any body known C to ever wait he gets dopesíck faster than us and everything like
that and is all piss and vinegar for Wo and starting with the Shivers and with the noses' mucis all ready and everything like that
and C is not 2Bdenied and we say we are screwing down to Chinatown and if Poor Tony dont' want to come he can take a like a
giant breath and hold it in the Squar until we get back and well' cop for him, and Poor Tony says he might be a dicksucking fag
but hes' not a starry eyed' moroon.
And so offwego and everything like that with 400 $ on the Orangeline, and thru a fucked up circumstances yrstruly and C
almost end up raping a older type nurse in a white nurses' uniform and coat on the train but we dont' and but Poor Tony seems
white and detracted on the train playng with his feather snake and says he says he seems in his mind maybe to recall an
involvment in some type deal where Dr. Wo might of got slightly got over on and burnt and that maybe down in Chinatown we
could air on the side of low profiles and try to cop some where else except from the Wos'. Except Dr. Wo is who we know. C is
Wos' former aquaintance from crewing with slopes on the North shore for Whity Sorkin in the days of his youth. C is not
2Bdenied. And so at the Orangeline Tstop we grab a fat cab to about two blocks from Hung Toys and screw out of the cab at a
light and the thing with fat cabbies is they cant' run after you and Poor Tony is pisser to watch tearassing it down the street in
hiheels with a feather stoal. Poor Tony runs right by the front of Hung Toys, this is by pryor agreement to wait for us low profile
down the street and yrstruly and C go in Hung Toys where they dont' open till 2300 and sell tea unquot like 100 Proof tea till all
hours and everything like that and never get Inspected because Dr. Wo has arrangements with Chinatowns' Finest. XMas is
noncelebrated in Chinatown. Dr. Wo a good thing about Wo is hes' always there in Hung Toys at known times. Here theres' all old
slope racial type ladies sitting in booths eating noddles and drinking quot tea out of white cups the size of a shotglass and
everything like that. With small slope kids tearassing it all over and older men in like jew caps and skinny beerds out of just the
middle of there chin but Dr. Wo is only middle aged and wears iron glasses and a tie and looks more like a banker for a slope but
he is 100 % business and icecold all the way down for slope type comerce plus hes' connected bigtime and not to be fucked or got
over on if some body has a head left and yrstruly I cant' believe Poor Tony would ever take part of tryng to crew on Wo who he
knows thru C in even the smallest comerce and if he did C says he sure never heard about it nor saw any of the skeet or anything
like that, and why. Cs' the one that knows Wo. We arranged Poor Tony to wait for us out side and try to be low profile. Its' sub 0
snow and hes' in a leather spring coat and stoal and brown wig thats' not as good as a hat and hell' freeze his low profile balls off
and C was tryng to smile and he told Dr. Wo we needed three bundles and Dr. Wo was smiling in his slope manner said the
boosting life must surely be exellent and C laughed and said most exellent Cs' tight with slopes he does the talking and everything
like that, and he says were' going to lay up low profile for the XMas vacation and not crew because I had a rape type situation
from an older nurse last nite on the T and almost got pinched by the Ts' Finest and Dr. Wo nods in a special subservant manner he
uses for non slopes who hes' realy polite with but hes' a dictater to his slopes when we see him with his subservant slopes but with
us were' allike most polite and everything like conversession and its' nice but expensive but it feels nice at the time but Wo
finishes his so called tea and Wo goes back behind the curtains in the back of Hung Toys thats' a giant brightred curtain with
purple mountains or hills and clouds that are flyng snakes with leather wings that is one curtain yrstruly would want to boost for
personnel hanging use that no body that isnt' a slope and isnt' in with Wo cant' never go behind it but you can see when he opens it
and goes behind the curtain it looks like merly more old slope ladies sitting on packing cases with slope writing eating more
noddles in bowls they hold about like a millmeter from their yellow maps and everything like that. Slopes rarly stop shovling in 
the old noddles. Stokely Darkstar calls them maggoteaters and subservant slopes keep going in and out of the curtain while Wos'
back there a longer than avrege time and Cs' got the Shivers and starting to jones and dope-fiends are full of super station and he
says to yrstruly he says the fuck he says maybe what if Poor Tony realy did take part with burning Wo and what if a slope sees
Poor Tony out side and is one of these slopes going in and out of the curtain maybe telling Wo, like ratting out Poor Tony as our
aquaintance, and my muds is starting and were' jonesing super statiously over PT and wheres' Wo behind the curtain and
everything like that, tryng to smile and conversession ultralow, drinking quot tea thats' like schnapps only wurse and green. And
we jones and Dr. Wo comes back finally at last out smiling subservantly with all the wonderful skeet three bundles in a newspaper
who could fucking read it but the pictures are of slope VIPs' in suits and Wo sits down, and Wo never sits down at the booth with
the skeet it isnt' done in his comerce, and Wos' hands are folded over our skeet in the thing and Wo smiling says he asks C if
weve' seen goodold Poor Tony or Susan T. Cheese around we crew with Poor Tony in boosting life did we not he said. C he says
PT is a fucking dicksucking fag queer and a proven cheeseater and wed' fucked up his map and Cheese and Lolasisters' map in a
beef and didnt' crew with fags since aprox the autum period. C is pouring mucis and tryng to smile cusually, Dr. Wo laughed in a
harty fashion and said exellent and Wo leaned over our skeet sayng if we should happenbychance to see Poor Tony or them to
please give Poor Tony his quite best regards and wish him prosparity and a thousand blisses. And everything like that. And we
promote the newspaper of skeet and Wo promotes our $ and very politely outwego and I admit it yrstruly wanted we should burn
Poor Tony and rickytick the fuck out of Chinatown but we go over down more by the China Pearl Place and Poor Tony is sortof
hunched behind a lightpoal with his gray teeth chatting in his dress and thin coat tryng to be low profile in his red coat and heels
around a million + slopes that all are subservants of Wo. And later after screwing out we didnt' tell him of what Wo said about
sitting down and asking about him and Cheeses' blisses and we screw to the Orangeline to our hot air blowergrate we use at nite at
the library behind the Copley Squar and we get our personnel works out from behind the brickworks behind the bush by the hot
blowergrate where we stash our works and were' eggerly into the first bundle and were' cooking up and notice Poor Tony doesnt'
the least bitch when yrstruly and C tie off first in line seeing as were' the ones that copped it and Poor Tonys' gotto wait as usal,
except I notice he doesnt' bitch even a little, normally Poor Tony keeps up this usal wine yrstruly learned how to not notice, but
when he doesnt' wine now that were' jonesing and the skeets' right there I notice hes' cusually looking like every place but at the
skeet which is unusal and C jonesing and with the Shivers cooking up tryng to keep his lighter lit in the hot airs' wind and snow of
nite, and I admit it yrstruly I get a wicked cold inside feeling even with all this hot air from the blowergrate blowing up from
under us and making our hair blow around and Tonys' feather snake pernt upword I yrstruly get a cold feeling of super station
once more, you get wicked super stations in this fucked up kindof shit life because its' a never ending chase and you get too tired
to go by much more than never ending habit and super station and everything like that so but I dont' say any thing but yrstruly I
have a cold super station about Poor Tony not wining while he makes like he has to cusually piss and takes a piss and the piss
steams up around the lower ares of the bush with his back turned away and isnt' looking around with interst or anything like that
you never turn your back on the skeet when its' partly your skeet which is wicked unusal which C is so eggerly dopesick he
doesnt' notice any thing past keeping the lighter lit. And so I admit it I yrstruly did yrstruly purplously let C tie off and boot up
first while I still cooked up, I did cook up unusally slow, fucking with the getting the snowmelt hot in the spoon and everything
like that yrstruly I let the lighter go out and took more time with the cotton and C had the Shivers wurst of us and cooks up the
fastest and would of got it anyway. Later with Cs' map elemonaded Poor Tony later conceited admitting Susan T. Cheese helped a
Worcester fag get over on Wo for a fronted bundle in autum is why. And all three bundles Wo give us in slope news was
Hotshots. Laced. It started the instantly C undid the belt and booted up we knew allready, yrstruly I and PT thearized it was Drano
with the blue like glittershit and everything like that taken out by subservant slopes it had that Drano like effect on C and
everything like that it was laced what ever it was C started with the screaming in a loud hipitch fashion instantly after he unties
and boots and downhegoes flopping with his heels pouning on the metal of the blower-grate and hes' at his throat with his hands
tearing at him self in the most fucked up fashions and Poor Tony is hiheeling rickytick over over C zipping up sayng he screams
sweety C but and stuffing the feather snake from his necks' head in Cs' mouth to shut him up from hipitch screaming in case
Bostons' Finest can hear involvment and blood and bloody materil is coming out Cs' mouth and Cs' nose and its' allover the
feathers its' a sure sign of Drano, blood is and Cs' eyes get beesly and bulge and hes' cryng blood into the feathers in his mouth
and tryng to hold onto my glove but Cs' arms are going allover and one eye it like allofa sudden pops outof his map, like with a
Pop you make with fingers in your mouth with all this blood and materil and a blue string at the back of the eye and the eye falls
over the side of Cs' map and hangs there looking at the fag Poor Tony. And C turned lightblue and bit thru the snakes' head and
died for keeps and shit his pants instanly with shit so bad the hot air blowergrate is blowing small bits of fart and blood and missty
shit up into our maps and Poor Tony backs offof over C and puts his hands over his madeup map and looks at C thru his fingers.
And yrstruly I take the belt off it goes without saying, and dont' even rethink or dream about tryng maybe a diffrent bag out of a
diffrent bundle from C for how could Wo know what bundle wed' cook up outof first so all three bundles must be Hot so I dont'
even dream even tho yrstrulys' Shiverng and mucis sick allready and now in payback Wo has our only $ to get straight with for
XMas. It might sound fucking low but the reason we had to leave the decesed body C in one of the librarys' dumsters is the reason
is because the Copley Squars' Finest know it is our personnel hot air blowergrate and if we leave C there its' a sure pinch for us as
known aquain-tance and a period of Kicking The Bird in holding in a cell but the dumster was empty of materil and Cs' head made
a fucked up sound when it hit the empty bottom and Poor Tony cried and wined and said he said he had no inkling that beast Wo
was that vindicative and poorold decesed C and how this was it hes' going to get clean from heronout and get a straightjob dancing
in a Patty type Club in the Fenway and everything like that on and on piss and wine. I didnt' say any thing. I had to rethink on the
T to the Squar if yrstruly I should elemonade Poor Tonys' map for keeps for payback on how he purplously lets C shoot up first
and wouldof let yrstruly shoot first even knowing, or make that cheese move and go back down the Orangeline to Wo and try and
get enough bags to get true straight eating cheese to Wo about the wherehouse that Poor Tony and Susan T. Cheese and Lolasister
with Eckwus crashed at now. Or like what. Yrstruly I almost was cryng. It was when Poor Tony took off his hiheels and wanted
yrstruly I should boost him like over the edge of Cs' bodies' dumster to get back what was left of his feather stoal out of Cs' mouth
that yrstruly I thought I decided what to do. But the connected slope Wo wasnt' even there in front of the Hung Toys curtain in the
early XMas AM, and then Poor Tony departed for green pastures and ate cheese, and it took yrstruly two days of Kicking The 
Bird in the hall out side my Mumsters' apartment that for payback she locked the door before I yrstruly can get in a Detox to
atleast cop some methedoan and get three squars to stay down in yrstruly to start to thearize on what to try and do after I could
standup straight and walk upright again once more.
3 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U.
Hal could hear the phone console ringing as he dropped his gear bag and took the room key from around his neck. The phone
itself had been Orin's and its plastic case was transparent and you could see the phone's guts.
'Mmyellow.’
'Why do I always get the feeling I'm interrupting you in the middle of some like vigorous self-abuse session?' It was Orin's
voice. 'It's always multiple rings. Then you're always a little breathless when you do.’
'Do what.’
'A certain sweaty urgency to your voice. Are you one of the 99% of adolescent males, Hallie?’
Hal never liked talking on the phone after he'd gotten high in secret down in the Pump Room. Even if there was water or
liquid handy to keep the cotton at bay. He didn't know why this was so. It just made him uneasy.
'You're sounding hale and fit, O.’
'You can tell me, you know. No shame in it. Let me tell you, boy, I did myself raw for years on end on that hill.’
Hal estimated over 60% of what he told Orin on the phone since Orin had abruptly started calling again this spring was a lie.
He had no idea why he liked lying to Orin on the phone so much. He looked at the clock. 'Where are you?’
'Home. Snug and toasty. It's 90+ out.’
'That would be Fahrenheit I'm assuming.’
'This city is made of all glass and light. The windows are like high-beams coming at you. The air has that spilled-fuel
shimmer to it.’
'So to what do we owe.’
'Sometimes I wear sunglasses even in the house. Sometimes at the stadium I hold my hand up and look at it and I swear I can
see right through it. Like that thing with the flashlight and your hand.’
'Hands seem to be sort of a theme to this call, thus far.’
'On the way in from the lot off the street here I saw a pedestrian in a pith helmet stagger and like claw at the air and pitch
forward onto his face. Another Phoenician felled by the heat I think to myself.’
It occurred to Hal that although he lied about meaningless details to Orin on the phone it had never occurred to him to
consider whether Orin was ever doing the same thing. This induced a spell of involuted marijuana-type thinking that led quickly,
again, to Hal's questioning whether or not he was really all that intelligent. 'SATs are six weeks away and Pemulis is less and less
helpful on the math, if you want to know what I'm doing all day.’
'The man's face made a sizzling noise when it hit the pavement. Like bacon-caliber sizzling. He's still lying there, I see out the
window. He's not moving anymore. Everyone's avoiding him, going around him. He looks too hot to touch. A little Hispanic kid
made off with his hat. Have y'all had snow yet? Describe snow for me again, Hallie, I'm begging you.’
'So you go around with this image of me sitting around during the day masturbating, is what you're saying.’
'I've actually been thinking of maneuvering for the whole Kleenex concession at E.T.A., as a venture.’
'That of course would mean actually contacting C.T. and the Moms.’
'Me and this forward-looking reserve QB have been making inquiries.
Putting out feelers. Volume discounts, preferred-vendor status. Maybe a sideline in unscented lubricants. Any thoughts?’
'O.?’
'I'm sitting here actually missing New Orleans, kid. It'd be just coming up on Advent I think. The Quarter always gets really
quaint and demure during Advent. It almost never rains down there during Advent for some reason. People remark on it, the
phenomena.’
'You sound somehow a little off to me, O.’
Tm heat-crazed. I might be dehydrated. What's that word? Everything's looked all beige and powdery all day. Trash bags
have been swelling up and spontaneously combusting out in the dumpsters. These sudden rains of coffee grounds and orange
peels. The Displacement guys in the barges have to wear asbestos gloves. Also I met somebody. Hallie, a possibly very special
somebody.’
'Uh oh. Dinnertime. Triangle's a-clangín' over in West.’
'Hey Halíie though? Hang on. Kidding aside for a second. What all do you know about Separatism?’
Hal stopped for a moment. 'You mean in Canada?’
'Is there any other kind?’
Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House4949 was founded in the Year of the Whopper by a nail-tough old chronic
drug addict and alcoholic who had spent the bulk of his adult life under the supervision of the Massachusetts Department of
Corrections before discovering the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous at M.D.C.-Walpole and undergoing a sudden experience
of total self-surrender and spiritual awakening in the shower during his fourth month of continuous AA sobriety. This recovered
addict/ alcoholic — who in his new humility so valued AA's tradition of anonymity that he refused even to use his first name, and
was known in Boston AA simply as the Guy Who Didn't Even Use His First Name — opened Ennet House within a year of his
parole, determined to pass on to other chronic drug addicts and alcoholics what had been so freely given to him in the E-Tier
shower.
Ennet House leases a former physicians' dormitory in the Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital Complex, managed by the
United States Veterans Administration. Ennet House is equipped to provide 22 male and female clients a nine-month period of
closely supervised residency and treatment.
Ennet House was not only founded but originally renovated, furnished, and decorated by the nameless local AA ex-con, who 
— since sobriety doesn't exactly mean instant sainthood — used to lead select teams of early-recovery dope fiends on after-hours
boosting expeditions at area furniture and housewares establishments.
This legendary anonymous founder was an extremely tough old Boston AA galoot who believed passionately that everyone,
no matter how broad the trail of slime they dragged in behind them, deserved the same chance at sobriety through utterly total
surrender he'd been granted. It's a kind of extremely tough love found almost exclusively in tough old Boston galoots.5050 He
sometimes, the founder, in the House's early days, required incoming residents to attempt to eat rocks — as in like rocks from the
ground — to demonstrate their willingness to go to any lengths for the gift of sobriety. The Massachusetts Department of Public
Health's Division of Substance Abuse Services eventually requested that this practice be discontinued.
Ennet was not any part of the nameless Ennet House founder's name, by the way.
The rock thing — which has become a grim bit of mythopoeia now trotted out to illustrate how cushy the present Ennet
residents have it — was probably not as whacko as it seemed to Division of S.A.S., since many of the things veteran AA's ask
newcomers to do and believe seem not much less whacko than trying to chew feldspar. E.g. be so strung out you can feel your
pulse in your eyeballs, have the shakes so badly you make a spatter-painting on the wall every time somebody hands you a cup of
coffee, have the life-forms out of the corner of your eye be your only distraction from the chainsaw-racing chatter in your head,
sitting there, and have some old lady with cat-hair on her nylons come at you to hug you and tell you to make a list of all the
things you're grateful for today: you'll wish you had some feldspar handy, too.
In the Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install Upgrade For
Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office Or Mobile,5151 the nameless founder's death of a cerebral hemorrhage at age
sixty-eight went unremarked outside the Boston AA community.
FROM INTERNAL INTERLACE-SYSTEM E-MAIL MEMO
CAH-NNE22-3575634-22, CLAIMS ADJUSTMENT HEADQUARTERS, STATE FARM INSURANCE COMPANIES,
INC., BLOOMINGTON IL 26 JUNE
YEAR OF DAIRY PRODUCTS FROM THE AMERICAN HEARTLAND
FROM: murrayf @clmshqnne22.626INTCOM TO: powellg/sanchezm/parryk @ clmhqnne.626INTCOM MESSAGE: guys,
get a load, my def. of a bad day. metro boston region 22 this spring, comp claim, witnesses deposed by boston wrkmans comp.
establish claimant Impaired and the emerg. room
rept. lists a blood-alcohol of .3+, so be pleased to know we're clear on the 357-5 liability end. but basic facts below confirmed
by witnesses and CYD accident rept. here's just the first page, get a load:
murrayf ©clmshqnne22.626INTCOM 626YDPAH0112317/p. 1
Dwayne R. Glynn 1 76N. Faneuil Blvd. Stoneham, Mass. 021808754/4 June 21, YODPFTAH
Workmans Accident Claims Office State Farm Insurance 1 State Farm Plaza Normal, III. 617062262/6
Dear Sir:
I am writing in response to your request for additional information. In block #3 of the accident reporting form, I put "trying to
do the job alone", as the cause of my accident. You said in your letter that I should explain more fully and I trust that the following
details will be sufficient.
I am a bricklayer by trade. On the day of the accident, March 27, I was working alone on the roof of a new six story building.
When I completed my work, I discovered that I had about 900 kg. of brick left over. Rather than laboriously carry the bricks down
by hand, I decided to lower them in a barrel by using a pulley which fortunately was attached to the side of the building at the
sixth floor. Securing the rope at ground level, I went up to the roof, swung the barrel out and loaded the brick into it. Then I went
back to the ground and untied the rope, holding it tightly to insure a slow descent of the 900 kg of bricks. You will note in block
#11 of the accident reporting form that I weigh 75 kg.
Due to my surprise at being jerked off the ground so suddenly, I lost my presence of mind and forgot to let go of the rope.
Needless to say, I proceeded at a rapid rate up the side of the building. In the vicinity of the third floor I met the barrel coming
down. This explains the fractured skull and the broken collar bone.
Slowed only slightly, I continued my rapid ascent not stopping until the fingers of my right hand were two knuckles deep into
the pulleys. Fortunately, by this time, I had regained my presence of mind, and was able to hold tightly to the rope in spite of
considerable pain. At approximately the same time, however, the barrel of bricks hit the ground and the bottom fell out of the
barrel from the force of hitting the ground.
Devoid of the weight of the bricks, the barrel now weighed approximately 30 kg. I refer you again to my weight of 75 kg in
block #11. As you could imagine, still holding the rope, I began a rather rapid descent from the pulley down the side of the
building. In the vicinity of the third floor, I met the barrel coming up. This accounts for the two fractured ankles and the laceration
of my legs and lower body.
The encounter with the barrel slowed me enough to lessen my impact with the brick-strewn ground below. I am sorry to
report, however, that as I lay there on the bricks in considerable pain, unable to stand or move and watching the empty barrel six
stories above me, I again lost my presence of mind and unfortunately let go of the rope, causing the barrel to begin a
endtranslNTCOM626
HAL INCANDENZA'S FIRST EXTANT WRITTEN COMMENT ON ANYTHING EVEN REMOTELY FILMIC,
SUBMITTED IN MR.
OGILVIE'S SEVENTH-GRADE 'INTRODUCTION to ENTERTAINMENT STUDIES' (2 TERMS, REQUIRED),
ENFIELD
TENNIS ACADEMY, 21 FEBRUARY IN THE YEAR OF THE PERDUE
WONDERCHICKEN, @ FOUR YEARS AFTER THE DEMISE OF
BROADCAST TELEVISION, ONE YEAR AFTER DR. JAMES O.
INCANDENZA PASSED FROM THIS LIFE, A SUBMISSION
RECEIVING JUST A B/B+, DESPITE OVERALL POSITIVE
FEEDBACK, MOSTLY BECAUSE ITS CONCLUDING WAS
NEITHER SET UP BY THE ESSAY'S BODY NOR SUPPORTED, OGILVIE POINTED OUT, BY ANYTHING MORE
than SUBJECTIVE INTUITION AND RHETORICAL FLOURISH.
Chief Steve McGarrett of 'Hawaii Five-0' and Captain Frank Furillo of 'Hill Street Blues' are useful for seeing how our North
American idea of the hero changed from the B.S. 1970s era of 'Hawaii Five-0' to the B.S. 1980s era of 'Hill Street Blues.’
Chief Steve McGarrett is a classically modern hero of action. He acts out. It is what he does. The camera is always on him.
He is hardly ever offscreen. He has just one case per week. The audience knows what the case is and also knows, by the end of
Act One, who is guilty. Because the audience knows the truth before Steve McGarrett does, there is no mystery, there is only
Steve McGarrett. The drama of 'Hawaii Five-0' is watching the hero in action, watching Steve McGarrett stalk and strut, homing
in on the truth. Homing in is the essence of what the classic hero of modern action does.
Steve McGarrett is not weighed down by administrative State-Políce-Chief chores, or by females, or friends, or emotions, or
any sorts of conflicting demands on his attention. His field of action is bare of diverting clutter. Thus Chief Steve McGarrett
single-mindedly acts to refashion a truth the audience already knows into an object of law, justice, modern heroism.
In contrast, Captain Frank Furillo is what used to be designated a 'post'-modern hero. Viz., a hero whose virtues are suited to a
more complex and corporate American era. I.e., a hero of reaction. Captain Frank Furillo does not investigate cases or singlemindedly home in. He commands a precinct. He is a bureaucrat, and his heroism is bureaucratic, with a genius for navigating
cluttered fields. In each broadcast episode of 'Hill Street Blues,' Captain Frank Furillo is beset by petty distractions on all sides
from the very beginning of Act One. Not one but eleven complex cases, each with suspects and snitches and investigating officers
and angry community leaders and victims' families all clamoring for redress. Hundreds of tasks to delegate, egos to massage,
promises to make, promises from last week to keep. Two or three cops' domestic troubles. Payroll vouchers. Duty logs. Corruption
to be tempted by and agonized over. A Police Chief who's a political parody, a hyperactive son, an ex-wife who haunts the
frosted-glass cubicle that serves as Frank Furillo's office (whereas Steve McGarrett's B.S. 1970s office more closely resembled the
libraries of landed gentry, hushed behind two heavy doors and wainscot-ted in thick, tropical oak), plus a coldly attractive Public
Defendress who wants to talk about did this suspect get Mirandized in Spanish and can Frank stop coming too soon he came too
soon again last night maybe he should get into some kind of stress counselling. Plus all the weekly moral dilemmas and double
binds his even-handed bureaucratic heroism gets Captain Frank Furillo into.
Captain Frank Furillo of 'Hill Street Blues' is a 'post'-modern hero, a virtuoso of triage and compromise and administration.
Frank Furillo retains his sanity, composure, and superior grooming in the face of a barrage of distracting, unheroic demands that
would have left Chief Steve McGarrett slumped, unkempt, and chewing his knuckle in administrative confusion.
In further contrast to Chief Steve McGarrett, Captain Frank Furillo is rarely filmed tight or full-front. He is usually one part of
a frenetic, moving pan by the program's camera. In contrast, 'Hawaii Five-o' 's camera crew never even used a dolly, favoring a
steady tripodic close-up on McGar-rett's face that today seems more reminiscent of romantic portraiture than filmed drama.
What kind of hero comes after McGarrett's Irishized modern cowboy, the lone man of action riding lonely herd in paradise?
Furillo's is a whole different kind of loneliness. The 'post'-modern hero was a heroic part of the herd, responsible for all of what he
is part of, responsible to everyone, his lonely face as placid under pressure as a cow's face. The jut-jawed hero of action ('Hawaii
Five-0') becomes the mild-eyed hero of reaction ('Hill Street Blues,' a decade later).
And, as we have observed thus far in our class, we, as a North American audience, have favored the more Stoic, corporate
hero of reactive probity ever since, some might be led to argue 'trapped' in the reactive moral ambiguity of 'post-' and 'post-post'-
modern culture.
But what comes next? What North American hero can hope to succeed the placid Frank? We await, I predict, the hero of «o«-
action, the catatonic hero, the one beyond calm, divorced from all stimulus, carried here and there across sets by burly extras
whose blood sings with retrograde amines.
ENORMOUS, ELECTROLYSIS-RASHED 'JOURNALIST' 'HELEN’
STEEPLY'S ONLY PUTATIVE PUBLISHED ARTICLE BEFORE
BEGINNING HER SOFT PROFILE ON PHOENIX CARDINALS
PUNTER ORIN J. INCANDENZA, AND HER ONLY PUTATIVE
PUBLISHED ARTICLE TO HAVE ANYTHING OVERTLY TO DO
WITH GOOD OLD METROPOLITAN BOSTON, 10 AUGUST IN THE
YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT, FOUR YEARS
AFTER OPTICAL THEORIST, ENTREPRENEUR, TENNIS
ACADEMICIAN, AND AVANT-GARDE FILMMAKER JAMES O.
INCANDENZA TOOK HIS OWN LIFE BY PUTTING HIS HEAD IN A
MICROWAVE OVEN
Moment Magazine has learned that the tragic fate of the second North American citizen to receive a Jarvik IX Exterior
Artificial Heart has, sadly, been kept from the North American people. The woman, a 46-year-old Boston accountant with
irreversible restenosis of the heart, responded so well to the replacement of her defective heart with a Jarvik IX Exterior Artificial
Heart that within weeks she was able to resume the active lifestyle she had so enjoyed before stricken, pursuing her active
schedule with the extraordinary prosthesis portably installed in a stylish Etienne Aigner purse. The heart's ventricular tubes ran up
to shunts in the woman's arms and ferried life-giving blood back and forth between her living, active body and the extraordinary
heart in her purse.
Her tragic, untimely, and, some might say, cruelly ironic fate, however, has been the subject of the all too frequent silence
needless tragedies are buried beneath when they cast the callous misunderstanding of public officials in the negative light of
public knowledge. It took the sort of searching and fearless journalistic doggedness readers have come to respect in Moment to
unearth the tragically negative facts of her fate.
The 46-year-old recipient of the Jarvik IX Exterior Artificial Heart was actively window shopping in Cambridge,
Massachusetts' fashionable Harvard Square when a transvestíte purse snatcher, a drug addict with a criminal record all too well
known to public officials, bizarrely outfitted in a strapless cocktail dress, spike heels, tattered feather boa, and auburn wig, brutally 
tore the life sustaining purse from the woman's unwitting grasp.
The active, alert woman gave chase to the purse snatching 'woman' for as long as she could, plaintively shouting to passers by
the words 'Stop her! She stole my heart!' on the fashionable sidewalk crowded with shoppers, reportedly shouting repeatedly, 'She
stole my heart, stop her!' In response to her plaintive calls, tragically, misunderstanding shoppers and passers by merely shook
their heads at one another, smiling knowingly at what they ignorantly presumed to be yet another alternative lifestyle's relationship gone sour. A duo of Cambridge, Massachusetts, patrolmen, whose names are being withheld from Moment's dogged
queries, were publicly heard to passively quip, 'Happens all the time,' as the victimized woman staggered frantically past in the
wake of the fleet transvestite, shouting for help for her stolen heart.
That the prosthetic crime victim gave spirited chase for over four blocks before collapsing onto her empty chest is testimony
to the impressive capacity of the Jarvik IX replacement procedure, was the anonymous comment of a public medical official
reached for comment by Moment.
The drug crazed purse snatcher, informed officials passively speculated, may have found even his hardened conscience
moved by the life saving prosthesis the ill gotten woman's Aigner purse revealed, which runs on the same rechargeable power cell
as an electric man's razor, and may well have continued to beat and bleed for a period of time in the rudely disconnected purse.
The purse snatcher's response to this conscience appears to have been cruelly striking the Jarvik IX Exterior Artificial Heart
repeatedly with a stone or small hammer-like tool, where its remains were found some hours later behind the historic Boston
Public Library in fashionable Copley Square.
Is medical science's awe inspiring march forward, however, always doomed to include such tragic incidents of ignorance and
callous loss, one might ask. Such seems to be the stance of North American officials. If indeed so, the victims' fate is frequently
kept from the light of public knowledge.
And the facts of the case's outcome? The 46-year-old deceased woman's formerly active, alert brain was removed and
dissected six weeks later by a Brigham and Women's City of Boston Hospital medical student reportedly so moved by her terse
toe tag's account of the victim's heartless fate that he confessed to Moment a temporary inability to physically wield the power
saw of his assigned task.
ALPHABETICAL TALLY OF SÉPARATISTEUR / ANTI-O.N.A.N.
GROUPS WHOSE OPPOSITION
TO INTERDEPENDENCE / RECONFIGURATION is DESIGNATED BY R.C.M.P. AND U.S.O.U.S. AS
TERRORIST / EXTORTIONIST IN CHARACTER
(Q=Québecois, E=Environmental, S=Separatist, V=Violent, W=Extremely Violent)
— Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents (Q, S, W)
— Le Bloc Québecois (Q, S, E)
— Calgarian Pro-Canadian Phalanx (E, V)
— Les Fils de Montcalm (Q, E)
— Les Fils de Papineau (Q, S, V)
— Le Front de la Liberation de la Quebec (Q, S, W)
— Le Parti Québecois (Q, S, E)
WRY — THOUGH IN THE EARLY DAYS OF INTERLACE'S
INTERNETTED TELEPUTERS THAT OPERATED OFF LARGELY
THE SAME FIBER-DIGITAL GRID AS THE PHONE COMPANIES, THE ADVENT OF VIDEO-TELEPHONING
(A.K.A. 'VIDEOPHONY')
ENJOYED AN INTERVAL OF HUGE CONSUMER POPULARITY —
CALLERS THRILLED AT THE IDEA OF PHONE-INTERFACING
BOTH AURALLY AND FACIALLY (THE LITTLE FIRST-GENERATION PHONE-VIDEO CAMERAS BEING TOO
CRUDE AND NARROW-APERTURED FOR ANYTHING MUCH MORE THAN FACIAL CLOSE-UPS) ON FIRSTGENERATION TELEPUTERS THAT AT THAT TIME WERE LITTLE MORE THAN HIGH-TECH
TV SETS, THOUGH OF COURSE THEY HAD THAT LITTLE 'INTELLIGENT-AGENT' HOMUNCULAR ICON THAT
WOULD
APPEAR AT THE LOWER-RIGHT OF A BROADCAST/CABLE
PROGRAM AND TELL YOU THE TIME AND TEMPERATURE
OUTSIDE OR REMIND YOU TO TAKE YOUR BLOOD-PRESSURE
MEDICATION OR ALERT YOU TO A PARTICULARLY COMPELLING ENTERTAINMENT-OPTION NOW
COMING UP ON
CHANNEL LIKE 491 OR SOMETHING, OR OF COURSE NOW ALERTING YOU TO AN INCOMING VIDEO-PHONE
CALL AND THEN TAP-DANCING WITH A LITTLE ICONIC STRAW BOATER AND CANE JUST UNDER A MENU OF
POSSIBLE OPTIONS FOR
RESPONSE, AND CALLERS DID LOVE THEIR LITTLE
HOMUNCULAR ICONS — BUT WHY, WITHIN LIKE 16 MONTHS
OR 5 SALES QUARTERS, THE TUMESCENT DEMAND CURVE FOR
'VIDEOPHONY' SUDDENLY COLLAPSED LIKE A KICKED TENT, SO THAT, BY THE YEAR OF THE DEPEND
ADULT UNDERGARMENT, FEWER THAN 10% OF ALL PRIVATE TELEPHONE COMMUNICATIONS UTILIZED ANY
VIDEO-IMAGE-FIBER DATA-TRANSFERS OR COINCIDENT PRODUCTS AND SERVICES, THE AVERAGE U.S.
PHONE-USER DECIDING THAT S/HE ACTUALLY PREFERRED THE RETROGRADE OLD LOW-TECH BELL-ERA
VOICE-ONLY TELEPHONIC INTERFACE AFTER ALL, A PREFERENTIAL ABOUT-FACE THAT COST A GOOD
MANY PRECIPITANT VIDEO-TELEPHONY-RELATED ENTREPRENEURS THEIR SHIRTS, PLUS DESTABILIZING
TWO HIGHLY RESPECTED MUTUAL FUNDS THAT HAD GROUND-FLOORED HEAVILY IN VIDEO-PHONE
TECHNOLOGY, AND 
VERY NEARLY WIPING OUT THE MARYLAND STATE EMPLOYEES' RETIREMENT SYSTEM'S FREDDIE-MAC
FUND, A FUND WHOSE ADMINISTRATOR'S MISTRESS'S BROTHER HAD BEEN AN ALMOST MANICALLY
PRECIPITANT VIDEO-PHONE-TECHNOLOGY ENTREPRENEUR . . . AND BUT SO WHY THE ABRUPT CONSUMER
RETREAT BACK TO GOOD OLD VOICE-ONLY TELEPHONING?
The answer, in a kind of trivalent nutshell, is: (1) emotional stress, (2) physical vanity, (3) a certain queer kind of selfobliterating logic in the microeconomics of consumer high-tech.
fl) It turned out that there was something terribly stressful about visual telephone interfaces that hadn't been stressful at all
about voice-only interfaces. Videophone consumers seemed suddenly to realize that they'd been subject to an insidious but wholly
marvelous delusion about conventional voice-only telephony. They'd never noticed it before, the delusion — it's like it was so
emotionally complex that it could be countenanced only in the context of its loss. Good old traditional audio-only phone
conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting
you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her. A traditional aural-only conversation — utilizing a handheld phone whose earpiece contained only 6 little pinholes but whose mouthpiece (rather significantly, it later seemed) contained
(62) or 36 little pinholes — let you enter a kind of highway-hypnotic semi-attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look
around the room, doodle, fine-groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your cuticles, compose phone-pad haiku, stir things on
the stove; you could even carry on a whole separate additional sign-language-and-exaggerated-facial-expression type of
conversation with people right there in the room with you, all while seeming to be right there attending closely to the voice on the
phone. And yet — and this was the retrospectively marvelous part — even as you were dividing your attention between the phone
call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the
other end's attention might be similarly divided. During a traditional call, e.g., as you let's say performed a close tactile blemishscan of your chin, you were in no way oppressed by the thought that your phonemate was perhaps also devoting a good
percentage of her attention to a close tactile blemish-scan. It was an illusion and the illusion was aural and aurally supported: the
phone-line's other end's voice was dense, tightly compressed, and vectored right into your ear, enabling you to imagine that the
voice's owner's attention was similarly compressed and focused . . . even though your own attention was not, was the thing. This
bilateral illusion of unilateral attention was almost infantilely gratifying from an emotional standpoint: you got to believe you
were receiving somebody's complete attention without having to return it. Regarded with the objectivity of hindsight, the illusion
appears arational, almost literally fantastic: it would be like being able both to lie and to trust other people at the same time.
Video telephony rendered the fantasy insupportable. Callers now found they had to compose the same sort of earnest, slightly
overintense listener's expression they had to compose for in-person exchanges. Those callers who out of unconscious habit
succumbed to fuguelike doodling or pants-crease-adjustment now came off looking rude, absentminded, or childishly selfabsorbed. Callers who even more unconsciously blemish-scanned or nostril-explored looked up to find horrified expressions on
the video-faces at the other end. All of which resulted in videophonic stress.
Even worse, of course, was the traumatic expulsion-from-Eden feeling of looking up from tracing your thumb's outline on the
Reminder Pad or adjusting the old Unit's angle of repose in your shorts and actually seeing your videophonic interfacee idly strip a
shoelace of its gumlet as she talked to you, and suddenly realizing your whole infantile fantasy of commanding your partner's
attention while you yourself got to fugue-doodle and make little genital-adjustments was deluded and insupportable and that you
were actually commanding not one bit more attention than you were paying, here. The whole attention business was monstrously
stressful, video callers found.
(2) And the videophonic stress was even worse if you were at all vain. I.e. if you worried at all about how you looked. As in
to other people. Which all kidding aside who doesn't. Good old aural telephone calls could be fielded without makeup, toupee,
surgical prostheses, etc. Even without clothes, if that sort of thing rattled your saber. But for the image-conscious, there was of
course no such answer-as-you-are informality about visual-video telephone calls, which consumers began to see were less like
having the good old phone ring than having the doorbell ring and having to throw on clothes and attach prostheses and do hairchecks in the foyer mirror before answering the door.
But the real coffin-nail for videophony involved the way callers' faces looked on their TP screen, during calls. Not their
callers' faces, but their own, when they saw them on video. It was a three-button affair:, after all, to use the TP's cartridge-card's
Video-Record option to record both pulses in a two-way visual call and play the call back and see how your face had actually
looked to the other person during the call. This sort of appearance-check was no more resistible than a mirror. But the experience
proved almost universally horrifying. People were horrified at how their own faces appeared on a TP screen. It wasn't just
'Anchorman's Bloat,' that well-known impression of extra weight that video inflicts on the face. It was worse. Even with high-end
TPs' high-def viewer-screens, consumers perceived something essentially blurred and moist-looking about their phone-faces, a
shiny pallid indefiniteness that struck them as not just unflattering but somehow evasive, furtive, untrustworthy, unlikable. In an
early and ominous InterLace/G.T.E. focus-group survey that was all but ignored in a storm of entrepreneurial sci-fi-tech
enthusiasm, almost 60% of respondents who received visual access to their own faces during videophonic calls specifically used
the terms untrustworthy, unlikable, or hard to like in describing their own visage's appearance, with a phenomenally ominous 71
% of senior-citizen respondents specifically comparing their video-faces to that of Richard Nixon during the Nixon-Kennedy
debates of B.S. 1960.
The proposed solution to what the telecommunications industry's psychological consultants termed Video-Physiognomic
Dysphoria (or VPD) was, of course, the advent of High-Definition Masking; and in fact it was those entrepreneurs who gravitated
toward the production of high-definition videophonic imaging and then outright masks who got in and out of the short-lived
videophonic era with their shirts plus solid additional nets.
Mask-wise, the initial option of High-Definition Photographic Imaging — i.e. taking the most flattering elements of a variety
of flattering multi-angle photos of a given phone-consumer and — thanks to existing image-configuration equipment already
pioneered by the cosmetics and law-enforcement industries — combining them into a wildly attractive high-def broadcastable
composite of a face wearing an earnest, slightly overintense expression of complete attention — was quickly supplanted by the
more inexpensive and byte-economical option of (using the exact same cosmetic-and-FBI software) actually casting the enhanced 
facial image in a form-fitting polybutylene-resin mask, and consumers soon found that the high up-front cost of a permanent
wearable mask was more than worth it, considering the stress- and VFD-reduction benefits, and the convenient Velcro straps for
the back of the mask and caller's head cost peanuts; and for a couple fiscal quarters phone/cable companies were able to rally
VPD-afflicted consumers' confidence by working out a horizontally integrated deal where free composite-and-masking services
came with a videophone hookup. The high-def masks, when not in use, simply hung on a small hook on the side of a TP's phoneconsole, admittedly looking maybe a bit surreal and discomfiting when detached and hanging there empty and wrinkled, and
sometimes there were potentially awkward mistaken-identity snafus involving multi-user family or company phones and the
hurried selection and attachment of the wrong mask taken from some long row of empty hanging masks — but all in all the masks
seemed initially like a viable industry response to the vanity,-stress,-and-Nixonian-facial-image problem.
(2 and maybe also 3) But combine the natural entrepreneurial instinct to satisfy all sufficiently high consumer demand, on the
one hand, with what appears to be an almost equally natural distortion in the way persons tend to see themselves, and it becomes
possible to account historically for the speed with which the whole high-def-videophonic-mask thing spiralled totally out of
control. Not only is it weirdly hard to evaluate what you yourself look like, like whether you're good-looking or not — e.g. try
looking in the mirror and determining where you stand in the attractiveness-hierarchy with anything like the objective ease you
can determine whether just about anyone else you know is good-looking or not — but it turned out that consumers' instinctively
skewed self-perception, plus vanity-related stress, meant that they began preferring and then outright demanding videophone
masks that were really quite a lot better-looking than they themselves were in person. High-def mask-entrepreneurs ready and
willing to supply not just verisimilitude but aesthetic enhancement — stronger chins, smaller eye-bags, air-brushed scars and
wrinkles — soon pushed the original mimetic-mask-entrepreneurs right out of the market. In a gradually unsubtlizing progression,
within a couple more sales-quarters most consumers were now using masks so undeniably better-looking on videophones than
their real faces were in person, transmitting to one another such horrendously skewed and enhanced masked images of themselves,
that enormous psychosocial stress began to result, large numbers of phone-users suddenly reluctant to leave home and interface
personally with people who, they feared, were now habituated to seeing their far-better-looking masked selves on the phone and
would on seeing them in person suffer (so went the callers' phobia) the same illusion-shattering aesthetic disappointment that, e.g.,
certain women who always wear makeup give people the first time they ever see them without makeup.
The social anxieties surrounding the phenomenon psych-consultants termed Optimistically Misrepresentational Masking (or
OMM) intensified steadily as the tiny crude first-generation videophone cameras' technology improved to where the aperture
wasn't as narrow, and now the higher-end tiny cameras could countenance and transmit more or less full-body images. Certain
psychologically unscrupulous entrepreneurs began marketing full-body polybutylene and -urethane 2-D cutouts — sort of like the
headless muscleman and bathing-beauty cutouts you could stand behind and position your chin on the cardboard neck-stump of
for cheap photos at the beach, only these full-body videophone-masks were vastly more high-tech and convincing-looking. Once
you added variable 2-D wardrobe, hair- and eye-color options, various aesthetic enlargements and reductions, etc., costs started to
press the envelope of mass-market affordability, even though there was at the same time horrific social pressure to be able to
afford the very best possible masked 2-D body-image, to keep from feeling comparatively hideous-looking on the phone. How
long, then, could one expect it to have been before the relentless entrepreneurial drive toward an ever-better mousetrap conceived
of the Transmittable Tableau (a.k.a. TT), which in retrospect was probably the really sharp business-end of the videophonic
coffin-nail. With TTs, facial and bodily masking could now be dispensed with altogether and replaced with the video-transmitted
image of what was essentially a heavily doctored still-photograph, one of an incredibly fit and attractive and well-turned-out
human being, someone who actually resembled you the caller only in such limited respects as like race and limb-number, the
photo's face focused attentively in the direction of the video-phonic camera from amid the sumptuous but not ostentatious
appointments of the sort of room that best reflected the image of yourself you wanted to transmit, etc.
The Tableaux were simply high-quality transmission-ready photographs, scaled down to diorama-like proportions and fitted
with a plastic holder over the videophone camera, not unlike a lens-cap. Extremely good-looking but not terrifically successful
entertainment-celebrities — the same sort who in decades past would have swelled the cast-lists of infomercials — found
themselves in demand as models for various high-end videophone Tableaux.
Because they involved simple transmission-ready photography instead of computer imaging and enhancement, the Tableaux
could be mass-produced and commensurately priced, and for a brief time they helped ease the tension between the high cost of
enhanced body-masking and the monstrous aesthetic pressures videophony exerted on callers, not to mention also providing
employment for set-designers, photographers, airbrushers, and infomercial-level celebrities hard-pressed by the declining fortunes
of broadcast television advertising.
(3) But there's some sort of revealing lesson here in the beyond-short-term viability-curve of advances in consumer
technology. The career of videophony conforms neatly to this curve's classically annular shape: First there's some sort of terrific,
sci-fi-like advance in consumer tech — like from aural to video phoning — which advance always, however, has certain unforeseen disadvantages for the consumer; and then but the market-niches created by those disadvantages — like people's
stressfully vain repulsion at their own videophonic appearance — are ingeniously filled via sheer entrepreneurial verve; and yet
the very advantages of these ingenious disadvantage-compensations seem all too often to undercut the original high-tech advance,
resulting in consumer-recidivism and curve-closure and massive shirt-loss for precipitant investors. In the present case, the stressand-vanity-compensations' own evolution saw video-callers rejecting first their own faces and then even their own heavily masked
and enhanced physical likenesses and finally covering the video-cameras altogether and transmitting attractively stylized static
Tableaux to one another's TPs. And, behind these lens-cap dioramas and transmitted Tableaux, callers of course found that they
were once again stresslessly invisible, unvainly makeup- and toupeeless and baggy-eyed behind their celebrity-dioramas, once
again free — since once again unseen — to doodle, blemish-scan, manicure, crease-check — while on their screen, the attractive,
intensely attentive face of the well-appointed celebrity on the other end's Tableau reassured them that they were the objects of a
concentrated attention they themselves didn't have to exert.
And of course but these advantages were nothing other than the once-lost and now-appreciated advantages of good old Bellera blind aural-only telephoning, with its 6 and (62) pinholes. The only difference was that now these expensive silly unreal 
stylized Tableaux were being transmitted between TPs on high-priced video-fiber lines. How much time, after this realization sank
in and spread among consumers (mostly via phone, interestingly), would any micro-econometrist expect to need to pass before
high-tech visual videophony was mostly abandoned, then, a return to good old telephoning not only dictated by common
consumer sense but actually after a while culturally approved as a kind of chic integrity, not Ludditism but a kind of retrograde
transcendence of sci-fi-ish high-tech for its own sake, a transcendence of the vanity and the slavery to high-tech fashion that
people view as so unattractive in one another. In other words a return to aural-only telephony became, at the closed curve's end, a
kind of status-symbol of anti-vanity, such that only callers utterly lacking in self-awareness continued to use videophony and
Tableaux, to say nothing of masks, and these tacky facsimile-using people became ironic cultural symbols of tacky vain slavery to
corporate PR and high-tech novelty, became the Subsidized Era's tacky equivalents of people with leisure suits, black velvet
paintings, sweater-vests for their poodles, electric zirconium jewelry, NoCoat Lin-guaScrapers, and c. Most communications
consumers put their Tableaux-dioramas at the back of a knick-knack shelf and covered their cameras with standard black lenscaps and now used their phone consoles' little mask-hooks to hang these new little plasticene address-and-phone diaries specially
made with a little receptacle at the top of the binding for convenient hanging from former mask-hooks. Even then, of course, the
bulk of U.S. consumers remained verifiably reluctant to leave home and teleputer and to interface personally, though this
phenomenon's endurance can't be attributed to the videophony-fad per se, and anyway the new panagoraphobia served to open
huge new entrepreneurial teleputerized markets for home-shopping and -delivery, and didn't cause much industry concern.
Four times per annum, in these chemically troubled times, the Organization of North American Nations Tennis Association's
Juniors Division sends a young toxicologist with cornsilk hair and a smooth wide button of a nose and a blue O.N.A.N.T.A. blazer
to collect urine samples from any student at any accredited tennis academy ranked higher than =tt=64 continen-tally in his or her
age-division. Competitive junior tennis is meant to be good clean fun. It's October in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.
An impressive percentage of the kids at E.T.A. are in their divisions' top 64. On urine-sample day, the juniors form two long lines
that trail out of the locker rooms and up the stairs and then run agnate and coed across the E.T.A. Comm.-Ad. Bldg. lobby with its
royal-blue shag and hardwood panelling and great glass cases of trophies and plaques. It takes about an hour to get from the
middle of the line to your sex's locker room's stall-area, where either the blond young toxicologist or on the girls' side a nurse
whose severe widow's peak tops her square face with a sort of bisected forehead dispenses a plastic cup with a pale-green lid and a
strip of white medical tape with a name and a monthly ranking and 10-15-Y.D.A.U. and Enf.T.A. neatly printed in a six-pt. font.
Probably about a fourth of the ranking players over, say, fifteen at the Enfield Tennis Academy cannot pass a standard North
American GC/MS5252 urine scan. These, seventeen-year-old Michael Pemulis's nighttime customers, now become also, four
times yearly, his daytime customers. Clean urine is ten adjusted dollars a cc.
'Get your urine here!' Pemulis and Trevor Axford become quarterly urine vendors; they wear those papery oval caps ballparkvendors wear; they spend three months collecting and stashing the urine of sub-ten-year-old players, warm pale innocent childish
urine that's produced in needly little streams and the only G/M scan it couldn't pass would be like an Ovaltine scan or something;
then every third month Pemulis and Axford work the agnate unsupervised line that snakes across the blue lobby shag, selling little
Visine bottles of urine out of an antique vendor's tub for ballpark wieners, snagged for a song from a Fenway Park wienerman
fallen on hard offseason times, a big old box of dull dimpled tin with a strap in Sox colors that goes around the back of the neck
and keeps the vendor's hands free to make change.
'Urine!’
'Clinically sterile urine!’
'Piping hot!’
'Urine you'd be proud to take home and introduce to the folks!’
Trevor Axford handles cash-flow. Pemulis dispenses little conical-tipped Visine bottles of juvenile urine, bottles easily
rendered discreet in underarm, sock or panty.
'Urine trouble? Urine luck!’
Quarterly sales breakdowns indicate slightly more male customers than female customers, for urine. Tomorrow morning,
E.T.A. custodial workers — Kenkle and Brandt, or Dave ('Fall Down Very') Harde, the well-loved old janitor laid off from Boston
College for contracting narcolepsy, or thick-ankled Irish women from the semi-tenements down the hill across Comm. Ave., or
else sullen and shifty-eyed residents from Ennet House, the halfway facility at the bottom of the hill's other side in the old VA
Hospital complex, hard-looking and generally sullen types who come and do nine months of menial-type work for the 32 hours a
week their treatment-contract requires — will empty scores of little empty plastic Visine bottles from subdorm wastebaskets into
the dumpster-nest behind the E.T.A. Employee parking lot, from which dumpsters Pemulis will then get Mario In-candenza and
some of the naïver of the original ephebic urine-donators themselves to remove, sterilize, and rebox the bottles under the guise of
a rousing game of Who-Can-Find,-Boil,-And-Box-The-Most-Empty-Visine-Bottles-In-A-Three-Hour-Period-Without-Any-KindOf-Authority-Figure-Knowing-What-You're-Up-To, a game which Mario had found thumpingly weird when Pemulis introduced
him to it three years ago, but which Mario's really come to look forward to, since he's found he has a real sort of mystical intuitive
knack for finding Visine bottles in the sedimentary layers of packed dumpsters, and always seems to win hands-down, and if
you're poor old Mario Incandenza you take your competitive strokes where you can find them. T. Axford then stashes and recycles
the bottles, and packaging overhead is nil. He and Pemulis keep the wiener-tub stashed under a discarded Yarmouth sail in the
back of the used tow truck they'd chipped in on with Hal and Jim Struck and another guy who's since graduated E.T.A. and now
plays for Pepperdine, and paid to have reconditioned and the rusty chain and hook that hung from the tow truck's back-tilted
derrick replaced with a gleamingly new chain and thick hook — which get used really only twice a year, spring and late fall, for
brief intervals of short-distance hauling during the all-weather Lung's dismantling and erection, plus occasionally pulling a
paralyzed rear-wheel-drive student or employee vehicle either back onto or all the way up the E.T.A. hillside's long 70° driveway
during bad snowstorms — and the whole thing derusted and painted in E.T.A.'s proud red and gray school colors, with the
complex O.N.A.N. heraldic ensign — a snarling full-front eagle with a broom and can of disinfectant in one claw and a Maple 
Leaf in the other and wearing a sombrero and appearing to have about half-eaten a swatch of star-studded cloth — rather
ironically silk-screened onto the driver's-side door and the good old pre-Tavis E.T.A. traditional motto TE OCCIDERE
POSSUNT. .. unironically emblazoned on the passenger door, and which they all share use of, though Pemulis and Axford get
slight priority, because the truck's registration and basic-liability insurance get paid for out of quarterly urine-revenues.
Hal's older brother Mario — who by Dean of Students' fiat gets to bunk in a double with Hal in subdorm A on the third floor
of Comm.-Ad. even though he's too physically challenged even to play low-level recreational tennis, but who's keenly interested
in video- and film-cartridge production, and pulls his weight as part of the E.T.A. community recording assigned sections of
matches and drills and processional stroke-filming sessions for later playback and analysis by Schtitt and his staff — is filming the
congregated line and social interactions and vending operation of the urine-day lobby, using his strap-attached head-mounted
camera and thoracic police-lock and foot-treadle, apparently getting footage for one of the short strange Himself-influenced
conceptual cartridges the administration lets him occupy his time making and futzing around with down in the late founder's
editing and f/x facilities off the main sub-Comm.-Ad. tunnel; and Pemulis and Axford do not object to the filming, nor do they
even do that hand-to-temple face-obscuring thing when he aims the head-mounted Bolex their way, since they know nobody will
end up seeing the footage except Mario himself, and that at their request he'll modulate and scramble the vendors' and customers'
faces into undulating systems of flesh-colored squares, by means of his late father's reconfigururing matte-panel in the editing
room, since facial scrambling will heighten whatever weird conceptual effect Mario's usually after anyway, though also because
Mario's notoriously fond of undulating flesh-colored squares and will jump at any opportunity to edit them in over people's faces.
They do brisk business.
Michael Pemulis, wiry, pointy-featured, phenomenally talented at net but about two steps too slow to get up there effectively
against high-level pace — so in compensation also a great offensive-lob man — is a scholarship student from right nearby in
Allston MA — a grim section of tract housing and vacant lots, low-rise Greek and Irish housing projects, gravel and haphazard
sewage and indifferent municipal upkeep, a lot of depressed petrochemical light industry all along the Spur, an outlying district
zoned for sprawl; an old joke in Enfield-Brighton goes ' "Kiss me where it smells" she said so I took her to Allston' — where he
discovered a knack playing Boys Club tennis in cut-off shorts and no shirt and a store-strung stick on scuzzy courts with blacktop
that discolored your yellow balls and nets made of spare Feeny Park fencing that sent net-cord shots spronging all the way out into
traffic. An Inner City Development Program tennis prodigy at ten, recruited up the hill at eleven, with parents who wanted to
know how much E.T.A.'d pay up front for rights to all future possible income. Cavalier about practice but a bundle of strangled
nerves in tournaments, the rap on Pemulis is that he's way lower-ranked than he could be with a little hard work, since he's not
only E.T.A.'s finest Eschatonic5353 marksman off the lob but Schtitt says is the one youth here now who knows truly what is it to
punch the volley. Pemulis, whose pre-E.T.A. home life was apparently hackle-raising, also sells small-time drugs of distinguished
potency at reasonable retail prices to a large pie-slice of the total junior-tournament-circuit market. Mario Incandenza is one of
those people who wouldn't see the point of trying recreational chemicals even if he knew how to go about it. He just wouldn't get
it. His smile, below the Bolex camera strapped to his large but sort of withered-looking head, is constant and broad as he films the
line's serpentine movement against glass shelves full of prizes.
M. M. Pemulis, whose middle name is Mathew (sic), has the highest Stanford-Bïnet of any kid on academic probation ever at
the Academy. Hal Incandenza's most valiant efforts barely get Pemulis through Mrs. I's triad of required Grammars5454 and
Soma R.-L.-O. Chawaf's heady Literature of Discipline, because Pemulis, who claims he sees every third word upside-down,
actually just has a born tech-science wienie's congenital impatience with the referential murkiness and inelegance of verbal
systems. His early tennis promise quick-peaking and it's turned out a bit dilettantish, Pemulis's real enduring gift is for math and
hard science, and his scholarship is the coveted James O. Incandenza Geometrical Optics Scholarship, of which there is only one,
and which each term Pemulis manages to avoid losing by just one dento-dermal layer of overall G.P.A., and which gives him
sanctioned access to all the late director's lenses and equipment, some of which turn out to be useful to unrelated enterprises.
Mario's the only other person sharing the optic-and-editing labs off the main tunnel, and the two have the kind of transpersonal
bond that shared interests and mutual advantage can inspire: if Mario's not helping Pemulis fabricate the products of independentoptical-study work M.P. isn't really much into doing — you should see the boy with a convex lens, Avril likes to say within
Mario's hearing; he's like a fish in brine — then Pemulis is giving Mario, who's a film-nut but no great tech-mind, serious help
with cinemo-optical praxis, the physics of focal-length and reflective compounds — you should see Pemulis with an emulsion
curve, yawning blasély under his bill-reversed yachting hat and scratching an armpit, juggling differentials like a boy born to wear
a pocket-protector and high-water corduroys and electrician's tape on his hornrims' temples, asking Mario if he knows what you
call three Canadians copulating on a snowmobile. Mario and his brother Hal both consider Pemulis a good friend, though
friendship at E.T.A. is nonnego-tiable currency.
Hal Incandenza for a long time identified himself as a lexical prodigy who — though Avril had taken pains to let all three of
her children know that her nonjudgmental love and pride depended in no way on achievement or performance or potential talent
— had made his mother proud, plus a really good tennis player. Hal Incandenza is now being encouraged to identify himself as a
late-blooming prodigy and possible genius at tennis who is on the verge of making every authority-figure in his world and beyond
very proud indeed. He's never looked better on court or on monthly O.N.A.N.T.A. paper. He is erumpent. He has made what
Schtitt termed a 'leap of exponents' at a post-pubescent age when radical, plateaux-hopping, near-J.-Wayne-and-Show-caliber
improvement is extraordinarily rare in tennis. He gets his sterile urine gratis, though he could well afford to pay: Pemulis depends
on him for verbal-academic support, and dislikes owing favors, even to friends.
Hal is, at seventeen, as of 10/Y.D.A.U., judged ex cathedra the fourth-best tennis player under age eighteen in the United
States of America, and the sixth-best on the continent, by those athletic-organizing bodies duly charged with the task of ranking.
Hal's head, closely monitored by deLint and Staff, is judged still level and focused and unswollen/-bludgeoned by the sudden eclat
and rise in general expectations. When asked how he's doing with it all, Hal says Fine and thanks you for asking.
If Hal fulfills this newly emergent level of promise and makes it all the way up to the Show, Mario will be the only one of the
Incandenza children not wildly successful as a professional athlete. No one who knows Mario could imagine that this fact would
ever even occur to him. 
Orin, Mario, and Hal's late father was revered as a genius in his original profession without anybody ever realizing what he
really turned out to be a genius at, even he himself, at least not while he was alive, which is perhaps bona-fidely tragic but also, as
far as Mario's concerned, ultimately all right, if that's the way things unfolded.
Certain people find people like Mario Incandenza irritating or even think they're outright bats, dead inside in some essential
way.
Michael Pemulis's basic posture with people is that Mrs. Pemulis raised no dewy-eyed fools. He wears painter's caps on-court
and sometimes a yachting cap turned around 180°, and, since he's not ranked high enough to get any free-corporate-clothing
offers, plays in T-shirts with things like ALLSTON HS WOLF SPIDERS and CHOOSY MOTHERS and THE FIENDS IN
HUMAN SHAPE Y.D.A.U. TOUR or like an ancient CAN YOU BELIEVE IT THE SUPREME COURT JUST DESECRATED
OUR FLAG on them. His face is the sort of spiky-featured brow-dominated Feen-ian face you see all over Irish Allston and
Brighton, its chin and nose sharp and skin the natal brown color of the shell of a quality nut.
Michael Pemulis is nobody's fool, and he fears the dealer's Brutus, the potential eater of cheese, the rat, the wiretap, the
pubescent-looking Finest sent to make him look foolish. So when somebody calls his room's phone, even on video, and wants to
buy some sort of substance, they have to right off the bat utter the words 'Please commit a crime,' and Michael Pemulis will reply
'Gracious me and mine, a crime you say?' and the customer has to insist, right over the phone, and say he'll pay Michael Pemulis
money to commit a crime, or like that he'll harm Michael Pemulis in some way if he refuses to commit a crime, and Michael
Pemulis will in a clear and I.D.able voice make an appointment to see the caller in person to 'plead for my honor and personal
safety,' so that if anybody eats cheese later or the phone's frequency is covertly accessed, somehow, Pemulis will have been
entrapped.5555
Secreting a small Visine bottle of urine in an armpit in line also brings it up to plausible temperature. At the entrance to the
male stall-area, the ephebic-looking O.N.A.N.T.A. toxicologist rarely even looks up from his clipboard, but the square-faced nurse
can be a problem over on the female side, because every so often she'll want the stall door open during production. With Jim
Struck handling published-source plagiarism and compressed iteration and Xerography, Pemulis also offers, at reasonable cost, a
small vade mecumish pamphlet detailing several methods for dealing with this contingency.
WINTER B.S. 1960 — TUCSON AZ
Jim not that way Jim. That's no way to treat a garage door, bending stiffly down at the waist and yanking at the handle so the
door jerks up and out jerky and hard and you crack your shins and my ruined knees, son. Let's see you bend at the healthy knees.
Let's see you hook a soft hand lightly over the handle feeling its subtle grain and pull just as exactly gently as will make it come to
you. Experiment, Jim. See just how much force you need to start the door easy, let it roll up out open on its hidden greasy rollers
and pulleys in the ceiling's set of spiderwebbed beams. Think of all garage doors as the well-oiled open-out door of a broiler with
hot meat in, heat roiling out, hot. Needless and dangerous ever to yank, pull, shove, thrust. Your mother is a shover and a thruster,
son. She treats bodies outside herself without respect or due care. She's never learned that treating things in the gentlest most
relaxed way is also treating them and your own body in the most efficient way. It's Marlon Brando's fault, Jim. Your mother back
in California before you were born, before she became a devoted mother and long-suffering wife and breadwinner, son, your
mother had a bit part in a Marlon Brando movie. Her big moment. Had to stand there in saddle shoes and bobby sox and ponytail
and put her hands over her ears as really loud motorbikes roared by. A major thespian moment, believe you me. She was in love
from afar with this fellow Marlon Brando, son. Who? Who. Jim, Marlon Brando was the archetypal new-type actor who ruined it
looks like two whole generations' relations with their own bodies and the everyday objects and bodies around them. No? Well it
was because of Brando you were opening that garage door like that, Jimbo. The disrespect gets learned and passed on. Passed
down. You'll know Brando when you watch him, and you'll have learned to fear him. Brando, Jim, Jesus, B-r-a-n-d-o. Brando the
new archetypal tough-guy rebel and slob type, leaning back on his chair's rear legs, coming crooked through doorways, slouching
against everything in sight, trying to dominate objects, showing no artful respect or care, yanking things toward him like a moody
child and using them up and tossing them crudely aside so they miss the wastebasket and just lie there, ill-used. With the overclumsy impetuous movements and postures of a moody infant. Your mother is of that new generation that moves against life's
grain, across its warp and baffles. She may have loved Marlon Brando, Jim, but she didn't understand him, is what's ruined her for
everyday arts like broilers and garage doors and even low-level public-park knock-around tennis. Ever see your mother with a
broiler door? It's carnage, Jim, it's to cringe to see it, and the poor dumb thing thinks it's tribute to this slouching slob-type she
loved as he roared by. Jim, she never intuited the gentle and cunning economy behind this man's quote harsh sloppy unstudied
approach to objects. The way he'd oh so clearly practiced a chair's back-leg tilt over and over. The way he studied objects with a
welder's eye for those strongest centered seams which when pressured by the swinishest slouch still support. She never . . . never
sees that Marlon Brando felt himself as body so keenly he'd no need for manner. She never sees that in his quote careless way he
actually really touched whatever he touched as if it were part of him. Of his own body. The world he only seemed to manhandle
was for him sentient, feeling. And no one . . . and she never understood that. Sour sodding grapes indeed. You can't envy someone
who can be that way. Respect, maybe. Maybe wistful respect, at the very outside. She never saw that Brando was playing the
equivalent of high-level quality tennis across sound stages all over both coasts, Jim, is what he was really doing. Jim, he moved
like a careless finger-ling, one big muscle, muscularly naïve, but always, notice, a fingerling at the center of a clear current. That
kind of animal grace. The bastard wasted no motion, is what made it art, this brutish no-care. His was a tennis player's dictum:
touch things with consideration and they will be yours; you will own them; they will move or stay still or move for you; they will
lie back and part their legs and yield up their innermost seams to you. Teach you all their tricks. He knew what the Beats know
and what the great tennis player knows, son: learn to do nothing, with your whole head and body, and everything will be done by
what's around you. I know you don't understand. Yet. I know that goggle-eyed stare. I know what it means all too well, son. It's no
matter. You will. Jim, I know what I know.
I'm predicting it right here, young sir Jim. You are going to be a great tennis player. I was near-great. You will be truly great.
You will be the real thing. I know I haven't taught you to play yet, I know this is your first time, Jim, Jesus, relax, I know. It 
doesn't affect my predictive sense. You will overshadow and obliterate me. Today you are starting, and within a very few years I
know all too well you will be able to beat me out there, and on the day you first beat me I may well weep. It'll be out of a sort of
selfless pride, an obliterated father's terrible joy. I feel it, Jim, even here, standing on hot gravel and looking: in your eyes I see the
appreciation of angle, a prescience re spin, the way you already adjust your overlarge and apparently clumsy child's body in the
chair so it's at the line of best force against dish, spoon, lens-grinding appliance, a big book's stiff bend. You do it unconsciously.
You have no idea. But I watch, very closely. Don't ever think I don't, son.
You will be poetry in motion, Jim, size and posture and all. Don't let the posture-problem fool you about your true potential
out there. Take it from me, for a change. The trick will be transcending that overlarge head, son. Learning to move just the way
you already sit still. Living in your body.
This is the communal garage, son. And this is our door in the garage. I know you know. I know you've looked at it before,
many times. Now . . . now see it, Jim. See it as body. The dull-colored handle, the clockwise latch, the bits of bug trapped when
the paint was wet and now still protruding. The cracks from this merciless sunlight out here. Original color anyone's guess, boyo.
The concave inlaid squares, how many, bevelled at how many levels at the borders, that pass for decoration. Count the squares,
maybe ... let's see you treat this door like a lady, son. Twisting the latch clockwise with one hand that's right and.... I guess you'll
have to pull harder, Jim. Maybe even harder than that. Let me ... that's the way she wants doing, Jim. Have a look. Jim, this is
where we keep this 1956 Mercury Montclair you know so well. This Montclair weighs 3,900 pounds, give or take. It has eight
cylinders and a canted windshield and aerodynamic fins, Jim, and has a maximum flat-out road-speed of 95 m.p.h. per. I described
the shade of the paint job of this Montclair to the dealer when I first saw it as bit-lip red. Jim, it's a machine. It will do what it's
made for and do it perfectly, but only when stimulated by someone who's made it his business to know its tricks and seams, as a
body. The stimulator of this car must know the car, Jim, feel it, be inside much more than just the . . . the compartment. It's an
object, Jim, a body, but don't let it fool you, sitting here, mute. It will respond. If given its due. With artful care. It's a body and
will respond with a well-oiled purr once I get some decent oil in her and all Mercuryish at up to 95 big ones per for just that driver
who treats its body like his own, who feels the big steel body he's inside, who quietly and unnoticed feels the nubbly plastic of the
grip of the shift up next to the wheel when he shifts just as he feels the skin and flesh, the muscle and sinew and bone wrapped in
gray spiderwebs of nerves in the blood-fed hand just as he feels the plastic and metal and flange and teeth, the pistons and rubber
and rods of the amber-fueled Montclair, when he shifts. The bodily red of a well-bit lip, parping along at a silky 80-plus per. Jim,
a toast to our knowledge of bodies. To high-level tennis on the road of life. Ah. Oh.
Son, you're ten, and this is hard news for somebody ten, even if you're almost five-eleven, a possible pituitary freak. Son,
you're a body, son. That quick little scientific-prodigy's mind she's so proud of and won't quit twittering about: son, it's just neural
spasms, those thoughts in your mind are just the sound of your head revving, and head is still just body, Jim. Commit this to
memory. Head is body. Jim, brace yourself against my shoulders here for this hard news, at ten: you're a machine a body an
object, Jim, no less than this rutilant Montclair, this coil of hose here or that rake there for the front yard's gravel or sweet Jesus
this nasty fat spider flexing in its web over there up next to the rake-handle, see it? See it? Latrodectus mactans, Jim. Widow.
Grab this racquet and move gracefully and feelingly over there and kill that widow for me, young sir Jim. Go on. Make it say 'K.'
Take no names. There's a lad. Here's to a spiderless section of communal garage. Ah.
Bodies bodies everywhere. A tennis ball is the ultimate body, kid. We're coming to the crux of what I have to try to impart to
you before we get out there and start actuating this fearsome potential of yours. Jim, a tennis ball is the ultimate body. Perfectly
round. Even distribution of mass. But empty inside, utterly, a vacuum. Susceptible to whim, spin, to force — used well or poorly.
It will reflect your own character. Characterless itself. Pure potential. Have a look at a ball. Get a ball from the cheap green plastic
laundry basket of old used balls I keep there by the propane torches and use to practice the occasional serve, Jimbo. Attaboy. Now
look at the ball. Heft it. Feel the weight. Here, I'll... tear the ball. . . open. Whew. See? Nothing in there but evacuated air that
smells like a kind of rubber hell. Empty. Pure potential. Notice I tore it open along the seam. It's a body. You'll learn to treat it
with consideration, son, some might say a kind of love, and it will open for you, do your bidding, be at your beck and soft lover's
call. The thing truly great players with hale bodies who overshadow all others have is a way with the ball that's called, and keep in
mind the garage door and broiler, touch. Touch the ball. Now that's ... that's the touch of a player right there. And as with the ball
so with that big thin slumped overtall body, sir Jimbo. I'm predicting it right now. I see the way you'll apply the lessons of today to
yourself as a physical body. No more carrying your head at the level of your chest under round slumped shoulders. No more
tripping up. No more overshot reaches, shattered plates, tilted lampshades, slumped shoulders and caved-in chest, the simplest
objects twisting and resistant in your big thin hands, boy. Imagine what it feels like to be this ball, Jim. Total physicality. No
revving head. Complete presence. Absolute potential, sitting there potentially absolute in your big pale slender girlish hand so
young its thumb's unwrinkled at the joint. My thumb's wrinkled at the joint, Jim, some might say gnarled. Have a look at this
thumb right here. But I still treat it as my own. I give it its due. You want a drink of this, son? I think you're ready for a drink of
this. No? Nein? Today, Lesson One out there, you become, for better or worse, Jim, a man. A player. A body in commerce with
bodies. A helmsman at your own vessel's tiller. A machine in the ghost, to quote a phrase. Ah. A ten-year-old freakishly tall bowtied and thick-spectacled citizen of the. ... I drink this, sometimes, when I'm not actively working, to help me accept the same
painful things it's now time for me to tell you, son. Jim. Are you ready? I'm telling you this now because you have to know what
I'm about to tell you if you're going to be the more than near-great top-level tennis player I know you're going to be eventually
very soon. Brace yourself. Son, get ready. It's glo . . . gloriously painful. Have just maybe a taste, here. This flask is silver. Treat it
with due care. Feel its shape. The near-soft feel of the warm silver and the calfskin sheath that covers only half its flat rounded
silver length. An object that rewards a considered touch. Feel the slippery heat? That's the oil from my fingers. My oil, Jim, from
my body. Not my hand, son, feel the flask. Heft it. Get to know it. It's an object. A vessel. It's a two-pint flask full of amber liquid.
Actually more like half full, it seems. So it seems. This flask has been treated with due care. It's never been dropped or jostled or
crammed. It's never had an errant drop, not drop one, spilled out of it. I treat it as if it can feel. I give it its due, as a body. Unscrew
the cap. Hold the calfskin sheath in your right hand and use your good left hand to feel the cap's shape and ease it around on the
threads. Son . . . son, you'll have to put that what is that that Columbia Guide to Refractive Indices Second Edition down, son.
Looks heavy anyway. A tendon-strainer. Fuck up your pronator teres and surrounding tendons before you even start. You're going 
to have to put down the book, for once, young Sir Jimbo, you never try to handle two objects at the same time without just aeons
of diligent practice and care, a Brando-like dis . . . and well no you don't just drop the book, son, you don't just just don't drop the
big old Guide to Indices on the dusty garage floor so it raises a square bloom of dust and gets our nice white athletic socks all gray
before we even hit the court, boy, Jesus I just took five minutes explaining how the key to being even a potential player is to treat
the things with just exactly the ... here lemme have this .. . that books aren't just dropped with a crash like bottles in the trashcan
they're placed, guided, with senses on Full, feeling the edges, the pressure on the little floor of both hands' fingers as you bend at
the knees with the book, the slight gassy shove as the air on the dusty floor ... as the floor's air gets displaced in a soft square that
raises no dust. Like soooo. Not like so. Got me? Got it? Well now don't be that way. Son, don't be that way, now. Don't get all
oversensitive on me, son, when all I'm trying to do is help you. Son, Jim, I hate this when you do this. Your chin just disappears
into that bow-tie when your big old overhung lower lip quivers like that. You look chinless, son, and big-lipped. And that cape of
mucus that's coming down on your upper lip, the way it shines, don't, just don't, it's revolting, son, you don't want to revolt people,
you have to learn to control this sort of oversensitivity to hard truths, this sort of thing, take and exert some goddamn control is the
whole point of what I'm taking this whole entire morning off rehearsal with not one but two vitally urgent auditions looming down
my neck so I can show you, planning to let you move the seat back and touch the shift and maybe even ... maybe even drive the
Montclair, God knows your feet'll reach, right Jimbo? Jim, hey, why not drive the Montclair? Why not you drive us over, starting
today, pull up by the courts where today you'll — here, look, see how I unscrew it? the cap? with the soft very outermost tips of
my gnarled fingers which I wish they were steadier but I'm exerting control to control my anger at that chin and lip and the cape of
snot and the way your eyes slant and goggle like some sort of mon-goloid child's when you're threatening to cry but just the very
tips of the fingers, here, the most sensitive parts, the parts bathed in warm oil, the whorled pads, I feel them singing with nerves
and blood I let them extend ... further than the warm silver hip-flask's cap's very top down its broadening cone where to where the
threads around the upraised little circular mouth lie hidden while with the other warm singing hand I gently grip the leather holster
so I can feel the way the whole flask feels as I guide ... guide the cap around on its silver threads, hear that? stop that and listen,
hear that? the sound of threads moving through well-machined grooves, with great care, a smooth barbershop spiral, my whole
hand right through the pads of my fingertips less ... less unscrewing, here, than guiding, persuading, reminding the silver cap's
body what it's built to do, machined to do, the silver cap knows, Jim, I know, you know, we've been through this before, leave the
book alone, boy, it's not going anywhere, so the silver cap leaves the flask's mouth's warm grooved lips with just a snick, hear
that? that faintest snick? not a rasp or a grinding sound or harsh, not a harsh brutal Brando-esque rasp of attempted domination but
a snick a ... nuance, there, ah, oh, like the once you've heard it never mistakable ponk of a true-hit ball, Jim, well pick it up then if
you're afraid of a little dust, Jim, pick the book up if it's going to make you all goggle-eyed and chinless honestly Jesus why do I
try I try and try just wanted to introduce you to the broiler's garage and let you drive, maybe, feeling the Montclair's body, taking
my time to let you pull up to the courts with the Montclair's shift in a neutral glide and the eight cylinders thrumming and snicking
like a healthy heart and the wheels all perfectly flush with the curb and bring out my good old trusty laundry . .. laundry basket of
balls and racquets and towels and flask and my son, my flesh of my flesh, white slumped flesh of my flesh who wanted to embark
on what I predict right now will be a tennis career that'll put his busted-up used-up old Dad back square in his little place, who
wanted to maybe for once be a real boy and learn how to play and have fun and frolic and play around in the unrelieved sunshine
this city's so fuck-all famous for, to enjoy it while he can because did your mother tell you we're moving? That we're moving back
to California finally this spring? We're moving, son, I'm harking one last attempted time to that celluloid siren's call, I'm giving it
the one last total shot a man's obligation to his last waning talent deserves, Jim, we're headed for the big time again at last for the
first time since she announced she was having you, Jim, hitting the road, celluloid-bound, so say adios to that school and that
fluttery little moth of a physics teacher and those slumped chinless slide-rule-wielding friends of no now wait I didn't mean it I
meant I wanted to tell you now, ahead of time, your mother and I, to give you plenty of notice so you could adjust this time
because oh you made it so unmisinterpretably clear how this last move to this trailer park upset you so, didn't you, to a mobile
home with chemical toilet and bolts to hold it in place and widow-webs everyplace you look and grit settling on everything like
dust out here instead of the Club's staff quarters I got us removed from or the house it was clearly my fault we couldn't afford anymore. It was my fault. I mean who else's fault would it be? Am I right? That we moved your big soft body with allegedly not
enough notice and that east-side school you cried over and that Negro research resource librarian there with the hair out to here
that. . . that lady with the upturned nose on tiptoe all the time I have to tell you she seemed so consummate east-side Tucsonian all
self-consciously not of this earth's grit urging us to quote nurture your optical knack with physics with her nose upturned so you
could see up in there and on her toes like something skilled overhead had sunk a hook between her big splayed fingerling's nostrils
and were reeling skyward up toward the aether little by little I'll bet those heelless pumps are off the floor altogether by now son
what do you say son what do you think . . . no, go on, cry, don't inhibit yourself, I won't say a word, except it's getting to me less
all the time when you do it, I'll just warn you, I think you're overworking the tears and the . . . it's getting less effec .. . effective
with me each time you use it though we know we both know don't we just between you and me we know it'll always work on your
mother, won't it, never fail, she'll every time take and bend your big head down to her shoulder so it looks obscene, if you could
see it, pat-patting on your back like she's burping some sort of slumping oversized obscene bow-tied infant with a book straining
his pronator teres, crying, will you do this when you're grown? Will there be episodes like this when you're a man at your own
tiller? A citizen of a world that won't go pat-pat-there-there? Will your face crumple and bulge like this when you're six-and-a-half
grotesque feet tall, six-six-plus like your grandfather may he rot in hell's rubber vacuum when he finally kicks on the tenth tee and
with your flat face and no chin just like him on that poor dumb patient woman's fragile wet snotty long-suffering shoulder did I
tell you what he did? Did I tell you what he did? I was your age Jim here take the flask no give it here, oh. Oh. I was thirteen, and
I'd started to play well, seriously, I was twelve or thirteen and playing for years already and he'd never been to watch, he'd never
come once to where I was playing, to watch, or even changed his big flat expression even once when I brought home a trophy I
won trophies or a notice in the paper TUCSON NATIVE QUALIFIES FOR NATIONAL JR CH'SHIPS he never acknowledged I
even existed as I was, not as I do you, Jim, not as I take care to bend over backwards way, way out of my way to let you know I
see you recognize you am aware of you as a body care about what might go on behind that big flat face bent over a homemade
prism. He plays golf. Your grandfather. Your grand-pappy. Golf. A golf man. Is my tone communicating the contempt? Billiards 
on a big table, Jim. A bodiless game of spasmodic flailing and flying sod. A quote unquote sport. Anal rage and checkered berets.
This is almost empty. This is just about it, son. What say we rain-check this. What say I put the last of this out of its amber misery
and we go in and tell her you're not feeling up to snuff enough again and we're rain-checking your first introduction to the Game
till this weekend and we'll head over this weekend and do two straight days both days and give you a really extensive intensive
intro to a by all appearances limitless future. Intensive gentleness and bodily care equals great tennis, Jim. We'll go both days and
let you plunge right in and get wet all over. It's only five dollars. The court fee. For one lousy hour. Each day. Five dollars each
day. Don't give it a thought. Ten total dollars for an intensive weekend when we live in a glorified trailer and have to share a
garage with two DeSotos and what looks like a Model A on blocks and my Montclair can't afford the kind of oil she deserves.
Don't look like that. What's money or my rehearsals for the celluloid auditions we're moving 700 miles for, auditions that may
well comprise your old man's last shot at a life with any meaning at all, compared to my son? Right? Am I right? Come here, kid.
C'mere c'mere c'mere c'mere. That's a boy. That's my J.O.I, of a guy of a joy of boy. That's my kid, in his body. He never came
once, Jim. Not once. To watch. Mother never missed a competitive match, of course. Mother came to so many it ceased to mean
anything that she came. She became part of the environment. Mothers are like that, as I'm sure you're aware all too well, am I
right? Right? Never came once, kiddo. Never lumbered over all slumped and soft and cast his big grotesque long-even-at-midday
shadow at any court I performed on. Till one day he came, once. Suddenly, once, without precedent or warning, he ... came. Ah.
Oh. I heard him coming long before he hove into view. He cast a long shadow, Jim. It was some minor local event. It was some
early-round local thing of very little consequence in the larger scheme. I was playing some local dandy, the kind with fine
equipment and creased white clothing and country-club lessons that still can't truly play, even, regardless of all the support. You'll
find you often have to endure this type of opponent in the first couple rounds. This gleaming hapless lox of a kid was some client
of my father's son .. . son of one of his clients. So he came for the client, to put on some sham show of fatherly concern. He wore a
hat and coat and tie at 95° plus. The client. Can't recall the name. There was something canine about his face, I remember, that his
kid across the net had inherited. My father wasn't even sweating. I grew up with the man in this town and never once saw him
sweat, Jim. I remember he wore a boater and the sort of gregariously plaid uniform professional men had to wear on the weekends
then. They sat in the indecisive shade of a scraggly palm, the sort of palm that's just crawling with black widows, in the fronds,
that come down without warning, that hide lying in wait in the heat of midday. They sat on the blanket my mother always brought
— my mother, who's dead, and the client. My father stood apart, sometimes in the waving shade, sometimes not, smoking a long
filter. Long filters had come into fashion. He never sat on the ground. Not in the American Southwest he didn't. There was a man
with a healthy respect for spiders. And never on the ground under a palm. He knew he was too grotesquely tall and ungainly to
stand up in a hurry or roll screaming out of the way in a hurry in case of falling spiders. They've been known to be willing to drop
right out of the trees they hide in, in the daytime, you know. Drop right on you if you're sitting on the ground in the shade. He was
no fool, the bastard. A golfer. They all watched. I was right there on the first court. This park no longer exists, Jim. Cars are now
parked on what used to be these rough green asphalt courts, shimmering in the heat. They were right there, watching, their heads
going back and forth in that windshield-wiper way of people watching quality tennis. And was I nervous, young sir J.O.I.? With
the one and only Himself there in all his wooden glory there, watching, half in and out of the light, expressionless? I was not. I
was in my body. My body and I were one. My wood Wilson from my stack of wood Wilsons in their trapezoid presses was a
sentient expression of my arm, and I felt it singing, and my hand, and they were alive, my well-armed hand was the secretary of
my mind, lithe and responsive and senza errori, because I knew myself as a body and was fully inside my little child's body out
there, Jim, I was in my big right arm and scarless legs, safely ensconced, running here and there, my head pounding like a heart,
sweat purled on every limb, running like a veldt-creature, leaping, frolicking, striking with maximum economy and minimum
effort, my eyes on the ball and the corners both, I was two, three, a couple shots ahead of both me and the hapless canine client's
kid, handing the dandy his pampered ass. It was carnage. It was a scene out of nature in its rawest state, Jim. You should have
been there. The kid kept bending over to get his breath. The smoothly economical frolicking I was doing contrasted starkly
compared to the heavily jerky way he was being forced to stomp around and lunge. His white knit shirt and name-brand shorts
were soaked through so you could see the straps of his jock biting into the soft ass I was handing him. He wore a flitty little white
visor such as fifty-two-year-old women at country clubs and posh Southwestern resorts wear. I was, in a word, deft, considered,
prescient. I made him stomp and stagger and lunge. I wanted to humiliate him. The client's long sharp face was sagging. My father
had no face, it was sharply shadowed and then illuminated in the wagging fronds' shadow he half stood in but was wreathed in
smoke from the long filters he fancied, long plastic filtered holders, yellowed at the stem, in imitation of the President, as courtiers
once spluttered with the King . . . veiled in shade and then lit smoke. The client didn't know enough to keep quiet. He thought he
was at a ball game or something. The client's voice carried. Our first court was right near the tree they sat under. The client's legs
were out in front of them and protruded from the sharp star of frond-shade. His slacks were lattice-shadowed from the pattern of
the fence his son and I played just behind. He was drinking the lemonade my mother had brought for me. She made it fresh. He
said I was good. My father's client did. In that emphasized way that made his voice carry. You know, son? Good godfrey
Incandenza old trout but that lad of yours is good. Unquote. I heard him say it as I ran and whacked and frolicked. And I heard the
tall son of a bitch's reply, after a long pause during which the world's whole air hung there as if lifted and left to swing. Standing
at the baseline, or walking back to the baseline, to either serve or receive, one of the two, I heard the client. His voice carried. And
then later I heard my father's reply, may he rot in a green and empty hell. I heard what. .. what he said in reply, sonbo. But not
until after I'd fallen. I insist on this point, Jim. Not until after I'd started to fall. Jim, I'd been in the middle of trying to run down a
ball way out of mortal reach, a rare blind lucky dribbler of a drop-shot from the over-groomed lox across the net. A point I could
have more than afforded to concede. But that's not the way I ... that's not the way a real player plays. With respect and due effort
and care for every point. You want to be great, near-great, you give every ball everything. And then some. You concede nothing.
Even against loxes. You play right up to your limit and then pass your limit and look back at your former limit and wave a hankie
at it, embarking. You enter a trance. You feel the seams and edges of everything. The court becomes a ... an extremely unique
place to be. It will do everything for you. It will let nothing escape your body. Objects move as they're made to, at the lightest
easiest touch. You slip into the clear current of back and forth, making delicate X's and L's across the harsh rough bright green
asphalt surface, your sweat the same temperature as your skin, playing with such ease and total mindless effortless effort and and 
and entranced concentration you don't even stop to consider whether to run down every ball. You're barely aware you're doing it.
Your body's doing it for you and the court and Game's doing it for your body. You're barely involved. It's magic, boy. Nothing
touches it, when it's right. I predict it. Facts and figures and curved glass and those elbow-straining books of yours' lightless pages
are going to seem flat by comparison. Static. Dead and white and flat. They don't begin to. ... It's like a dance, Jim. The point is I
was too bodily respectful to slip up and fall on my own, out there. And the other point is I started to fall forward even before I
started to hear him reply, standing there: Yes, But He'll Never Be Great. What he said in no way made me fall forward. The
unlovely opponent had dribbled one just barely over the too-low public-park net, a freak accident, a mishit drop-shot, and another
man on another court in another early-round laugher would have let it dribble, conceded the affordable, not tried to wave a hankie
from the vessel of his limit. Not race on all eight healthy scarless cylinders desperately forward toward the net to try to catch the
goddamn thing on the first bounce. Jim, but any man can slip. I don't know what I slipped on, son. There were spiders well-known
to infest the palms' fronds all along the courts' fences. They come down at night on threads, bulbous, flexing. I'm thinking it could
have been a bulbous goo-filled widow I stepped and slipped on, Jim, a spider, a mad rogue spider come down on its thread into
the shade, flabby and crawling, or that leapt suicidally right from an overhanging frond onto the court, probably making a slight
flabby hideous sound when it landed, crawling around on its claws, blinking grotesquely in the hot light it hated, that I stepped on
rushing forward and killed and slipped on the mess the big loathsome spider made. See these scars? All knotted and ragged, like
something had torn at my own body's knees the way a slouching Brando would just rip a letter open with his teeth and let the
envelope fall on the floor all wet and rent and torn? All the palms along the fence were sick, they had palm-rot, it was the A.D.
year 1933, of the Great Bisbee Palm-Rot epidemic, all through the state, and they were losing their fronds and the fronds were
blighted and the color of really old olives in those old slim jars at the very back of the refrigerator and exuded a sick sort of puslike slippery discharge and sometimes abruptly fell from trees curving back and forth through the air like celluloid pirates' paper
swords. God I hate fronds, Jim. I'm thinking it could have been either a daytime latrodectus or some pus from a frond. The wind
blew cruddy pus from the webbed fronds onto the court, maybe, up near the net. Either way. Something poisonous or infected, at
any rate, unexpected and slick. All it takes is a second, you're thinking, Jim: the body betrays you and down you go, on your
knees, sliding on sandpaper court. Not so, son. I used to have another flask like this, smaller, a rather more cunning silver flask, in
the glove compartment of my Montclair. Your devoted mother did something to it. The subject has never been mentioned between
us. Not so. It was a foreign body, or a substance, not my body, and if anybody did any betraying that day I'm telling you sonny kid
boy it was something / did, Jimmer, I may well have betrayed that fine young lithe tan unslumped body, I may very well have
gotten rigid, overconscious, careless of it, listening for what my father, who I respected, I respected that man, Jim, is what's sick, I
knew he was there, I was conscious of his flat face and filter's long shadow, I knew him, Jim. Things were different when I was
growing up, Jim. I hate ... Jesus I hate saying something like this, this things-were-different-when-I-was-a-lad-type cliche shit, the
sort of cliche fathers back then spouted, assuming he said anything at all. But it was. Different. Our kids, my generation's kids,
they ... now you, this post-Brando crowd, you new kids can't like us or dislike us or respect us or not as human beings, Jim. Your
parents. No, wait, you don't have to pretend you disagree, don't, you don't have to say it, Jim. Because I know it. I could have
predicted it, watching Brando and Dean and the rest, and I know it, so don't splutter. I blame no one your age, boyo. You see
parents as kind or unkind or happy or miserable or drunk or sober or great or near-great or failed the way you see a table square or
a Montclair lip-red. Kids today . . . you kids today somehow don't know how to feel, much less love, to say nothing of respect.
We're just bodies to you. We're just bodies and shoulders and scarred knees and big bellies and empty wallets and flasks to you.
I'm not saying something cliche like you take us for granted so much as I'm saying you cannot. .. imagine our absence. We're so
present it's ceased to mean. We're environmental. Furniture of the world. Jim, I could imagine that man's absence. Jim, I'm telling
you you cannot imagine my absence. It's my fault, Jim, home so much, limping around, ruined knees, overweight, under the
Influence, burping, nonslim, sweat-soaked in that broiler of a trailer, burping, farting, frustrated, miserable, knocking lamps over,
overshooting my reach. Afraid to give my last talent the one shot it demanded. Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live
up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever. Use it or lose it, he'd say over the newspaper. I'm ... I'm just afraid of having a
tombstone that says HERE LIES A PROMISING OLD MAN. It's ... potential may be worse than none, Jim. Than no talent to
fritter in the first place, lying around guzzling because I haven't the balls to ... God I'm I'm so sorry. Jim. You don't deserve to see
me like this. I'm so scared, Jim. I'm so scared of dying without ever being really seen. Can you understand? Are you enough of a
big thin prematurely stooped young bespectacled man, even with your whole life still ahead of you, to understand? Can you see I
was giving it all I had? That I was in there, out there in the heat, listening, webbed with nerves? A self that touches all edges, I
remember she said. I felt it in a way I fear you and your generation never could, son. It was less like falling than being shot out of
something, is the way I recall it. It did not did not happen in slow motion. One minute I was at a dead and beautiful forward run
for the ball, the next minute there were hands at my back and nothing underfoot like a push down a stairway. A rude whip-lashing
shove square in the back and my promising body with all its webs of nerves pulsing and firing was in full airborne flight and came
down on my knees this flask is empty right down on my knees with all my weight and inertia on that scabrous hot sandpaper
surface forced into what was an exact parody of an imitation of contemplative prayer, sliding forward. The flesh and then tissue
and bone left twin tracks of brown red gray white like tire tracks of bodily gore extending from the service line to the net. I slid on
my flaming knees, rushed past the dribbling ball and toward the net that ended my slide. Our slide. My racquet had gone
pinwheeling off Jim and my racquetless arms out before me sliding Jim in the attitude of a mortified monk in total prayer. It was
given me to hear my father pronounce my bodily existence as not even potentially great at the moment I ruined my knees forever,
Jim, so that even years later at USC I never got to wave my hankie at anything beyond the near- and almost-great and would-havebeen-great-//, and later could never even hope to audition for those swim-trunk and Brylcreem beach movies that snake Avalon is
making his mint on. I do not insist that the judgment and punishing fall are ... were connected, Jim. Any man can slip out there.
All it takes is a second of misplaced respect. Son, it was more than a father's voice, carrying. My mother cried out. It was a
religious moment. I learned what it means to be a body, Jim, just meat wrapped in a sort of flimsy nylon stocking, son, as I fell
kneeling and slid toward the stretched net, myself seen by me, frame by frame, torn open. I may have to burp, belch, son, son,
telling you what I learned, son, my .. . my love, too late, as I left my knees' meat behind me, slid, ended in a posture of
supplication on my knees' disclosed bones with my fingers racquetless hooked through the mesh of the net, across which, the net, 
the sopped dandy had dropped his pricey gut-strung Davis racquet and was running toward me with his visor askew and his hands
to his cheeks. My father and the client he was there to perform for dragged me upright to the palm's infected shade where she
knelt on the plaid beach-blanket with her knuckles between her teeth, Jim, and I felt the religion of the physical that day, at not
much more than your age, Jim, shoes filling with blood, held under the arms by two bodies big as yours and dragged off a public
court with two extra lines. It's a pivotal, it's a seminal, religious day when you get to both hear and feel your destiny at the same
moment, Jim. I got to notice what I'm sure you've noticed long ago, I know, I know you've seen me brought home on occasions,
dragged in the door, under what's called the Influence, son, helped in by cabbies at night, I've seen your long shadow grotesquely
backlit at the top of the house's stairs I helped pay for, boy: how the drunk and the maimed both are dragged forward out of the
arena like a boneless Christ, one man under each arm, feet dragging, eyes on the aether.
4 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
From Cambridge's Latinate Inman Square, Michael Pemulis, nobody's fool at all, rides one necessary bus to Central Square
and then an unnecessary bus to Davis Square and a train back to Central. This is to throw off the slightest possible chance of
pursuit. At Central he catches the Red Line to Park St. Station, where he's parked the tow truck in an underground lot he can more
than afford. The day is autumnal and mild, the east breeze smelling of urban commerce and the vague suede smell of new-fallen
leaves. The sky is pilot-light blue; sunlight reflects complexly off the smoked-glass sides of tall centers of commerce all around
Park St. downtown. Pemulis wears button-fly chinos and an E.T.A. shirt beneath a snazzy blue Brioni sport-coat, plus the brightwhite yachting cap that Mario Incandenza calls his Mr. Howell hat. The hat looks rakish even when turned around, and it has a
detachable lining. Inside the lining can be kept portable quantities of just about anything. Having indulged in 150 nig. of very mild
'drines, post-transaction. Wearing also gray-and-blue saddle oxfords w/o socks, it's such a mild autumn day. The streets literally
bustle. Vendors with carts instead of tubs sell hot pretzels and tonics and those underboiled franks Pemulis likes to have them put
the works on. You can see the State House and Common and Courthouse and Public Gardens, and beyond all that the cool smooth
facades of Back Bay brownstones. The echoes in the underground Park PL garage — PARK — are pleasantly complex. Traffic
westward on Commonwealth Avenue is light (meaning things can move) all the way through Ken-more Square and past Boston
U. and up the long slow hill into Allston and Enfield. When Tavis and Schtitt and the players and ground crew and Testar and
ATHSCME teams inflate the all-weather Lung for the winter over Courts 16-32, the domed Lung's nacelle is visible against the
horizon all the way down by the Brighton Ave.-Comm. Ave. split in lower Allston.
The incredibly potent DMZ is apparently classed as a para-methoxylated amphetamine but really it looks to Pemulis from his
slow and tortured survey of the MED.COM's monographs more like more similar to the anticholinergic-deliriant class, Way more
powerful than mescaline or MDA or DMA or TMA or MDMA or DOM or STP or the I.V.-ingestible DMT (or Ololiuqui or
datura's scopolamine, or Fluothane, or Bufotenine (a.k.a. 'Jackie-O.'), or Ebene or psilocybin or Cylert5656; DMZ resembling
chemically some miscegenation of a lysergic with a muscimoloid, but significantly different from LSD-25 in that its effects are
less visual and spatially-cerebral and more like temporally-cerebral and almost ontological, with some sort of manipulatedphenylkylamine-like speediness whereby the ingester perceives his relation to the ordinary flow of time as radically (and
euphorically, is where the muscimole-affective resemblance shows its head) altered.5757 The incredibly potent DMZ is
synthesized from a derivative of fitviavi, an obscure mold that grows only on other molds, by the same ambivalently lucky
chemist at Sandoz Pharm. who'd first stumbled on LSD, as a relatively ephebic and clueless organic chemist, while futzing around
with ergotic fungi on rye. DMZ's discovery was the tail-end of the B.S. 1960s, just about the same time Dr. Alan Watts was
considering T. Leary's invitation to become 'Writer in Resonance' at Leary's Utopian LSD-25 colony in Millbrook NY on what is
now Canadian soil. A substance even just the accidental-synthesis of which sent the Sandoz chemist into early retirement and
serious unblinking wall-watching, the incredibly potent DMZ has a popular-lay-chemical-underground reputation as the single
grimmest thing ever conceived in a tube. It is also now the hardest recreational compound to acquire in North America after raw
Vietnamese opium, which forget it.
DMZ is sometimes also referred to in some metro Boston chemical circles as Madame Psychosis, after a popular very-earlymorning cult radio personality on M.I.T.'s student-run radio station WYYY-109, 'Largest Whole Prime on the FM Band,' which
Mario Incandenza and E.T.A. stats-wienie and Eschaton game-master Otis P. Lord listen to almost religiously.
The day-shift Ennet House kid at the booth who raises the portcullis to let him onto the grounds had a couple times in October
approached Pemulis about a potential transaction. Pemulis has a rigid policy about not transacting with E.T.A. employees who
come up the hill from the halfway house, since he knows some of them are at the place on Court Order, and knows for a fact they
pull unscheduled Urines all over the place down there, and types like the Ennet House types are just the sorts of people Pemulis's
talents let him get away from in terms of like social milieu and mixing and transacting; and his basic attitude with these low-rent
employees is one of unfoolish discretion and like why tempt fate.
The East Courts are empty and ball-strewn when Pemulis pulls in; most of them are still at lunch. Pemulis, Troeltsch, and
Schacht's triple-room is in subdorm B in the back north part of the second floor of West House and so superjacent to the Dining
Hall, from which through the floor Pemulis can hear voices and silverware and can smell exactly what they're having. The first
thing he does is boot up the phone console and try Inc and Mario's room over in Comm.-Ad., where Hal is sitting in wíndowlight
with the Riverside Hamlet he told Mario he'd read and help with a conceptual film-type project based on part of, his uncushioned
captain's chair partly under an old print of a detail from the minor and soft-core Alexandrian mosaic Consummation of the
Levirates, eating an AminoPal® energy-bar and waiting very casually, the phone with its antenna already out lying ready on the
arm of the chair and two folio-size Baron's SAT-prep guides and a spine-shot copy of the B.S. 1937 Tilden on Spin and his keys
on their neck-chain lying on the Lindistarne carpet by his shoe, waiting in a very casual posture. Hal deliberately waits till the
audio console's third ring, like a girl at home on Saturday night.
'Mmyellow.’
'The turd emergeth.' Pemulis's clear and digitally condensed voice on the line. 'Repeat. The turd emergeth.’
'Please commit a crime,' is Hal Incandenza's immediate reply. 
'Gracious me,' Pemulis says into the phone tucked under his jaw, carefully de-Velcroing the lining of his Mr. Howell hat.
TENNIS AND THE FERAL PRODIGY, NARRATED BY HAL INCANDENZA, AN 11.5-MINUTE DIGITAL
ENTERTAINMENT
CARTRIDGE DIRECTED, RECORDED, EDITED, AND —
ACCORDING TO THE ENTRY FORM — WRITTEN BY MARIO
INCANDENZA, IN RECEIPT OF NEW-NEW-ENGLAND REGIONAL
HONORABLE MENTION IN INTERLACE TELENTERTAINMENT'S
ANNUAL 'NEW EYES, NEW VOICES' YOUNG FILMMAKERS’
CONTEST, APRIL IN THE YEAR OF THE YUSHITYU 2007
MIMETIC-RESOLUTION-CARTRIDGE-VIEW-MOTHERBOARDEASY-TO-INSTALL UPGRADE FOR INFERNATRON/INTERLACE TP
SYSTEMS FOR HOME, OFFICE OR MOBILE (SIC), ALMOST
EXACTLY THREE YEARS AFTER DR. JAMES O. INCANDENZA
PASSED FROM THIS LIFE
Here is how to put on a big red tent of a shirt that has ETA across the chest in gray.
Please ease carefully into your supporter and adjust the elastic straps so the straps do not bite into your butt and make bulged
ridges in your butt that everyone can see once you've sweated through your shorts.
Here is how to wrap your torn ankle so tightly in its flesh-tone Ace bandages your left leg feels like a log.
Here is how to win, later.
This is a yellow iron-mesh Ball-Hopper full of dirty green dead old balls. Take them to the East Courts while the dawn is still
chalky and no one's around except the mourning doves that infest the pines at sunrise, and the air is so sopped you can see your
summer breath. Hit serves to no one. Make a mess of balls along the base of the opposite fence as the sun hauls itself up over the
Harbor and a thin sweat breaks and the serves start to boom. Stop thinking and let it flow and go boom, boom. The shiver of the
ball against the opposite fence. Hit about a thousand serves to no one while Himself sits and advises with his flask. Older men's
legs are white and hairless from decades in pants. Here is the set of keys a stride's length before you in the court as you serve dead
balls to no one. After each serve you must almost fall forward into the court and in one smooth motion bend and scoop up the keys
with your left hand. This is how to train yourself to follow through into the court after the serve. You still, years after the man's
death, cannot keep your keys anywhere but on the floor.
This is how to hold the stick.
Learn to call the racquet a stick. Everyone does, here. It's a tradition: The Stick. Something so much an extension of you
deserves a sobriquet.
Please look. You'll be shown exactly once how to hold it. This is how to hold it. Just like this. Forget all the near-Easternslice-backhand-grip bafflegab. Just say Hello is all. Just shake hands with the calfskin grip of the stick. This is how to hold it. The
stick is your friend. You will become very close.
Grasp your friend firmly at all times. A firm grip is essential for both control and power. Here is how to carry a tennis ball
around in your stick-hand, squeezing it over and over for long stretches of time — in class, on the phone, in lab, in front of the TP,
a wet ball for the shower, ideally squeezing it at all times except during meals. See the Academy dining hall, where tennis balls sit
beside every plate. Squeeze the tennis ball rhythmically month after year until you feel it no more than your heart squeezing blood
and your right forearm is three times the size of your left and your arm looks from across a court like a gorilla's arm or a
stevedore's arm pasted on the body of a child.
Here is how to do extra individual drills before the Academy's A.M. drills, before breakfast, so that after the thousandth ball
hit just out of reach by Himself, with his mammoth wingspan and ghastly calves, urging you with nothing but smiles on to great
and greater demonstrations of effort, so that after you've gotten your third and final wind and must vomit, there is little inside to
vomit and the spasms pass quickly and an east breeze blows cooler past you and you feel clean and can breathe.
Here is how to don red and gray E.T.A. sweats and squad-jog a weekly 40 km. up and down urban Commonwealth Avenue
even though you would rather set your hair on fire than jog in a pack. Jogging is painful and pointless, but you are not in charge.
Your brother gets to ride shotgun while a senile German blows BBs at your legs both of them laughing and screaming Schnell.
Enfield is due east of the Marathon's Hills of Heartbreak, which are just up Commonwealth past the Reservoir in Newton. Urban
jogging in a sweaty pack is tedious. Have Himself hunch down to put a long pale arm around your shoulders and tell you that his
own father had told him that talent is sort of a dark gift, that talent is its own expectation: it is there from the start and either lived
up to or lost.
Have a father whose own father lost what was there. Have a father who lived up to his own promise and then found thing
after thing to meet and surpass the expectations of his promise in, and didn't seem just a whole hell of a lot happier or tighter
wrapped than his own failed father, leaving you yourself in a kind of feral and flux-ridden state with respect to talent.
Here is how to avoid thinking about any of this by practicing and playing until everything runs on autopilot and talent's
unconscious exercise becomes a way to escape yourself, a long waking dream of pure play.
The irony is that this makes you very good, and you start to become regarded as having a prodigious talent to live up to.
Here is how to handle being a feral prodigy. Here is how to handle being seeded at tournaments, signifying that seeding
committees composed of old big-armed men publicly expect you to reach a certain round. Reaching at least the round you're
supposed to is known at tournaments as 'justifying your seed.' By repeating this term over and over, perhaps in the same rhythm at
which you squeeze a ball, you can reduce it to an empty series of phonemes, just formants and fricatives, trochaically stressed,
signifying zip.
Here is how to beat unseeded, wide-eyed opponents from Iowa or Rhode Island in the early rounds of tournaments without
expending much energy but also without seeming contemptuous.
This is how to play with personal integrity in a tournament's early rounds, when there is no umpire. Any ball that lands on
your side and is too close to call: call it fair. Here is how to be invulnerable to gamesmanship. To keep your attention's aperture 
tight. Here is how to teach yourself, when an opponent maybe cheats on the line-calls, to remind yourself that what goes around
comes around. That a poor sport's punishment is always self-inflicted.
Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.
Here is how to spray yourself down exactly once with Lemon Pledge, the ultimate sunscreen, then discover that when you go
out and sweat into it it smells like close-order skunk.
Here is how to take nonnarcotic muscle relaxants for the back spasms that come from thousands of serves to no one.
Here is how to weep in bed trying to remember when your torn blue ankle didn't hurt every minute.
This is the whirlpool, a friend.
Here is how to set up the electric ball machine at dawn on the days Himself is away living up to what will be his final talent.
Here is how to tie a bow tie. Here is how to sit through small openings of your father's first art films, surrounded by surly
foreign cigarette smoke and conversations so pretentious you literally cannot believe them, you're sure you have misheard them.
Pretend you're engaged by the jagged angles and multiple exposures without pretending you have the slightest idea what's going
on. Assume your brother's expression.
Here is how to sweat.
Here is how to hand a trophy to Lateral Alice Moore to put in the E.T.A. lobby's glass case under its system of spotlights and
small signs.
What is unfair can be a stern but invaluable teacher.
Here is how to pack carbohydrates into your tissues for a four-singles two-doubles match day in a Florida June.
Please learn to sleep with perpetual sunburn.
Expect some rough dreams. They come with the territory. Try to accept them. Let them teach you.
Keep a flashlight by your bed. It helps with the dreams.
Please make no extramural friends. Discourage advances from outside the circuit. Turn down dates.
If you do exactly the rehabilitative exercises They assign you, no matter how silly and tedious, the ankle will mend more
quickly.
This type of stretch helps prevent the groin-pull.
Treat your knees and elbow with all reasonable care: you will have them with you for a long time.
Here is how to turn down an extramural date so you won't be asked again. Say something like I'm terribly sorry I can't come
out to see 8 1/2 revived on a wall-size Cambridge Celluloid Festival viewer on Friday, Kim-berly, or Daphne, but you see if I
jump rope for two hours then jog backwards through Newton till I puke They'll let me watch match-cartridges and then my mother
will read aloud to me from the O.E.D. until 2200 lights-out, and c.; so you can be sure that henceforth Daphne/Kimberly/Jennifer
will take her adolescent-mating-dance-type-ritual-socialization business somewhere else. Be on guard. The road widens, and many
of the detours are seductive. Be constantly focused and on alert: feral talent is its own set of expectations and can abandon you at
any one of the detours of so-called normal American life at any time, so be on guard.
Here is how to schnell.
Here is how to go through your normal adolescent growth spurt and have every limb in your body ache like a migraine
because selected groups of muscles have been worked until thick and intensile and they resist as the sudden growth of bone tries
to stretch them, and they ache all the time. There is medication for this condition.
If you are an adolescent, here is the trick to being neither quite a nerd nor quite a jock: be no one.
It is easier than you think.
Here is how to read the monthly E.T.A. and U.S.T.A. and O.N.A.N.T.A. rankings the way Himself read scholars' reviews of
his multiple-exposure melodramas. Learn to care and not to care. They mean the rankings to help you determine where you are,
not who you are. Memorize your monthly rankings, and forget them. Here is how: never tell anyone where you are.
This is also how not to fear sleep or dreams. Never tell anyone where you are. Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear:
sometimes words that seem to express really invoke.
This can be tricky.
Here is how to get free sticks and strings and clothes and gear from Dunlop, Inc. as long as you let them spraypaint the
distinctive Dunlop logo on your sticks' strings and sew logos on your shoulder and the left pocket of your shorts and use a Dunlop
gear-bag, and you become a walking lunging sweating advertisement for Dunlop, Inc.; this is all as long as you keep justifying
your seed and preserving your rank; the Dunlop, Inc. New New England Regional Athletic Rep will address you as 'Our gray
swan'; he wears designer slacks and choking cologne and about twice a year wants to help you dress and has to be slapped like a
gnat.
Be a Student of the Game. Like most cliches of sport, this is profound. You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not
much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard. Peers who
fizzle or blow up or fall down, run away, disappear from the monthly rankings, drop off the circuit. E.T.A. peers waiting for
deLint to knock quietly at their door and ask to chat. Opponents. It's all educational. How promising you are as a Student of the
Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away. Nets and fences can be mirrors. And between the nets
and fences, opponents are also mirrors. This is why the whole thing is scary. This is why all opponents are scary and weaker
opponents are especially scary.
See yourself in your opponents. They will bring you to understand the Game. To accept the fact that the Game is about
managed fear. That its object is to send from yourself what you hope will not return.
This is your body. They want you to know. You will have it with you always.
On this issue there is no counsel; you must make your best guess. For myself, I do not expect ever really to know.
But in the interval, if it is an interval: here is Motrin for your joints, Noxzema for your burn, Lemon Pledge if you prefer
nausea to burn, Con-tracol for your back, benzoin for your hands, Epsom salts and anti-inflammatories for your ankle, and
extracurriculars for your folks, who just wanted to make sure you didn't miss anything they got.
SELECTED TRANSCRIPTS OF THE RESIDENT-INTERFACE-DROP- 
IN-HOURS OF MS. PATRICIA MONTESIAN, M.A., C.S.A.C.,5858 EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, ENNET HOUSE DRUG
AND ALCOHOL
RECOVERY HOUSE (SIC), ENFIELD MA, 1300-1500H., WEDNESDAY, 4 NOVEMBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND
ADULT
UNDERGARMENT
'But there's this way he drums his fingers on the table. Not even like really drumming. More like in-way between drumming
and like this scratching, picking, the way you see somebody picking at dead skin. And without any kind of rhythm, see, constant
and never-stopping but with no kind of rhythm you could grab onto and follow and stand. Totally like whacked, insane. Like the
kind of sounds you can imagine a girl hears in her head right before she kills her whole family because somebody took the last bit
of peanut butter or something. You know what I'm saying? The sound of a fucking mind coming apart. You know what I'm
saying? So yeah, yes, OK, the short answer is when he wouldn't quit with the drumming at supper I sort of poked him with my
fork. Sort of. I could see how maybe somebody could have thought I sort of stabbed him. I offered to get the fork out, though. Let
me just say I'm ready to make amends at like anytime. For my part in it. I'm owning my part in it is what I'm saying. Can I ask am
I going to get Restricted for this? Cause I have this Overnight tomorrow that Gene he approved already in the Overnight Log. If
you want to look. But I'm not trying to get out of owning my part of the, like, occurrence. If my Higher Power who I choose to
call God works through you saying I've got some kind of a punishment due, I won't try to get out of a punishment. If I've got one
due. I just wanted to ask. Did I mention I'm grateful to be here?’
'I'm not denying anything. I'm simply asking you to define "alcoholic." How can you ask me to attribute to myself a given
term if you refuse to define the term's meaning? I've been a reasonably successful personal-injury attorney for sixteen years, and
except for that one ridiculous so-called seizure at the Bar Association dinner this spring and that clot of a judge banning me from
his courtroom — and let me just say that I can support my contention that the man masturbates under his robe behind the bench
with detailed corroboration from both colleagues and Circuit Court laundry personnel — with the exception of less than a handful
of incidents I've held my liquor and my head as high as many a taller advocate. Believe you me. How old are you, young lady? I
am not in denial so to speak about anything empirical and objective. Am I having pancreas problems? Yes. Do I have trouble
recalling certain intervals in the Kemp and Limbaugh administrations? No contest. Is there a spot of domestic turbulence
surrounding my intake? Why yes there is. Did I experience yes some formication in detox? I did. I have no problem forthrightly
admitting things I can grasp. Forwicate, with an m, yes. But what is this you demand I admit? Is it denial to delay signature until
the vocabulary of the contract is clear to all parties so bound? Yes, yes, you don't follow what I mean here, good! And you're
reluctant to proceed without clarification. I rest. I cannot deny what I don't understand. This is my position.’
'So I'm sitting there waiting for my meatloaf to cool and suddenly there's a simply sphincter-loosening shriek and here's Nell
in the air with a steak-fork, positively aloft, leaping across the table, in flight, horizontal, I mean Pat the girl's body is literally
parallel to the surface of the table, hurling herself at me, with this upraised fork, shrieking something about the sound of peanut
butter. I mean my God. Gately and Diehl had to pull the fork out of my hand and the tabletop both. To give you an idea. Of the
savagery. Don't even ask me about the pain. Let's don't even get into that, I assure you. They offered me Percocet5959 at the
emergency room, is all I'll say about the levels of pain involved. I told them I was in recovery and powerless over narcotics of any
sort. Please don't even ask me how moved they were at my courage if you don't want me to get weepy. This whole experience has
me right on the edge of a complete hysterical fit. So but yes, guilty, I may very well have been tapping on the table. Excuse me for
occupying space. And then she ever so magnaminously says she'll apologize if I will. Well come again I said? Come again? I
mean my God. I'm sitting there attached to the table by tines. I know bashing, Pat, and this was unabashed bashing at its most
fascist. I respectfully ask that she be kicked out of here on her enormous rear-end. Let her go back to whatever fork-wielding
district she came from, with her Hefty bag full of gauche clothes. Honestly. I know part of this process is learning to live in a
community. The give and take, to let go of personality issues, turn them over. Et cetera. But is it not also supposed to be and here I
quote the handbook a safe and nurturing environment? I have seldom felt less nurtured than I did impaled on that table I have to
say. The pathetic harassments of Minty and McDade are bad enough. I can get bashed back at the Fenway. I did not come here to
get bashed on some pretense of table-tapping. I'm dangerously close to saying either that . . . that specimen goes or I do.’
'I'm awful sorry to bother. I can come back. I was wondering if maybe there was any special Program prayer for when you
want to hang yourself.’
'I want understanding I have no denial I am drug addict. Me, I know that I am addicted since the period of before Miami. I am
no trouble to stand up in the meetings and say I am Alfonso, I am drug addict, powerless. I am knowing powerlessness since the
period of Castro. But I cannot stop even since I know. This I have fear. I fear I do not stop when I admit I am Alfonso, powerless.
How does to admit I am powerless make me stop what the thing is I am powerless to stop? My head it is crazy from this fearing of
no power. I am now hope for power, Mrs. Pat. I want to advice. Is hope of power the bad way for Alfonso as drug addict?’
'Sorry to barge, there, P.M. Division called again about the thing with the vermin. The word was ultimatum that they said.’
'Sorry if I'm bothering you about something that isn't a straightforward treatment interface thing. I'm up there trying to do my
Chore. I've got the men's upstairs bathroom. There's something .. . Pat there's something in the toilet up there. That won't flush.
The thing. It won't go away. It keeps reappearing. Flush after flush. I'm only here for instructions. Possibly also protective
equipment. I couldn't even describe the thing in the toilet. All I can say is if it was produced by anything human then I have to say
I'm really worried. Don't even ask me to describe it. If you want to go up and have a look, I'm a 100% confident it's still there. It's
made it real clear it's not going anywhere.’
'Alls I know is I put a Hunt's Pudding Cup in the resident fridge like I'm supposed to at 1300 and da-da-da and at 1430 I come
down all primed for pudding that I paid for myself and it's not there and McDade comes on all concerned and offers to help me
look for it and da-da, except if you look I look and here's the son of a whore got this big thing of pudding on his chin.’
'Yeah but except so how can I answer just yes or no to do I want to stop the coke? Do I think I want to absolutely I think I
want to. I don't have a septum no more. My septum's been like fucking dissolved by coke. See? You see anything like a septum
when I lift up like that? I've absolutely with my whole heart thought I wanted to stop and so forth. Ever since with the septum. So
but so since I've been wanting to stop this whole time, why couldn't I stop? See what I'm saying? Isn't it all about wanting to and 
so on? And so forth? How can living here and going to meetings and all do anything except make me want to stop? But I think I
already want to stop. How come I'd even be here if I didn't want to stop? Isn't being here proof I want to stop? But then so how
come I can't stop, if I want to stop, is the thing.’
'This kid had a harelip. Where it goes like, you know, thith. But his went way up. Further up. He sold bad speed but good pot.
He said he'd cover our part of the rent if we kept his snakes supplied with mice. We were smoking up all our cash so what's to do.
They ate mice. We had to go into pet stores and pretend to be real heavily into mice. Snakes. He kept snakes. Doocy. They
smelled bad. He never cleaned the tanks. His lip covered his nose. The harelip. My guess he couldn't smell what they smelled like.
Or something would have got done. He had a thing for Mildred. My girlfriend. I don't know. She probably has a problem too. I
don't know. He had a thing for her. He'd keep saying shit like, with all these t-h's, he'd go Tho you want to fuck me, Mildred, or
what? We don't hath t'eat each other or nothin. He'd say shit like this with me right there, dropping mice into these tanks, holding
my breath. The mice had to be alive. All in this godawful voice like somebody's holding their nose and can't say 5. He didn't wash
his hair for two years. We had like an in-joke on how long he wouldn't wash his hair and we'd make X's on the calendar every
week. We had a lot of these in-type jokes, to help us stand it. We were wasted I'd say 90% of the time. Nine-0.
But he never did the whole time we were there. Wash. When she said we had to leave or she was taking off and taking Harriet
was when she said when I was at work he started telling her how to have sex with a chicken. He said he had sex with the chickens.
It was a trailer out past the dumpster-dock in the Spur, and he kept a couple chickens under it. No wonder they ran like hell when
anybody came. He'd been like sexually abusing fowls. He kept talking to her about it, with all t-h's, like You hath to like thcrew
them on, but when you come they jutht thort of fly off of you. She said she drew the line. We left and went to Pine Street shelter
and she stayed for a while till this guy with a hat said he had a ranch in New Jersey and off she goes, and with Harriet. Harriet's
our daughter. She's going to be three. She says it free, though. I doubt now the kid'll ever say a single t-h her whole life. And I
don't even know where in New Jersey. Does New Jersey even have ranches? I'd been in school with her since grade school.
Mildred. We were like childhood sweethearts. And then this guy who got her old cot at the shelter I got lice from. He moves into
her cot and then I start to get lice. I was still trying to deliver ice to machines at gas stations. Who wouldn't have to get high just to
stand it?’
'So this purports to be a disease, alcoholism? A disease like a cold? Or like cancer? I have to tell you, I have never heard of
anyone being told to pray for relief from cancer. Outside maybe certain very rural parts of the American South, that is. So what is
this? You're ordering me to pray? Because I allegedly have a disease? I dismantle my life and career and enter nine months of
low-income treatment for a disease, and I'm prescribed prayer? Does the word retrograde signify? Am I in a sociohistorical era I
don't know about? What exactly is the story here?’
'Fine, fine. Fine. Just completely fine. No problem at all. Happy to be here. Feeling better. Sleeping better. Love the chow. In
a word, couldn't be finer. The grinding? The tooth-grinding? A tic. A jaw-strengthener. Expression of all-around fineness.
Likewise the thing with the eyelid.’
'But I did too try. I been trying all month. I been on four interviews. They didn't none of them start till 11, and I'm like what's
the point get up early sit around here I don't have to be down there till 11 ? I filled out applications everday. Where'm I suppose to
go? You can't kick me out just for the moth— they don't call me back if I'm trying. Snot my fault. Go on and ask Clenette. Ask
that Thrale girl and them if I ain't been trying. You can't. This is just so fucked up.
'I said where'm I suppose to go to?’
'I'm on a month's Full-House Restriction for using freaking mouth wash? Newsflash: news bulletin: mouthwash is for spitting
out! It's like 2% proof!’
'It's about somebody else's farting, why I'm here.’
Til gladly identify myself if you'll first simply explain what it is I'm identifying myself as. This is my position. You're
requiring me to attest to facts I do not possess. The term for this is "duress."
'So my offense is what, misdemeanor gargling?' Til come back when you're free.’
'It's back. For a second there I hoped. I had hope. Then there it was again.’
'First just let me say one thing.’
LATE OCTOBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
'Open me anothowone of those boy and I'll tell you the highlight of that season of my season tickets was I got to see that
incwedible son of a bitch set his fiwst wecord in the flesh. It was y'bwother's Cub Scout twoop outing you wouldn't join because I
wemember this you w'afwaid you'd lose the online time in fwont of the TP. Wemember? Well I'll always wemember this one day,
boy. It was against Sywacuse, what, eight seasons back. The little son of a bitch had a long of seventy-thwee that day and a
avewage of sixty-fwigging-nine. Seventy-thwee for Chwist's sake. Open me anothowone, boy, use the exowcise. I wecall the sky
was cloudy. When he punted you spent a weal long time studying the sky. They weally hung. He had a long hang-time of eightpoint-thwee seconds that day. That's sewious hanging, boy. Me I nevewit five in my day. Chwist. The whole twoop said they
never heawd anything like the sound of the son of a bitch's seventy-thwee. Won Wichardson, you wemember Wonnie, the twoopleadawhateva, petwoleum jelly salesman outta Bwookline, Wonnie's a wetired pilot from the Sewvice, from a bomma-squadwon,
Wonnie we's down at t'pub that night Wonnie says he says that seventy-thwee sounded just like fucking bombs sounded, that kind
of cwacking WHUMP, when they hit, to the boys in the squadwon in the planes when they let them go.’
The radio show right before Madame Psychosis's midnight show on M.I.T.'s semi-underground WYYY is 'Those Were the
Legends That Formerly Were,' one of those cruel tech-collegiate formats where any U.S. student who wants to can dart over from
the super-collider lab or the Fourier Transforms study group for fifteen minutes and read on-air some parodic thing where he'd
pretend to be his own dad apotheosizing some sort of thick-necked historic athletic figure the dad'd admired and had by
implication compared with woeful distaste to the pencil-necked big-headed asthmatic little kid staring up through Coke-bottle
lenses from his digital keyboard. The show's only rule is that you have to read your thing in the voice of some really silly cartoon
character. There are other, rather more exotic patricidal formats for Asian, Latin, Arab, and European students on select weekend 
evenings. The consensus is Asian cartoon characters have the silliest voices.
Albeit literally sophomoric, 'Those Were the Legends . . .' is a useful drama-therapy-type catharsis-op — M.I.T. students tend
to carry their own special psychic scars: nerd, geek, dweeb, wonk, fag, wienie, four-eyes, spazola, limp-dick, needle-dick,
dickless, dick-nose, pencil-neck; getting your violin or laptop TP or entomologist's kill-jar broken over your large head by thicknecked kids on the playground — and the show pulls down solid FM ratings, though a lot of that's due to reverse-inertia, a
Newton'sTI-like backward shove from the rabidly popular Madame Psychosis Hour, M-F 0000h.-0100h., which it precedes.
Y.D.A.U.'s WYYY late-shift student engineer, unfond of any elevator that follows a serpentine or vascular path, eschews the
M.I.T. Student Union's elevator. He has an arrival routine where he skips the front entrances and comes in through the south side's
acoustic meatus and gets a Millennial Fizzy® out of the vending machine in the sephenoid sinus, then descends creaky back
wooden stairs from the Massa Intermedia's Reading Room down to about the Infundibular Recess, past the Tech Talk Daily CDROM student paper's production floor and the sick chemical smell of the Read-Only cartridge-press's developer, down past the
epiglottal Hillel Club's dark and star-doored HQ, past the heavier door to the tiled lattice of hallways to the squash and racquetball
courts and one volleyball court and the airy corpus callosum of 24 high-ceiling tennis courts endowed by an M.I.T. alum and now
so little used they don't even know now where the nets are, down three more levels to the ghostly-clean and lithium-lit studios of
FM 109-WYYY FM, broadcasting for the M.I.T. community and selected points beyond. The studio's walls are pink and
laryngeally fissured. His asthma's better down here, the air thin and keen, the tracheal air-filters just below the flooring and the
ventilators' air the freshest in the Union.
The engineer, a work-study graduate student with bad lungs and occluded pores, settles alone at his panel in the engineer's
booth, adjusts a couple needles' bob, and sound-checks the only paid personality on the nightly docket, the darkly revered
Madame Psychosis, whose cameo shadow is just visible outside the booth's thick glass, her screen half-obscuring the on-air
studio's bank of phones, checking cueing and transition for the Thursday edition. She is hidden from all view by a jointed triptych
screen of cream chiffon that glows red and green in the lights of the phone bank and the cueing panel's dials and frames her
silhouette. Her silhouette is cleanly limned against the screen, sitting cross-legged in its in-sectile microphonic headset, smoking.
The engineer always has to tighten his own headset's cranial band down from the 'Those Were' engineer's mammoth parietal
breadth. He activates the intercom and offers to check Madame Psychosis's levels. He requests sound. Anything at all. He hasn't
opened his can of pop. There is a long silence during which Madame Psychosis's silhouette doesn't look up from something she
looks like she's collating at her little desk.
After a while she makes some little sounds, little plosives to check for roaring sounds in exhalations, a perennial problem in
low-budget FM.
She makes a long s-sound.
The student engineer takes a hit from his portable inhaler.
She says 'He liked that sort of dreamy, dreaming music that had the rhythm of long things swinging.’
The engineer's movements at the panel's dials resemble someone adjusting the heater and sound system while driving.
'The Dow that can be told is not the eternal Dow,' she says.
The engineer, age twenty-three, has extremely bad skin.
'Attractive paraplegic female seeks same; object:’
The windowless laryngeal studio is terribly bright. Nothing casts a shadow. Recessed-lit fluorescence with a dual-spectrum
lithiumized corona, developed two buildings over and awaiting O.N.A.N. patent. The chilly shadowless light of surgical theaters,
convenience stores at 0400. The pink wrinkled walls sometimes look more gynecological than anything else.
'Like most marriages, theirs was the evolved product of concordance and compromise.’
The engineer shivers in the bright chill and lights a gasper of his own and tells Madame Psychosis through the intercom that
the whole range of levels is fine. Madame Psychosis is the only WYYY personality who brings in her own headset and jacks, plus
a triptych screen. Over the screen's left section are four clocks set for different Zones, plus a numberless disk someone hung for a
joke, to designate the annularized Great Concavity's No-Time. The E.S.T. clock's trackable hand carves off the last few seconds
from the five minutes of dead air Madame Psychosis's contract stipulates gets to precede her show. You can see her silhouette
putting out the cigarette very methodically. She cues tonight's synthesized bumper and theme music; the engineer flicks a lever
and pumps the music up the coaxial medulla and through the amps and boosters packed into the crawlspaces above the high false
ceiling of the corpus callosum's idle tennis courts and up and out the aerial that protrudes from the gray and bulbous surface of the
Union's roof. Institutional design has come a ways from I. M. Pei. M.I.T.'s near-new Student Union, off the corner of Ames and
Memorial Dr.,6060 East Cambridge, is one enormous cerebral cortex of reinforced concrete and polymer compounds. Madame
Psychosis is smoking again, listening, head cocked. Her tall screen will leak smoke for her show's whole hour. The student
engineer is counting down from five on an outstretched hand he can't see how she sees. And as pinkie meets palm, she says what
she's said for three years of midnights, an opening bit that Mario Incandenza, the least cynical person in the history of Enfield
MA, across the river, listening faithfully, finds, for all its black cynicism, terribly compelling:
Her silhouette leans and says 'And Lo, for the Earth was empty of form, and void.
'And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep.
'And We said: 'Look at that fucker Dance.’
A toneless male voice is then cued in to say It's Sixty Minutes More Or Less With Madame Psychosis On YYY-109, Largest
Whole Prime On The FM Band. The different sounds are encoded and pumped by the student engineer up through the building's
corpus and out the roof's aerial. This aerial, low-watt, has been rigged by the station's EM-wienies to tilt and spin, not unlike a
centrifugal theme-park-type ride, spraying the signal in all directions. Since the B.S. 1966 Hundt Act, the low-watt fringes of the
FM band are the only part of the Wireless Spectrum still licensed for public broadcast. The deep-water green of FM tuners all over
the campus's labs and dorms and barnacled clots of grad apartments align themselves slowly toward the spatter's center, moving
toward the dial's right, a little creepily, like plants toward light they can't even see. Ratings are minor-league by the pre-InterLace
broadcast standards of yore, but they are rock-solid consistent. Audience demand for Madame Psychosis has been, from the very
start, inelastic. The aerial, inclined at about the angle of a 3-km. cannon, spins in a blurred ellipse — its rotary base is elliptical 
because that's the only shape the EM-wienies could rig a mold for. Obstructed on all sides by the tall buildings of East Cambridge
and Commercial Drive and serious Downtown, though, only a couple thin pie-slices of signal escape M.I.T. proper, e.g. through
the P.E.-Dept. gap of barely used lacrosse and soccer fields between the Philology and Low-Temp Physics complexes on Mem.
Dr. and then across the florid-purple nighttime breadth of the historic Charles River, then through the heavy flow of traffic on
Storrow Dr. on the Chuck's other side, so that by the time the signal laps at upper Brighton and Enfield you need almost
surveillance-grade antennation to filter it in out of the EM-miasma of cellular and interconsole phone transmissions and TPs' EMauras that crowd the FM fringes from every side. Unless, that is, your tuner is lucky enough to be located at the apex of a tall and
more or less denuded hill, in Enfield, in which case you find yourself right in YYY's centrifugal line of fire.
Madame Psychosis eschews chatty openings and contextual filler. Her hour is compact and no-nonsense.
After the music fades, her shadow holds collated sheets up and riffles them slightly so the sound of paper is broadcast.
'Obesity,' she says. 'Obesity with hypogonadism. Also morbid obesity. Nodular leprosy with leonine fades.' The engineer can see
her silhouette lift a cup as she pauses, which reminds him of the Millennial Fizzy in his bookbag.
She says 'The acromegalic and hyperkeratosistic. The enuretic, this year of all years. The spasmodically torticollic.’
The student engineer, a pre-doctoral transuranial metallurgist working off massive G.S.L. debt, locks the levels and fills out
the left side of his time sheet and ascends with his bookbag through a treillage of interneural stairways with Semitic ideograms
and developer-smell and past snack bar and billiard hall and modem-banks and extensive Student Counseling offices around the
rostral lamina, all the little-used many-staired neuroform way up to the artery-red fire door of the Union's rooftop, leaving
Madame Psychosis, as is S.O.P., alone with her show and screen in the shadowless chill. She's mostly alone in there when she's
on-air. Every so often there's a guest, but the guest will usually get introduced and then not say anything. The monologues seem
both free-associative and intricately structured, not unlike nightmares. There's no telling what'll be up on a given night. If there's
one even remotely consistent theme it's maybe film and film-cartridges. Early and (mostly Italian) neorealist and (mostly German)
expressionist celluloid film. Never New Wave. Thumbs-up on Peterson/Broughton and Dali/ Buñuel and -down on
Deren/Hammid. Passionate about Antonioni's slower stuff and some Russian guy named Tarkovsky. Sometimes Ozu and Bresson.
Odd affection for the hoary dramaturgy of one Sir Herbert Tree. Bizarre Kaelesque admiration for goremeisters Peckinpah, De
Palma, Tarantino. Positively poisonous on the subject of Fellini's 8 1/2. Exceptionally conversant w/r/t avant-garde celluloid and
avant- and après-garde digital cartridges, antíconfluential cinema,6161 Brutalism, Found Drama, etc. Also highly literate on U.S.
sports, football in particular, which fact the student engineer finds dissonant. Madame takes one phone call per show, at random.
Mostly she solos. The show kind of flies itself. She could do it in her sleep, behind the screen. Sometimes she seems very sad. The
engineer likes to monitor the broadcast from a height, the Union's rooftop, summer sun and winter wind. The more correct term
for an asthmatic's inhaler is 'nebulizer.' The engineer's graduate research specialty is the carbonated translíthium particles created
and destroyed billions of times a second in the core of a cold-fusion ring. Most of the lithioids can't be smashed or studied and
exist mostly to explain gaps and incongruities in annulation equations. Once last year, Madame Psychosis had the student engineer
write out the home-lab process for turning uranium oxide powder into good old fissionable U-235. Then she read it on the air
between a Baraka poem and a critique of the Steeler defense's double-slot secondary. It's something a bright high-schooler could
cook and took less than three minutes to read on-air and didn't involve one classified procedure or one piece of hardware not
gettable from any decent chemical-supply outlet in Boston, but there was no small unpleasantness about it from the M.I.T.
administration, which it's well-known M.I.T. is in bed with Defense. The hot-fuel recipe was the one bit of verbal intercourse the
engineer's had with Madame Psychosis that didn't involve straight levels and cues.
The Union's soft latex-polymer roof is cerebrally domed and a cloudy pia-mater pink except in spots where it's eroded down
to pasty gray, and everywhere textured, the bulging rooftop, with sulci and bulbous convolutions. From the air it looks wrinkled;
from the roof's fire door it's an almost nauseous system of serpentine trenches, like water-slides in hell. The Union itself, the late
A.Y. ('V.F.') Rickey's summum opus, is a great hollow brain-frame, an endowed memorial to the North American seat of Very
High Tech, and is not as ghastly as out-of-towners suppose it must be, though the vitreally inflated balloon-eyes, deorbited and
hung by twined blue cords from the second floor's optic chiasmae to flank the wheelchair-accessible front ramp, take a bit of
getting used to, and some like the engineer never do get comfortable with them and use the less garish auditory side-doors; and the
abundant sulcus-fissures and gyrus-bulges of the slick latex roof make rain-drainage complex and footing chancy at best, so
there's not a whole lot of recreational strolling up here, although a kind of safety-balcony of skull-colored polybutylene resin,
which curves around the midbrain from the inferior frontal sulcus to the parietooccipital sulcus — a halo-ish ring at the level of
like eaves, demanded by the Cambridge Fire Dept. over the heated pro-mimetic protests of topological Rickeyites over in the
Architecture Dept. (which the M.I.T. administration, trying to placate Rickeyites and C.F.D. Fire Marshal both, had had the premolded resin injected with dyes to render it the distinctively icky brown-shot off-white of living skull, so that the balcony
resembles at once corporeal bone and numinous aura) — which balcony means that even the worst latex slip-and-slide off the
steeply curved cerebrum's edge would mean a fall of only a few meters to the broad butylene platform, from which a venous-blue
emergency ladder can be detached and lowered to extend down past the superior temporal gyrus and Pons and abducent to hook
up with the polyurethane basilar-stem artery and allow a safe shimmy down to the good old oblongata just outside the rubberized
meatus at ground zero.
Topside in the bitter river wind, wearing a khaki parka with a fake fur fringe, the student engineer makes his way and settles
into the first intra-parietal sulcus that catches his fancy, makes a kind of nest in the soft trench — the convoluted latex is filled
with those little non-FHC Styrofoam peanuts everything industrially soft is filled with, and the pia-mater surface gives rather like
one of those old bean bag-chairs of more innocent times — settles in and back with his Millennial Fizzy and inhaler and cigarette
and pocket-size Heathkit digital FM-band receiver under a high-CO night sky that makes the stars' points look extra sharp. The
Boston P.M. is 10°C. The postcentral sulcus he sits in is just outside the circumference of the YYY aerial's high-speed spin, so
five m. overhead its tip's aircraft-light describes a blurred oval, vascularly hued. His FM receiver's power cells, tested daily against
the Low-Temp Lab's mercuric resistors, are fresh, the wooferless tuner's sound tinny and crisp, so that Madame sounds like a
faithful but radically miniaturized copy of her studio self.
'Those with saddle-noses. Those with atrophic limbs. And yes chemists and pure-math majors also those with atrophic necks. 
Scleredema adultorum. Them that seep, the serodermatotic. Come one come all, this circular says. The hydrocephalic. The
tabescent and chachetic and anorexic. The Brag's-Diseased, in their heavy red rinds of flesh. The dermally wine-stained or
carbuncular or steatocryptotic or God forbid all three. Marin-Amat Syndrome, you say? Come on down. The psoriatic. The
exzematically shunned. And the scrofulodermic. Bell-shaped steatopygiacs, in your special slacks. Afflictees of Pityriasis Rosea.
It says here Come all ye hateful. Blessed are the poor in body, for they.’
The pulsing aircraft-alert light of the aerial is magenta, a sharp and much closer star, now, with his fingers laced behind his
head, reclined and gazing upward, listening, the centrifugal whirl's speed making its tip's light trail color across the eyes. The
light's oval a bloody halo over the very barest of all possible heads. Madame Psychosis has done U.H.I.D. stuff before, once or
twice. He is listening to her read four levels below the Oblangated Recess that becomes the heating shaft's nubbin of spine, ad-libstyle reading from one of the PR-circulars of the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed, an agnostic-style 12-step
support-group deal for what it calls the 'aesthetically challenged.'6262 She sometimes reads circulars and catalogues and PR-type
things, though not regularly. Some things take several successive shows to get through. Ratings stay solid; listeners hang in. The
engineer's pretty sure he'd hang in even if he weren't paid to. He does like to settle into a sulcus and smoke slowly and exhale up
past the blurred red ellipse of the aerial, monitoring. Madame's themes are at once unpredictable and somehow rhythmic, more
like probability-waves for subhadronics than anything else.6363 The student engineer has never once seen Madame Psychosis
enter or leave WYYY; she probably takes the elevator. It's 22 October in the O.N.A.N.ite year of the Depend Adult
Undergarment.
Like most marriages, Avril and the late James Incandenza's was an evolved product of concordance and compromise, and the
scholastic curriculum at E.T.A. is the product of negotiated compromises between Avril's academic hard-assery and James's and
Schtitt's keen sense of athletic pragmatics. It is because of Avril — who quit M.I.T. entirely and went down to half-time at
Brandeis and even turned down an extremely plummy-type stipended fellowship at Radcliffe's Bunting Institute that first year to
design and assume the helm of E.T.A.'s curriculum — that the Enfield Tennis Academy is the only athletic-focus-type school in
North America that still adheres to the trivium and quadrivium of the hard-ass classical L.A.S. tradition,6464 and thus one of the
very few extant sports academies that makes a real stab at being a genuine pre-college school and not just an Iron Curtainish jockfactory. But Schtitt never let Incandenza forget what the place was supposed to be about, and so Avril's flinty mens-sana pedagogy
wasn't diluted so much as ad-valoremized, pragmatically focused toward the corpore-potis-type goals kids were coming up the hill
to give their childhoods for. Some E.T.A. twists Avril'd allowed into the classic L.A.S. path are e.g. that the seven subjects of the
T and Q are mixed and not divided into Quadrivial Upper-class v. Trivial Ephebic; that E.T.A. geometry classes pretty much
ignore the study of closed figures (excepting rectangles) to concentrate (also except for Thorp's Trigonometry of Cubes, which is
elective and mostly aesthetic) for two increasingly brutal semesters on the involution and expansion of bare angles; that the
quadrivial requirement of astronomy has at E.T.A. become a two-term elementary optics survey, since vision issues are obviously
more germane to the Game, and since all the hardware required for everything from aphotic to apochromatic lens work were and
are right there in the lab off the Comm.-Ad. tunnel. Music's been pretty much bagged. Plus the trivi-umoid fetish for classical
oratory has by now at E.T.A. been converted to a wide range of history and studio courses in various types of entertainment,
mostly recorded film — again, way too much of Incandenza's lavish equipment lying around not to exploit, plus the legally willed
and endowed-for-perpetuity presence on the academic payroll of Mrs. Pricket, Mr. Ogilvie, Mr. Disney R. Leith, and Ms. Soma
Richardson-Levy-O'Byrne-Chawaf, the late founder/director's loyal sound engineer, Best Boy, production assistant, and thirdfavorite actress, respectively.
Plus also the six-term Entertainment Requirement because students hoping to prepare for careers as professional athletes are
by intension training also to be entertainers, albeit of a deep and special sort, was Incandenza's line, one of the few philosophical
points he had to pretty much ram down the throats of both Avril and Schtitt, who was pushing hard for some mix of theology and
the very grim ethics of Kant.
Mario Incandenza has sat in on a back-row stool for every session of an E.T.A. Entertainment Dept. offering ever since he
was finally three years ago December asked to disenroll from the Winter Hill Special School in Cam-bridgeport for cheerfully
declining even to try to learn to really read, explaining he'd way rather listen and watch. And he is a fanatical listener/ observer.
He treats the lavish Tatsuoka fringe-FM-band tuner in the living room of the Headmaster's House like kids of three generations
past, listening the way other kids watch TP, opting for mono and sitting right up close to one of the speakers with his head cocked
dog-like, listening, staring into that special pocket of near-middle distance reserved for the serious listener. He really does have to
sit right up close to listen to 'Sixty Minutes +/— ...' when he's over at the HmH6565 with C.T. and sometimes Hal at his mother's
late suppers, because Avril has some auditory thing about broadcast sound and gets the howling fantods from any voice that does
not exit a living corporeal head, and though Avril's made it clear that Mario's free at any time to activate and align the Tatsuoka's
ghostly-green tuner to whatever he wishes, he keeps the volume so low that he has to be lowered onto a low coffee table and lean
in and almost put his ear up against the woofer's tremble and concentrate closely to hear YYY's signal over the conversation in the
dining room, which tends to get sort of manically high-pitched toward the end of supper. Avril never actually asks Mario to keep
it down; he does it out of unspoken consideration for her thing about sound. Another of her unspoken but stressful things involves
issues of enclosure, and the HmH has no interior doors between rooms, and not even much in the way of walls, and the living and
dining rooms are separated only by a vast multileveled tangle of house-plants in pots and on little stools of different heights and
arrayed under hanging UV lamps of an intensity that tends to give the diners strange little patterns of tan that differ according to
where someone usually sits at the table. Hal sometimes complains privately to Mario that he gets more than enough UV during the
day thank you very much. The plants are incredibly lush and hale and sometimes threaten to block off the whole easement from
dining to living room, and the rope-handled Brazilian machete C.T. had mounted on the wall by the tremulous china-case has
stopped really being a joke. The Moms calls the houseplants her Green Babies, and she has a rather spectacular thumb, plant-wise,
for a Canadian.
'The leukodermatic. The xanthodantic. The maxillofacially swollen. Those with distorted orbits of all kinds. Get out from
under the sun's cove-lighting is what this says. Come in from the spectral rain.' Madame Psy-chosis's broadcast accent is not
Boston. There are r's, for one thing, and there is no cultured Cambridge stutter. It's the accent of someone who's spent time either 
losing a southern lilt or cultivating one. It's not flat and twangy like Stice's, and it's not a drawl like the people at Gainesville's
academy. Her voice itself is sparely modulated and strangely empty, as if she were speaking from inside a small box. It's not bored
or laconic or ironic or tongue-in-cheek. 'The basilisk-breathed and pyorrheic.' It's reflective but not judgmental, somehow. Her
voice seems low-depth familiar to Mario the way certain childhood smells will strike you as familiar and oddly sad. 'All ye
peronic or teratoidal. The phrenologically malformed. The sup-puratively lesioned. The endocrinologically malodorous of
whatever ilk. Run don't walk on down. The acervulus-nosed. The radically -ectomied. The morbidly diaphoretic with a hankie in
every pocket. The chronically granulomatous. The ones it says here the ones the cruel call Two-Baggers — one bag for your head,
one bag for the observer's head in case your bag falls off. The hated and dateless and shunned, who keep to the shadows. Those
who undress only in front of their pets. The quote aesthetically challenged. Leave your lazarettes and oubliettes, I'm reading this
right here, your closets and cellars and TP Tableaux, find Nurturing and Support and the Inner Resources to face your own
unblinking sight, is what this goes on to say, a bit overheatedly maybe. Is it our place to say. It says here Hugs Not Ughs. It says
Come don the veil of the type and token. Come learn to love what's hidden inside. To hold and cherish. The almost unbelievably
thick-ankled. The kyphotic and lordotic. The irremediably cellulitic. It says Progress Not Perfection. It says Never Perfection. The
fatally pulchritudinous: Welcome. The Actaeonizing, side by side with the Medusoid. The papuled, the macu-lar, the albinic.
Medusas and odalisques both: Come find common ground. All meeting rooms windowless. That's in ital: all meeting rooms
window-less.' Plus the music she's cued for this inflectionless reading is weirdly compelling. You can never predict what it will
be, but over time some kind of pattern emerges, a trend or rhythm. Tonight's background fits, somehow, as she reads. There's not
any real forwardness to it. You don't sense it's straining to get anywhere. The thing it makes you see as she reads is something
heavy swinging slowly at the end of a long rope. It's minor-key enough to be eerie against the empty lilt of the voice and the clinks
of tines and china as Mario's relations eat turkey salad and steamed crosiers and drink lager and milk and vin blanc from Hull over
behind the plants bathed in purple light. Mario can see the back of the Moms's head high above the table, and then over to the left
Hal's bigger right arm, and then Hal's profile when he lowers it to eat. There's a ball by his plate. The E.T.A. players seem to need
to eat six or seven times a day. Hal and Mario had walked over for 2100 supper at HmH after Hal had read something for Mr.
Leith's class and then disappeared for about half an hour while Mario stood supported by his police lock and waited for him.
Mario rubs his nose with the heel of his hand. Madame Psychosis has an unironic but generally gloomy outlook on the universe in
general. One of the reasons Mario's obsessed with her show is that he's somehow sure Madame Psychosis cannot herself sense the
compelling beauty and light she projects over the air, somehow. He has visions of interfacing with her and telling her she'd feel a
lot better if she listened to her own show, he bets. Madame Psychosis is one of only two people Mario would love to talk to but
would be scared to try. The word periodic pops into his head.
'Hey Hal?' he calls across the plants.
Like for months in the spring semester of Y.D.P.A.H. she referred to her own program as 'Madame's Downer-Lit Hour' and
read depressing book after depressing book — Good Morning, Midnight and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Giovanni's Room
and Under the Volcano, plus a truly ghastly Bret Ellis period during Lent — in a monotone, really slowly, night after night. Mario
sits on the low little van der Rohe-knockoff coffee table with bowed legs (the table) with his head cocked right up next the speaker
and his claws in his lap. His toes tend to point inward when he sits. The background music is both predictable and, within that
predictability, surprising: it's periodic. It suggests expansion without really expanding. It leads up to the exact kind of inevitability
it denies. It is heavily digital, but with something of a choral bouquet. But unhuman. Mario thinks of the word haunting, like in 'a
haunting echo of thus-and-such.' Madame Psy-chosis's cued music — which the student engineer never chooses or even sees her
bring in — is always terribly obscure6666 but often just as queerly powerful and compelling as her voice and show itself, the
M.I.T. community feels. It tends to give you the feeling there's an in-joke that you and she alone are in on. Very few devoted
WYYY listeners sleep well M-F. Mario has horizontal breathing-trouble sometimes, but other than that he sleeps like a babe.
Avril Incandenza still sticks with the old L'Islet-region practice of taking just tea and nibbles at U.S. suppertime and waiting to eat
seriously until right before bed. Cultured Canadians tend to think vertical digestion makes the mind unkeen. Some of Orin and
Mario and Hal's earliest memories are of nodding off at the dining-room table and being gently carried by a very tall man to bed.
This was in a different house. Madame Psychosis's cued musics stir very early memories of Mario's father. Avril is more than
willing to take some good-natured guff about her inability to eat before like 223Oh. Prandial music holds little charm or
associations for Hal, who like most of the kids on double daily drills makes fists around his utensils and eats like a wild dog.
'Nor are excluded the utterly noseless, nor the hideously wall- and crosseyed, nor either the ergotic of St. Anthony, the
leprous, the varicelliformally eruptive or even the sarcoma'd of Kaposi.’
Hal and Mario probably eat/listen late over at the HmH twice a week. Avril likes to see them outside the awkward formality
of her position at E.T.A. C.T.'s the same at home and office. Both Avril and Tavis's bedrooms are on the second floor, as a matter
of fact right next to each other. The only other room up there is Avril's personal study, with a big color Xerox of M. Hamilton as
Oz's West Witch on the door and custom fiber-wiring for a tri-modem TP console. A stairway runs from her study down the
backside of HmH, north, down to a tributary-tunnel leading to the main tunnel to Comm.-Ad., so Avril can commute over to
E.T.A. below ground. The HmH tunnel connects with the main at a point between the Pump Room and Comm.-Ad., meaning
Avril never like hunches idly past the Pump Room, which fact Hal obviously endorses. Late suppers at HmH for Hal are limited
by deLint to twice a week tops because they get him excused from dawn drills, which also means late-night mischief possibilities.
Sometimes they bring Canada's John ('No Relation') Wayne over with them, whom Mrs. I. likes and speaks to animatedly even
though he rarely says anything the whole time he's there and also eats like a wild dog, sometimes neglecting utensils altogether.
Avril also likes it when Axford comes; Axford has a hard time eating, and she likes to exhort him to eat. Very rarely anymore
does Hal bring Pemulis or Jim Struck, to whom Avril is so faultlessly, brittlely polite that the dining room's tension raises hair.
Whenever Avril parts ficus leaves to check, Mario's still hunched pigeon-toed and cocked in the same RCA-Victorish posture,
with the little horizontal forehead-crease that means he's either listening or thinking hard.
'The multiple amputee. The prosthetically malmatched. The snaggle-toothed, wattled, weak-chinned, and walrus-cheeked.
The palate-clefted. The really large-pored. The excessively but not necessarily lycanthropically hirsute. The pin-headed. The
convulsively Tourettic. The Parkinsonianly tremulous. The stunted and gnarled. The teratoid of overall visage. The twisted and 
hunched and humped and halitotic. The in any way asymmetrical. The rodential- and saurian- and equine-looking.’
'Hey Hal?’
The tri-nostriled. The invaginate of mouth and eye. Those with those dark loose bags under their eyes that hang halfway down
their faces. Those with Cushing's Disease. Those who look like they have Down Syndrome even though they don't have Down
Syndrome. You decide. You be the judge. It says You are welcome regardless of severity. Severity is in the eye of the sufferer, it
says. Pain is pain. Crow's feet. Birthmark. Rhinoplasty that didn't take. Mole. Overbite. A bad-hair year.’
The WYYY student engineer in his sulcus contemplates the moon, which looks sort of like a full moon that somebody's
bashed in a little bit with a hammer. Madame Psychosis asks rhetorically whether the circular's left anyone out. The engineer
finishes his Fizzy and makes ready to descend again for the hour's close, his skin turned toward the terrible cerebral chill off the
Charles, which is windy and blue. Sometimes Madame Psychosis takes one random call to start '60 +/—.' Tonight the one caller
she ends by taking has a cultured stutter and invites M.P. and the YYY community to consider the fact that the moon, which of
course as any sot knows revolves around the earth, does not itself revolve. Is this true? He says it is. That it just stays there, hidden
and disclosed by our round shadow's rhythms, but never revolving. That it never turns its face away.
The little Heathkit can't receive signals inside the Cerebrum's subdural stairwells, during descent, but the student engineer can
anticipate she'll make no direct reply. Her sign-off is more dead air. She almost reminds the engineer of certain types in high
school whom everyone adored because you sensed it made no difference to them whether you adored them. It had sure made a
difference to the engineer, though, who hadn't been invited to even one graduation party, with his inhaler and skin.
The dessert Avril serves when Hal's over is Mrs. Clarke's infamous high-protein-gelatin squares, available in bright red or
bright green, sort of like Jell-O on steroids. Mario's wild for them. C.T. clears the table and loads the dishwasher, since he didn't
cook, and Hal gets into his coat at like OlOlh. Mario's still listening to the WYYY nightly sign-off, which takes a while because
they not only list the station's kilowattage specs but go through proofs for the formulae by which the specs are derived. C.T.
always drops at least one plate out in the kitchen and then bellows. Avril always brings some hell-Jell-O squares in to Mario and
adopts a mock-dry tone and tells Hal it's been reasonably nice to see him outside les bâtiments sanctifies. The whole thing to Hal
sometimes gets ritualistic and almost hallucinatory, the postprandial farewell routine. Hal stands under the big framed poster of
Metropolis and whumps his gloves together casually and tells Mario there's no reason for him to leave too; Hal's going to blast
down the hill for a bit. Avril and Mario always smile and Avril asks casually what his plans are.
Hal always whumps his gloves together and smiles up at her and says 'Make trouble.’
And Avril always puts on a sort of mock-stern expression and says 'Do not, under any circumstances, have fun,' which Mario
still always finds clutch-your-stomach funny, every time, week after week.
Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House is the sixth of seven exterior Units on the grounds of an Enfield Marine
Public Health Hospital complex that, from the height of an ATHSCME 2100 industrial displacement fan or Enfield Tennis
Academy's hilltop, resembles seven moons orbiting a dead planet. The hospital building itself, a VA facility of iron-colored brick
and steep slate roofs, is closed and cordoned, bright pine boards nailed across every possible access and aperture, with really stern
government signs about trespassing. Enfield Marine was built during either WWII or Korea, when there were ample casualties and
much convalescence. About the only people who use the Enfield Marine complex in a VA-related way now seem to be wild-eyed
old Vietnam veterans in fatigue jackets de-sleeved to make vests, or else drastically old Korea vets who are now senile or
terminally alcoholic or both.
The hospital building itself stripped of equipment and copper wire, defunct, Enfield Marine stays solvent by maintaining
several smaller buildings on the complex's grounds — buildings the size of like prosperous homes, which used to house VA
doctors and support staff — and leasing them to different state-related health agencies and services. Each building has a Unitnumber that increases with the Unit's distance from the defunct hospital and with its proximity, along a rutted cement roadlet that
extends back from the hospital's parking lot, to a steep ravine that overlooks a particularly unpleasant part of Brighton MA's
Commonwealth Avenue and its Green Line train tracks.
Unit #l, right by the lot in the hospital's afternoon shadow, is leased by some agency that seems to employ only guys who
wear turtlenecks; the place counsels wild-eyed Vietnam vets for certain very-delayed stress disorders, and dispenses various
pacifying medications. Unit#2, right next door, is a methadone clinic overseen by the same MA Division of Substance Abuse
Services that licenses Ennet House. Customers for the services of Units #1 and #2 arrive around sunup and form long lines. The
customers for Unit #l tend to congregate in like-minded groups of three or four and gesture a lot and look wild-eyed and generally
pissed-off in some broad geopolitical way. The customers for the methadone clinic tend to arrive looking even angrier, as a rule,
and their early-morning eyes tend to bulge and flutter like the eyes of the choked, but they do not congregate, rather stand or lean
along #2's long walkway's railing, arms crossed, alone, brooding, solo acts, standoffish — 50 or 60 people all managing to form a
line on a narrow walkway waiting for the same small building to unlock its narrow front door and yet still managing to appear
alone and stand-offish is a strange sight, and if Don Gately had ever once seen a ballet he would, as an Ennet House resident, from
his sunup smoking station on the fire escape outside the Five-Man bedroom upstairs, have seen the movements and postures
necessary to maintain this isolation-in-union as balletic.
The other big difference between Units#1 and #2 is that the customers of #2 leave the building deeply changed, their eyes not
only back in their heads but peaceful, if a bit glazed, but anyway in general just way better put-together than when they arrived,
while #l's wild-eyed patrons tend to exit #l looking even more stressed and historically aggrieved than when they went in.
When Don Gately was in the very early part of his Ennet House residency he almost got discharged for teaming up with a
bad-news methedrine addict from New Bedford and sneaking out after curfew across the E.M.P.H.H. complex in the middle of the
night to attach a big sign on the narrow front door of Unit #2's methadone clinic. The sign said CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER
NOTICE BY ORDER COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS. The first staffer at the methadone clinic doesn't get there
to open up until O8OOh., and yet it's been mentioned how #2's customers always begin to show up with twisting hands and
bulging eyes at like dawn, to wait; and Gately and the speed freak from New Bedford had never seen anything like the psychic
crises and near-riot among these semi-ex-junkies — pallid blade-slender chain-smoking homosexuals and bearded bruiser-types in
leather berets, women with mohawks and multiple sticks of gum in, upscale trust-fund-fritterers with shiny cars and computerized 
jewelry who'd arrived, as they'd been doing like hyper-conditioned rats for years, many of them, arrived at sunup with their eyes
protruding and with Kleenexes at their noses and scratching their arms and standing on first one foot and then the other, doing
basically everything but truly congregating, wild for chemical relief, ready to stand in the cold exhaling steam for hours for that
relief, who'd arrived with the sun and now seemed to be informed that the Commonwealth of MA was suddenly going to withdraw
the prospect of that relief, until (and this is what really seemed to drive them right over the edge, out there in the lot) until Further
Notice. Apeshit has rarely enjoyed so literal a denotation. At the sound of the first windowpane breaking and the sight of a blownout old whore trying to hit a leather-vested biker with an old pre-metric GRASS GROWS BY INCHES BUT IT DIES BY FEET
sign from #2's clinic's pathetic front lawn, the methedrine addict began laughing so hard that she dropped the binoculars from the
Ennet House upstairs fire escape where they were watching, at like 0630h., and the binoculars fell and hit the roof of one of the
Ennet House counselors' cars right below in the little roadlet, with a ringing clunk, just as he was pulling in, the counselor, his
name was Calvin Thrust and he was four years sober and a former NYC porn actor who'd gone through the House himself and
now took absolutely zero in terms of shit from any of the residents, and his pride and joy was his customized 'Vette, and the
binoculars made rather a nasty dent, and plus they were the House Manager's amateur-ornithology binoculars and had been
borrowed out of the back office without explicit permission, and the long fall and impact didn't do them a bit of good, to say the
least, and Gately and the methedrine addict got pinched and put on Full House Restriction and very nearly kicked out. The addict
from New Bedford picked up the aminating needle a couple weeks after that anyway and was discovered by a night staffer
simultaneously playing air-guitar and polishing the lids of all the donated canned goods in the House pantry way after lights out,
stark naked and sheened with meth-sweat, and after the formality of a Urine she was given the old administrative boot — over a
quarter of incoming Ennet House residents get discharged for a dirty Urine within their first thirty days, and it's the same at all
other Boston halfway houses — and the girl ended up back in New Bedford, and then within like three hours of hitting the streets
got picked up by New Bedford's Finest on an old default warrant and sent to Framingham Women's for a 1-to-2 bit, and got found
one morning in her bunk with a kitchen-rigged shiv protruding from her privates and another in her neck and a thoroughly
eliminated personal map, and Gately's individual counselor Gene M. brought Gately the news and invited him to see the
methedrine addict's demise as a clear case of There But For the Grace of God Goeth D. W. Gately.
Unit #3, across the roadlet from #2, is unoccupied but getting reconditioned for lease; it's not boarded up, and the Enfield
Marine maintenance guys go in there a couple days a week with tools and power cords and make a godawful racket. Pat
Montesian hasn't yet been able to find out what sort of group misfortune +3 will be devoted to servicing.
Unit #4, more or less equidistant from both the hospital parking lot and the steep ravine, is a repository for Alzheimer's
patients with VA pensions. #4's residents wear jammies 24/7, the diapers underneath giving them a lumpy and toddlerish aspect.
The patients are frequently visible at #4's windows, in jammies, splayed and open-mouthed, sometimes shrieking, sometimes just
mutely open-mouthed, splayed against the windows. They give everybody at Ennet House the howling fantods. One ancient
retired Air Force nurse does nothing but scream 'Help!' for hours at a time from a second-story window. Since the Ennet House
residents are drilled in a Boston-AA recovery program that places great emphasis on 'Asking For Help,' the retired shrieking Air
Force nurse is the object of a certain grim amusement, sometimes. Not six weeks ago, a huge stolen HELP WANTED sign was
found attached to #4's siding right below the retired shrieking nurse's window, and #4's director was less than amused, and
demanded that Pat Montesian determine and punish the Ennet House residents responsible, and Pat had delegated the investigation
to Don Gately, and though Gately had a pretty good idea who the perps were he didn't have the heart to really press and kick ass
over something so much like what he'd done himself, when new and cynical, and so the whole thing pretty much blew over.
Unit #5, kittycorner across the little street from Ennet House, is for cata-tonics and various vegetablish, fetal-positioned
mental patients subcontracted to a Commonwealth outreach agency by overcrowded LTIs. Unit #5 is referred to, for reasons
Gately's never been able to pinpoint, as The Shed.6767 It is, understandably, a pretty quiet place. But in nice weather, when its
more portable inmates are carried out and placed in the front lawn to take the air, standing there propped-up and staring, they
present a tableau it took Gately some time to get used to. A couple newer residents got discharged late in Gately's treatment for
tossing firecrackers into the crowd of catatonics on the lawn to see if they could get them to jump around or display affect. On
warm nights, one long-limbed bespectacled lady who seems more autistic than catatonic tends to wander out of The Shed wrapped
in a bedsheet and lay her hands on the thin shiny bark of a silver maple in #5's lawn, stands there touching the tree until she's
missed at bedcheck and retrieved; and since Gately graduated treatment and took the offer of a live-in Staffer's job at Ennet House
he sometimes wakes up in his Staff cellar bedroom down by the pay phone and tonic machine and looks out the sooty groundlevel window by his bed and watches the catatonic touching the tree in her sheet and glasses, illuminated by Comm. Ave.'s neon
or the weird sodium light that spills down from the snooty tennis prep school overhead on its hill, he'll watch her standing there
and feel an odd chilled empathy he tries not to associate with watching his mother pass out on some piece of living-room chintz.
Unit #6, right up against the ravine on the end of the rutted road's east side, is Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery
House, three stories of whitewashed New England brick with the brick showing in patches through the whitewash, a mansard roof
that sheds green shingles, a scabrous fire escape at each upper window and a back door no resident is allowed to use and a front
office around on the south side with huge protruding bay windows that yield a view of ravine-weeds and the unpleasant stretch of
Commonwealth Ave. The front office is the director's office, and its bay windows, the House's single attractive feature, are kept
spotless by whatever residents get Front Office Windows for their weekly Chore. The mansard's lower slope encloses attics on
both the male and female sides of the House. The attics are accessed from trapdoors in the ceiling of the second floor and are filled
to the beams with trash bags and trunks, the unclaimed possessions of residents who've up and vanished sometime during their
term. The shrubbery all around Ennet House's first story looks explosive, ballooning in certain unpruned parts, and there are
candy-wrappers and Styrofoam cups trapped throughout the shrubs' green levels, and gaudy homemade curtains billow from the
second story's female side's bedroom windows, which are open what seems like all year round.
Unit #7 is on the west side of the street's end, sunk in hill-shadow and teetering right on the edge of the eroding ravine that
leads down to the Avenue. #7 is in bad shape, boarded up and unmaintained and deeply slumped at the red roof's middle as if
shrugging its shoulders at some pointless indignity. For an Ennet House resident, entering Unit #7 (which can easily be entered
through the detachable pine board over an old kitchen window) is cause for immediate administrative discharge, since Unit #7 is
infamous for being the place where Ennet House residents who want to secretly relapse with Substances sneak in and absorb
Substances and apply Visine and Clorets and then try to get back across the street in time for 2330 curfew without getting
pinched.
Behind Unit #7 begins far and away the biggest hill in Enfield MA. The hillside is fenced, off-limits, densely wooded and
without sanctioned path. Because a legit route involves walking north all the way up the rutted road through the parking lot, past
the hospital, down the steep curved driveway to Warren Street and all the way back south down Warren to Commonwealth,
almost half of all Ennet House residents negotiate #7's back fence and climb the hillside each morning, short-cutting their way to
minimum-wage temp jobs at like the Provident Nursing Home or Shuco-Mist Medical Pressure Systems, etc., over the hill up
Comm., or custodial and kitchen jobs at the rich tennis school for blond gleaming tennis kids on what used to be the hilltop. Don
Gately's been told that the school's maze of tennis courts lies now on what used to be the hill's hilltop before the Academy's burly
cigar-chomping tennis-court contractors shaved the curved top off and rolled the new top flat, the whole long loud process sending
all sorts of damaging avalanche-type debris rolling down and all over Enfield Marine's Unit #7, something over which you can
sure bet the Enfield Marine VA administration litigated, years back; and but Gately doesn't know that E.T.A.'s balding of the hill
is why #7 can still stand empty and unrepaired: Enfield Tennis Academy still has to pay full rent, every month, on what it almost
buried.
6 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
1610h. E.T.A. Weight Room. Freestyle circuits. The clank and click of various resistance-systems. Lyle on the towel
dispenser conferring with an extremely moist Graham Rader. Schacht doing sit-ups, the board almost vertical, his face purple and
forehead pulsing. Troeltsch by the squat rack blowing his nose into a towel. Coyle doing military presses with a bare bar. Carol
Spodek curling, intent on the mirror. Rader nodding as Lyle bends and leans in. Hal up on the spotter-shelf in back of the inclinebench in the shadow of the monster copper beech through the west window doing single-leg toe-raises, for the ankle. Ingersoll at
the shoulder-pull, steadily upping the weight against Lyle's advice. Keith ('The Viking') Freer6868 and the ster-oidic fifteen-yearold Eliot Kornspan spotting each other on massive barbell-curls next to the water cooler's bench, taking turns bellowing encouragement. Hal keeps pausing to lean down and spit into an old NASA glass on the floor by the little shelf. E.T.A. Trainer
Barry Loach walking around with a clipboard he doesn't write anything down on, but watching people intently and nodding a lot.
Axford with one shoe off in the corner, doing something to his bare foot. Michael Pemulis seated cross-legged on the cooler's
bench just off Kornspan's left hip, doing facial isometrics, trying to eavesdrop on Lyle and Rader, wincing whenever Kornspan
and Freer roar at each other.
'Three more! Get it up there!’
'Hoooowaaaaa.’
'Get that shit up there man!’
' Gwwwhoooooowaaaaar
'It raped your sister! It killed your fucking mother man!’
'Huhl huhl huhl huhl gwwwww.’
'Do it!’
Pemulis makes his face very long for a while and then very short and broad, then all sort of hollow and distended like one of
Bacon's popes.
'Well suppose' — Pemulis can just make out Lyle — 'Suppose I were to give you a key ring with ten keys. With, no, with a
hundred keys, and I were to tell you that one of these keys will unlock it, this door we're imagining opening in onto all you want to
be, as a player. How many of the keys would you be willing to try?’
Troeltsch calls over to Pemulis, 'Do the deLínt-jerking-off face again!' Pemulis for a second lets his mouth gape slackly and
his eyes roll way up and flutters his lids, moving his fist.
'Well I'd try every darn one,' Rader tells Lyle.
'Huhl. Huhl. Gwwwwwivww.’
'Motherfucker! Fucker!’
Pemulis's wince looks like a type of facial isometric.
'Do Bridget having a tantrum! Do Schacht in a stall!’
Pemulis makes a shush-finger.
Lyle never whispers, but it's just about the same. 'Then you are willing to make mistakes, you see. You are saying you will
accept 99% error. The paralyzed perfectionist you say you are would stand there before that door. Jingling the keys. Afraid to try
the first key.’
Pemulis pulls his lower lip down as far as it will go and contracts his cheek muscles. Cords stand out on Freer's neck as he
screams at Kornspan. There's a little hanging mist of spittle and sweat. Kornspan looks like he's about to have a stroke. There are
90 kg. on the bar, which itself is 20 kg.
'One more you fuck. Fucking take it.’
'Fuck me. Fuck me you fuck. Gwwwwww.’
'Take the pain.’
Freer has one finger under the bar, barely helping. Kornspan's red face is leaping around on his skull.
Carol Spodek's smaller bar goes silently up and down.
Troeltsch comes over and sits down and saws at the back of his neck with the towel, looking up at Kornspan. 'I don't think all
the curls I've ever done all together add up to 110,' he said.
Kornspan's making sounds that don't sound like they're coming from his throat.
'Yes! Yiiissss!' roars Freer. The bar crashes to the rubber floor, making Pemulis wince. Every vein on Kornspan stands out
and pulses. His stomach looks pregnant. He puts his hands on his thighs and leans forward, a string of something hanging from his 
mouth.
'Way to fucking take it baby,' Freer says, going over to the box on the dispenser to get rosin for his hands, watching himself
walk toward the mirror.
Pemulis starts very slowly to lean over toward Kornspan, looking around confidentially. He gets so his face is right up near
the side of Kornspan's mesomorphic head and whispers. 'Hey. Eliot. Hey.’
Kornspan, bent over, chest heaving, rolls his head a little his way.
Pemulis whispers: 'Pussy.’
If, by the virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substancerecovery halfway facility like Enfield MA's state-funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts. You will find out
that once MA's Department of Social Services has taken a mother's children away for any period of time, they can always take
them away again, D.S.S., like at will, empowered by nothing more than a certain signature-stamped form. I.e. once deemed Unfit
— no matter why or when, or what's transpired in the meantime — there's nothing a mother can do.
Or for instance that people addicted to a Substance who abruptly stop ingesting the Substance often suffer wicked papular
acne, often for months afterward, as the accumulations of Substance slowly leave the body. The Staff will inform you that this is
because the skin is actually the body's biggest excretory organ. Or that chronic alcoholics' hearts are — for reasons no M.D. has
been able to explain — swollen to nearly twice the size of civilians' human hearts, and they never again return to normal size. That
there's a certain type of person who carries a picture of their therapist in their wallet. That (both a relief and kind of an odd letdown) black penises tend to be the same general size as white penises, on the whole. That not all U.S. males are circumcised.
That you can cop a sort of thin jittery amphetaminic buzz if you rapidly consume three Millennial Fizzies and a whole
package of Oreo cookies on an empty stomach. (Keeping it down is required, however, for the buzz, which senior residents often
neglect to tell newer residents.)
That the chilling Hispanic term for whatever interior disorder drives the addict back again and again to the enslaving
Substance is tecato gusano, which apparently connotes some kind of interior psychic worm that cannot be sated or killed.
That black and Hispanic people can be as big or bigger racists than white people, and then can get even more hostile and
unpleasant when this realization seems to surprise you.
That it is possible, in sleep, for some roommates to secure a cigarette from their bedside pack, light it, smoke it down to the
quick, and then extinguish it in their bedside ashtray — without once waking up, and without setting anything on fire. You will be
informed that this skill is usually acquired in penal institutions, which will lower your inclination to complain about the practice.
Or that even Flents industrial-strength expandable-foam earplugs do not solve the problem of a snoring roommate if the roommate
in question is so huge and so adenoidal that the snores in question also produce subsonic vibrations that arpeggio up and down
your body and make your bunk jiggle like a motel bed you've put a quarter in.
That females are capable of being just as vulgar about sexual and elim-inatory functions as males. That over 60% of all
persons arrested for drug-and alcohol-related offenses report being sexually abused as children, with two-thirds of the remaining
40% reporting that they cannot remember their childhoods in sufficient detail to report one way or the other on abuse. That you
can weave hypnotic Madame Psychosis-like harmonies around the minor-D scream of a cheap vacuum cleaner, humming to
yourself as you vacuum, if that's your Chore. That some people really do look like rodents. That some drug-addicted prostitutes
have a harder time giving up prostitution than they have giving up drugs, with their explanation involving the two habits' very
different directions of currency-flow. That there are just as many idioms for the female sex-organ as there are for the male sexorgan.
That a little-mentioned paradox of Substance addiction is: that once you are sufficiently enslaved by a Substance to need to
quit the Substance in order to save your life, the enslaving Substance has become so deeply important to you that you will all but
lose your mind when it is taken away from you. Or that sometime after your Substance of choice has just been taken away from
you in order to save your life, as you hunker down for required a.m. and P.M. prayers, you will find yourself beginning to pray to
be allowed literally to lose your mind, to be able to wrap your mind in an old newspaper or something and leave it in an alley to
shift for itself, without you.
That in metro Boston the idiom of choice for the male sex-organ is: Unit, which is why Ennet House residents are wryly
amused by E.M.P.H. Hospital's designations of its campus's buildings.
That certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you do. Then that most nonaddicted adult civilians have already
absorbed and accepted this fact, often rather early on.
That no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that.
That AA and NA and CA's 'God' does not apparently require that you believe in Him/Her/It before He/She/It will help
you.6969 That, pace macho bullshit, public male weeping is not only plenty masculine but can actually feel good (reportedly).
That sharing means talking, and taking somebody's inventory means criticizing that person, plus many additional pieces of
Recoveryspeak. That an important part of halfway-house Human Immuno-Virus prevention is not leaving your razor or
toothbrush in communal bathrooms. That apparently a seasoned prostitute can (reportedly) apply a condom to a customer's Unit so
deftly he doesn't even know it's on until he's history, so to speak.
That a double-layered steel portable strongbox w/ tri-tumblered lock for your razor and toothbrush can be had for under
$35.00U.S./$38.50 O.N.A.N. via Home-Net Hardware, and that Pat M. or the House Manager will let you use the back office's old
TP to order one if you put up a sustained enough squawk.
That over 50% of persons with a Substance addiction suffer from some other recognized form of psychiatric disorder, too.
That some male prostitutes become so accustomed to enemas that they cannot have valid bowel movements without them. That a
majority of Ennet House residents have at least one tattoo. That the significance of this datum is unanalyzable. That the metro
Boston street term for not having any money is: sporting lint. That what elsewhere's known as Informing or Squealing or Narcing
or Ratting or Ratting Out is on the streets of metro Boston known as 'Eating Cheese,' presumably spun off from the associative
nexus of rat.
That nose-, tongue-, lip-, and eyelid-rings rarely require actual penetrative piercing. This is because of the wide variety of 
clip-on rings available. That nipple-rings do require piercing, and that clitoris- and glans-rings are not things anyone thinks you
really want to know the facts about. That sleeping can be a form of emotional escape and can with sustained effort be abused. That
female chicanos are not called chicanas. That it costs $225 U.S. to get a MA driver's license with your picture but not your name.
That purposeful sleep-deprivation can also be an abusable escape. That gambling can be an abusable escape, too, and work,
shopping, and shoplifting, and sex, and abstention, and masturbation, and food, and exercise, and meditation/prayer, and sitting so
close to Ennet House's old D.E.C. TP cartridge-viewer that the screen fills your whole vision and the screen's static charge tickles
your nose like a linty mitten.7070
That you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it. That loneliness is not a function of solitude. That it is
possible to get so angry you really do see everything red. What a 'Texas Catheter' is. That some people really do steal — will steal
things that are yours. That a lot of U.S. adults truly cannot read, not even a ROM hypertext phonics thing with HELP functions for
every word. That cliquey alliance and exclusion and gossip can be forms of escape. That logical validity is not a guarantee of
truth. That evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil. That it is possible to learn valuable things
from a stupid person. That it takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds. That you can all of a
sudden out of nowhere want to get high with your Substance so bad that you think you will surely die if you don't, and but can just
sit there with your hands writhing in your lap and face wet with craving, can want to get high but instead just sit there, wanting to
but not, if that makes sense, and if you can gut it out and not hit the Substance during the craving the craving will eventually pass,
it will go away — at least for a while. That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ
people. That the metro Boston street term for panhandling is: stemming, and that it is regarded by some as a craft or art; and that
professional stem-artists actually have like little professional colloquia sometimes, little conventions, in parks or public-transport
hubs, at night, where they get together and network and exchange feedback on trends and techniques and public relations, etc.
That it is possible to abuse OTC cold-and allergy remedies in an addictive manner. That Nyquil is over 50 proof. That boring
activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them. That if enough people in a silent room are
drinking coffee it is possible to make out the sound of steam coming off the coffee. That sometimes human beings have to just sit
in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how
seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an
anxiety attack.
That concentrating intently on anything is very hard work.
That addiction is either a disease or a mental illness or a spiritual condition (as in 'poor of spirit') or an O.C.D.-like disorder or
an affective or character disorder, and that over 75% of the veteran Boston AAs who want to convince you that it is a disease will
make you sit down and watch them write DISEASE on a piece of paper and then divide and hyphenate the word so that it
becomes DIS-EASE, then will stare at you as if expecting you to undergo some kind of blinding epiphanic realization, when really
(as G. Day points tirelessly out to his counselors) changing DISEASE to DIS-EASE reduces a definition and explanation down to
a simple description of a feeling, and rather a whiny insipid one at that.
That most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy
relationship with their own thinking. That the cute Boston AA term for addictive-type thinking is: Analysis-Paralysis. That cats
will in fact get violent diarrhea if you feed them milk, contrary to the popular image of cats and milk. That it is simply more
pleasant to be happy than to be pissed off. That 99% of compulsive thinkers' thinking is about themselves; that 99% of this selfdirected thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to them; and then, weirdly, that
if they stop to think about it, that 100% of the things they spend 99% of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for
all the contingencies and consequences of are never good. Then that this connects interestingly with the early-sobriety urge to pray
for the literal loss of one's mind. In short that 99% of the head's thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out
of itself. That it is possible to make rather tasty poached eggs in a microwave oven. That the metro-street term for really quite
wonderful is: pisser. That everybody's sneeze sounds different. That some people's moms never taught them to cover up or turn
away when they sneeze. That no one who has been to prison is ever the same again. That you do not have to have sex with a
person to get crabs from them. That a clean room feels better to be in than a dirty room. That the people to be most frightened of
are the people who are the most frightened. That it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak. That you don't have
to hit somebody even if you really really want to. That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable. That nobody
who's ever gotten sufficiently addictively enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance and has successfully quit it for a
while and been straight and but then has for whatever reason gone back and picked up the Substance again has ever reported being
glad that they did it, used the Substance again and gotten re-enslaved; not ever. That bit is a metro Boston street term for a jail
sentence, as in 'Don G. was up in Billerica on a six-month bit.' That it's impossible to kill fleas by hand. That it's possible to smoke
so many cigarettes that you get little white ulcerations on your tongue. That the effects of too many cups of coffee are in no way
pleasant or intoxicating.
That pretty much everybody masturbates. Rather a lot, it turns out.
That the cliche 'I don't know who I am' unfortunately turns out to be more than a cliche. That it costs $330 U.S. to get a
passport in a phony name. That other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are
stupid. That you can obtain a major credit card with a phony name for $1500 U.S., but that no one will give you a straight answer
about whether this price includes a verifiable credit history and line of credit for when the cashier slides the phony card through
the register's little verification-modem with all sorts of burly security guards standing around. That having a lot of money does not
immunize people from suffering or fear. That trying to dance sober is a whole different kettle of fish. That the term vig is street
argot for the bookmaker's commission on an illegal bet, usually 10%, that's either subtracted from your winnings or added to your
debt. That certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find
parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers. That cockroaches can, up to a certain point, be lived with. That
'acceptance' is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else. That different people have radically different ideas of basic
personal hygiene.
That, perversely, it is often more fun to want something than to have it. 
That if you do something nice for somebody in secret, anonymously, without letting the person you did it for know it was you
or anybody else know what it was you did or in any way or form trying to get credit for it, it's almost its own form of intoxicating
buzz.
That anonymous generosity, too, can be abused.
That having sex with someone you do not care for feels lonelier than not having sex in the first place, afterward.
That it is permissible to want.
That everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That
this isn't necessarily perverse.
That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels.
That God — unless you're Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both — speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human
beings, if there is a God.
That God might regard the issue of whether you believe there's a God or not as fairly low on his/her/its list of things s/he/it's
interested in re you.
That the smell of Athlete's Foot is sick-sweet v. the smell of podiatric Dry Rot is sick-sour.
That a person — one with the Disease/-Ease — will do things under the influence of Substances that he simply would not
ever do sober, and that some consequences of these things cannot ever be erased or amended.7171 Felonies are an example of this.
As are tattoos. Almost always gotten on impulse, tattoos are vividly, chillingly permanent. The shopworn 'Act in Haste,
Repent at Leisure' would seem to have been almost custom-designed for the case of tattoos. For a while, the new resident Tiny
Ewell got first keenly interested and then weirdly obsessed with people's tattoos, and he started going around to all the residents
and outside people who hung around Ennet House to help keep straight, asking to check out their tattoos and wanting to hear
about the circumstances surrounding each tattoo. These little spasms of obsession — like first with the exact definition of
alcoholic, and then with Morris H.'s special tollhouse cookies until the pancreatitis-flare, then with the exact kinds of corners
everybody made their bed up with — these were part of the way Tiny E. temporarily lost his mind when his enslaving Substance
was taken away. The tattoo thing started out with Tiny's white-collar amazement at just how many of the folks around Ennet
House seemed to have tattoos. And the tattoos seemed like potent symbols of not only whatever they were pictures of but also of
the chilling irrevocability of intoxicated impulses.
Because the whole thing about tattoos is that they're permanent, of course, irrevocable once gotten — which of course the
irrevocability of a tattoo is what jacks up the adrenaline of the intoxicated decision to sit down in the chair and actually get it (the
tattoo) — but the chilling thing about the intoxication is that it seems to make you consider only the adrenaline of the moment
itself, not (in any depth) the irrevocability that produces the adrenaline. It's like the intoxication keeps your tattoo-type-class
person from being able to project his imagination past the adrenaline of the impulse and even consider the permanent
consequences that are producing the buzz of excitement.
Tiny Ewell'll put this same abstract but not very profound idea in a whole number of varied ways, over and over, obsessively
almost, and still fail to get any of the tattooed residents interested, although Bruce Green will listen politely, and the clinically
depressed Kate Gompert usually won't have the juice to get up and walk away when Tiny starts in, which makes Ewell seek her
out vis-à-vis tattoos, though she hasn't got a tattoo.
But they don't have any problem with showing Tiny their tatts, the residents with tatts don't, unless they're female and the
thing is in some sort of area where there's a Boundary Issue.
As Tiny Ewell comes to see it, people with tattoos fall under two broad headings. First there are the younger scrofulous
boneheaded black-T-shirt-and-spiked-bracelet types who do not have the sense to regret the impulsive permanency of their tatts,
and will show them off to you with the same fake-quiet pride with which someone more of Ewell's own social stratum would
show off their collection of Dynastic crockery or fine Sauvignon. Then there are the more numerous (and older) second types,
who'll show you their tattoos with the sort of stoic regret (albeit tinged with a bit of self-conscious pride about the stoicism) that a
Purple-Hearted veteran displays toward his old wounds' scars. Resident Wade McDade has complex nests of blue and red serpents
running down the insides of both his arms, and is required to wear long:sleeved shirts every day to his menial job at Store 24, even
though the store's heat always loses its mind in the early A.M. and it's always wicked motherfucking hot in there, because the
store's Pakistani manager believes his customers will not wish to purchase Marlboro Lights and Mass. Gig-abucks lottery tickets
from someone with vascular-colored snakes writhing all over his arms.7272 McDade also has a flaming skull on his left shoulderblade. Doony Glynn has the faint remains of a black dotted line tattooed all the way around his neck at about Adam's-apple
height, with instruction-manual-like directions for the removal of his head and maintenance of the disengaged head tattooed on his
scalp, from the days of his Skinhead youth, which now the tattooed directions take patience and a comb and three of April
Cortelyu's barrettes for Tiny even to see.
Actually, a couple weeks into the obsession Ewell broadens his dermo-taxonomy to include a third category, Bikers, of whom
there are presently none in Ennet House but plenty around the area's AA meetings, in beards and leather vests and apparently
having to meet some kind of weight-requirement of at least 200 kilos. Bikers is the metro Boston street term for them, though they
seem to refer to themselves usually as Scooter-Puppies, a term which (Ewell finds out the hard way) non-Bikers are not invited to
use. These guys are veritable one-man tattoo festivals, but when they show them to you they're disconcerting because they'll bare
their tatts with the complete absence of affect of somebody just showing you like a limb or a thumb, not quite sure why you want
to see or even what it is you're looking at.
A like N.B. that Ewell ends up inserting under the heading Biker is that every professional tattooist everybody who can
remember getting their tattoos remembers getting them from was, from the sound of everybody's general descriptions, a Biker.
W/r/t the Stoic-Regret group within Ennet House, it emerges that the male tattoos with women's names on them tend, in their
irrevocability, to be especially disastrous and regretful, given the extremely provisional nature of most addicts' relationships.
Bruce Green will have MILDRED BONK on his jilted right triceps forever. Likewise the DORIS in red-dripping Gothic script
just below the left breast of Emil Minty, who yes apparently did love once. Minty also has a palsied and amateur swastika with the
caption FUCK NIGERS on a left biceps he is heartily encouraged to keep covered, as a resident. Chandler Foss has an undulating 
banner with a redly inscribed MARY on one forearm, said banner now mangled and necrotic because Foss, dumped and badly
coked out one night, tried to nullify the romantic connotations of the tatt by inscribing BLESSED VIRGIN above the MARY with
a razor blade and a red Bic, with predictably ghastly results. Real tattoo artists (Ewell gets this on authority after a White Flag
Group meeting from a Biker whose triceps' tattoo of a huge disembodied female breast being painfully squeezed by a disembodied
hand which is itself tattooed with a disembodied breast and hand communicates real tattoo-credibility, as far as Tiny's concerned)
real tatt-artists are always highly trained professionals.
What's sad about the gorgeous violet arrow-pierced heart with PAMELA incised in a circle around it on Randy Lenz's right
hip is that Lenz has no memory either of the tattoo-impulse and -procedure or of anybody named Pamela. Charlotte Treat has a
small green dragon on her calf and another tattoo on a breast she's set a Boundary about letting Tiny see. Hester Thrale has an
amazingly detailed blue and green tattoo of the planet Earth on her stomach, its poles abutting pubis and breasts, an equatorial
view of which cost Tiny Ewell two weeks of doing Hester's weekly Chore. Overall searing-regret honors probably go to Jennifer
Belbin, who has four uncoverable black teardrops descending from the corner of one eye, from one night of mescaline and
adrenalized grief, so that from more than two meters away she always looks like she has flies on her, Randy Lenz points out. The
new black girl Didi N. has on the plane of her upper abdomen a tattered screaming skull (off the same stencil as McDade's, but
w/o the flames) that's creepy because it's just a tattered white outline: Black people's tattoos are rare, and for reasons Ewell regards
as fairly obvious they tend to be just white outlines.
Ennet House alumnus and volunteer counselor Calvin Thrust is quietly rumored to have on the shaft of his formerly
professional porn-cartridge-performer's Unit a tattoo that displays the magiscule initials CT when the Unit is flaccid and the full
name CALVIN THRUST when hyperemic. Tiny Ewell has soberly elected to let this go unsubstantiated. Alumna and v.c.
Danielle Steenbok once got the bright idea of having eyeliner-colored tattoos put around both eyes so she'd never again have to
apply eyeliner, not banking on the inevitable fade that over time's turned the tattoos a kind of nauseous dark-green she now has to
constantly apply eyeliner to cover up. Current female live-in Staffer Johnette Foltz has undergone two of the six painful
procedures required to have the snarling orange-and-blue tiger removed from her left forearm and so now has a snarling tiger
minus a head and one front leg, with the ablated parts looking like someone determined has been at her forearm with steel wool.
Ewell decides this is what gives profundity to the tattoo-impulse's profound irrevocability: Having a tatt removed means just
exchanging one kind of disfigurement for another. There are Tingly and Diehl's identical palmate-cannabis-leaf-on-inner-wrist
tattoos, though Tingly and Diehl are from opposite shores and never crossed paths before entering the House.
Nell Gunther refuses to discuss tattoos with Tiny Ewell in any way or form.
For a while, Tiny Ewell considers live-in Staffer Don Gately's homemade jailhouse tattoos too primitive to even bother asking
about.
He'd made a true pest of himself, though, Ewell did, when at the height of the obsession this one synthetic-narc-addicted kid
came in who refused to be called anything but his street name, Skull, and lasted only like four days, but who'd been a walking
exhibition of high-regret ink — both arms tattooed with spiderwebs at the elbows, on his fishy-white chest a naked lady with the
same kind of overlush measurements Ewell remembered from the pinball machines of his Watertown childhood. On Skull's back a
half-m.-long skeleton in a black robe and cowl playing the violin in the wind on a crag with THE DEAD in maroon on a vertical
gonfalonish banner unfurling below; on one biceps either an icepick or a mucronate dagger, and down both forearms a kind of St.
Vitus's dance of leather-winged dragons with the words —on both forearms —HOW DO YOU LIK YOUR BLUEYED BOY
NOW MR DETH.'?, the typos of which, Tiny felt, only served to heighten Skull's whole general tatt-gestalt's intended effect,
which Tiny presumed was primarily to repel.
In fact Tiny E.'s whole displacement of obsession from bunks' hospital corners to people's tattoos was probably courtesy of
this kid Skull, who on his second night in the newer male residents' Five-Man Room had shed his electrified muscle-shirt and was
showing off his tattoos in a boneheaded regretless first-category fashion to Ken Erdedy while R. Lenz did headstands against the
closet door in his jockstrap and Ewell and Geoffrey D. had their wallets' credit cards spread out on EwelPs drum-tight bunk and
were trying to settle a kind of admittedly childish argument about who had the more prestigious credit cards — Skull flexing his
pectorals to make the overdeveloped woman on his chest writhe, reading his forearms to Erdedy, etc. — and Geoffrey Day had
looked up from his AmEx (Gold, to EwelFs Platinum) and shaken his moist pale head at Ewell and asked rhetorically what had
ever happened to good old traditional U.S. tattoos like MOM or an anchor, which for some reason touched off a small obsessive
explosion in EwelPs detox-frazzled psyche.
Probably the most poignant items in Ewell's survey are the much-faded tattoos of old Boston AA guys who've been sober in
the Fellowship for decades, the crocodilic elder statesmen of the White Flag and Allston Groups and the St. Columbkill Sunday
Night Group and Ewell's chosen Home Group, Wednesday night's Better Late Than Never Group (Nonsmoking) at St. Elizabeth's
Hospital just two blocks down from the House. There is something queerly poignant about a deeply faded tattoo, a poignancy
something along the lines of coming upon the tiny and poignantly unfashionable clothes of a child long-since grown up in an attic
trunk somewhere (the clothes, not the grown child, Ewell confirmed for G. Day). See, e.g., White Flag's cantankerous old Francis
('Ferocious Francis') Gehaney's right forearm's tatt of a martini glass with a naked lady sitting in the glass with her legs kicking up
over the broad flaring rim, with an old-style Rita Hayworth-era bangs-intensive hairstyle. Faded to a kind of underwater blue, its
incidental black lines gone soot-green and the red of the lips/nails/ SUBIKBAY'62USN4-07 not lightened to pink but more like
decayed to the dusty red of fire through much smoke. All these old sober Boston blue-collar men's irrevocable tattoos fading
almost observably under the low-budget fluorescence of church basements and hospital auditoria — Ewell watched and charted
and cross-referenced them, moved. Any number of good old U.S.N. anchors, and in Irish Boston sooty green shamrocks, and
several little frozen tableaux of little khaki figures in G.I. helmets plunging bayonets into the stomachs of hideous urine-yellow
bucktoothed Oriental caricatures, and screaming eagles with their claws faded blunt, and SEMPER FI, all autolyzed to the point
where the tattoos look like they're just under the surface of a murky-type pond.
A tall silent hard-looking old black-haired BLTN-Group veteran has the terse and hateful single word PUSSY in what's faded
to pond-scum green down one liver-spotted forearm; but yet the fellow transcends even stoic regret by dressing and carrying
himself as if the word simply wasn't there, or was so irrevocably there there was no point even thinking about it: there's a deep and 
tremendously compelling dignity about the old man's demeanor w/r/t the PUSSY on his arm, and Ewell actually considers
approaching this fellow re the issue of sponsorship, if and when he feels it's appropriate to get an AA sponsor, if he decides it's
germane in his case.
Near the conclusion of this two-month obsession, Tiny Ewell approaches Don Gately on the subject of whether the jailhouse
tattoo should maybe comprise a whole separate phylum of tattoo. Ewell's personal feeling is that jailhouse tattoos aren't poignant
so much as grotesque, that they seem like they weren't a matter of impulsive decoration or self-presentation so much as simple
self-mutilation arising out of boredom and general disregard for one's own body and the aesthetics of decoration. Don Gately's
developed the habit of staring coolly at Ewell until the little attorney shuts up, though this is partly to disguise the fact that Gately
usually can't follow what Ewell's saying and is unsure whether this is because he's not smart or educated enough to understand
Ewell or because Ewell is simply out of his fucking mind.
Don Gately tells Ewell how your basic-type jailhouse tatt is homemade with sewing needles from the jailhouse canteen and
some blue ink from the cartridge of a fountain pen promoted from the breast pocket of an unalert Public Defender, is why the
jailhouse genre is always the same night-sky blue. The needle is dipped in the ink and jabbed as deep into the tattooee as it can be
jabbed without making him recoil and fucking up your aim. Just a plain ultraminimal blue square like Gately's got on his right
wrist takes half a day and hundreds of individual jabs. How come the lines are never quite straight and the color's never quite all
the way solid is it's impossible to get all the individualized punctures down to the same uniform deepness in the, like, twitching
flesh. This is why jailhouse tatts always look like they were done by sadistic children on rainy afternoons. Gately has a blue
square on his right wrist and a sloppy cross on the inside of his mammoth left forearm. He'd done the square himself, and a
cellmate had done the cross in return for Gately doing a cross on the cellmate. Oral narcotics render the process both less painful
and less tedious. The sewing needle is sterilized in grain alcohol, which Gately explains that the alcohol is got by taking mess-hall
fruit and mashing it up and adding water and secreting the whole mess in a Ziploc just inside the flush-hole thing of the cell's
toilet, to, like, foment. The sterilizing results of this can be consumed, as well. Bonded liquor and cocaine are the only things hard
to get inside of M.D.C. penal institutions, because the expense of them gets everybody all excited and it's only a matter of time
before somebody goes and eats cheese. The inexpensive C-IV oral narcotic Talwin can be traded for cigarettes, however, which
can in turn be got at the canteen or won at cribbage and dominoes (M.D.C. regs prohibit straight-out cards) or got in mass
quantities off smaller inmates in return for protection from the romantic advances of larger inmates. Gately is right-handed and his
arms are roughly the size of Tiny EwelPs legs. His wrist's jailhouse square is canted and has sloppy extra blobs at three of the
corners. Your average jailhouse tatt can't be removed even with laser surgery because it's incised so deep in. Gately is polite about
Tiny Ewell's inquiries but not expansive, i.e. Tiny has to ask very specific questions about whatever he wishes to know and then
gets a short specific answer from Gately to just that question. Then Gately stares at him, a habit Ewell tends to complain about at
some length up in the Five-Man Room. His interest in tattoos seems to be regarded by Gately not as invasive but as the temporary
obsession of a still-quivering Substanceless psyche that in a couple weeks will have forgot all about tattoos, an attitude Ewell
finds condescending in the extremus. Gately's attitude toward his own primitive tattoos is a second-category attitude, with most of
the stoicism and acceptance of his tatt-regret sincere, if only because these irrevocable emblems of jail are minor Rung Bells
compared to some of the fucked-up and really irrevocable impulsive mistakes Gately'd made as an active drug addict and burglar,
not to mention their consequences, the mistakes', which Gately's trying to accept he'll be paying off for a real long time.
Michael Pemulis has this habit of looking first to one side and then over to the other before he says anything. It's impossible
to tell whether this is unaffected or whether Pemulis is emulating some film-noir-type character. It's worse when he's put away a
couple 'drines. He and Trevor Axford and Hal Incandenza are in Pemulis's room, with Pemulis's roommates Schacht and Troeltsch
down at lunch, so they're alone, Pemulis and Axford and Hal, stroking their chins, looking down at Michael Pemulis's yachting
cap on his bed. Lying inside the overturned hat are a bunch of fair-sized but bland-looking tablets of the allegedly incredibly
potent DMZ.
Pemulis looks all around behind them in the empty room. 'This, Incster, Axhandle, is the incredibly potent DMZ. The Great
White Shark of organo-synthesized hallucinogens. 'The gargantuan feral infant of—’
Hal says 'We get the picture.’
'The Yale U. of the Ivy League of Acid,' says Axford.
'Your ultimate psychosensual distorter,' Pemulis sums up.
'Think you mean psychosensory, unless I don't know the whole story here.’
Axford gives Hal a narrow look. Interrupting Pemulis means having to watch him do the head-thing all over again each time.
'Hard to find, gentlemen. As in very hard to find. Last lots came off the line in the early 70s. These tablets here are artifacts.
Certain amount of decay in potency probably inevitable. Used in certain shady CIA-era military experiments.’
Axford nods down at the hat. 'Mind-control?’
'More like getting the enemy to think their guns are hydrangea, the enemy's a blood-relative, that sort of thing. Who knows.
The accounts I've been reading have been incoherent, gistless. Experiments conducted. Things got out of hand. Let's just say
things got out of control. Potency judged too incredible to proceed. Subjects locked away in institutions and written off as
casualties of peace. Formula shredded. Research team scattered, reassigned. Vague but I've got to tell you pretty sobering rumors.’
'These are from the early 70s?' Axhandle says.
'See the little trademark on each one, with the guy in bell-bottoms and long sideburns?’
'Is that what that is?’
'Unprecedentedly potent, this stuff. The Swiss inventor they say was originally recommending LSD-25 as what to take to
come down off the stuff.' Pemulis takes one of the tablets and puts it in his palm and pokes at it with a callused finger. 'What we're
looking at. We're looking here at either a serious sudden injection of cash —’
Axford makes a shocked noise. 'You'd actually try to peddle the incredibly potent DMZ around this sorry place?’
Pemulis's snort sounds like the letter K. 'Get a large economy-size clue, Axhandle. Nobody here'd have any clue what they'd
even be dealing with. Not to mention be willing to pay what they're worth. Why, there are pharmaceutical museums, left-wing
think tanks, New York designer-drug consortiums I'm sure'd be dying to dissect these. Decoct like. Toss into the spectrometer and 
see what's what.’
'That we could get bids from, you're saying,' Axford says. Hal squeezes a ball, silently looking at the hat.
Pemulis turns the tablet over. 'Or certain very progressive and hip-type nursing homes I know guys that know of. Or down at
Back Bay at that yogurt place with that picture of those historical guys Inc was saying at breakfast was up on the wall.’
'Ram Das. William Burroughs.’
'Or just down in Harvard Square at Au Bon Pain where all those 70s-era guys in old wool ponchos play chess against those
little clocks they keep hitting.’
Axford's pretending to punch Hal's arm in excitement.
Pemulis says 'Or of course I'm thinking I could just go the sheer-entertainment route and toss them in the Gatorade barrels at
the meet with Port Washington Tuesday, or down at the WhataBurger — watch everybody run around clutching their heads or
whatever. I'd be way into watching Wayne play with distorted senses.’
Hal puts one foot up on Pemulis's little frustum-shaped bedside stool and leans farther in. 'Would it be prying to ask how you
finally managed to get hold of these?’
'It wouldn't be prying at all,' Pemulis says, removing from the yachting cap's lining every piece of contraband he's got and
spreading it out on the bed, sort of the way older people will array all their valuables in quiet moments. He has a small quantity of
personal-consumption Lamb's Breath cannabis (bought back from Hal out of a 20-g. he'd sold Hal) in a dusty baggie, a little
Saran-Wrapped cardboard rectangle with four black stars spaced evenly across it, the odd 'drine, and it looks like a baker's dozen
of the incredibly potent DMZ, Sweet Tart-sized tablets of no particular color with a tiny mod hipster in each center wishing the
viewer peace. 'We don't even know how many hits this is,' he muses quietly. There's sun on the wall with the hanging viewer and
poster of the paranoid king and an enormous hand-drawn Sierpinski gasket. In one of the three big mullioned west windows — the
Academy is nothing if not well-fenestrated — there's an oval flaw that's casting a bubble of ale-colored autumn sunlight from the
window's left side to elongate onto Pemulis's tightly made bed,7373 and he moves everything his hat's got into the brighter
bubble, going down on one knee to study a tablet between his forceps (Pemulis owns stuff like philatelic forceps, a loupe, a
pharmaceutical scale, a postal scale, a personal-size Bun-sen burner) with the calm precision of a jeweler. 'The literature's mute on
the titration. Do you take one tablet?' He looks up on one side and then back around on the other at the boys' faces leaning in
above. 'Is like half a tab a regulation hit?’
'Two or even three tablets, maybe?' Hal says, knowing he sounds greedy but unable to help himself.
'The accessible data's vague,' Pemulis says, his profile contorted around the loupe in his socket. 'The literature on muscimolelysergic blends is spotty and vague and hard to read except to say how massively powerful the supposed yields are.’
Hal looks at the top of Pemulis's head. 'Did you hit a medical library?’
'I got on MED.COM off Lateral Alice's WATS line and went back and forth and up and down through MED.COM. Plenty on
lysergícs, plenty on methoxy-class hybrids. Vague and almost gossip-columny shit on fitviavi-compounds. To get anything you
got to cross-key Ergotics with the phrase muscimole or muscimolated. Only a couple things ring the bell when you key in DMZ.
Then they're all potent this, sinister that. Nothing with any specifics. And jumbly polysyllables out the ass. Whole thing gave me a
migraine. ‘
'Yes but did you actually hop in the truck and actually go to a real med-library?' Hal's his mother Avril's child when it comes
to databases, software Spell-Checks, etc. Axford now really does punch him once in the shoulder, albeit the right one. Pemulis is
scratching absently at the little hair-hurricane at the center of his hair. It's close to !43Oh., and the flawed bubble of light on the
bed is getting to be the slightly sad color of early winter P.M. There are still no sounds from the West Courts outside, but there's
high song of much volume through the wall's water-pipes — a lot of the guys who are drilled past caring in the A.M. don't get it
up to shower until after lunch, then sit through P.M. classes with wet hair and different clothes than their A.M. classes.
Pemulis rises to stand between them and looks around the empty three-bedded room again, with neat stacks of three players'
clothes and bright gear on shelves and three wicker laundry hampers bulging slightly. There is the rich scent of athletic laundry,
but other than that the room looks almost professionally clean. Pemulis and Schacht's room makes Hal and Mario's room look like
an insane asylum, Hal thinks. Axford drew one of only two single upperclass rooms in last spring's lottery, the other having gone
to the Vaught twins, who get counted as one entry in Room Draw.
Pemulis still has his cheek screwed up to keep the loupe in as he looks around. 'One monograph had this toss-off about DMZ
where the guy invites you to envision acid that has itself dropped acid.' 'Holy crow.’
'One article out of fucking Moment of all sources talks about how this one Army convict at Leavenworth got allegedly
injected with some massive unspecified dose of early DMZ as part of some Army experiment in Christ only knows what and
about how this convict's family sued over how the guy reportedly lost his mind.' He directs the loupe dramatically at first Hal and
then Axford. 'I mean literally lost his mind, like the massive dose picked his mind up and carried it off somewhere and put it down
someplace and forgot where.’
'I think we get the picture, Mike.’
'Allegedly Moment says how the guy's found later in his Army cell, in some impossible lotus position, singing show tunes in
a scary deadly-accurate Ethel-Merman-impression voice.’
Axford says maybe Pemulis stumbled on a possible explanation for poor old Lyle and his lotus position down in the weight
room, gesturing with the bad right hand in the direction of Comm.-Ad.
Again Pemulis with the thing with the head. The slackening of a cheek lets the loupe fall out and bounce off the drum-tight
bed, and Pemulis gets it to rebound into his palm without even looking. 'I think we can err on the side of not dickying the
Gatorade barrels, anyway. This soldier's story's moral was proceed with caution, big time. The guy's mind's still allegedly AWOL.
An old soldier, now, still belting out Broadway medleys in some secretive institution someplace. Blood-relatives try to sue on the
guy's behalf, Army apparently came up with enough arguments to give the jury reasonable doubt about if the guy can even be said
to legally exist enough to bring suit, anymore, since the dose misplaced his mind.’
Axford feels absently at his elbow. 'So you're saying let's proceed with care why don't we.’
Hal kneels to prod one of the tablets up against the dusty baggie's side. His finger looks dark in the elongated bubble of light. 
Tm thinking these look like two tablets are possibly a hit. A kind of Motrinish look to them.’
'Visual guesswork isn't going to do it. This is not Bob Hope, Inc.’
'We could even designate it "Ethel," for on the phone,' Axford suggests.
Pemulis watches Hal arranging the tablets into the same general cardioid-shape as E.T.A. itself. 'What I'm saying. This is not
a fools-rush-in-type substance, Inc. This show-tune soldier like left the planet.’
'Well, so long as he waves every so often.’
'The sense I got is the only thing he waves at is his food.’
'But that was from a massive early dose,' Axford says.
Hal's arrangement of the tablets on the red-and-gray counterpane is almost Zen in its precision. 'These are from the 70s?’
After intricate third-party negotiations, Michael Pemulis finally landed 650 mg. of the vaunted and elusive compound DMZ
or 'Madame Psychosis' from a small-arms-draped duo of reputed former Canadian insurgents who now undertook small and
probably kind of pathetic outdated insurgency-projects from behind the front-operation of a cut-rate mirror, blown-glass, practical
joke 'n gag, trendy postcard, and low-demand old film-cartridge emporium called Antitoi Entertainment, just up Prospect St. from
Inman Square in Cambridge's decayed Portugo/Brazilian district. Because Pemulis always conducts business solo and speaks no
French, the whole transaction with the Nuck in charge had to be negotiated in dumbshow, and since this lumberjackish Antitoi
Nuckwad tended to look from side to side before he communicated even more than Pemulis looked all around himself, with his
dim-looking partner standing there cradling a broom and also scanning for eavesdroppers in the closed shop the whole time, the
whole negotiated deal had resembled a kind of group psychomotor seizure, with different bits of whipping and waggling heads
reflected in dislocated sections and at jagged angles in more mirrors and pebbled blown-glass vases than Pemulis had ever seen
crammed into anywhere. A very low-rent TP indeed had a hardcore-porn cartridge going at five times the normal speed so it
looked like crazed rodents and may have turned Pemulis's sexual glands off for all time, he feels. God alone knew where these
clowns had acquired thirteen incredibly potent 50-mg. artifacts of the B.S. 1970s. But the good news is they were Canadians, and
like fucking Nucksters about almost anything they had no idea what what they were in possession of was worth, as it slowly
emerged. Pemulis, w/ aid of 150 mg. of time-release Tenuate Dospan, almost danced a little post-transaction jig on his way up the
steps of the otiose Cambridge bus, feeling the way W. Penn in his Quaker Oats hat in like the 16th century must have felt trading a
few trinkets to babe-in-the-woods Natives for New Jersey, he imagines, doffing the nautical cap to two nuns in the aisle.
Over the course of the next academic day — the incredibly potent stash now wrapped tight in Saran and stashed deep in the
toe of an old sneaker that sits atop the aluminum strut between two panels in subdorm B's drop ceiling, Pemulis's time-tested
entrepot — over the course of the next day or so the matter's hashed out and it's decided that while there's no real reason to involve
Boone or Stice or Struck or Troeltsch, it's really Pemulis and Axford and Hal's right — duty, almost, to the spirits of inquiry and
good trade practice — to sample the potentially incredibly potent DMZ in predeter-minedly safe amounts before unleashing it on
Boone or Troeltsch or any unwitting civilians. Axford having been allowed in on the front end, the question of Hal's defraying the
opportunity-cost of his part in the experiment is tactfully broached and turns out to be no problem. Pemulis's mark-up isn't
anything beyond accepted norms, and there's always room in Hal's budget for spirited inquiry. Hal's one condition is that
somebody tech-literate actually take the truck down to B.U. or M.I.T.'s medical library and physically verify that the compound is
both organic and nonaddictive, which Pemulis says a physical hands-on library assault is already down in his day-planner in pen,
anyway. After P.M. drills on Thursday, as Hal Incandenza and Pemulis with camera-mounted Mario Incandenza in tow stand with
their hands in the chainlink mesh of one of the Show Courts' fencing and watch Teddy Schacht play a private exhibition against a
Syrian Satellite-pro who's at E.T.A. for two paid weeks of corrective instruction on a service-motion that's eroding his rotator cuff
— the guy wears thick glasses with a black athletic band around his head and plays with an upright square-jawed liquid precision
and is dispatching Ted Schacht handily, which Schacht is taking with his customary sanguine good temper, giving his stolid all,
learning what he can, one of very few genuinely stocky players at E.T.A. and one of the even fewer ranked junior players around
without an apparent ego, wholly noninsecure since he blew out his knee on a contre-pied in the pre-Thanksgiving exhibition three
years back, which is odd, now still in and at it for just the fun — and more or less doomed, therefore, to a purgatorial existence in
128-256 Alphabetville — as Pemulis and Hal stand there sweaty in full red-and-gray E.T.A. sweats on a raw 11/5 P.M., the sweat
in their hair starting to accrete and freeze, Mario's head bowed under the weight of the head-mount rig and his hideously
arachnodactylìc fingers whitening as the fence takes his forward weight, Hal's posture subtly but warmly inclined ever so slightly
toward his tiny older brother, who resembles him the way creatures of the same Order but not the same Family might resemble
one another — as they stand watching and hashing matters out, Hal and Pemulis, there's the thud and sprong of an E.W.D.
transnational catapult off way below to their left and then the high keen sound of a waste-displacement projectile the clouds are
too low to let them see the flight of — though a weirdly yellow sheep-shaped cloud is visible somewhere up off past Acton,
connecting the horizon's seam to some kind of coming storm-front held off by the ATHSCME fans along the Lowell-Methuen
stretch of border, northwest. Pemulis finally nixes the notion of performing the spirited controlled experiment here in Enfield,
where Axford has to be at the A squad's dawn drills every morning at 0500, and also Hal, unless he's slept over at HmH the night
before, with HmH just not being a good DMZ-dropping venue at all. Pemulis, scanning up and down the length of the fence and
winking at Mario, posits that a solid 36 hours of demand-free time will be advisable for any interaction with the incredibly potent
you-know-whatski. That also lets out the inter-academy thing with Port Washington tomorrow, for which Charles Tavis has
chartered two buses, because so many E.T.A. players are getting to go and do battle in this one — Port Washington Academy is
gargantuan, the Xerox Inc. of North American tennis academies, with over 300 students and 64 courts, half of which they'll have
already put under warm inflatable TesTar cover as of like Halloween, P.W.'s staff being less into the value of elemental suffering
than Schtitt & Co. — so many that Tavis will almost surely go ahead and bus them all back up from Long Island just as soon as
the post-competition dance is over, rather than shell out for all those motel rooms without corporate support. This E.T.A.-P.W.
meet and buffet and dance are a private, inter-academy tradition, an epic rivalry almost a decade old. Plus Pemulis says he'll need
a couple weeks of quality med-library-stacks-tossing time to do the more exacting titration and side-effects research Hal agrees
the soldier's sobering story seems to dictate. So, they conclude, the window of opportunity looks to be 11/20-21 — the weekend
right after the big End-of-Fiscal-Year fundraising exhibition with the E.T.A. A & B squads in singles against (this year) Quebec's 
notoriously hapless Jr. Davis and Jr. Wightman Cup squads,7474 invited down under very quiet low-profile political conditions
via the good expatriate offices of Avril Incan-denza to get vivisected by Wayne and Hal et al for the philanthropic amusement of
E.T.A. patrons and alums, then to dance the p.m. away at a catered supper and Alumni Ball — the weekend right before
Thanksgiving week and the WhataBurger Invitational in sunny AZ, because this year in addition to Friday 11/20 they also get
Saturday 11/21 off, as in from both class and practice, because C.T. and Schtitt have arranged a special one-match doubles
exhibition for the Saturday A.M. following the big meet, one between two female coaches of the Québecois Wightmans and
E.T.A.'s infamous Vaught twins, Caryn and Sharyn Vaught, seventeen, O.N.A.N.'s top-ranked junior women's doubles team,
unbeaten in three years, an unbeatable duo, uncanny in their cooperation on the court, moving as One at all times, playing not just
as if but in fact because they shared a brain, or at least the psychomotor lobes of one, the twins Siamese, fused at the left and right
temple, banned from Singles by O.N.A.N. regs, the broad-shadow-casting Vaughts, flinty-eyed tire-executive's daughters out of
Akron, using her/their four legs to cover chilling amounts of court, plus to sweep the Charleston competition at every postexhibition formal ball for the last five years running. Tavis'll be on Wayne to play some sort of exhibitory thing, too, though
asking Wayne to publicly smear a second Québecer in two days might be a bit much. And but everyone who's anyone'll be down
at the Lung, watching the Vaughts vivisect some adult-ranked Nucks, plus maybe Wayne,7575 then the E.T.A.s will get Saturday
to rest and recharge before starting both the pre-WhataBurger training week and the bell-lap of prep for 12/12's Boards, meaning
late Friday night-Sunday A.M. will give Pemulis, Hal, and Axford (and maybe Struck if Pemulis needs to let Struck in, for help
with library-tossing) enough time to psychospiritually rally from whatever meninges-withering hangover the incredibly potent
DMZ might involve .. . and Axford in the sauna predicted it would be a witherer indeed, since even just LSD alone he observed
left you the next day not just sick or down but utterly empty, a shell, void inside, like your soul was a wrung-out sponge. Hal
wasn't sure he concurred. An alcohol hangover was definitely no frolic in the psychic glade, all thirsty and sick and your eyes
bulging and receding with your pulse, but after a night of involved hallucinogens Hal said the dawn seemed to confer on his
psyche a kind of pale sweet aura, a luminescence.7676 Halation, Axford observed.
Pemulis appears to have left out of his calculations the fact that he'll get that Saturday P.M. off classes only if he makes the
travelling list for the Tucson-WhataBurger the following week, and that unlike Hal and Axford he's not a lock: Pemulis's U.S.T.A.
rank, excepting his halcyon thirteenth year in the Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken, has never gotten higher than 128, and the
WhataBurger draws kids from all over O.N.A.N. and even Europe; the draw will have to be weak indeed for him to get even one
of the 64 Qualifying-Round invitations. Axford's on the fringes of the top 50, but he got to go last year at seventeen, so he's almost
got to get to go. And Hal is looking at getting a Third or maybe Fourth Seed in 18's Singles; he's definitely going, barring some
sort of cataclysmic ankle-relapse against either Port Wash, or Quebec. Axford postulates that Pemulis isn't miscalculating so much
as simply showing a slitty-eyed confidence, which as far as his match-play outlook is concerned would be unusual and rather a
fine thing — prorector Aubrey deLint says (publicly) that seeing M. Pemulis in practice v. seeing M. Pemulis in a real match that
means anything is like getting to know some girl through e-mail as like e-mail-keyboard-type penpals and really falling for her
and then finally meeting her in person and finding out she's got like just one enormous tit in the exact middle of her chest or
something like that.7777
Mario will get to come along if Avril can convince C.T. to bring him along to get WhataBurger footage for this year's E.T.A.
promotional Xmas-giveaway-to-private-and-incorporated-patrons cartridge.
Schacht and the glossy Syrian are laughing together about something up at the net-post, where they've walked to gather gear
and various spare rotator-cuff- and knee-appliances after the Syrian kind of cornily jumped the net and pumped Schacht's hand,
breath and sweat-steam rising up off and moving off through the fence's mesh toward the manicured western hills as Mario's laugh
rings out at some broad mock-supplicant's gesture Schacht's just now made.
7 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
You can be at certain parties and not really be there. You can hear how certain parties have their own implied ends embedded
in the choreography of the party itself. One of the saddest times Joelle van Dyne ever feels anywhere is that invisible pivot where
a party ends — even a bad party — that moment of unspoken accord when everyone starts collecting his lighter and date, jacket or
greatcoat, his one last beer hanging from the plastic rind's five rings, says certain perfunctory things to the hostess in a way that
acknowledges their perfunctoriness without seeming insincere, and leaves, usually shutting the door. When everybody's voices
recede down the hall. When the hostess turns back in from the closed door and sees the litter and the expanding white V of utter
silence in the party's wake.
Joelle, at the end of her rope and preparing to hang from it, listening, is supported by a polished hardwood floor above both
river and Bay's edge, perched uncomfortably in striated light in one of Molly Notkin's chairs molded in the likeness of great
filmmakers from the celluloid canon, seated between empty Cukor and frightening Murnau in Méliès's fiberglass lap, his trousers'
crease uncomfortable and his cummerbund M.I.T.-crested. The lurid chairs' directors are larger than life: Joelle's feet dangle well
off the floor, her squished hamstrings beginning to burn under a damp thick cotton Brazilian skirt which is vivid, curled pale
purples and fresh red against a Latin black that seems to glow above pale knees and white rayon kneesocks and feet in clogs that
are hanging half off, legs swinging like a child's, always feeling like a child in Molly's chairs, conspicuously perched in the eye of
a bad party's somewhat forced-feeling storm of wit and good cheer, sitting by herself under what used to be her window, the
daughter of a low-pH chemist and homemaker from western Kentucky, a lot of fun to be with, normally, if you can get over the
disconcerting veil.
Among pernicious myths is the one where people always get very upbeat and generous and other-directed right before they
eliminate their own map for keeps. The truth is that the hours before a suicide are usually an interval of enormous conceit and selfinvolvement.
There are decorative bars, slender and of black iron that pigeon droppings have made piebald, over the west windows to this
third-floor cooperative apartment on the East Cambridge fringes of the Back Bay, where near-Professor Notkin is holding a party
to celebrate passing her Orals in Film & Film-Cartridge Theory, the doctoral program where Joelle — before her retreat into 
broadcast sound — had met her.
Molly Notkin often confides on the phone to Joelle van Dyne about the one tormented love of Notkin's life thus far, an
erotically circumscribed G. W. Pabst scholar at New York University tortured by the neurotic conviction that there are only a
finite number of erections possible in the world at any one time and that his tumescence means e.g. the detumescence of some
perhaps more deserving or tortured Third World sorghum farmer or something, so that whenever he tumefies he'll suffer the same
order of guilt that your less eccentrically tortured Ph.D.-type person will suffer at the idea of, say, wearing baby-seal fur. Molly
still takes the high-speed rail down to visit him every couple weeks, to be there for him in case by some selfish mischance he
happens to harden, prompting in him black waves of self-disgust and an extreme neediness for understanding and nonjudgmental
love. She and poor Molly Notkin are just the same, Joelle reflects, seated alone, watching doctoral candidates taste wine — sisters,
sororal twins. With her fear of direct light, Notkin. And the disguises and whiskers are simply veiled veils. How many sub-rosa
twins are there, out there, really? What if heredity, instead of linear, is branching? What if it's not arousal that's so finitely
circumscribed? What if in fact there were ever only like two really distinct individual people walking around back there in
history's mist? That all difference descends from this difference? The whole and the partial. The damaged and the intact. The
deformed and the paralyzingly beautiful. The insane and the attendant. The hidden and the blindingly open. The performer and the
audience. No Zen-type One, always rather Two, one upside-down in a convex lens.
Joelle is thinking about what she has in her purse. She sits alone in her linen veil and pretty skirt, obliquely looked at,
listening to bits of conversation she reels in out of the overall voices' noise but seeing no one really else, the absolute end of her
life and beauty running in a kind of stuttered old hand-held 16mm before her eyes, projected against the white screen on her side,
for once, from Uncle Bud and twirling to Orin and Jim and YYY, all the way up to today's wet walk here from the Red Line's
Downtown stop, walking the whole way from East Charles St., employing a self-conscious and kind of formal stride, but
undeniably pretty, the overall walk toward her last hour was, on this last day before the great O.N.A.N.ite Interdependence revel.
East Charles to the Back Bay today is a route full of rained-on sienna-glazed streets and upscale businesses with awnings and
wooden signs hung with cute Colonial script, and people looking at her like you look at the blind, naked gazes, not knowing she
could see everything at all times. She likes the wet walk for this, everything milky and halated through her veil's damp linen, the
brick sidewalks of Charles St. unchipped and impersonally crowded, her legs on autopilot, she a perceptual engine, holding the
collar of her overcoat closed at her poncho's neckline in a way that lets her hold the veil secure against her face with a finger on
her chin, thinking always about what she has in her purse, stopping in at a discount tobacconist and buying a quality cigar in a
glass tube and then a block later placing the cigar inside carefully in among the overflowing waste atop a corner receptacle of
pine-green mesh, but keeps the tube, puts the glass tube in her purse, can hear the rain's thup on tight umbrellas and hear it hiss in
the street, and can see droplets broken and regathering on her polyresin coat, cars sheening by with the special lonely sound of
cars in rain, wipers making black rainbows on taxis' shining windshields. In every alley are green I.W.D. dumpsters and the
smaller red I.W.D. dumpsters to take the overflow from the green dumpsters. And the sound of her wood-sole clogs against the
receding staccato of brittle women's high heels on brick westward as Charles St. now approaches Boston Common and becomes
less quaint and upscale: sodden litter — flat the way only wet litter can be flat — appears on the sidewalk and in the curb's seam,
and now murky-colored people with sacks and grocery carts appraising that litter, squatting to lift and sift through litter; and the
rustle and jut of limbs from dumpsters being sifted by people who all day do nothing but sift through I.W.D. dumpsters; and other
people's blue shoeless limbs extending in coronal rays from refrigerator boxes in each block's three alleys, and the little cataract of
rainwater off the edge of each dumpster's red annex's downsloping side and hitting refrigerator boxes' tops with a rhythmless
thappathappappathap; somebody going Pssssst from an alley's lip, and ghastly-white or blotched faces declaiming to thin air from
recessed doorways curtained by rain, and for an other-directed second Joelle wishes she'd hung on to the cigar, to give away, and
moving westward into the territory of the Endless Stem near the end of Charles she starts to dispense change she is asked for from
doorways and inverted up-tilted boxes; and she gets asked about the deal with the veil with a lack of delicacy she rather prefers. A
sooty wheelchaired man with a dead white face below a NOTRE RAI PAYS cap silently extends a hand for coins — a puffed red
cut across that businesslike palm is half-healed and almost visibly closing. It looks like a dent in dough. Joelle gives him a folded
U.S. twenty and likes that he says nothing.
She buys a .473-liter Pepsi Cola in a blunt plastic bottle at a Store 24 whose Jordanian clerk just looks at her blankly when
she asks if they carry Big Red Soda Water, and settles for the Pepsi and comes out and pours the pop out down a storm-drain and
watches it pool there foaming brownly and stay put because the drain's grate is clogged solid with leaves and sodden litter. She
walks on toward the Common with the empty bottle and glass tube in her purse. There was no need to buy Chore Boy pads at the
Store 24.
Joelle van Dyne is excruciatingly alive and encaged, and in the director's lap can call up everything from all times. What will
be that most self-involved of acts, self-cancelling, to lock oneself in Molly Notkin's bedroom or bath and get so high that she's
going to fall down and stop breathing and turn blue and die, clutching her heart. No more back and forth. Boston Common is like
a lush hole Boston's built itself around, a two-k. square of shiny trees and dripping limbs and green benches over wet grass.
Pigeons all over, the same sooty cream as the willows' rinds. Three young black men perched like tough crows along a bench's
back approve her body and call her bitch with harmless affection and ask where's the wedding at. No more deciding to stop at
2300h. and then barely getting through the hour's show and hurtling back home at 0l30h. and smoking the Chore Boy's resins and
not stopping after all. No more throwing the Material away and then half an hour later rooting through the trash, no more all-fours
scrutiny of the carpet in hopes of a piece of lint that looks enough like the Material to try to smoke. No more singeing the selvage
of veils. The Common's south edge is Boylston Street with its 24/7 commerce, upscale, cashmere scarves and cellular holsters,
doormen with gold braid, jewelers with three names, women with valence-curtain bangs, stores disgorging shoppers with their
wide white monogrammed twine-handle bags. The rain's wet veil blurs things like Jim had designed his neonatal lens to blur
things in imitation of a neonatal retina, everything recognizable and yet without outline. A blur that's more deforming than fuzzy.
No more clutching her heart on a nightly basis. What looks like the cage's exit is actually the bars of the cage. The afternoon's
meshes. The entrance says EXIT. There isn't an exit. The ultimate annular fusion: that of exhibit and its cage. Jim's own Cage III:
Free Show. It is the cage that has entered her, somehow. The ingenuity of the whole thing is beyond her. The Fun has long since
dropped off the Too Much. She's lost the ability to lie to herself about being able to quit, or even about enjoying it, still. It no
longer delimits and fills the hole. It no longer delimits the hole. There's a certain smell to a rain-wet veil. Something about that
caller and the moon, saying the moon never looked away. Revolving and yet not. She had hurtled on back home on the night's
final T and gone home and at least finally not turned her face away from the situation, the predicament that she didn't love it
anymore she hated it and wanted to stop and also couldn't stop or imagine stopping or living without it. She had in a way done as
they'd made Jim do near the end and admitted powerlessness over this cage, this unfree show, weeping, literally clutching her
heart, smoking first the Chore Boy-scrap she'd used to trap the vapors and form a smokable resin, then bits of the carpet and the
acetate panties she'd filtered the solution through hours earlier, weeping and veílless and yarn-haired, like some grotesque clown,
in all four mirrors of her little room's walls.
CHRONOLOGY OF ORGANIZATION OF NORTH AMERICAN NATIONS' REVENUE-ENHANCING SUBSIDIZED
TIME™, BY YEAR
(1) Year of the Whopper
(2) Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad
(3) Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar
(4) Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken
(5) Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster
(6) Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For
Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office, Or Mobile (sic)
(7) Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland
(8) Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment
(9) Year of Glad7878
Jim's eldest, Orin — punter extraordinaire, dodger of flung acid extraordinaire — had once shown Joelle van Dyne his
childhood collection of husks of the Lemon Pledge that the school's players used to keep the sun off. Different-sized legs and
portions of legs, well-muscled arms, a battery of five-holed masks hung on nails from an upright fiberboard sheet. Not all the
husks had names below them.
Boylston St. east means she passes again the black-bronze equestrian statue of Boston's Colonel Shaw and the MA 54th,
illuminated now by a patch of emergent sunlight, Shaw's metal head and raised sword illicitly draped in a large Québecois fleurde-lis flag with all four irises' stems altered to red blades, so it's absurdly now a red white and blue flag; three Boston cops on
ladders with poles and shears; the Canadian militants come in the night, on the eve of Interdependence, thinking anyone cares
whether they hang things from historic icons, hang anti-O.N.A.N. flags, as if anyone not paid to remove them cares one way or the
other. The encaged and suicidal have a really hard time imagining anyone caring passionately about anything. And here too are E.
Boylston's dealers, sirens of the other, second cage, standing as always outside F.A.O. Schwartz, young little black boys, boys so
black they're blue, horrifically skinny and young, little more than living shadows in knit caps and knee-length sweatshirts and very
white hightops, shifting and blowing into their cupped hands, alluding to the availability of a certain Material, just barely alluding
is all, with their postures and bored blank important gaze. Certain salesmen have only to stand there. Certain types of sales: the
customer comes to you; and Lo. The cops at the flag across the street don't give them a look. Joelle hurries past the line of dealers,
she tries to, her clogs loose and clocking, tarrying for just a moment at the end, just past the gauntlet's end, still within two
extended hands' reach of the last bored dealer; for here on the street outside Schwartz is placed an odd adverting display, not a live
salesman of any sort but rather a humanoid figure of something that's better than cardboard, untouched by the vendors who don't
seem even to look, a display on an angled rear-mount stand like a photo-frame's stand, 2-D, the figure a man in a wheelchair, in a
coat and tie, his lap blanketed and no legs below, his well-fed face artistically reddened with some terrible joy, his smile's arc of
the extreme curvature that exists between mirth and fury, his ecstasy terrible to see, his head hairless and plastic and cast back, his
eyes on the blue harlequin-patches of the post-storm sky, looking straight up, or having a seizure, or ecstatic, his arms also up and
out in a gesture of submission or triumph or thanks, his oddly thick right hand the receptacle for the black spine of the case of
some new film cartridge being advertised for distribution, the cartridge stuck like a tongue out of a slot in his (lineless) palm;
except there is only this display, this ecstatic figure and a cartridge no feral vendor's removed, no mention of title, no blurbs or
quoted references to critics' thumbs, the case's spine itself bare black slightly pebbled generic plastic, conspicuously unlabelled.
Two Oriental women's shopping bags catch and make her raincoat billow slightly as Joelle stands there briefly, feeling the lines'
dealers looking at her, assessing; and then someone calls something to one of the cops halfway up the statue, using his first name,
which echoes slightly and breaks the spell; the little black boys look away. None of the passersby seem to notice the display she
stands before, reflecting. It's some kind of anti-ad. To direct attention at what is not said. Lead up to an inevitability you deny. Not
new. But an expensive and affecting display. The film-cartridge itself would be a blank, too, or the case empty, worthless because
it really can be removed all the way from the slot in the figure's hand. Joelle removes it and looks at it and puts it back. She's had
her last fling with film cartridges. Jim had used her several times. Jim at the end had filmed her at prodigious and multilensed
length, and refused to share what he'd made of it, and died w/o a note.7979 Her mental name for the man had been 'Infinite Jim.'
The display cartridge shoves home with a click. One of the such young dealers calls her Mama and asks where's the funeral at.
For a while, after the acid, after first Orin left and then Jim came and made her sit through that filmed apology-scene and then
vanished and then came back but only to — only four years seven months six days past — to leave, for a while, after taking the
veil, for a while she liked to get really high and clean. Joelle did. Scrub sinks until they were mint-white. Dust the ceilings without
using any kind of ladder. Vacuum like a fiend and put in a fresh vacuum-bag after each room. Imitate the wife and mother they
both declined to shoot. Use Incandenza's toothbrush on tiles' grout.
In places along Boylston cars are triple-parked. People's wipers are on that setting that Joelle, who does not drive, imagines to
read occasional on the controls. Her own personal Daddy's old car had wipers' controls on the turr-sígnal stalk by the wheel.
Available yellow cabs pass, hissing in the streets. Over half the passing cabs out here in the rain are advertising themselves as
available, purple numbers lit below TAXI. As she remembers things Jim was, besides a great filmic mind and her true heart's
friend, the world's best hailer of Boston cabs, known to have less hailed than conjured cabs in spots where Boston cabs by all 
that's right just aren't, a hailer of Boston cabs in places like Veedersburg, Indiana and Powell, Wyoming, something in the
authority of the lifted arm's height, the oncoming taxi undergoing a sort of parallax as it bore down over tumbleweed streets, appearing under Incandenza's upraised palm as if awaiting benediction. He was a tall and physically slow-moving man with a great
love of taxis. And they loved him back. Never again a cab in four-plus years, after that. And so Joelle van Dyne, a.k.a. Madame
P., surrendered, suicidal, eschews tumbrel or hack, her solid clogs sounding formal on the smooth cement down Boyl-ston's
sidewalk past fine stores' revolving doors southeast toward serious brownstone-terrain, open coat swirling over poncho and
hanging rain breaking into stutters and drips.
After she had smoked homemade freebase cocaine this A.M. for the last time and then fired up the Chore Boys and good
panties she'd used as a last filter and choked on burnt acetate when she shredded and smoked them, and had wept and imprecated
at the mirrors and thrown away her paraphernalia again for the final time, when an hour later she'd walked not formally to her Tstop under a parliament of gathering storm-clouds and faint sticky bits of autumn thunder to ride to Upper Brighton and find Lady
Delphina, get real weight from Lady Delphina, so hard to just cut it off in mid-binge, on a Saturday, unless you just passed out, to
tell L.D. when she'd said goodbye and it was the last time it had been really the penultimate time but that this was the last time,
this was goodbye for real, and get serious weight from Lady Delphina, pay her twice the 8-gram rate as a generous farewell, as she
walked without much real formality to her T-stop and stood on the platform, each time mistaking little mutters of thunder for the
approach of the train, wanting more of it so badly she could feel her brain heaving around in its skull, then a pleasant and gentlefaced older black man in raincoat and hat with a little flat black feather in the band and the sort of black-frame styleless spectacles
pleasant older black men wear, with the weary but dignified mild comportment of the older black, waiting alone with her on the
chill dim Davis Square subway platform, this man had folded his Herald neatly lengthwise and had it under the same arm he
tipped his hat with and said to excuse him if this was an intrusion, he said, but he'd had occasion to see one or two of these linen
veils before, around, like what she wore, and was interested and rendered curious. He pronounced all four syllables of interested,
which Joelle, from Kentucky, enjoyed. If he might be so bold, he said, tipping his hat. Joelle had engaged with him completely,
which was extremely rare, even off the air. She rather welcomed the chance to think about anything else at all, with the train
surely never pulling in. She reflected that the anecdote had gotten about, but not the incident's legacy, she said, as if that part were
hidden. The Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed was unofficially founded in London in B.S. 1940 in London U.K.
by the cross-eyed, palate-clefted, and wildly carbuncular wife of a junior member of the House of Commons, a lady whom Sir
Winston Churchill, P.M.U.K., having had several glasses of port plus a toddy at a reception for an American Lend-Lease
administrator, had addressed in a fashion wholly inappropriate to social intercourse between civilized gentlemen and ladies.
Unwittingly all but authoring the Union designed to afford the scopophobic empathic fellowship and the genesis of sturdy inner
resources through shame-free and unconstrained concealment, W. Churchill — when the lady, no person's doormat, informed him
with prim asperity that he appeared to be woefully inebriated — made the anec-dotally famous reply that while, yes, yea verily, he
was indeed inebriated, he would the following A.M. be once again sober, while she, dear lady, would tomorrow still be hideously
and improbably deformed. Churchill, doubtless under weighty emotional pressures during this period in history, had then
proceeded to extinguish his cigar in the lady's sherry and to place a finger-bowl napkin delicately over the ruined features of her
flaming visage. The laminated non-photo U.H.I.D. membership card Joelle showed the interested old black gentleman related all
this data and more in a point-size so tiny the card looked somehow both blank and defaced.
PUTATIVE CURRICULUM VITAE OF HELEN P. STEEPLY, 36, 1.93 M., 104 KG., A.B., M.J.A.
1 Year, Time (graduate intern, 'Newsmakers' Section);
16 Months, Decade Magazine ('Hottest and Nottest,' a trends-and-style-analysis column) until Decade folded;
5 Years, Southwest Annual (human-interest, geriatric-medical, personality and tourism articles);
5 Months, Newsweek (11 small features on trends and entertainment until her Executive Editor, with whom she was in love,
left Newsweek and took her with him);
1 Year, Ladies Day (personality and medical-cosmetic features — some research first-hand — until one week in which the
Executive Editor reconciled with his wife and H.P.S. got mugged and purse-snatched on W. 62nd and vowed never again to live
in Manhattan);
15 Months-Present, Moment magazine, Southwest Bureau, Erythema AZ (medical, soft sports, personality, and homeentertainment-trends reporting, masthead byline, contributing-editor status).
Thereafter proceeding first to the Upper Brighton and now to the cooperative Back Bay-edge brownstone she had lived in
once with Orin and performed in with his father and then passed on to Molly Notkin, today's party's guest of honor and hostess in
one, as of yesterday enjoying A.B.D. pre-doctoral status in Film & Film-Cartridge Theory at M.I.T., having cleared the notorious
hurdle of Oral Examinations on that day by offering her examination committee a dramatically rendered and if she did say so
herself devastating oral critique of post-millennial Marxist Film-Cartridge Theory from the point of view of Marx himself, Marx
as pretend-film-cartridge theorist and scholar. Still dressed as K.M. a day later, in celebration — the glued beard matted and
pubic-black, Homburg ordered direct from Wiesbaden, soot from a terribly obscure British souvenir-filth shop — she has no idea
that Joelle's been in a cage since Y.T.S.D.B., has no idea what she and Jim Incandenza were even about for twenty-one months,
whether they were lovers or what, whether Orin left because they were lovers or what,8080 or that Joelle even now lives hand-tolung on a grossly generous trust willed her by a man she unveiled for but never slept with, the prodigious punter's father, infinite
jester, director of a final opus so magnum he'd claimed to have had it locked away. Joelle's never seen the completed assembly of
what she'd appeared in, or seen anyone who's seen it, and doubts that any sum of scenes as pathologic as he'd stuck that long
quartzy auto-wobbling lens on the camera and filmed her for could have been as entertaining as he'd said the thing he'd always
wanted to make had broken his heart by ending up.
Climbing to the third-floor, stairs pale from wear, still trembling from the a.m.'s interruptus, Joelle finds herself having a hard
time, climbing, as if the force of gravity goes up as she does. The party-sounds start around the second landing. Here is Molly
Notkin dressed as a crumbling Marx again greeting Joelle at her door with the sort of delighted mock-surprise U.S. hostesses use
for greetings. Notkin secures Joelle's veil for her during removal of the beaded coat and poncho, then lifts the veil slightly in a
practiced two-finger gesture to deliver a double-cheek kiss that is sour with cigarettes and wine — Joelle never smokes when 
veiled — asking how Joelle got here and then without waiting for an answer offering her that odd kind of British-Columbian apple
juice they'd found they both liked so, and that Joelle at home's abandoned and gone back to the Big Red Soda Water of childhood,
which Notkin doesn't know, and still cluelessly considers extra-sweet Canadian juice to be pretty much both her and Joelle's
biggest vices. Molly Notkin's the kind of soul you want desperately to be polite to but have to hide it with because she'd be
mortified if she suspected you were ever just being polite to her about anything.
Joelle makes a get-out~of-here gesture. 'The really really good kind?’
'The kind that looks muddy it's so fresh.’
'Where'd you get it this late this far east?’
'The kind you just about have to strain it's so fresh.’
The living room is full and hot, campy mambo playing, walls still the same off-white but all the trim now a confectioner's rich
brown. Or plus there's wine, Joelle sees, a whole assortment on the old sideboard it took three men with cigars in gray jumpsuits to
get up the stairs when they got it, an assortment of bottles of different shapes and dim colors and different levels of what's inside.
Molly Notkin has one dirty-nailed hand on Joelle's arm and one on the head of a chair of Maya Deren brooding avant-gardedly in
vivid spun-glass polymers, and is telling Joelle about her Orals in a party's near-shout that will leave her hoarse well before this
big one's sad end.
A good muddy juice fills Joelle's mouth with spit that's as good as the juice, and her linen veil is drying and beginning once
again comfortingly to flutter with her breath, and, perched alone and glanced at covertly by persons who don't know they know
her voice, she feels the desire to raise the veil before a mirror, to refine some of her purse's untouched Material, raise the veil and
set free the encaged rapacious thing inside to breathe the only uncloth'd gas it can stomach; she feels ghastly and sad; she looks
like death, her mascara's all over the place; no one can tell. The plastic Pepsi bottle and glass cigar tube and lighter and packet of
glycine bags are a shape in the corner of the rain-darkened cloth purse that rests on the floor just below her dangling clogs. Molly
Notkin is standing with Rutherford Keck and Crosby Baum and a radically bad-postured man before the school-supplied
Infernatron viewer. Baum's wide back and pompadour obscure whatever's on the screen. Academics' voices sound nasal, with a
cultivated stutter at sentences' start. A good many of James O. Incandenza's films were silent. He was a self-acknowledged visual
filmmaker. His damaged grinning boy Joelle never got to know because Orin had disliked him often carried the case with the
lenses, grinning like somebody squinting into bright light. That insufferable child actor Smothergill used to contort his face at the
boy and he'd just laugh, which sent Smothergill into tantrums that Miriam Prickett would resolve in the bathroom somehow. An
old Latin-revival CD issues at acceptable volume from the speakers screwed into planters and hung with thin chains from each
corner of the cream ceiling. Another large loose group is dancing in the cleared space between the cluster of directorial chairs and
the bedroom door, most favoring Y.D.A.U.'s Minimal Mambo, this autumn's East Coast anticraze, the dancers appearing to be just
this side of standing still, the subtlest possible hints of fingers snapping under right-angled elbows. Orin Incandenza, she has not
forgotten, had a poor mottled swollen elbow above a forearm the size of a leg of lamb. He had switched neatly from arm to leg.
Joelle was Orin Incandenza's only lover for twenty-six months and his father's optical beloved for twenty-one. A foreign academic
with an almost Franciscan bald spot has the swirling limp of someone with a prosthesis — hired by M.I.T. after her time. The
better dancers' movements are so tiny they are evocative and compel watching, their near-static mass curdled and bent somehow
subtly around one beautiful young woman, quite beautiful, her back undulating minimally in a thin tight blue-and-white-striped
sailorish top as she alludes to a cha-cha with maracas empty of anything to rattle, watching herself almost dance in the full-length
mirror of quality plate that after Orin left Joelle had forbidden Jim to hang and had slid beneath her bed face-down; now it's the
west wall's framed mirror, hung between two empty ornate gilt frames Notkin thinks she's been retroironic by having the frames
themselves framed, in rather less ornate frames, in wry allusion to the early-Experialist fashion of making art out of the
accessories of artistic presentation, the framed frames hanging not quite evenly on either side of the mirror he'd cut for the scenes
of that last ghastly thing he'd made her stand before, reciting in the openly empty tones she'd gone on to use on-air; the girl stands
transfixed in alternating horizontal blue and white, then vertically sliced by bar-cut sunlight, diced, drunk, so wrecked on good
vintage her lips hang slack and the reflected cheeks' muscles have lost all integrity and the cheeks jiggle like the outstanding paps
in her little sailor's top. Apocalyptic rouge and a nose-ring that's either electrified or is catching bits of light from the window. She
is watching herself with unselfconscious fascination in the only serviceable mirror here outside the bathroom. This absence of
shame at the self-obsession. Is she Canadian? Mirror-cult? Not possibly a U.H.I.D.: the bearing's all wrong. But now, whispered to
by a near-motionless man in an equestrian helmet, she turns abruptly falling away from her own reflection to explain, not to the
man so much as no one in particular, the whole dancing mass: I was just looking at my tits she says looking down at herself aren't
they beautiful, and it's moving, there's something so heartbreakingly sincere in what she says Joelle wants to go to her, tell her it is
and will be completely all right, she's pronounced beautiful like the earlier interested in four syllables, splitting the diphthong,
betraying her class and origin with the heartbreaking openness Joelle's always viewed as either terribly stupid or terribly brave, the
girl raising her striped arms in triumph or artless thanks for being constructed this way, these 'tits,' built by whom and for whom
never occurring, artlessly ecstatic, she is not drunk Joelle now sees but has taken Ecstasy, Joelle can see, from the febrile flush and
eyes jacked so wide you can make out brain-meat behind the balls' poles, a.k.a. X or MDMA, a beta-something, an early synthetic,
emotional acid, the Love Drug so-called, big among the artistic young under say Bush and successors, since fallen into relative
disuse because its pulverizing hangover has been linked to the impulsive use of automatic weapons in public venues, a hangover
that makes a freebase hangover look like a day at the emotional beach, the difference between suicide and homicide consisting
perhaps only in where you think you discern the cage's door: Would she kill somebody else to get out of the cage? Was the
allegedly fatally entertaining and scopophiliac thing Jim alleges he made out of her unveiled face here at the start of Y.T.S.D.B. a
cage or really a door? Had he even cut the tape into something coherent? There was nothing coherent in the mother-deathcosmology and apologies she'd repeated over and over, inclined over that auto-wobbled lens propped up in the plaid-sided pram.
He never let her see it, not even the dailies. He killed himself less than ninety days later. Fewer than ninety days? How much must
a person want out, to put his head in a microwave oven? A dim woman all the kids had known of in Boaz had put her cat in a
microwave to dry it after a tick-bath and set the oven just on Defrost and the cat ended up all over the woman's kitchen's walls.
How would you rig the thing so it would activate with the door open? Is there just some sort of refrigerator-light button you could 
hold down and secure with tape? Would the tape melt? She cannot remember thinking of it once in four years. Did she kill him,
somehow, just inclining veilless over that lens? The woman in love with her own breasts is being congratulated with the subtlest
possible allusions to clapping hands from barely animate dancers with their glass tulips held between their teeth, and Vogelsong of
Emerson College tries suddenly to stand on his head and is immediately ill in a spreading plum-colored ectoplasm the dancers do
not even try to evade the spread of, and Joelle applauds the Xtatic woman as well, because they are, Joelle admits freely, the paps,
they are attractive, which in the Union is designated Compelling Within Compatible Relative Limits; Joelle has no problem seeing
beauty approved, within compatible relative limits; she feels not empathy or maternal nurture any longer, just a desire to swallow
every last drop of saliva she will ever manufacture and exit this vessel, have fifteen more minutes of Too Much Fun, eliminate her
own map with the afflatus of the blind god of all doorless cages; and she lets herself slide forward from Méliès' lap, a tiny fall,
leading with her lumpy purse and glass of matte apple juice toward the door beyond the lines of a becalmed conga and door-way'd
huddles of a warm and well-felt theoretical party. And then, again, delays, dithers, and the easement to the bathroom is blocked.
She is the only veiled woman here, and an academic generation ahead of most of these candidates, and rather feared, even though
not many know she is an Aural Personality, feared for quitting instead of failing, and because of the connection of the memory of
Jim, and she is given a certain wide social berth, allowed to delay and orbit and stand unengaged at the fringes of shifting groups,
obliquely glanced at, veil going concave at each inbreath, waiting with hip-shot nonchalance for the bathroom off the bedroom to
clear, lac-carino the Chaplin-archivist and a jaundice-yellow older man have gone into Molly's bedroom and left the door ajar,
waiting nonchalantly, ignoring the foreign academic who wishes to know where she works with that veil, turning from him,
rudely, brain heaving in its bone-box, memorizing every detail like collecting empty shells, sipping cloudy juice under neatly
lifted corners of veil, now looking at instead of through the translucent cloth, the Improbably Deformed's equivalent of closing the
eyes in concentration on sound, letting the Very Last Party wash over her, passed gracefully by different mingling guests and once
or twice almost touched, seeing only inrushing and then billowing white, listening to different mingling voices the way the
unveiled young taste wine.
'This is a technologically constituted space.’
'— thing opens tight on Remington in a hideous grandfatherly flannel suit, b & w, straight full-frontal shot in this grainy b &
w stuff Bouvier taught him to manipulate the f-stop to mimic that horrid old Super 8, straight full-frontal, staring past the camera,
no attempt to disguise he's reading off a prompter, monotone and all, saying "Few foreigners realize that the German term Berliner
is also the vulgate idiom for a common jelly doughnut, and thus that Kennedy's seminal 'Icb bein ein Berliner' was greeted by the
Teutonic crowds with a delight only apparently political," at which point he aims his thumb and finger at his own temple at which
point his TA doubles the focal-length so there's this giant —’
'I would die to defend your constitutional right to error, friend, but in this one case you —’
'They used to be less beautiful but then Rutherford said to quit sleeping face-down.’
'No no I'm saying that this, this whole thing, what you and I are discoursing within, is a technologically constituted space.’
'A du nous avons foi au poison.’
'It's good cheese, but I've had better cheese.’
'Mainwaring, this is Kirby, Kirby here's in pain, he's been telling me about it and now he'd like to tell you about it.’
'— complete mystery why Eve Plumb didn't show, it's known she'd re-upped for the part, the whole rest of them were there,
even Henderson and that Davis woman as Alice who had to be wheeled out under nurses' care, my God and Peter, looking as if
he'd eaten nothing but pastry for the past forty years, Greg with that absurd hairpiece and snakeskin boots, yes but all the kids
recognizable, underneath, somehow, this pre-digital insistence on continuity through time that was the project's whole magic and
raison, you know this, you're current on pre-digital phenomenology and Brady-theory. And then but now here's this entirely
incongruous middle-aged black woman playing Jan!’
'De gustibus non est disputandum.’
'Balls.’
'An incongruous central blackness could have served to accentuate the terrible whiteness that had been in ineluct —’
'The entire historical effect of a seminal program was horribly, horribly altered. Terribly altered.’
'Eisenstein and Kurosawa and Michaux walk into a bar.’
'You know those mass-market cartridges, for the masses? The ones that are so bad they're somehow perversely good? This
was worse than that.’
'— so-called phantom, but real. And mobile. First the spine. Then not the spine but the right eye-socket. Then the old socket's
fit as a fiddle but the thumb, the thumb doubles me over. It won't stay put.’
'Fucks with the emulsion's gradient so that all the tesseract's angles appear to be right-angled, except in —’
'So what I did I sat right up next to him, you see, so in a sense he didn't have room to stalk or draw a bead, Keck had said they
needed a good ten m., so I cocked the hat just so, just ever so slightly, like so, just cocked it over to the side like so and sat down
practically on the man's knee, asked after his show-carp, he keeps pedigreed carp, and of course you can imagine what —’
'— more interesting issue from a Heideggerian perspective is a priori, whether space as a concept is enframed by technology
as a concept.’
'It has a mobile cunning, a kind of wraith- or phantom-like —’
'Because they're emotional more labile at that stage.’
' "So get dentures?" she said. "So get dentures?" '‘
'Who shot The Incision? Who did the cinematography on The Incision?’
'— way it can be film qua film. Comstock says if it even exists it has to be something more like an aesthetic pharmaceutical.
Some beastly post-annular scopophiliacal vector. Suprasubliminals and that. Some kind of abstractable hypnosis, an optical
dopamine-cue. A recorded delusion. Duquette says he's lost contact with three colleagues. He said a good bit of Berkeley isn't
answering their phone.’
'I don't think anyone here would dispute that they're absolutely fetching tits, Melinda.’
'We had blinis with caviar. There were tartines. We had sweetbreads in mushroom cream sauce. He said it was all on him. He 
said he was treating. There was roast artichoke topped with a sort of sly aiolí. Mutton stuffed with foie gras, double chocolate rum
cake. Seven kinds of cheese. A kiwi glace and brandy in snifters you needed two hands to swirl.’
'That coke-addled fag in his Morris Mini.’
The prosthetic film-scholar: 'Fans do not begin to keep it all in the Great Convexity. It creeps back in. What goes around, it
comes back around. This your nation refuses to learn. It will keep creeping back in. You cannot give away your filth and prevent
all creepage, no? Filth by its very nature it is a thing that is creeping always back. Me, I can remember when your Charles was
cafe with cream. Look now at it. It is the blue river. You have a river outside you that is robin-egg's blue.’
'I think you mean Great Concavity, Alain.’
'I meant Great Convexity. I know what is the thing I meant.’
'And then it turned out he'd put ipecac in the brandy. It was the most horrible thing you've ever seen. Everyone, all over,
spouting like whales. I'd heard the term projectile vomiting but I never thought that I — you could aim, the pressure was such that
you could aim. And out come his grad technicians from under the tablecloth's like overhang, and he pulls out a canvas chair and
clapper and begins filming the whole horrible staggering spouting groaning —’
This ultimate cartridge-as-ecstatic-death rumor's been going around like a lazy toilet since Dishmaster, for Christ's sake.
Simply make inquiries, mention some obscure foundation grant, obtain the thing through whatever shade of market the thing's
alleged to be out in. Have a look. See that it's doubtless just high-concept erotica or an hour of rotating whorls. Or something like
late Makavajev, something that's only entertaining after it's over, on reflection.’
The striated parallelogram of p.m. sunlight is elongating in transit across the coop's eastern wall, over bottle-laden sideboard
and glass cabinet of antique editing equipment and louvered vent and shelves of art-cartridges in their dull black and dun cases.
The mole-studded man in the equestrian helmet is either winking at her or has a tic. There's the pre-suicide's classic longing: Sit
down one second, I want to tell you everything. My name is Joelle van Dyne, Dutch-Irish, and I was reared on family land east of
Shiny Prize, Kentucky, the only child of a low-pH chemist and his second wife. I now have no accent except under stress. I am 1.7
meters tall and weigh 48 kilograms. I occupy space and have mass. I breathe in and breathe out. Joelle has never before today
been conscious of the sustained volition required to just breathe in and breathe out, her veil recessing into nose and rounded mouth
and then bowing out slightly like curtains over an opened pane.
'Convexity.’
'Concavity!’
'Convexity!’
'Concavity damn your eyes!’
The bathroom has a hook and a mirrored medicine cabinet over the sink and is off the bedroom. Molly Notkin's bedroom
looks like the bedroom of someone who stays in bed for serious lengths of time. A pair of pantyhose has been tossed onto a lamp.
There are not crumbs but whole portions of crackers protruding from the gray surf of wopsed-up bedding. A photo of the
phalloneurotic New Yorker with the same fold-out triangular support as the blank cartridge's anti-ad. A Ziploc of pot and EZWiders and seeds in the ashtray. Books with German and Cyrillic titles lie open in spine-cracking attitudes on the colorless rug.
Joelle's never liked the fact that Notkin's father's photograph is nailed at iconic height to the wall above the headboard, a systems
planner out of Knoxville TN, his smile the smile of a man who wears white loafers and a squirting carnation. And why are
bathrooms always way brighter lit than whatever room they're off? On the private side of the bathroom door she's had to take two
damp towels off the top of to close all the way, the same rotten old hook for a lock never quite ever seeming to want to fit its
receptacle in the jamb, the party's music now some horrible collection of mollified rock classics with all soft rock's grim dental
associations, the business side of the door is hung with a Selective Automation of Knoxville calendar from before Subsidized
Time and cut-out photos of Kinski as Paganini and Léaud as Doinel and a borderless still of the crowd scene in what looks like
Peterson's The Lead Shoes and rather curiously the offprinted page of J. van Dyne, M.A.'s one and only published film-theory
monograph.8181 Joelle can smell, through her veil and own stale exhalations, the little room's complicated spice of sandalwood
rubble in a little violet-ribboned pomander and deodorant soap and the sharp decayed-lemon odor of stress-diarrhea. Low-budget
celluloid horror films created ambiguity and possible elision by putting ? after THE END, is what pops into her head: THE END?
amid the odors of mildew and dicky academic digestion? Joelle's mother's family had no indoor plumbing. It is all right. She
represses all bathetic this-will-be-the-last-thing-I-smell thought-patterns. Joelle is going to have Too Much Fun in here. It was
beyond all else so much fun, at the start. Orin had neither disapproved nor partaken; his urine was an open book because of
football. Jim hadn't disapproved so much as been vacant with disinterest. His Too Much was neat bourbon, and he had lived life to
the fullest, and then gone in for detoxification, again and again. This had been simply too much fun, at the start. So much better
even than nasaling the Material up through rolled currency and waiting for the cold bitter drip at the back of your throat and
cleaning the newly spacious apartment to within an inch of its life while your mouth twitches and writhes unbidden beneath the
veil. The 'base frees and condenses, compresses the whole experience to the implosion of one terrible shattering spike in the
graph, an afflated orgasm of the heart that makes her feel, truly, attractive, sheltered by limits, deveiled and loved, observed and
alone and sufficient and female, full, as if watched for an instant by God. She always sees, after inhaling, right at the apex, at the
graph's spike's tip, Bernini's 'Ecstasy of St. Teresa,' behind glass, at the Vittoria, for some reason, the saint recumbent, half-supine,
her flowing stone robe lifted by the angel in whose other hand a bare arrow is raised for that best descent, the saint's legs frozen in
opening, the angel's expression not charity but the perfect vice of barb-headed love. The stuff had been not just her encaging god
but her lover, too, fiendish, angelic, of rock. The toilet seat is up. She can hear a helicopter's chop somewhere overhead east, a
traffic helicopter over Stor-row, and Molly Notkin's shriek as an enormous glass crash sounds off in the living room, imagines her
beard hanging aslant and her mouth ellipsed with champagne's foam as she waves off the breakage that signals good Party, can
hear through the door the ecstatic Melinda's apologies and Molly's laugh, which sounds like a shriek:
'Oh everything falls off the wall sooner or later.’
Joelle has lifted her veil back to cover her skull like a bride. Since she threw away her pipes and bowls and screens again this
A.M. she is going to have to be resourceful. On the counter of an old sink the same not-quite white as the floor and ceiling (the
wallpaper is a maddening uncountable pattern of roses twined in garlands on sticks) on the counter are an old splay-bristled 
toothbrush, tube of Gleem rolled neatly up from the bottom, unsavory old NoCoat scraper, rubber cement, NeGram, depilatory
ointment, tube of Monostat not squeezed from the bottom, phony-beard whis-kerbits and curled green threads of used mint floss
and Parapectolin and a wholly unsqueezed tube of diaphragm-foam and no makeup but serious styling gel in a big jar with no lid
and hairs around the rim and an empty tampon box half-filled with nickels and pennies and rubber bands, and Joelle sweeps an
arm across the counter and squunches everything over to the side under the small rod with a washcloth wrung viciously out and
dried in the tight spiral of a twisted cord, and if some items do totter and fall to the floor it is all right because everything
eventually has to fall. On the cleared counter goes Joelle's misshapen purse. The absence of veil dulls the bathroom's smells,
somehow.
She's been resourceful before, but this is the most deliberate Joelle has been able to be about it in something like a year. From
the purse she removes the plastic Pepsi container, a box of wooden matches kept dry in a resealable baggie, two little thick glycine
bags each holding four grams of pharmaceutical-grade cocaine, a single-edge razor blade (increasingly tough to find), a little black
Kodachrome canister whose gray lid she pops and discards to reveal baking soda sifted fine as talc, the empty glass cigar tube, a
folded square of Reynolds Wrap foil the size of a playing card, and an amputated length of the bottom of a quality wire coat
hanger. The overhead light casts shadows of her hands over what she needs, so she turns on the light over the medicine cabinet's
mirror as well. The light stutters and hums and bathes the counter with cold lithium-free fluorescence. She undoes the four pins
and removes the veil from her head and places it on the counter with the rest of the Material. Lady Delphina's little glycine baglets
have clever seals that are green when sealed and blue and yellow when not. She taps half a glycine's worth into the cigar tube and
adds half again as much baking soda, spilling some of the soda in a parenthesis of bright white on the counter. This is the most
deliberate she's been able to be in at least a year. She turns the sink's C knob and lets the water get really cold, then cranks the
volume back to a trickle and fills the rest of the tube to the top with water. She holds the tube up straight and gently taps on its
side with a blunt unpainted nail, watching the water slowly darken the powders beneath it. She produces a double rose of flame in
the mirror that illuminates the right side of her face as she holds the tube over the matches' flame and waits for the stuff to begin to
bubble. She uses two matches, twice. When the tube gets too hot to hold she takes and folds her veil and uses it as a kind of ovenmitt over the fingers of her left hand, careful (from habit and experience) not to let the bottom corners get close enough to the
flame to brown. After it's bubbled for just a second Joelle shakes out the matches with a flourish and tosses them in the toilet to
hear that briefest of hisses. She takes up the black wire prod from the hanger and begins to stir and mash the just-bubbled stuff in
the tube, feeling it thicken quickly and its resistance to the wire's tiny circles increase. It was when her hands started to tremble
during this part of the cooking procedure that she'd first known she liked this more than anyone can like anything and still live.
She is not stupid. The Charles rolling away far below the windowless bathroom is vividly blue, more mildly blue on top from the
fresh rainwater that had made purple rings appear and widen, a deeper Magic Marker-type blue below the dilute layer, gulls
stamped to the cleared sky, motionless as kites. A bulky thump sounds from behind the large flat-top Enfield hill on the river's
south shore, a large but relatively shapeless projectile of drums wrapped in brown postal paper and belted with twine hurtling in a
broad upward arc that bothers the gulls into dips and wheels, the brown package quickly a pinpoint in the yet-hazy sky to the
north, where a yellow-brown cloud hangs just above the line between sky and terrain, its top slowly dispersing and opening out so
that the cloud looks like a not very pretty sort of wastebasket, waiting. Inside, Joelle hears only a bit of the bulky thump, which
could be anything. The only other thing besides what she's about to do too much of here right now she'd ever come close to feeling
this way about: In Joelle's childhood, Paducah, not too bad a drive from Shiny Prize, still had a few public movie theaters, six and
eight separate auditoria clustered in single honeycombs at the edges of interstate malls. The theaters always ended in -plex, she
reflected. The Thisoplex and Thatoplex. It had never struck her as odd. And she never saw even one film there, as a girl, that she
didn't just about die with love for. It didn't matter what they were. She and her own personal Daddy up in the front row, they sat in
the front rows of the narrow little overinsulated -plexes up in neck-crick territory and let the screen fill their whole visual field, her
hand in his lap and their big box of Crackerjacks in her hand and sodapops secure in little rings cut out of the plastic of their seats'
arms; and he, always with a wooden match in the corner of his mouth, pointing up into the rectangular world at this one or that
one, performers, giant flawless 2D beauties iridescent on the screen, telling Joelle over and over again how she was prettier than
this one or that one right there. Standing in the placid line as he bought the -plex's paper tickets that looked like grocery receipts,
knowing that she was going to love the celluloid entertainment no matter what it was, wonderfully innocent, still thinking quality
referred to the living teddy bears in Qantas commercials, standing hand-held, eyes even with his wallet's back-pocket bulge, she'd
never so much again as in that line felt so taken care of, destined for big-screen entertainment's unalloyed good fun, never once
again until starting in with this lover, cooking and smoking it, five years back, before Incandenza's death, at the start. The punter
never made her feel quite so taken care of, never made her feel about to be entered by something that didn't know she was there
and yet was all about making her feel good anyway, coming in. Entertainment is blind.
The improbable thing of the whole thing is that, when the soda and water and cocaine are mixed right and heated right and
stirred just right as the mix cools down, then when the stuff's too stiff to stir and is finally ready to come on out it comes out slick
as shit from a goat, just an inverted-ketchup-bottle thump and out the son of a fucking whore slides, one molded cylinder hardened
onto the black wire, its snout round from the glass tube's bottom. The average pre-chopped freebase rock looks like a .38 round.
What Joelle now slides with three fillips from the cigar tube is a monstrous white wiener, a county-fair corn dog, its sides a bit
rough, like mâché, a couple clots left on the inside of the tube that are what you forage and smoke before the Chore Boys and
panties.
She is now a little under two deliberate minutes from Too Much Fun for anyone mortal to hope to endure. Her unveiled face
in the dirty lit mirror is shocking in the intensity of its absorption. Out in the bedroom doorway she can hear Reeves Mainwaring
telling some helium-voiced girl that life is essentially one long search for an ashtray. Too Much Fun. She uses the razor blade to
cross-section chunks out of the freebase wiener. You can't whittle thin deli-shaved flakes off because they'll crumble back to
powder right away and they anyway don't smoke as well as you'd think. Blunt chunks are S.O.P. Joelle chops out enough chunks
for maybe twenty good-sized hits. They form a little quarry on the soft cloth of her folded veil on the counter. Her Brazilian skirt
is no longer damp. Reeves Mainwaring's blond imperial often had little bits of food residue in it. 'The Ecstasy of St. Teresa' is on
perpetual display at the Vittoria in Rome and she never got to see it. She will never again say And Lo and invite people to watch 
darkness dance on the face of the deep. 'The Face of the Deep' had been the title she'd suggested for Jim's unseen last cartridge,
which he'd said would be too pretentious and then used that skull-fragment out of the Hamlet graveyard scene instead, which talk
about pretentious she'd laughed. His frightened look when she'd laughed is for the life of her the last facial-expression memory she
can remember of the man. Orin had referred to his father sometimes as Himself and sometimes as The Mad Stork and once in a
slip as The Sad Stork. She lights one wooden match and blows it right out and touches the hot black head to the side of the plastic
pop bottle. It melts right through and makes a little hole. The helicopter was probably a traffic helicopter. Somebody at their
Academy had had some connection to some traffic helicopter that had had an accident. She can't for the life of her. No one out
there knows she is in here getting ready to have Too Much. She can hear Molly Notkin calling through rooms about has anyone
seen Keck. In her first theory seminar Reeves Mainwaring had called one film 'wretchedly ill-conceived' and another 'desperately
acquiescent' and Molly Notkin had pretended to have a coughing fit and had had a Tennessee accent and that was how they met.
The Reynolds Wrap is to make a screen that will rest in the bottle's open top. A regular dope screen is the size of a thimble, its
sides spread like an opening bud. Joelle uses the point of some curved nail scissors on the back of the toilet to poke tiny holes in
the rectangle of aluminum foil and shapes it into a shallow funnel large enough to siphon gasoline, narrowing its tip to fit in the
bottle's mouth. She now owns a pipe with a monster-sized bowl and screen, now, and puts in enough chunklets to make five or six
hits at once. The little rocks lie there piled and yellow-white. She puts her lips experimentally to the melted hole in the side of the
bottle and draws, then, very deliberately, lights another match and extinguishes it and makes the hole bigger. The idea that she'll
never see Molly Notkin or the cerebral Union or her U.H.I.D. support-brothers and -sisters or the YYY engineer or Uncle Bud on
a roof or her stepmother in the Locked Ward or her poor personal Daddy again is sentimental and banal. The idea of what she's
about in here contains all other ideas and makes them banal. Her glass of juice is on the back of the toilet, half-empty. The back of
the toilet is lightly sheened with condensation of unknown origin. These are facts. This room in this apartment is the sum of very
many specific facts and ideas. There is nothing more to it than that. Deliberately setting about to make her heart explode has
assumed the status of just one of these facts. It was an idea but now is about to become a fact. The closer it comes to becoming
concrete the more abstract it seems. Things get very abstract. The concrete room was the sum of abstract facts. Are facts abstract,
or are they just abstract representations of concrete things? Molly Notkin's middle name is Cantrell. Joelle puts two more matches
together and prepares to strike them, breathing rapidly in and out like a diver preparing for a long descent.
'I say is someone in there?' The voice is the young post-New Formalist from Pittsburgh who affects Continental and wears an
ascot that won't stay tight, with that hesitant knocking of when you know perfectly well someone's in there, the oathroom door
composed of thirty-six that's three times a lengthwise twelve recessed two-bevelled squares in a warped rectangle of steamsoftened wood, not quite white, the bottom outside corner right here raw wood and mangled from hitting the cabinets' bottom
drawer's wicked metal knob, through the door and offset 'Red' and glowering actors and calendar and very crowded scene and
pubic spiral of pale blue smoke from the elephant-colored rubble of ash and little blackened chunks in the foil funnel's cone, the
smoke's baby-blanket blue that's sent her sliding down along the wall past knotted washcloth, towel rack, blood-flower wallpaper
and intricately grimed electrical outlet, the light sharp bitter tint of a heated sky's blue that's left her uprightly fetal with chin on
knees in yet another North American bathroom, deveiled, too pretty for words, maybe the Prettiest Girl Of All Time (Prettiest
G.O.A.T.), knees to chest, slew-footed by the radiant chill of the claw-footed tub's porcelain, Molly's had somebody lacquer the
tub in blue, lacquer, she's holding the bottle, recalling vividly its slogan for the last generation was The Choice of a Nude
Generation, when she was of back-pocket height and prettier by far than any of the peach-colored titans they'd gazed up at, his
hand in her lap her hand in the box and rooting down past candy for the Prize, more fun way too much fun inside her veil on the
counter above her, the stuff in the funnel exhausted though it's still smoking thinly, its graph reaching its highest spiked prick,
peak, the arrow's best descent, so good she can't stand it and reaches out for the cold tub's rim's cold edge to pull herself up as the
white- party-noise reaches, for her, the sort of stereophonic precipice of volume to teeter on just before the speakers blow, people
barely twitching and conversations strettoing against a ghastly old pre-Carter thing saying 'We've Only Just Begun,' Joelle's limbs
have been removed to a distance where their acknowledgment of her commands seems like magic, both clogs simply gone, nowhere in sight, and socks oddly wet, pulls her face up to face the unclean medicine-cabinet mirror, twin roses of flame still
hanging in the glass's corner, hair of the flame she's eaten now trailing like the legs of wasps through the air of the glass she uses
to locate the de-faced veil and what's inside it, loading up the cone again, the ashes from the last load make the world's best filter:
this is a fact. Breathes in and out like a savvy diver —
'Look here then who's that in there? Is someone in there? Do open up. I'm on one foot then the other out here. I say Notkin
someone's been in here locked in and, well, sounding unwell, amid rather a queer scent.’
— and is knelt vomiting over the lip of the cool blue tub, gouges on the tub's lip revealing sandy white gritty stuff below the
lacquer and porcelain, vomiting muddy juice and blue smoke and dots of mercuric red into the claw-footed trough, and can hear
again and seems to see, against the fire of her closed lids' blood, bladed vessels aloft in the night to monitor flow, searchlit
helicopters, fat fingers of blue light from one sky, searching.
Enfield MA is one of the stranger little facts that make up the idea that is metro Boston, because it is a township composed
almost entirely of medical, corporate, and spiritual facilities. A kind of arm-shape extending north from Commonwealth Avenue
and separating Brighton into Upper and Lower, its elbow nudging East Newton's ribs and its fist sunk into Allston, Enfield's broad
municipal tax-base includes St. Elizabeth's Hospital, Franciscan Children's Hospital, The Universal Bleacher Co., the Provident
Nursing Home, Shuco-Mist Medical Pressure Systems Inc., the Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital Complex, the Svelte Nail
Co., half the metro Boston turbine and generating stations of Sunstrand Power and Light (the part that gets taxed is in incorporated
Allston), corporate headquarters for 'The ATHSCME Family of Air-Displacement Effectuators' (meaning they make really big
fans), the Enfield Tennis Academy, St. John of God Hospital, Hanneman Orthopedic Hospital, the Leisure Time Ice Company, a
Dicalced monastery, the combined St. John's Seminary and offices for the RCC's Boston Archdiocese (partly in Upper Brighton;
neither half taxed), convent headquarters of The Sisters for Africa, the National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation, the Dr. George
Roebling Runyon Memorial Institute for Po-diatric Research, regional shiny-truck, land-barge, and catapult facilities for the 
O.N.A.N.-subsidized Empire Waste Displacement Co. (what the Qué-becois call les trebuchets noirs, spectacular block-long
catapults that make a sound like a giant stamping foot as they fling great twine-bundled waste-vehicles into the subannular regions
of the Great Concavity at a parabolic altitude exceeding 5 km.; the devices' slings are of alloy-belted elastic and their huge cupped
vehicle-receptacles like catcher's mitts from hell, a half dozen or so of the catapults in this like blimp-hangarish thing with a selectively slide-backable roof, taking up a good six square blocks of Enfield's brachiform incursion into the Allston Spur, occasional
school tours tolerated but not encouraged), and so on. W/ the whole flexed Enfield limb sleeved in a perimeter layer of light
residential and mercantile properties. The Enfield Tennis Academy occupies probably now the nicest site in En-field, some ten
years after balding and shaving flat the top of the big abrupt hill that constitutes a kind of raised cyst on the township's elbow, the
better part of 75 hectares of broad lawns and cloverleafing paths and topologically cutting-edge erections, 32 asphalt tennis courts
and sixteen Har-Tru composition tennis courts and extensive underground maintenance and storage and athletic-training facilities
and briers and calliopsis and pines mixed artfully in on the inclines with deciduous trees, the E.T.A. hilltop overlooking on one
side, east, historic Commonwealth Avenue's acclivated migration out of the squalor of Lower Brighton — liquor stores and
Laundromats and bars and palisades of somber and guano-dappled tenement facades, the huge and brooding Brighton Project
high-rises with three-story-high orange I.D.-numerals on the sides, plus liquor stores, and pale men in leather and whole gangs of
pale children in leather on the corners and Greek-owned pizza places with yellow walls and dirty corner markets owned by
Orientals who try like heck to keep their sidewalks clean but can t, even with hoses, plus the quarter-hourly trundle and ding of the
Green Line train's labor up the Ave.'s long rise to Boston College — into the spiky elegance of B.C. and the broad gentrification
of Newton out to the west, where the haze-haloed Boston sun drops behind the last node in the four-km. sine wave that is
collectively called the historic April Marathon's 'Heartbreak Hill,' the sun always setting fifteen minutes to the nanosecond after
deLint turns on the courts' high-tower lights. To I think it must be the southwest, E.T.A. overlooks the steely gray tangle of
Sunstrand's transformers and high-voltage grids and coaxial chokers strung with beads of ceramic insulators, with not one
Sunstrand smokestack anywhere in sight but a monstrous mega-ohm insulator-cluster at the terminus of a string of signs trailing in
from the northeast, each sign talking with many 0's about how many annular-generated amps are waiting underground for anyone
who digs or in any way dicks around, with hair-raising nonverbal stick-figure symbols of somebody with a shovel going up like a
Kleenex in the fireplace. There are smokestacks in the visual background slightly south of Sunstrand, though, from the E.W.D.
hangars, each stack with a monstrous ATHSCME 2100-Series A.D.E. (fan) bolted behind it and blowing due north with an
insistent high-pitched fury that is somehow soothing, aurally, at E.T.A.'s distance and height. From both the north and northeast
tree-lines E.T.A. looks down its hill's steepest, best-planted decline into the complexly decaying grounds of Enfield Marine.
5 NOVEMBER —YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
The transparent phone sounded from somewhere under the hill of bedding8282 as Hal was on the edge of the bed with one leg
up and his chin on its knee, clipping his nails into a wastebasket that sat several meters away in the middle of the room. It took
four rings to find the receiver in the bedding and pull the antenna out.
'Mmmyellow.’
'Mr. Incredenza, this is the Enfield Raw Sewage Commission, and quite frankly we've had enough shit out of you.’
'Hello Orin.’
'How hangs it, kid.’
'God, please no, please O., not more Separatism questions.’
'Relax. Never crossed my mind. Social call. Shoot the breeze.’
'Interesting you should call just now. Because I'm clipping my toenails into a wastebasket several meters away.’
'Jesus, you know how I hate the sound of nail clippers.’
'Except I'm shooting seventy-plus percent. The little fragments of clipping. It's uncanny. I keep wanting to go out in the hall
and get somebody in here to see it. But I don't want to break the spell.’
'The fragile magic-spell feel of those intervals where it feels you just can't miss.’
'It's definitely one of those can't-miss intervals. It's just like that magical feeling on those rare days out there playing. Playing
out of your head, de-Lint calls it. Loach calls it The Zone. Being in The Zone. Those days when you feel perfectly calibrated.’
'Coordinated as God.’
'Some groove in the shape of the air of the day guides everything down and in.’
'When you feel like you couldn't miss if you tried to.’
'I'm so far away the wastebasket's mouth looks more like a slot than a circle. And yet in they go, ka-chíng ka-ching. There
went another one. Even the misses are near-misses, caroms off the rim.’
'I'm sitting here with the leg in a whirlpool in the bathroom of a Norwegian deep-tissue therapist's ranch-style house 1100
meters up in the Superstition mountains. Mesa-Scottsdale in flames far below. The bathroom's redwood-panelled and overlooks a
precipice. The sunlight's the color of the bronze.’
'But you never know when the magic will descend on you. You never know when the grooves will open up. And once the
magic descends you don't want to change even the smallest detail. You don't know what concordance of factors and variables
yields that calibrated can't-miss feeling, and you don't want to soil the magic by trying to figure it out, but you don't want to
change your grip, your stick, your side of the court, your angle of incidence to the sun. Your heart's in your throat every time you
change sides of the court.’
'You start to get like a superstitious native. What's the word propitiate the divine spell.’
T suddenly understand the gesundheit-impulse, the salt over the shoulder and apotropaic barn-signs. I'm actually frightened to
switch feet right now. I'm clipping off the tiniest aerodynamically viable clippings possible, to prolong the time on this foot, in
case the magic's a function of the foot. This isn't even the good foot.’
'These can't-miss intervals make superstitious natives out of us all, Hal-lie. The professional football player's maybe the worst
superstitious native of all the sports. That's why all the high-tech padding and garish Lycra and complex play-terminology. The
like self-reassuring display of high-tech. Because the bug-eyed native's lurking just under the surface, we know. The bug-eyed
spear-rattling grass-skirted primitive, feeding virgins to Pop-ogatapec and afraid of planes.’
'The new Discursive O.E.D. says the Ahts of Vancouver used to cut virgins' throats and pour the blood very carefully into the
orifices of the embalmed bodies of their ancestors.’
'I can hear those clippers. Quit with the clippers a second.’
'The phone's no longer wedged under my jaw. I can even do it one-handed, holding the phone in one hand. But it's still the
same foot.’
'You don't know from true bug-eyed athletic superstition till you hit the pro ranks, Hallie. When you hit the Show is when
you'll understand primitive. Winning streaks bring the native bubbling up to the surface. Jock straps unwashed game after game
until they stand up by themselves in the overhead luggage compartments of planes. Bizarrely ritualized dressing, eating, peeing.’
'Micturation.’
'Picture a 200-kilo interior lineman insisting on sitting down to pee. Don't even ask what wives and girlfriends have to suffer
during a can't-miss winning streak.’
'I don't want to hear sexual stuff.’
'Then there are the players who write down exactly what they say to everybody before a game, so if it's a magical can't-misstype game they can say exactly the same things to the same people in the same exact order before the next game.’
'Apparently the Ahts tried to fill up ancestors' bodies completely with virgin-blood to preserve the privacy of their own mental
states. The apposite Aht dictum here being quote "The sated ghost cannot see secret things." The Discursive O.E.D. postulates that
this is one of the earlier on-record prophylactics against schizophrenia.' 'Hey Hallie?’
'After a burial, rural Papineau-region Québecers purportedly drill a small hole down from ground level all the way down
through the lid of the coffin, to let out the soul, if it wants out.’
'Hey Hallie? I think I'm being followed.’
'This is the big moment. I've totally exhausted the left foot finally and am switching to the right foot. This'll be the real test of
the fragility of the spell.' 'I said I think I'm being followed.' 'Some men are born to lead, O.' 'I'm serious. And here's the weird
part.’
'Here's the part that explains why you're sharing this with your estranged little brother instead of with anybody whose
credulity you'd actually value.’
'The weird part is I think I'm being followed by ... by handicapped people.’
'Two for three on the right foot, with one carom. Jury's still out.' 'Quit with the clipping a second. I'm not kidding. Take the
other day. I strike up a conversation with a certain Subject in line in the post office. I notice a guy in a wheelchair behind us. No
big deal. Are you listening?' 'What are you doing going to the post office? You hate snail-mail. And you quit mailing the Moms
the pseudo-form-replies two years ago, Mario says.’
'But so the conversation goes well and hits it off, Seduction Strategies 12 and 16 are employed, which I'll tell you about
sometime at length. The point is the Subject and I walk out together hitting it off and there's another guy in a wheelchair whittling
in the shade of a shop-awning just down the street. OK. Still not necessarily any kind of deal. But now the Subject and I drive to
her trailer park —’
'Phoenix has trailer parks? Not those silverish metal trailers.’
'So but we get out of the car, and across the park's lot here's yet another wheelchaired guy, trying to maneuver in the gravel
and not making a very good job of it.’
'Doesn't Arizona have more than its share of the old and infirm?’
'But none of these handicapped guys were old. And they were all awfully burly for guys in wheelchairs. And three in an
hour's kind of stretching it, I was thinking.’
'I always picture you having your little trysts in more domestic suburban settings. Or else tall motels with exotically shaped
beds. Do women in metal trailers even have small children?’
'This one had very sweet little twin girls who played very quietly with blocks without supervision the whole time.’
'Cockle-warming, O.’
'And but so the point is I decamp the trailer like x number of hours later, and the guy's still there, mired in gravel. And in the
distance I could swear he's got on some kind of domino-mask. And now everywhere I go the last several days there seems to be a
statistically improbable number of wheel-chaired figures around, lurking, somehow just a little too nonchalantly.’
'Very shy fans, possibly? Some club of leg-dysfunctional people all obsessed in that shy-fan-like way with one of the first
North American sports figures people think of in connection with the word leg?’
'It's probably my imagination. A dead bird fell in my Jacuzzi.’
'But now let me ask you a couple questions.’
'This all wasn't even why I originally called.’
'But you brought up trailer parks and trailers. I need to confirm some suspicions — two points, right in there, ka-ching. Never
having been in a trailer, and even the Discursive O.E.D. having pretty much of a lacuna where trailer-park trailers are concerned.’
'And this is the one supposedly nonbats family-member I call. This is who I reach out to.’
'It'd be whom, I think. But this trailer. This lady you met's trailer. Confirm or deny the following. Its carpet was wall-to-wall
and extremely thin, a kind of burnt yellow or orange.’
'Yes.’
'The living-room or like den area contained some or all of the following: a black velvet painting featuring an animal; a
videophonic diorama on some sort of knickknack shelf; a needlepoint sampler with some kind of frothy biblical saw on it; at least
one piece of chintz furniture with protective doilies on the arms; a Smoke-B-Gone air-filtration ashtray; the last couple years'
Reader's Digests neatly displayed in their own special inclined magazine rack.’
'Check on velvet painting of leopard, sampler sofa with doilies, ashtray. No Reader's Digests. This isn't especially funny,
Hallie. The Moms comes out in you in these odd little ways sometimes.’ 
'Last one. The trailer-person's name. Jean. May. Nora. Vera. Nora-Jean or Vera-May.’
'...’
'That was my question.’
'I guess I'll have to get back to you on that.’
'Boy, you really put the small r in romance, don't you.’
'But why I'm calling.’
'It's not clear whether the fragile can't-miss magic's still in force on the right foot. I'm seven for nine, but there's a whole
different feel of somehow deliberately trying to get them in.’
'Hallie, I've got somebody from Moment fucking magazine out here doing a quote soft profile.’
'You've got what?’
'A human-interest thing. On me as a human. Moment doesn't do hard sports, this lady says. They're more people-oriented,
human-interest. It's for something called quote People Right Now, a section.’
'Moment's a supermarket-checkout-lane-display magazine. It's in there with the rodneys and gum. Lateral Alice Moore reads
it. It's all over C.T.'s waiting room. They did a thing on the little blind Illinois kid Thorp thought so well of.’
'Hal.’
T think Lateral Alice spends a lot of time in grocery-store checkout lanes, which if you think about it are almost the ideal
environment for her.’
'Hal.’
'. .. Being that she can just locomote sideways right on through.’
'Hallie, this physically imposing Moment girl's asking all these soft-profilesque family-background questions.’
'She wants to know about Himself?’
'Everybody. You, the Mad Stork, the Moms. It's gradually emerging it's going to be some sort of memorial to the Stork as
patriarch, everybody's talents and accomplishments profiled as some sort of refracted tribute to el Storko's careers.’
'He always did cast a long shadow, you said.’
'Of course and my first thought is to invite her to go piss up a string. But Moment's been in touch with the team. The front
office's indicated a soft profile would be positive for the team. Cardinal Stadium isn't exactly groaning under the weight of all the
fannies, winning streak or no. I've also thought of referring her to Bain, let Bain rant at her or send her letters just trying to unparse
for quotes'd take her a month.’
'Her as in female. Not your typical Orin-type subject. A hardened, fast-lane, gum-cracking, maybe even small-childless
journalist-type female, in from New Youok on the red-eye. Plus you said imposing.’
'Not all that tough or hard, but physically imposing. Large but not un-erotic. A girl and a half in all directions.’
'A girl to dominate the space of any trailer she lives in.’
'Enough with the trailerisms.’
'The strained quality is me trying to speak and pick caromed toenail-parings up off the floor at the same time.’
'This girl's immune to most of your standard conversational distractions.’
'You're afraid you're losing your touch. An immune girl and a half.’
'I said distraction not seduction.’
'You kind of wisely avoid any female who you suspect could beat you up if things came down to that.’
'She's more imposing than like most of our starting backfield. But weirdly sexy. The linemen are gaga. The tackles keep
making all these cracks about does she maybe want to see their hard profile.’
'Let's hope her prose is better than whoever did that human-interest thing on the blind kid last spring. Have you bounced this
new fear of the handicapped off her?’
'Listen. You of all people should know I have zero intent of forthrightly answering any stained-family-linen-type questions
from anybody, much less somebody who takes shorthand. Physical charms or no.’
'You and tennis, you and the Saints, Himself and tennis, the Moms and Quebec and Royal Victoria, the Moms and
immigration, Himself and annu-lation, Himself and Lyle, Himself and distilled spirits, Himself killing himself, you and Joelle,
Himself and Joelle, the Moms and C.T., you v. the Moms, E.T.A., nonexistent films, et cetera.’
'But you can see how it's all going to get me thinking. How to avoid being forthright about the Stork material unless I know
what the really forthright answers would be.’
'Everybody said you'd regret not coming to the funeral. But I don't think this is what they meant.’
'For example the Stork took himself down before C.T. moved in upstairs at HmH? or after?’
'This is you asking me?’
'Don't make this appalling for me, Hal.’
'I wouldn't dream of even trying.’
'...’
'Immediately before. Two, three days before. C.T. had had what's now deLint's room, next to Schtitt's, in Comm.-Ad.' 'And
Dad knew they were .. . ?' 'Very close? I don't know, O.' 'You don't know?’
'Mario might know. Like to chew the fat with Booboo on this, O.?' 'Don't make this like this Hallie.’
'And Dad . . . the Mad Stork put his head in the oven?’
'The microwave, O. The rotisserie microwave over next to the fridge, on the freezer side, on the counter, under the cabinet
with the plates and bowls to the left of the fridge as you face the fridge.’
'A microwave oven.’
'That is a Rog and Wile, O.’
'Nobody ever said microwave.’
'I think it came out generally at the funeral.’
'I keep getting your point, if you're wondering.’ 
'...’
'So where was he found, then?’
'20 for 28 is what, 65%?’
'It's not like this is all that —’
'The microwave was in the kitchen I already explained, O.’
'All right.’
'All right.’
'So OK now, who would you say speaks most about the guy, keeps his memory alive, verbally, the most now: you, C.T., or
the Moms?’
T think it's a three-way tie.’
'So it's never mentioned. Nobody talks about him. It's taboo.’
'But you seem to be forgetting somebody.’
'Mario talks about him. About it.’
'Sometimes.’
'To what and/or who all this talking?’
'To me, for one, I suppose.’
'And so you do talk about it, but only to him, and only after he initiates it.’
'Orin I lied. I haven't even started on the right foot yet. I've been too afraid to change my angle of approach to the nails. The
right foot's a whole different angle of approach. I'm afraid the magic is left-foot-dependent. I'm like your superstitious lineman.
Talking about it's broken the spell. Now I'm self-conscious and afraid. I've been sitting here on the edge of the bed with my right
knee up under my chin, poised, studying the foot, frozen with aboriginal terror. And lying about it to my own brother.’
'Can I ask you who it was who found him? His — who found him at the oven?’
'Found by one Harold James Incandenza, thirteen going on really old.’
'You were who found him? Not the Moms?’
'Listen, may I ask why this sudden interest after four years 216 days, and with two years of that not even once even calling?’
'I've already said I don't feel safe not answering Helen's questions if I haven't got a handle on what I'm not saying.’
'Helen. So you did.’
'Is why.’
'I'm still frozen, by the way. The self-consciousness that kills the magic is getting worse and worse. This is why Pemulis and
Troeltsch always seem to let a lead slip away. The standard term is Tightening Up. The clippers are poised, blades on either side
of the nail. I just can't achieve the unconsciousness to actually clip. Maybe it was cleaning up the few that missed. Suddenly the
wastebasket seems small and far away. I've lost the magic by talking about it instead of just giving in to it. Launching the nail out
toward the wastebasket now seems like an exercise in telemachry.’
'You mean telemetry?’
'How embarrassing. When the skills go they go.’
'Listen
'You know, why don't you go ahead and ask me whatever standard ghoulish questions you want not to answer. This may be
your only shot. Usually I seem not to talk about it.’
'Was she there? The P.G.O.A.T.?’
'Joelle hadn't been around the grounds since you two split up. You knew about that. Himself met her at the brownstone,
shooting. I'm sure you know way more about whatever it was they were trying to make. Joelle and Himself. Himself went
underground too. C.T. was already doing most of the day-to-day administration. Himself was down in that little post-production
closet off the lab for like a solid month. Mario'd bring food and ... essentials down. Sometimes he'd eat with Lyle. I don't think he
came up to ground level for at least a month, except for just one trip out to Belmont to McLean's for a two-day purge and detox.
This was about a week after he came back. He'd flown off somewhere for three days, for what the impression I get was workrelated business. Film-related. If Lyle didn't go with him Lyle went somewhere, because he wasn't in the weight room. I know
Mario didn't go with him and didn't know what was up. Mario doesn't lie. It was unclear whether he'd finished whatever he was
editing. Himself I mean. He stopped living on April First, if you weren't sure, was the day. I can tell you on April First he wasn't
back by the time P.M. matches started, because I'd been around the lab door right after lunch and he wasn't back.’
'He went in for another detox you say. In what, March?’
'The Moms herself emerged and risked exterior transit and took him herself, so I gather it was urgent.’
'He quit drinking in January, Hal. It was something Joelle was real specific about. She called even after we'd agreed not to call
and told me about it even after I said I didn't want to hear about him if she was going to still be in his things. She said he hadn't
had a drop in weeks. It was her condition for letting him put her in what he was doing. She said he said he'd do anything.’
'Well, I don't know what to tell you. By this time it was hard to tell whether he'd been ingesting anything or not. Apparently at
a certain point it stops making a difference.’
'Did he have film-related things with him when he flew somewhere? A film case? Equipment?’
'O., I didn't see him leave and didn't see him come back. He wasn't around by match-time, I know. Freer beat me badly and
fast. It was 4 and 1, 4 and 2, something, and we were the first ones done. I came around HmH to do an emergency load of laundry
before dinner. This was around 1630. I came over and came in and noticed something right away.’
'And found him.’
'And went to get the Moms, then changed my mind and went to get C.T., then changed my mind and went to get Lyle, but the
first authority figure I ran into was Schtitt. Who was irreproachably brisk and efficient and sensible about everything and turned
out to be just the authority figure to go get in the first place.’
'I didn't even think a microwave oven would go on unless the door was closed. What with microwaves oscillating all over,
inside. I thought there was like a refrigerator-light or Read-Only-tab-like device.’ 
'You seem to be forgetting the technical ingenuity of the person we're talking about.’
'And you were totally shocked and traumatized. He was asphyxuated, irradiated, and/or burnt.’
'As we later reconstructed the scene, he'd used a wide-bit drill and small hacksaw to make a head-sized hole in the oven door,
then when he'd gotten his head in he'd carefully packed the extra space around his neck with wadded-up aluminum foil.’
'Sounds kind of ad hoc and jerry-rigged and haphazard.’
'Everybody's a critic. This wasn't an aesthetic endeavor.’
'...’
'And there was a large and half-full bottle of Wild Turkey found on the counter not far away, with a large red decorative
giftwrappish bow on the neck.’
'On the bottle's neck, you mean.’
'That is a Rog.’
'As in he hadn't been sober after all.’
'That would seem to follow, O.’
'And he left no note or living-will-type video or communique of any kind.’
'O, I know you know very well he didn't. You're now asking me stuff I know you know, besides criticizing him and making
sobriety-claims when you weren't anywhere near the scene or the funeral. Are we just about through here? I've got a whole longnailed foot waiting for me here.’
'As you reconstructed the scene, you just said.’
'Also it just hit me I've got a library book I was supposed to return. I'd forgotten all about it. Kertwang.’
' "Reconstructed the scene" as in the scene when you found him was somehow ... deconstructed?’
'You of all people, O. You know that was the one word he hated more than —’
'So burned, then. Just say it. He was really really badly burned.’
'...’
'No, wait. Asphyxuated. The packed foil was to preserve the vacuum in a space that got automatically evacuated as soon as
the magnitron started oscillating and generating the microwaves.’
'Magnitron? What do you know about magnitrons and oscillators? Aren't you the brother of mine who has to be reminded
which way to turn the ignition key in a car?’
'Brief liaison with this one Subject who used to model at kitchen-appliance trade shows.’
'...’
'It was kind of a brutal brand of modelling. She'd stand there on a huge rotating Lazy Susan in a one-piece with one thigh
turned in and a hand out palm-up, indicating the appliance next to her. Stood there smiling and spinning day after day. She'd
stagger around half the evening trying to get her balance back.’
'Did this subject by any chance explain to you how microwaves actually cook things?’
'...’
'Or have you for example, say, ever like baked a potato in a microwave oven? Did you know you have to cut the potato open
before you turn the oven on? Do you know why that is?’
'Jesus.’
'The B.P.D.8383 field pathologist said the build-up of internal pressures would have been almost instantaneous and equivalent
in kg.s.cm. to over two sticks of TNT.’
'Jesus Christ, Hallie.’
'Hence the need to reconstruct the scene.’
'Jesus.’
'Don't feel bad. There's no guarantee anybody would have told you even if you'd popped in for, say, the memorial service. I
for one wasn't exactly a jabberjaw at the time. I seemed to have been evincing shock and trauma throughout the whole funeral
period. What I mostly recall is a great deal of quiet talk about my psychic well-being. It got so I kind of enjoyed popping in and
out of rooms just to enjoy the quiet conversations stopping in mid-clause.’
'You must have been traumatized beyond fucking belief.’
'Your concern is much appreciated, believe me.’
'...’
'Trauma seems to have been the consensus. It turns out Rusk and the Moms had begun interviewing top-flight trauma- and
grief-counselors for me within hours after it happened. I was shunted directly into concentrated grief- and trauma-therapy. Four
days a week for over a month, right in the April-May gearing-up-for-summer-tour period. I lost two spots on the 14's ladder just
because of all the P.M. matches I missed. I missed the Hard Court Qualies and would have missed Indianapolis if... if I hadn't
finally figured out the grief- and trauma-therapy process.’
'But it helped. Ultimately. The grief-therapy.’
'The therapy ended up taking place in that Professional Building right up Comm. Ave. past the Sunstrand Plaza by Lake
Street, the one with bricks the color of Thousand Island dressing we all run by four days a week. Who was to know one of the
continent's top grief-men was right up the street.’
'The Moms didn't want the process going on too far from the old web, if need be, I'm sure.’
'This grief-counselor insisted I call him by his first name, which I forget. A large red meaty character with eyebrows at a
demonic-looking synclinal angle and very small nubbly gray teeth. And a mustache. He always had the remains of a sneeze in his
mustache. I got to know that mustache very well. His face had that same blood-pressure flush C.T.'s face gets. And let's not even
go into the man's hands.’
'The Moms had Rusk shunt you to a top grief-pro so she wouldn't have to feel guilty about practically sawing the hole in the
microwave door herself. Among other little guilt and antiguilt operations. She always did believe Himself was doing more with
Joelle than work. Poor old Himself never had eyes for anybody but the Moms.’ 
'This was one tough hombré, O., this grief-counselor. He made a Rusk-session look like a day on the Adriatic. He wouldn't let
up: "How did it feel, how does it feel, how do you feel when I ask how it feels."
'Rusk always reminded me of a freshman fumbling with some Subject's bra, the way she'd sort of tug and fumble at your
head.’
'The man was unsatisfiable and scary. Those eyebrows, that ham-rind face, bland little eyes. He never once turned his face
away or looked away at anything but right at me. It was the most brutal six weeks of full-bore professional conversation anybody
could imagine.’
'With fucking C.T. already moving his collection of platform shoes and unconvincing hairpieces and StairMaster in upstairs at
HmH already.’
'The whole thing was nightmarish. I just could not figure out what the guy wanted. I went down and chewed through the
Copley Square library's grief section. Not disk. The actual books. I read Kübler-Ross, Hinton. I slogged through Kastenbaum and
Kastenbaum. I read things like Elizabeth Harper Neeld's Seven Choices: Taking the Steps to New Life After Losing Someone You
Love,8484 which was 352 pages of sheer goo. I went in and presented with textbook-perfect symptoms of denial, bargaining,
anger, still more denial, depression. I listed my seven textbook choices and vacillated plausibly between and among them. I
provided etymological data on the word acceptance all the way back to Wyclif and 14th-century langue-d'oc French. The grieftherapist was having none of it. It was like one of those final exams in nightmares where you prepare immaculately and then you
get there and all the exam questions are in Hindi. I even tried telling him Himself was miserable and pancreatitic and out of his
tree half the time by then anyway, that he and the Moms were basically estranged, that even work and Wild Turkey weren't
helping anymore, that he was despondent about something he was editing that turned out so bad he didn't want it released. That
the . . . that what happened was probably kind of a mercy, in the end.’
'Himself didn't suffer, then. In the microwave.’
'The B.P.D. field pathologist who drew the chalk lines around Himself's shoes on the floor said maybe ten seconds tops. He
said the pressure buildup would have been almost instantaneous. Then he gestured at the kitchen walls. Then he threw up. The
field pathologist.’
'Jesus Christ, Hallie.’
'But the grief-therapist was having none of it, the at-least-his-suffering's-over angle that Kastenbaum and Kastenbaum said is
basically a neon-bright sign of real acceptance. This grief-therapist hung on like a Gila monster. I even tried telling him I really
didn't feel anything.’
'Which was a fiction.’
'Of course it was a fiction. What could I do? I was panic-stricken. This guy was a nightmare. His face just hung there over his
desk like a hypertensive moon, never turning away. With this glistening mucoidal dew in his mustache. And don't even ask me
about his hands. He was my worst nightmare. Talk about self-consciousness and fear. Here was a top-rank authority figure and I
was failing to supply what he wanted. He made it manifestly clear I wasn't delivering the goods. I'd never failed to deliver the
goods before.’
'You were our designated deliverer, Hallie, no question about it.’
'And here but here was this authority figure with top credentials in frames over every square cm. of his walls who sat there
and refused even to define what the goods here would be. Say what you will about Schtitt and deLint: they let you know what they
want in no uncertain terms. Flottman, Chawaf, Prickett, Nwangi, Fentress, Lingley, Pettijohn, Ogilvie, Leith, even the Moms in
her way: they tell you on the very first day of class what they want from you. But this son of a bee right here: no dice.’
'You must have been in shock the whole time, too.’
'O., it got worse and worse. I dropped weight. I couldn't sleep. This was when the nightmares started. I kept dreaming of a
face in the floor. I lost to Freer again, then to Coyle. I went three sets with Troeltsch. I got B's on two different quizzes. I couldn't
concentrate on anything else. I'd become obsessed with the fear that I was somehow going to flunk grief-therapy. That this
professional was going to tell Rusk and Schtitt and C.T. and the Moms that I couldn't deliver the goods.
'I'm sorry I couldn't be there.’
'The odd thing was that the more obsessed I got, the worse I played and slept, the happier everybody got. The grief-therapist
complimented me on how haggard I was looking. Rusk told deLint the grief-therapist'd told the Moms that it was starting to work,
that I was starting to grieve, but that it was a long process.’
'Long and costly.’
'Roger. I began to despair. I began to foresee somehow getting left back in grief-therapy, never delivering the goods and it
never ending. Having these Kafkaesque interfaces with this man day after day, week after week. It was now May. The Continental
Clays I'd gotten all the way to the fourth round of the year before were coming up, and it became quietly clear that everybody felt
I was at a crucial stage in the long costly grieving process and I wasn't going to get to go with the contingent to Indianapolis
unless I could figure out some last-ditch way to deliver the emotional goods to this guy. I was totally desperate, a wreck.’
'So you schlepped on down to the weight room. You and the forehead paid a visit to good old Lyle.’
'Lyle turned out to be the key. He was down there reading Leaves of Grass. He was going through a Whitman period, part of
grieving for Himself, he said. I'd never gone to Lyle before in any kind of supplicatory capacity, but he said he took one griefstricken look at me flailing away down there working up a gourmet sweat and said he felt so moved by my additional suffering on
top of having had to be the first of Himself's loved ones to experience the loss of Himself that he'd bend every cerebral effort. I assumed the position and let him at the old forehead and explained what had been happening and that if I couldn't figure out some
way to satisfy this grief-pro I was going to end up in a soft quiet room somewhere. Lyle's key insight was that I'd been
approaching the issue from the wrong side. I'd gone to the library and acted like a student of grief. What I needed to chew through
was the section for grief-professionals themselves. I needed to prepare from the grief-pro's own perspective. How could I know
what a professional wanted unless I knew what he was professionally required to want, etc. It was simple, he said. I needed to
empathize with the grief-therapist, Lyle said, if I wanted to spread a broader breast than his own. It was such a simple obversion of
my normal goods-delivery-preparation system that it hadn't once occurred to me, Lyle explained.’ 
'Lyle said all that? That doesn't sound like Lyle.’
'But a sort of soft light broke inside me for the first time in weeks. I called a cab, still in my towel. I jumped in the cab before
it had even stopped at the gate. I actually said, "The nearest library with a cutting-edge professional grief- and trauma-therapy
section, and step on it." Et cetera et cetera.’
'The Lyle my class knew wasn't a how-to-deliver-the-goods-to-authorities-type figure.’
'By the time I hit the grief-therapist's the next day I was a different man, immaculately prepared, unfazable. Everything I'd
come to dread about the man — the eyebrows, the multicultural music in the waiting room, the implacable stare, the crusty
mustache, the little gray teeth, even the hands — did I mention that this grief-therapist hid his hands under his desk at all times?’
'But you got through it. You grieved to everybody's satisfaction, you're saying.’
'What I did,-1 went in there and presented with anger at the grief-therapist. I accused the grief-therapist of actually inhibiting
my attempt to process my grief, by refusing to validate my absence of feelings. I told him I'd told him the truth already. I used foul
language and slang. I said I didn't give a damn if he was an abundantly credentialed authority figure or not. I called him a
shithead. I asked him what the cock-shitting fuck he wanted from me. My overall demeanor was paroxysmic. I told him I'd told
him that I didn't feel anything, which was the truth. I said it seemed like he wanted me to feel toxically guilty for not feeling
anything. Notice I was subtly inserting certain loaded professional-grief-therapy terms like validate, process as a transitive verb,
and toxic guilt. These were library-derived.’
'The whole difference was this time you were walking on-court oriented, with a sense of where the lines were, Schtitt would
say.’
'The grief-therapist encouraged me to go with my paroxysmic feelings, to name and honor my rage. He got more and more
pleased and excited as I angrily told him I flat-out refused to feel iota-one of guilt of any kind. I said what, I was supposed to have
lost even more quickly to Freer, so I could have come around HmH in time to stop Himself? It wasn't my fault, I said. It was not
my fault I found him, I shouted; I was down to black street-socks, I had legitimate emergency-grade laundry to do. By this time I
was pounding myself on the breastbone with rage as I said that it just by-God was not my fault that —’
That what?’
'That's just what the grief-therapist said. The professional literature had a whole bold-font section on Abrupt Pauses in HighAffect Speech. The grief-therapist was now leaning way forward at the waist. His lips were wet. I was in The Zone,
therapeutically speaking. I felt on top of things for the first time in a long time. I broke eye-contact with him. That I'd been
hungry, I muttered.’
'Come again?’
'That's just what he said, the grief-therapist. I muttered that it was nothing, just that it damn sure wasn't my fault that I had the
reaction I did when I came through the front door of HmH, before I came into the kitchen to get to the basement stairs and found
Himself with his head in what was left of the microwave. When I first came in and was still in the foyer trying to get my shoes off
without putting the dirty laundry-bag down on the white carpet and hopping around and couldn't be expected to have any idea
what had happened. I said nobody can choose or have any control over their first unconscious thoughts or reactions when they
come into a house. I said it wasn't my fault that my first unconscious thought turned out to be —’
'Jesus, kid, what?’
' "That something smelled delicious!" I screamed. The force of my shriek almost sent the grief-therapist over backwards in his
leather chair. A couple credentials fell off the wall. I bent over in my own nonleather chair as if for a crash-landing. I put a hand to
each temple and rocked back in forth in the chair, weeping. It came out between sobs and screams. That it'd been four hours plus
since lunchtime and I'd worked hard and played hard and I was starved. That the saliva had started the minute I came through the
door. That golly something smells delicious was my first reaction!’
'But you forgave yourself.’
'I absolved myself with seven minutes left in the session right there in full approving view of the grief-therapist. He was
ecstatic. By the end I swear his side of the desk was half a meter off the floor, at my grief-therapist-textbook breakdown into
genuine affect and trauma and guilt and textbook earsplit-ting grief, then absolution.’
'Christ on a jet-ski, Hallie.’
'...’
'But you got through it. You really did grieve, and you can tell me what it was like, so I can say something generic but
convincing about loss and grief for Helen for Moment.’
'But I'd omitted that somehow the single most nightmarishly compelling thing about this top grief-therapist was that his hands
were never visible. The dreadfulness of the whole six weeks somehow coalesced around the issue of the guy's hands. His hands
never emerged from underneath his desk. It was as if his arms terminated at the elbow. Besides mustache-material-analysis, I also
spent large blocks of each hour trying to imagine the configurations and activities of those hands under there.’
'Hallie, let me just ask and then I'll never bring it back up again. You implied before that what was especially traumatic was
that Himself's head had popped like an uncut spud.’
'Then on what turned out to be the last day of the therapy, the last day before the A squads were picked for Indianapolis, after
I'd finally delivered the goods and my traumatic grief was professionally pronounced uncovered and countenanced and processed,
when I put on my sweatshirt and got set to take my leave, and came up to the desk and put out my hand in a trembly grateful way
he couldn't possibly have refused, and he stood and brought out the hand and shook my hand, I finally understood.’
'His hands were disfigured or something.’
'His hands were no bigger than a four-year-old girl's. It was surreal. This massive authoritative figure, with a huge red meaty
face and thick walrus mustache and dewlaps and a neck that spilled over the rim of his shirt-collar, and his hands were tiny and
pink and hairless and butt-soft, delicate as shells. The hands were the capper. I barely made it out of the office before it started.’
'The cathartic post-traumatic-like-reexperience hysteria. You reeled out of there.’
'I barely made it to the men's room down the hall. I was laughing so hysterically I was afraid all the periodontists and C.P.A.s
on either side of the men's room would hear. I sat in a stall with my hands over my mouth, stamping my feet and beating my head
against first one side of the stall and then the other in hysterical mirth. If you could have seen those hands.’
'But you got through it all, and you can thumbnail-sketch the overall feeling for me.’
'What I feel is myself gathering my resources for the right foot, finally. That magic feeling's back. I'm not lining up the
vectors for the wastebasket or anything. I'm not even thinking. I'm trusting the feeling. It's like that celluloid moment when Luke
removes his high-tech targeting helmet.’
'What helmet?’
'You know, of course, that human nails are the vestiges of talons and horns. That they're atavistic, like coccyges and hair.
That they develop in-utero long before the cerebral cortex.’
'What's the matter?’
'That at some point in the first trimester we lose our gills but are now still now little more than a bladdery sac of spinal fluid
and a rudimentary tail and hair-follicles and little microchips of vestigial talon and horn.’
Ts this to make me feel bad? Did this fuck you up, me probing for details after all this time? Did it reactivate the grief?’
'Just one more confirmation. The trailer's interior. There was some object or contiguous trio of objects with the following
color scheme: brown, lavender, and either mint-green or jonquil-yellow.’
'I can call back when you're more yourself. The leg's starting to prune a bit from the whirlpool anyway.’
Til be right here. I've got a whole foot to yield to the magic with. I'm not going to alter the smallest particular. I'm just about
ready to bear down on the clippers. It's going to feel right, I know.’
'A throw. Like an afghan throw, on the chintz sofa. The yellow was more fluorescent than jonquil.’
'And the word is asphyxiated. Kick some egg-shaped balls for all of us, O. The next sound you hear will be unpleasant,' Hal
said, holding the phone down right next to the foot, his expression terrifically intense.
6 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
White halogen off the green of the composite surface, the light out on the indoor courts at the Port Washington Tennis
Academy is the color of sour apples. To the spectators at the gallery's glass, the duos of players arrayed and moving down below
have a reptilian tinge to their skin, a kind of seasick-type pallor. This annual meet is mammoth: both academies' A and B teams
for both Boys and Girls, both singles and doubles, in 14 and Unders, 16 and Unders, 18 and Unders. Thirty-six courts stretch out
down away from one end's gallery under a fancy tri-domed system of permanent all-weather Lung.
A jr. tennis team has six people on it, with the highest-ranked playing # 1 singles against the other team's best guy, the nexthighest-ranked playing #2, and on down the line to #6. After the six singles matches there are three doubles, with a team's best two
singles players usually turning around and also playing #l doubles — with occasional exceptions, e.g. the Vaught twins, or the fact
that Schacht and Troeltsch, way down on the B squad in 18's singles, play #2 doubles on E.T.A.'s 18's A team, because they've
been a doubles team since they were incontinent toddlers back in Philly, and they're so experienced and smooth together they can
wipe surfaces with the 18's A team's #3 and #4 singles guys, Coyle and Axford, who prefer to skip doubles altogether. It all tends
to get complicated, and probably not all that interesting — unless you play.
But so a normal meet between two junior teams is the best out of nine matches, whereas this mammoth annual earlyNovember thing between E.T.A. and P.W.T.A. will try to be the best out of 108. A 54-match-all conclusion is extremely unlikely
— odds being 1 in 227 — and has never happened in nine years. The meet's always down on Long Island because P.W.T.A. has
indoor courts out the bazoo. Each year the academy that loses the meet has to get up on tables at the buffet supper afterward and
sing a really silly song. An even more embarrassing transaction is supposed to take place in private between the two schools'
Headmasters, but nobody knows quite what. Last year Enfield lost 57-51 and Charles Tavis didn't say one word on the bus-ride
home and used the lavatory several times.
But last year E.T.A. didn't have John Wayne, and last year H. J. Incan-denza hadn't yet exploded, competitively. John Wayne,
formerly of Mont-cerf, Quebec — an asbestos-mining town ten clicks or so from the infamously rupture-prone Mercier Dam —
formerly the top-ranked junior male in Canada at sixteen as well as #5 overall in the Organization of North American Nations
Tennis Association computerized rankings, was finally successfully recruited by Gerhardt Schtitt and Aubrey deLint last spring
via the argument that two gratis years at an American academy would maybe let Wayne bypass the usual couple seasons of top
college tennis and go pro immediately at nineteen with more than enough competitive tempering. This reasoning was not unsound,
since the top four U.S. tennis academies' tournament schedules closely resemble the A.T.P. tour in terms of numbing travel and
continual stress. John Wayne is currently ranked #3 in the O.N.A.N.T.A.'s Boys' 18's and *2 in the U.S.T.A. (Canada, under
Provincial pressure, has disowned him as an emigrant) and has in this Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment reached the semis
of both the Junior French and Junior U.S. Opens, and has lost to exactly nobody American in seven meets and a dozen major
tournaments. He trails the #l American kid, an Independent8585 down in Florida, Veach, by only a couple U.S.T.A. computer
points, and they haven't yet met in sanctioned play this year, and the kid is well known to be hiding out from Wayne, avoiding
him, staying down in Pompano Beach, allegedly nursing a like four-month groin-pull, sitting on his ranking. He's supposed to
show at the WhataBurger Invitational in AZ in a couple weeks, this Veach, having won the 18's at age seventeen there last year,
but he's got to know Wayne's coming down, and speculation is rife and complex. O.N.A.N.T.A.-wise, there's an Argentine kid that
Mexico's Academia de Vera Cruz has got rat-holed away who's #1 and not about to lose to anybody, having this year taken three
out of four legs of the Junior Grand Slam, the first time anybody's done that since a sepulchral Czech kid named Lendl, who
retired from the Show and suicided well before the advent of Subsidized Time. But so there's Wayne at #l.
And it's been established that Hal Incandenza, last year a respectable but by no means to-write-home-about 43rd nationally
and bouncing between #4 and #5 on the Academy's A team in Boys' 16's singles, has made a kind of quantumish competitive
plateaux-hop such that this year — the one nearly done, Kimberly-Clark Corp.'s Depend Absorbent Products Division soon to
give way to the highest corporate bidder for rights to the New Year — Incandenza, mind you this year just seventeen, is 4th in the
nation and #6 on the O.N.A.N.T.A. computer and playing A-#2 for E.T.A. in Boys' 18's. These competitive explosions happen
sometimes. Nobody at the Academy talks to Hal much about the explosion, sort of the way you avoid a pitcher who's got a no-
hitter going. Hal's delicate and spinny, rather cerebral game hasn't altered, but this year it seems to have grown a beak. No longer
fragile or abstracted-looking on court, he seems now almost to hit the corners without thinking about it. His Unforced-Error stats
look like a decimal-error.
Hal's game involves attrition. He'll probe, pecking, until some angle opens up. Until then he'll probe. He'd rather run his man
ragged, wear him down. Three different opponents this past summer had to go to oxygen during breaks.8686 His serve yanks
across at people as if on a hidden diagonal string. His serve, now, suddenly, after four summers of thousand-a-day serves to no
one at dawn, is suddenly supposed to be one of the best left-handed kick serves the junior circuit has ever seen. Schtitt calls Hal
Incandenza his 'revenant,' now, and sometimes points his pointer at him in an affectionate way from his observation crow's nest in
the transom, during drills.
Most of the singles' A matches are under way. Coyle and his man on 3 are in an endless butterfly-shaped rally. Hal's muscular
but unquick opponent is bent over trying to get his breath while Hal stands there and futzes with his strings. Tall Paul Shaw on 6
bounces the ball eight times before he serves. Never seven or nine.
And John Wayne's without question the best male player to appear at Enfield Academy in several years. He'd been spotted
first by the late Dr. James Incandenza at age six, eleven summers back, when Incandenza was doing an early and coldly
conceptual Super-8 on people named John Wayne who were not the real thespio-historical John Wayne, a film Wayne's not-to-befucked-with papa eventually litigated the kid's segment out of because the film had the word Homo in the title.8787
On 1, with John Wayne up at net, Port Washington's best boy throws up a lob. It's a beauty: the ball soars slowly up, just
skirts the indoor courts' system of beams and lamps, and floats back down gentle as lint: a lovely quad-function of fluorescent
green, seams whirling. John Wayne backpedals and flies back after it. You can tell — if you play seriously — you can tell just by
the way the ball comes off a guy's strings whether the lob is going to land fair. There's surprisingly little thought. Coaches tell
serious players what to do so often it gets automatic. John Wayne's game could be described as having a kind of automatic beauty.
When the lob first went up he'd backpedaled from the net, keeping the ball in sight until it reached the top of its flight and its
curve broke, casting many shadows in the tray of lights hung from the ceiling's insulation; then Wayne turned his back to the ball
and sprinted flat-out for the spot where it will land fair. Would land. He doesn't have to locate the ball again until it's hit the green
court just inside the baseline. By now he's come around the side of the bounced ball's flight, still sprinting. He looks mean in a
kind of distant way. He comes around the side of the bounced ball's second ascent the way you come up around the side of
somebody you're going to hurt, and he has to leave his feet and half-pirouette to get his side to the ball and whip his big right arm
through it, catching it on the rise and slapping it down the line past the Port Washington boy, who's played the percentages and
followed a beauty of a lob up to net. The Port Washington kid applauds with the heel of his hand against his strings in
acknowledgment of a really nice get, even as he looks up at Port Washington's coaching staff in the gallery. The spectators' glass
panel is at ground level, and the players play below it on courts that have been carved out of a kind of pit, dug long ago: some
northeast clubs favor courts below ground, because earth insulates and keeps utility bills daunting instead of prohibitive, once the
Lungs go up. The gallery panel stretches overhead behind Courts 1 through 6, but there's a decided spectatorial clumping at the
part of the gallery that looks out over the Show Courts, Boys' 18's #1 and #2, Wayne and Hal and P.W.T.A.'s two best. Now after
Wayne's balletic winner there's the sad sound of a small crowd behind glass's applause; on the courts the applause is muffled and
compromised by on-court sounds, and sounds like the trapped survivors of something tapping for help at a great depth. The panel
is like an aquarium's glass, thick and clean, and traps noise behind it, and to the gallery it seems that 72 well-muscled children are
arrayed and competing in total silence in the pit. Almost everyone in the gallery is wearing tennis clothes and bright nylon warmups; some even wear wristbands, the tennis equivalent of a football fan's pennant and raccoon coat.
John Wayne's post-pirouette backward inertia has carried him into the heavy black tarpaulin that hangs several meters behind
both sides of the 36 courts on a system of rods and rings not unlike a very ambitious shower-curtain, the tarps hiding from view
the waterstained walls of puffy white-wrapped insulation and creating a narrow passage for players to get to their courts without
crossing open court and interrupting play. Wayne hits the heavy tarp and kind of bounces off, producing a boom that resounds.
The sounds on court in an indoor venue are huge and complex; everything echoes and the echoes then meld. In the gallery, Tavis
and Nwangi bite their knuckles and deLint squashes his nose flat against the glass in anxiety as everyone else politely applauds.
Schtitt calmly taps his pointer against the top of his boot at times of high stress. Wayne isn't hurt, though. Everybody goes into the
tarp sometimes. That's what it's there for. It always sounds worse than it is.
The boom of the tarp sounds bad down below, though. The boom rattles Teddy Schacht, who's kneeling in the little passage
right behind Court 1, holding M. Pemulis's head as Pemulis down on one knee is sick into a tall white plastic spare-ball bucket.
Schacht has to haul Pemulis slightly back as Wayne's outline bulges for a moment into the billowing tarp and threatens to knock
Pemulis over, plus maybe the bucket, which would be a bad scene. Pemulis, deep into the little hell of his own nauseous prematch nerves, is too busy trying to vomit w/o sound to hear the mean sound of Wayne's winner or the boom of him against the
heavy curtain. It's freezing back here in the little passage, up next to insulation and I-beams and away from the infrared heaters
that hang over the courts. The plastic bucket is full of old bald Wilson tennis balls and Pemulis's breakfast. There is of course an
odor. Schacht doesn't mind. He lightly strokes the sides of Pemulis's head as his mother had stroked his own big sick head, back in
Philly.
Placed at eye-level intervals in the tarp are little plastic windows, archer-slit views of each court from the cold backstage
passage. Schacht sees John Wayne walk to the net-post and flip his card as he and his opponent change sides. Even indoors, you
change ends of the court after every odd-numbered game. No one knows why odd rather than even. Each P.W.T.A. court has,
welded to its west net-post, another smaller post with a double set of like flippable cards with big red numerals from 1 to 7; in
umpless competition you're supposed to flip your card appropriately at every change of sides, to help the gallery follow the score
in the set. A lot of junior players neglect to flip their cards. Wayne is always automatic and scrupulous in his accounts. Wayne's
father is an asbestos miner who at forty-three is far and away the seniorest guy on his shift; he now wears triple-thick masks and is
trying to hold on until John Wayne can start making serious $ and take him away from all this. He has not seen his eldest son play
since John Wayne's Qué-becois and Canadian citizenships were revoked last year. Wayne's card is on (5); his opponent has yet to
flip a card. Wayne never even sits down to take the 60 seconds he's allowed on each change of sides. His opponent, in his light-
blue flare-collared shirt with WILSON and P.W.T.A. on the sleeves, says something not unfriendly as Wayne brushes past him by
the post. Wayne doesn't respond one way or the other. He just goes back to the baseline farthest from Schacht's little tarp-window
and bounces a ball up and down in the air with the reticulate face of his stick as the Port Washington boy sits in his little canvas
director's chair and towels the sweat off his arms (neither of which is large) and looks briefly up at the gallery behind the panel.
The thing about Wayne is he's all business. His face on court is blankly rigid, with the hypertonic masking of schizophrenics and
Zen adepts. He tends to look straight ahead at all times. He is about as reserved as they come. His emotions emerge in terms of
velocity. Intelligence as strategic focus. His play, like his manner in general, seems to Schacht less alive than undead. Wayne
tends to eat and study alone. He's sometimes seen with two or three expatriate E.T.A. Nucks, but when they're together they all
seem morose. It's wholly unclear to Schacht how Wayne feels about the U.S. or his citizenship-status. He figures Wayne figures it
doesn't much matter: he is destined for the Show; he will be an all-business entertainer, citizen of the world, everywhere undead,
endorsing juice drinks and liniment ointment.
Pemulis has nothing left and is spasming dryly over the bucket, his covered Dunlop gut-strung sticks and gear tumbled just
past Schacht's in the passage. They are the last guys to get out on court. Schacht is to play #3 singles on the 18's B team, Pemulis
#6-B. They are undeniably tardy getting out there. Their opponents stand out on the baselines of Courts 9 and 12 waiting for them
to come out and warm up, jittery, stretching out the way you do when you've already stretched out, dribbling fresh bright balls
with their black Wilson widebody sticks. The whole Port Washington Tennis Academy student body gets free and mandatory
Wilson sticks under an administrative contract. Nothing personal, but no way would Schacht let an academy tell him what brand
of stick to swing. He himself favors Head Masters,-which is regarded as bizarre and eccentric. The AMF-Head rep brings them
out to him out of some cobwebby warehouse where they're kept since the line was discontinued during the large-head revolution
many years back. Aluminum Head Masters have small, perfectly round heads and a dull blue plastic brace in the V of the throat
and look less like weapons than toys. Coyle and Axford are always kibitzing that they've seen a Head Master for sale at like a flea
market or garage sale someplace and Schacht better get down there quick. Schacht, who's historically tight with Mario and with
Lyle down in the weight room (where Schacht, since the knee and the Crohn's Disease, likes to go even on off-days, to work off
discomfort, and deLint and Loach are always on him about not getting musclebound), has a way of just smiling and holding his
tongue when he's kibitzed.
'Are you okay?’
Pemulis says 'Blarg.' He wipes at his forehead in a gesture of completion and submits to being hauled to his feet and stands
there on his own with his hands on his hips, slightly bent.
Schacht straightens and pulls some wrinkles out of the bandage around the brace on his knee. 'Take maybe another second.
Wayne's already way up.’
Pemulis sniffs unpleasantly. 'How come this happens to me every time? This is not like me.’
'Happens to some people is all.’
'This hunched spurting pale guy is not any me I ever recognize.’
Schacht gathers gear. 'Some people their nerves are in their stomachs. Cisne, Yard-Guard, Lord, you: stomach men.’
'Teddy brother man I'm never once hung-over for a competitive thing. I take elaborate precautions. Not so much as a whippet.
I'm always in bed the night before by 2300 all pink-cheeked and clean.’
As they pass the plastic window behind Court 2 Schacht sees Hal Incan-denza try to pass his serve-and-volley guy with a
baroque sideways slice down the backhand side and miss just wide. Hal's card's already flipped to (4). Schacht gives a little
toodleoo-wave that Hal can't see to acknowledge. Pemulis is in front of him as they go down the cold passage.
'Hal's way up too. Another victory for the forces of peace.’
'Jesus I feel awful,' Pemulis says.
'Things could be worse.’
'Expand on that, will you?’
'This wasn't like that Atlanta stomach-incident. We were enclosed here. No one saw. You saw that glass; to Schtitt and deLint
it's all a silent movie down here. Nobody heard thing one. Our guys'll think we were back here butting heads to get enraged or
something. Or we can tell them I got a cramp. That was a freebie, in terms of stomach-incidents.’
Pemulis is a whole different person before competitive play.
T'm fucking inept.’
Schacht laughs. 'You're one of the eptest people I know. Get off your own back.’
'Never remember getting sick as a kid. Now it's like I make myself sick just from worrying about getting sick.’
'Well then there you go. Just don't think anything thoracic. Pretend you don't have a stomach.’
'I have no stomach,' Pemulis says. His head stays still when he talks, at least, negotiating the passage. He carries four sticks, a
rough white P.W.T.A. locker-room towel, an empty ball-can full of high-chlorine Long Island water, nervously zipping and
unzipping the top stick's cover. Schacht only ever carries three sticks. His don't have covers on them. Except for Pemulis and
Rader and Unwin and a couple others who favor gut strings and really need protection, nobody at Enfield uses racquet-covers; it's
like an antifashion statement. People with covers make a point of telling you they're valid and for gut. A similar point of careful
nonpride is never having their shirts tucked in. Ortho Stice used to drill in cut-off black jeans until Schtitt had Tony Nwangi go
over and scream at him about it. Each academy has its own style or antistyle. The P.W.T.A. people, more or less a de facto
subsidiary of Wilson, have unnecessary light-blue Wilson covers on all their courtside synthetic-strung sticks and big red Ws
stencilled onto their Wilson synth-gut strings. You have to let your company of choice spraypaint their logo on your strings if you
want to be on their Free List for sticks, is the universal junior deal. Schacht's orange Gamma-9 synthetic strings have AMF-Head
Inc.'s weird Taoist paraboloid logo sprayed on. Pemulis isn't on Dunlop's Free List8888 but gets the E.T.A. stringer to put
Dunlop's dot-and-circumflex trademark on all his stick's strings, as a kind of touchingly insecure gesture, in Schacht's opinion.
'I played your guy in Tampa two years ago,' Pemulis says, sidestepping one of the old discolored drill-balls that always litter
passages behind indoor tarps. 'Name escapes.’
'Le-something,' says Schacht. 'Yet another Nuck. One of those names that start with Le.' Mario Incandenza, in a pair of little 
Audern Tallat-Kelpsa's E.T.A. drill-sweats, is lurching noiselessly some ten m. behind them in the passage, his police-lock up and
head uncamera'd; he's framing Schacht's back in a three-cornered box with his thumbs and long fingers, simulating the view
through a lens. Mario's been authorized to travel with the squads to the WhataBurger Invitational for final footage for his short and
upbeat annual documentary — brief testimonials and lighthearted moments and behind-the-scenes shots and emotional moments
on court, etc. — that every year gets distributed to E.T.A. alumni and patrons and guests at the pre-Thanksgiving fundraising
exhibition and formal fete. Mario is wondering how you could get enough light back here in a tarp-tunnel to film a tense cold prematch gladiatorial march behind an indoor tarp, carrying tennis racquets in your arms like an obscene bouquet, without sacrificing
the dim and diffuse and kind of gladiatorially doomed quality figures in the dim passage have. After Pemulis has mysteriously
won, he'll tell Mario maybe a Marino 350 with a diffusion-filter on some kind of overhead cable you could winch along behind
the figures at about twice the focal length, or else use fast film and station the Marino at the tunnel's very start and let the figures'
backs gradually recede into a kind of doomed mist of low exposure.
'I remember your guy as one big forehand. Nothing but slice off the back. His VAPS never varies. If you kick the serve over
to the backhand he'll slice it short. You can come in behind it at like will.’
'Worry about your own guy,' Schacht says.
'Your guy's got zero imagination.’
'And you've got an empty expanse where your stomach ought to be, remember.’
'I am a man with no stomach.’
They emerge through flaps in the tarp with hands upraised in slight apology to their opponents, walk out onto the warmer
courts, the slow green eraserish footing of indoor composite. Their ears dilate into all the sounds in the larger space. Gasps and
thwaps and pocks and sneakers' squeaks. Pemulis's court is almost down in female territory. Courts 13 to 24 are Girls' 18's A and
B, all bobbing ponytails and two-handed backhands and high-pitched grunts that if girls could only hear what their own grunts
sounded like they'd cut it out. Pemulis can't tell whether the very muffled applause way down up behind the gallery-panel is
sardonic applause at his finally appearing after several minutes of vomiting or is sincerely for K. D. Coyle on Court 3, who's just
smashed a sucker-lob so hard it's bounced up and racked 3's tray of hanging lights. Except for some rubber in his legs Pemulis
feels stomachless and tentatively OK. This match is an all-out must-win for him in terms of the WhataBurger.
The infra-lit courts are warm and soft; the heaters bolted into both walls above the tarp's upper hem are the deep warm red of
little square suns.
The Port Washington players all wear matching socks and shorts and tucked-in shirts. They look sharp but effete, a
mannequinish aspect to them. Most of the higher-ranked E.T.A. students are free to sign on with different companies for no fees
but free gear. Coyle is Prince and Reebok, as is Trevor Axford. John Wayne is Dunlop and Adidas. Schacht is Head Master sticks
but his own clothes and knee-supports. Ortho Stice is Wilson and all-black Fila. Keith Freer is Fox sticks and both Adidas and
Reebok until one of the two companies' NNE reps catches on. Troeltsch is Spalding and damn lucky to get that. Hal Incandenza is
Dunlop and lightweight Nike hightops and an Air Stirrup brace for the dicky ankle. Shaw is Kennex sticks and clothes from
Tachani's Big St Tall line. Pemulis's entrepreneurial vim has earned him complete freedom of choice and expense, though he's
barred by deLint and Nwangi from shirts that mention the Sinn Fein or that extol Allston MA in any way, in competition.
Before going back to the baseline and warming up groundstrokes Schacht likes to take a little time courtside futzing around,
hitting his heads' frames against strings and listening for the pitch of best tension, arranging his towel on the back of his chair,
making sure his cards aren't still flipped from some previous match, etc., and then he prefers to sort of snuffle around his baseline
for a bit, checking for dustbunnies of ball-fuzz and little divots or ridges from cold-weather heave, adjusting the brace on his
ruined knee, putting his thick arms out cruciform and pulling them way back to stretch out the old pecs and cuffs. His opponent
waits patiently, twirling his poly-butylene stick; and when they finally start to hit around, the guy's expression is pleasant. Schacht
always prefers a pleasant match, one way or the other. He really doesn't care all that much whether he wins anymore, since first
the Crohn's and then the knee at sixteen. He'd probably now describe his desire to win as a preference, nothing more. What's
singular is that his tennis seems to have improved slightly in the two years since he stopped really caring. It's like his hard flat
game stopped having any purpose beyond itself and started feeding on itself and got fuller, looser, its edges less jagged, though
everybody else has been improving too, even faster, and Schacht's rank has been steadily declining since sixteen, and the staff has
stopped talking even about a top-college ride. Schtitt's warmed to him, though, since the knee and the loss of any urge beyond the
play itself, and treats Schacht now almost more like a peer than an experimental subject with something at stake. Schacht is
already in his heart committed to a dental career, and he even interns twice a week for a root-specialist over at the National
Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation, in east Enfield, when not touring.
It strikes Schacht as odd that Pemulis makes such a big deal of stopping all substances the day before competitive play but
never connects the neurasthenic stomach to any kind of withdrawal or dependence. He'd never say this to Pemulis unless Pemulis
asked him directly, but Schacht suspects Pemulis is physically 'drine-dependent, Preludin or Tenuate or something. It's not his
business.
Schacht's supposedly French-Canadian guy is as broad as Schacht but shorter, his face dark and with a kind of Eskimoid
structure to it, at eighteen his hairline recessed in the sort of way where you just know the kid's already got hair on his back, and
he warms up with crazy spins, moony top off a western forehand and weird inside-out shit off a one-hand back, his knees dipping
oddly whenever he makes contact and his follow-through full of the dancerly flourishes that characterize a case of nerves. A
nervous spin-artist can be eaten more or less for lunch, if you hit as hard as Schacht does, and what Pemulis said is true: the guy's
backhand is always sliced and lands shallow. Schacht looks over at Pemulis's guy, a grunter with a moody profile and the storky
look of recent puberty. Pemulis is looking oddly sanguine and confident after a couple minutes futzing with the cans of water,
rinsing out the oral cavity and so on. Pemulis is maybe going to win, too, despite himself. Schacht figures he can run in and get
one of the twelve-year-olds he Big Buddies to go back into the passage and empty Pemulis's bucket on the sly before anybody
coming off court sees it. Evidence of nervous incapacity of any kind gets noted and logged, at E.T.A., and Schacht's observed
Pemulis having some kind of vested emotional interest in attending the WhataBurger Inv. over Thanksgiving. He thought Mario's
lurking around in the cold passage scratching his poor big head over technical lighting problems was kind of funny. There will be 
no Lungs or tarps or dim passages at the WhataBurger: the Tucson tournament is outside, and Tucson cruised around 40° C even
in November, and the sun there was a retinal horror-show on overheads and serves.
Though Schacht buys quarterly urine like the rest of them, it seems to Pemulis that Schacht ingests the occasional chemical
that way grownups who sometimes forget to finish their cocktails drink liquor: to make a tense but fundamentally OK interior life
interestingly different but no more, no element of relief; a kind of tourism; and Schacht doesn't even have to worry about
obsessive training like Inc or Stice or get sick so often from the physical stress of constant 'drines like Troeltsch or suffer from
thinly disguised psychological fallout like Inc or Struck or Pemulis himself. The way Pemulis and Troeltsch and Struck and
Axford ingest substances and recover from substances and have a whole jargony argot based around various substances gives
Schacht the creeps, a bit, but since the knee injury broke and remade him at sixteen he's learned to go his own interior way and let
others go theirs. Like most very large men, he's getting comfortable early with the fact that his place in the world is very small and
his real impact on other persons even smaller — which is a big reason he can sometimes forget to finish his portion of a given
substance, so interested does he become in the way he's already started to feel. He's one of these people who don't need much,
much less much more.
Schacht and his opponent warm up their groundstrokes with the fluid economy of years of warming up groundstrokes. They
take turns feeding each other some volleys at net and then each take a 'couple up,' lobs, hitting loose easy overheads, slowly
adjusting the idle from half-speed to three-quarter-speed. The knee feels fundamentally all right, springy. Slow indoor composite
surfaces do not like Schacht's hard flat game, but they are kind to the knee, which after some days outside on hard cement swells
to about the size of a volleyball. Schacht feels blandly happy down here on 9, playing in private, way down past the gallery's
panel. There is a nourishing sense of pregnable space in a big indoor club that you never get playing outside, especially playing
outside in the cold, when the balls feel hard and sullen and come off the stick's strung face with an echoless ping. Here everything
cracks and booms, the grunts and shoe-squeaks and booming pocks of impact and curses unfolding across the white-on-green
plane and echoing off each tarp. Soon they'll all go inside for the winter. Schtitt will yield and let them inflate the E.T.A. Lung
over the sixteen Center Courts; it's like a barn-raising, inflation-day; it's communal and fun, and they'll take down the central
fences and outdoor night-lamps and unbolt all the posts into sections and stack them and store them, and the TesTar and
ATHSCME guys will come up in vans smoking cigarettes and squinting with weary expertise at tubes of plans in draftsman-blue,
and there'll be one and sometimes two ATHSCME helicopters w/ slings and grappling hooks for the Lung's dome and nacelle; and
Schtitt and deLint will let the younger E.T.A.s get the infrared indoor heaters out of the same corrugated shed the disassembled
fences and lamps will go in, leaf-cutter-ant- or Korean-like armies of 14- and 16-year-olds carrying sections and heaters and GoreTex swatches and long halo-lithiated bulbs while the 18s get to sit on canvas chairs and kibitz because they did their leaf-cutter
Lung-raising bits at 13-16 already. Two TesTar guys'll supervise Otis P. Lord and all this year's conspicuous tech-wonks in
mounting the heaters and stringing the lights and running coaxial shunts with ceramic jacks between the Pump Room's main
breaker and the Sunstrand grid and booting up the circulation-fans and pneumatic hoists that'll raise the Lung to the inflated shape
of a distended igloo, sixteen courts in four rows of four, enclosed and warmed by nothing but fibrous Gore-Tex and AC current
and an enormous ATHSCME Exhaust-Flow Effectuator that an ATHSCME crew in one of the ATHSCME helicopters will bring
in in a sling and cable and mount and secure on the Lung's nipply nacelle at the top of the inflating dome. And that first night after
Inflation, traditionally the fourth Monday of November, all the upperclass 18s so inclined will crank up the infrareds and get high
and eat low-lipid microwave pizza and play all night, sweating magnificently, sheltered for the winter atop Enfield's levelheaded
hill.
Schacht stands back in the deuce court and lets his guy warm up his serves, oddly flat and low-margin for a nervous touchartist. Schacht bloops each return up with severe backspin so the balls'll roll back to him and he can serve them back to his guy,
also warming up. The warm-up routine has become automatic and requires no attention. Way up on #l, Schacht sees John Wayne
just plaster a backhand cross-court. Wayne hits it so hard a little mushroom cloud of green fuzz hangs in the air where ball had
met strings. Their cards were too far to read in the sour-apple light, but you could tell by the way Port Washington's best boy
walked back to the baseline to take the next serve that his ass had already been presented to him. In a lot of junior matches
everything past the fourth game or so is kind of a formality. Both players tend to know the overall score by then. The big picture.
They'll have decided who's going to lose. Competitive tennis is largely mental, once you're at a certain plateau of skill and
conditioning. Schtitt'd say spiritual instead of mental, but as far as Schacht can see it's the same thing. As Schacht sees it, Schtitt's
philosophical stance is that to win enough of the time to be considered successful you have to both care a great deal about it and
also not care about it at all.8989 Schacht does not care enough, probably, anymore, and has met his gradual displacement from
E.T.A.'s A singles squad with an equanimity some E.T.A.'s thought was spiritual and others regarded as the surest sign of
dicklessness and burnout. Only one or two people have ever used the word brave in connection with Schacht's radical
reconfiguration after the things with the Crohn's Disease and knee. Hal Incandenza, who's probably as asymetrically hobbled on
the care-too-much side as Schacht is on the not-enough, privately puts Schacht's laissez-faire down to some interior decline, some
doom-gray surrender of his childhood's promise to adult gray mediocrity, and fears it; but since Schacht is an old friend and a
dependable designated driver and has actually gotten pleasanter to be around since the knee — which Hal prays fervently that the
ankle won't start being the size of a volleyball itself at the end of each outdoor day — Hal in a weird and deeper internal way
almost somehow admires and envies the fact that Schacht's stoically committed himself to the oral professions and stopped
dreaming of getting to the Show after graduation — an air of something other than failure about Schacht's not caring enough,
something you can't quite define, the way you can't quite remember a word that you know you know, inside — Hal can't quite feel
the contempt for Teddy Schacht's competitive slide that would be a pretty much natural contempt in one who cared so dreadfully
secretly much, and so the two of them tend to settle for not talking about it, just as Schacht cheerfully wordlessly drives the tow
truck on occasions when the rest of the crew are so incapacitated they'd have to hold one eye closed even to see an undoubled
road, and consents w/o protest to pay retail for clean quarterly urine, and doesn't say a word about Hal's devolution from
occasional tourist to subterranean compulsive, substance-wise, with his Pump Room visits and Visine, even though Schacht deep
down believes that the substance-compulsion's strange apparent contribution to Hal's erumpent explosion up the rankings has got
to be a temporary thing, that there's like a psychic credit-card bill for Hal in the mail, somewhere, coming, and is sad for him in 
advance about whatever's surely got to give, eventually. Though it won't be the Boards. Hal'll murder his Boards, and Schacht
may well be among those jockeying to sit near him, he'd be the first to admit. On 2 Hal now kicks a second serve to the ad court
with so much left-handed top on it that it almost kicks up over Port Washington's #2 guy's head. It's clearly carnage up there on
Show Courts 1 and 2. Dr. Tavis will be irrepressible. The gallery is barely even applauding Wayne and Incandenza anymore; at a
certain point it becomes like Romans applauding lions. All the coaches and staff and P.W.T.A. parents and civilians in the
overhead gallery wear tennis outfits, the high white socks and tucked-in shirts of people who do not really play.
Schacht and his man play.
Both Pat Montesian and Gately's AA sponsor like to remind Gately how this new resident Geoffrey Day could end up being
an invaluable teacher of patience and tolerance for him, Gately, as Ennet House Staff.
'So then at forty-six years of age I came here to learn to live by cliches,' is what Day says to Charlotte Treat right after Randy
Lenz asked what time it was, again, at 0825. 'To turn my will and life over to the care of cliches. One day at a time. Easy does it.
First things first. Courage is fear that has said its prayers. Ask for help. Thy will not mine be done. It works if you work it. Grow
or go. Keep coming back.’
Poor old Charlotte Treat, needlepointing primly beside him on the old vinyl couch that just came from Goodwill, purses her
lips. 'You need to ask for some gratitude.’
'Oh no but the point is I've already been fortunate enough to receive gratitude.' Day crosses one leg over the other in a way
that inclines his whole little soft body toward her. 'For which, believe you me, I'm grateful. I cultivate gratitude. That's part of the
system of cliches I'm here to live by. An attitude of gratitude. A grateful drunk will never drink. I know the actual cliche is "A
grateful heart will never drink," but since organs can't properly be said to imbibe and I'm still afflicted with just enough self-will to
decline to live by utter non sequiturs, as opposed to just good old cliches, I'm taking the liberty of light amendment.' He gives with
this a look like butter wouldn't melt. 'Albeit grateful amendment, of course.’
Charlotte Treat looks over to Gately for some sort of help or Staff enforcement of dogma. The poor bitch is clueless. All of
them are clueless, still. Gately reminds himself that he too is probably mostly still clueless, still, even after all these hundreds of
days. 'I Didn't Know That I Didn't Know' is another of the slogans that looks so shallow for a while and then all of a sudden drops
off and deepens like the lobster-waters off the North Shore. As Gately fidgets his way through daily a.m. meditation he always
tries to remind himself daily that this is all an Ennet House residency is supposed to do: buy these poor yutzes some time, some
thin pie-slice of abstinent time, till they can start to get a whiff of what's true and deep, almost magic, under the shallow surface of
what they're trying to do.
'I cultivate it assiduously. I do special gratitude exercises at night up there in the room. Gratitude-Ups, you could call them.
Ask Randy over there if I don't do them like clockwork. Diligently. Sedulously.’
'Well'it's true is all,' Treat sniffs. 'About gratitude.’
Everybody else except Gately, lying on the old other couch opposite them, is ignoring this exchange, watching an old
InterLace cartridge whose tracking is a little messed up so that staticky stripes eat at the screen's picture's bottom and top. Day is
not done talking. Pat M. encourages newer Staff to think of residents they'd like to bludgeon to death as valuable teachers of
patience, tolerance, self-discipline, restraint.
Day is not done talking. 'One of the exercises is being grateful that life is so much easier now. I used sometimes to think. I
used to think in long compound sentences with subordinate clauses and even the odd polysyllable. Now I find I needn't. Now I
live by the dictates of macramé samplers ordered from the back-page ad of an old Reader's Digest or Saturday Evening Post. Easy
does it. Remember to remember. But for the grace of capital-g God. Turn it over. Terse, hard-boiled. Monosyllabic. Good old
Norman Rockwell-Paul Harvey wisdom. I walk around with my arms out straight in front of me and recite these cliches. In a
monotone. No inflection necessary. Could that be one? Could that be added to the cliche-pool? "No inflection necessary"? Too
many syllables, probably.’
Randy Lenz says 'I ain't got time for this shit.’
Poor old Charlotte Treat, all of nine weeks clean, is trying to look primmer and primmer. She looks again over to Gately,
lying on his back, taking up the living room's whole other sofa, one sneaker up on the sofa's square frayed fabric arm-thing, his
eyes almost closed. Only Staff get to lie on the couches.
'Denial,' Charlotte finally says, 'is not a river in Egypt.' 'Hows about the both of you shut the fuck up,' says Emil Minty.
Geoffrey (not Geoff, Geoffrey) Day has been at Ennet House six days. He came from Roxbury's infamous Dimock Detox, where
he was the only white person, which Gately bets must have been broadening for him. Day has a squished blank smeared flat face,
one requiring like great self-effort to like, and eyes that are just starting to lose the nictitated glaze of early sobriety. Day is a
newcomer and a wreck. A red-wine-and-Quaalude man who finally nodded out in late October and put his Saab through the
window of a Maiden sporting goods store and then got out and proceeded to browse until the Finest came and got him. Who
taught something horseshit-sounding like social historicity or historical sociality at some jr. college up the Expressway in Medford
and came in saying on his Intake he also manned the helm of a Scholarly Quarterly. Word for word, the House Manager had said:
'manned the helm'' and 'Scholarly.' His Intake estimated that Day's been in and out of a blackout for most of the last several years,
and his wiring is still as they say a bit frayed. His detox at Dimock, where they barely have the resources to give you a Librium if
you start to D.T., must have been just real grim, because Geoffrey D. alleges it never happened: now his story is he just strolled
into Ennet House on a lark one day from his home 10+ clicks away in Maiden and found the place too hilariously egregulous to
want to ever leave. It's the newcomers with some education that are the worst, according to Gene M. They identify their whole
selves with their head, and the Disease makes its command headquarters in the head.9090 Day wears chinos of indeterminate hue,
brown socks with black shoes, and shirts that Pat Montesian had described in the Intake as 'Eastern-European-type Hawaiian
shirts.' Day's now on the vinyl couch with Charlotte Treat after breakfast in the Ennet House living room with a few of the other
residents that either aren't working or don't have to be at work early, and with Gately, who'd pulled an all-night Dream Duty shift
out in the front office till 0400, then got temp-relieved by Johnette Foltz so he could go to work janitoring down at the Shattuck
Shelter till 0700, then came and hauled ass back up here and took back over so's that Johnette could go off to her NA thing with a
bunch of NA people in what looked like a dune buggy if the dunes in question were in Hell, and is now, Gately, trying to unclench 
and center himself inside by tracing the cracks in the paint of the living room ceiling with his eyes. Gately often feels a terrible
sense of loss, narcotics-wise, in the A.M., still, even after this long clean. His sponsor over at the White Flag Group says some
people never get over the loss of what they'd thought was their one true best friend and lover; they just have to pray daily for
acceptance and the brass danglers to move forward through the grief and loss, to wait for time to harden the scab. The sponsor,
Ferocious Francis G., doesn't give Gately one iona of shit for feeling some negative feelings about it: on the contrary, he
commends Gately for his candor in breaking down and crying like a baby and telling him about it early one A.M. over the pay
phone, the sense of loss. It's a myth no one misses it. Their particular Substance. Shit, you wouldn't need help if you didn't miss it.
You just have to Ask For Help and like Turn It Over, the loss and pain, to Keep Coming, show up, pray, Ask For Help. Gately
rubs his eye. Simple advice like this does seem like a lot of cliches — Day's right about how it seems. Yes, and if Geoffrey Day
keeps on steering by the way things seem to him then he's a dead man for sure. Gately's already watched dozens come through
here and leave early and go back Out There and then go to jail or die. If Day ever gets lucky and breaks down, finally, and comes
to the front office at night to scream that he can't take it anymore and clutch at Gately's pantcuff and blubber and beg for help at
any cost, Gately'll get to tell Day the thing is that the clichéd directives are a lot more deep and hard to actually do. To try and live
by instead of just say. But he'll only get to say it if Day comes and asks. Personally, Gately gives Geoffrey D. like a month at the
outside before he's back tipping his hat to parking meters. Except who is Gately to judge who'll end up getting the Gift of the
program v. who won't, he needs to remember. He tries to feel like Day is teaching him patience and tolerance. It takes great
patience and tolerance not to want to punt the soft little guy out into the Comm. Ave. ravine and open up his bunk to somebody
that really desperately wants it, the Gift. Except who is Gately to think he can know who wants it and who doesn't, deep down.
Gately's arm is behind his head, up against the sofa's other arm. The old D.E.C. viewer is on to something violent and colorenhanced Gately neither sees nor hears. It was part of his gifts as a burglar: he can sort of turn his attention on and off like a light.
Even when he was a resident here he'd had this prescient housebreaker's ability to screen input, to do sensory triage. It was one
reason he'd even been able to stick out his nine residential months here with twenty-one other newly detoxed housebreakers,
hoods, whores, fired execs, Avon ladies, subway musicians, beer-bloated construction workers, vagrants, indignant car salesmen,
bulimic trauma-mamas, bunko artists, mincing pillow-biters, North End hard guys, pimply kids with electric noserings, denialridden housewives and etc., all jonesing and head-gaming and mokus and grieving and basically whacked out and producing
nonstopping output 24-7-365.
At some point in here Day's saying 'So bring on the lobotomist, bring him on I say!’
Except Gately's own counselor when he was a resident here, Eugenio Martinez, one of the volunteer alumni counselors, a
one-eared former boiler-room bunko man and now a cellular-phone retailer who'd hooked up with the House under the original
founder Guy That Didn't Even Use His First Name, and had about ten years clean, Gene M. did — Eugenio'd lovingly confronted
Gately early on about his special burglar's selective attention and about how it could be dangerous because how can you be sure
it's you doing the screening and not The Spider. Gene called the Disease The Spider and talked about Feeding The Spider versus
Starving The Spider and so on and so forth. Eugenio M. had called Gately into the House Manager's back office and said what if
Don's screening input turned out to be Feeding The Old Spider and what about an experimental unscreening of input for a while.
Gately had said he'd do his best to try and'd come back out and tried to watch a Spont-Dissem of the Celtics while two resident
pillow-biters from the Fenway were having this involved conversation about some third fag having to go in and get the skeleton of
some kind of fucking rodent removed from inside their butthole.9191 The unscreening experiment had lasted half an hour. This
was right before Gately got his 90-day chip and wasn't exactly wrapped real tight or real tolerant, still. Ennet House this year is
nothing like the freakshow it was when Gately went through.
Gately has been completely Substance-free for 421 days today.
Ms. Charlotte Treat, with a carefully made-up, ruined face, is watching the viewer's stripe-shot cartridge while she
needlepoints something. Conversation between her and Geoffrey D. has mercifully petered out. Day is scanning the room for
somebody else to engage and piss off so he can prove to himself he doesn't fit in here and stay separated off isolated inside himself
and maybe get them so pissed off there's a beef and he gets bounced out, Day, and it won't be his fault. You can almost hear his
Disease chewing away inside his head, feeding. Emil Minty, Randy Lenz, and Bruce Green are also in the room, sprawled in
spring-shot chairs, lighting one gasper off the end of the last, their postures the don't-fuck-with-me slouch of the streets that here
makes their bodies' texture somehow hard to distinguish from that of the chairs. Nell Gunther is sitting at the long table in the
door-less dining room that opens out right off the old D.E.C. fold-out TP's pine stand, whitening under her nails with a manicure
pencil amid the remains of something she's eaten that involved serious syrup. Burt F. Smith is also in there, way down by himself
at the table's far end, trying to saw at a waffle with a knife and fork attached to the stumps of his wrists with Velcro bands. A longtime-ago former DMV Driver's License Examiner, Burt F. Smith is forty-five and looks seventy, has almost all-white hair that's
waxy and yellow from close-order smoke, and finally got into Ennet House last month after nine months stuck in the Cambridge
City Shelter. Burt F. Smith's story is he's making his like fiftieth-odd stab at sobriety in AA. Once devoutly R.C., Burt F.S. has
potentially lethal trouble with Faith In A Loving God ever since the R.C. Church apparently granted his wife an annulment in like
B.S.
'99 after fifteen years of marriage. Then for several years a rooming-house drunk, which on Gately's view is about like one
step up from a homeless-person-type drunk. Burt F.S. got mugged and beaten half to death in Cambridge on Xmas Eve of last
year, and left there to like freeze there, in an alley, in a storm, and ended up losing his hands and feet. Doony Glynn's been
observed telling Burt F.S. things like that there's some new guy coming into the Disabled Room off Pat's office with Burt F.S.
who's without not only hands and feet but arms and legs and even a head and who communicates by farting in Morris Code. This
sally earned Glynn three days Full-House Restriction and a week's extra Chore for what Johnette Foltz described in the Log as
'XSive Cruetly.' There is a vague intestinal moaning in Gately's right side. Watching Burt F. Smith smoke a Benson & Hedges by
holding it between his stumps with his elbows out like a guy with pruning shears is an adventure in fucking pathos as far as
Gately's concerned. And Geoffrey Day cracks wise about There But for Grace. And forget about what it's like trying to watch Burt
F. Smith try and light a match.
Gately, who's been on live-in Staff here four months now, believes Charlotte Treat's devotion to needlepoint is suspect. All 
those needles. In and out of all that thin sterile-white cotton stretched drum-tight in its round frame. The needle makes a kind of
thud and squeak when it goes in the cloth. It's not much like the soundless pop and slide of a real cook-and-shoot. But still. She
takes such great care.
Gately wonders what color he'd call the ceiling if forced to call it a color. It's not white and it's not gray. The brown-yellow
tones are from high-tar gaspers; a pall hangs up near the ceiling even this early in the new sober day. Some of the drunks and
tranq-jockeys stay up most of the night, joggling their feet and chain-smoking, even though there's no cartridges or music allowed
after OOOOh. He has that odd House Staffer's knack, Gately, already, after four months, of seeing everything in both living and
dining rooms without really looking. Emil Minty, a hard-core smack-addict punk here for reasons nobody can quite yet pin down,
is in an old mustard-colored easy chair with his combat boots up on one of the standing ashtrays, which is tilting not quite enough
for Gately to tell him to watch out, please. Minty's orange mohawk and the shaved skull around it are starting to grow out brown,
which is just not a pleasant sight in the morning at all. The other ashtray on the floor by his chair is full of the ragged little new
moons of bitten nails, which has got to mean that the Hester T. that he'd ordered to bed at 0230 was right back down here in the
chair going at her nails again the second Gately left to mop shit at the Shelter. When he's up all night Gately's stomach gets all
tight and acidy, from either all the coffee maybe or just staying up. Minty's been on the streets since he was like sixteen, Gately
can tell: he's got that sooty complexion homeless guys get where the soot has insinuated itself into the dermal layer and thickened,
making Minty look somehow upholstered. And the big-armed driver for Leisure Time Ice, the quiet kid, Green, a garbage-head
all-Substance-type kid, maybe twenty-one, face very slightly smunched in on one side, wears sleeveless khaki shirts and had lived
in a trailer in that apocalyptic Enfield trailer park out near the Allston Spur; Gately likes Green because he seems to have got sense
enough to keep his map shut when he's got nothing important to say, which is basically all the time. The tattoo on the kid's right
tricep is a spear-pierced heart over the hideous name MILDRED BONK, who Bruce G. told him was a ray of living light and a
dead ringer for the late lead singer of The Fiends in Human Shape and his dead heart's one love ever, and who took their daughter
and left him this summer for some guy that told her he ranched fucking longhorn cows east of Atlantic City NJ. He's got, even by
Ennet House standards, major-league sleep trouble, Green, and he and Gately play cribbage sometimes in the wee dead hours, a
game Gately picked up in jail. Burt F.S. is now hunched in a meaty coughing fit, his elbows out and his forehead purple. No sign
of Hester Thrale, nailbiter and something Pat calls Borderline. Gately can see everything without moving or moving his head or
either eye. Also in here is Randy Lenz, who Lenz is a small-time organic-coke dealer who wears sportcoats rolled up over his
parlor-tanned forearms and is always checking his pulse on the inside of his wrists. It's come out that Lenz is of keen interest to
both sides of the law because this past May he'd apparently all of a sudden lost all control and holed up all of a sudden in a
Charlestown motel and free-based most of a whole 100 grams he'd been fronted by a suspiciously trusting Brazilian in what Lenz
didn't know was supposed to have been a D.E.A. sting operation in the South End. Having screwed both sides in what Gately
secretly views as a delicious fuck-up, Randy Lenz has, since May, been the most wanted he's probably ever been. He is seedily
handsome in the way of pimps and low-level coke dealers, muscular in the MP-ish way that certain guys' muscles look muscular
but can't really lift anything, with complexly gelled hair and the little birdlike head-movements of the deeply vain. One forearm's
hair has a little hairless patch, which Gately knows well spells knife-owner, and if there's one thing Gately's never been able to
stomach it's a knife-owner, little swaggery guys that always queer a square beef and come up off the ground with a knife where
you have to get cut to take it away from them. Lenz is teaching Gately reserved politeness to people you pretty much want to beat
up on sight. It's pretty obvious to everybody except Pat Montesian — whose odd gullibility in the presence of human sludge,
though, Gately needs to try to remember had been one of the reasons why he himself had got into Ennet House, originally —
obvious that Lenz is here mostly just to hide out: he rarely leaves the House except under compulsion, avoids windows, and
travels to the nightly required AA/NA meetings in a disguise that makes him look like Cesar Romero after a terrible accident; and
then he always wants to walk back to the House solo afterward, which is not encouraged. Lenz is seated low in the
northeasternmost corner of an old fake-velour love seat he's jammed in the northeasternmost corner of the living room. Randy
Lenz has a strange compulsive need to be north of everything, and possibly even northeast of everything, and Gately has no clue
what it's about but observes Lenz's position routinely for his own interest and files. Lenz's leg, like Ken Erdedy's leg, never stops
joggling; Day claims it joggles even worse in sleep. Another gurgle and abdominal chug for Don G., lying there. Charlotte Treat
has violently red hair. As in hair the color of like a red crayon. The reason she doesn't have to work an outside menial job is she's
got some strain of the Virus or like H.I.V. Former prostitute, reformed. Why do prostitutes when they get straight always try and
get so prim? It's like long-repressed librarian-ambitions come flooding out. Charlotte T. has a cut-rate whore's hard half-pretty
face, her eyes lassoed with shadow around all four lids. Her also with a case of the dermal-layer sooty complexion. The riveting
thing about Treat is how her cheeks are deeply pitted in these deep trenches that she packs with foundation and tries to cover over
with blush, which along with the hair gives her the look of a mean clown. The ghastly wounds in her cheeks look for all the world
like somebody got at her with a woodburning kit at some point in her career path. Gately would rather not know.
Don Gately is almost twenty-nine and sober and just huge. Lying there gurgling and inert with a fluttery-eyed smile. One
shoulder blade and buttock pooch out over the side of a sofa that sags like a hammock. Gately looks less built than poured, the
smooth immovability of an Easter Island statue. It would be nice if intimidating size wasn't one of the major factors in a male
alumni getting offered the male live-in Staff job here, but there you go. Don G. has a massive square head made squarer-looking
by the Prince Valiantish haircut he tries to maintain himself in the mirror, to save $: room and board aside — plus the opportunity
for Service — he makes very little as an Ennet House Staffer, and is paying off restitution schedules in three different district
courts. He has the fluttery white-eyed smile now of someone who's holding himself just over the level of doze. Pat Montesian is
due in at 0900 and Don G. can't go to bed until she arrives because the House Manager has driven Jennifer Belbin to a court
appearance downtown and he's the only Staffer here. Foltz, the female live-in Staffer, is at a Narcotics Anonymous convention in
Hartford for the long Interdependence Day weekend. Gately personally is not hot on NA: so many relapses and un-humble
returns, so many war stories told with nondisguised bullshit pride, so little emphasis on Service or serious Message; all these
people in leather and metal, preening. Rooms full of Randy Lenzes, all hugging each other, pretending they don't miss the
Substance. Rampant newcomer-fucking. There's a difference between abstinence v. recovery, Gately knows. Except of course
who's Gately to judge what works for who. He just knows what seems like it works for him today: AA's tough Enfield-Brighton 
love, the White Flag Group, old guys with suspendered bellies and white crew cuts and geologic amounts of sober time, the
Crocodiles, that'll take your big square head off if they sense you're getting complacent or chasing tail or forgetting that your life
still hangs in the balance every fucking day. White Flag newcomers so crazed and sick they can't sit and have to pace at the
meeting's rear, like Gately when he first came. Retired old kindergarten teachers in polyresin slacks and a pince-nez who bake
cookies for the weekly meeting and relate from behind the podium how they used to blow bartenders at closing for just two more
fingers in a paper cup to take home against the morning's needled light. Gately, albeit an oral narcotics man from way back, has
committed himself to AA. He drank his fair share, too, he figures, after all.
Exec. Director Pat M. is due in at 0900 and has application interviews with three people, 2F and 1M, who better be showing
up soon, and Gately will answer the door when they don't know enough to just come in and will say Welcome and get them a cup
of coffee if he judges them able to hold it. He'll get them aside and tip them off to be sure to pet Pat M.'s dogs during the
interview. They'll be sprawled all over the front office, sides heaving, writhing and biting at themselves. He'll tell them it's a
proved fact that if Pat's dogs like you, you're in. Pat M. has directed Gately to tell appliers this, and then if the appliers do actually
pet the dogs — two hideous white golden retrievers with suppurating scabs and skin afflictions, plus one has Grand Mall epilepsy
— it'll betray a level of desperate willingness that Pat says is just about all she goes by, deciding.
A nameless cat oozes by on the broad windowsill above the back of the fabric couch. Animals here come and go. Alumni
adopt them or they just disappear. Their fleas tend to remain. Gately's intestines moan. Boston's dawn coming back on the Green
Line this morning was chemically pink, trails of industrial exhaust blowing due north. The nail-parings in the ashtray on the floor
are, he realizes now, too big to be from fingernails. These bitten arcs are broad and thick and a deep autumnal yellow. He
swallows hard. He'd tell Geoffrey Day how, even if they are just cliches, cliches are (a) soothing, and (b) remind you of common
sense, and (c) license the universal assent that drowns out silence; and (4) silence is deadly, pure Spider-food, if you've got the
Disease. Gene M. says you can spell the Disease DIS-EASE, which sums the basic situation up nicely. Pat has a meeting at the
Division of Substance Abuse Services in Government Center at noon she needs to be reminded about. She can't read her own
handwriting, which the stroke affected her handwriting. Gately envisions going around having to find out who's biting their
fucking toenails in the living room and putting the disgusting toenail-bits in the ashtray at like 0500. Plus House regs prohibit bare
feet anyplace downstairs. There's a pale-brown water stain on the ceiling over Day and Treat the almost exact shape of Florida.
Randy Lenz has issues with Geoffrey Day because Day is glib and a teacher at a Scholarly Journal's helm. This threatens the selfconcept of a Randy Lenz that thinks of himself as a kind of hiply sexy artist-intellectual. Small-time dealers never conceptualize
themselves as just small-time dealers, kind of like whores never do. For Occupation on his Intake form Lenz had put free lance
script writer. And he makes a show of that he reads. For the first week here in July he'd held the books upside-down in the
northeast corner of whatever room. He had a gigantic Medical Dictionary he'd haul down and smoke and read until Annie Parrot
the Asst. Manager had to tell him not to bring it down anymore because it was fucking with Morris Hanley's mind. At which juncture he quit reading and started talking, making everybody nostalgic for when he just sat there and read. Geoffrey D. has issues
with Randy L., also, you can tell: there's a certain way they don't quite look at each other. And so now of course they're mashed
together in the 3-Man together, since three guys in one night missed curfew and came in without one normal-sized pupil between
them and refused Urines and got bounced on the spot, and so Day gets moved up in his first week from the 5-Man room to the 3-
Man. Seniority comes quick around here. Past Minty, down at the dining-room table's end, Burt F.S.'s still coughing, still hunched
over, his face a dusky purple, and Nell G. is behind him pounding him on the back so that it keeps sending him forward over his
ashtray, and he's waving one stump vaguely over his shoulder to try and signal her to quit. Lenz and Day: a beef may be brewing:
Day'll try to goad Lenz into a beef that'll be public enough so he doesn't get hurt but does get bounced, and then he can leave
treatment and go back to Chianti and 'Ludes and getting assaulted by sidewalks and make out like the relapse is Ennet House's
fault and never have to confront himself or his Disease. To Gately, Day is like a wide-open interactive textbook on the Disease.
One of Gately's jobs is to keep an eye on what's possibly brewing among residents and let Pat or the Manager know and try to
smooth things down in advance if possible. The ceiling's color could be called dun, if forced. Someone has farted; no one knows
just who, but this isn't like a normal adult place where everybody coolly pretends a fart didn't happen; here everybody has to make
their little comment.
Time is passing. Ennet House reeks of passing time. It is the humidity of early sobriety, hanging and palpable. You can hear
ticking in clockless rooms here. Gately changes the angle of one sneaker, puts the other arm behind his head. His head has real
weight and pressure. Randy Lenz's obsessive compulsions include the need to be north, a fear of disks, a tendency to constantly
take his own pulse, a fear of all forms of timepieces, and a need to always know the time with great precision.
'Day man you got the time maybe real quick?' Lenz. For the third time in half an hour. Patience, tolerance, compassion, selfdiscipline, restraint.
Gately remembers his first six months here straight: he'd felt the sharp edge of every second that went by. And the freakshow
dreams. Nightmares beyond the worst D.T.s you'd ever heard about. A reason for a night-shift Staffer in the front office is so
somebody's there for the residents to talk at when — not if, when — when the freakshow dreams ratchet them out of bed at like
0300. Nightmares about relapsing and getting high, not getting high but having everybody think you're high, getting high with
your alcoholic mom and then killing her with a baseball bat. Whipping the old Unit out for a spot-Urine and starting up and flames
coming shooting out. Getting high and bursting into flames. Having a waterspout shaped like an enormous Talwin suck you up
inside. A vehicle explodes in an enhanced bloom of sooty flame on the D.E.C. viewer, its hood up like an old pop-tab.
Day's making a broad gesture out of checking his watch. 'Right around 0830, fella.’
Randy L.'s fine nostrils flare and whiten. He stares straight ahead, eyes narrowed, fingers on his wrist. Day purses his lips, leg
joggling. Gately hangs his head over the arm of the sofa and regards Lenz upside-down.
'That look on your map there mean something there, Randy? Are you like communicating something with that look?’
'Does anybody maybe know the time a little more exactly is what I'm wondering, Don, since Day doesn't.’
Gately checks his own cheap digital, head still hung over the sofa's arm. 'I got 0832:14, 15, 16, Randy.’
"ks a lot, D.G. man.’
So and now Day has that same flared narrow look for Lenz. 'We've been over this, friend. Amigo. Sport. You do this all the 
time with me. Again I'll say it — I don't have a digital watch. This is a fine old antique watch. It points. A memento of far better
days. It's not a digital watch. It's not a cesium-based atomic clock. It points, with hands. See, Spiro Agnew here has two little
arms: they point, they suggest. It's not a sodding stopwatch for life. Lenz, get a watch. Am I right? Why don't you just get a watch,
Lenz. Three people I happen to know of for a fact have offered to get you a watch and you can pay them back whenever you feel
comfortable about poking your nose out and investigating the work-a-world. Get a watch. Obtain a watch. A fine, digital,
incredibly wide watch, about five times the width of your wrist, so you have to hold it like a falconer, and it treats time like pi.’
'Easy does it,' Charlotte Treat half-sings, not looking up from her needle and frame.
Day looks around at her. 'I don't believe I was speaking to you in any way shape or form.’
Lenz stares at him. 'If you're trying to fuck with me, brother.' He shakes his fine shiny head. 'Big mistake.’
'Oo I'm all atremble. I can barely hold my arm steady to read my watch.’
'Big big big real big mistake.’
'Peace on earth good will toward men,' says Gately, back on his back, smiling at the dun cracked ceiling. He's the one who'd
farted.
They returned from Long Island bearing their shields rather than upon them, as they say. John Wayne and Hal Incandenza lost
only five total games between them in singles. The A doubles had resembled a spatterpainting. And the B teams, especially the
distaffs, had surpassed themselves. The whole P.W.T.A. staff and squad had had to sing a really silly song. Coyle and Troeltsch
didn't win, and Teddy Schacht had, incredibly, lost to his squat spin-doctory opponent in three sets, despite the kid's debilitating
nerves at crucial junctures. The fact that Schacht wasn't all that upset got remarked on by staff. Schacht and a conspicuously
energized Jim Troeltsch rallied for the big win in 18-A #2 dubs, though. Troeltsch's disconnected microphone mysteriously
disappeared from his gear bag during post-doubles showers, to the rejoicing of all. Pemulis's storky intense two-hands-off-bothsides opponent had gotten weirdly lethargic and then disoriented in the second set after Pemulis had lost the first in a tie-break.
After the kid had delayed play for several minutes claiming the tennis balls were too pretty to hit, P.W.T.A. trainers had conducted
him gently from the court, and the Peemster got 'V.D.,' which is jr.-circuit argot for a Victory by Default. The fact that Pemulis
hadn't walked around with his chest out recounting the win for any E.T.A. females got remarked on only by Hal and T. Axford.
Schacht was in too much knee-pain to remark on much of anything, and Schtitt had E.T.A.'s Barry Loach inject the big purple
knee with something that made Schacht's eyes roll up in his head.
Then during the post-meet mixer and dance Pemulis's defaulted opponent ate from the hors d' oeuvres table without using
utensils or at one point even hands, did a disco number when there wasn't any music going, and was finally heard telling the Port
Washington Headmaster's wife that he'd always wanted to do her from behind. Pemulis spent a lot of time whistling and staring
innocently up at the pre-fab ceiling.
The bus for all the 18's squads was warm and there were little nozzles of light over your seat that you could either have on to
do homework or shut off and sleep. Troeltsch, left eye ominously nystagmic, pretended to recap the day's match highlights for a
subscription audience, speaking earnestly into his fist. The C team's Stockhausen was pretending to sing opera. Hal and Tall Paul
Shaw were each reading an SAT prep-guide. A good quarter of the bus was yellow-highlighting copies of E. A. Abbott's
inescapable-at-E.T.A. book Flatland for either Flottman or Chawaf or Thorp. An elongated darkness with assorted shapes melted
by, plus long gauntlets, near exits, of tall Interstatish lamps laying down cones of dirty-looking sodium light. The ghastly sodium
lamplight made Mario Incandenza happy to be in his little cone of white inside light. Mario sat next to K. D. Coyle — who was
kind of mentally slow, especially after a hard loss — and they played rock-paper-scissors for two hundred clicks or more, not
saying anything, engrossed in trying to locate patterns in each other's rhythms of choices of shapes, which they both decided there
weren't any. Two or three upper-classmen in Levy-Richardson-O'Byrne-Chawaf's Disciplinary Lit. were slumped over
Goncharov's Oblomov, looking very unhappy indeed. Charles Tavis sat way in the back with John Wayne and beamed and spoke
nonstop in hushed tones to Wayne as the Canadian stared out the window. DeLint was with the 16's one bus back; he'd been
ragging Slice's and Korn-span's asses since their doubles, which it looked like they practically gave away. The bus was Schtittless:
Schtitt always found a private mysterious way back, then appeared at dawn drills with deLint and elaborate work-ups of
everything that had gone wrong the day before. He was particularly shrill and insistent and negative after they'd won something.
Schacht sat listing to port and didn't respond when hands were waved in front of his face, and Axford and Struck started kibitzing
Barry Loach about their knees were feeling punk as well. The luggage rack over everyone's heads bristled with grips and coverless
strings, and liniment and tincture of benzoin had been handed out and liberally applied, so the warm air became complexly spiced.
Everybody was tired in a good way.
The homeward ride's camaraderie was marred only by the fact that someone near the back of the bus started the passing
around of a Gothic-fonted leaflet offering the kingdom of prehistoric England to the man who could pull Keith Freer out of
Bernadette Longley. Freer had been discovered by prorector Mary Esther Thode more or less Xing poor Bernadette Longley under
an Adidas blanket in the very back seat on the bus trip to the East Coast Clays in Providence in September, and it had been a nasty
scene, because there were some basic Academy-license rules that it was just unacceptable to flout under the nose of staff. Keith
Freer was deeply asleep when the leaflet was getting passed around, but Bernadette Longley wasn't, and when the leaflet hit the
front half where all the females now had to sit since September she'd buried her face in her hands and flushed even on the back of
her pretty neck, and her doubles partner9292 came all the way back to where Jim Struck and Michael Pemulis were sitting and
told them in no uncertain terms that somebody on this bus was so immature it was really sad.
Charles Tavis was irrepressible. He did a Pierre Trudeau impersonation no one except the driver was old enough to laugh at.
And the whole mammoth travelling squad, three buses' worth, got to stop and have the Mega-breakfast at Denny's, over next to
Empire Waste, at like 0030, when they got in.
Hal's eldest brother Orin Incandenza got out of competitive tennis when Hal was nine and Mario nearly eleven. This was
during the period of great pre-Experialist upheaval and the emergence of the fringe C.U.S.P. of Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner,
and the tumescence of O.N.A.N.ism. At late seventeen, Orin was ranked in the low 70s nationally; he was a senior; he was at that 
awful age for a low-70s player where age eighteen and the terminus of a junior career are looming and either: (1) you're going to
surrender your dreams of the Show and go to college and play college tennis; or (2) you're going to get your full spectrum of
gram-negative and cholera and amoebic-dysentery shots and try to eke outsome kind of sad diasporic existence on a Eurasian
satellite pro tour and try to hop those last few competitive plateaux up to Show-caliber as an adult; or (3) or you don't know what
you're going to do; and it's often an awful time.9393
E.T.A. tries to dilute the awfulness a little by letting eight or nine postgraduates stay on for two years and serve in deLint's
platoon of prorec-tors9494 in exchange for room and board and travel expenses to small sad satellite tourneys, and Orin's being
directly related to E.T.A. Administration obviously gave him kind of a lock on a prorector appointment if he wanted it, but a
prorector's job was only for maybe at most a few years, and was regarded as sad and purgatorial . . . and then of course what then,
what are you going to do after that, etc.
Orin's decision to attend college pleased his parents a great deal, though Mrs. Avril Incandenza, especially, had gone out of
her way to make it clear that whatever Orin decided to do would please them because they stood squarely behind and in full
support of him, Orin, and any decision his very best thinking yielded. But they were still in favor of college, privately, you could
tell. Orin was clearly not ever going to be a professional-caliber adult tennis player. His competitive peak had come at thirteen,
when he'd gotten to the 14-and-Under quarterfinals of the National Clays in Indianapolis IN and in the Quarters had taken a set off
the second seed; but starting soon after that he'd suffered athletically from the same delayed puberty that had compromised his
father when Himself had been a junior player, and having boys he'd cleaned the clocks of at twelve and thirteen become now
seemingly overnight mannish and deep-chested and hairy-legged and starting now to clean Orin's own clock at fourteen and
fifteen — this had sucked some kind of competitive afflatus out of him, broken his tennis spirit, Orin, and his U.S.T.A. ranking
had nosedived through three years until it levelled off somewhere in the low 70s, which meant that by age fifteen he wasn't even
qualifying for the major events' main 64-man draw. When E.T.A. opened, his ranking among the Boys' 18s hovered around 10 and
he was relegated to a middle spot on the Academy's B-squad, a mediocrity that sort of becalmed his verve even further. His style
was essentially that of a baseliner, a coun-terpuncher, but without the return of serve or passing shots you need to stand much of a
chance against a quality net-man. The E.T.A. rap on Orin was that he lobbed well but too often. He did have a phenomenal lob: he
could hug the curve of the dome of the Lung and three times out of four nail a large-sized coin placed on the opposite baseline; he
and Marlon Bain and two or three other marginal counterpunching boys at E.T.A. all had phenomenal lobs, honed through spare
P.M. devoted more and more to Es-chaton, which by the most plausible account a Croatian-refugee transfer had brought up from
the Palmer Academy in Tampa. Orin was Eschaton's first game-master at E.T.A., where in the first Eschaton generations it was
mostly marginal and deafflatusized upperclassmen who played.
College was the comparatively obvious choice, then, for Orin, as the time of decision drew nigh. Oblique family pressures
aside, as a low-ranked player at E.T.A. he'd had stiffer academic demands than did those for whom the real Show had seemed like
a viable goal. And the Eschatonology helped a great deal with the math/computer stuff E.T.A. tended to be a bit weak in, both
Himself and Schtitt being at that point pretty anti-quantitative. His grades were solid. His board-scores weren't going to embarrass
anybody. Orin was basically academically sound, especially for a somebody with a top-level competitive sport on his secondary
transcript.
And you have to understand that mediocrity is relative in a sport like junior tennis. A national ranking of 74 in Boys 18-andUnder Singles, while mediocre by the standards of aspiring pros, is enough to make most college coaches' chins shiny. Orin got a
couple Pac-10 offers. Big 10 offers. U. New Mexico actually hired a mariachi band that established itself under his dorm-room's
window six nights running until Mrs. Incandenza got Himself to authorize 'F. D. V.' Harde to electrify the fences. Ohio State flew
him out to Columbus for such a weekend of 'prospective orientation' that when Orin got back he had to stay in bed for three days
drinking Alka-Seltzer with an ice pack on his groin. Cal-Tech offered him an ROTC waiver and A.P. standing in their elite
Strategic Studies program after Decade Magazine had run a short interest-piece on Orin and the Croate and Eschaton's applied use
of c:\Pink2.9595
Orin chose B.U. Boston U. Not a tennis power. Not in Cal-Tech's league academically. Not the sort of place that hires bands
or flies you out for Roman orgies of inducement. And only just about three clicks down the hill and Comm. Ave. from E.T.A.,
west of the Bay, around the intersection of Commonwealth and Beacon, Boston. It was kind of a joint Orin Incandenza/ Avril
Incandenza decision. Orin's Moms privately thought it was important for Orin to be away from home, psychologically speaking,
but still to be able to come home whenever he wished. She put everything to Orin in terms of worrying that her concern over
what'd be best for him psychologically might prompt her to overstep her maternal bounds and speak out of turn or give intrusive
advice. According to all her lists and advantage-disadvantage charts, B.U. was from every angle far and away O.'s best choice, but
to keep ever from overstepping or lobbying intrusively the Moms actually for six weeks would flee any room Orin entered, both
hands clapped over her mouth. Orin had this way his face would get when she'd beg him not to let her influence his choice. It was
during this period that Orin had characterized the Moms to Hal as a kind of contortionist with other people's bodies, which Hal's
never been able to forget. Himself, from his own experience, probably thought it'd be better for Orin to get the hell out of Dodge
altogether, do something Midwest or PAC, but he kept his own counsel. He never had to struggle not to overstep. He probably
figured Orin was a big boy. This was four years and 30-some released entertainments before Himself put his head in a microwave
oven, fatally. Then it turned out Avril's adoptive-slash-half-brother Charles Tavis, who at this time was back chairing A.S.A. at
Throppinghamshire,9696 turned out to be old minor-sport-athletic-administration-network friends with Boston University's varsity
tennis coach. Tavis flew down special on Air Canada to set up a meet between the four of them, Avril and son and Tavis and the
B.U. tennis coach. The B.U. tennis coach was a septuagenaric Ivy League guy, one of those emptily craggily handsome old
patrician men whose profile looks like it ought to be on a coin, who liked his 'lads' to wear all white and actually literally vault the
net, win or lose, after matches. B.U. had only had a couple nationally ranked players, like ever, and that had been in the A.D.
1960s, way before this fashion-conscious guy's tenure; and when the coach saw Orin play he about fell over sideways. Recall how
mediocrity is contextual. B.U.'s players all hailed (literally) from New England country clubs and wore ironed shorts and those
faggy white tennis sweaters with that blood-colored stripe across the chest, and talked without moving their jaw, and played the
sort of stiff and patrician serve-and-volley game you play if you've had lots of summer lessons and club round-robins but had 
never ever had to get out there and kill or die, psychically. Orin wore cut-off jeans and deck-sneakers w/o socks and yawned
compulsively as he beat B.U.'s immaculately groomed #l Singles man 2 and 0, hitting something like 40 offensive lobs for
winners. Then at the four-way meeting Tavis arranged, the old B.U. coach showed up in L.L. Bean chinos and a Lacoste polo shirt
and got a look at the size of Orin's left arm, and then at Orin's Moms in a tight black skirt and levantine jacket with kohl around
her eyes and a moussed tower of hair and about fell back over sideways the other way. She had this effect on older men,
somehow. Orin was in a position to dictate terms limited only by the parameters of B.U.'s own sports-budget mar-ginality.9797
Orin signed a Letter of Intent accepting a Full Ride to B.U., plus books and a Hitachi lap-top w/ software and off-campus housing
and living expenses and a lucrative work-study job where his job was to turn on the sprinklers every morning at the B.U. football
Terriers' historic Nickerson Field, sprinklers that were already on automatic timers — the sprinkler job was B.U.'s tennis team's
one plum, recruitment-wise. Charles Tavis — who at Avril's urging that fall cashed in his Canadian return ticket and stayed on as
Assistant Headmaster to assist Orin's father's oversight of the Academy9898 in a progressively more and more total capacity as
both in- and external travels took J. O. Incandenza away from Enfield more and more often — said 3½ years later that he'd never
really expected a Thank-You from Orin anyway, for liaisoning with the B.U. tennis apparatus, that he wasn't in this for the ThankYous, that a person who did a service for somebody's gratitude was more like a 2-D cutout image of a person than a bona fide
person; at least that's what he thought, he said; he said what did Avril and Hal and Mario think? was he a genuine 3-D person? was
he perhaps just rationalizing away some legitimate hurt? did Orin maybe resent him for seeming to move in just as he, Orin,
moved out? though surely not for Tavis's assuming more and more total control of the E.T.A. helm as J. O. Incandenza spent
increasingly long hiati either off with Mario on shoots or editing in his room off the tunnel or in alcohol-rehabilitative facilities
(13 of them over those final three years; Tavis has the Blue Cross statements right here), and even more surely not for the final
felo de se anyone with any kind of denial-free sensitivity could have predicted for the past 3½ years; but, C.T. opined on 4 July
Y.D.P.A.H. after Orin, who now had plenty of free summer time, declined his fifth straight invitation back to Enfield and his
family's annual barbecue and Wimbledon-Finals-InterLace-spontaneous-dissemination-watching, Orin might just be harboring a
resentment over C.T. moving into the Headmaster's office and changing the door's TE OCCIDERE POS-SUNT. . .' before
Himself's microwaved head had even cooled, even if it was to take over a Headmaster's job that had been positively keening to
have someone sedulous and brisk take over. Incandenza Himself having eliminated his own map on 1 April of the Year of the
Trial-Size Dove Bar just as spring Letters of Intent were due from seniors who'd decided to slouch off to college tennis, just as
invitations for the European-dirt-circuit Invitationals were pouring in all over Lateral Alice Moore's paraboloid desk, just as
E.T.A.'s tax-exempt status was coming up for review before the M.D.R.99 Exemption Panel, just as the school was trying to
readjust to new O.N.A.N.T.A.-accreditation procedures after years of U.S.T.A.-accreditation procedures, just as litigations with
Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital over alleged damage from E.T.A.'s initial hilltop-flattening and with Empire Waste
Displacement over the flight-paths of Concavity-bound displacement vehicles were reaching the appellate stage, just as
applications and fellowships for the Fall term were in the final stages of review and response. Well someone had had to come in
and fill the void, and that person was going to have to be someone who could achieve Total Worry without becoming paralyzed
by the worry or by the absence of minimal Thank-Yous for inglorious duties discharged in the stead of a person whose
replacement was naturally, naturally going to come in for some resentment, Tavis felt, since since you can't get mad at a dying
man, much less at a dead man, who better to assume the stress of filling in as anger-object than that dead man's thankless
inglorious sedulous untiring 3-D bureaucratic assistant and replacement, whose own upstairs room was right next to the HmH's
master bedroom and who might, by some grieving parties, be viewed as some kind of interloping usurper. Tavis had been ready
for all this stress and more, he told the assembled Academy in preparatory remarks before last year's Fall term Convocation,
speaking through amplification from the red-and-gray-bunting-draped crow's nest of Gerhardt Schtitt's transom down into the
rows of folding chairs arranged all along the base-and sidelines of E.T.A. Courts 6-9: he not only fully accepted the stress and
resentment, he said he had worked hard and would continue, in his dull quiet unromantic fashion, to work hard to remain open to
it, to this resentment and sense of loss and irreplaceability, even after four years, to let everyone who needed to get it out get it out,
the anger and resentment and possible contempt, for their own psychological health, since Tavis acknowledged publicly that there
was more than enough on every E.T.A.'s plate to begin with as it was. The Convocation assembly was outside, on the Center
Courts that in winter are sheltered by the Lung. It was 31 August in the Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland, hot
and muggy. Upper-classmen who'd heard these same basic remarks for the past four years made little razor-to-jugular and
hangman's-noose-over-imaginary-cross-beam motions, listening. The sky overhead was glassy blue between clots and strings of
clouds moving swiftly north. On Courts 30-32 the Applied Music Chorus guys kept up a background of 'Tenabrae Factae Sunt,'
sotto v. Everybody had had on the black armbands everybody still wore for functions and assemblies, to keep from forgetting; and
the cotton U.S. and crisp nylon O.N.A.N. flags flapped and clanked halfway down the driveway's poles in remembrance. The
Sunstrand Plaza still as of that fall hadn't yet found a way to muffle its East Newton ATHSCME fans, and Tavis's voice, which
even with the police bullhorn tended to sound distant and receding anyway, wove in and out of the sound of the fans and the
whump of the E.W.D. catapults and locusts' electric screams and the exhaust-rich hot rush of the summer wind up off Comm.
Ave. and the car-horns and Green Line's trundle and clang and the clank of the flags' poles and wires, and everybody but the staff
and littlest kids up front missed most of Tavis's explanation that Salic law'd nothing to do with the fact that there was simply no
way the late Headmaster's beloved spouse and E.T.A. Dean of Academic Affairs and of Females Mrs. Avril Incandenza could
have become Headmaster: how would 'Headmistress' have sounded? and she had the females and female prorectors and Harde's
custodians to oversee, and curricula and assignments and schedules, and complex new O.N.A.N.T.A. accreditation to finalize the
Kafkan application for, plus daily HmH-sterilization and personal-ablution rituals and the constant battle against anthracnose and
dry-climate blight in the dining room's Green Babies, plus of course E.T.A. teaching duties on top of that, with the addition of
untold sleepless nights with the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts, the academic PAC that watchdogged media-syntax and
invited florid fish-lipped guys from the French Academy to come speak with trilled r's on prescriptive preservation, and held
marathon multireadings of e.g. Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language,' and whose Avril-chaired Tactical Phalanx (MGM's)
was then (unsuccessfully, it turned out) court-fighting the new Gentle administration's Title-II/G-public-funded-library-phaseoutfat-trimming initiative, besides of course being practically laid out flat with grief and having to do all the emotional-processing 
work attendant on working through that kind of personal trauma, on top of all of which assuming the administrative tiller of
E.T.A. itself would have been simply an insupportable burden she's thanked C.T. effusively on more than one public occasion for
leaving the plush sinecure of Throppinghamshire and coming down to undertake the stress-ridden tasks not only of bureaucratic
administration and insuring as smooth a transition as possible but of being there for the Incandenza family itself, w/ or w/o ThankYous, and for helping support not only Orin's career and institutional decision-processes but also for being there supportively for
all involved when Orin made his seminal choice not to go ahead and play competitive college tennis after all, at B.U.
What happened was that by the third week of his freshman year Orin was attempting an extremely unlikely defection from
college tennis to college football. The reason he gave his parents — Avril made it clear that the very last thing she wanted was to
have any of her children feel they had to justify or explain to her any sort of abruptly or even bizarrely sudden major decision they
might happen to make, and it's not clear that The Mad Stork had even nailed down the fact that Orin was still in metro-Boston at
B.U. in the first place, but Orin still felt the move demanded some kind of explanation — was that fall tennis practice had started
and he'd discovered that he was an empty withered psychic husk, competitively, burned out.
Orin had been playing, eating, sleeping, and excreting competitive tennis since his racquet was bigger than he was. He said he
realized he had at eighteen become exactly as fine a tennis player as he was ever destined to be. The prospect of further
improvement, a crucial carrot that Schtitt and the E.T.A. staff were expert at dangling, had disappeared at a fourth-rate tennis
program whose coach had a poster of Bill Tilden in his office and offered critique on the level of Bend Your Knees and Watch
The Ball. This was all actually true, the burn-out part, and totally swallowable as far as the from-tennis- part went, but Orin had a
harder time explaining the decision's -to-football component, partly because he had only the vaguest understanding of U.S.
football's rules, tactics, and nonmetric venue; he had in fact never once even touched a real pebbled-leather football before and,
like most serious tennis players, had always found the misshapen ball's schizoid bounces disorienting and upsetting to look at. In
fact the decision had very little to do with football at all, or with the reason Orin ended up starting to give before Avril all but
demanded that he stop feeling in any way pressured or compelled to do anything more than ask for their utter and unqualified
support of whatever actions he felt his personal happiness required, which is what she did when he started a slightly lyrical thing
about the crash of pads and Sisboomba of Pep Squad and ambience of male bonding and smell of dewy turf at Nickerson Field at
dawn when he showed up to watch the sprinklers come on and turn the lemon-wedge of risen sun into plumed rainbows of
refraction. The refracting-sprinklers part was actually true, and that he liked it; the rest had been fiction.
The real football reason, in all its inevitable real-reason banality, was that, over the course of weeks of dawns of watching the
autosprinklers and the Pep Squad (which really did practice at dawn) practices, Orin had developed a horrible schoolboy-grade
crush, complete with dilated pupils and weak knees, for a certain big-haired sophomore baton-twirler he watched twirl and strut
from a distance through the diffracted spectrum of the plumed sprinklers, all the way across the field's dewy turf, a twirler who'd
attended a few of the All-Athletic-Team mixers Orin and his strabismic B.U. doubles partner had gone to, and who danced the
same way she twirled and invoked mass Pep, which is to say in a way that seemed to turn everything solid in Orin's body watery
and distant and oddly refracted.
Orin Incandenza, who like many children of raging alcoholics and OCD-sufferers had internal addictive-sexuality issues, had
already drawn idle little sideways 8's on the postcoital flanks of a dozen B.U. coeds. But this was different. He'd been smitten
before, but not decapitated. He lay on his bed in the autumn P.M.s during the tennis coach's required nap-time, squeezing a tennis
ball and talking for hours about this twirling sprinkler-obscured sophomore while his doubles partner lay way on the other side of
the huge bed looking simultaneously at Orin and at the N.E. leaves changing color in the trees outside the window. The schoolboy
epithet they'd made up to refer to Orin's twirler was the P.G.O.A.T., for the Prettiest Girl Of All Time. It wasn't the entire
attraction, but she really was almost grotesquely lovely. She made the Moms look like the sort of piece of fruit you think you want
to take out of the bin and but then once you're right there over the bin you put back because from close up you can see a much
fresher and less preserved-seeming piece of fruit elsewhere in the bin. The twirler was so pretty that not even the senior B.U.
football Terriers could summon the saliva to speak to her at Athletic mixers. In fact she was almost universally shunned. The
twirler induced in heterosexual males what U.H.I.D. later told her was termed the Actaeon Complex, which is a kind of deep
phylogenic fear of transhuman beauty. About all Orin's doubles partner — who as a strabismic was something of an expert on
female unattain-ability — felt he could do was warn O. that this was the kind of hideously attractive girl you just knew in advance
did not associate with normal collegiate human males, and clearly attended B.U.-Athletic social functions only out of a sort of
bland scientific interest while she waited for the cleft-chinned ascapartic male-model-looking wildly-successful-in-business adult
male she doubtless was involved with to telephone her from the back seat of his green stretch Infiniti, etc. No major-sport player
had ever even orbited in close enough to hear the elisions and apical lapses of a mid-Southern accent in her oddly flat but resonant
voice that sounded like someone enunciating very carefully inside a soundproof enclosure. When she danced, at dances, it was
with other cheerleaders and twirlers and Pep Squad Terrierettes, because no male had the grit or spit to ask her. Orin himself
couldn't get closer than four meters at parties, because he suddenly couldn't figure out where to put the stresses in the CharlesTavis-unwittingly-inspired 'Describe-the-sort-of-man-you-find-attractive-and-ril-affect-the-demeanor-of-that-sort-of-man'
strategic opening that had worked so well on other B.U. Subjects. It took three hearings for him to figure out that her name wasn't
Joel. The big hair was red-gold and the skin peachy-tinged pale and arms freckled and zy-gomatics indescribable and her eyes an
extra-natural HD green. He wouldn't learn till later that the almost pungently clean line-dried-laundry scent that hung about her
was a special low-pH dandelion attar decocted special by her chemist Daddy in Shiny Prize KY.
Boston University's tennis team, needless to say, had neither cheerleaders nor baton-twirling Pep Squads, which were
reserved for major and large-crowd sports. This is pretty understandable.
The tennis coach took Orin's decision hard, and Orin had had to hand him a Kleenex and stand there for several minutes under
the poster of an avuncular Big Bill Tilden standing there in WWII-era long white pants and ruffling a ballboy's hair, Orin
watching the Kleenex soggify and get holes blown through it while he tried to articulate just what he meant by burned out and
withered husk and carrot. The coach had kept asking if this meant Orin's mother wouldn't be coming down to watch practice
anymore.
Orin's now former doubles partner, a strabismic and faggy-sweatered but basically decent guy who also happened to be heir 
to the Nickerson Farms Meat Facsmile fortune, had his cleft-chinned and solidly B.U.-connected Dad make 'a couple quick calls'
from the back seat of his forest-green Lexus. B.U.'s Head Football Coach, the Boss Terrier, an exiled Oklahoman who really did
wear a gray crewneck sweatshirt with a whistle on a string, was intrigued by the size of the left forearm and hand extended
(impolitely but intriguingly) during introductions — this was Orin's tennis arm, roughly churn-sized; the other, whose dimensions
were human, was hidden under a sportcoat draped strategically over the aspiring walk-on's right shoulder.
But you can't play U.S. football with a draped sportcoat. And Orin's only real speed was in tiny three-meter lateral bursts. And
then it turned out that the idea of actually making direct physical contact with an opponent was so deeply ingrained as alien and
horrific that Orin's tryouts, even at reserve positions, were too pathetic to describe. He was called a dragass and then a mollygag
and then a bona fried pussy. He was finally told that he seemed to have some kind of empty swinging sack where his balls ought
to be and that if he wanted to keep his scholarship he might ought to stick to minor-type sports where what you hit didn't up and
hit you back. The Coach finally actually grabbed Orin's facemask and pointed to the mouth of the field's southern tunnel. Orin
walked south off the field solo and disconsolate, helmet under his little right arm, with not even a wistful glance back at the Pep
Squad's P.G.O.A.T. practicing baton-aloft splits in a heart-rendingly distant way beneath the Visitors' northern goalposts.
What metro Boston AAs are trite but correct about is that both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual
person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life:100100 i.e. almost nothing important that ever
happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with
some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to
engineer. The destiny-grade event that happened to Orin Incandenza at this point was that just as he was passing glumly under the
Home goalposts and entering the shadow of the south exit-tunnel's adit a loud and ominously orthopedic cracking sound, plus then
shrieking, issued from somewhere on the field behind him. What had happened was that B.U.'s best defensive tackle — a 180-kilo
future pro who had no teeth and liked to color — practicing Special Teams punt-rushes, not only blocked B.U.'s varsity punter's
kick but committed a serious mental error and kept coming and crashed into the little padless guy while the punter's cleated foot
was still up over his head, falling on him in a beefy heap and snapping everything from femur to tarsus in the punter's leg with a
dreadful high-caliber snap. Two Pep majorettes and a waterboy fainted from the sound of the punter's screams alone. The blocked
punt's ball caromed hard off the defensive tackle's helmet and bounced crazily and rolled untended all the way back to the shadow
of the south tunnel, where Orin had turned to watch the punter writhe and the lineman rise with a finger in his mouth and a guilty
expression. The Defensive Line Coach disconnected his headset and dashed out and began blowing his whistle at the lineman at
extremely close range, over and over, as the huge tackle started to cry and hit himself in the forehead with the heel of his hand.
Since nobody else was close, Orin picked up the blocked punt's ball, which the Head Coach was gesturing impatiently for from his
position at the midfield bench. Orin held the football (which he'd not been very good at it during tryouts, holding onto it), feeling
its weird oval weight, and looked way upfield at the stretcher-bearers and punter and assistants and Coach. It was too far to try to
throw, and there was just no way Orin was making another solo walk up the sideline and then back off the field again under the
distant green gaze of the twirler who owned his CNS.
Orin, before that seminal moment, had never tried to kick any sort of ball before in his whole life, was the unengineered and
kind of vulnerable revelation that ended up moving Joelle van Dyne way more than status or hang-time.
And but as of that moment, as whistles fell from lips and people pointed, and under that same green and sprinkler-hazed gaze
Orin found for himself, within competitive U.S. football, a new niche and carrot. A Show-type career he could never have
dreamed of trying to engineer. Within days he was punting 60 yards without a rush, practicing solo on an outside field with the
Special Teams Assistant, a dreamy Gauloise-smoking man who invoked ideas of sky and flight and called Orin 'ephebe,' which a
discreet phone call to his youngest brother revealed not to be the insult Orin had feared it sounded like. By the second week O.
was up around 65 yards, still without a snap or rush, his rhythm clean and faultless, his concentration on the transaction between
one foot and one leather egg almost frighteningly total. Nor, by the third week, was he much distracted by the ten crazed pituitary
giants bearing down as he took the snap and stepped forward, the gasps and crunching and meaty splats of interpersonal contact
around him, the cooly-type shuffle of the stretcher-bearers who came and went after the whistles blew. He'd been taken aside and
the empty-scrotum crack apologized for, and it had been explained — complete with blow-ups of Rulebook pages — that
regulations against direct physical contact with the punter were draconian, enforced by the threat of massive yardage and loss of
possession. The rifle-shot sounds of the ex-punter's now useless leg were one-in-a-million sounds, he was assured. The Head
Coach let Orin overhear him telling the defense that any man misfortunate enough to impact the team's new stellar punt-man
might could just keep on walking after the play was over, all the way to the south tunnel and the stadium exit and the nearest
transportation to some other institution of learning and ball.
It was, pretty obviously, the start of football season. Crisp air, everything half dead, burning leaves, hot chocolate, raccoon
coats and halftime-twirling and something called the Wave. Crowds exponentially larger and more demonstrative than tennistournament crowds. HOME v. SUNY-Buffalo, HOME v. Syracuse, AT Boston College, AT Rhode Island, HOME v. the despised
Minutemen of UMass-Amherst. Orin's average reached 69 yards per kick and was still improving, his eyes fixed on the twin
inducements of a gleaming baton and a massive developmental carrot he hadn't felt since age fourteen. He punted the football
better and better as his motion — a dancerly combination of moves and weight-transfers every bit as complex and precise as a
kick serve — got more instinctive and he found his hamstrings and adductors loosening through constant and high-impact
competitive punting, his left cleat finishing at 90° to the turf, knee to his nose, Rockette-kicking in the midst of crowd-noise so
rabid and entire it seemed to remove stadiums' air, the one huge wordless orgasmic voice rising and creating a vacuum that sucked
the ball after it into the sky, the leather egg receding as it climbed in a perfect spiral, seeming to chase the very crowd-roar it had
produced.
By Halloween his control was even better than his distance. It wasn't by accident that the Special Teams Assistant described it
as 'touch.' Consider that a football field is basically just a grass tennis court tugged unnaturally long, and that white lines at
complex right angles still define tactics and movement, the very possibility of play. And that Orin Incandenza, who tennishistorically had had mediocre passing shots, had been indicted by Schtitt for depending way too often on the lob he'd developed as
compensation. Like the equally weak-passing Eschaton-prodigy Michael Pemulis after him, Orin's whole limited game had been 
built around a preternatural lob, which of course a lob is just a higher-than-opponent parabola that ideally lands just shy of the
area of play's rear boundary and is hard to retrieve and return. Gerhardt Schtitt and deLínt and their depressed prorectors had had
to sit eating butterless popcorn through only one cartridge of one B.U. game to understand how Orin had found his major-sport
niche. Orin was still just only lobbing, Schtitt observed, illustrating with the pointer and a multiple-replayed fourth down, but now
with the leg instead, the only punting, and now with ten armored and testosterone-flushed factota to deal with what ever return an
opponent could muster; Schtitt posited that Orin had stumbled by accident on a way, in this grotesquely physical and territorial
U.S. game, to legitimate the same dependency on the one shot of lob that had kept him from developing the courage to develop his
weaker areas, which this unwillingness to risk the temporary failure and weakness for long-term gaining had been the real
herbicide on the carrot of Orin Incandenza's tennis. Puberty Schmüberty, as the real reason for burning down the inside fire for
tennis, Schtitt knew. Schtitt's remarks were nodded vigorously at and largely ignored, in the Viewing Room. Schtitt later told
deLint he had several very bad feelings about Orin's future, inside.
But so by freshman Halloween Orin was regularly placing his punts inside the opponents' 20, spinning the ball off his cleats'
laces so it either hit and squiggled outside the white sideline and out of play or else landed on its point and bounced straight up
and seemed to squat in the air, hovering and spinning, waiting for some downfield Terrier to kill it just by touching. The Special
Teams Assistant told Orin that these were historically called coffin-corner kicks, and that Orin Incandenza was the best natural
coffin-corner man he'd lived to see. You almost had to smile. Orin's Full-Ride scholarship was renewed under the aegis of a
brutaler but way more popular North American sport than competitive tennis. This was after the second home game, around the
time that a certain Actaeonizingly pretty baton-twirler, invoking mass Pep during breaks in the action, seemed to begin somehow
directing her glittering sideline routines at Orin in particular. So and then the only really cardiac-grade romantic relationship of
Orin's life took bilateral root at a distance, during games, without one exchanged personal phoneme, a love communicated —
across grassy expanses, against stadiums' monovocal roar — entirely through stylized repetitive motions — his functional, hers
celebratory — their respective little dances of devotion to the spectacle they were both — in their different roles — trying to make
as entertaining as possible.
But so the point was that the accuracy came after the distance. In his first couple games Orin had approached his fourth-down
task as one of simply kicking the ball out of sight and past hope of return. The dreamy S.T. Assistant said this was a punter's
natural pattern of growth and development. Your raw force tends to precede your control. In his initial Home start, wearing a
padless uniform that didn't fit and a wide receiver's number, he was summoned when B.U.'s first drive stalled on the 40 of a
Syracuse team that had no idea it was in its last season of representing an American university. A side-issue. College-sport
analysts would later use the game to contrast the beginning and end of different eras. But a side-issue. Orin had a book-long of 73
yards that day, and an average hang of eight-point-something seconds; but that first official punt, exhilarated — the carrot, the
P.G.O.A.T., the monovocal roar of a major-sport crowd — he sent over the head of the Orangeman back waiting to receive it, over
the goalposts and the safety-nets behind the goalposts, over the first three sections of seats and into the lap of an Emeritus
theology prof in Row 52 who'd needed opera glasses to make out the play itself. It went in the books at 40 yards, that baptismal
competitive punt. It was really almost a 90-yard punt, and had the sort of hang-time the Special Teams Asst. said you could have
tender and sensitive intercourse during. The sound of the podiatric impact had silenced a major-sport crowd, and a retired USMC
flier who always came with petroleum-jelly samples he hawked to the knuckle-chapped crowds in the Nickerson stands told his
cronies in a Brookline watering hole after the game that this Incandenza kid's first public punt had sounded just the way Rolling
Thunder's big-bellied Berthas had sounded, the exaggerated WHUMP of incendiary tonnage, way larger than life.
After four weeks, Orin's success at kicking big egg-shaped balls was way past anything he'd accomplished hitting little round
ones. Granted, the tennis and Eschaton hadn't hurt. But it wasn't all athletic, this affinity for the public punt. It wasn't all just highlevel competitive training and high-pressure experience transported inter-sport. He told Joelle van Dyne, she of the accent and
baton and brainlocking beauty, told her in the course of an increasingly revealing conversation after kind of amazingly she had
approached him at a Columbus Day Major Sport function and asked him to autograph a squooshy-sided football he'd kicked a hole
through in practice — the deflated bladder had landed in the Marching Terriers' sousaphone player's sousaphone and had been
handed over to Joelle after extrication by the lardy tubist, sweaty and dumb under the girl's Ac-taeonizingly imploring gaze —
asked him — Orin now also suddenly damp and blank on anything attractive to say or recite — asked him in an emptily resonant
drawl to inscribe the punctured thing for her Own Personal Daddy, one Joe Lon van Dyne of Shiny Prize KY and she said also of
the Dyne-Riney Proton Donor Reagent Corp. of nearby Boaz KY, and engaged him (O.) in a slowly decreasingly one-sided
social-function-type conversation — the P.G.O.A.T. was pretty easy to stay in a one-to-one like tête-à-tête with, since no other
Terrier could bring himself within four meters of her — and Orin gradually found himself almost meeting her eye as he shared
that he believed it wasn't all athletic, punting's pull for him, that a lot of it seemed emotional and/or even, if there was such a thing
anymore, spiritual: a denial of silence: here were upwards of 30,000 voices, souls, voicing approval as One Soul. He invoked the
raw numbers. The frenzy. He was thinking out loud here. Audience exhortations and approvals so total they ceased to be
numerically distinct and melded into a sort of single coital moan, one big vowel, the sound of the womb, the roar gathering, tidal,
amniotic, the voice of what might as well be God. None of tennis's prim applause cut short by an umpire's patrician shush. He said
he was just speculating here, ad-libbing; he was meeting her eye and not drowning, his dread now transformed into whatever it
had been dread of. He said the sound of all those souls as One Sound, too loud to bear, building, waiting for his foot to release it:
Orin said the thing he thought he liked was he literally could not hear himself think out there, maybe a cliche, but out there transformed, his own self transcended as he'd never escaped himself on the court, a sense of a presence in the sky, the crowd-sound
congregational, the stadium-shaking climax as the ball climbed and inscribed a cathedran arch, seeming to take forever to fall. ... It
never even occurred to him to ask her what sort of demeanor she preferred. He didn't have to strategize or even scheme. Later he
knew what the dread had been dread of. He hadn't had to promise her anything, it turned out. It was all for free.
By the end of his freshman fall and B.U.'s championship of the Yankee Conference, plus its nonvictorious but still
unprecedented appearance at Las Vegas's dignitary-attended K-L-RMKI/Forsythia Bowl, Orin had taken his off-campus housing
subsidy and moved with Joelle van Dyne the heart-stopping Kentuckian into an East Cambridge co-op three subway stops distant
from B.U. and the all-new inconveniences of being publicly stellar at a major sport in a city where people beat each other to death 
in bars over stats and fealty.
Joelle had done the midnight Thanksgiving dinner at E.T.A., and survived Avril, and then Orin spent his first Xmas ever
away from home, flying to Paducah and then driving a rented 4WD to kudzu-hung Shiny Prize, Kentucky, to drink toddies under a
little white reusable Xmas tree with all red balls with Joelle and her mother and Personal Daddy and his loyal pointers, getting a
storm-cellar tour of Joe Lon's incredible Pyrex collection of every solution in the known world that can turn blue litmus paper red,
little red rectangles floating in the flasks for proof, Orin nodding a lot and trying incredibly hard and Joelle saying that Mr. van
D.'s not once smiling at him was just His Way, was all, the way his own Moms had Her Way Joelle'd had trouble with. Orin wired
Marlon Bain and Ross Real and the strabismic Nickerson that he was by all indications in love with somebody.
Freshman New Year's Eve in Shiny Prize, far from the O.N.A.N.ite upheavals of the new Northeast, the last P.M. Before
Subsidization, was the first time Orin saw Joelle ingest very small amounts of cocaine. Orin had exited his own substance-phase
about the time he discovered sex, plus of course the N./O.N.A.N.C.A.A.-urine considerations, and he declined it, the cocaine, but
not in a judgmental or killjoy way, and found he liked being with his P.G.O.A.T. straight while she ingested, he found it exciting,
a vicariously on-the-edge feeling he associated with giving yourself not to any one game's definition but to yourself and how you
unjudgmentally feel about somebody who's high and feeling even freer and better than normal, with you, alone, under the red
balls. They were a natural match here: her ingestion then was recreational, and he not only didn't mind but never made a show of
not minding, nor she that he abstained; the whole substance issue was natural and kind of free. Another reason they seemed starfated was that Joelle had in her sophomore year decided to concentrate in Film/Cartridge, academically, at B.U. Either FilmCartridge Theory or Film-Cartridge Production. Or maybe both. The P.G.O.A.T. was a film fanatic, though her tastes were pretty
corporate: she told O. she preferred movies where 'a whole bunch of shit blows up.'101101 Orinina low-key way introduced her to
art film, conceptual and highbrow academic avant- and après-garde film, and taught her how to use some of InterLace's more
esoteric menus. He blasted up the hill to Enfield and brought down The Mad Stork's own Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and
Hell, which had a major impact on her. Right after Thanksgiving Himself let the P.G.O.A.T. understudy with Leith on the set of
The American Century as Seen Through a Brick in return for getting to film her thumb against a plucked string. After an only
mildly disappointing sophomore season O. flew with her to Toronto to watch part of the filming of Blood Sister: One Tough Nun.
Himself would take Orin and his beloved out after dailies, entertaining Joelle with his freakish gift for Canadian-cab-hailing while
Orin stood turtle-headed in his topcoat; and then later Orin would shepherd the two of them back to their Ontario Place hotel,
stopping the cab to let them both throw up, fireman-carrying Joelle while he watched The Mad Stork negotiate his suite by
holding on to walls. Himself showed them the U. Toronto Conference Center where he and the Moms had first met. This might
have been the end's start, gradually, in hindsight. Joelle that summer declined a sixth summer at the Dixie Baton-Twirling Institute
in Oxford MS and let Himself give her a stage name and use her in rapid succession in Low Temperature Civics, (The) Desire to
Desire, and Safe Boating Is No Accident, travelling with Himself and Mario while Orin stayed in Boston recuperating from minor
surgery on a hypertrophied left quadriceps at a Massachusetts General Hospital where no fewer than four nurses and P.T.s in the
Sports Medicine wing filed for legal separation from their husbands, with custody.
The P.G.O.A.T.'s real ambitions weren't thespian, Orin knew, is one reason he hung in so long. Joelle when he'd met her
already owned some modest personal film equipment, courtesy of her Personal Daddy. And she now had access to nothing if not
serious digital gear. By Orin's sophomore year she no longer twirled or incited Pep in any way. In his first full season she stood
behind various white lines with a little Bolex R32 digital recorder and BTL meters and lenses, including a bitching Angenieux
zoom O.'d gone and paid for, as a gesture, and she shot little half-disk-sector clips of #78, B.U. Punter, sometimes with Leith in
attendance (never Himself), experimenting with speed and focal length and digital mattes, extending herself technically. Orin,
despite his interests in upgrading the P.G.O.A.T.'s commercial tastes, was himself pretty luke-warm on film and cartridges and
theater and pretty much anything that reduced him to herd-like spectation, but he respected Joelle's own creative drives, to an
extent; and he found out that he really did like watching the football footage of Joelle van Dyne, featuring pretty much him only,
strongly preferred the little .5-sector clips to Himself's cartridges or corporate films where things blew up while Joelle bounced in
her seat and pointed at the viewer; and he found them (her clips of him at play) way more engaging than the grainy overcluttered
game- and play-celluloids the Head Coach made everybody sit through. Orin liked to adjust the co-op's rheostat way down when
Joelle wasn't home and haul out the diskettes and make Jiffy Pop and watch her little ten-second clips of him over and over. He
saw something different each time he rewound, something more. The clips of him punting unfolded like time-lapsing flowers and
seemed to reveal him in ways he could never have engineered. He sat rapt. It only happened when he watched them alone.
Sometimes he got an erection. He never masturbated; Joelle came home. Still in the last stages of a late puberty and the prettiness
getting visibly worse day by day, Joelle had been maiden, still, when Orin met her. She'd been shunned theretofore, both at B.U.
and Shiny Prize-Boaz Consolidated: the beauty had repelled every comer. She'd devoted her life to her twirling and amateur film.
Disney Leith said she had the knack: her camera-hand was rock-steady; even the early clips from the start of the Y.W. season
looked shot off a tripod. There'd been no audio in the sophomore clips, and you could hear the high-pitched noise of the cartridge
in the TP's disk drive. A cartridge revolving at a digital diskette's 450 rpm sounds a bit like a distant vacuum cleaner. Late-night
car-noises and sirens drifted in through the bars from as far away as the Storrow 500. Silence was not part of what Orin was after,
watching. (Joelle housekeeps like a fiend. The place is always sterile. The resemblance to the Moms's housekeeping he finds a bit
creepy. Except Joelle doesn't mind a mess or give anybody the creeps worrying about hiding that she minds it so nobody's feelings
will be hurt. With Joelle the mess just disappears sometime during the night and you wake up and the place is sterile. It's like
elves.) Soon after he started watching the clips in his junior year, Orin had blasted up Comm.'s hill and brought Joelle back a
Bolex-compatible Tatsuoka recorder w/ sync pulse, a cardioid mike, a low-end tripod w/ a barney to muffle the Bolex's whir, a
classy Pilotone blooper and sync-pulse cords, a whole auracopia. It took Leith three weeks to teach her to use the Pilotone. Now
the clips had sound. Orin has trouble not burning the Jiffy Pop popcorn. It tends to burn as the foil top inflates; you have to take it
off the stove before the foil forms a dome. No microwave popcorn for Orin, even then. He liked to dim the track-lights when
Joelle was out and haul out the cartridge-rack and watch her little ten-second clips of his punts over and over. Here he is back
against Delaware in the second Home game of Y.T.M.P. The sky is dull and pale, the five Yankee Conference flags — U.
Vermont and UNH now history — are all right out straight with the gale off the Charles for which Nickerson Field is infamous. 
It's fourth down, obviously. Thousands of kilos of padded meat assume four-point stances and chuff at each other, poised to
charge and stave. Orin is twelve yards back from scrimmage, his cleated feet together, his weight just ahead of himself, his
mismatched arms out before him in the attitude of the blind before walls. His eyes are fixed on the distant grass-stained Valentine
of the center's ass. His stance, waiting to receive the snap, is not unlike a diver's, he sees. Nine men on line, four-pointed, poised to
stave off ten men's assault. The other team's deep back is back to receive, seventy yards away or more. The fullback whose sole
job is to keep Orin from harm is ahead and to the left, bent at the knees, his taped fists together and elbows out like a winged thing
ready to hurl itself at whatever breaches the line and comes at the punter. Joelle's equipment isn't quite pro-caliber but her
technique is very good. By junior year there's also color. There's only one sound, and it is utter: the crowd's noise and its response
to that noise, building. Orin's back against Delaware, ready, his helmet a bright noncontact white and his head's insides scrubbed
free for ten seconds of every thought not connected to receiving the long snap and stepping martially forward to lob the leather
egg beyond sight at an altitude that makes the wind no factor. Madame P.G.O.A.T. gets it all, zooming in from the opposite end
zone. She gets his timing; a punt's timing is minutely precise, like a serve's; it's like a solo dance; she gets the ungodly WHUMP
against and above the crowd's vowel's climax; she captures the pendular 180-arc of Orin's leg, the gluteal follow-through that puts
his cleat's laces way over his helmet, the perfect right angle between leg and turf. Her technique is superb on the Delaware debacle
Orin can just barely take reviewing, the one time all year the big chuffing center oversnaps and arcs the ball over Orin's upraised
hands so by the time he's run back and grabbed the crazy-bouncing thing ten yards farther back the Delaware defense has
breached the line, are through the line, the fullback supine and trampled, all ten rushers rushing, wanting nothing more than
personal physical contact with Orin and his leather egg. Joelle gets him sprinting, a three-meter lateral burst as he avoids the first
few sets of hands and the beefy curling lips and but is just about to get personally contacted and knocked out of his cleats by the
Delaware strong safety flying in on a slant from way outside when the tiny .5-sector of digital space each punt's programmed to
require runs out and the crowd-sound moos and dies and you can hear the disk-drive stalled at the terminal byte and Orin's chinstrapped plastic-barred face is there on the giant viewer, frozen and High-Def in his helmet, right before impact, zoomed in on
with a quality lens. Of particular interest are the eyes.
14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
Poor Tony Krause had a seizure on the T. It happened on a Gray Line train from Watertown to Inman Square, Cambridge.
He'd been drinking codeine cough syrup in the men's room of the Armenian Foundation Library in horrid central Watertown MA
for over a week, darting out from cover only to beg a scrip from hideous Equus Reese and then dash in at Brooks Pharmacy,
wearing a simply vile ensemble of synthetic-fiber slacks and suspenders and tweed Donegal cap he'd had to cadge from a
longshoremen's union hall. Poor Tony couldn't dare wear anything comely, not even the Antitoi brothers' red leather coat, not
since that poor woman's bag had turned out to have a heart inside. He had simply never felt so beset and overcome on all sides as
the black July day when it fell to his lot to boost a heart. Who wouldn't wonder Why Me? He didn't dare dress expressive or ever
go back to the Square. And Emil still had him marked for de-mapping as a consequence of that horrid thing with Wo and Bobby C
last winter. Poor Tony hadn't dared show one feather east of Tremont St. or at the Brighton Projects or even Delphina's in
backwater Enfield since last Xmas, even after Emil simply dematerialized from the street-scene; and now since 29 July he was
non grata at Harvard Square and environs; and even the sight of an Oriental now gave him palpitations — say nothing of an
Aigner accessory.
Thus Poor Tony had no way to cop for himself. He could trust no one enough to inject their wares. S. T. Cheese and
Lolasister were no more trustworthy than he himself; he didn't even want them to know where he slept. He began drinking cough
syrup. He managed to get Bridget Tender hole and the strictly rough-trade Stokely Dark Star to cop for him on the wink for a few
weeks, until Stokely died in a Fenway hospice and then Bridget Ten-derhole was shipped by her pimp to Brockton under
maddeningly vague circumstances. Then Poor Tony had read the dark portents and swallowed the first of his pride and hid himself
even more deeply in a dumpster-complex behind the I.B.P.W.D.W.102102 Local #4 Hall in Fort Point downtown and resolved to
stay hidden there for as long as he could swallow the pride to send Lolasister out to acquire heroin, accepting w/o pride or complaint the shameless rip-offs the miserable bitch perpetrated upon him, until a period in October when Lolasister went down with
hepatitis-G and the supply of heroin dried horribly up and the only people even copping enough to chip were people in a position
to dash here and there to great beastly lengths under an open public-access sky and no friend, no matter how dear or indebted,
could afford to cop for another. Then, wholly friend- and connectionless, Poor Tony, in hiding, began to Withdraw From Heroin.
Not just get strung out or sick. Withdraw. The words echoed in his neuralgiac and wigless head with the simply most awful
sinister-footsteps-echoing-in-deserted-corridor quality. Withdrawal. The Wingless Fowl. Turkeyfication. Kicking. The Old Cold
Bird. Poor Tony had never once had to Withdraw, not all the way down the deserted corridor of Withdrawal, not since he first got
strung at seventeen. At the very worst, someone kind had always found him charming, if things got dire enough to have to rent out
his charms. Alas thus about the fact that his charms were now at low ebb. He weighed fifty kilos and his skin was the color of
summer squash. He had terrible shivering-attacks and also perspired. He had a sty that had scraped one eyeball as pink as a
bunny's. His nose ran like twin spigots and the output had a yellow-green tinge he didn't think looked promising at all. There was
an uncomely dry-rot smell about him that even he could smell. In Water-town he tried to pawn his fine auburn wig w/ removable
chignon and was cursed at in Armenian because the wig had infestations from his own hair below. Let's not even mention the
Armenian pawnbroker's critique of his red leather coat.
Poor Tony got more and more ill as he further Withdrew. His symptoms themselves developed symptoms, troughs and nodes
he charted with morbid attention in the dumpster, in his suspenders and horrid tweed cap, clutching a shopping bag with his wig
and coat and comely habilements he could neither wear nor pawn. The empty Empire Displacement Co. dumpster he was hiding
in was new and apple-green and the inside was bare dimpled iron, and it remained new and unutilized because persons declined to
come near enough to utilize it. It took some time for Poor Tony to realize why this was so; for a brief interval it had seemed like a
break, fortune's one wan smile. An E.W.D. land-barge crew set him straight in language that left quite a bit of tact to be wished
for, he felt. The dumpster's green iron cover also leaked when it rained, and it contained already a colony of ants along one wall, 
which insects Poor Tony had ever since a neurasthenic childhood feared and detested in particular, ants; and in direct sunlight the
quarters became a hellish living environment from which even the ants seemed to vanish.
With each step further into the black corridor of actual Withdrawal, Poor Tony Krause stamped his foot and simply refused to
believe things could feel any worse. Then he stopped being able to anticipate when he needed to as it were visit the powder room.
A fastidious gender-dysphoric's horror of incontinence cannot properly be described. Fluids of varying consistency began to pour
w/o advance notice from several openings. Then of course they stayed there, the fluids, on the summer dumpster's iron floor.
There they were, not going anywhere. He had no way to clean up and no way to cop. His entire set of interpersonal associations
consisted of persons who did not care about him plus persons who wished him harm. His own late obstetrician father had rended
his own clothing in symbolic shiva in the Year of the Whopper in the kitchen of the Krause home, 412 Mount Auburn Street,
horrid central Watertown. It was the incontinence plus the prospect of 11/4's monthly Social Assistance checks that drove Poor
Tony out for a mad scampering relocation to an obscure Armenian Foundation Library men's room in Watertown Center, wherein
he tried to arrange a stall as comfortingly as he could with shiny magazine photos and cherished knickknacks and toilet paper laid
down around the seat, and flushed repeatedly, and tried to keep true Withdrawal at some sort of bay with bottles of Codinex Plus.
A tiny percentage of codeine gets metabolized into good old C17-morphine, affording an agonizing hint of what real relief from
The Bird might feel like. I.e. the cough syrup did little more than draw the process out, extend the corridor — it slowed up time.
Poor Tony Krause sat on the insulated toilet in the domesticated stall all day and night, alternately swilling and gushing. He
held his high heels up at !9OOh. when the library staff checked the stalls and turned off all the lights and left Poor Tony in a
darkness within darkness so utter he had no idea where his own limbs were or went. He left that stall maybe once every two days,
scampering madly to Brooks in cast-off shades and a kind of hood or shawl made pathetically of brown men's-room paper towels.
Time began to take on new aspects for him, now, as Withdrawal progressed. Time began to pass with sharp edges. Its passage
in the dark or dim-lit stall was like time was being carried by a procession of ants, a gleaming red martial column of those
militaristic red Southern-U.S. ants that build hideous tall boiling hills; and each vile gleaming ant wanted a minuscule little
portion of Poor Tony's flesh in compensation as it helped bear time slowly forward down the corridor of true Withdrawal. By the
second week in the stall time itself seemed the corridor, lightless at either end. After more time time then ceased to move or be
moved or be move-throughable and assumed a shape above and apart, a huge, musty-feathered, orange-eyed wingless fowl
hunched incontinent atop the stall, with a kind of watchful but deeply uncaring personality that didn't seem keen on Poor Tony
Krause as a person at all, or to wish him well. Not one little bit. It spoke to him from atop the stall, the same things, over and over.
They were unrepeatable. Nothing in even Poor Tony's grim life-experience prepared him for the experience of time with a shape
and an odor, squatting; and the worsening physical symptoms were a spree at Bonwit's compared to time's black assurances that
the symptoms were merely hints, signposts pointing up at a larger, far more dire set of Withdrawal phenomena that hung just
overhead by a string that unravelled steadily with the passage of time. It would not keep still and would not end; it changed shape
and smell. It moved in and out of him like the very most feared prison-shower assailant. Poor Tony had once had the hubris to
fancy he'd had occasion really to shiver, ever, before. But he had never truly really shivered until time's cadences — jagged and
cold and smelling oddly of deodorant — entered his body via several openings — cold the way only damp cold is cold — the
phrase he'd had the gall to have imagined he understood was the phrase chilled to the bone — shard-studded columns of chill
entering to fill his bones with ground glass, and he could hear his joints' glassy crunch with every slightest shift of hunched
position, time ambient and in the air and entering and exiting at will, coldly; and the pain of his breath against his teeth. Time
came to him in the falcon-black of the library night in an orange mohawk and Merry Widow w/ tacky Amalfo pumps and nothing
else. Time spread him and entered him roughly and had its way and left him again in the form of endless gushing liquid shit that
he could not flush enough to keep up with. He spent the longest morbid time trying to fathom whence all the shit came from when
he was ingesting nothing at all but Codinex Plus. Then at some point he realized: time had become the shit itself: Poor Tony had
become an hourglass: time moved through him now; he ceased to exist apart from its jagged-edged flow. He now weighed more
like 45 kg. His legs were the size his comely arms had been, before Withdrawal. He was haunted by the word Zuckung, a foreign
and possibly Yiddish word he did not recall ever before hearing. The word kept echoing in quick-step cadence through his head
without meaning anything. He'd naively assumed that going mad meant you were not aware of going mad; he'd naively pictured
madmen as forever laughing. He kept seeing his sonless father again — removing the training wheels, looking at his pager,
wearing a green gown and mask, pouring iced tea in a pebbled glass, tearing his sportshirt in filial woe, grabbing his shoulder,
sinking to his knees. Stiffening in a bronze casket. Being lowered under the snow at Mount Auburn Cemetery, through dark
glasses from a distance. 'Chilled to the Zuckung.' When, then, even the funds for the codeine syrup were exhausted, he still sat on
the toilet of the rear stall of the A.F.L. loo, surrounded by previously comforting hung habilements and fashion-magazine
photographs he'd fastened to the wall with tape cadged on the way in from the Reference desk, sat for almost a whole nother night
and day, because he had no faith that he could stem the flow of diarrhea long enough to make it anywhere — if anywhere to go
presented itself — in his only pair of gender-appropriate slacks. During hours of lit operation, the men's room was full of old men
who wore identical brown loafers and spoke Slavic and whose rapid-fire flatulence smelled of cabbage.
Toward the end of the day of the second syrupless afternoon (the day of the seizure) Poor Tony Krause began to Withdraw
from the cough syrup's alcohol and codeine and demethylated morphine, now, as well as from the original heroin, yielding a set of
sensations for which not even his recent experience had prepared him (the alcohol-Withdrawal especially); and when the true
D.T.-type big-budget visuals commenced, when the first glossy and minutely hirsute army-ant crawled up his arm and refused
ghostlike to be brushed away or hammered dead, Poor Tony threw his hygienic pride into time's porcelain maw and pulled up his
slacks — mortifyingly wrinkled from 10+ days puddled around his ankles — made what slight cosmetic repairs he could, donned
his tacky hat with Scotch-taped scarf of paper towels, and lit out in last-ditch desperation for Cambridge's Inman Square, for the
sinister and duplicitous Antitoi brothers, their Glass-Entertainment-'N-Notions-fronted operations center he'd long ago vowed
never again to darken the door of and but now figured to be his place of very last resort, the Antitois, Canadians of the Quebec
subgenus, sinister and duplicitous but when it came down to it rather hapless political insurgents he'd twice availed of services
through the offices of Lolasister, now the only persons anywhere he could claim somehow owed him a kindness, since the affair
of the heart. 
In his coat and skallycap-over-scarf on Watertown Center's underground Gray Line platform, when the first hot loose load fell
out into the baggy slacks and down his leg and out around his high heel — he still had only his red high heels with the crossing
straps, which the slacks were long enough to mostly hide — Poor Tony closed his eyes against the ants formicating up and down
his arms' skinny length and screamed a soundless interior scream of utter and soul-scalded woe. His beloved boa fit almost
entirely in one breast pocket, where it stayed in the name of discretion. On the crowded train itself, then, he discovered that he'd
gone in three weeks from being a colorful and comely albeit freakishly comely person to being one of those loathsome urban
specimens that respectable persons on T-trains slide and drift quietly away from without even seeming to notice they're even there.
His scarf of paper towels had come partly untaped. He smelled of bilirubin and yellow sweat and wore week-old eyeliner that
simply did not fly if one needed a shave. There had been some negative urine-incidents as well, in the slacks, to round matters out.
He had simply never in his life felt so unattractive or been so sick. He wept silently in shame and pain at the passage of each
brightly lit public second's edge, and the driver ants that boiled in his lap opened needle-teethed little insectile mouths to catch the
tears. He could feel his erratic pulse in his sty. The Gray Line was of the Green- and Orange-Line trundling-behemoth-type train,
and he sat all alone at one end of the car, feeling each slow second take its cut.
When it descended, the seizure felt less like a separate distinct health-crisis than simply the next exhibit in the corridor of
horrors that was the Old Cold Bird. In actual fact the seizure — a kind of synaptic firefight in Poor Tony's desiccated temporal
lobes — was caused entirely by Withdrawal not From Heroin but from plain old grain alcohol, which was Co-dinex Plus cough
syrup's primary ingredient and balm. He'd consumed upwards of sixteen little Eighty-Proof bottles of Codinex per day for eight
days, and so was cruising for a real neurochemical bruising when he just up and stopped. The first thing that didn't augur very well
was a shower of spark-sized phosphenes from the ceiling of the swaying train, this plus the fiery violet aura around the heads of
the respectables who'd quietly retreated as far as possible from the various puddles in which he sat. Their clean pink faces looked
somehow stricken, each inside a hood of violet flame. Poor Tony didn't know that his silent whimpers had ceased to be silent, was
why everyone in the car had gotten so terribly interested in the floor-tiles between their feet. He knew only that the sudden and
incongruous smell of Old Spice Stick Deodorant, Classic Original Scent — unbidden and unex-plainable, his late obstetric
Poppa's brand, not smelled for years — and the tiny panicked twitters with which Withdrawal's ants skittered glossily up into his
mouth and nose and disappeared (each of course taking its tiny pincered farewell bite as it went) augured some new and vivider
exhibit on the corridor's horizon. He'd become, at puberty, violently allergic to the smell of Old Spice. As he soiled himself and
the plastic seat and floor once again the Classic Scent of times past intensified. Then Poor Tony's body began to swell. He
watched his limbs become airy white dirigibles and felt them deny his authority and detach from him and float sluggishly up
snout-first into the steel-mill sparks the ceiling rained. He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero
sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied.
Then he had a seizure.103103 The floor of the subway car became the ceiling of the subway car and he was on his arched
back in a waterfall of light, gagging on Old Spice and watching his tumid limbs tear-ass around the car's interior like undone
balloons. The booming Zuckung Zuckung Zuckung was his high heels' heels drumming on the soiled floor's tile. He heard a
rushing train-roar that was no train on earth and felt a vascular roaring rushing that until the pain hit seemed like the gathering of a
kind of orgasm of the head. His head inflated hugely and creaked as it stretched, inflating. Then the pain (seizures hurt, is what
few civilians have occasion to know) was the sharp end of a hammer. There was a squeak and rush of release inside his skull and
something shot from him into the air. He saw Bobby ('C') C's blood misting upward in the hot wind of the Copley blower. His
father knelt beside him on the ceiling in a well-rended sleeveless tee-, extolling the Red Sox of Rice and Lynn. Tony wore
summer taffeta. His body flopped around without OK from HQ. He didn't feel one bit like a puppet. He thought of gaffed fish.
The gown had 'a thousand flounces and a saucy bodice of lace crochet.' Then he saw his father, green-gowned and rubber-gloved,
leaning to read the headlines off the skin of a fish a newspaper had wrapped. That had never happened. The largest-print headline
said PUSH. Poor Tony flopped and gasped and pushed down inside and the utter red of the blood that feeds sight bloomed behind
his fluttering lids. Time wasn't passing so much as kneeling beside him in a torn tee-shirt disclosing the rodent-nosed tits of a man
who disdains the care of his once-comely bod. Poor Tony convulsed and drummed and gasped and fluttered, a fountain of light all
around him. He felt a piece of nourishing and possibly even intoxicating meat in the back of his throat but elected not to swallow
it but swallowed it anyway, and was immediately sorry he did; and when his father's bloody-rubbered fingers folded his teeth back
to retrieve the tongue he'd swallowed he refused absolutely to bite down ungratefully on the hand that was taking his food, then
without authorization he pushed and bit down and took the gloved fingers clean off, so there was rubber-wrapped meat in his
mouth again and his father's head exploded into needled antennae of color like an exploding star between his gown's raised green
arms and a call for Zuckung while Tony's heels drummed and struggled against the widening stirrups of light they were hoisted
into while a curtain of red was drawn wetly up over the floor he stared down at, Tony, and he heard someone yelling for someone
to Give In, Err, with a hand on his lace belly as he bore down to PUSH and he saw the legs in the stirrups they held would keep
spreading until they cracked him open and all the way inside-out on the ceiling and his last worry was that red-handed Poppa
could see up his dress, what was hidden.
7 NOVEMBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
Each of the eight to ten prorectors at the Enfield Tennis Academy teaches one academic class per term, usually a once-a-week
Saturday thing. This is mostly for certification reasons,104104 plus all but one of the prorectors are low-level touring
professionals, with low-level professional tennis players in general being not exactly the most candent stars in the intellectual
Orion. Because of all this, their classes tend to be not only electives but Academy jokes, and the E.T.A. Dean of Academic Affairs
regards prorector-taught classes — e.g., in Fall Y.D.A.U., Corbett Thorp's 'Deviant Geometries,' Aubrey deLint's 'Introduction to
Athletic Spreadsheets,' or the colon-mad Tex Watson's 'From Scarcity to Plenty: From Putrid Stuff Out of the Ground to the Atom
in the Mirror: A Lay Look at Energy Resources from Anthracite to Annular Fusion,' etc. — as not satisfying any sort of quadrivial
requirement. But the older E.T.A.s, with more latitude credit- and elective-wise, still tend to clamor and jostle for spots in the
prorectors' seminars, not just because the classes can be passed by pretty much anybody who shows up and displays vital signs, 
but because most of the prorectors are (also like low-level tennis pros as a genus) kind of bats, and their classes are usually
fascinating the way plane-crash footage is fascinating. E.g., although any closed room she's in soon develops a mysterious and
overpowering vitamin-B stink he can just barely stand, E.T.A. senior Ted Schacht has taken Mary Esther Thode's perennially
batsoid 'The Personal Is the Political Is the Psy-chopathological: the Politics of Contemporary Psychopathological Double-Binds'
all three times it's been offered. M. E. Thode is regarded by the up-perclassmen as probably insane, by like clinical standards,
although her coaching proficiency with the Girls' 16's is beyond dispute. A bit on the old side for an E.T.A. prorector, Thode had
been a pupil of Coach G. Schtitt back at Schtitt's infamous old crop-and-epaulette Harry Hopman program in Winter Park FL and
then for a couple years at the new E.T.A. as a top and Show-bound if kind of rabidly political and not too tightly wrapped female
junior. Later blacklisted off both the Virginia Slims and Family Circle professional distaff circuits after trying to organize the
circuits' more politically rabid and unwrapped players into a sort of radical post-feminist grange that would compete only in pro
tournaments organized, subsidized, refereed, overseen, and even attended and cartridge-distributed exclusively to not only women
or homosexual women, but only by, for, and to registered members of the infamously unpopular early-interdependence-era
Female Objectification Prevention and Protest Phalanx,105105 given the shoe, she'd come, practically with a bandanna-tied stick
over her shoulder, back to Coach Schtitt, who for historico-national reasons has always had a soft place inside for anyone who
seems even marginally politically repressed. Last spring's airless and B-redolent section of Thode's psycho-political offering, 'The
Toothless Predator: Breast-Feeding as Sexual Assault,' had been one of the most disorientingly fascinating experiences of Ted
Schacht's intellectual life so far, outside the dentist's chair, whereas this fall's focus on pathologic double-bind-type quandaries
was turning out to be not quite as compelling but weirdly — almost intuitively — easy: E.g., from today's:
The Personal Is the Political Is the Psychopathological: The Politics of
Contemporary Psychopathological Double-Binds
Midterm Examination
Ms. THODE November 7, Yr. of D.A.U.
KEEP YOUR ANSWERS BRIEF AND GENDER NEUTRAL
ITEM
(la) You are an individual who, is pathologically kleptomaniacal. As a kleptomaniac, you are pathologically driven to steal,
steal, steal. You must steal.
(Ib) But, you are also an individual who, is pathologically agoraphobic. As an agoraphobic, you cannot so much as step off
your front step of the porch of your home, without undergoing palpitations, drenching sweats, and feelings of impending doom.
As an agoraphobic, you are driven to pathologically stay home and not leave. You cannot leave home.
(Ic) But, from (la) you are pathologically driven to go out and steal, steal, steal. But, from (Ib) you are pathologically driven
to not ever leave home. You live alone.
Meaning, there is no one else in your home to steal from. Meaning, you must go out, into the marketplace to satisfy your
overwhelming compulsion to steal, steal, steal. But, such is your fear of the marketplace that you cannot under any circumstances,
leave home. Whether your problem is true personal psychopathology, or merely marginalization by a political definition
of'psychopathology,' nevertheless, it is a Double-Bind.
(Id) Thus, respond to the question of, what do you do?
Schacht was just looping the d in mail fraud when Jim Troeltsch's pseudo-radio program, backed by its eustacian-crumpling
operatic soundtrack, came over 112 West House's E.T.A.-intercom speaker up over the classroom clock. When no awaytournaments or meets were going on, WETA student-run 'radio' got to 'broadcast' E.T.A.-related news, sports and community
affairs for ten or so minutes over the closed-circuit intercom every Tuesday and Saturday during the last P.M. class period, like
1435-I445h. Troeltsch, who's dreamed of a tennis-broadcast career ever since it became clear (very early) that he would be in no
way Show-bound — the Troeltsch who spends every last fin his folks send him on his staggering InterLace/SPN-pro-matchcartridge library, and spends almost every free second calling pro action with his room's TP's viewer's volume down;106106 the
kind of pathetic Troeltsch who shamelessly kiss-asses the InterLace/SPN sportscasters whenever he's on the scene of an I/SPNrecorded jr. event,107107 pestering the sportscasters and offering to get them doughnuts and joe, etc.; the Troeltsch who already
owns a whole rack of generic blue blazers and practices combing his hair so that it has that glassy toupee-like look of a real
sportscaster — Troeltsch's been doing the sports portion of WETA's weekly broadcast ever since Schacht's old man died of
ulcerative colitis and Ted came up to join his old childhood doubles partner at the Academy in the fall of the Year of the TrialSize Dove Bar, which had been four months after the late E.T.A. Headmaster's felo de se, when the flags were still at half-mast
and everybody's bicep was banded in black cotton, which the mesomorphic Schacht got excused from because of biceps-size;
Troeltsch'd already been doing WETA sports when he came, and he's been undislodgeable from the post ever since.
The sports portion of WETA's broadcast is mostly just reporting the outcomes and scores of whatever competitive events the
E.T.A. squads have been in since the last broadcast.108108 Troeltsch, who approaches his twice-a-week duties with all possible
verve, will say he feels like the hardest thing about his intercom-broadcasts is keeping things from getting repetitive as he goes
through long lists of who beat whom and by how much. His quest for synonyms for beat and got beat by is never-ending and
serious and a continual source of irritation to his friends. Mary Esther's exams were notorious no-brainers and automatic A's if you
were careful with your third-person pronouns, and even while he listened closely enough to Troeltsch to be able to supply the
audience-feedback that tonight's dinner-table would be inescapable without, Schacht was already on the test's third item, which
concerned exhibitionism among the pathologically shy. 11/7's broadcast results were from E.T.A.'s 71-37 rout of Port
Washington's A and B teams at the Port Washington annual thing.
'John Wayne at A-l 18's beat Port Washington's Bob Francis of Great Neck, New New York, 6-0, 6-2,' Troeltsch says, 'while
A-2 Singles' Hal Incandenza defeated Craig Burda of Vivian Park, Utah, 6-2, 6-1; and while A-3 K. D. Coyle went down in a
hard-fought loss to Port Wash's Shelby van der Merwe of Hempstead, Long Island 6-3, 5-7, 7-5, A-4 Trevor "The Axhandle"
Axford crushed P.W.'s Tapio Martti out of Sonora, Mexico, 7-5, 6-2.’
And so on. By the time it's down to Boys A-i4's, Troeltsch's delivery gets terser even as his attempts at verbiform variety tend
to have gotten more lurid, e.g.: 'LaMont Chu disembowelled Charles Pospisilova 6-3, 6-2; Jeff Penn was on Nate Millis-Johnson 
like a duck on a Junebug 6-4, 6-7, 6-0; Peter Beak spread Ville Dillard on a cracker like some sort of hors d'oeuvre and bit down
6-4, 7-6, while 14's A-4 Idris Arslanian ground his heel into the neck of David Wiere 6-1, 6-4 and P.W.'s 5-man R. Greg Chubb
had to be just about carried off over somebody's shoulder after Todd Possalthwaite moonballed him into a narcoleptic coma 4-6,
6-4, 7-5.’
Some of Corbett Thorp's class on geometric distortions a lot of kids find hard; likewise deLint's class, for the software-inept.
And though Tex Watson's overall handle on Cold-Containment DT-annulation is shaky, his lay-physics survey of combustion and
annulation has some sort of academic validity to it, especially because he some terms gets Pemulis to guest-lecture when he and
Pemulis are in a period of detente. But the only really challenging prorected class ever for Hal Incandenza is turning out to be
Mile. Thierry Poutrincourt's 'Separatism and Return: Québecois History from Frontenac Through the Age of Interdependence,'
which to be candid Hal'd never heard much positive about and had always deflected his Moms's suggestions that he might
profitably take until finally this term's schedule-juggling got dicey, and which (the class) he finds difficult and annoying but
surprisingly less and less dull as the semester wears on, and is actually developing something of a layman's savvy for Canadianism
and O.N.A.N.ite politics, topics he'd previously found for some reason not only dull but queerly distasteful. The rub of this
particular class's difficulty is that Pou-trincourt teaches only in Québecois French, which Hal can get by in because of his youthful
tour through Orin's real-French Pléiade Classics but has never all that much liked, particularly sound-wise, Québecois being a gurgly, glottal language that seems to require a perpetually sour facial expression to pronounce. Hal sees no way of Orin's knowing
he was taking Poutrincourt's 'Separatism and Return' when he called to ask for help with Separatism, which Orin's asking for help
from him with anything was strange enough in itself.
'Bernadette Longley reluctantly bowed to P.W.'s Jessica Pearlberg at 18 A-l Singles 6-4,4-6, 6-2, though A-2 Diane Prins
hopped up and down on the thorax of Port's Marilyn Ng-A-Thiep 7-6, 6-1, and Bridget Boone drove a hot thin spike into the right
eye of Aimee Middleton-Law 6-3, 6-3'; and so on, in classroom after classroom, while instructors grade quizzes or read or tap a
decreasingly patient foot, every Tues./Sat., while Schacht sketches prenatal dentition-charts in his exam's margins w/ a
concentrated look, not wanting to embarrass Thode by handing the no-brainer exam in too soon.
Most of the early-Quebec stuff about Cartier and Roberval and Cap Rouge and Champlain and flocks of Ursuline nuns with
frozen wimples covered up to like U.N. Day Hal'd found mostly dry and repetitive, the wig-and-jerkin gentlemanly warfare stilted
and absurd, like slow-motion slapstick, though everyone'd been sort of queasily intrigued by the way the English Commander
Amherst had handled the Hurons by dispensing free blankets and buckskin that had been carefully coated with smallpox variola.
'14's A-3 Felicity Zweig went absolutely SACPOP on P.W.'s Kiki Pfefferblit 7-6, 6-1, while Gretchen Holt made PW's
Tammi Taylor-Bing sorry her parents were ever even in the same room together 6-0, 6-3. At 5, Ann Kittenplan grimaced and
flexed her way to a 7-5, 2-6, 6-3 win over Paisley Steinkamp, right next to where Jolene Criess at 6 was doing to P.W.'s Mona
Ghent what a quality boot can do to a toadstool, 2 and 2.’
Saluki-faced Thierry Poutrincourt leans back in her chair and closes her eyes and presses her palms hard against her temples
and stays like that all the way through every WETA broadcast, which always interrupts her last-period lecture and puts this
section slightly and maddeningly behind Separation & Return's other section, resulting in two required lesson-preps instead of
one. The sour Saskatchewanese kid next to Hal has been making impressive schematic drawings of automatic weaponry in his
notebook all semester. The kid's assigned ROM-diskettes are always visible in his book-bag still in their wrapper, yet the Skatch
kid always finishes quizzes in like five minutes. It had taken up to the week before Halloween to get through with the B.S. '67
Levesque-Parti-and-Bloc Québecois109109 and early Fronte de la Liberation Nationale stuff and up to the present Interdependent
era. Poutrincourt's lecture-voice has gotten quieter and quieter as history's approached its contemporary limit; and Hal, finding the
stuff rather more high-concept and less dull than he'd expected — seeing himself as at his innermost core apolitical —
nevertheless found the Québecois-Separatism mentality almost impossibly convolved and confused and impervious to U.S.
parsing,110110 plus was both com- and repelled by the fact that the contemporary-anti-O.N.A.N.-insurgence stuff provoked
in him a queasy feeling, not the glittery disorientation of nightmares or on-court panic but a soggier, more furtively nauseous kind
of sense, as if someone had been reading mail of Hal's that he thought he'd thrown away.
The proud and haughty Québecois had been harassing and even terrorizing the rest of Canada over the Separation issue for
time out of mind. It was the establishment of O.N.A.N. and the gerrymandering of the Great Convexity (Poutrincourt's Canadian,
recall) that turned the malevolent attention of Quebec's worst post-F.L.N. insurgents south of the border. Ontario and New
Brunswick took the continental Anschluss and territorial Reconfiguration like good sports. Certain far-right fringes in Alberta
weren't too pleased, but not much pleases an Albertan far-rightist anyway. It was, finally, only the proud and haughty Québecois
who whinged,111111 and the insurgent cells of Quebec who completely lost their political shit.
Quebec's anti-O.N.A.N. and thus -U.S. Séparatisteurs, the different terrorist cells formed when Ottawa had been the foe,
proved to be not a very nice bunch at all. The earliest unignorable strikes involved a then-unknown terrorist cell112112 that
apparently snuck down from the E.W.D.-blighted Pa-pineau region at night and dragged huge standing mirrors across U.S. Interstate 87 at selected dangerous narrow winding Adirondack passes south of the border and its Lucite walls. Naively empiricist
north-bound U.S. motorists — a good many of them military and O.N.A.N.ite personnel, this close to the Concavity — would see
impending headlights and believe some like suicidal idiot or Canadian had transversed the median and was coming right for them.
They'd flash their high beams, but to all appearances the impending idiot would just flash his high beams right back. The U.S.
motorists — usually not to be fucked with in their vehicles, historically, it was well known — would brazen it out as long as
anyone right-minded possibly could, but right before apparent impact with the impending lights they'd always veer wildly and
leave shoulderless 1-87 and put their arm over their head in that screaming pre-crash way and go ass-over-teakettle into an
Adirondack chasm with a many-petaled bloom of Hi-Test flame, and the then-unknown Québecois terrorist cell would remove the
huge mirror and truck off back up north via checkpointless back roads back into the blighted bowels of southern Quebec until next
time. There were fatalities this way well into the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad before anyone had any idea they were diaboliccell-related. For over twenty months the scores of burnt-out hulls piling up in Adirondack chasms were regarded as either suicides
or inexplicable doze-behind-the-wheel-type single-car accidents by NNY State Troopers who had to detach their chinstraps to
scratch under their big brown hats over the mysterious sleepiness that seemed to afflict Adirondack motorists at what looked to be 
high-adrenaline mountaintop passes. Chief of the new United States Office of Unspecified Services Rodney Tine pressed, to his
later embarrassment, for a series of anti-driving-when-drowsy Public Service spots to be InterLace-disseminated in upstate New
New York. It was an actual U.S. would-be suicide, a late-stage Valium-addicted Amway distributor from Schenectady who was at
the end of her benzodioxane-rope and all over the road anyway, and who by historical accounts saw the sudden impending
headlights in her northbound lane as Grace and shut her eyes and floored it right for them, the lights, never once veering, spraying
glass and micronized silver over all four lanes, this unwitting civilian who 'SMASHED THE ILLUSION,' 'MADE THE
BREAKTHROUGH' (media headlines), and brought to light the first tangible evidence of an anti-O.N.A.N. ill will way worse
than anything aroused by plain old historical Separatism, up in Quebec.
The first birth of the Incandenzas' second son was a surprise. The tall and eye-poppingly curvaceous Avril Incandenza did not
show, bled like clockwork; no hemorrhoids or gland-static; no pica; affect and appetite normal; she threw up some mornings but
who didn't in those days?
It was on a metal-lit November evening in the seventh month of a hidden pregnancy that she stopped, Avril, on her husband's
long arm as they ascended the maple staircase of the Back Bay brownstone they were soon to leave, stopped, turned partly toward
him, ashen, and opened her mouth in a mute way that was itself eloquent.
Her husband looked down at her, paling: 'What is it?’
'It's pain.’
It was pain. Broken water had made several steps below them gleam. She seemed to James Incandenza to sort of turn in
toward herself, hold herself low, curl and sink to a stairstep she barely made the edge of, hunched, her forehead against her
shapely knees. Incandenza saw the whole slow thing in a light like he was Vermeer: she sank steadily from his side and he bent to
hers and she then tried to rise.
'Wait wait wait wait. Wait.’
'It's pain.’
A bit ragged from an afternoon of Wild Turkey and low-temperature holography, James had thought Avril was dying right
before his eyes. His own father had dropped dead on a set of stairs. Luckily Avril's half-brother Charles Tavis was upstairs, using
the portable StairMaster he'd brought with him for an extended and emotional-battery-recharging visit the preceding spring, after
the horrible snafu with the video-scoreboard at Toronto's Skydome; and he heard the commotion and scuttled out and down and
promptly took charge.
He had to be more or less scraped out, Mario, like the meat of an oyster from a womb to whose sides he'd been found
spiderishly clinging, tiny and unobtrusive, attached by cords of sinew at both feet and a hand, the other fist stuck to his face by the
same material.113113 He was a complete surprise and terribly premature, and withered, and he spent the next many weeks
waggling his withered and contractured arms up at the Pyrex ceilings of incubators, being fed by tubes and monitored by wires
and cupped in sterile palms, his head cradled by a thumb. Mario had been given the name of Dr. James Incandenza's father's
father, a dour and golf-addicted Green Valley AZ oculist who made a small fortune, just after Jim grew up and fled east, by
inventing those quote X-Ray Specs! that don't work but whose allure for mid-'6os pubescent comic-book readers almost
compelled mail-order, then selling the copyrights to New England novelty-industry titan AcméCo, then promptly in mid-putt died,
Mario Sr. did, allowing James Incandenza Sr. to retire from a sad third career as the Man From Glad114114 in sandwich-bag
commercials during the B.S. 1960s and move back to the saguaro-studded desert he loathed and efficiently drink himself to a
cerebral hemorrhage on a Tucson stairway.
Anyway, Mario II's incomplete gestation and arachnoidal birth left the kid with some lifelong character-building physical
challenges. Size was one, he being in sixth grade about the size of a toddler and at 18+ in a range somewhere between elf and
jockey. There was the matter of the withered-looking and bradyauxetic arms, which just as in a hair-raising case of Volk-mann's
contracture115115 curled out in front of his thorax in magiscule S's and were usable for rudimentary knifeless eating and slapping
at doorknobs until they sort of turned just enough and doors could be kicked open and forming a pretend lens-frame to scout
scenes through, plus maybe tossing tennis balls very short distances to players who wanted them, but not for much else, though
the arms were impressively — almost familial-dysautonomically — pain-resistant, and could be pinched, punctured, singed, and
even compressed in a basement optical-device-securing viselike thing by Mario's older brother Orin without effect or complaint.
Bradypedestríanism-wise, Mario had not so much club feet as more like block feet: not only flat but perfectly square, good for
kicking knob-fumbled doors open with but too short to be conventionally employed as feet: together with the lordosis in his lower
spine, they force Mario to move in the sort of lurchy half-stumble of a vaudeville inebriate, body tilted way forward as if into a
wind, right on the edge of pitching face-first onto the ground, which as a child he did fairly often, whether given a bit of a shove
from behind by his older brother Orin or no. The frequent forward falls help explain why Mario's nose was squished severely in
and so flared out to either side of his face but did not rise from it, with the consequence that his nostrils tended to flap just a bit,
particularly during sleep. One eyelid hung lower than the other over his open eyes — good and gently brown eyes, if a bit large
and protrusive to qualify as conventionally human eyes — the one lid hung like an ill-tempered windowshade, and his older
brother Orin had sometimes tried to give the recalcitrant lid that smart type of downward snap that can unstick a dicky shade, but
had succeeded only in gradually loosening the lid from its sutures, so that it eventually had to be refashioned and reattached in yet
another blepharoplasty-procedure, because it was in fact not Mario's real eyelid — that had been sacrificed when the fist stuck to
his face like a tongue to cold metal had been peeled away, at nativity — but an extremely advanced blepharoprosthesis of dermal
fibropolymer studded with horsehair lashes that curved out into space well beyond the reach of his other lid's lashes and together
with the lazy lid-action itself gave even Mario's most neutral expression the character of an oddly friendly pirate's squint. Together
with the involuntarily constant smile.
This is probably also the place to mention Hal's older brother Mario's khaki-colored skin, an odd dead gray-green that in its
corticate texture and together with his atrophic in-curled arms and arachnodactylism gave him, particularly from a middledistance, an almost uncannily reptilian/ dinosaurian look. The fingers being not only mucronate and talonesque but nonprehensile,
which is what made Mario's knifework untenable at table. Plus the thin lank slack hair, at once tattered and somehow too smooth,
that looked at 18+ like the hair of a short plump 48-year-old stress engineer and athletic director and Academy Headmaster who 
grows one side to girlish length and carefully combs it so it rides thinly up and over the gleaming yarmulke of bare gray-greencomplected scalp on top and down over the other side where it hangs lank and fools no one and tends to flap back up over in any
wind Charles Tavis forgets to carefully keep his left side to. Or that he's slow, Hal's brother is, technically, Stanford-Binet-wise,
slow, the Brandeis C.D.C. found — but not, verifiably not, retarded or cognitively damaged or bradyphrenic, more like refracted,
almost, ever so slightly epis-temically bent, a pole poked into mental water and just a little off and just taking a little bit longer, in
the manner of all refracted things.
Or that his status at the Enfield Tennis Academy — erected, along with Dr. and Mrs. Fs marriage's third and final home at the
northern rear of the grounds, when Mario was nine and Hallie eight and Orin seventeen and in his one E.T.A. year B-4 Singles
and in the U.S.T.A.'s top 75 — that Mario's life there is by all appearances kind of a sad and left-out-type existence, the only
physically challenged minor in residence, unable even to grip a regulation stick or stand unaided behind a boundaried space. That
he and his late father had been, no pun intended, inseparable. That Mario'd been like an honorary assistant production-assistant
and carried the late Incan-denza's film and lenses and filters in a complex backpack the size of a joint of beef for most of the last
three years of the late-blooming filmmaker's life, attending him on shoots and sleeping with multiple pillows in small soft
available spaces in the same motel room as Himself and occasionally tottering out for a bright-red plastic bottle of something
called Big Red Soda Water and taking it to the apparently mute veiled graduate-intern down the motel's hall, fetching coffee and
joe and various pancreatitis-remedies and odds and ends for props and helping D. Leith out with Continuity when Incandenza
wanted to preserve Continuity, basically being the way any son would be whose dad let him into his heart's final and best-loved
love, lurching gamely but not pathetically to keep up with the tall stooped increasingly bats man's slow patient two-meter stride
through airports, train stations, carrying the lenses, inclined ever forward but in no way resembling any kind of leashed pet.
When required to stand upright and still, like when videotaping an E.T.A.'s service motion or manning the light meters on the
set of a high-contrast chiaroscuro art film, Mario in his forward list is supported by a NNYC-apartrnent-door-style police lock, a
.7-meter steel pole that extends from a special Velcroed vest and angles about 40° down and out to a slotted piece of lead blocking
(a bitch to carry, in that complicated pack) placed by someone understanding and prehensile on the ground before him. He stood
thus buttressed on sets Himself had him help erect and furnish and light, the lighting usually unbelievably complex and for some
parts of the crew sometimes almost blinding, sunbursts of angled mirrors and Marino lamps and key-light kliegs, Mario getting a
thorough technical grounding in a cinematic craft he never even imagined being able to pursue on his own until Xmas of the Year
of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, when a gaily wrapped package forwarded from the offices of Incandenza's attorney revealed that
Himself had designed and built and legally willed (in a codicil) to be gaily wrapped and forwarded for Mario's thirteenth Xmas a
trusty old Bolex H64 Rex 5116116 tri-lensed camera bolted to an oversized old leather aviator's helmet and supported by struts
whose ends were the inverted tops of training-room crutches and curved nicely over Mario's shoulders, so the Bolex H64 required
no digital prehensility because it fit over Mario's oversized face117117 like a tri-plated scuba mask and was controlled by a
sewing-machine-adapted foot treadle, and but even then it took some serious getting used to, and Mario's earliest pieces of digital
juvenilia are marred/enhanced by this palsied, pointing-every-which-way quality of like home movies shot at a dead run.
Five years hence, Mario's facility with the head-mount Bolex attenuates the sadness of his status here, allowing him to
contribute via making the annual E.T.A. fundraising documentary cartridge, videotaping students' strokes and occasionally from
over the railing of Schtitt's supervisory transom the occasional challenge-match — the taping's become part of the pro-instruction
package detailed in the E.T.A. catalogue — plus producing more ambitious, arty-type things that occasionally find a bit of an àclef-type following in the E.T.A. community.
After Orin Incandenza left the nest to first hit and then kick collegiate balls, there was almost nobody at E.T.A. or its EnfieldBrighton environs who did not treat Mario M. Incandenza with the casual gentility of somebody who doesn't pity you or admire
you so much as just vaguely prefer it when you're around. And Mario — despite rectilinear feet and cumbersome police lock the
most prodigious walker-and-recorder in three districts — hit the unsheltered area streets daily at a very slow pace, a halting
constitutional, sometimes w/ head-mounted Bolex and sometimes not, and took citizens' kindness and cruelty the same way, with
a kind of extra-inclined half-bow that mocked his own canted posture without pity or cringe. Mario's an especial favorite among
the low-rent shopkeepers up and down E.T.A.'s stretch of Commonwealth Ave., and photographic stills from some of his better
efforts adorn the walls behind certain Comm. Ave. deli counters and steam presses and Korean-keyed cash registers. The object of
a strange and maybe kind of cliquey affection from Lyle the Spandexed sweat-guru, to whom he sometimes brings Caffeine-Free
Diet Cokes to cut the diet's salt, Mario sometimes finds younger E.T.A.s referred to him by Lyle on really ticklish matters of
injury and incapacity and character and rallying-what-remains, and never much knows what to say. Trainer Barry Loach all but
kisses the kid's ring, since it's Mario who through coincidence saved him from the rank panhandling underbelly of Boston
Common's netherworld and more or less got him his job.118118 Plus of course there's the fact that Schtitt himself
constitutionalizes with him, of certain warm evenings, and lets him ride in his surplus sidecar. An object of some weird attractorepulsive gestalt for Charles Tavis, Mario treats C.T. with the quiet deference he can feel his possible half-uncle wanting, and
stays out of his way as much as possible, for Tavis's sake. Players at Denny's, when they all get to go to Denny's, almost vie to see
who gets to cut up the cut-upable parts of Mario's under-12-size Kilobreakfast.
And his younger and way more externally impressive brother Hal almost idealizes Mario, secretly. God-type issues aside,
Mario is a (semi-) walking miracle, Hal believes. People who're somehow burned at birth, withered or ablated way past anything
like what might be fair, they either curl up in their fire, or else they rise. Withered saurian homodontic119119 Mario floats, for
Hal. He calls him Booboo but fears his opinion more than probably anybody except their Moms's. Hal remembers the unending
hours of blocks and balls on the hardwood floors of early childhood's 36 Belle Ave., Weston MA, tangrams and See 'N Spell,
huge-headed Mario hanging in there for games he could not play, for make-believe in which he had no interest other than
proximity to his brother. Avril remembers Mario still wanting Hal to help him with bathing and dressing at thirteen — an age
when most unchallenged kids are ashamed of the very space their sound pink bodies take up — and wanting the help for Hal's
sake, not his own. Despite himself (and showing a striking lack of insight into his Moms's psyche), Hal fears that Avril sees Mario
as the family's real prodigy, an in-bent savant-type genius of no classifiable type, a very rare and shining thing, even if his
intuition — slow and silent — scares her, his academic poverty breaks her heart, the smile he puts on each A.M. without fail since 
the suicide of their father makes her wish she could cry. This is why she tries so terribly hard to leave Mario alone, not to hover or
wring, to treat him so less specially than she wants: it is for him. It is kind of noble, pitiable. Her love for the son who was born a
surprise transcends all other experiences and informs her life. Hal suspects. It was Mario, not Avril, who obtained Hal his first
copies of the unabridged O.E.D. at a time when Hal was still being shunted around for the assessment of possible damage,
Booboo pulling them home in a wagon by his bicuspids over the fake-rural blacktop roads of upscale Weston, months before Hal
tested out at Whatever's Beyond Eidetic on the Mnemonic Verbal Inventory designed by a dear and trusted colleague of the Moms
at Brandeis. It was Avril, not Hal, who insisted that Mario live not in HmH with her and Charles Tavis but with Hal in an E.T.A.
subdorm. But in the Year of Dairy Products From the American Heartland it was Hal, not she, who, when the veiled legate from
the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed showed up at the E.T.A. driveway's portcullis to discuss with Mario issues
of blind inclusion v. visual estrangement, of the openness of concealment the veil might afford him, it was Hal, even as Mario
laughed and half-bowed, it was Hal, brandishing his Dunlop stick, who told the guy to go peddle his linen someplace else.
30 APRIL / 1 MAY YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
The sky of U.S.A.'s desert was clotted with blue stars. Now it was deep at night. Only above the U.S.A. city was the sky
blank of stars; its color was pearly and blank. Marathe shrugged. 'Perhaps in you is the sense that citizens of Canada are not
involved in the real root of the threat.’
Steeply shook the head in seeming annoyance. 'What's that supposed to mean?' he said. The lurid wig of him slipped when he
moved the head with any abrupt force.
The first way Marathe betrayed anything of emotion was to smooth rather too fussily at the blanket on his lap. 'It is meaning
that it will not of finality be Québecers making this kick to I'aìne des Etats Urn's. Look: the facts of the situation speak loudly.
What is known. This is a U.S.A. production, this Entertainment cartridge. Made by an American man in the U.S.A. The appetite
for the appeal of it: this also is U.S.A. The U.S.A. drive for spectation, which your culture teaches. This I was saying: this is why
choosing is everything. When I say to you choose with great care in loving and you make ridicule it is why I look and say: can I
believe this man is saying this thing of ridicule?' Marathe leaned slightly forward on his stumps, leaving the machine pistol to use
both his hands in saying. Steeply could tell this was important to Marathe; he really believed it.
Marathe made small emphatic circles and cuts in the air while he spoke: 'These facts of situation, which speak so loudly of
your Bureau's fear of this samizdat: now is what has happened when a people choose nothing over themselves to love, each one. A
U.S.A. that would die — and let its children die, each one — for the so-called perfect Entertainment, this film. Who would die for
this chance to be fed this death of pleasure with spoons, in their warm homes, alone, unmoving: Hugh Steeply, in complete
seriousness as a citizen of your neighbor I say to you: forget for a moment the Entertainment, and think instead about a U.S.A.
where such a thing could be possible enough for your Office to fear: can such a U.S.A. hope to survive for a much longer time?
To survive as a nation of peoples? To much less exercise dominion over other nations of other peoples? If these are other peoples
who still know what it is to choose? who will die for something larger? who will sacrifice the warm home, the loved woman at
home, their legs, their life even, for something more than their own wishes of sentiment? who would choose not to die for
pleasure, alone?’
Steeply removed with cool deliberation another Belgian cigarette and lit it, this time on the first match. Waving the match out
with a circular flourish and snap. All this took time of his silence. Marathe settled back. Marathe wondered why the presence of
Americans could always make him feel vaguely ashamed after saying things he believed. An aftertaste of shame after revealing
passion of any belief and type when with Americans, as if he had made flatulence instead of had revealed belief.
Steeply rested his one elbow on the forearm of the other arm across his prostheses, to smoke like a woman: 'You're saying
that the administration wouldn't even be concerned about the Entertainment if we didn't know we were fatally weak. As in as a
nation. You're saying the fact that we're worried speaks volumes about the nation itself.’
Marathe shrugged. 'Us, we will force nothing on U.S.A. persons in their warm homes. We will make only available.
Entertainment. There will be then some choosing, to partake or choose not to.' Smoothing slightly at his lap's blanket. 'How will
U.S.A.s choose? Who has taught them to choose with care? How will your Offices and Agencies protect them, your people?
By laws? By killing Québecois?' Marathe rose, but very slightly. 'As you were killing Colombians and Bolivians to protect
U.S.A. citizens who desire their narcotics? How well did this work for your Agencies and Offices, the killing? How long was it
before the Brazilians replaced the dead of Colombia?’
Steeply's wig had slipped hard to starboard. 'Rémy, no. Drug-dealers don't want you dead, necessarily; they just want your
money. There's a difference. You people seem to want us dead. Not just the Concavity re-demised. Not just secession for Quebec.
The F.L.Q., maybe they're like the Bolivians. But Fortier wants us dead.’
'Again you pass over what is important. Why B.S.S. cannot understand us. You cannot kill what is already dead.’
'Just you wait and see if we're dead, paisano.’
Marathe made a gesture as if striking his own head. 'Again passing over the important. This appetite to choose death by
pleasure if it is available to choose — this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death. What you call the
death, the collapsing: this will be the formality only. Do you not see? This was the genius of Guillaume DuPlessis, what M.
DuPlessis taught the cells, even if F.L.Q. and les Fils did not understand. Much less the Albertans, all crazy inside their head. We
of the A.F.R., we understand. This is why this cell of Québecers, that danger of Entertainment so fine it will kill the viewer, if so
— the exact way does not matter. The exact time of death and way of death, this no longer matters. Not for your peoples. You
wish to protect them? But you can only delay. Not save. The Entertainment exists. The attache and gendarmes of the razzle
incident — more proof. It is there, existing. The choice for death of the head by pleasure now exists, and your authorities know, or
you would not be now trying to stop the pleasure. Your Sans-Christe Gentle was in this one part correct: "Someone is to blame."
'That had nothing to do with the Reconfiguration. The Reconfiguration was self-preservation.’
'That: forget it. There is the villain he saw you needed, all of you, to delay this splitting apart. To keep you together, the
hating some other. Gentle is crazy in his head, but in this "fault of someone" he was correct in saying it. Un ennemi commun. But 
not someone outside you, this enemy. Someone or some people among your own history sometime killed your U.S.A. nation
already, Hugh. Someone who had authority, or should have had authority and did not exercise authority. I do not know. But
someone sometime let you forget how to choose, and what. Someone let your peoples forget it was the only thing of importance,
choosing. So completely forgetting that when I say choose to you you make expressions with your face such as "Herrrrrre we are
going," Someone taught that temples are for fanatics only and took away the temples and promised there was no need for temples.
And now there is no shelter. And no map for finding the shelter of a temple. And you all stumble about in the dark, this confusion
of permissions. The without-end pursuit of a happiness of which someone let you forget the old things which made happiness
possible. How is it you say: "Anything is going"'?’
'And this is why we shudder at what a separate Quebec would be like. Choose what we tell you, neglect your own wish and
desires, sacrifice. For Quebec. For the State.’
Marathe shrugged. 'L'état protecteur.’
Steeply said 'Does this sound a little familiar, Rémy? The National Socialist Neofascist State of Separate Quebec? You guys
are worse than the worst Albertans. Totalitarity. Cuba with snow. Ski immediately to your nearest reeducation camp, for
instructions on choosing. Moral eugenics. China. Cambodia. Chad. Unfree.’
'Unhappy.’
'There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and
contemptible in us — these are just the hazards of being free.’
'But what does this U.S.A. expression want to mean, this Buckeroo?’
Steeply turned to face away into the space they were above. 'And now here we go. Now you will say how free are we if you
dangle fatal fruit before us and we cannot help ourselves from temptation. And we say "human" to you. We say that one cannot be
human without freedom.’
Marathe's chair squeaked slightly as his weight shifted. 'Always with you this freedom! For your walled-up country, always to
shout "Freedom! Freedom!" as if it were obvious to all people what it wants to mean, this word. But look: it is not so simple as
that. Your freedom is the freedom-from: no one tells your precious individual U.S.A. selves what they must do. It is this meaning
only, this freedom from constraint and forced duress.' Marathe over Steeply's shoulder suddenly could realize why the skies above
the coruscating city were themselves erased of stars: it was the fumes from the exhaust's wastes of the moving autos' pretty lights
that rose and hid stars from the city and made the city Tucson's lume nacreous in the dome's blankness of it. 'But what of the
freedom-tor1 Not just free-from. Not all compulsion comes from without. You pretend you do not see this. What of freedom-to.
How for the person to freely choose? How to choose any but a child's greedy choices if there is no loving-filled father to guide,
inform, teach the person how to choose? How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?’
Steeply threw away a cigarette and faced partly Marathe, from the edge: 'Now the story of the rich man.’
Marathe said 'The rich father who can afford the cost of candy as well as food for his children: but if he cries out "Freedom!"
and allows his child to choose only what is sweet, eating only candy, not pea soup and bread and eggs, so his child becomes weak
and sick: is the rich man who cries "Freedom!" the good father?’
Steeply made four small noises. Excitement of some belief made the American's electrolysis's little pimples of rash redden
even in the milky dilute light of lume and low stars. The moon over the Mountains of Rincon was on its side, its color the color of
a fat man's face. Marathe could believe he could hear some young U.S.A. voices shouting and laughing in a young gathering
somewhere out on the desert floor below, but saw no headlights or young persons. Steeply stamped a high heel in frustration.
Steeply said:
'But U.S. citizens aren't presumed by us to be children, to pater-nalistically do their thinking and choosing for them. Human
beings are not children.’
Marathe pretended again to sniff.
'Ah, yes, but then you say: No?' Steeply said. 'No? you say, not children? You say: What is the difference, please, if you make
a recorded pleasure so entertaining and diverting it is lethal to persons, you find a Copy-Capable copy and copy it and disseminate
it for us to choose to see or turn off, and if we cannot choose to resist it, the pleasure, and cannot choose instead to live? You say
what your Fortier believes, that we are children, not human adults like the noble Québecers, we are children, bullies but still
children inside, and will kill ourselves for you if you put the candy within the arms' reach.’
Marathe tried to make his face expressive of anger, which was difficult for him. 'This is what happens: you imagine the things
I will say and then say them for me and then become angry with them. Without my mouth; it never opens. You speak to yourself,
inventing sides. This itself is the habit of children: lazy, lonely, self. I am not even here, possibly, for listening to.’
Unmentioned by either man was how in heaven's name either man expected to get up or down from the mountainside's shelf
in the dark of the U.S. desert's night.
8 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
INTERDEPENDENCE DAY
GAUDEAMUS IGITUR
Every year at E.T.A., maybe a dozen of the kids between maybe like twelve and fifteen — children in the very earliest stages
of puberty and really abstract-capable thought, when one's allergy to the confining realities of the present is just starting to emerge
as weird kind of nostalgia for stuff you never even knew120120 — maybe a dozen of these kids, mostly male, get fanatically
devoted to a homemade Academy game called Eschaton. Eschaton is the most complicated children's game anybody around
E.T.A.'d ever heard of. No one's entirely sure who brought it to Enfield from where. But you can pretty easily date its conception
from the mechanics of the game itself. Its basic structure had already pretty much coalesced when Allston's Michael Pemulis hit
age twelve and helped make it way more compelling. Its elegant complexity, combined with a dismissive-reenactment frisson and
a complete disassociation from the realities of the present, composes most of its puerile appeal. Plus it's almost addictively
compelling, and shocks the tall. 
This year it's been Otis P. Lord, a thirteen-year-old baseliner and calculus phenom from Wilmington DE, who 'Wears the
Beanie' as Eschaton's game-master and statistician of record, though Pemulis, since he's still around and is far and away the
greatest Eschaton player in E.T.A. history, has a kind of unofficial emeritus power of correction over Lord's calculations and mandate.
Eschaton takes eight to twelve people to play, w/ 400 tennis balls so dead and bald they can't even be used for service drills
anymore, plus an open expanse equal to the area of four contiguous tennis courts, plus a head for data-retrieval and coldly logical
cognition, along with at least 40 megabytes of available RAM and wide array of tennis paraphernalia. The vade-mecumish
rulebook that Pemulis in Y.P.W. got Hal Incandenza to write — with appendices and sample c:\Pink2\Mathpak\EndStat-path
Decision-Tree diagrams and an offset of the most accessible essay Pemulis could find on applied game theory — is about as long
and interesting as J. Bunyan's stupefying Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come, and a pretty tough nut to
compress into anything lively (although every year a dozen more E.T.A. kids memorize the thing at such a fanatical depth that
they sometimes report reciting mumbled passages under light dental or cosmetic anesthesia, years later). But if Hal had a Luger
pointed at him and were under compulsion to try, he'd probably start by explaining that each of the 400 dead tennis balls in the
game's global arsenal represents a 5-mega-ton thermonuclear warhead. Of the total number of a given day's players,121121 three
compose a theoretical Anschluss designated AMNAT, another three SOVWAR, one or two REDCHI, another one or two the
wacko but always pesky LIBSYR or more formidable IRLIBSYR, and that the day's remaining players, depending on involved
random considerations, can form anything from SOUTHAF to INDPAK to like an independent cell of Nuck insurgents with a 50-
click Howitzer and big ideas. Each team is called a Combatant. On the open expanse of contiguous courts, Combatants are arrayed
in positions corresponding to their location on the planet earth as represented in The Rand McNally Slightly Rectangular Hanging
Map of the World.122122 Practical distribution of total megatonnage requires a working knowledge of the Mean-Value Theorem
for Integrals,123123 but for Hal's synoptic purposes here it's enough to say that megatonnage is distributed among Combatants
according to an integrally regressed ratio of (a) Combatant's yearly military budget as percentage of Combatant's yearly GNP to
(b) the inverse of stratego-tactical expenditures as percentage of Combatant's yearly military budget. In quainter days, Combatants'
balls were simply doled out by throws of shiny red Yahtzee-dice. Quaint chance is no longer required, because Pemulis has
downloaded Mathpak Unltd.'s elegant EndStat124124 stats-cruncher software into the late James Incandenza's fearsome idle dropclothed D.E.C. 2100, and has shown Otis P. Lord how to dicky the lock to Schtitt's office at night with a dining-hall meal card and
plug the D.E.C. into a three-prong that's under the lower left corner of the enormous print of Dürer's 'The Magnificent Beast' on
the wall by the relevant edge of Schtitt's big glass desk, so Schtitt or deLint won't even know it's on, when it's on, then link it by
cellular modem to a slick Yushityu portable with color monitor out on the courts' nuclear theater. AMNAT and SOVWAR usually
end up with about 400 total megatons each, with the rest inconsistently divided. It's possible to complicate Pemulis's Mean-Value
equation for distribution by factoring in stuff like historical incidences of bellicosity and appeasement, unique characteristics of
perceived national interests, etc., but Lord, the son of not one but two bankers, is a straight bang-for-buck type of apportíoner, a
stance the equally bottom-line-minded Michael Pemulis endorses with both thumbs. Pieces of tennis gear are carefully placed
within each Combatant's territories to mirror and map strategic targets. Folded gray-on-red E.T.A. T-shirts are MAMAs — Major
Metro Areas. Towels stolen from selected motels on the junior tour stand for airfields, bridges, satellite-linked monitoring
facilities, carrier groups, conventional power plants, important rail convergences. Red tennis shorts with gray trim are
CONFORCONs — Conventional-Force Concentrations. The black cotton E.T.A. armbands — for when God forbid there's a death
— designate the noncontemporary game-era's atomic power plants, uranium-/ plutonium-enrichment facilities, gaseous diffusion
plants, breeder reactors, initiator factories, neutron-scattering-reflector labs, tritium-production reactor vessels, heavy-water plants,
semiprivate shaped-charge concerns, linear accelerators, and the especially point-heavy Annular Fusion research laboratories in
North Syracuse NNY and Presque Isle ME, Chyonskrg Kurgistan and Pliscu Romania, and possibly elsewhere. Red shorts with
gray trim (few in number because strongly disliked by the travelling squads) are SSTRACs — equally low-number but pointintensive Sites of Strategic Command. Socks are either missile installations or antimissile installations or isolated silo-clusters or
Cruise-capable B2 or SS5 squadrons — let's draw the curtain of charity across any more MILABBREVs — depending on whether
they're boys' tennis socks or boys' street-shoe socks or girls' tennis socks with the little bunny-tail at the heel or girls' tennis socks
w/o the bunny-tail. Toe-worn cast-off corporate-supplied sneakers sit open-mouthed and serenely lethal, strongly suggesting the
subs they stand for.
In the game, Combatants' 5-megaton warheads can be launched only with hand-held tennis racquets. Hence the requirement
of actual physical targeting-skill that separates Eschaton from rotisserie-league holocaust games played with protractors and PCs
around kitchen tables. The paraboloid transcontinental flight of a liquid-fuel strategic delivery vehicle closely resembles a topspin
lob. One reason the E.T.A. administration and staff unofficially permit Eschaton to absorb students' attention and commitment
might be that the game's devotees tend to develop terrific lobs. Pemulis's lobs can nail a coin on the baseline two out of three times
off either side, is why it's idiotic that he rushes the net so much instead of letting the other guy come in more. Warheads can be
launched independently or packed into an intricately knotted athletic supporter designed to open out in midflight and release
Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles — MIRVs. MIRVs, being a profligate use of a Combatant's available megatonnage, tend
to get used only if a game of Eschaton metastasizes from a controlled set of Spasm Exchanges — SPASEX — to an all-out
apocalyptic series of punishing Strikes Against Civilian Populations — SACPOP. Few Combatants will go to SACPOP unless
compelled by the remorseless logic of game theory, since SACPOP-exchanges usually end up costing both Combatants so many
points they're eliminated from further contention. A given Es-chaton's winning team is simply that Combatant with the most
favorable ratio of points for INDDIR — Infliction of Death, Destruction, and Inca-pacitation of Response — to SUFDDIR —
self-evident — though the assignment of point-values for each Combatant's shirts, towels, shorts, armbands, socks, and shoes is
statistically icky, plus there are also wildly involved corrections for initial megatonnage, population density, Land-Sea-Air
delivery distributions, and EM-pulse-resistant civil-defense expenditures, so that the official victor takes three hours of EndStat
number-crunching and at least four Motrin for Otis P. Lord to confirm.
Another reason why each year's master statistician has to be a special combination of tech-wonk and compulsive is that the
baroque apparatus of each Eschaton has to be worked out in advance and then sold to a kind of immature and easily bored
community of world leaders. A quorum of the day's Combatants has to endorse a particular simulated World Situation as Lord's
stayed up well past several bedtimes to develop it: Land-Sea-Air force-distributions; ethnic, sociologic, economic, and even
religious demographics for each Combatant, plus broadly sketched psych-profiles of all relevant heads of state; prevailing weather
in all the map's quadrants; etc. Then everybody playing that day is assigned to a Combatant's team, and they all sit down over
purified water and unfatted chips to hash out between Combatants stuff like mutual-defense alliances, humane-war pacts, facilities
for inter-Combatant communication, DEFCON-gradients, city-trading, and so on. Since each Combatant's team knows only their
own Situation-profile and total available megatonnage — and since even out in the four-court theater the stockpiled warheads are
hidden from view inside the identical white plastic cast-off industrial-solvent buckets all academies and serious players use for
drill-balls125125 — there can be a lot of poker-facing about response-resolve, willingness to go SACPOP, nonnegotiable
interests, EM-pulse-immunity, distribution of strategic forces, and commitment to geopolitical ideals. You should have seen
Michael Pemulis just about eat the whole world alive during pre-Eschaton summits, back when he played. His teams won most
games before the first lob landed.
What often takes the longest to get a quorum on is each game's Triggering Situation. Here Lord, like many stellar statisticswonks, shows a bit of an Achilles' heel imagination-wise, but he's got a good five or six years of Eschaton precedents to draw on.
A Russo-Chinese border dispute goes tactical over Sinkiang. An AMNAT computracker in the Aleutians misreads a flight of
geese as three SOVWAR SSios on reentry. Israel moves armored divisions north and east through Jordan after an El Al airbus is
bombed in midflight by a cell linked to both H'sseins. Black Albertan wackos infiltrate an isolated silo at Ft. Chimo and get two
MIRVs through SOUTHAF's defense net. North Korea invades South Korea. Vice versa. AMNAT is within 72 hours of putting
an impregnable string of antimissile satellites on line, and the remorseless logic of game theory compels SOVWAR to go
SACPOP while it still has the chance.
On Interdependence Day, Sunday 11/8, game-master Lord's Triggering Situation unwinds nicely, on Pemulis's view.
Explosions of suspicious origin occur at AMNAT satellite-receiver stations from Turkey to Labrador as three high-level Canadian
defense ministers vanish and then a couple of days later are photographed at a Volgograd bistro hoisting shots of Stolichnaya with
Slavic bimbos on their knee.126126 Then two SOVWAR trawlers just inside international waters off Washington are strafed by
Fi6s on patrol out of Cape Flattery Naval Base. Both AMNAT and SOVWAR go from DEFCON 2 to DEFCON 4. REDCHI goes
to DEFCON 3, in response to which SOVWAR airfields and antimissile networks from Irkutsk to the Dzhugdzhur Range go to
DEFCON 5, in response to which AMNAT-SAC bombers and antimissile-missile silos in Nebraska and South Dakota and
Saskatchewan and eastern Spain assume a Maximum Readiness posture. SOVWAR's bald and port-wine-stained premier calls
AMNAT's wattle-chinned127127 president on the Hot Line and asks him if he's got Prince Albert in a can. Another pretty shady
explosion levels a SOVWAR Big Ear monitoring station on Sakhalin. General Atomic Inc.'s gaseous diffusion uraniumenrichment facility in Portsmouth OH reports four kilograms of enriched uranium hexafluoride missing and then suffers a
cataclysmic fire that forces evacuation of six downwind counties. An AMNAT minesweeper of the Sixth Fleet on maneuvers in
the Red Sea is hit and sunk with REDCHI Silkworm torpedoes fired by LIBSYR MiG25s. Italy, in an apparently bizarre EndStatgenerated development Otis P. Lord will only smile enigmatically about, invades Albania. SOVWAR goes apeshit. Apoplectic
premier rings AMNAT's president, only to be asked if his refrigerator's running. LIBSYR shocks the Christian world by airbursting a half-megaton device two clicks over Tel Aviv, causing deaths in the low six figures. Everybody and his brother goes to
DEFCON 5. Air Force One leaves the ground. SOUTHAF and REDCHI announce neutrality and plead for cool heads. Israeli
armored columns behind heavy tactical-artillery saturation push into Syria all the way to Abu Kenal in twelve hours: Damascus
has firestorms; En Nebk is reportedly just plain gone. Several repressive right-wing regimes in the Third World suffer coups d'etat
and are replaced by repressive left-wing regimes. Tehran and Baghdad announce full dip-mil support of LIBSYR, thus
reconstituting LIBSYR as IRLIBSYR. AMNAT and SOVWAR activate all civil defense personnel and armed forces reserves and
commence evacuation of selected MAMAs. IRLIBSYR is today represented by Evan Ingersoll, whom Axford keeps growling at
under his breath, Hal can hear. A shifty-eyed member of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff vanishes and isn't photographed anywhere.
Albania sues for terms. Crude and apparently amateur devices in the low-kiloton range explode across Israel from Haifa to Ashqelon. Tripoli is incommunicado after at least four thermonuclear explosions cause second-degree burns as far away as Médenine
Tunisia. A 10-kiloton tactical-artillery device air-bursts over the Command Center of the Czech 3rd Army in Ostrava, resulting in
what one Pentagon analyst calls 'a serious wienie roast.' Despite the fact that nobody but SOVWAR itself has anybody close
enough to hit Ostrava from Howitzer-distance, SOVWAR stonewalls AMNAT's denials and regrets. AMNAT's president tries
ringing SOVWAR's premier from the air and gets only the premier's answering machine. AMNAT is unable to determine whether
the string of explosions at its radar installations all along the Arctic Circle are conventional or tactical. CIA/NSA reports that 64%
of the civilian populations of SOVWAR's MAMAs have been successfully relocated below ground in hardened shelters. AMNAT
orders evacuation of all MAMAs. SOVWAR MiG25s engage REDCHI aircraft over seas off Tientsin. Air Force Two tries to
leave the ground and gets a flat tire. A single one-megaton SS10 evades antimissile missiles and detonates just over Provo UT,
from which all communications abruptly cease. Eschaton's game-master now posits — but does not go so far as to actually assert
— that EndStat's game-theoretic Decision Tree now dictates a SPASEX response from AMNAT.
Uninitiated adults who might be parked in a nearby mint-green advertorial Ford sedan or might stroll casually past E.T.A.'s
four easternmost tennis courts and see an atavistic global-nuclear-conflict game played by tanned and energetic little kids and so
this might naturally expect to see fuzzless green warheads getting whacked indiscriminately skyward all over the place as
everybody gets blackly drunk with thanatoptic fury in the crisp November air — these adults would more likely find an actual
game of Es-chaton strangely subdued, almost narcotized-looking. Your standard round of Eschaton moves at about the pace of
chess between adepts. For these devotees become, on court, almost parodically adult — staid, sober, humane, and judicious
twelve-year-old world leaders, trying their best not to let the awesome weight of their responsibilities — responsibilities to nation,
globe, rationality, ideology, conscience and history, to both the living and the unborn — not to let the terrible agony they feel at
the arrival of this day — this dark day the leaders've prayed would never come and have taken every conceivable measure
rationally consistent with national strategic interest to avoid, to prevent — not to let the agonizing weight of responsibility
compromise their resolve to do what they must to preserve their people's way of life. So they play, logically, cautiously, so earnest 
and deliberate in their calculations they appear thoroughly and queerly adult, almost Talmudic, from a distance. A couple gulls fly
overhead. A mint-green Ford sedan has passed through the gate's raised portcullis and is trying to parallel park between two
dumpsters in the circular drive behind West House, which is behind and to the neck-straining left of the Gatorade pavilion. There's
an autumnal tang to the air and a brittle gray shell of cloud-cover, plus the constant faraway hum of Sunstrand Plaza's ATHSCME
fan-line.
Strategic acumen and feel for realism vary from kid to kid, of course. When IRLIBSYR's Evan Ingersoll starts lobbing
warheads at SOVWAR's belt of Third-Wave reserve silos in the Kazakh, and it becomes pretty clear that AMNAT has won
IRLIBSYR to its side by making sinister promises about the ultimate disposition of Israel, Israel, even though nobody's Israel out
there today, seems in a fit of pique to have somehow persuaded SOUTHAF, who today is Brooklyn NY's little hard-ass Josh
Gopnik — the same Josh Gopnik who by the way subscribes to Commentary — to expend all sixteen of its green fuzzy warheads
in a debilitating enfilade against AMNAT dams, bridges, and bases from Florida to Baja. Everybody involved orders total
displacement of MAMA populations. Then, without any calculation whatever, INDPAK, who today is J. J. Penn — a high-ranked
thirteen-year-old but not exactly the brightest log on the Yuletide fire — dumps three poorly tied jockstraps' worth of MIRVs on
Israel, landing most of the megatonnage in sub-Beersheba desert areas that didn't look much different before the blasts. When
roundly kibitzed from the shelter of the Gatorade pavilion under Schtitt's tower by Troeltsch, Axford, and Incandenza, Penn
shrilly reminds them that Pakistan is a Muslim state and sworn foe to all infidelic enemies of Islam, but can do little but fiddle
with the strings of his launcher when Pemulis cheerfully reminds him that nobody's Israel today and there isn't so much as a
Combatant's sock on that part of the courts. It is not a matter of the principle of thing, ever, in Es-chaton.
Except for the SOUTHAF flurry and INDPAK boner, 11/8's game proceeds with much probity and cold deliberation, with
even more pauses and hushed, chin-stroking conferences today than tend to be the norm. The only harried-looking person on the
1300-m.2 map is Otis P. Lord, who has to keep legging it from one continent to another, pushing a rolling double-shelf stainless
steel food cart purloined from St. John of God Hospital with a blinking Yushityu portable on one shelf and a 256-capacity diskette
case about two-thirds full on the other, the shelves' sides hung with clattering clipboards, Lord having to dramatize manually the
effortless dictates of real logic and necessity, verifying that command decisions are allowable functions of situation and capacity
(he'd shrugged his shoulders in a neutral Whatever at SOUTHAF and INDPAK), locating necessary data for subterranean
premiers and dictators and airsick presidents, removing vaporized articles of clothing from sites of devastating hits and just
woppsing them up or folding them over at the sites of near-hits and fizzle yields, triangulating EM-pulse estimates from confirmed
hits to authorize or deny communication-capacity, it's a nerve-racking job, he's more or less having to play God, tallying kill-ratios
and radiation-levels and parameters of fallout, strontium-90 and iodine levels and the likelihood of conflagrations v. firestorms in
MAMAs with different Mean-Value skyscraper-heights and combustible-capital indices. Despite chapped hands and a badly
running nose, Lord's response-time to requests for data is impressive, thanks mainly to the sly D.E.C. hookup and the detailed
decision-algorithm files Pemulis had authored three years back. Otis P. Lord informs SOVWAR and AM-NAT that Peoria IL's
topographic flatness ups the effective kill-radius for SOVWAR's 5-megaton direct hit to 10.1 clicks, meaning half of this MAMAPOP burns to death in evacuatory traffic jams out on Interstate 74. An AMNAT Minuteman can hold an absolute maximum of
eight MIRVs irregardless of whether the titanic jockstrap little LaMont Chu promoted out of the sedated Teddy Schacht's gear bag
on the bus Friday night can hold thirteen dead tennis balls. Given standard climatic conditions, the fire area from an air-burst will
be 2ir times larger than the blast area. Toronto has enough sub-code skyscrapers within its total area to guarantee a firestorm off a
minimum of two strikes within
__________2n__________
(1 / total Toronto area in m.2)
of target center. Five megatons of heavy-hydrogen fusion yields at least 1,400,000 curies worth of strontium-^o, meaning
microcephalic kids in Montreal for roughly twenty-two generations, and yes wiseacre McKenna of AMNAT the world will
probably notice the difference. Struck and Trevor Axford hoot loudly from under the green GATORADE THIRST AID awning of
the open-air pavilion outside the fence along the south side of the East Courts, where (the pavilion) they and Michael Pemulis and
Jim Troeltsch and Hal Incandenza are splayed on reticulate-mesh patio chairs in street clothes and with their street-sneakers up on
reticulate-mesh footstools, Struck and Axford with suspiciously bracing Gatorades and what looks like a hand-rolled
psychochemical cigarette of some sort being passed between them. 11/8 is an E.T.A. day of mandatory total R&R, though the
public intoxicants are a bit much. Pemulis has a bag of red-skinned peanuts he hasn't eaten much of. Trevor Axford has
overinhaled from the cigarette and is hunched coughing, his forehead purple. Hal Incandenza is squeezing a tennis ball and
leaning out far to starboard to spit into a NASA glass on the ground and struggling with a strong desire to get high again for the
second time since breakfast v. a strong distaste about smoking dope with/in front of all these others, especially out in the open in
front of Little Buddies, which seems to him to violate some sort of issue of taste that he struggles to articulate satisfactorily to
himself. A tooth way back on the upper left is twinging electrically in the cold air. Pemulis, though from his twitchy right eye he's
clearly had recent recourse to some Tenuate (which helps explain the uneaten nuts), is currently abstaining and sitting on his
hands for warmth, peanuts on the floor well away from Hal's NASA glass. The pavilion is open on all sides and compliments of
Stokely-van Camp Corp. and little more than like a big fancy tent with a green felt cover over the expanse's real grass and whiteiron patio furniture with reticulate plastic mesh; it's mostly used for civilians' spectation during exhibition matches on the East
Show Courts 7, 8, 9; sometimes E.T.A.s cluster under it during drill-breaks in the summer in the heat of the day. The green
awning gets taken down when they go into the Lung for the winter. Eschaton traditionally commandeers Courts 6-9, the really
nice East Courts, unless there's legit tennis going on. All the upperclass spectators except Jim Struck are former Eschaton
devotees, though Hal and Troeltsch were both marginal. Troeltsch, who's also pretty clearly had some Tenuate, is left-eyenystagmic and is calling the action into a disconnected broadcast-headset, but Eschaton's tough to enliven, verbally, even for the
stimulated. Being generally too slow and cerebral.
Struck is telling Axford to put his hands over his head and Pemulis is telling Axford to hold his breath. Now, in a stressheightened voice, Otis P. Lord says he needs Pemulis to real quick come zip inside through the Cyclone-fence gate south of Court
12 and walk across the theater's four-court map to show Lord how to access the EndStat calculation that every thousand 
Roentgens of straight X and gamma produces 6.36 deaths per hundred POP and for the other 93.64 means reduced lifespans of
(Total R - 100) (.0636(Total R-100)2)
years, meaning nobody's exactly going to have to be pricing dentures in Minsk, so to speak, in the future. And so on.
After about half the planet's extant megatonnage has been expended, things are looking pretty good for the AMNAT crew.
Even though they and SOVWAR are SPASEXing back and forth with chilling accuracy — SOVWAR's designated launcher is the
butch and suspiciously muscular Ann Kittenplan (who at twelve-and-a-half looks like a Belorussian shot-putter and has to buy
urine more than quarter-annually and has a way more lush and impressive mustache than for instance Hal himself could raise, and
who gets these terrible rages) but so Kittenplan's landed nothing worse than an indirect hit all afternoon, while AMNAT's
launchman is Todd ('Postal Weight') Possalthwaite, an endomorphic thirteen-year-old from Edina MN whose whole infuriating
tennis-game consists of nothing but kick serves and topspin lobs, and who's been the Eschaton MVL128128 for the last two years,
and accuracy-wise has to be seen to be believed — still, both sides have artfully avoided the escalation to SACPOP that often
takes both super-Combatants right out of the game; and AMNAT's president LaMont Chu has used the excuse of Gopnik's
emotional strikes against the U.S. South, plus Penn's arational lobbing at an Israel that at the summit was explicitly placed under
AMNAT's mutual-defense umbrella, has used these as golden tactical geese, racking up serious INDDIR-points against a
SOUTHAF and INDPAK whose hasty defensive alliance and shaky aim produce nothing more than a lot of irradiated cod off
Gloucester. Whenever there's a direct hit, Troeltsch sits up straight and gets to use the exclamation he's hit on for a kind of
announcerial trademark: 'Ho-/y CROW!' But SOVWAR, beset from two vectors by AMNAT and IRLIBSYR (whose occasional
lob Israel's way AMNAT, drawing a storm of diplomatic protest from SOUTHAF and INDPAK, keeps instructing Lord to log as
'regrettable mistargetings'), even with cutting-edge civil defense and EMP-resistant communications, poor old SOVWAR is
absorbing such serious collateral SUFDDIR that it's being inexorably impelled by game-theoretic logic to a position where it's
going to pretty much have no choice but to go SACPOP against AMNAT.
Now SOVWAR premier Timmy ('Sleepy T.P.') Peterson petitions O. P. Lord for capacity/authorization to place a scrambled
call to Air Force One. 'Scrambled call' means they don't yell at each other publicly across the courts' map; Lord has to ferry
messages from one side the other, complete with inclined heads and hushed tones etc. Premier and president exchange standard
formalities. Premier apologizes for the Prince Albert crack. Hal, who's declining all public chemicals, he's decided, has a gander at
Pemulis's rough tallies of Combatants' INDDIR/SUFDDIR ratios so far and agrees to bet Axford a U.S. finski no way AMNAT
accepts SOVWAR's invitation to possible terms. During actionless diplomatic intervals like this, Troeltsch is reduced to saying
'What a beautiful day for an Eschaton' over and over and asking people for their thoughts on the game until Pemulis tells him he's
cruising to get dope-slapped. There's pretty much nobody around: Tavis and Schtitt are off giving what are essentially recruitingtalks at indoor clubs in the west suburbs; Pemulis'd let Tall Paul Shaw take the multi-emblazoned tow truck to take Mario down to
the Public Gardens to watch the public I.-Day festivities with the Bolex H64; the local kids often go home for the day; a lot of the
rest like to lie in the Viewing Rooms barely moving all I. Day until the dinner gala. Lord tear-asses back and forth between Courts
6 ana 8, food cart clattering (the food cart, which Pemulis and Axford picked up from a kind of a seedy-looking orderly at SJOG
hospital that Pemulis knew from Allston, has one of those crazy left front wheels that e.g. seems always to afflict only your
particular grocery cart in supermarkets, and makes a hell of a clattering racket when rushed), ferrying messages which the 18-andUnder guys can tell AMNAT and SOVWAR are making deliberately oblique and obtuse so Lord has to do that much more
running: God is never a particularly popular role to have to play, and Lord this fall has already been the victim of several
boarding-school-type pranks too puerile even to detail. J. A. L. Struck Jr., who as usual has made a swine of himself with the
suspiciously bracing cups of Gatorade, is abruptly ill all over his own lap and then sort of slumps to one side in his patio-chair
with his face slack and white and doesn't hear Pemulis's quick analysis that Hal might as well give Axhandle the $ right now,
because LaMont Chu can parse a Decision Tree with the best of them, and the D. Tree's now indicating peace terms in whatever a
D. Tree's version of neon letters is, because the biggest priority for AMNAT right at 1515h. is to avoid having to SACPOP with
SOVWAR, since if the game stops right now AMNAT's probably won, whereas if they SACPOP with SOVWAR, trading
massive infliction of INDDIR for massive body-shots of SUFDDIR, staying more or less even with each other, AM-NAT'll still
be the same number of points ahead of SOVWAR overall, but it'll have taken such heavy SUFDDIR debits that IRLIBSYR —
never forget IRLIBSYR, brilliantly if obnoxiously Imam'd today by eleven-year-old eye-browless Evan Ingersoll of Binghamton
NNY — by staying out of the SACPOP-fest and lobbing sporadically at SOVWAR just often enough to rack up serious INDDIR
but not quite enough to piss SOVWAR off enough to provoke the retaliatory SSlO-wave that would mean significant SUFDDIR,
could well have a serious shot at overtaking AMNAT for the overall Eschaton, especially when you factored in the f(x)
advantages for bellicosity and nonexistent civil defense. At some point Axford has passed the remainder of the cigarette back over
toward Struck without looking to see that Struck is no longer in his chair, and Hal finds himself taking the proffered duBois and
smoking dope in public without even thinking about it or having consciously decided to go ahead. Sure enough, poor red-faced
runny-nosed Lord is making way too many clattering trips between Courts 6 and 8 for it to mean anything but peace terms. Evan
Ingersoll is positively strip-mining his right nostril. Finally Lord stops with the running back and forth and positions himself in the
ad service box of Court 7 and loads a new diskette into the Yushityu. Struck moans something in a possibly foreign tongue. All
the other upperclass spectators have scooted their chairs well away from Struck. Troeltsch extends a blood-blistered palm and rubs
the tips of the hand's fingers together at Hal, and Hal forks over the fin without handing the thin cigarette back over to Axford,
somehow. Pemulis has leaned forward intently with his pointy chin in his hands; he seems completely absorbed.
Interdependence Day Y.D.A.U.'s Eschaton enters probably its most crucial phase. Lord, at his cart and portable TP, puts on
the white beanie (n.b.: not the black or the red beanie) that signals a temporary cessation of SPASEX between two Combatants but
allows all other Combatants to go on pursuing their strategic interests as they see fit. SOVWAR and AMNAT are thus pretty
vulnerable right now. SOVWAR's Premier Peterson and Air Marshal Kittenplan, carrying their white janitorial stockpile-bucket
between them, walk across Europe and the Atlantic to parley with AMNAT President Chu and Supreme Commander
Possalthwaite in what looks to be roughly Sierra Leone. Various territories smolder quietly. The other players are mostly standing
around beating their arms against their chests to stay warm. A few hesitant white flakes appear and swirl around and melt into
dark stars the moment they hit court. A couple ostensible world leaders run here and there in a rather unstatesmanlike fashion with 
their open mouths directed at the sky, trying to catch bits of the fall's first snow. Yesterday it had been warmer and rained. Axford
speculates about whether snow will mean Schtitt might consent to inflate the Lung even before the Fundraiser two weeks hence.
Struck is threatening to fall out of his chair. Pemulis, leaning forward intently, wearing his Mr. Howell yachting cap, ignores everyone. He hates to type and keeps his tallies via pencil and clipboard a la deLint. The idling Ford sedan is conspicuous for the
excruciated full-color old Nunhagen Aspirin ad on the green of its right rear door. Hal and Axford are passing what looks to the
Combatants like a suckerless Tootsie-Roll stick back and forth between them, and occasionally to Troeltsch. Trevor ('The
Axhandle') Axford has a total of only three-and-a-half digits on his right hand. From West House you can hear Mrs. Clarke and
the time-and-a-half holiday kitchen staff preparing the Interdependence Day gala dinner, which always includes dessert.
Now REDCHI, itself quietly trying to rack up some unanswered INDDIR, sends a towering topspin Job into INDPAK's
quadrant, scoring what REDCHI claims is a direct hit on Karachi and what warheadless INDPAK claims is only an indirect hit on
Karachi. It's an uneasy moment: a dispute such as this would never occur in the real God's real world, since the truth would be
manifest in the actual size of the actual wienie roast in the actual Karachi. But God here is played by Otis P. Lord, and Lord is
number-crunching so fiendishly at the cart's Yushityu, trying to confirm the verisimilitude of the peace terms AMNAT and
SOVWAR are hashing out, that he can't even pretend to have seen where REDCHI's strike against INDPAK landed w/ respect to
Karachi's T-shirt — which is admittedly kind of mashed and woppsed up, though this could be primarily from breezes and feet —
and in his lapse of omniscience cannot see how he's supposed to allocate the relevant INDDIR- and SUFDDIR-points. Troeltsch
doesn't know whether to say 'Holy CROW!' or not. Lord, vexed by a lapse it's tough to see how any mortal could have avoided,
appeals over to Michael Pemulis for an independent ruling; and when Pemulis gravely shakes his white-hatted head, pointing out
that Lord is God and either sees or doesn't, in Eschaton, Lord has an intense little crying fit that's made abruptly worse when now
J. J. Penn of INDPAK all of a sudden gets the idea to start claiming that now that it's snowing the snow totally affects blast area
and fire area and pulse-intensity and maybe also has fallout implications, and he says Lord has to now completely redo
everybody's damage parameters before anybody can form realistic strategies from here on out.
Pemulis's chairlegs shriek and make red-skin peanuts spill out in a kind of cornucopic cone-shape and he's up in his capacity
as sort of eminence grise of Eschaton and ranging up and down just outside the theater's chain-link fencing, giving J. J. Penn the
very roughest imaginable side of his tongue. Besides being real sensitive to any theater-boundary-puncturing threats to the map's
integrity — threats that've come up before, and that as Pemulis sees it threaten the game's whole sense of animating realism
(which realism depends on buying the artifice of 1300 m.2 of composition tennis court representing the whole rectangular
projection of the planet earth) — Pemulis is also a sworn foe of all Penns for all time: it had been J. J. Penn's much older brother
Miles Penn, now twenty-one and flailing away on the grim Third-World Satellite pro tour, playing for travel-expenses in bleak
dysenteric locales, who when Pemulis first arrived at E.T.A. at age eleven had christened him Michael Penisless and had had
Pemulis convinced for almost a year that if he pressed on his belly-button his ass would fall off.129129
'It's snowing on the goddamn map, not the territory, you dick!' Pemulis yells at Penn, whose lower lip is out and quivering.
Pemulis's face is the face of a man who will someday need blood-pressure medication, a constitution the Tenuate doesn't help one
bit. Troeltsch is sitting up straight and speaking very intensely and quietly into his headset. Hal, who in his day never wore the
beanie, and usually portrayed some marginal nation somewhere out in the nuclear boondocks, finds himself more intrigued by
Penn's map/ territory faux pas than upset by it, or even amused.
Pemulis turns back to the pavilion and seems to be looking at Hal in some kind of appeal: 'Jaysusl’
'Except is the territory the real world, quote unquote, though!' Axford calls across to Pemulis, who's pacing like the fence is
between him and some sort of prey. Axford knows quite well Pemulis can be fucked with when he's like this: when he's hot he
always cools down and becomes contrite.
Struck tries to yell out a Kertwang on Pemulis but can't get the megaphone he makes of his hands to fit over the mouth.
'The real world's what the map here stands for!' Lord lifts his head from the Yushityu and cries over at Axhandle, trying to
please Pemulis.
'Kind of looks like real-world-type snow from here, M.P.,' Axford calls out. His forehead's still maroon from the coughing fit.
Troeltsch is trying to describe the distinction between the symbolic map of the gear-littered courts and the global strategic theater
it stands for using all and only sports-broadcast cliches. Hal looks from Axhandle to Pemulis to Lord.
Struck finally falls out of his chair with a clunk but his legs are still somehow entangled in the legs of the chair. It starts to
snow harder, and dark stars of melt begin to multiply and then merge all over the courts. Otis Lord is trying to type and wipe his
nose on his sleeve at the same time. J. Gopnik and K. McKenna are running around well outside their assigned quadrants with
their tongues outstretched.
'Real-world snow isn't a factor if it's falling on the fucking map!’
Ann Kittenplan's crew-cutted head now protrudes from the kind of rugby-scrum AMNAT's and SOVWAR's heads of state
form around Lord's computational food cart. 'For Christ's sake leave us alone!' she shrieks at Pemulis. Troeltsch is going 'Oh, my'
into his headset. O. Lord is struggling with the cart's protective umbrella, his head's beanie's little white propeller rotating in a
rising wind. A light dusting of snow is starting to appear in the players' hair.
'It's only real-world snow if it's already in the scenario!' Pemulis keeps directing everything at Penn, who hasn't said a word
since his original suggestion and is busy sort of casually kicking the Karachi-shirt over into the Arabian Sea, clearly hoping the
original detonation will get forgotten about in all the metatheoretical fuss. Pemulis rages along the East Courts' western fence. The
combination of several Tenuate spansules plus Eschaton-adrenaline bring his blue-collar Irish right out. He's a muscular but
fundamentally physically narrow guy: head, hands, the sharp little wad of cartilage at the tip of Pemulis's nose — everything about
him seems to Hal to taper and come to a point, like a bad El Greco. Hal leans to spit and watches him pace like a caged thing as
Lord works feverishly over EndStat's peace-terms decision-matrix. Hal wonders, not for the first time, whether he might deep
down be a secret snob about collar-color issues and Pemulis, then whether the fact that he's capable of wondering whether he's a
snob attenuates the possibility that he's really a snob. Though Hal hasn't had more than four or five total very small hits off the
public duBois, this is a prime example of what's sometimes called 'marijuana thinking.' You can tell because Hal's leaned way
over to spit but has gotten lost in a paralytic thought-helix and hasn't yet spit, even though he's right in bombing-position over the 
NASA glass. It also occurs to him that he finds the real-snow/unreal-snow snag in the Eschaton extremely abstract but somehow
way more interesting than the Eschaton itself, so far.
IRLIBSYR's strongman Evan Ingersoll, all of 1.3 m. tall, warmed by baby-fat and high-calorie cerebral endeavor, has been
squatting on his heels like a catcher just west of Damascus, spinning his Rossignol launcher idly in his hand, watching the onesided exchange between Pemulis and Ingersoll's roommate J. J. Penn, who's now threatening to quit and go in for cocoa if they
can't for once play Eschaton without the big guys horning in again like always. There's a tiny whirring sound as Ingersoll's mental
gears grind. From the duration of the little Sierra Leone summit and the studious blankness on everybody's face it's pretty clear
that SOVWAR and AMNAT are going to come to terms, and the terms are likely to involve SOVWAR agreeing not to go
SACPOP against AMNAT in return for AMNAT letting SOVWAR go SACPOP against Ingersoll's IRLIBSYR, because if
SOVWAR goes SACPOP against an IRLIBSYR that can't have many warheads left in the old bucket by now (Ingersoll knows
they know) then SOVWAR'll get to rack up a lot of INDDIR without much SUFDDIR, while inflicting such SUFDDIR on
IRLIBSYR that IRLIBSYR'll be effectively eliminated as a threat to AMNAT's commanding lead in points, which is what has the
most utility in the old game-theoretic matrix right now. The exact utility transformations are too oogly for an Ingersoll who's still
grappling with fractions, but he can see clearly that this'd be the most remorselessly logical best-interest-conducive scenario for
both LaMont Chu and especially the Sleepster, Peterson, who's hated Ingersoll for months now anyway without any good reason
or cause or anything, Ingersoll can just somehow tell.
Hal, paralyzed and absorbed, watches Ingersoll bob on his haunches and shift his stick from hand to hand and cerebrate
furiously and logically conclude, then, that IRLIBSYR's highest possible strategic utility lies in AMNAT and SOVWAR failing to
come to terms.
Hal can almost visualize a dark lightbulb going on above Ingersoll's head. Pemulis is telling Penn that there's a critical
distinction between horning in and letting asswipes like Jeffrey Joseph Penn run roughshod over the delimiting boundaries that are
Eschaton's very life-blood. Chu and Peterson are nodding soberly at little things they're saying to each other while Kittenplan
cracks her knuckles and Possalthwaite bounces a warhead idly on his strings.
So now Evan Ingersoll rises from his squat now only to bend again and take a warhead out of IRLIBSYR's ordnance-bucket,
and Hal seems to be the only one who sees Ingersoll line up the vector very carefully with his slim thumb and take a lavish
backswing and fire the ball directly at the little circle of super-Combatant leaders in West Africa. It's not a lob. It flies straight as if
shot from a rifle and strikes Ann Kittenplan right in the back of the head with a loud thock. She whirls to face east, a hand at the
back of her bristly skull, scanning and then locking on Damascus, her face a stony Toltec death-mask.
Pemulis and Penn and Lord and everyone else all freeze, shocked and silent, so there's just the weird glittered hiss of falling
snow and the sounds of a couple crows interfacing in the pines over by HmH. The ATHSCME fans are silent, and four sweatsockshaped clouds of exhaust hang motionless over the Sunstrand stacks. Nothing moves. No Eschaton Combatant has ever
intentionally struck another Combatant's physical person with a 5-megaton thermonuclear weapon. No matter how frayed players'
nerves, it's never made a lick of sense. A Combatant's megatonnage is too precious to waste on personal attacks outside the map.
It's been like this unspoken but very basic rule.
Ann Kittenplan is so shocked and enraged that she stands there transfixed, quivering, her sights locked on Ingersoll and his
smoking Rossignol. Otis P. Lord feels at his beanie.
Ingersoll now makes a show of examining the tiny nails of his left hand and casually suggests that IRLIBSYR has just scored
a direct 5-megaton contact-burst against SOVWAR's entire launch capacity, namely Air Marshal Ann Kittenplan, and that plus
also AMNAT's own launch capacity, plus both Combatants' ordnance and heads of state, all lie well within the blast's kill-radius
— which by Ingersoll's rough calculations extends from the Ivory Coast to the doubles alley's Senegal. Unless of course that killradius is somehow altered by the possible presence of climatic snow, he adds, beaming.
Pemulis and Kittenplan now each let loose with a linear series of anti-Ingersoll invectives that drown each other out and make
the trees' crows take slow flight.
But Otis Lord — who's watched the exchange, ashen, and has called up something relevant on EndStat's TREEMASTER
metadecision subdirectory — now, to everyone's horror, removes from around his neck a shoelace with a little nickel-colored key
and bends to the small locked so-lander box on the food cart's bottom shelf and as everyone watches in horror opens the box and
with near-ceremonial care exchanges the white beanie on his head for the red beanie that signifies Utter Global Crisis. The
dreaded red UGC beanie has been donned by an Eschaton game-master only once before, and that was over three years ago, when
human input-error on EndStat tallies of aggregate SUFDDIR during a three-way SACPOP free-for-all yielded an apparent ignition
of the earth's atmosphere.
Now a real-world chill descends over the grainily white-swirled landscape of the nuclear theater.
Pemulis tells Lord he cannot believe his fucking eyes. He tells Lord how dare he don the dreaded red beanie over such an
obvious instance of map-not-territory equivocationary horseshit as Ingersoll's trying to foist.
Lord, bent to the cart's blinking Yushityu, responds that there seems to be a problem.
Ingersoll is whistling and pretending to do the Charleston between Abu Kemal and Es Suweida, using his racquet like a
hoofer's cane.
Hal finally spits.
Under Pemulis's wild-eyed stare, Lord clears his throat and calls out to Ingersoll, tentatively positing that today's pre-game
Triggering-Situation negotiations established no valid strategic target areas in the postage-stamp-sized nation of Sierra Leone.
Ingersoll calls back across the Mediterranean that target areas of keen strategic interest appeared in Sierra Leone at the exact
moment the heads of state and total launch capacities of AMNAT and SOVWAR took it upon themselves to traipse into Sierra
Leone. That Sierra Leone thenceforward as of that moment has, or rather had, he pretends to correct with a smile, become a de
facto SSTRAC. If presidents and premiers wanted to leave the protection of their territories' defense-nets and hold cliquey little
other-Combatant-excluding parleys in some hut somewhere that was up to them, but Lord had been wearing the white beanie that
explicitly authorized the overexploited and underdeveloped defenders of the One True Faith of the world to keep on pursuing their
strategic interests, and IRLIBSYR was now keenly interested in the aggregate INDDIR-points it had coming to them for just now 
vaporizing both super-Combatants' strategic capacities with one Flaming-Sword-of-The-Most-High-like strike.
Ann Kittenplan keeps taking a couple quivery steps toward Ingersoll and getting restrained and pulled back by LaMont Chu.
'Sleepy T.P.' Peterson, who always looks a little dazed even in the best of circumstances, asks Otis P. Lord to define
equivocationary for him, causing Hal Incandenza to laugh out loud despite himself.
Just outside the theater's fence, Pemulis is bug-eyed with fury — not impossibly 'drine-aggravated — and is literally jumping
up and down in one spot so hard that his yachting cap jumps slightly off his head with each impact, which Troeltsch and Axford
confer and agree they have previously seen occur only in animated cartoons. Pemulis howls that Lord is in his vacillation
appeasing Ingersoll in Ingersoll's effort to fatally fuck with the very breath and bread of Eschaton.130130 Players themselves can't
be valid targets. Players aren't inside the goddamn game. Players are part of the apparatus of the game. They're part of the map. It's
snowing on the players but not on the territory. They're part of the map, not the cluster-fucking territory. You can only launch
against the territory. Not against the map. It's like the one ground-rule boundary that keeps Eschaton from degenerating into chaos.
Eschaton gentlemen is about logic and axiom and mathematical probity and discipline and verity and order. You do not get points
for hitting anybody real. Only the gear that maps what's real. Pemulis keeps looking back over his shoulder to the pavilion and
screaming 'Jaysus!’
IngersolPs roommate J. J. Penn tries to claim that the vaporized Ann Kittenplan is wearing several articles of gear worth
mucho INDDIR, and everyone tells him to shut up. The snow is now coming down hard enough to compose an environment, and
everybody outside the sheltered pavilion looks gauzily shrouded, from Hal's perspective.
Lord is crunching madly away at the TP under the just-opened protection of an old beach umbrella a previous game-master
had welded to the top of the food cart. Lord wipes his nose against the same shoulder that's clamping a phone to his ear,
awkwardly, and reports he's checked the D.E.C.'s Eschaton-Axiom directory via Pink2-capable modem and that unfortunately
with all due respect to Ann and Mike it doesn't seem to explicitly say players with strategic functions can't become target-areas if
they traipse around outside their defense-nets. LaMont Chu says how come point-values for actual players have never been
assigned, then, for Pete's sake, and Pemulis shouts across that that's so totally beside the point it doesn't matter, that the reason
players aren't explicitly exempted in the ESCHAX.DIR is that their exemption is what makes Eschaton and its axioms fucking
possible in the first place. A kind of pale boat-wake of exhaust exits the idling Ford sedan off behind the pavilion and widens as it
rises, dispersing. Pemulis says because otherwise use your heads otherwise nonstrategic emotions would get aroused and
Combatants would be whacking balls at each other's physical persons all the time and Eschaton wouldn't even be possible in its
icily elegant game-theoretical form. He's stopped jumping up and down, at least, Troeltsch observes. Players' exemption from
strikes goes without saying, Pemulis says; it's like preaxiomatic. Pemulis tells Lord to consider what he's doing very carefully,
because from where Pemulis is standing Lord looks to be willing to very possibly compromise Eschaton's map for all time. Girls
16's/18's prorector Mary Esther Thode putts from left to right behind the pavilion on the long driveway from the circular drive to
the portcullis and halts her scooter and lifts her helmet's tinted visor and yells across for Kittenplan to put a hat on if she's going to
play in the snow in a crew-cut. This even though Kittenplan isn't even strictly in Ms. Thode's like umbrella of authority, Axford
observes to Troeltsch, who relays this fact into his headset. Hal moves his mouth around to try to gather up spit in a mouth that's
gotten rather dry, which when you have a plug of Kodiak in is not very pleasant. Ann Kittenplan has been suffering from what
look like almost Parkinsonian tremors for the last few minutes, her face writhing and her mustache almost standing right out
straight. LaMont Chu repeats his claim that there's no way players even with strategic functions can ever be legit target-areas if no
INDDIR/SUFDDIR values have been entered for them in EndStat's tally-function. Pemulis orders Chu not to distract Otis Lord
from the incredibly potent and lethal ground Lord's letting Ingersoll lead them onto. He says none of them have ever even seen the
true meaning of the word crisis yet. Ingersoll calls over to Pemulis that his emeritus veto-power is only over Lord's calculations,
not over today's game's God's decisions about what's part of the game and what isn't. Pemulis invites Ingersoll to do something
anatomically impossible. Pemulis asks LaMont Chu and Ann Kittenplan if they're just going to stand there with their thumbs in
their bottoms and let Lord let Ingersoll eliminate Eschaton's map for keeps for one slimy cheesy victory in just one day's
apocalypse. Kittenplan has been trembling and feeling at the back of her vein-laced head and looking across the Mediterranean at
Ingersoll like somebody who knows they'll go to prison for what they want to do. Axford posits certain very unlikely physical
conditions under which what Pemulis told Ingersoll to do to himself wouldn't be totally impossible. Hal spits thickly and gathers
and tries to spit again, watching. Troeltsch broadcasts the fact that there's always a queer vague vitaminish stink about Mary
Esther Thode that he never can quite place. There's the sudden tripartite whump of three Empire Waste Displacement vehicles
being propelled above the cloud-cover to points far north. Hal identifies Thode's ambient odor as the stink of thiamine, which for
reasons best known to Thode she takes a lot of; and Troeltsch broadcasts the datum and refers to Hal as a 'close source,' which
strikes Hal as odd and somehow off in a way he can't quite name. Kittenplan shakes Chu's arm loose and darts over and extracts a
warhead from SOVWAR's portable stockpile and shouts out that well OK then if players can be targets then in that case: and she
fires a real screamer at IngersolPs head, which Ingersoll barely blocks with his Rossignol and shrieks that Kittenplan can't launch
anything at anything because she's been vaporized by a 5-megaton contact-burst. Kittenplan tells Ingersoll to write his
congressman about it and over LaMont Chu's pleas for reasoned discussion takes several more theoretically valuable warheads out
of the industrial-solvent bucket and gets truly serious about hitting Ingersoll, moving steadily east across Nigeria and Chad, causing Ingersoll to run due north across the courts' map at impressive speed, abandoning IRLIBSYR's ammo-bucket and tear-assing
up through Siberia crying Foul. Lord's mewing ineffectually for order, but some of the other Combatants' staffs have begun to
smell that Evan Ingersoll's become fair game for cruelty — the way kids can seem to smell this sort of thing out with such
uncanny acuity — and REDCHPs General Secretary and an AM-NAT vector-planning specialist and Josh Gopnik all start moving
northeast over the map firing balls as hard as they can at Ingersoll, who's dropped his launcher and is shaking frantically at the
chained gate on the fence's north side, where Mrs. Incandenza has decided she doesn't want kids exiting the East Courts and
trampling her calliopsis; and these little kids can hit balls exceptionally hard. Hal is now unable to gather enough spit to spit. One
warhead hits Ingersoll in the neck and another solidly in the meat of the thigh. Ingersoll begins to limp around in small circles
holding his neck, crying in that slow-motion shuddery way little kids have when they're crying more at the fact of being hurt than
at the hurt itself. Pemulis is walking backwards away from the south fence back toward the pavilion and has both arms up in either 
appeal or fury or something else. Axford tells Hal and Troeltsch he wishes he didn't feel the dark thrill he felt watching Ingersoll
get pummeled. Some filmy red peanut-skin has gotten into Jim Struck's hair as he lies there motionless. O. P. Lord attempts to rule
that Ingersoll is no longer on the four courts of Eschaton's earth-map and so isn't even theoretically a valid target-area. It doesn't
matter. Several kids close in on Ingersoll, triangulating their bombardment, T. Peterson on point. Ingersoll is hit several times,
once right near the eye. Jim Troeltsch is up and running to the fence wanting to stop the thing, but Pemulis catches him by his
headset's cord and tells him to let them all lie in their own bed. Hal, now leaning forward, steeple-fingered, finds himself just
about paralyzed with absorption. Trevor Axford, fist to his chin, asks Hal if he's ever just simply fucking hated somebody without
having any idea why. Hal finds himself riveted at something about the degenerating game that seems so terribly abstract and
fraught with implications and consequences that even thinking about how to articulate it seems so complexly stressful that being
almost incapacitated with absorption is almost the only way out of the complex stress. Now INDPAK's Penn and AMNAT's
McKenna, who have long-standing personal bones to pick with Ann Kittenplan, peel off and gather ordnance and execute a pincer
movement on Ann Kittenplan. She is hit twice from behind at close range. Ingersoll has long since gone down and is still getting
hit. Lord is ruling at the top of his lungs that there's no way AMNAT can launch against itself when he gets tagged right on the
breastbone by an errant warhead. Clutching his chest with one hand, with the other he flicks the red beanie's propeller, never
before flicked, whose flicked spin heralds a worst-case-&-utterly-decontrolled-Armageddon-type situation. Timmy Peterson takes
a ball in the groin and goes down like a sack of refined flour. Everybody's scooping up spent warheads and totally unrealistically
refiring them. The fences shudder and sing as balls rain against them. Ingersoll now resembles some sort of animal that's been run
over in the road. Troeltsch, who's looking for the first time at the idling sedan by West House's dump-sters and asking if anybody
knew anybody who drove a Nunhagen-Aspirin-adverting Ford, is the only upperclass spectator who doesn't seem utterly silently
engrossed. Ann Kittenplan has dropped her racquet and is charging McKenna. She takes two contact-bursts in the breast-area
before she gets to him and lays McKenna out with an impressive left cross. LaMont Chu tackles Todd Possalthwaite from behind.
Struck looks to have wet his pants in his sleep. J. J. Penn slips on a grounded warhead near Fiji and goes spectacularly down. The
snowfall makes everything gauzy and terribly clear at the same time, eliminating all visual background so that the map's action
seems stark and surreal. Nobody's using tennis balls now anymore. Josh Gopnik punches LaMont Chu in the stomach, and
LaMont Chu yells that he's been punched in the stomach. Ann Kittenplan has Kieran McKenna in a headlock and is punching him
repeatedly on the top of the skull. Otis P. Lord lets down the beach umbrella and starts pushing his crazy-wheeled food cart at a
diskette-rattling clip toward 12's open south gate, still flicking furiously at the red beanie's propeller. Struck's hair is steadily
accreting nut-skins. Pemulís is under cover but still standing, his legs well apart and his arms folded. The figure in the green Ford
still hasn't moved once. Troeltsch says he for his own part wouldn't be just sitting and lying there if any of the Little Buddies
under his personal charge were out there getting potentially injured, and Hal reflects that he does feel a certain sort of intense
anxiety, but can't sort through the almost infinite-seeming implications of what Troeltsch is saying fast enough to determine
whether the anxiety is over something about what he's seeing or something in the connection between what Troeltsch is saying
and the degree to which he's absorbed in what's going on out inside the fence, which is a degenerative chaos so complex in its
disorder that it's hard to tell whether it seems choreographed or simply chaotically disordered. LaMont Chu is throwing up into the
Indian Ocean. Todd Possalthwaite has his hands to his face and is shrieking something about his 'doze.' It is now, beyond any
argument or equivocation, snowing. The sky is off-white. Lord and his cart are now literally making tracks for the edge of the
map. Evan Ingersoll hasn't moved in several minutes. Penn lies in a whitening service box with one leg bent beneath him at an
impossible angle. Someone way off behind them has been blowing an athletic whistle. Ann Kittenplan begins to chase REDCHI's
General Secretary south across the Asian subcontinent at top speed. Pemulis is telling Hal he hates to say he told them so. Hal can
see Axford leaning way forward sheltering something tiny from the wind as he flicks at it with a spent lighter. It occurs to him this
is the third anniversary of Axhandle losing a right finger and half his right thumb. Fierce little J. Gopnik is flailing at the air and
telling whoever wants it to come on, come on. Otis P. Lord and his cart sail clattering across Indochina toward the southern gate.
Hal is suddenly aware that Troeltsch and Pemulis are wincing but is not himself wincing and isn't sure why they are wincing and
is looking out into the fray trying to determine whether he should be wincing when REDCHI's General Secretary, calling loudly
for his mother and in full flight as he looks over his shoulder at Ann Kittenplan's contorted face, barrels directly into Lord's
speeding food cart. There's a noise like the historical sum of all cafeteria accidents everywhere. 3.6-MB diskettes take flight like
mad bats across what uncovered would be the baseline of Court 12. Different-colored beanies spill from the rolling solander box,
whose lock's hasp is broken and protrudes like a tongue as it rolls. The TP's monitor and modem and Yushityu chassis, with most
of Eschaton's nervous system on its hard drive, assume a parabolic southwest vector. The heavy equipment's altitude is
impressive. An odd silent still moment hangs, the TP aloft. Pemulis bellows, his hands to his cheeks. Otis P. Lord hurdles the bent
forms of food cart and General Secretary and sprints low over the court's map's snow, trying to save hardware that's now at the top
of its rainbow's arc. It's clear Lord won't make it. It's a slow-motion moment. The snowfall's more than heavy enough now, Hal
thinks, to excuse Lord's not seeing LaMont Chu directly before him, on his hands and knees, throwing up. Lord impacts Chu's
arched form at about knee-level and is spectacularly airborne. The idling Ford reveals a sudden face at the driver's-side window.
Axford is holding the lighter's chassis up to his ear and shaking it. Ann Kittenplan is ramming REDCHI's leader's face repeatedly
into the mesh of the south fence. Lord's flight's parabola is less spectacular on the y-axis than the TP's has been. The Yushityu's
hard-drive chassis makes an indescribable sound as it hits the earth and its brightly circuited guts come out. The color monitor
lands on its back with its screen blinking ERROR at the white sky. Hal and everyone else can project Lord's flight's own terminus
an instant before impact. For a brief moment that Hal will later regard as completely and uncomfortably bizarre, Hal feels at his
own face to see whether he is wincing. The distant whistle patweets. Lord does indeed go headfirst down through the monitor's
screen, and stays there, his sneakers in the air and his warm-up pants sagging upward to reveal black socks. There'd been a bad
sound of glass. Penn flails on his back. Possalthwaite, Ingersoll, and McKenna bleed. The second shift's 1600h. siren down at
Sunstrand Power & Light is creepily muffled by the no-sound of falling snow.
8 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
INTERDEPENDENCE DAY 
GAUDEAMUS IGITUR
Boston AA is Jike AA nowhere else on this planet. Just like AA everyplace else, Boston AA is divided into numerous
individual AA Groups, and each Group has its particular Group name like the Reality Group or the Allston Group or the Clean
and Sober Group, and each Group holds its regular meeting once a week. But almost all Boston Groups' meetings are speaker
meetings. That means that at the meetings there are recovering alcoholic speakers who stand up in front of everybody at an
amplified podium and 'share their experience, strength, and hope.'131131 And the singular thing is that these speakers are not ever
members of the Group that's holding the meeting, in Boston. The speakers at one certain Group's weekly speaker meeting are
always from some other certain Boston AA Group. The people from the other Group who are here at like your Group speaking are
here on something called a Commitment. Commitments are where some members of one Group commit to hit the road and travel
to another Group's meeting to speak publicly from the podium. Then a bunch of people from the host Group hit the opposite lane
of the same road on some other night and go to the visiting Group's meeting, to speak. Groups always trade Commitments: you
come speak to us and we'll come speak to you. It can seem bizarre. You always go elsewhere to speak. At your own Group's
meeting you're a host; you just sit there and listen as hard as you can, and you make coffee in 60-cup urns and stack polystyrene
cups in big ziggurats and sell raffle tickets and make sandwiches, and you empty ashtrays and scrub out urns and sweep floors
when the other Group's speakers are through. You never share your experience, strength, and hope on-stage behind a fiberboard
podium with its cheap nondigital PA system's mike except in front of some other metro Boston Group.132132 Every night in
Boston, bumper-stickered cars full of totally sober people, wall-eyed from caffeine and trying to read illegibly scrawled directions
by the dashboard lights, crisscross the city, heading for the church basements or bingo halls or nursing-home cafeterias of other
AA Groups, to put on Commitments. Being an active member of a Boston AA Group is probably a little bit like being a serious
musician or like athlete, in terms of constant travel.
The White Flag Group of Enfield MA, in metropolitan Boston, meets Sundays in the cafeteria of the Provident Nursing Home
on Hanneman Street, off Commonwealth Avenue a couple blocks west of Enfield Tennis Academy's flat-topped hill. Tonight the
White Flag Group is hosting a Commitment from the Advanced Basics Group of Concord, a suburb of Boston. The Advanced
Basics people have driven almost an hour to get here, plus there's always the problem of signless urban streets and directions
given over the phone. On this coming Friday night, a small horde of White Flag-gers will drive out to Concord to put on a
reciprocal Commitment for the Advanced Basics Group. Travelling long distances on signless streets trying to parse directions
like 'Take the second left off the rotary by the driveway to the chiropractor's' and getting lost and shooting your whole evening
after a long day just to speak for like six minutes at a plywood podium is called 'Getting Active With Your Group'; the speaking
itself is known as '12th-Step Work' or 'Giving It Away.' Giving It Away is a cardinal Boston AA principle. The term's derived
from an epigrammatic description of recovery in Boston AA: 'You give it up to get it back to give it away.' Sobriety in Boston is
regarded as less a gift than a sort of cosmic loan. You can't pay the loan back, but you can pay it forward, by spreading the
message that despite all appearances AA works, spreading this message to the next new guy who's tottered in to a meeting and is
sitting in the back row unable to hold his cup of coffee. The only way to hang onto sobriety is to give it away, and even just 24
hours of sobriety is worth doing anything for, a sober day being nothing short of a daily miracle if you've got the Disease like he's
got the Disease, says the Advanced Basics member who's chairing this evening's Commitment, saying just a couple public words
to the hall before he opens the meeting and retires to a stool next to the podium and calls his Group's speakers by random lot. The
chairperson says he didn't used to be able to go 24 lousy minutes without a nip, before he Came In. 'Coming In' means admitting
that your personal ass is kicked and tottering into Boston AA, ready to go to any lengths to stop the shit-storm. The Advanced
Basics chairperson looks like a perfect cross between pictures of Dick Cavett and Truman Capote133133 except this guy's also
like totally, almost flamboyantly bald, and to top it off he's wearing a bright-black country-western shirt with baroque curlicues of
white Nodie-piping across the chest and shoulders, and a string tie, plus sharp-toed boots of some sort of weirdly imbricate reptile
skin, and overall he's riveting to look at, grotesque in that riveting way that flaunts its grotesquerie. There are more cheap metal
ashtrays and Styrofoam cups in this broad hall than you'll see anywhere else ever on earth. Gately's sitting right up front in the
first row, so close to the podium he can see the tailor's notch in the chairperson's outsized incisors, but he enjoys twisting around
and watching everybody come in and mill around shaking water off their outerwear, trying to find empty seats. Even on the night
of the I.-Day holiday, the Provident's cafeteria is packed by 2OOOh. AA does not take holidays any more than the Disease does.
This is the big established Sunday p.m. meeting for AAs in Enfield and Allston and Brighton. Regulars come every week from
Watertown and East Newton, too, often, unless they're out on Commitments with their own Groups. The Provident cafeteria walls,
painted an indecisive green, are tonight bedecked with portable felt banners emblazoned with AA slogans in Cub-Scoutish blue
and gold. The slogans on them appear way too insipid even to mention what they are. E.g. 'ONE DAY AT A TIME,' for one. The
effete western-dressed guy concludes his opening exhortation, leads the opening Moment of Silence, reads the AA Preamble, pulls
a random name out of the Crested Beaut cowboy hat he's holding, makes a squinty show of reading it, says he'd like to call
Advanced Basics' first random speaker of the evening, and asks if his fellow Group-member John L. is in the house, here, tonight,
John L. gets up to the podium and says, 'That is a question I did not used to be able to answer.' This gets a laugh, and everybody's
posture gets subtly more relaxed, because it's clear that John L. has some sober time in and isn't going to be one of those AA
speakers who's so wracked with self-conscious nerves he makes the empathetic audience nervous too. Everybody in the audience
is aiming for total empathy with the speaker; that way they'll be able to receive the AA message he's here to carry. Empathy, in
Boston AA, is called Identification.
Then John L. says his first name and what he is, and everybody calls Hello.
White Flag is one of the area AA meetings Ennet House requires its residents to attend. You have to be seen at a designated
AA or NA meeting every single night of the week or out you go, discharged. A House Staff member has to accompany the
residents when they go to the designated meetings, so they can be officially seen there.134_ The residents' House counselors
suggest that they sit right up at the front of the hall where they can see the pores in the speaker's nose and try to Identify instead of
Compare. Again, Identify means empathize. Identifying, unless you've got a stake in Comparing, isn't very hard to do, here.
Because if you sit up front and listen hard, all the speakers' stories of decline and fall and surrender are basically alike, and like
your own: fun with the Substance, then very gradually less fun, then significantly less fun because of like blackouts you suddenly 
come out of on the highway going 145 kph with companions you do not know, nights you awake from in unfamiliar bedding next
to somebody who doesn't even resemble any known sort of mammal, three-day blackouts you come out of and have to buy a
newspaper to even know what town you're in; yes gradually less and less actual fun but with some physical need for the
Substance, now, instead of the former voluntary fun; then at some point suddenly just very little fun at all, combined with terrible
daily hand-trembling need, then dread, anxiety, irrational phobias, dim siren-like memories of fun, trouble with assorted
authorities, knee-buckling headaches, mild seizures, and the litany of what Boston AA calls Losses —
'Then come the day I lost my job to drinking.' Concord's John L. has a huge hanging gut and just no ass at all, the way some
big older guys' asses seem to get sucked into their body and reappear out front as gut. Gately, in sobriety, does nightly sit-ups out
of fear this'11 all of a sudden happen to him, as age thirty approaches. Gately is so huge no one sits behind him for several rows.
John L. has the biggest bunch of keys Gately's ever seen. They're on one of those pull-outable-wire janitor's keychains that clips to
a belt loop, and the speaker jangles them absently, unaware, his one tip of the hat to public nerves. He's also wearing gray janitor's
pants. 'Lost my damn job,' he says. 'I mean to say I still knew where it was and whatnot. I just went in as usual one day and there
was some other fellow doing it,' which gets another laugh.
— then more Losses, with the Substance seeming like the only consolation against the pain of the mounting Losses, and of
course you're in Denial about it being the Substance that's causing the very Losses it's consoling you about —
'Alcohol destroys slowly but thoroughly is what a fellow said to me the first night I Come In, up in Concord, and that fellow
ended up becoming my sponsor.’
— then less mild seizures, D.T.s during attempts to taper off too fast, introduction to subjective bugs and rodents, then one
more binge and more formicative bugs; then eventually a terrible acknowledgment that some line has been undeniably crossed,
and fist-at-the-sky, as-God-is-my-witness vows to buckle down and lick this thing for good, to quit for all time, then maybe a few
white-knuckled days of initial success, then a slip, then more pledges, clock-watching, baroque self-regulations, repeated slips
back into the Substance's relief after like two days' abstinence, ghastly hangovers, head-flattening guilt and self-disgust,
superstructures of additional self-regulations (e.g. not before O9OOh. not on a worknight, only when the moon is waxing, only in
the company of Swedes) which also fail —
'When I was drunk I wanted to get sober and when I was sober I wanted to get drunk,' John L. says; 'I lived that way for years,
and I submit to you that's not livin, that's a fuckin death-in-life.’
— then unbelievable psychic pain, a kind of peritonitis of the soul, psychic agony, fear of impending insanity (why can't I
quit if I so want to quit, unless I'm insane?), appearances at hospital detoxes and rehabs, domestic strife, financial free-fall,
eventual domestic Losses —
'And then I lost my wife to drinking. I mean I still knew where she was and whatnot. I just went in one day and there was
some other fellow doing it,' at which there's not all that much laughter, lots of pained nods: it's often the same all over, in terms of
domestic Losses.
— then vocational ultimatums, unemployability, financial ruin, pancreatitis, overwhelming guilt, bloody vomiting, cirrhotic
neuralgia, incontinence, neuropathy, nephritis, black depressions, searing pain, with the Substance affording increasingly brief
periods of relief; then, finally, no relief available anywhere at all; finally it's impossible to get high enough to freeze what you feel
like, being this way; and now you hate the Substance, bate it, but you stiJl find yourself unable to stop doing it, the Substance, you
find you finally want to stop more than anything on earth and it's no fun doing it anymore and you can't believe you ever liked
doing it and but you still can't stop, it's like you're totally fucking bats, it's like there's two yous; and when you'd sell your own
dear Mum to stop and still, you find, can't stop, then the last layer of jolly friendly mask comes off your old friend the Substance,
it's midnight now and all masks come off, and you all of a sudden see the Substance as it really is, for the first time you see the
Disease as it really is, really has been all this time, you look in the mirror at midnight and see what owns you, what's become what
you are —
'A fuckin livin death, I tell you it's not being near alive, by the end I was undead, not alive, and I tell you the idea of dyin was
nothing compared to the idea of livin like that for another five or ten years and only then dyin,' with audience heads nodding in
rows like a wind-swept meadow; boy can they ever Identify.
— and then you're in serious trouble, very serious trouble, and you know it, finally, deadly serious trouble, because this
Substance you thought was your one true friend, that you gave up all for, gladly, that for so long gave you relief from the pain of
the Losses your love of that relief caused, your mother and lover and god and compadre, has finally removed its smily-face mask
to reveal centerless eyes and a ravening maw, and canines down to here, it's the Face In The Floor, the grinning root-white face of
your worst nightmares, and the face is your own face in the mirror, now, it's you, the Substance has devoured or replaced and
become you, and the puke-, drool-and Substance-crusted T-shirt you've both worn for weeks now gets torn off and you stand there
looking and in the root-white chest where your heart (given away to It) should be beating, in its exposed chest's center and centerless eyes is just a lightless hole, more teeth, and a beckoning taloned hand dangling something irresistible, and now you see you've
been had, screwed royal, stripped and fucked and tossed to the side like some stuffed toy to lie for all time in the posture you land
in. You see now that It's your enemy and your worst personal nightmare and the trouble It's gotten you into is undeniable and you
still can't stop. Doing the Substance now is like attending Black Mass but you still can't stop, even though the Substance no longer
gets you high. You are, as they say, Finished. You cannot get drunk and you cannot get sober; you cannot get high and you cannot
get straight. You are behind bars; you are in a cage and can see only bars in every direction. You are in the kind of a hell of a mess
that either ends lives or turns them around. You are at a fork in the road that Boston AA calls your Bottom, though the term is
misleading, because everybody here agrees it's more like someplace very high and unsupported: you're on the edge of something
tall and leaning way out forward....
If you listen for the similarities, all these speakers' Substance-careers seem to terminate at the same cliff's edge. You are now
Finished, as a Substance-user. It's the jumping-off place. You now have two choices. You can either eliminate your own map for
keeps — blades are the best, or else pills, or there's always quietly sucking off the exhaust pipe of your re-possessable car in the
bank-owned garage of your familyless home. Something whimpery instead of banging. Better clean and quiet and (since your
whole career's been one long futile flight from pain) painless. Though of the alcoholics and drug addicts who compose over 70% 
of a given year's suicides, some try to go out with a last great garish Balaclavan gesture: one longtime member of the White Flag
Group is a prognathous lady named Louise B. who tried to take a map-eliminating dive off the old Hancock Building downtown
in B.S. '81 but got caught in the gust of a rising thermal only six flights off the roof and got blown cartwheeling back up and in
through the smoked-glass window of an arbitrage firm's suite on the thirty-fourth floor, ending up sprawled prone on a high-gloss
conference table with only lacerations and a compound of the collarbone and an experience of willed self-annihilation and
external intervention that has left her rabidly Christian — rabidly, as in foam — so that she's comparatively ignored and avoided,
though her AA story, being just like everybody else's but more spectacular, has become metro Boston AA myth. But so when you
get to this jumping-off place at the Finish of your Substance-career you can either take up the Luger or blade and eliminate your
own personal map — this can be at age sixty, or twenty-seven, or seventeen — or you can get out the very beginning of the
Yellow Pages or InterNet Psych-Svce File and make a blubbering O2OOh. phone call and admit to a gentle grandparentish voice
that you're in trouble, deadly serious trouble, and the voice will try to soothe you into hanging on until a couple hours go by and
two pleasantly earnest, weirdly calm guys in conservative attire appear smiling at your door sometime before dawn and speak
quietly to you for hours and leave you not remembering anything from what they said except the sense that they used to be eerily
like you, just where you are, utterly fucked, and but now somehow aren't anymore, fucked like you, at least they didn't seem like
they were, unless the whole thing's some incredibly involved scam, this AA thing, and so but anyway you sit there on what's left
of your furniture in the lavender dawnlight and realize that by now you literally have no other choices besides trying this AA thing
or else eliminating your map, so you spend the day killing every last bit of every Substance you've got in one last joyless bitter
farewell binge and resolve, the next day, to go ahead and swallow your pride and maybe your common sense too and try these
meetings of this 'Program' that at best is probably just Unitarian happy horseshit and at worst is a cover for some glazed and canny
cult-type thing where they'll keep you sober by making you spend twenty hours a day selling cellophane cones of artificial flowers
on the median strips of heavy-flow roads. And what defines this cliffish nexus of exactly two total choices, this miserable roadfork Boston AA calls your Bottom, is that at this point you feel like maybe selling flowers on median strips might not be so bad,
not compared to what you've got going, personally, at this juncture. And this, at root, is what unites Boston AA: it turns out this
same resigned, miserable, brainwash-and-exploit-me-if-that's-what-it-takes-type desperation has been the jumping-off place for
just about every AA you meet, it emerges, once you've actually gotten it up to stop darting in and out of the big meetings and start
walking up with your wet hand out and trying to actually personally meet some Boston AAs. As the one particular tough old guy
or lady you're always particularly scared of and drawn to says, nobody ever Comes In because things were going really well and
they just wanted to round out their p.m. social calendar. Everybody, but everybody Comes In dead-eyed and puke-white and with
their face hanging down around their knees and with a well-thumbed firearm-and-ordnance mail-order catalogue kept safe and
available at home, map-wise, for when this last desperate resort of hugs and cliches turns out to be just happy horseshit, for you.
You are not unique, they'll say: this initial hopelessness unites every soul in this broad cold salad-bar'd hall. They are like
Hindenburg-survivors. Every meeting is a reunion, once you've been in for a while.
And then the palsied newcomers who totter in desperate and miserable enough to Hang In and keep coming and start feebly to
scratch beneath the unlikely insipid surface of the thing, Don Gately's found, then get united by a second common experience. The
shocking discovery that the thing actually does seem to work. Does keep you Substance-free. It's improbable and shocking. When
Gately finally snapped to the fact, one day about four months into his Ennet House residency, that quite a few days seemed to
have gone by without his playing with the usual idea of slipping over to Unit #7 and getting loaded in some nonuremic way the
courts couldn't prove, that several days had gone without his even thinking of oral narcotics or a tightly rolled duBoís or a cold
foamer on a hot day ... when he realized that the various Substances he didn't used to be able to go a day without absorbing hadn't
even like occurred to him in almost a week, Gately hadn't felt so much grateful or joyful as just plain shocked. The idea that AA
might actually somehow work unnerved him. He suspected some sort of trap. Some new sort of trap. At this stage he and the other
Ennet residents who were still there and starting to snap to the fact that AA might work began to sit around together late at night
going batshit together because it seemed to be impossible to figure out just how AA worked. It did, yes, tentatively seem maybe
actually to be working, but Gately couldn't for the life of him figure out how just sitting on hemorrhoid-hostile folding chairs
every night looking at nose-pores and listening to cliches could work. Nobody's ever been able to figure A A out, is another
binding commonality. And the folks with serious time in AA are infuriating about questions starting with How. You ask the scary
old guys How AA Works and they smile their chilly smiles and say Just Fine. It just works, is all; end of story. The newcomers
who abandon common sense and resolve to Hang In and keep coming and then find their cages all of a sudden open, mysteriously,
after a while, share this sense of deep shock and possible trap; about newer Boston AAs with like six months clean you can see
this look of glazed suspicion instead of beatific glee, an expression like that of bug-eyed natives confronted suddenly with a Zippo
lighter. And so this unites them, nervously, this tentative assemblage of possible glimmers of something like hope, this grudging
move toward maybe acknowledging that this unromantic, unhip, clichéd AA thing — so unlikely and unpromising, so much the
inverse of what they'd come too much to love — might really be able to keep the lover's toothy maw at bay. The process is the
neat reverse of what brought you down and In here: Substances start out being so magically great, so much the interior jigsaw's
missing piece, that at the start you just know, deep in your gut, that they'll never let you down; you just know it. But they do. And
then this goofy slapdash anarchic system of low-rent gatherings and corny slogans and saccharin grins and hideous coffee is so
lame you just know there's no way it could ever possibly work except for the utterest morons . . . and then Gately seems to find
out AA turns out to be the very loyal friend he thought he'd had and then lost, when you Came In. And so you Hang In and stay
sober and straight, and out of sheer hand-burned-on-hot-stove terror you heed the improbable-sounding warnings not to stop
pounding out the nightly meetings even after the Substance-cravings have left and you feel like you've got a grip on the thing at
last and can now go it alone, you still don't try to go it alone, you heed the improbable warnings because by now you have no faith
in your own sense of what's really improbable and what isn't, since AA seems, improbably enough, to be working, and with no
faith in your own senses you're confused, flummoxed, and when people with AA time strongly advise you to keep coming you
nod robotically and keep coming, and you sweep floors and scrub out ashtrays and fill stained steel urns with hideous coffee, and
you keep getting ritually down on your big knees every morning and night asking for help from a sky that still seems a burnished
shield against all who would ask aid of it — how can you pray to a 'God' you believe only morons believe in, still? — but the old 
guys say it doesn't yet matter what you believe or don't believe, Just Do It they say, and like a shock-trained organism without any
kind of independent human will you do exactly like you're told, you keep coming and coming, nightly, and now you take pains not
to get booted out of the squalid halfway house you'd at first tried so hard to get discharged from, you Hang In and Hang In,
meeting after meeting, warm day after cold day ...; and not only does the urge to get high stay more or less away, but more general
life-quality-type things — just as improbably promised, at first, when you'd Come In — things seem to get progressively
somehow better, inside, for a while, then worse, then even better, then for a while worse in a way that's still somehow better,
realer, you feel weirdly unblinded, which is good, even though a lot of the things you now see about yourself and how you've
lived are horrible to have to see — and by this time the whole thing is so improbable and unparsable that you're so flummoxed
you're convinced you're maybe brain-damaged, still, at this point, from all the years of Substances, and you figure you'd better
Hang In in this Boston AA where older guys who seem to be less damaged — or at least less flummoxed by their damage — will
tell you in terse simple imperative clauses exactly what to do, and where and when to do it (though never How or Why); and at
this point you've started to have an almost classic sort of Blind Faith in the older guys, a Blind Faith in them born not of zealotry
or even belief but just of a chilled conviction that you have no faith whatsoever left in yourself;135_ and now if the older guys say
Jump you ask them to hold their hand at the desired height, and now they've got you, and you're free.
Another Advanced Basics Group speaker, whose first name Gately loses in the crowd's big Hello but whose last initial is E.,
an even bigger guy than John L., a green-card Irishman in a skallycap and Sinn Fein sweatshirt, with a belly like a swinging sack
of meal and a thoroughly visible ass to back it up, is sharing his hope's experience by listing the gifts that have followed his
decision to Come In and put the plug in the jug and the cap on the phentermine-hydrochloride bottle136_ and stop driving longhaul truck routes in unbroken 96-hour metal-pedalled states of chemical psychosis. The rewards of his abstinence, he stresses,
have been more than just spiritual. Only in Boston A A can you hear a fifty-year-old immigrant wax lyrical about his first solid
bowel movement in adult life.
' 'd been a confarmed bowl-splatterer for yars b'yond contin'. 'd been barred from t'facilities at o't' troock stops twixt hair'n
Nork for yars. T'wallpaper in de loo a t'ome hoong in t'ese carled sheets froom t'wall, ay till yo. But now woon dey . . . ay'll
remaember't'always. T'were a wake to t'day ofter ay stewed oop for me ninety-dey chip. Ay were tray moents sobber. Ay were
thar on t'throne a't'ome, yo new. No't'put too fain a point'on it, ay prodooced as er uzhal and ... and ay war soo amazed as to
no't'belaven' me yairs. 'Twas a sone so wonefamiliar at t'first ay tought ay'd droped me wallet in t'loo, do yo new. Ay tought ay'd
droped me wallet in t'loo as Good is me wetness. So doan ay bend twixt m'knays and'ad a luke in t'dim o't'loo, and codn't belave
me'yize. So gud paple ay do then ay drope to m'knays by t'loo an't'ad a rail luke. A leaver's luke, d'yo new. And friends t'were
loavely past me pur poewers t'say. T'were a tard in t'loo. A rail tard. T'were farm an' teppered an' aiver so jaintly aitched. T'luked .
. . conestroocted instaid've sprayed. T'luked as ay fel't'in me 'eart Good 'imsailf maint a tard t'Juke. Me friends, this tard'o'mine
practically had a poolse. Ay sted doan own m'knays an tanked me Har Par, which ay choose t'call me Har Par Good, an' ay been
tankin me Har Par own m'knays aiver sin, marnin and natetime an in t'loo's'well, aiver sin.' The man's red-leather face radiant
throughout. Gately and the other White Flaggers fall about, laugh from the gut, a turd that practically had a pulse, an ode to a solid
dump; but the lightless eyes of certain palsied back-row newcomers widen with a very private Identification and possible hope,
hardly daring to imagine. ... A certain Message has been Carried.
Gately's biggest asset as an Ennet House live-in Staffer — besides the size thing, which is not to be discounted when order
has to be maintained in a place where guys come in fresh from detox still in Withdrawal with their eyes rolling like palsied cattle
and an earring in their eyelid and a tattoo that says BORN TO BE UNPLEASANT — besides the fact that his upper arms are the
size of cuts of beef you rarely see off hooks, his big plus is he has this ability to convey his own experience about at first hating
AA to new House residents who hate AA and resent being forced to go and sit up in nose-pore-range and listen to such limply
improbable clichéd drivel night after night. Limp AA looks, at first, and actually limp it sometimes really is, Gately tells the new
residents, and he says no way he'd expect them to believe on just his say-so that the thing'll work if they're miserable and
desperate enough to Hang In against common sense for a while. But he says he'll clue them in on a truly great thing about AA:
they can't kick you out. You're In if you say you're In. Nobody can get kicked out, not for any reason. Which means you can say
anything in here. Talk about solid turds all you want. The molecular integrity of shit is small potatoes. Gately says he defies the
new Ennet House residents to try and shock the smiles off these Boston AAs' faces. Can't be done, he says. These folks have
literally heard it all. Enuresis. Impotence. Priapism. Onanism. Projectile-incontinence. Autocastration. Elaborate paranoid
delusions, the grandiosest megalomania, Communism, fringe-Birchísm, National-Socialist-Bundism, psychotic breaks, sodomy,
bestiality, daughter-diddling, exposures at every conceivable level of indecency. Coprophilia and -phagia. Four-year White
Flagger Glenn K.'s personally chosen Higher Power is Satan, for fuck's sake. Granted, nobody in White Flag much likes Glenn K.,
and the thing with the hooded cape and makeup and the candelabrum he carries around draw some mutters, but Glenn K. is a
member for exactly as long as he cares to Hang In.
So say anything you want, Gately invites them. Go to the Beginner Meeting at !93Oh. and raise your shaky mitt and tell the
unlacquered truth. Free-associate. Run with it. Gately this morning, just after required A.M. meditation, Gately was telling the
tatt-obsessed little new lawyer guy Ewell, with the hypertensive flush and little white beard, telling him how he, Gately, had
perked up considerably at 30 days clean when he found he could raise his big mitt in Beginner Meetings and say publicly just how
much he hates this limp AA drivel about gratitude and humility and miracles and how he hates it and thinks it's horseshit and hates
the AAs and how they all seem like limp smug moronic self-satisfied shit-eating pricks with their lobotomized smiles and goopy
sentiment and how he wishes them all violent technicolor harm in the worst way, new Gately sitting there spraying vitriol, wetlipped and red-eared, trying to get kicked out, purposely trying to outrage the AAs into giving him the boot so he could quickmarch back to Ennet House and tell crippled Pat Montesian and his counselor Gene M. how he'd been given the boot at AA, how
they'd pleaded for honest sharing of innermost feelings and OK he'd honestly shared his deepest feelings on the matter of them
and the grinning hypocrites had shaken their fists and told him to screw . . . and but so in the meetings the poison would leap and
spurt from him, and how but he found out all that these veteran White Flaggers would do as a Group when he like vocally wished
them harm was nod furiously in empathetic Identification and shout with maddening cheer 'Keep Coming!' and one or two
Flaggers with medium amounts of sober time would come up to him after the meeting and say how it was so good to hear him 
share and holy mackerel could they ever Identify with the deeply honest feelings he'd shared and how he'd done them the service
of giving them the gift of a real 'Remember-When'-type experience because they could now remember feeling just exactly the
same way as Gately, when they first Came In, only they confess not then having the spine to honestly share it with the Group, and
so in a bizarre improbable twist they'd have Gately ending up standing there feeling like some sort of AA hero, a prodigy of
vitriolic spine, both frustrated and elated, and before they bid him orevwar and told him to come back they'd make sure to give
him their phone numbers on the back of their little raffle tickets, phone numbers Gately wouldn't dream of actually calling up (to
say what, for chrissakes?) but which he found he rather liked having in his wallet, to just carry around, just in case of who knew
what; and then plus maybe one of these old Enfield-native White Flag guys with geologic amounts of sober time in AA and a
twisted ruined old body and clear bright-white eyes would hobble sideways like a crab slowly up to Gately after a meeting in
which he'd spewed vitriol and reach way up to clap him on his big sweaty shoulder and say in their fremitic smoker's croak that
Well you at least seem like a ballsy little bastard, all full of piss and vinegar and whatnot, and that just maybe you'll be OK, Don
G., just maybe, just Keep Coming, and, if you'd care for a spot of advice from somebody who likely spilled more booze in his day
than you've even consumed in yours, you might try to just simply sit down at meetings and relax and take the cotton out of your
ears and put it in your mouth and shut the fuck up and just listen, for the first time perhaps in your life really listen, and maybe
you'll end up OK; and they don't offer their phone numbers, not the really old guys, Gately knows he'd have to eat his pride raw
and actually request the numbers of the old ruined grim calm longtimers in White Flag, 'The Crocodiles' the less senior White
Flaggers call them, because the old twisted guys all tend to sit clustered together with hideous turd-like cigars in one corner of the
Provident cafeteria under a 16 X 20 framed glossy of crocodiles or alligators sunning themselves on some verdant riverbank
somewhere, with the maybe-joke legend OLD-TIMERS CORNER somebody had magisculed across the bottom of the photo, and
these old guys cluster together under it, rotating their green cigars in their misshapen fingers and discussing completely
mysterious long-sober matters out of the sides of their mouths. Gately sort of fears these old AA guys with their varicose noses
and flannel shirts and white crew cuts and brown teeth and coolly amused looks of appraisal, feels like a kind of low-rank tribal
knucklehead in the presence of stone-faced chieftains who rule by some unspoken shamanistic fiat,137_ and so of course he hates
them, the Crocodiles, for making him feel like he fears them, but oddly he also ends up looking forward a little to sitting in the
same big nursing-home cafeteria with them and facing the same direction they face, every Sunday, and a little later finds he even
enjoys riding at 30 kph tops in their perfectly maintained 25-year-old sedans when he starts going along on White Flag
Commitments to other Boston AA Groups. He eventually heeds a terse suggestion and starts going out and telling his grisly personal story publicly from the podium with other members of White Flag, the Group he gave in and finally officially joined. This is
what you do if you're new and have what's called The Gift of Desperation and are willing to go to any excruciating lengths to stay
straight, you officially join a Group and put your name and sobriety-date down on the Group secretary's official roster, and you
make it your business to start to get to know other members of the Group on a personal basis, and you carry their numbers
talismanically in your wallet; and, most important, you get Active With Your Group, which here in Gately's Boston AA Active
means not just sweeping the footprinty floor after the Lord's Prayer and making coffee and emptying ashtrays of gasper-butts and
ghastly spit-wet cigar ends but also showing up regularly at specified p.m. times at the White Flag Group's regular haunt, the Elit
(the final e's neon's ballast's out) Diner next to Steve's Donuts in Enfield Center, showing up and pounding down tooth-loosening
amounts of coffee and then getting in well-maintained Crocodilian sedans whose suspensions' springs Gately's mass makes sag
and getting driven, wall-eyed with caffeine and cigar fumes and general public-speaking angst, to like Lowell's Joy of Living
Group or Charlestown's Plug In The Jug Group or Bridgewater State Detox or Concord Honor Farm with these guys, and except
for one or two other pale wall-eyed newcomers with The Gift of utter Desperation it's mostly Crocodiles with geologic sober time
in these cars, it's mostly the guys that've stayed sober in White Flag for decades who still go on every single booked Commitment,
they go every time, dependable as death, even when the Celtics are on Spontaneous-Dis they hit the old Commitment trail, they
remain rabidly Active With Their Group; and the Crocodiles in the car invite Gately to see the coincidence of long-term contented
sobriety and rabidly tireless AA Activity as not a coincidence at all. The backs of their necks are complexly creased. The
Crocodiles up front look into the rearview mirror and narrow their baggy bright-white eyes at Gately in the sagging backseat with
the other new guys, and the Crocodiles say they can't even begin to say how many new guys they've seen Come In and then get
sucked back Out There, Come In to AA for a while and Hang In and put together a little sober time and have things start to get
better, head-wise and life-quality-wise, and after a while the new guys get cocky, they decide they've gotten 'Well,' and they get
really busy at the new job sobriety's allowed them to get, or maybe they buy season Celtics tickets, or they rediscover pussy and
start chasing pussy (these withered gnarled toothless totally post-sexual old fuckers actually say pussy), but one way or another
these poor cocky clueless new bastards start gradually drifting away from rabid Activity In The Group, and then away from their
Group itself, and then little by little gradually drift away from any AA meetings at all, and then, without the protection of
meetings or a Group, in time — oh there's always plenty of time, the Disease is fiendishly patient — how in time they forget what
it was like, the ones that've cockily drifted, they forget who and what they are, they forget about the Disease, until like one day
they're at like maybe a Celtics-Sixers game, and the good old Fleet/First Interstate Center's hot, and they think what could just one
cold foamer hurt, after all this sober time, now that they've gotten 'Well.' Just one cold one. What could it hurt. And after that one
it's like they'd never stopped, if they've got the Disease. And how in a month or six months or a year they have to Come Back In,
back to the Boston AA halls and their old Group, tottering, D.T.ing, with their faces hanging down around their knees all over
again, or maybe it's five or ten years before they can get it up to get back In, beaten to shit again, or else their system isn't ready
for the recurred abuse again after some sober time and they die Out There — the Crocodiles are always talking in hushed, 'Namlike tones about Out There — or else, worse, maybe they kill somebody in a blackout and spend the rest of their lives in MCIWalpole drinking raisin jack fermented in the seatless toilet and trying to recall what they did to get in there, Out There; or else,
worst of all, these cocky new guys drift back Out There and have nothing sufficiently horrible to Finish them happen at all, just go
back to drinking 24/7/365, to not-living, behind bars, undead, back in the Disease's cage all over again. The Crocodiles talk about
how they can't count the number of guys that've Come In for a while and drifted away and gone back Out There and died, or not
gotten to die. They even point some of these guys out — gaunt gray spectral men reeling on sidewalks with all that they own in a
trashbag — as the White Flaggers drive slowly by in their well-maintained cars. Old emphysemic Francis G. in particular likes to 
slow his LeSabre down at a corner in front of some jack-legged loose-faced homeless fuck who'd once been in AA and drifted
cockily out and roll down his window and yell 'Live it up!’
Of course — the Crocodiles dig at each other with their knobby elbows and guffaw and wheeze — they say when they tell
Gately to either Hang In AA and get rabidly Active or else die in slime of course it's only a suggestion. They howl and choke and
slap their knees at this. It's your classic in-type joke. There are, by ratified tradition, no 'musts' in Boston AA. No doctrine or
dogma or rules. They can't kick you out. You don't have to do what they say. Do exactly as you please — if you still trust what
seems to please you. The Crocodiles roar and wheeze and pound on the dash and bob in the front seat in abject AA mirth.
Boston AA's take on itself is that it's a benign anarchy, that any order to the thing is a function of Miracle. No regs, no musts,
only love and support and the occasional humble suggestion born of shared experience. A non-authoritarian, dogma-free
movement. Normally a gifted cynic, with a keen bullshit-antenna, Gately needed over a year to pinpoint the ways in which he
feels like Boston AA really is actually sub-rosa dogmatic. You're not supposed to pick up any sort of altering Substance, of
course; that goes without saying; but the Fellowship's official line is that if you do slip or drift or fuck up or forget and go Out
There for a night and absorb a Substance and get all your Disease's triggers pulled again they want you to know they not only
invite but urge you to come on back to meetings as quickly as possible. They're pretty sincere about this, since a lot of new people
slip and slide a bit, total-abstinence-wise, in the beginning. Nobody's supposed to judge you or snub you for slipping. Everybody's
here to help. Everybody knows that the returning slippee has punished himself enough just being Out There, and that it takes
incredible desperation and humility to eat your pride and wobble back In and put the Substance down again after you've fucked up
the first time and the Substance is calling to you all over again. There's the sort of sincere compassion about fucking up that
empathy makes possible, although some of the AAs will nod smugly when they find out the slippee didn't take some of the basic
suggestions. Even newcomers who can't even start to quit yet and show up with suspicious flask-sized bulges in their coat pockets
and list progressively to starboard as the meeting progresses are urged to keep coming, Hang In, stay, as long as they're not too
disruptive. Inebriates are discouraged from driving themselves home after the Lord's Prayer, but nobody's going to wrestle your
keys away. Boston AA stresses the utter autonomy of the individual member. Please say and do whatever you wish. Of course
there are about a dozen basic suggestions,138_ and of course people who cockily decide they don't wish to abide by the basic
suggestions are constantly going back Out There and then wobbling back in with their faces around their knees and confessing
from the podium that they didn't take the suggestions and have paid full price for their willful arrogance and have learned the hard
way and but now they're back, by God, and this time they're going to follow the suggestions to the bloody letter just see if they
don't. Gately's sponsor Francis ('Ferocious Francis') G., the Crocodile that Gately finally got up the juice to ask to be his sponsor,
compares the totally optional basic suggestions in Boston AA to, say for instance if you're going to jump out of an airplane, they
'suggest' you wear a parachute. But of course you do what you want. Then he starts laughing until he's coughing so bad he has to
sit down.
The bitch of the thing is you have to want to. If you don't want to do as you're told — I mean as it's suggested you do — it
means that your own personal will is still in control, and Eugenio Martinez over at Ennet House never tires of pointing out that
your personal will is the web your Disease sits and spins in, still. The will you call your own ceased to be yours as of who knows
how many Substance-drenched years ago. It's now shot through with the spidered fibrosis of your Disease. His own experience's
term for the Disease is: The Spider.139_ You have to Starve The Spider: you have to surrender your will. This is why most people
will Come In and Hang In only after their own entangled will has just about killed them. You have to want to surrender your will
to people who know how to Starve The Spider. You have to want to take the suggestions, want to abide by the traditions of
anonymity, humility, surrender to the Group conscience. If you don't obey, nobody will kick you out. They won't have to. You'll
end up kicking yourself out, if you steer by your own sick will. This is maybe why just about everybody in the White Flag Group
tries so hard to be so disgustingly humble, kind, helpful, tactful, cheerful, nonjudgmental, tidy, energetic, sanguine, modest,
generous, fair, orderly, patient, tolerant, attentive, truthful. It isn't like the Group makes them do it. It's more like that the only
people who end up able to hang for serious time in AA are the ones who willingly try to be these things. This is why, to the
cynical newcomer or fresh Ennet House resident, serious AAs look like these weird combinations of Gandhi and Mr. Rogers with
tattoos and enlarged livers and no teeth who used to beat wives and diddle daughters and now rhapsodize about their bowel
movements. It's all optional; do it or die.
So but like e.g. Gately puzzled for quite some time about why these AA meetings where nobody kept order seemed so
orderly. No interrupting, fist-icuffery, no heckled invectives, no poisonous gossip or beefs over the tray's last Oreo. Where was the
hard-ass Sergeant at Arms who enforced these principles they guaranteed would save your ass? Pat Montesian and Eugenio
Martinez and Ferocious Francis the Crocodile wouldn't answer Gately's questions about where's the enforcement. They just all
smiled coy smiles and said to Keep Coming, an apothegm Gately found just as trite as 'Easy Does It!' 'Live and Let Live!’
How do trite things get to be trite? Why is the truth usually not just un-but anti-interesting? Because every one of the seminal
little mini-epiphanies you have in early AA is always polyesterishly banal, Gately admits to residents. He'll tell how, as a resident,
right after that one Harvard Square industrial-grunge post-punk, this guy whose name was Bernard but insisted on being called
Plasmatron-7, right after old Plasmatron-7 drank nine bottles of NyQuil in the men's upstairs head and pitched forward face-first
into his instant spuds at supper and got discharged on the spot, and got fireman-carried by Calvin Thrust right out to Comm.
Ave.'s Green Line T-stop, and Gately got moved up from the newest guys' 5-Man room to take Plas-matron-7's old bunk in the
less-new guys' 3-Man room, Gately had an epi-phanic AA-related nocturnal dream he'll be the first to admit was banally trite.140_
In the dream Gately and row after row of totally average and non-unique U.S. citizens were kneeling on their knees on polyester
cushions in a crummy low-rent church basement. The basement was your average low-rent church basement except for this
dream-church's basement walls were of like this weird thin clean clear glass. Everybody was kneeling on these cheap but
comfortable cushions, and it was weird because nobody seemed to have any clear idea why they were all on their knees, and there
was like no tier-boss or sergeant-at-arms-type figure around coercing them into kneeling, and yet there was this sense of some
compelling unspoken reason why they were all kneeling. It was one of those dream things where it didn't make sense but did. And
but then some lady over to Gately's left got off her knees and all of a sudden stood up, just like to stretch, and the minute she stood
up she was all of a sudden yanked backward with terrible force and sucked out through one of the clear glass walls of the 
basement, and Gately had winced to get ready for the sound of serious glass, but the glass wall didn't shatter so much as just let
the cartwheeling lady sort of melt right through, and healed back over where she'd melted through, and she was gone. Her cushion
and then Gately notices a couple other polyester cushions in some of the rows here and there were empty. And it was then, as he
was looking around, that Gately in his dream looked slowly up overhead at the ceiling's exposed pipes and could now all of a
sudden see, rotating slow and silent through the basement a meter above the different-shaped and -colored heads of the kneeling
assembly, he could see a long plain hooked stick, like the crook of a giant shepherd, like the hook that appears from stage-left and
drags bad acts out of tomato-range, moving slowly above them in French-curled circles, almost demurely, as if quietly scanning;
and when a mild-faced guy in a cardigan happened to stand up and was hooked by the hooked stick and pulled ass-over-teakettle
out through the soundless glass membrane Gately turned his big head as far as he could without leaving the cushion and could see,
now, just outside the wall's clean pane, trolling with the big stick, an extraordinarily snappily dressed and authoritative figure
manipulating the giant shepherd's crook with one hand and coolly examining the nails of his other hand from behind a mask that
was simply the plain yellow smily-face circle that accompanied invitations to have a nice day. The figure was so impressive and
trustworthy and casually self-assured as to be both soothing and compelling. The authoritative figure radiated good cheer and
abundant charm and limitless patience. It manipulated the big stick in the coolly purposeful way of the sort of angler who you
know isn't going to throw back anything he catches. The slow silent stick with the hook he held was what kept them all kneeling
below the baroque little circumferences of its movement overhead.
One of Ennet House's live-in Staffers' rotating P.M. jobs is to be awake and on-call in the front office all night for Dream
Duty — people in early recovery from Substances often get hit with real horror-show dreams, or else traumatically seductive
Substance-dreams, and sometimes trite but important epiphanic dreams, and the Staffer on Dream Duty is required to be up doing
paperwork or sit-ups or staring out the broad bay window in the front office downstairs, ready to make coffee and listen to the
residents' dreams and offer the odd practical upbeat Boston-AA-type insight into possible implications for the dreamer's progress
in recovery — but Gately had no need to clomp downstairs for a Staffer's feedback on this one, since it was so powerfully, tritely
obvious. It had come clear to Gately that Boston AA had the planet's most remorselessly hard-ass and efficient sergeant at arms.
Gately lay there, overhanging all four sides of his bunk, his broad square forehead beaded with revelation: Boston AA's Sergeant
at Arms stood outside the orderly meeting halls, in that much-invoked Out There where exciting clubs full of good cheer throbbed
gaily below lit signs with neon bottles endlessly pouring. AA's patient enforcer was always and everywhere Out There: it stood
casually checking its cuticles in the astringent fluorescence of pharmacies that took forged Talwin scrips for a hefty surcharge, in
the onionlight through paper shades in the furnished rooms of strung-out nurses who financed their own cages' maintenance with
stolen pharmaceutical samples, in the isopropyl reek of the storefront offices of stooped old chain-smoking MD's whose scrippads were always out and who needed only to hear 'pain' and see cash. In the home of a snot-strangled Canadian VIP and the
office of an implacable Revere A.D.A. whose wife has opted for dentures at thirty-five. AA's disciplinarian looked damn good and
smelled even better and dressed to impress and his blank black-on-yellow smile never faltered as he sincerely urged you to have a
nice day. Just one more last nice day. Just one.
And that was the first night that cynical Gately willingly took the basic suggestion to get down on his big knees by his
undersized spring-shot Ennet House bunk and Ask For Help from something he still didn't believe in, ask for his own sick Spiderbit will to be taken from him and fumigated and squished.
But and plus in Boston AA there is, unfortunately, dogma, too, it turns out; and some of it is both dated and smug. And there's
an off-putting jargon in the Fellowship, a psychobabbly dialect that's damn near impossible to follow at first, says Ken Erdedy, the
college-boy ad exec semi-new at Ennet House, complaining to Gately at the White Flag meeting's raffle-break, Boston AA
meetings are unusually long, an hour and a half instead of the national hour, but here they also have this formal break at about 45
minutes where everybody can grab a sandwich or Oreo and a sixth cup of coffee and stand around and chat, and bond, where
people can pull their sponsors aside and confide some trite insight or emotional snafu that the sponsor can swiftly, privately
validate but also place in the larger imperative context of the primary need not to absorb a Substance today, just today, no matter
what happens. While everybody's bonding and interfacing in a bizarre system of catchphrases, there's also the raffle, another
Boston idiosyncrasy: the newest of the White Flag newcomers trying to Get Active In Group Service wobble around with rattan
baskets and packs of tickets, one for a buck and three for a fin, and the winner eventually gets announced from the podium and
everyone hisses and shouts 'Fix!' and laughs, and the winner wins a Big Book or an As Bill Sees It or a Came To Believe, which if
he's got some sober time in and already owns all the AA literature from winning previous raffles he'll stand up and publicly offer
it to any newcomer who wants it, which means any newcomer with enough humble desperation to come up to him and ask for it
and risk being given a phone number to carry around in his wallet.
At the White Flag raffle-break Gately usually stands around chainsmoking with the Ennet House residents, so that he's
casually available to answer questions and empathize with complaints. He usually waits til after the meeting to do his own
complaining to Ferocious Francis, with whom Gately now shares the important duty of 'breaking down the hall,' sweeping floors
and emptying ashtrays and wiping down the long cafeteria tables, which F.F.G.'s function is limited because he's on oxygen and
his function consists mostly of standing there sucking oxygen and holding an unlit cigar while Gately breaks down the hall. Gately
rather likes Ken Erdedy, who came into the House about a month ago from some cushy Belmont rehab. Erdedy's an upscale guy,
what Gately's mother would have called a yuppie, an account executive at Viney and Veals Advertising downtown his Intake form
said, and though he's about Gately's age he's so softly good-looking in that soft mannequinish way Harvard and Tufts schoolboys
have, and looks so smooth and groomed all the time even in jeans and a plain cotton sweater, that Gately thinks of him as much
younger, totally ungrizzled, and refers to him mentally as 'kid.' Erdedy's in the House mainly for 'marijuana addiction,' which
Gately has a hard time Identifying with anybody getting in enough trouble with weed to leave his job and condo to bunk in a room
full of tattooed guys who smoke in their sleep, and to work like pumping gas (Erdedy just started his nine-month humility job at
the Merit station down by North Harvard St. in Allston) for 32 minimum-wage hours a week. Or to have his leg be joggling like
that all the time from tensions of Withdrawal: from fucking grass? But it's not Gately's place to say what's bad enough to make
somebody Come In and what isn't, not for anybody else but himself, and the shapely but big-time-troubled new girl Kate Gompert
— who mostly just stays in her bed in the new women's 5-Woman room when she isn't at meetings, and is on a Suicidality 
Contract with Pat, and isn't getting the usual pressure to get a humility job, and gets to get some sort of scrip-meds out of the meds
locker every morning — Kate Gompert's counselor Danielle S. reported at the last Staff Meeting that Kate had finally opened up
and told her she'd mostly Come In for weed, too, and not the lightweight prescription tranqs she'd listed on her Intake form. Gately
used to treat weed like tobacco. He wasn't like some other narcotics addicts who smoked weed when they couldn't get anything
else; he always smoked weed and could always get something else and simply smoked weed while he did whatever else he could
get. Gately doesn't miss weed much. The shocker-type AA Miracle is he doesn't much miss the Demerol, either, today.
A hard November wind is spattering goopy sleet against the broad windows all around the hall. The Provident Nursing Home
cafeteria is lit by a checkerboard array of oversized institutional bulbs overhead, a few of which are always low and give off
fluttery strobes. The fluttering bulbs are why Pat Montesian and all the other photic-seizure-prone area AAs never go to White
Flag, opting for the Freeway Group over in Brookline or the candyass Lake Street meeting up in West Newton on Sunday nights,
which Pat M. bizarrely drives all the way up from her home down on the South Shore in Milton to get to, to hear people talk about
their analysts and Saabs. There is no way to account for people's taste in AA. The White Flag hall is so brightly lit up all Gately
can see out any of the windows is a kind of shiny drooling black against everybody's pale reflection.
Miracle's one of the Boston AA terms Erdedy and the brand-new and very shaky veiled girl resident standing over him
complain they find hard to stomach, as in 'We're All Miracles Here' and 'Don't Leave Five Minutes Before The Miracle Happens'
and 'To Stay Sober For 24 Hours Is A Miracle.’
Except the brand-new girl, either Joelle V. or Joelle D., who said she'd hit the occasional meeting in the past before her
Bottom and had been roundly repelled, and is still pretty much cynical and repelled, she said on the way down to Provident under
Gately's direct new-resident supervision, says she finds even the word Miracle preferable to the constant AA talk about 'the Grace
of God,' which reminds her of wherever she grew up, where she's indicated places of worship were often aluminum trailers or
fiberboard shacks and church-goers played with copperheads in the services to honor something about serpents and tongues.
Gately's also observed how Erdedy's also got that Tufts-Harvard way of speaking without seeming to move his lower jaw.
'It's as if it's its own country or something,' Erdedy complains, legs crossed in maybe a bit of a faggy schoolboy way, looking
around at the raffle-break, sitting in Gately's generous shadow. 'The first time I ever talked, over at the St. E's meeting on
Wednesday, somebody comes up after the Lord's Prayer and says "Good to hear you, I could really I.D. with that bottom you were
sharing about, the isolating, the can't-and-can't, it's the greenest I've felt in months, hearing you." And then gives me this raffle
ticket with his phone number that I didn't ask for and says I'm right where I'm supposed to be, which I have to say I found a bit
patronizing.’
The best noise Gately produces is his laugh, which booms and reassures, and a certain haunted hardness goes out of his face
when he laughs. Like most huge men, Gately has kind of a high hoarse speaking voice; his larynx sounds compressed. 'I still hate
that right-where-you're-supposed-to-be thing,' he says, laughing. He likes that Erdedy, sitting, looks right up at him and cocks his
head slightly to let Gately know he's got his full attention. Gately doesn't know that this is a requisite for a white-collar job where
you have to show you're attending fully to clients who are paying major sums and get to expect an overt display of full attention.
Gately is still not yet a good judge of anything about upscale people except where they tend to hide their valuables.
Boston AA, with its emphasis on the Group, is intensely social. The raffle-break goes on and on. An intoxicated street-guy
with a venulated nose and missing incisors and electrician's tape wrapped around his shoes is trying to sing 'Volare' up at the
empty podium microphone. He is gently, cheerfully induced offstage by a Crocodile with a sandwich and an arm around the
shoulders. There's a certain pathos to the Crocodile's kindness, his clean flannel arm around the weatherstained shoulders, which
pathos Gately feels and likes being able to feel it, while he says 'But at least the "Good to hear you" I quit minding. It's just what
they say when somebody's got done speaking. They can't say like "Good job" or "You spoke well," cause it can't be anybody's
place here to judge if anybody else did good or bad or whatnot. You know what I'm saying, Tiny, there?’
Tiny Ewell, in a blue suit and laser chronometer and tiny shoes whose shine you could read by, is sharing a dirty aluminum
ashtray with Nell Gunther, who has a glass eye which she amuses herself by usually wearing so the pupil and iris face in and the
dead white and tiny manufacturer's specifications on the back of the eye face out. Both of them are pretending to study the blond
false wood of the tabletop, and Ewell makes a bit of a hostile show of not looking up or responding to Gately or entering into the
conversation in any way, which is his choice and on him alone, so Gately lets it go. Wade McDade has a Walkman going, which
is technically OK at the raffle-break although it's not a real good idea. Chandler Foss is flossing his teeth and pretending to throw
the used floss at Jennifer Belbin. Most of the Ennet House residents are mingling satisfactorily. The couple of residents that are
black are mingling with other blacks.141_ The Diehl kid and Doony Glynn are amusing themselves telling homosexuality jokes to
Morris Hanley, who sits smoothing his hair with his fingertips, pretending to not even acknowledge, his left hand still bandaged.
Alfonso Parias-Carbo is standing with three Allston Group guys, smiling broadly and nodding, not understanding a word anybody
says. Bruce Green has gone downstairs to the men's head and amused Gately by asking his permission first. Gately told him to go
knock himself out. Green has good big arms and no gut, even after all the Substances, and Gately suspects he might have played
some ball at some point. Kate Gompert is totally by herself at a nonsmoking table over by a window, ignoring her pale reflection
and making little cardboard tents out of her raffle tickets and moving them around. Clenette Henderson clutches another black girl
and laughs and says 'Girl!' several times. Emil Minty is clutching his head. Geoff Day in his black turtleneck and blazer keeps
lurking on the fringes of various groups of people pretending he's part of the conversations. No immediate sign of Burt F. Smith or
Charlotte Treat. Randy Lenz, in his cognito white mustache and sideburns, is doubtless at the pay phone in the northeast corner of
the Provident lobby downstairs: Lenz spends nearly unacceptable amounts of time either on a phone or trying to get in position to
use a phone. 'Cause what I like,' Gately says to Erdedy (Erdedy really is listening, even though there's a compellingly cheap young
woman in a brief white skirt and absurd black mesh stockings sitting with her legs nicely crossed — one-strap low-spike black
Ferragamos, too — at the periphery of his vision, and the woman is with a large man, which makes her even more compelling;
and also the veiled new girl's breasts and her hips' clefs are compelling and distracting, next to him, even in a long baggy loose
blue sweater that matches the embroidered selvage around her veil), 'What I think I like is how "It was good to hear you" ends up,
like, saying two separate things together.' Gately's also saying this to Joelle, who it's weird but you can tell she's looking at you,
even through the linen veil. There's maybe half a dozen or so other veiled people in the White Flag hall tonight; a decent 
percentage of people in the 11-Step Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed are also in 12-Step fellowships for other
issues besides hideous deformity. Most of the room's veiled AAs are women, though there is this one male veiled U.H.I.D. guy
that's an active White Flagger, Tommy S. or F., who years ago nodded out on a stuffed acrylic couch with a bottle of Rémy and a
lit Tiparillo — the guy now wears U.H.I.D. veils and a whole spectrum of silk turtlenecks and assorted hats and classy lambskin
driving gloves. Gately's had the U.H.I.D.-and-veil philosophy explained to him in passing a couple times but still doesn't much get
it, it seems like a gesture of shame and concealment, still, to him, the veil. Pat Montesian had said there's been a few other
U.H.I.D.s who'd gone through Ennet House prior to the Year of Dairy Products From the American Heartland, which is when new
resident Gately came wobbling in, but this Joelle van Dyne, who Gately feels he has zero handle on yet as a person or how serious
she is about putting down Substances and Coming In to really get straight, this Joelle is the first veiled resident Gately's had under
him, as a Staffer. This Joelle girl, that wasn't even on the two-month waiting list for Intake, got in overnight under some private
arrangement with somebody on the House's Board of Directors, upscale Enfield guys into charity and directing. There'd been no
Intake interview with Pat at the House; the girl just showed up two days ago right after supper. She'd been up at Brigham and
Women's for five days after some sort of horrific O.D.-type situation said to have included both defib paddles and priests. She'd
had real luggage and this like Chinese portable dressing-screen thing with clouds and pop-eyed dragons that even folded
lengthwise took both Green and Parias-Carbo to lug upstairs. There's been no talk of a humility job for her, and Pat's counseling
the girl personally. Pat's got some sort of privately directed arrangement with the girl; Gately's already seen enough private-type
arrangements between certain Staffers and residents to feel like it's maybe kind of a character defect of Ennet House. A girl from
the Brookline Young People's Group over in a cheerleader skirt and slut-stockings is ignoring all the ashtrays and putting her
extra-long gasper out on the bare tabletop two rows over as she laughs like a seal at something an acne'd guy in a long camelhair
car coat he hasn't taken off and sockless leather dance-shoes Gately's never seen at a meeting before says. And he's got his hand
on hers as she grinds the gasper out. Something like putting a cigarette out against the wood-grain plastic tabletop, which Gately
can already see the ragged black burn-divot that's formed, it's something the rankness of which would never have struck him one
way or the other, before, until Gately took on half the break-down-the-hall-and-wipe-down-the-tables job at Ferocious Francis G.'s
suggestion, and now he feels sort of proprietary about the Prov-ident's tabletops. But it's not like he can go over and take anybody
else's inventory and tell them how to behave. He settles for imagining the girl pinwheeling through the air toward a glass wall.
'When they say it it sort of means like what you said was good for them, it helped them out somehow,' he says, 'but plus now
also I like saying it myself because if you think about it it also means it was good to be able to hear you. To really hear.' He's
trying subtly to alternate and look at Erdedy and Joelle both, like he's addressing them both. It's not something he's good at. His
head's too big to be subtle with. 'Because I remember for like the first sixty days or so I couldn't hear shit. I didn't hear nothing. I'd
just sit there and Compare, I'd go to myself, like, "I never rolled a car," "I never lost a wife," "I never bled from the rectum." Gene
would tell me to just keep coming for a while and sooner or later I'd start to be able to both listen and hear. He said it's hard to
really hear. But he wouldn't say what was the difference between hearing and listening, which pissed me off. But after a while I
started to really hear. It turns out — and this is just for me, maybe — but it turned out hearing the speaker means like all of a
sudden hearing how fucking similar the way he felt and the way I felt were, Out There, at the Bottom, before we each Came In.
Instead of just sitting here resenting being here and thinking how he bled from the ass and I didn't and how that means I'm not as
bad as him yet and I can still be Out There.’
One of the tricks to being of real service to newcomers is not to lecture or give advice but only talk about your own personal
experience and what you were told and what you found out personally, and to do it in a casual but positive and encouraging way.
Plus you're supposed to try and Identify with the newcomer's feelings as much as possible. Ferocious Francis G. says this is one of
the ways guys with just a year or two sober can be most helpful: being able to sincerely ID with the newly Sick and Suffering.
Ferocious Francis told Gately as they were wiping down tables that if a Crocodile with decades of sober AA time can still
sincerely empathize and Identify with a whacked-out bug-eyed Disease-ridden newcomer then there's something deeply fucked up
about that Crocodile's recovery. The Crocodiles, decades sober, live in a totally different spiritual galaxy, inside. One long-timer
describes it as he has a whole new unique interior spiritual castle, now, to live in.
Part of this new Joelle girl's pull for Ken Erdedy isn't just the sexual thing of her body, which he finds made way sexier by the
way the overlarge blue coffee-stained sweater tries to downplay the body thing without being so hubristic as to try to hide it —
sloppy sexiness pulls Erdedy in like a well-groomed moth to a lit window — but it's also the veil, wondering what horrific
contrast to the body's allure lies swollen or askew under that veil; it gives the pull a perverse sideways slant that makes it even
more distracting, and so Erdedy cocks his head a little more up at Gately and narrows his eyes to make his listening-look terribly
intense. He doesn't know that there's an abstract distance in the look that makes it seem like he's studying a real bitch of a 7-iron
on the tenth rough or something; the look doesn't communicate what he thinks his audience wants it to.
The raffle-break is winding down as everybody starts to want their own ashtray. Two more big urns of coffee emerge from
the kitchen door over by the literature table. Erdedy is probably the second-biggest leg-and-foot-joggler in present residence, after
Geoffrey D. Joelle v. D. now says something very strange. It's a very strange little moment, right at the end of the raffle-break, and
Gately later finds it impossible to describe it in his Log entry for the P.M. shift. It is the first time he realizes that Joelle's voice —
crisp and rich and oddly empty, her accent just barely Southern and with a strange and it turns out Kentuckian lapse in the
pronunciation of all apicals except s — is familiar in a faraway way that both makes it familiar and yet lets Gately be sure he's
never once met her before, Out There. She inclines the plane of her blue-bordered veil briefly toward the floor's tile (very bad tile,
scab-colored, nauseous, worst thing about the big room by far), brings it back up level (unlike Erdedy she's standing, and in flats is
nearly Gately's height), and says that she's finding it especially hard to take when these earnest ravaged folks at the lectern say
they're 'Here But For the Grace of God,' except that's not the strange thing she says, because when Gately nods hard and starts to
interject about 'It was the same for —' and wants to launch into a fairly standard Boston AA agnostic-soothing riff about the 'God'
in the slogan being just shorthand for a totally subjective and up-to-you 'Higher Power' and AA being merely spiritual instead of
dogmatically religious, a sort of benign anarchy of subjective spirit, Joelle cuts off his interjection and says that but that her
trouble with it is that 'But For the Grace of God' is a subjunctive, a counterfactual, she says, and can make sense only when
introducing a conditional clause, like e.g. 'But For the Grace of God I would have died on Molly Notkin's bathroom floor,' so that 
an indicative transposition like 'I'm here But For the Grace of God' is, she says, literally senseless, and regardless of whether she
hears it or not it's meaningless, and that the foamy enthusiasm with which these folks can say what in fact means nothing at all
makes her want to put her head in a Radarange at the thought that Substances have brought her to the sort of pass where this is the
sort of language she has to have Blind Faith in. Gately looks at a rectangular blue-selvaged expanse of clean linen whose gentle
rises barely allude to any features below, he looks at her and has no idea whether she's serious or not, or whacked, or trying like
Dr. Geoff Day to erect Denial-type fortifications with some kind of intellectualish showing-off, and he doesn't know what to say
in reply, he has absolutely nothing in his huge square head to Identify with her with or latch onto or say in encouraging reply, and
for an instant the Provident cafeteria seems pin-drop silent, and his own heart grips him like an infant rattling the bars of its
playpen, and he feels a greasy wave of an old and almost unfamiliar panic, and for a second it seems inevitable that at some point
in his life he's going to get high again and be back in the cage all over again, because for a second the blank white veil levelled at
him seems a screen on which might well be projected a casual and impressive black and yellow smily-face, grinning, and he feels
all the muscles in his own face loosen and descend kneeward; and the moment hangs there, distended, until the White Flag raffle
coordinator for November, Glenn K., glides up to the podium mike in his scarlet velour caparison and makeup and candelabrum
with candles the same color as the floor tile and uses the plastic gavel to formally end the break and bring things back to whatever
passes here for order, for the raffle drawing. The Watertown guy with middle-level sober time who wins the Big Book publicly
offers it to any newcomer that wants it, and Gately is pleased to see Bruce Green raise a big hand, and decides he'll just turn it
over and ask Ferocious Francis G. for feedback on subjunctives and countersexuals, and the infant leaves its playpen alone inside
him, and the rivets of the long table his seat's attached to make a brief distressed noise as he sits and settles in for the second half
of the meeting, asking silently for help to be determined to try to really hear or die trying.
NNYC's harbor's Liberty Island's gigantic Lady has the sun for a crown and holds what looks like a huge photo album under
one iron arm, and the other arm holds aloft a product. The product is changed each 1 Jan. by brave men with pitons and cranes.
But it's funny what they'll find funny, AAs at Boston meetings, listening. The next Advanced Basics guy summoned by their
gleamingly bald western-wear chairman to speak is dreadfully, transparently unfunny: painfully new but pretending to be at ease,
to be an old hand, desperate to amuse and impress them. The guy's got the sort of professional background where he's used to
trying to impress gatherings of persons. He's dying to be liked up there. He's performing. The White Flag crowd can see all this.
Even the true morons among them see right through the guy. This is not a regular audience. A Boston AA is very sensitive to the
presence of ego. When the new guy introduces himself and makes an ironic gesture and says, 'I'm told I've been given the Gift of
Desperation. I'm looking for the exchange window,' it's so clearly unspontaneous, rehearsed—plus commits the subtle but cardinal
Message-offense of appearing to deprecate the Program rather than the Self—that just a few polite titters resound, and people shift
in their seats with a slight but signal discomfort. The worst punishment Gately's seen inflicted on a Commitment speaker is when
the host crowd gets embarrassed for him. Speakers who are accustomed to figuring out what an audience wants to hear and then
supplying it find out quickly that this particular audience does not want to be supplied with what someone else thinks it wants. It's
another conundrum Gately finally ran out of cerebral steam on. Part of finally getting comfortable in Boston AA is just finally
running out of steam in terms of trying to figure stuff like this out. Because it literally makes no sense. Close to two hundred
people all punishing somebody by getting embarrassed for him, killing him by empathetically dying right there with him, for him,
up there at the podium. The applause when this guy's done has the relieved feel of a fist unclenching, and their cries of 'Keep
Coming!' are so sincere it's almost painful.
But then in equally paradoxical contrast have a look at the next Advanced Basics speaker — this tall baggy sack of a man,
also painfully new, but this poor bastard here completely and openly nerve-racked, wobbling his way up to the front, his face
shiny with sweat and his talk full of blank cunctations and disassociated leaps — as the guy speaks with terrible abashed chagrin
about trying to hang on to his job Out There as his A.M. hangovers became more and more debilitating until he finally got so
shaky and aphasiac he just couldn't bear to even face the customers who'd come knocking on his Department's door — he was,
from 0800 to !6OOh., the Complaint Department of Filene's Department Store —
— 'What I did finally, Jesus I don't know where I got such a stupid idea from, I brought this hammer in from home and
brought it in and kept it right there under my desk, on the floor, and when somebody knocked at the door I'd just... I'd sort of dive
onto the floor and crawl under the desk and grab up the hammer, and I'd start in to pounding on the leg of the desk, real hard-like,
whacketa whacketa, like I was fixing something down there. And if they opened the door finally and came in anyhow or came in
to bitch about me not opening the door I'd just stay out of sight under there pounding away like hell and I'd yell out I was going to
be a moment, just a moment, emergency repairs, be with them momentarily. I guess you can guess how all that pounding felt, you
know, under there, what with the big head I had every morning. I'd hide under there and pound and pound with the hammer till
they finally gave up and went away, I'd watch from under the desk and tell when they finally went away, from I could see their
feet from under the desk.’
— And about how the hiding-under-the-desk-and-pounding thing worked, incredibly enough, for almost the whole last
year of his drinking, which ended around this past Labor Day, when one vindictive complainant finally figured out where in
Filene's to go to complain about the Complaint Dept. — the White Flaggers all fell about, they were totally pleased and amused,
the Crocodiles removed their cigars and roared and wheezed and stomped both feet on the floor and showed scary teeth, everyone
roaring with Identification and pleasure. This even though, as the speaker's confusion at their delight openly betrays, the story
wasn't meant to be one bit funny: it was just the truth.
Gately's found it's got to be the truth, is the thing. He's trying hard to really hear the speakers — he's stayed in the habit he'd
developed as an Ennet resident of sitting right up where he could see dentition and pores, with zero obstructions or heads between
him and the podium, so the speaker fills his whole vision, which makes it easier to really hear — trying to concentrate on
receiving the Message instead of brooding on that odd old dark moment of aphasiac terror with this veiled like psuedointellectual-type girl who was probably just in some sort of complex Denial, or on whatever doubtlessly grim place he feels like he
knows that smooth echoless slightly Southern voice from. The thing is it has to be the truth to really go over, here. It can't be a
calculated crowd-pleaser, and it has to be the truth unslanted, unfortified. And maximally unironic. An ironist in a Boston AA
meeting is a witch in church. Irony-free zone. Same with sly disingenuous manipulative pseudo-sincerity. Sincerity with an 
ulterior motive is something these tough ravaged people know and fear, all of them trained to remember the coyly sincere, ironic,
self-presenting fortifications they'd had to construct in order to carry on Out There, under the ceaseless neon bottle.
This doesn't mean you can't pay empty or hypocritical lip-service, however. Paradoxically enough. The desperate, newly
sober White Flaggers are always encouraged to invoke and pay empty lip-service to slogans they don't yet understand or believe
— e.g. 'Easy Does It!' and 'Turn It Over!' and 'One Day At a Time!' It's called Take It Till You Make It,' itself an oft-invoked
slogan. Everybody on a Commitment who gets up publicly to speak starts out saying he's an alcoholic, says it whether he believes
he is yet or not; then everybody up there says how Grateful he is to be sober today and how great it is to be Active and out on a
Commitment with his Group, even if he's not grateful or pleased about it at all. You're encouraged to keep saying stuff like this
until you start to believe it, just like if you ask somebody with serious sober time how long you'll have to keep schlepping to all
these goddamn meetings he'll smile that infuriating smile and tell you just until you start to want to go to all these goddamn
meetings. There are some definite cultish, brainwashy elements to the AA Program (the term Program itself resonates darkly, for
those who fear getting brainwashed), and Gately tries to be candid with his residents re this issue. But he also shrugs and tells
them that by the end of his oral-narcotics and burglary careers he'd sort of decided the old brain needed a good scrub and soak
anyway. He says he pretty much held his brain out and told Pat Montesian and Gene M. to go ahead and wash away. But he tells
his residents he's thinking now that the Program might be more like deprogramming than actual washing, considering the psychic
job the Disease's Spider has done on them all. Gately's most marked progress in turning his life around in sobriety, besides the fact
that he no longer drives off into the night with other people's merchandise, is that he tries to be just about as verbally honest as
possible at almost all times, now, without too much calculation about how a listener's going to feel about what he says. This is
harder than it sounds. But so that's why on Commitments, sweating at the podium as only a large man can sweat, his thing is that
he always says he's Lucky to be sober today, instead of that he's Grateful today, because he admits that the former is always true,
every day, even though a lot of the time he still doesn't feel Grateful, more like shocked that this thing seems to work, plus a lot of
the time also ashamed and depressed about how he's spent over half his life, and scared he might be permanently brain-damaged
or retarded from Substances, plus also usually without any sort of clue about where he's headed in sobriety or what he's supposed
to be doing or about really anything at all except that he's not at all keen to be back Out There behind any bars, again, in a hurry.
Ferocious Francis G. likes to punch Gately's shoulder and tell him he's right where he's supposed to be.
So but also know that causal attribution, like irony, is death, speaking-on-Commitments-wise. Crocodiles' temple-veins will
actually stand out and pulse with irritation if you start trying to blame your Disease on some cause or other, and everybody with
any kind of sober time will pale and writhe in their chair. See e.g. the White Flag audience's discomfort when the skinny hardfaced Advanced Basics girl who gets up to speak next to last posits that she was an eight-bag-a-day dope fiend because at sixteen
she'd had to become a stripper and semi-whore at the infamous Naked I Club out on Route 1 (a number of male eyes in the
audience flash with sudden recognition, and despite all willed restraint automatically do that crawly north-to-south thing down her
body, and Gately can see every ashtray on the table shake from the force of Joelle V.'s shudder), and then but that she'd had to
become a stripper at sixteen because she'd had to run away from her foster home in Saugus MA, and that she'd had to run away
from home because ... — here at least some of the room's discomfort is from the fact that the audience can tell the etiology is
going to get head-clutchingly prolix and involved; this girl has not yet learned to Keep It Simple —... because, well, to begin with,
she'd been adopted, and the foster parents also had their own biological daughter, and the biological daughter had, from birth, been
totally paralyzed and retarded and catatonic, and the foster mother in the household was — as Joelle V. put it later to Gately —
crazy as a Fucking Mud-Bug, and was in total Denial about her biological daughter's being a vegetable, and not only insisted on
treating the invertebrate biological daughter like a valid member of the chordate phylum but also insisted that the father and the
adopted daughter also treat It as normal and undamaged, and made the adopted daughter share a bedroom with It, bring It along to
slumber parties (the speaker uses the term It for the invertebrate sister, and also to tell the truth uses the phrase 'drag It along'
rather than 'bring It along,' which Gately wisely doesn't dwell over), and even to school with her, and softball practice, and the
hairdresser's, and Campfire Girls, etc., where at whatever place she'd dragged It along to It would lie in a heap, drooling and
incontinent under exquisite mother-bought fashions specially altered for atrophy and top-shelf Lancôme cosmetics that looked just
lurid on It, and with only the whites of Its eyes showing, with fluid dribbling from Its mouth and elsewhere, and making
unspeakable gurgly noises, completely pale and moist and stagnant; and then, when the adopted daughter now speaking turned
fifteen, the rabidly Catholic wacko foster mother even announced that OK now that the adopted daughter was fifteen she could go
out on dates, but only as long as It got to come along too, in other words that the only dates the fifteen-year-old adopted daughter
could go out on were double dates with It and whatever submammalian escort the speaker could root up for It; and how this sort of
stuff went on and on; and how the nightmarishness of Its continual pale soggy ubiquitousness in her young life would alone be
more than sufficient to cause and explain the speaker's later drug addiction, she feels, but that also it so happened that the foster
family's quiet smiling patriarch, who worked 0900 to 2100 as a claims processor for Aetna, it turned out that the cheerful smiling
foster father actually made the wacko foster mother look like a Doric column of stability by comparison, because there turned out
to be things about the biological daughter's utter paralytic pliability and catatonic inability to make anything except unspeakable
gurgly noises that the smiling father found greatly to a certain very sick advantage the speaker says she has trouble openly
discussing, still, even at thirty-one months sober in AA, being as yet still so retroactively Wounded and Hurting from it; but so in
sum that she'd been ultimately forced to run away from the adoptive foster Saugus home and so become a Naked-I stripper and so
become a raging dope fiend not, as in so many ununique cases, because she had been incestuously diddled, but because she'd been
abusively forced to share a bedroom with a drooling invertebrate who by fourteen was Itself getting incestuously diddled on a
nightly basis by a smiling biological claims processor of a father who — the speaker pauses to summon courage — who
apparently liked to pretend It was Raquel Welch, the former celluloid sex goddess of the father's glandular heyday, and he even
called It 'RAQUEL!' in moments of incestuous extremity; and how, the New England summer the speaker turned fifteen and had
to start dragging It along on double dates and then having to make sure to drag It back home again by 2300h. so It had plenty of
time to be incestuously diddled, that summer the smiling quiet foster father even bought, had found somewhere, a cheesy rubber
Raquel Welch full-head pull-on mask, with hair, and would now nightly come in in the dark and lift Its limp soft head up and
struggle and lug to get the mask on and the relevant holes aligned for air, and then would diddle his way to extremity and cry out 
'RAQUEL!' and then but he would just clamber out and off and leave the dark bedroom smiling and sated and lots of times leave
the mask still on It, he'd like forget, or not care, just as he seemed oblivious (But For the Grace of God, in a way) to the fetally
curled skinny form of the adopted daughter lying perfectly still in the next bed, in the dark, pretending to sleep, silent, shellbreathing, with her hard skinny wounded pre-addiction face turned to the wall, in the room's next bed, her bed, the one without the
collapsible crib-like hospital railings along the sides. . . . The audience is clutching its collective head, by this time only partly in
empathy, as the speaker specifies how she was de facto emotionally all but like forced to flee and strip and swan-dive into the dark
spiritual anesthesia of active drug addiction in a dysfunctional attempt to psychologically deal with one particular seminally
scarring night of abject horror, the indescribable horror of the way It, the biological daughter, had looked up at her, the speaker,
one particular final time on this one particular one of the frequent occasions the speaker had to get out of bed after the father had
come and gone and tiptoe over to Its bed and lean over the cold metal hospital railing and remove the rubber Raquel Welch mask
and replace it in a bedside drawer under some back issues of Ramparts and Commonweal, after carefully closing Its splayed legs
and pulling down Its variously-stained designer nightie, all of which she made sure to do when the father didn't bother to, at night,
so that the wacko foster mother wouldn't come in in the A.M. and find It in a rubber Raquel Welch mask with Its nightie hiked up
and Its legs agape and put two and two together and get all kinds of deep Denial shattered about why the foster father always went
around the foster house with a silent creepy smile, and flip out and make the invertebrate catatonic's father stop diddling It —
because, the speaker figured, if the foster father had to stop diddling It it didn't exactly take Sally Jessy Raphael M.S.W. to figure
out who was then probably going to get promoted to the role of Raquel, over in the next bed. The silent smiling claims-processor
father never once acknowledged the adopted daughter's little post-incestuous tidyings-up. It's the kind of sick unspoken complicity
characteristic of wildly dysfunctional families, confides the speaker, who's also proud she says to be a member of a splinter 12-
Step Fellowship, an Adult-Child-type thing called Wounded, Hurting, Inadequately Nurtured but Ever-Recovering Survivors. But
so she says it was this one particular night soon after she'd turned sixteen, after the father had come and gone and uncaringly just
left Its mask on again, and over to Its bedside the speaker had to creep in the dark, to tidy up, and but this time it turned out there
was a problem with the Raquel Welch mask's long auburn horsehair tresses having gotten twisted and knotted into the semi-living
strands of Its own elaborately overmoussed coiffure, and the adopted daughter had to activate the perimeter of lights on Its bedside
table's many-bulbed vanity mirror to see to try to get the Raquel Welch wig untangled, and when she finally got the mask off, with
the vanity mirror still blazing away, the speaker says how she was forced to gaze for the first time on Its lit-up paralytic postdiddle face, and how the expression thereon was most assuredly quite enough to force anybody with an operant limbic
system142_ to leg it right out of her dysfunctional foster family's home, nay and the whole community of Saugus MA, now
homeless and scarred and forced by dark psychic forces straight to Route 1 's infamous gauntlet of neon-lit depravity and
addiction, to try and forget, rasa the tabula, wipe the memory totally out, numb it with opiates. Voice trembling, she accepts the
chairperson's proffered bandanna-hankie and blows her nose one nostril at a time and says she can almost see It all over again: Its
expression: in the vanity's lights only Its eyes' whites showed, and while Its utter catatonia and paralysis prevented the contraction
of Its luridly rouged face's circumoral muscles into any conventional human facial-type expression, nevertheless some hideously
mobile and expressive layer in the moist regions below real people's expressive facial layer, some slow-twitch layer unique to It,
had blindly contracted, somehow, to gather the blank soft cheese of Its face into the sort of pinched gasping look of neurologic
concentration that marks a carnal bliss beyond smiles or sighs. Its face looked post-coital sort of the way you'd imagine the
vacuole and optica of a protozoan looking post-coital after it's shuddered and shot its mono-cellular load into the cold waters of
some really old sea. Its facial expression was, in a word, the speaker says, unspeakably, unforgettably ghastly and horrid and
scarring. It was also the exact same expression as the facial expression on the stone-robed lady's face in this one untitled photo of
some Catholic statue that hung (the photo) in the dysfunctional household's parlor right above the little teak table where the
dysfunctional foster mother kept her beads and Hours and lay breviary, this photo of a statue of a woman whose stone robes were
half hiked up and wrinkled in the most godawfully sensually prurient way, the woman reclined against uncut rock, her robes hiked
and one stone foot hanging off the rock as her legs hung parted, with a grinning little totally psychotic-looking cherub-type angel
standing on the lady's open thighs and pointing a bare arrow at where the stone robe hid her cold tit, the woman's face upturned
and cocked and pinched into that exact same shuddering-protozoan look beyond pleasure or pain. The wacko foster mom knelt
daily to that photo, in a beaded and worshipful posture, and also required daily that It be hoisted by the adopted daughter from Its
never-mentioned wheelchair and held under Its arms and lowered so as to approximate the same knelt devotion to the photo, and
while It gurgled and Its head lolled the speaker had gazed at the photo with a nameless revulsion each morning as she held Its
dead slumped weight and tried to keep Its chin off Its chest, and now was being forced into seeing by mirror-light the exact same
expression on the face of a catatonic who'd just been incestuously diddled, an expression at once reverent and greedy on a face
connected by dead hair to the slack and flapping rubber visage of an old sex goddess's empty face. And to make a long story short
(the speaker says, not trying to be funny as far as the Flaggers can see), the traumatically scarred adopted girl had legged it from
the bedroom and foster house into the brooding North Shore teen-runaway night, and had stripped and semi-whored and IVinjected her way all the way to that standard two-option addicted cliff-edge, hoping only to Forget. That's what caused it, she says;
that's what she's trying to recover from, a Day at a Time, and she's sure grateful to be here with her Group today, sober and
courageously remembering, and newcomers should definitely Keep Coming.... As she's telling what she sees as etiological truth,
even though the monologue seems sincere and unaffected and at least a B+ on the overall AA-story lucidity-scale, faces in the hall
are averted and heads clutched and postures uneasily shifted in empathetic distress at the look-what-happened-to-poor-me
invitation implicit in the tale, the talk's tone of self-pity itself less offensive (even though plenty of these White Flaggers, Gately
knows, had personal childhoods that made this girl's look like a day at Six Flags Over the Poconos) than the subcurrent of
explanation, an appeal to exterior Cause that can slide, in the addictive mind, so insidiously into Excuse that any causal attribution
is in Boston AA feared, shunned, punished by empathic distress. The Why of the Disease is a labrynth it is strongly suggested all
AAs boycott, inhabited as the maze is by the twin minotaurs of Why Me? and Why Not?, a.k.a. Self-Pity and Denial, two of the
smily-faced Sergeant at Arms' more fearsome aides de camp. The Boston AA 'In Here' that protects against a return to 'Out There'
is not about explaining what caused your Disease. It's about a goofily simple practical recipe for how to remember you've got the
Disease day by day and how to treat the Disease day by day, how to keep the seductive ghost of a bliss long absconded from 
baiting you and hooking you and pulling you back Out and eating your heart raw and (if you're lucky) eliminating your map for
good. So no whys or wherefores allowed. In other words check your head at the door. Though it can't be conventionally enforced,
this, Boston AA's real root axiom, is almost classically authoritarian, maybe even proto-Fascist. Some ironist who decamped back
Out There and left his meager effects to be bagged and tossed by Staff into the Ennet House attic had, all the way back in the Year
of the Tucks Medicated Pad, permanently engraved his tribute to AA's real Prime Directive with a rosewood-handled boot-knife
in the plastic seat of the 5-Man men's room's commode:
'Do not ask WHY If you dont want to DIE
Do like your TOLD If you want to get OLD143_
30 APRIL / 1 MAY YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
The choreography of interface had settled into the form of Steeply smoking, his bare arms crossed, going up and down slowly
on the toes of his high heels, while Marathe hunched slightly in his metal chair, shoulders rounded and head slightly forward in a
practiced position that allowed him almost to sleep while still attending to every detail of a conversation or wearisome
surveillance. He (Marathe) had drawn his plaid blanket up to his chest. It was increasingly chilly at the altitude of the shelf. They
could feel the remains of the U.S.A. Sonora Desert's heat rising past them into the clotted spangle of stars that were above them.
The shirt Marathe wore beneath his windbreaker was not of Hawaiian type.
Marathe remained unsure in this time of what exactly it was that Hugh Steeply of U.S.O.U.S. wished to learn from him, or
verify, through Mar-athe's betrayal. Near midnight Steeply had given him the datum that he (Steeply) had been on the personal
Marital Leave over his recent divorce, and was now back in the field of duty, wearing prosthetic breasts and woman-journalist
credentials, assigned to cultivate some of the Entertainment's alleged filmmaker's relatives and inner circles. Marathe had made
gentle fun of the inoriginality of a journalistic cover, then later less gentle fun of Steeply's cover's false name, expressing humored
doubts that the meaty electrolysized face of Steeply would be responsible of launching even one ship or vessel.
There'd been that first brutal winter night, early in the O.N.A.N.ite temporo-subsidized era, soon after the InterLace
dissemination of The Man Who Began to Suspect He Was Made of Glass, that Himself emerged from the sauna and came to Lyle
all sloppy-blotto and depressed over the fact that even the bastards in the avant-garde journals were complaining that even in his
commercially entertaining stuff Incan-denza's fatal Achilles' heel was plot, that Incandenza's efforts had no sort of engaging plot,
no movement that sucked you in and drew you along.144134 Mario and Ms. Joelle van Dyne are probably the only people who
know that Found Drama145135 and anticonfluentialism both came out of this night with Lyle.
It's not like Boston AA recoils from the idea of responsibility, though. Cause: no; responsibility: yes. It seems like it all
depends on which way the arrow of presumed responsibility points. The hard-faced adopted stripper had presented herself as the
object of an outside Cause. Now the arrow comes back around as tonight's meeting's last and maybe best Advanced Basics
speaker, another newcomer, a round pink girl with no eyelashes at all and a 'base-head's ruined teeth, gets up there and speaks in
an r-less South Boston brogue about being pregnant at twenty and smoking Eightballs of freebase cocaine like a fiend all through
her pregnancy even though she knew it was bad for the baby and wanted desperately to quit. She tells about having her water
break and contractions start late one night in her welfare-hotel room when she was right in the middle of an Eightball she'd had to
spend the evening turning unbelievably sordid and degrading tricks to pay for; she did what she had to do to get high, she says,
even while pregnant, she says; and she says even when the pain of the contractions got to be too bad to bear she'd been unable to
tear herself away from the 'base-pipe to go to the free clinic to deliver, and how she'd sat on the floor of the welfare-hotel room
and freebased her way all through labor (that new Joelle girl's veil's billowing in and out with her breath, Gately sees, just like it
also was during the last speaker's description of the statue's orgasm in the catatonic's dysfunctional Catholic mother's devotional
photo); and how she'd finally delivered of a stillborn infant right there alone on her side like a cow on the rug of her room, all the
time throughout still compulsively loading up the glass pipe and smoking; and how the infant emerged all dry and hard like a
constipated turdlet, with no protective moisture and no afterbirth-material following it out, and how the emerged infant was tiny
and dry and all withered and the color of strong tea, and dead, and also had no face, had in utero developed no eyes or nostrils and
just a little lipless hyphen of a mouth, and its limbs were malformed and arachnodactylic, and there had been some sort of
translucent reptilian like webbing between its mucronate digits; the speaker's mouth is a quivering arch of woe; her baby had been
poisoned before it could grow a face or make any personal choices, it would have soon died of Substance-Withdrawal in the free
clinic's Pyrex incubator if it had emerged alive anyway, she could tell, she'd been on such a bad 'base-binge all that pregnant year;
and but so eventually the Eightball was consumed and then the screen and steel-wool ball in the pipe itself smoked and the cloth
prep-filter smoked to ash and then of course likely-looking pieces of lint had been gleaned off the rug and also smoked, and the
girl finally passed out, still umbilically linked to the dead infant; and how when she came to again in unsparing noonlight the next
day and saw what still clung by a withered cord to her empty insides she got introduced to the real business-end of the arrow of
responsibility, and as she gazed in daylight at the withered faceless stillborn baby she was so overcome with grief and selfloathing that she erected a fortification of complete and black Denial, like total Denial. She held and swaddled the dead thing just
as if it were alive instead of dead, and she began to carry it around with her wherever she went, just as she imagined devoted
mothers carry their babies with them everywhere they go, the faceless infant's corpse completely veiled and hidden in a little pink
blanket the addicted expectant mother'd let herself buy at Woolworth's at seven months, and she also kept the cord's connection intact until her end of the cord finally fell out of her and dangled, and smelled, and she carried the dead infant everywhere, even
when turning sordid tricks, because single motherhood or not she still needed to get high and still had to do what she had to do to
get high, so she carried the blanket-wrapped infant in her arms as she walked the streets in her velvet fuchsia minipants and
haltertop and green spike heels, turning tricks, until there began to be strong evidence, as she circled her block — it was August
— let's just say compelling evidence that the infant in the stained cocoon of blanket in her arms was not a biologically viable
infant, and passersby on the South Boston streets began to reel away white-faced as the girl passed by, stretch-marked and browntoothed and lashless (lashes lost in a Substance-accident; fire hazard and dental dysplasia go with the freebase terrain) and also
just hauntedly calm-looking, oblivious to the olfactory havoc she was wreaking in the sweltering streets, and but her August's 
trick-business soon fell off sharply, understandably, and eventually word that there was a serious infant-and-Denial problem here
got around the streets, and her fellow Southie 'base-heads and street-friends came to her with not ungentle r-less remonstrances
and scented hankies and gently prying hands and tried to reason her out of her Denial, but she ignored them all, she guarded her
infant from all harm and kept it clutched to her — it was by now sort of stuck to her and would have been hard to separate from
her by hand anyway — and she'd walk the streets shunned and trickless and broke and in early-stage Substance-Withdrawal, with
the remains of the dead infant's tummy's cord dangling out from an unclosable fold in the now ominously ballooned and crusty
Woolworth's blanket: talk about Denial, this girl was in some major-league Denial; and but finally a pale and reeling beat-cop
phoned a hysterical olfactory alert in to the Commonwealth's infamous Department of Social Services — Gately sees alcoholic
moms all over the hall cross themselves and shudder at the mere mention of D.S.S., every addicted parent's worst nightmare,
D.S.S., they of the several different abstruse legal definitions of Neglect and the tungsten-tipped battering ram for triple-locked
apartment doors; in a dark window Gately sees one reflected mom sitting over with the Brighton AAs that has her two little girls
with her in the meeting and now at the D.S.S. reference clutches them reflexively to her bosom, one head per bosom, as one of the
girls struggles and dips her knees in the little curtsies of impending potty — but so now D.S.S. was on the case, and a platoon of
blandly efficient Wellesley-alum D.S.S. field personnel with clipboards and scary black Chanel women's businesswear were now
on the prowl in the South Boston streets for the addicted speaker and her late faceless infant; and but finally around this time,
during last year's awful late-August heat wave, evidence that the infant had a serious bio-viability problem started presenting itself
so forcefully that even the Denial-ridden addict in the mother could not ignore or dismiss it — evidence which the speaker's
reticence about describing (save to say that it involved an insect-attraction problem) makes things all the worse for the empathetic
White Flaggers, since it engages the dark imaginations all Substance-abusers share in surplus — and so but the mother says how
she finally broke down, emotionally and olfactorily, from the overwhelming evidence, on the cement playground outside her own
late mother's abandoned Project building off the L Street Beach in Southie, and a D.S.S. field team closed in for the pinch, and she
and her infant got pinched, and special D.S.S. spray-solvents had to be sent for and utilized in order to detach the Wool worth
baby-blanket from her maternal bosom, and the blanket's contents were more or less reassembled and were interred in a D.S.S.
coffin the speaker recalls as being the size of a Mary Kay makeup case, and the speaker was medically informed by somebody
with a clipboard from D.S.S. that the infant had been involuntarily toxified to death somewhere along in its development toward
becoming a boy; and the mother, after a painful D&C for the impacted placenta she'd carried inside, then spent the next four
months on the locked ward of Metropolitan State Hospital in Waltham MA, psychotic with Denial-deferred guilt and cocainewithdrawal and searing self-hatred; and how when she finally got discharged from Met State with her first S.S.I, mental-disability
check she found she had no taste for chunks or powders, she wanted only tall smooth bottles whose labels spoke of Proof, and she
drank and drank and believed in her heart she would never stop or swallow the truth, but finally she got to where she had to, she
says, swallow it, the responsible truth; how she quickly drank her way to the old two-option welfare-hotel window-ledge and
made a blubbering O2OOh. phone call, and then so here she is, apologizing for going on so long, trying to tell a truth she hopes
someday to swallow, inside. So she can just try and live. When she concludes by asking them to pray for her it almost doesn't
sound corny. Gately tries not to think. Here is no Cause or Excuse. It is simply what happened. This final speaker is truly new,
ready: all defenses have been burned away. Smooth-skinned and steadily pinker, at the podium, her eyes squeezed tight, she looks
like she's the one that's the infant. The host White Flaggers pay this burnt public husk of a newcomer the ultimate Boston AA
compliment: they have to consciously try to remember even to blink as they watch her, listening. I.D.ing without effort. There's no
judgment. It's clear she's been punished enough. And it was basically the same all over, after all, Out There. And the fact that it
was so good to hear her, so good that even Tiny Ewell and Kate Gompert and the rest of the worst of them all sat still and listened
without blinking, looking not just at the speaker's face but into it, helps force Gately to remember all over again what a tragic
adventure this is, that none of them signed up for.
They'd been the odd couple of libations, the muscled fitness-guru and the tall slope-shouldered optician/director, often down
there in the weight room til all hours, sitting on the towel dispenser, drinking, Lyle with his Caffeine Free Diet Coke, Incandenza
with his Wild Turkey. Mario literally standing by in case the ice bucket ran out or Himself needed moral support getting to the
urinal. Mario often fell asleep as the hour got severe, drifted in and out, slept upright and leaning forward, weight borne by his
police lock and lead receptacle.
James Incandenza was one of those profound-personality-change drinkers who seemed quiet and centered and almost
affectless when he was sober but would move way out to one side or the other of the human emotional spectrum, when drunk, and
seem to open up in a way that was almost injudicious.
Sometimes, libated late at night with Lyle in the newly outfitted E.T.A. weight room, Incandenza'd open up and pour his
heart's thickest chyme right out there for all to be affected and potentially scarred by. E.g. one night Mario, leaning way forward
into the police lock's support, drifted awake to the sound of his father saying that if he had to grade his marriage he'd give it a C—.
This seems injudicious in the extreme, potentially, though Mario, like Lyle, tends to take data pretty much as it comes.
Lyle, who sometimes would start to get tipsy himself as Himself's pores began to excrete the bourbon, often brought some
Blake out, as in William Blake, during these all-night sessions, and read Incandenza Blake, but in the voices of various cartoon
characters, which Himself eventually started regarding as deep.146136
8 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT GAUDEAMUS IGITUR
If it's odd that Mario Incandenza's first halfway-coherent film cartridge — a 48-minute job shot three summers back in the
carefully decorated janitor-closet of Subdorm B with his head-mount Bolex H64 and foot-treadle — if it's odd that Mario's first
finished entertainment consists of a film of a puppet show — like a kids' puppet show — then it probably seems even odder that
the film's proven to be way more popular with E.T.A.'s adults and adolescents than it is with the woefully historically underinformed children it had first been made for. It's proved so popular that it gets shown annually now every 11/8, Continental
Interdependence Day, on a wide-beam cartridge projector and stand-up screen in the E.T.A. dining hall, after supper. It's part of
the gala but rather ironic annual celebration of L-Day at an Academy whose founder had married a Canadian, and it usually gets 
under way about !93Oh., the film, and everybody gathers in the dining hall, and watches it, and by Charles Tavis's festive
fiat147137 everybody gets to two-handed snack instead of squeezing tennis balls while they watch, and not only that but normal
E.T.A. dietary regulations are for an hour completely suspended, and Mrs. Clarke, the dietician out in the kitchen — a former
Four-Star dessert chef normally relegated here to protein-conveyors and ways to vary complex carbs — Mrs. Clarke gets to put on
her floppy white chef's hat and just go sucrotically mad, out in West House's gleaming kitchen. Everybody's supposed to wear
some sort of hat — Avril Incan-denza positively towers in the same steeple-crowned witch's hat she teaches all her classes in
every 10/31, and Pemulis wears the complex yachting cap and naval braid, and pale and blotchy Struck a toque with a kind of
flitty aigrette, and Hal a black preacher's hat with a stern round downturned brim, etc. etc.148138 — and Mario, as director and
putative author of the popular film, is encouraged to say a few words, like eight:
'Thanks everybody and I hope you like it,' is what he said this year, with Pemulis behind him making a show of putting a
maraschino on top of the small twizzle of Redi-Whip that O. Stice had sprayed on the top of Mario's head-mount Bolex H64,
which counts as a hat, when the dessert-course's zenith had gotten slightly out of control near the I.-Day gala supper's end. These
few brief words and round of applause are Mario's big public yearly moment at E.T.A., and he neither likes the moment nor
dislikes it — same with the untitled film itself, which really started out as just a kids' adaptation of The ONANtiad, a four-hour
piece of tendentiously anticonfluential political parody long since dismissed as minor Incandenza by his late father's archivists.
Mario's piece isn't really better than his father's; it's just different (plus of course way shorter). It's pretty obvious that somebody
else in the Incandenza family had at least an amanuentic hand in the screenplay, but Mario did the choreography and most of the
puppet-work personally — his little S-shaped arms and falcate digits are perfect for the forward curve from body to snout of a
standard big-headed political puppet — and it was, without question, Mario's little square Hush Puppy on the H^4's operant foottreadle, the Bolex itself mounted on one of the tunnel's locked lab's Husky-VI TL tripods across the over lit closet, mops and dullgray janitorial buckets carefully moved out past the frame's borders on either side of the little velvet stage.
Ann Kittenplan and two older crew-cut girls sit in identical snap-brim fedoras with their arms crossed, Kittenplan's right hand
bandaged. Mary Esther Thode is grading midterms on the sly. Rik Dunkel has his eyes closed but is not asleep. Somebody's
slapped an ad hoc Red Sox cap on the visiting Syrian Satellite pro, and the Syrian Satellite pro sits with most of the prorec-tors,
looking confused, his shoulder taped up with a heatable compress, being polite about the comparative authenticity of Mrs. C.'s
baklava.
Everyone gathers and all's quiet except for the sounds of saliva and chewing, and there's the yeasty-sweet smell of Coach
Schtitt's pipe, and E.T.A.'s youngest kid Tina Echt in her giant beret gets to be in charge of the lights.
Mario's thing opens without credits, just a crudely matted imposition of fake-linotype print, a quotation from President
Gentle's second Inaugural: 'Let the call go forth, to pretty much any nation we might feel like calling, that the past has been
torched by a new and millennial generation of Americans,' against a full-facial still photo of a truly unmistakable personage. This
is the projected face of Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner. This is Johnny Gentle, né Joyner, lounge singer turned teenybopper throb
turned B-movie mainstay, for two long-past decades known unkindly as the 'Cleanest Man in Entertainment' (the man's a worldclass retentive, the late-Howard-Hughes kind, the really severe kind, the kind with the paralyzing fear of free-floating
contamination, the either-wear-a-surgical-microfiltration-mask-or-make-the-people-around-you-wear-surgical-caps-and-masksand-touch-doorknobs-only-with-a-boiled-hankie-and-take-fourteen-showers-a-day-only-they're-not-exactly-showers-they're-withthis-Dermalatix-brand-shower - sized - Hypospectral - Flash - Booth - that - actually - like - burns - your -outermost - layer -ofskin - off - in - a - dazzling - flash - and - leaves - you - baby's -butt -new - and - sterile - once - you - wipe - off - the - coating - of
- fine - epidermal -ash-with-a-boiled-hankie kind) then in later public life a sterile-toupee-wearing promoter and entertainmentunion bigwig, Vegas schmaltz-broker and head of the infamous Velvety Vocalists Guild, the tanned, gold-chained labor union that
enforced those seven months of infamously dreadful 'Live Silence,'149139 the total scab-free solidarity and performative silence
that struck floor-shows and soundstages from Desert to NJ coast for over half a year until equitable compensation-formulae on
certain late-millennial phone-order retrospective TV-advertised So-You-Don't-Forget-Order-Before-Midnight-Tonight-type
records and CDs were agreed on by Management. Hence then Johnny Gentle, the man who brought GE/RCA to heel. And then
thus, at the millennial fulcrum of very dark U.S. times, to national politics. The facial stills that Mario lap-dissolves between are of
Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner, founding standard-bearer of the seminal new 'Clean U.S. Party,' the strange-seeming but
politically prescient annular agnation of ultra-right jingoist hunt-deer-with-automatic-weapons types and far-left macrobiotic
Save-the-Ozone, -Rain-Forests, -Whales, -Spotted-Owl-and-High-pH-Waterways ponytailed granola-crunchers, a surreal union of
both Rush L.- and Hillary R.C.-disillusioned fringes that drew mainstream-media guffaws at their first Convention (held in sterile
venue), the seemingly LaRoucheishly marginal party whose first platform's plank had been Let's Shoot Our Wastes Into
Space,150140 C.U.S.P. a kind of post-Perot national joke for three years, until — white-gloved finger on the pulse of an
increasingly asthmatic and sunscreen-slathered and pissed-off American electorate — the C.U.S.P. suddenly swept to quadrennial
victory in an angry reactionary voter-spasm that made the U.W.S.A. and LaRouchers and Libertarians chew their hands in envy as
the Dems and G.O.P.s stood on either side watching dumbly, like doubles partners who each think the other's surely got it, the two
established mainstream parties split open along tired philosophical lines in a dark time when all landfills got full and all grapes
were raisins and sometimes in some places the falling rain clunked instead of splatted, and also, recall, a post-Soviet and -Jihad
era when — somehow even worse — there was no real Foreign Menace of any real unified potency to hate and fear, and the U.S.
sort of turned on itself and its own philosophical fatigue and hideous redolent wastes with a spasm of panicked rage that in
retrospect seems possible only in a time of geopolitical supremacy and consequent silence, the loss of any external Menace to hate
and fear. This motionless face on the E.T.A. screen is Johnny Gentle, Third-Party stunner. Johnny Gentle, the first U.S. President
ever to swing his microphone around by the cord during his Inauguration speech. Whose new white-suited Office of Unspecified
Services' retinue required Inauguration-attendees to scrub and mask and then walk through chlorinated footbaths as at public
pools. Johnny Gentle, managing somehow to look presidential in a Fukoama microfiltration mask, whose Inaugural Address
heralded the advent of a Tighter, Tidier Nation. Who promised to clean up government and trim fat and sweep out waste and hose
down our chemically troubled streets and to sleep darn little until he'd fashioned a way to rid the American psychosphere of the
unpleasant debris of a throw-away past, to restore the majestic ambers and purple fruits of a culture he now promises to rid of the 
toxic effluvia choking our highways and littering our byways and grungeing up our sunsets and cruddying those harbors in which
televised garbage-barges lay stacked up at anchor, clotted and impotent amid undulating clouds of potbellied gulls and those
disgusting blue-bodied flies that live on shit (first U.S. President ever to say shit publicly, shuddering), rusty-hulled barges
cruising up and down petroleated coastlines or laying up reeky and stacked and emitting CO as they await the opening of new
landfills and toxic repositories the People demanded in every area but their own. The Johnny Gentle whose C.U.S.P. had been
totally up-front about seeing American renewal as an essentially aesthetic affair. The Johnny Gentle who promised to be the
possibly sometimes unpopular architect of a more or less Spotless America that Cleaned Up Its Own Side of the Street. Of a newera'd nation that looked out for Uno, of a one-time World Policeman that was now going to retire and have its blue uniform deepdry-cleaned and placed in storage in triple-thick plastic dry-cleaning bags and hang up its cuffs to spend some quality domestic
time raking its lawn and cleaning behind its refrigerator and dandling its freshly bathed kids on its neatly pressed mufti-pants'
knee. A Gentle behind whom a diorama of the Lincoln Memorial's Lincoln smiled down benignly. A Johnny Gentle who was as
of this new minute sending forth the call that 'he wasn't in this for a popularity contest' (Popsicle-stick-and-felt puppets in the
Address's audience assuming puzzled-looking expressions above their tiny green surgical masks). A President J.G., F.C. who said
he wasn't going to stand here and ask us to make some tough choices because he was standing here promising he was going to
make them for us. Who asked us simply to sit back and enjoy the show. Who handled wild applause from camouflage-fatigue- and
sandal-and-poncho-clad C.U.S.P.s with the unabashed grace of a real pro. Who had black hair and silver sideburns, just like his
big-headed puppet, and the dusty brick-colored tan seen only among those without homes and those whose homes had a
Dermalatix Hypospectral personal sterilization booth. Who declared that neither Tax & Spend nor Cut & Borrow comprised the
ticket into a whole new millennial era (here more puzzlement among the Inaugural audience, which Mario represents by having
the tiny finger-puppets turn rigidly toward each other and then away and then toward). Who alluded to ripe and available Novel
Sources of Revenue just waiting out there, unexploited, not seen by his predecessors because of the trees (?). Who foresaw
budgetary adipose trimmed with a really big knife. The Johnny Gentle who stressed above all — simultaneously pleaded for and
promised — an end to atomized Americans' fractious blaming of one another for our terrible151141 internal troubles. Here bobs
and smiles from both wealthily green-masked puppets and homeless puppets in rags and mismatched shoes and with used surgical
masks, all made by E.T.A.'s fourth -and fifth-grade crafts class, under the supervision of Ms. Heath, of match-sticks and Popsiclestick shards and pool-table felt with sequins for eyes and painted fingernail-parings for smiles/frowns, under their masks.
The Johnny Gentle, Chief Executive who pounds a rubber-gloved fist on the podium so hard it knocks the Seal askew and
declares that Dammit there just must be some people besides each other of us to blame. To unite in opposition to. And he
promises to eat light and sleep very little until he finds them — in the Ukraine, or the Teutons, or the wacko Latins. Or — pausing
with that one arm up and head down in the climactic Vegas way — closer to right below our nose. He swears he'll find us some
cohesion-renewing Other. And then make some tough choices. Alludes to a whole new North America for a crazy post-millennial
world. First U.S. President ever to use boss as an adjective. His throwing his surgical gloves into the miniature Inaugural crowd as
souvenirs is Mario's own touch.
And Mario Incandenza's idea of representing President Gentle's cabinet as made up mostly of tall-coiffured black-girl puppets
in shiny imbricate-sequin dresses is also of course historically inaccurate, though the honorary inclusion, in that cabinet's second
year, of the Presidente of Mexico and the P.M. of Canada is both factual and of course seminal:
pres. mex. and P.M. can. [in unison and green-mask-muffled]: It is tremendously flattering to be invited to sit on the cabinet
of the leadership of our beloved neighbor to the [choose one].
gentle: Thanks, boys. You have gorgeous souls.
It's not the cartridge's strongest scene, heavy on stock phrases and two-handed handshakes. But the historical fact that the
Presidente of Mexico and P.M. of Canada are honorarily appointed by President Gentle to be 'Secretaries' of Mexico and Canada
(respectively) — as if the neighbors had already become sort of post-millennial American protectorates — is foreshadowed as
ominous by a wavered D-minor on the soundtrack's organ — Mrs. Clarke's Wurlitzer, at home — but the two leaders' respectively
dusky and Gallic expressions seem unperturbed, under their green masks, as more stock phrases are invoked.
Because budget and broom-closet constraints make artful transitions between scenes impractical, Mario has opted for the
inter-scenic 'entr'acte' device of having Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner doing some of his repertoire's bouncier numbers, with the
cabinet-members undulating and harmonizing Motownishly behind him, and other puppets bouncing in tempo on- and offstage as
the script requires. Audience-wise, most of the E.T.A.s under twelve, cortexes spangling with once-a-year sweets, have by now
emigrated hyperactively under the long tables' tablecloths and met up on the dining-hall floor below and begun navigating on
hands and knees the special children's second world of shins and chairlegs and tile that exists under long tablecloths, making
various sorts of puerile trouble — investigations from last year's I. Day are still in progress w/r/t which kid or kids tied Aubrey
deLint's shoelaces together and Krazy-Glued Mary Esther Thode's left buttock to the seat of her chair — but everyone
glycemically mature enough to sit still and watch the cartridge is having a rousing good time, eating chocolate cannolis and
twenty-six-layer baklava and Redi-Whip by itself if they want and homemade Raisinettes and little cream-filled caramel things
and occasionally heckling or cheering ironically, every so often throwing sweets that stick to the screen, giving the smooth sterile
Gentle a sort of carbuncu-lar look that everyone approves. There is much cracking wise and baritone mimicry of a President
roundly disliked for over two terms now. Only John Wayne and a handful of other Canadian students sit unhatted, chewing
stolidly, faces blurred and distant. This American penchant for absolution via irony is foreign to them. The Canadian boys
remember only hard facts, and the glass-walled Great Convexity whose southern array of ATHSCME Effectuators blow the tidy
U.S.'s northern oxides north, toward home; and they feel with special poignancy on 11/8 the implications of their being down
here, south of the border, training, in the land of their enemy-ally; and the less gifted among them wonder whether they'll ever get
to go home again after graduation if a pro career or scholarship doesn't pan out. Wayne has a cloth hankie and keeps wiping his
nose.
Mario's openly jejune version of his late father's take on the rise of O.N.A.N. and U.S. Experialism unfolds in little diffracted
bits of real news and fake news and privately-conceived dialogue between the architects and hard-choice-makers of a new
millennial era: 
gentle: Another piece of pre-tasted cobbler, J.J.J.C.?
P.M. can.: Couldn't. Stuffed. Having trouble breathing. I would not say no to another beer, however. gentle: ... P.M. can.: ...
gentle: So we're sympatico on the gradual and subtle but inexorable disarmament and dissolution of NATO as a system of mutualdefense agreements. P.M. can. [Less muffled than last scene because his surgical mask gets to have a prandial hole]: We are side
by side and behind you on this thing.
Let the EEC pay for their oown defendings henceforth I say. Let them foot some defensive budgets and then try to subsidize
their farmers into undercutting NAFTA. Let them eat butter and guns for their oown for once in a change. Hey? gentle: You said
more than a mouthful right there, J.J. Now maybe we can all direct some cool-headed attention to our own infraternal affairs.
Our own internal quality of life. Refocusing priorities back to this crazy continent we call home. Am I being dug?
P.M. can: John, I am kilometers ahead of you. I happen to have my Term-In-Office-At-A-Glance book right with me here.
Now that the big frappeurs are being put doown, we are wondering what is the date I can be pencilling in for the removals of
NATO ICBM frappeurs from Manitoba.
GENTLE: Put that pencil away, you good-looking Canadian. I've got more long shiny trailer-rigs full of large men with very
short haircuts and white suits than you can shake a maple leaf at heading for your silos right this very. Those complete totalities of
Canada's strategic capac-ity'll be out of your hair toot sweet.
P.M. CAN: John, let me be the first world leader to call you a statesman.
gentle: We North Americans have to stick together, J.J.J.C., especially now, no? Am I off-base? We're interdependent. We're
cheek to jowl.
P.M. can: It is a smaller world, today.
gentle: And an even smaller continent.
This segues into an entr'acte, with continent squeezed in for world in 'It's a Small World After All,' which enjambment doesn't
do the rhythm section of doo-wopping cabinet girls a bit of good, but does usher in the start of a whole new era.
Though can any guru be held to a standard of like 100% exemption from the human pains of stunted desire? No. Not 100%.
Regardless of level of transcendence, or diet.
Lyle, down in the dark Interdependence Day weight room, sometimes recalls an E.T.A. player from several years back whose
first name was Marlon and whose last name Lyle never to his knowledge learned.152142
The thing about this Marlon was that he was always wet. Arms purling, T-shirt darkly V'd, face and forehead ever gleaming.
Orin's Academy doubles partner. It had had a lemony, low-cal taste, the boy's omniwetness. It wasn't exactly sweat, because you
could lick off the forehead and more beads instantly replaced what you'd taken. None of real sweat's frus-tratingly gradual
accretion. The kid was always in the shower, always doing his best to stay clean. There were powders and pills and electrical
appliques. And still this Marlon dripped and shone. The kid wrote accomplished juvenile verses about the dry clean boy inside,
struggling to break the soggy surface. He shared extensively with Lyle. He confessed to Lyle one night in the quiet weight room
that he'd gone in for high-level athletics mostly to have an excuse of some sort for being as wet as he was. It always looked like
Marlon had been rained on. But it wasn't rain. It's like Marlon hadn't been dry since the womb. It's like he leaked. It had been a
tormenting but also in certain ways halcyon few years, in the past. A tormentingly unspecific hope in the air. Lyle had told this
boy everything he had to tell.
It's raining tonight, though. As so often happens in autumn below the Great Concavity, P.M. snow has given way to rain.
Outside the weight room's high windows a mean wind sweeps curtains of rain this way and that, and the windows shudder and
drool. The sky is a mess. Thunder and lightning happen at the same time. The copper beech outside creaks and groans. Lightning
claws the sky, briefly illuminating Lyle, seated lotus in Spandex on the towel dispenser, leaning forward to accept what is offered
in the dark weight room. The idle resistance-machines look insectile in the lightning's brief light. The answer to some of the newer
kids' complaints about what on earth Lyle can be doing down there at night in a locked empty weight room is that the nighttime
weight room is rarely empty. The P.M. custodians Kenkle and Brandt do lock it up, but the door can be dickied by even the
clumsiest insertion of an E.T.A. meal-card between latch and jamb. The kitchen crew always wonders why so many meal-cards'
edges always look ravaged. Though the idle machines are scary and the room smells somehow worse in the dark, they come most
at night, the E.T.A.s who are on to Lyle. They hit the saunas out by the cement stairs until they've got enough incentive on their
skin, then they lurk, purled and shiny, in towels, by the weight room door, waiting to enter one by one, sometimes several E.T.A.s,
dripping in towels, not speaking, some pretending to have other business down there, lurking in the eye-averted attitudes of like
patients in the waiting room of an impotence clinic or shrink. They have to be real quiet and the lights stay off. It's like the
administration'll turn a blind eye as long as you make it plausible to do so. From the dining hall, whose east wall of windows faces
Comm.-Ad., you can hear very muffled laughter and kibitzing and the occasional scream from Mario's Interdependent puppet
thing. A quiet slow small stream of yellow-slickered wet-shoed migrations back and forth between West House and the weight
room — people know the slow parts, the times to duck out and go very briefly down to Lyle, to confer. They dicky the lock and
go in one by one, in towels. Proffer beaded flesh. Confront the sorts of issues reserved for nighttime's gurutical tête-à-tête,
whispers made echoless by rubberized floors and much damp laundry.
Sometimes Lyle will listen and shrug and smile and say 'The world is very old' or some such general Remark and decline to
say much else. But it's the way he listens, somehow, that keeps the saunas full.
Lightning claws the eastern sky, and it's neat in the weight room's dark because Lyle is in a slightly different position and
forward angle each time he's illuminated through the window up over the grip/wrist/forearm machines to his left, so it looks like
there are different Lyles at different ful-gurant moments.
LaMont Chu, glabrous and high-gloss in a white towel and wristwatch, haltingly confesses to an increasingly crippling
obsession with tennis fame. He wants to get to the Show so bad it feels like it's eating him alive. To have his picture in shiny
magazines, to be a wunderkind, to have guys in blue I/SPN blazers describe his every on-court move and mood in hushed broadcast cliches. To have little patches with products' names sewn onto his clothes. To be soft-profiled. To get compared to M. Chang,
lately expired; to get called the next Great Yellow U.S. Hope. Let's not even talk about video magazines or the Grid. He confesses
it to Lyle: he wants the hype; he wants it. Sometimes he'll pretend a glowing up-at-net action shot he's clipping out of a shiny 
magazine is of him, LaMont Chu. But then he finds he can't eat or sleep or sometimes even pee, so horribly does he envy the
adults in the Show who get to have up-at-net action shots of themselves in magazines. Sometimes, he says, lately, he won't take
risks in tournament matches even when risks are OK or even called for, because he finds he's too scared of losing and hurting his
chances for the Show and hype and fame, down the road. A couple times this year the cold clenched fear of losing has itself made
him lose, he believes. He's starting to fear that rabid ambition has more than one blade, maybe. He's ashamed of his secret hunger
for hype in an academy that regards hype and the seduction of hype as the great Meph-istophelan pitfall and hazard of talent. A lot
of these are his own terms. He feels himself in a dark world, inside, ashamed, lost, locked in. LaMont Chu is eleven and hits with
two hands off both sides. He doesn't mention the Eschaton or having been punched in the stomach. The obsession with futuretense fame makes all else pale. His wrists are so thin he wears his watch halfway up his forearm, which looks sort of gladiatorial.
Lyle has a way of sucking on the insides of his cheeks as he listens. Plates of old ridged muscle emerge and subside as he
shifts his weight slightly on the raised towel dispenser. The dispenser's at about shoulder-height for someone like Chu. Like all
good listeners, he has a way of attending that is at once intense and assuasive: the supplicant feels both nakedly revealed and sheltered, somehow, from all possible judgment. It's like he's working as hard as you. You both of you, briefly, feel unalone. Lyle will
suck in first one side's cheek and then the other. 'You burn to have your photograph in a magazine.' 'I'm afraid so.' 'Why again
exactly, now?' 'I guess to be felt about as I feel about those players with their pictures in magazines.' 'Why?' 'Why? I guess to give
my life some sort of kind of meaning, Lyle.' 'And how would this do this again?' 'Lyle, I don't know. I do not know. It just does.
Would. Why else would I burn like this, clip secret pictures, not take risks, not sleep or pee?' 'You feel these men with their
photographs in magazines care deeply about having their photographs in magazines. Derive immense meaning.' 'I do. They must. I
would. Else why would I burn like this to feel as they feel?' 'The meaning they feel, you mean. From the fame.' 'Lyle, don't they ?'
Lyle sucks his cheeks. It's not like he's condescending or stringing you along. He's thinking as hard as you. It's like he's you in the
top of a clean pond. It's part of the attention. One side of his cheeks almost caves in, thinking. 'LaMont, perhaps they did at first.
The first photograph, the first magazine, the gratified surge, the seeing themselves as others see them, the hagiography of image,
perhaps. Perhaps the first time: enjoyment. After that, do you trust me, trust me: they do not feel what you burn for. After the first
surge, they care only that their photographs seem awkward or unflattering, or untrue, or that their privacy, this thing you burn to
escape, what they call their privacy is being violated. Something changes. After the first photograph has been in a magazine, the
famous men do not enjoy their photographs in magazines so much as they fear that their photographs will cease to appear in
magazines. They are trapped, just as you are.' 'Is this supposed to be good news? This is awful news.' 'LaMont, are you willing to
listen to a Remark about what is true?' 'Okey-dokey.' 'The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.' 'Maybe I
ought to be getting back.' 'LaMont, the world is very old. You have been snared by something untrue. You are deluded. But this is
good news. You have been snared by the delusion that envy has a reciprocal. You assume that there is a flip-side to your painful
envy of Michael Chang: namely Michael Chang's enjoyable feeling of being-envied-by-LaMont-Chu. No such animal.' 'Animal?'
'You burn with hunger for food that does not exist.' 'This is good news?' 'It is the truth. To be envied, admired, is not a feeling. Nor
is fame a feeling. There are feelings associated with fame, but few of them are any more enjoyable than the feelings associated
with envy of fame.' 'The burning doesn't go away?' 'What fire dies when you feed it? It is not fame itself they wish to deny you
here. Trust them. There is much fear in fame. Terrible and heavy fear to be pulled and held, carried. Perhaps they want only to
keep it off you until you weigh enough to pull it toward yourself.' 'Would I sound ungrateful if I said this doesn't make me feel
very much better at all?' 'La-Mont, the truth is that the world is incredibly, incredibly, unbelievably old. You suffer with the
stunted desire caused by one of its oldest lies. Do not believe the photographs. Fame is not the exit from any cage.' 'So I'm stuck in
the cage from either side. Fame or tortured envy of fame. There's no way out.' 'You might consider how escape from a cage must
surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage. And I believe I see a drop on your temple, right... there. .. .' Etc.
The thunder's died down to a mutter, and the window's spatter's gone random and post-storm sad.
An E.T.A. female (female students wear two different towels, coming in), a breastless senior who can barely perspire at all, is
troubled, whenever she has lunch with her fiance, by the persistent whine of a mosquito that she can't see and no one else can
hear. Summer and winter, indoors or alfresco. But only at lunch, and only with her fiance. Remarks or advice are not always the
point. Sometimes suffering's point is almost crying out in a high-pitched whine to be heard. As fitness gurus go, Lyle is resultsoriented and can-do.153143 Ten-year-old Kent Blott, whose parents are Seventh-Day Adventists, isn't yet old enough to
masturbate, but he hears quite a lot about it, not surprisingly, from his adolescent peers, in rather lush detail, masturbation, and is
worried about what sorts of homemade-type potentially wicked and soul-sapping pornographic cartridges will run through his
psychic projector as he masturbates, when he eventually can masturbate, and worries about whether different sorts of fantasy
scenes and combinations herald different sorts of psychic dysfunction or turpitude, and wants to get a good jump on worrying
about it. The sounds of the dining hall's gala are more frequent and convulsive without the sound of rain. Lyle tells Blott not to let
the weight he would pull to himself exceed his own personal weight. Up to the left the storm's clouds' stragglers run like ink in
water between the window and the risen moon. Mario Incandenza's presidential puppet is just about to inaugurate Subsidized
Time. 16-B's Anton Doucette's been driven to Lyle he says by an increasing self-consciousness about the big round dark raised
mole on his upper-upper lip, just under his left nostril. It's only a mole but looks pretty dire, nasally. People who first meet him are
always pulling him off to the side and handing him a Kleenex. Doucette lately wishes either the mole were gone or he were gone.
Even if people don't stare at the mole it's like they're intentionally not staring at it. Doucette pounds himself in the chest and thigh,
supposedly in frustration. He just cannot come to terms with how it must look. It's getting worse as puberty intensifies, the
anxiety. Then in a vicious cycle the anxiety prompts the nervous tic on his face's right side. He's starting to suspect that some
upperclassmen are referring to him behind his back as Anton ('Booger') Doucette. It's like he's frozen on this anxiety, unable to
move on to more advanced anxieties. He can't see any way past this. The pounding is more a sign of intense unconscious selfhatred, though, Lyle knows. Doucette grimaces and says he's starting to want to play tennis with his hand over his nose and upper
lip. But he has a two-handed backhand and it's too late to switch and there's no way they're going to let him switch to one hand
just for aesthetic reasons. Lyle sends Anton Doucette packing off with directions to come on back with Mario Incandenza the
minute the I.-Day gala lets out. Mario gets a fair number of aesthetic-self-consciousness referrals from Lyle. No type or rank of
guru is above delegating. It's like a law. Doucette says it's like he's stuck. It's becoming all he thinks about. This is on his way out. 
His back's additional moles form no outline or shape. Lyle pops the tab to a C.F.D.C. Mario tends to bring down most evenings
around suppertime. In between door-dickyings and visits Lyle does little isometric neck-stretches, for the tension.
Between Gerhardt Schtitt's pipe and Avril Incandenza's Benson & Hedges and certain cheeks full of chewing tobacco — plus
the maddening cooking-smells of honey and chocolate and real high-lipid walnuts from the kitchen vents, plus over 150 very fit
bodies only some of which have been showered on this day off — the dining hall is warm and close and multi-odored. Mario as
auteur opts for his late father's parodic device of mixing real and fake news-summary cartridges, magazine articles, and historical
headers from the last few great daily papers, all for a sort of time-lapse exposition of certain developments leading up to
Interdependence and Subsidized Time and cartographic Reconfiguration and the renewal of a tight and considerably tidier
Experialist U.S. of A., under Gentle:
UKRAINE, TWO MORE BALTIC STATES APPLY FOR NATO INCLUSION— 16-point bold Header;
SO THEN WHY A NATO? — Editorial Header;
E.E.C. SIDES WITH PACIFIC RIM, UPS TARIFFS IN RESPONSE TO U.S. QUOTAS — Header;
GENTLE ON WASTE STORAGE FROM DISMANTLED NATO THERMS: 'NOT IN MY NATION, BABE' — 12-point
Subheader;
'Amid smiles and two-handed handshakes that belied the high tensions here, the leaders of twelve out of fifteen NATO
nations today signed an accord effectively dismantling the Western Bloc's fifty-five-year-old defensive alliance.' — NewsSummary Cartridge Voiceover;
U.S., CANADIAN SUPPORT CUTS DOOMED NATO SUMMIT FROM START, ICELANDIC POL DECLARES —
Header;
SO THEN WHY NOT A CONTINENTAL ALLIANCE, NOW, MAYBE? — Editorial Header;
MEXICO SIGNS ON FOR 'ORGANIZATION OF NORTH AMERICAN NATIONS' CONTINENTAL ALLIANCE; BUT
QUEBEC SEPARATISTS RALLY AGAINST 'FINLANDIZATION' OF 'O.N.A.N.' ALLIANCE; BUT GENTLE TO
CANADA: UNLESS 'O.N.A.N.' TREATY SIGNED, NAFTA NULL, MANITOBAN THERMS STAY PUT,
INTRACONTINENTAL POLLUTION AND WASTE DISPOSAL EACH NATION'S 'INTERESTS TO PURSUE TO THE
BEST THEY SEE FIT' — Header from Veteran but Methamphetamine-Dependent Head-liner Finally Demoted after Repeated
Warnings about Taking up Too Much Space;
FED WORKERS PROTEST RANDOM FINGERNAIL-HYGIENE SCREENS — 12-point Header;
GENTLE PROPOSES NATIONALIZATION OF INTERLACE TELENT —Header; SAYS GOVT IN LINE FOR 'PIECE
OF THE ACTION' ON VIDEO, CARTRIDGE, DISK RENTALS — 8-point subheader;
BURGER KING'S PILLSBURY AWARDED RIGHTS TO NEW YEAR — Header; PIZZA HUT'S PEPSICO FILES BIDRIGGING COMPLAINT WITH IRS — 12-point Subheader; CALENDAR AND PREPRINTED CHECK INDUSTRIES
STOCKS SOAR — 8-point subheader;
Three blue-jawed convicts in antiquated stripes dicky their cell's lock and run, backed by sirens and searchlights' crisscrossed
play, not for the wall but straight to the Warden's empty nighttime office, where they sit rapt before his old dual-modem
Macintosh, slapping their knees and pointing to the monitor and elbowing each other in the ribs, nibbling at inexplicably-appeared
boxes of popcorn, with a Voiceover: 'Cartridges by Modem! Just Insert a Blank Diskette! Break Free of the Confinement of Your
Channel Selector!' — Some more of Ms. Heath's classes' puppets in a B-film parody of the InterLace TelEntertainment ads that
the cable networks seemed so mysteriously suicidally to run all the time that last year of Unsubsidized Time;
O.N.A.N. PACT PENNED — 24-point Superheader;
CANADA 'NUCK'LES UNDER — Tabloidish NY Daily's 24-point Superheader;
ACID RAIN, LANDFILLS, BARGES, FUSION-TECH, MANITOBAN THERMS WERE 'BIG STICKS,' CHRETIEN
ADMITS—16-point Header;
SHORT-HAIRED MEN IN SHINY TRUCKS ARE NOT DISMANTLING MANITOBAN THERMS BUT INSTEAD
MOVING THEM JUST OVER BORDER INTO TURTLE MTN. INDIAN RESERVATION, HORRIFIED N.D. GOV
CHARGES — 12-point Subheader from Demoted Headliner Already in Dutch Down in the Subheader Dept., Now, Too;
EXCLUSIVE COLOR PHOTOS SHOW BRAVE DOCS FUTILELY FIGHTING TIME TO REMOVE RAILROAD SPIKE
FROM CANADIAN PRIME MINISTER'S RIGHT EYE — Tabloidish NY Daily's 16-point Header;
PRESIDENT'S OFFICE IS 'A ANALLY RETENTIVE HORROR SHOW SAYS THIS JUST RETIRED WHITE HOUSE
CUSTODIAN —Tabloid Header with Photo of Old Guy with Basically One Eyebrow Running All
the Way across His Forehead Holding up a Mammoth Plastic Barrel He Claims Held Just One Day's Haul of Dental
Stimulators, Alcohol-Soaked Cotton Puffs, GI-X-Ray-Grade Colonic Purgative Bottles, Epidermal Ash, Surgical Masks and
Gloves, Q-Tïps, Kleenex, and Homeopathic Pruritis-Cream Containers;
U.S.O.U.S. CHIEF TINE: CHARGES OF AN OVAL OFFICE LITTERED WITH KLEENEX AND FLOSS A 'CLEAR
CASE OF DIRTY TRICKS' — Respectable Daily Header;
OVERLOADED WASTE BARGES COLLIDE, CAPSIZE OFF GLOUCESTER — Boston Daily Header;
HUGE PUTRID SLICK EMPTIES BEACHES OFF BOTH SHORES, CAPE — Equally Large Subheader;
GENTLE SPEAKS OUT ON A U.S. 'CONSTIPATEDLY IMPACTED ON CONTINENTAL WASTE' AT U.N.L.V.
COMMENCEMENT-Header;
AD COUNCIL REPORT: BOSTON'S VINEY & VEALS AGENCY'S LI-POSUCTION AND TONGUE-STICK
CAMPAIGNS NOT TO BLAME FOR ABC HQ BOMB THREATS — Advertising Age Header;
'The Governors of Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire today reacted strongly to President Gentle's establishment of a blueribbon panel of waste experts to investigate the feasibility of mass landfill and conversion sites in northern New England' —
Respectable NY Daily's Lead 'Graph;
'WE ARE NOT THIS CONTINENT'S SIGMOID COLON,' GENTLE WARNS O.N.A.N. JOINT SESSION — Header;
BETHESDA MD'S: STRICKEN PRESIDENT CONFINED FOR 'HYGIENIC STRESS' FOLLOWING INCOHERENT
O.N.A.N. ADDRESS —Header; 
HOLOGRAPHY MAKES ULTRA-TOXIC FUSION GAMBIT SAFE FOR WORKERS, COMMUNITY, D.O.E. REP
ASSURES METHUEN P.T.A. — Boston Daily Header;
GENTLE OUT OF BETHESDA NAVAL HOSP CONFINEMENT, TO ADDRESS U.S. CONGRESS ON
'RECONFIGURATIVE OPTIONS' FOR 'TIGHT, TIDIER NATIONAL ERA' — Header, all these twirling journalistically out
from a black-acetate (one of O. Stice's old Fila warm-up tops) background in vintagely allusive old-b&w-film style, with a sonic
background of that sad sappy Italianate stuff Scorcese had loved for his own montages, with the headlines lap-dissolving into
transverse-angled shots of a modest, green-masked Gentle accepting tight-lipped handshakes from Mexican and Canadian officials
in an agreement to make the U.S. President the first Chair of the Organization of North American Nations, with Mexican
Presidente and new heavily guarded Canadian P.M. to be co-Vice Chairs. Gentle's first State of the O.N.A.N. Address, delivered
before a triple-size Congress on the very last day of 'B.S.' solar time, holds out the promise of a whole bright spanking new
millennium of sacrifices and rewards and Interdependence's 'not impossibly radically altered new look,' continent-wide.
Do not underestimate objects! Lyle says he finds it impossible to over-stress this: do not underestimate objects. Partridge KS's
serve-and-volley prodigy Ortho ('The Darkness') Stice, 16-A's very top man, whose sauna-fresh torso gleams the same color as the
moonlight off the idle weights' metal, is being driven right to the edge by the fact that he goes to sleep with his bed against one
wall and then but wakes up with his bed against a whole nother wall. Stice'd already had a whole series of beefs with roommate
Kyle D. Coyle because he'd figured clearly Coyle was moving Stice's bed around in Stice's sleep. But then Coyle got put in the
infirmary with a suspicious discharge, and he's been out of the room for the last two nights, Coyle, and here Stice is still waking
up with his bed against a different wall. So then he thought like Axford or Struck was dickying his door with a meal-card and
sneaking in really late and messing with Stice's bed out of obscure motives. So but last night Stice jammed a chair up against his
door and piled empty tennis-ball cans on the chair to make a racket if there was any dickying, and lined up still more cans on the
sills of all three windows, just to cover all bases; and but so the reason he's here is this A.M. he wakes up with his bed moved over
against the chair by the door at an angle he didn't care for one bit and with all the ball-cans arranged in a neat pyramid in the dusty
rectangle where his bed was supposed to normally be. Ortho Stice can think of only three possible explanations for what's going
on, and he presents them to an attentive cheek-sucking Lyle in ascending order of grimness. One is that Stice is telekinetic, but
only in his sleep. Two is that somebody else at E.T.A. is telekinetic and has it in for Stice and wants to drive him batsoid for some
reason. Three is that Stice is like getting up in his sleep and rearranging the room without knowing it or remembering it, which
means he's a severe fucking somnambulist, which means Lord only knows what all else he could get up and wander around and do
in his sleep. He's got promise, the Staff say; he's got a quite legit shot at the Show when he graduates. Which he does not want to
mess up with any sort of telekinetic or somnambulistical shenanigans. Stice offers up the planes of his torso and forehead. He
wears one of his own personal towels, a black one. He is slim but wiry and beautifully muscled, and sweats freely and well. He
says he knows too well he'd neglected Lyle's advice about the pull-down station two years back, and regrets it. He wholeheartedly
apologizes for the time last spring he got Struck and Axford to distract Lyle and then Krazy-Glued Lyle's left buttock's Span-dex
to the wooden top of the towel dispenser. Stice says he realizes he's the last guy with any right to come to Lyle cap in hand after
all the cracks about the diet and hairstyle and all. But here he is, cap in hand, or rather calotte in hand, offering up his sauna'd
planes, asking for Lyle's input.
Lyle waves bygones away like a gnat you barely look at. He is completely engaged. The lightning now far off out over the
Atlantic treats him like a weak strobe. Do not underestimate objects, he advises Stice. Do not leave objects out of account. The
world, after all, which is radically old, is made up mostly of objects. Lyle leans in, waves Stice up even closer, and consents to tell
Stice the story of this one man he once knew of. This man earned his living by going to various public sites where people
congregated and were bored and impatient and cynical, he'd go in and bet people that he could stand on any chair in the place and
then lift that chair up off the ground while standing on it. A bootstrap-type scenario. His M.O. is he climbs up on a chair and
stands there and says publicly Hey, I can lift this chair I stand on. A bystander holds the bets. The idle bus-depot or DMV-waitingarea or hospital-lobby crowd is dumbstruck. They gaze up at a man who is standing 100% on top of a chair he has grabbed the
back of and raised several m. off the ground. There is vigorous speculation about how the trick's done, which gives rise to side-bet
action. A devoutly religious experimental oncologist dying of his own inoperable colorectal neoplastis moans Why oh why Lord
do You give this man this idiotic picayune power and I no power over my own ravening colorectal cells. There are numerous
silent variations on this sort of meditation in the crowd. The bet won, the $ finally forked over and handed up to him, the man Lyle
says he once knew of now jumps back down to the floor, incidental change spraying from his pockets on impact, straightens his
tie, and walks off, leaving behind a dumbfounded crowd still staring up at an object he had not underestimated.
Like most young people genetically hard-wired for a secret drug problem, Hal Incandenza also has severe compulsion-issues
around nicotine and sugar. Because smoking will simply kill you during drills, only Bridget Boone, a steroidic Girls' 16 named
Carol Spodek, and one or the other of the Vaught twins are masochistic enough to do it, though Teddy Schacht has been known to
enjoy the occasional panatela. The nicotine craving Hal tries to mollify as best he can by dipping Kodiak Wintergreen Smokeless
Tobacco several times daily, spitting into either a cherished old childhood NASA glass or the empty can of Spiru-Tein High
Protein Breakfast Beverage that even now sits — given a wide berth by all others — next to a small pile of the tennis balls the
table's kids don't have to squeeze as long as they're eating. Hal's more serious problem is with sucrose — the Hope-smoker's everbeckoning siren — because he craves it always and awfully, Hal does — sugar — but finds now lately that any sugar-infusion
above the level of a 56-gram AminoPal High Energy Bar now induces odd and unpleasant emotional states that don't do him one
bit of good on court.
Sitting here preacher-hatted, with a mouth full of multilayered baklava, Hal knows perfectly well that Mario gets his fetish for
cartridges about puppets and entr'actes and audiences from their late father. Himself, during his anticonfluential middle period,
went through this subphase of being obsessed with the idea of audiences' relationships with various sorts of shows. Hal doesn't
even want to think about the grim one about the carnival of eyeballs.154144 But this one other short high-tech one was called 'The
Medusa v. The Odalisque' and was a film of a fake stage-production at Ford's Theater in the nation's capital of Wash. DC that, like
all his audience-obsessed pieces, had cost Incandenza a real bundle in terms of human extras. The extras in this one are a welldressed audience of guys in muttonchops and ladies with paper fans who fill the place from first row to the rear of the balcony's 
boxes, and they're watching an incredibly violent little involuted playlet called 'The Medusa v. The Odalisque,' the relatively
plotless plot of which is just that the mythic Medusa, snake-haired and armed with a sword and well-polished shield, is fighting to
the death or petrification against L'Odalisque de Ste. Thérèse, a character out of old Québecois mythology who was supposedly so
inhumanly gorgeous that anyone who looked at her turned instantly into a human-sized precious gem, from admiration. A pretty
natural foil for the Medusa, obviously, the Odalisque has only a nail-file instead of a sword, but also has a well-wielded hand-held
makeup mirror, and she and the Medusa are basically rumbling for like twenty minutes, leaping around the ornate stage trying to
de-map each other with blades and/or de-animate each other with their respective reflectors, which each leaps around trying to
position just right so that the other gets a glimpse of its own full-frontal reflection and gets instantly petrified or gemified or
whatever. In the cartridge it's pretty clear from their milky-pixeled translu-cence and insubstantiality that they're holograms, but
it's not clear what they're supposed to be on the level of the playlet, whether the audience is supposed to see/(not)see them as
ghosts or wraiths or 'real' mythic entities or what. But it's a ballsy fight-scene up there on the stage — having been intricately
choreographed by an Oriental guy Himself rented from some commercial studio and put up in the HmH, who ate like a bird and
smiled very politely all the time and didn't have even a word to say to anybody, it seemed, except Avril, to whom the Oriental
choreographer had cottoned right off — balletic and full of compelling little cornerings and near-misses and reversals, and the
theater's audience is rapt and clearly entertained to the gills, because they keep spontaneously applauding, as much maybe for the
film's play's choreography as anything else — which would make it more like spontaneously meta-applauding, Hal supposes —
because the whole fight-scene has to be ingeniously choreographed so that both combatants have their respectively scaly and
cream-complected backs155145 to the audience, for obvious reasons ... except as the shield and little mirror get whipped martially
around and brandished at various strategic angles, certain members of the playlet's well-dressed audience eventually start catching
disastrous glimpses of the combatants' fatal full-frontal reflections, and instantly get transformed into like ruby statues in their
front-row seats, or get petrified and fall like embolized bats from the balcony's boxes, etc. The cartridge goes on like this until
there's nobody left in the Ford's Theater seats animate enough to applaud the nested narrative of the fight-scene play, and it ends
with the two aesthetic foils still rumbling like mad before an audience of varicolored stone. 'The Medusa v. The Odalisque' 's own
audiences didn't think too much of the thing, because the film audience never does get much of a decent full-frontal look at what it
is about the combatants that supposedly has such a melodramatic effect on the rumble's live audience, and so the film's audience
ends up feeling teased and vaguely cheated, and the thing had only a regional release, and the cartridge rented like yesterday's
newspapers, and it's now next to impossible to find. But that wasn't by any stretch of the imagination the James O. Incandenza
film that audiences hated the most. The most hated Incandenza film, a variable-length one called The Joke, had only a very brief
theatrical release, and then only at the widely scattered last remains of the pre-InterLace public art-film theaters in arty places like
Cambridge MA and Berkeley CA. And InterLace never considered it for Pulse-Order rerelease, for obvious reasons. The art-film
theaters' marquees and posters and ads for the thing were all required to say something like 'THE JOKE': You Are Strongly
Advised NOT To Shell Out Money to See This Film, which art-film habitues of course thought was a cleverly ironic anti-ad joke,
and so they'd shell out for little paper theater tickets and file in in their sweater vests and tweeds and dirndls and tank up on
espresso at the concession stand and find seats and sit down and make those little pre-movie leg and posture adjustments, and look
around with that sort of vacant intensity, and they'd figure the tri-lensed Bolex H32 cameras — one held by a tall stooped old guy
and one complexly mounted on the huge head of the oddly forward-listing boy with what looked like a steel spike coming out of
his thorax — the big cameras down by the red-lit EXITS on either side of the screen, the patrons figured, were there for like an ad
or an anti-ad or a behind-the-scenes metafilmic documentary or something. That is, until the lights went down and the film started
up and what was on the wide public screen was just a wide-angled binoculated shot of this very art-film theater's audience filing in
with espressos and finding seats and sitting down and looking around and getting adjusted and saying knowledgeable little premovie things to their thick-lensed dates about what the Don't-Pay-To-See-This ad and Bolex cameras probably signified, artistically, and settling in as the lights dimmed and facing the screen (i.e. now themselves, it turns out) with the coolly excited smiles
of highbrow-entertainment expectation, smiles which the cameras and screen's projection now revealed as just starting to drop
from the faces of the audience as the audience saw row after row of itself staring back at it with less and less expectant and more
and more blank and then puzzled and then eventually pissed-off facial expressions. The Joke's total running time was just exactly
as long as there was even one cross-legged patron left in the theater to watch his own huge projected image gazing back down at
him with the special distaste of a disgusted and ripped-off-feeling art-film patron, which ended up being more than maybe twenty
minutes only when there were critics or film-academics in the seats, who studied themselves studying themselves taking notes
with endless fascination and finally left only when the espresso finally impelled them to the loo, at which point Himself and Mario
would have to frantically pack up cameras and lens-cases and coaxials and run and totter like hell to catch the next cross-country
flight from Cambridge to Berkeley or Berkeley to Cambridge, since they obviously had to be there all set up and Bolex'd for each
showing at each venue. Mario said Lyle had said Incandenza had confessed that he'd loved the fact that The Joke was so publicly
static and simple-minded and dumb, and that those rare critics who defended the film by arguing at convolved length that the
simple-minded stasis was precisely the film's aesthetic thesis were dead wrong, as usual. It's still unclear whether it was the
Eyeball-and-Sideshow thing or 'The Medusa v....' or The Joke that had metamorphosized into their late father's later involvement
with the hostilely anti-Real genre of 'Found Drama,' which was probably the historical zenith of self-consciously dumb stasis, but
which audiences never actually even got to hate, for a-priori reasons.
FREAK STATUE OF LIBERTY ACCIDENT KILLS FED ENGINEER - Header; BRAVE MAN ON CRANE CRUSHED
BY 5 TON CAST IRON BURGER— 12-point Subheader;
GENTLE PROMISES SKEPTICAL CUB SCOUT CONVENTION 'YOU'LL BE ABLE TO EAT RIGHT OFF'
TERRITORIAL U.S. BY END OF TERM'S FIRST YEAR — Header;
ANOTHER LOVE CANAL? — 24-point Superheader; TOXIC HORROR ACCIDENTALLY UNCOVERED IN UPSTATE
NEW HAMPSHIRE— 16-point Header-sized Subheader;
'New Hampshire environmental officials yesterday flatly denied that vast collections of drums leaking industrial solvents,
chlorides, benzenes and oxins had been quote "stumbled on" by 18 federal EPA staffers playing a casual game of softball east of
Berlin, NH, claiming instead that the corroded receptacles had been placed there against statute by large men with white body 
suits and short haircuts in long shiny trailer trucks with O.N.A.N.'s official crest, a sombreroed eagle with a maple leaf in its
mouth, stencilled on the sides. In the nation's capital, a quote "full and energetic investigation" has been promised by the Gentle
administration into claims by residents of Berlin, NH and Rumford, ME that the incidence of soft-skulled and extra-eyed
newborns in the toxicly affected area far exceeds the national average.' — $3.75 U.S. Nightly-Rental News Cartridge Anchor
Lead;
SUB ROSA FUSION-IN-POISONOUS-ENVIRONMENT TEST SITE ALLEGED AT MONTPELIER, VT — Scientific
North American Header;
MY BABY HAS SIX EYES AND BASICALLY NO SKULL — Lurid Color 32-point Tabloid Header, Dateline Lancaster
NH;
FED EPA SOFTBALLERS ALLEGE TWO MORE 'POISONOUS WASTE HORRORFEST' ILLEGAL DUMP SITES
'STUMBLED OVER' NEAR NORTH SYRACUSE, HISTORIC TICONDEROGA — NYC Daily Header;
THE FINE ART OF FEDERAL STUMBLING: A WHOLE LOT OF SOFTBALL GOING ON —Editorial Header in
Syracuse NY's Post-Standard;
CANADIAN P.M. DENIES SECRET MINIATURE GOLF OUTING WITH OUTRAGED NEW ENGLAND GOVS —
Surprisingly Small 3rd-Page 10-poínt Header;
GENTLE SHOCKER — Pearl-Harbor-Sized 32-point Super-superheader Almost Too Big to Read Clearly; MAYFLOWER,
RED BALL, ALLIED, U-HAUL STOCKS SOAR— 16-point Financial Daily Subheader; TWO NORTHEAST GOVS
HOSPITALIZED FOR INFARCTION, ANEURISM— 10-point Subheader;
GENTLE DECLARES ALL U.S. TERRITORY NORTH OF LINE FROM SYRACUSE TO TICONDEROGA, NY,
TICONDEROGA, NY TO SALEM, MA FEDERAL DISASTERS, OFFERS FEDERAL AID FOR
UPSTATE AND NEW ENGLAND RESIDENTS WISHING TO RELOCATE, CLAIMS FUNDS FOR EPA CLEAN-UP
'ARE NOT WITHIN THE MAP OF WHAT'S POSSIBLE' [SIC]— Header from Chemically Over-Garrulous Headliner
Eventually Fired Even from Subheader Dept. for Exceeding Verbal Parameters and Now Starting to Get in the Same Hot Water
All Over Again at a Much Less Prestigious Daily Paper;
and so on and so forth. Himself's old optical editing lab has imposing Com-pugraphic typesetting and matteing facilities: it's
hard to tell which of the headlines and other stuff are for real and which have been dickied with, usually, if you're too young to
recall the actual chronology. At least some of the headlines are phony, the kids know; miniature golf indeed. But the accuracy of
Mario's puppeteered account of the seminal meeting of what's come to be known as 'The Concavity Cabinet' gets to stand
uncontested by fact. Nobody who wasn't actually there at the 16 January meeting knows just what was said when or by whom, the
Gentle administration being of the position that extant Oval Office recording equipment was a veritable petri dish of organisms.
Gentle's claque of doo-wopping Motown cabinet-puppets have purple dresses and matching lipstick and nail polish, and bouffants
so blindingly Afrosheened that there had been special lighting and film-speed problems in the custodial closet:
SEC. treas.: You're looking vigorous and hale today, sir.
gentle: Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh.
pres. MEX./SEC. MEX./V-C O.N.A.N.: May I ask, Señor, why my distinguished co-Vice Chair of O.N.A.N. is not with us in
attendance today.
gentle: Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh.
mr. rodney tine, chief, U.S. office of unspecified services: The president's taking a little pure oxygen today, boys, and has
authorized me as his oral proxy on this may I say historically opportune day. The Canadian P.M.'s in a bit of a snit. He prefers to
whinge in the media surrounded by Mounted Reserves and is off somewhere far from Quebec in a Kevlar vest doing whatever the
Canadian word is for pouting, doubtless poring over opinion polls prepared by chinless guys in Canadian hornrims.
mex. and some other secs.: [Various puzzled apprehensive noises.]
TiNE: I'm sure you've all been briefed on the unprecedented but not unop-portune crisis that obtains north of the almost
perfectly horizontal line between Buffalo and Northeast Mass.
tine arranges photos on seal-crested easels: a New Hampshire runoff-ditch running off stuff a color nobody's quite ever seen
before; a wide-angle horizon-stretching vista of skull-embossed drums, with short-haired guys in white body-suits walking around
adjusting knobs and reading dials on shiny hand-held devices; a very weird chemical sunrise, close in hue to the Cabinet members'
lipstick, over some forests in southern Maine that look way taller and generally lusher than January forests ought properly to be; a
couple indoor-lit snapshots of a multi-eyed infant crawling backwards, its ear to the carpet, dragging its shapeless head like a sack
of spuds. The last display's a real heartstring-plucker.
all secs.: [Various concerned and sympathetic noises.]
gentle: Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh.
TlNE: Gentlemen, let the president just say that no one's prepared to say they're quite sure what's happened, or just which
quote unquote loyal part of the Union or Organization might reasonably be said to be culpable, but it's not the administration's
immediate concern to point the levelling finger of blame or aspersion just yet or right now. Our concern is to act, to respond, and
act and respond decisively. Swiftly. And decisively.
sec. int.: We've come up with some extremely preliminary projections on the costs of detoxifying and/or deradiating the better
part of four U.S. states, sir, and I have to tell you gentlemen that even with the atmosphere of uncertainty at this point in time of
not yet having a definitive handle on just what kinds and combinations of compounds were — umm — found there and how wide
your — not 'your' personally, sir, J.G., 'your' just being a shorthand way for — to say something like I suppose simply 'the' — how
wide the dispersal- and toxicity-parameters are shaping up to look — umm — I have to relate that the figures we're looking at are
almost staggeringly multi-zeroed, sir, gentlemen.
tine: Tighten in and expand on staggering if you will, Blaine.
sec. int.: We're talking at bare minimum a staggering amount of Prívate-Sector-caliber guys in white suits and helmets, not
unlike your own helmet, sir, with a commensurately massive tab for the suits and helmets, plus gloves and throwaway booties, and
a lot of really shiny equipment with a great many knobs and dials. Sir. 
gentle: Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh.
tine: Gentlemen, let's pay the president the due tribute of proceeding right to the bone of the matter. I think the president's
position is rendered patently clear by the pure oxygen he's been forced to take here with us today. No way we can possibly permit
territory publicly exposed as this befouled and waste-impacted to continue to besmirch the already tight and tidier territory of a
new era's U.S. of A. The president shudders at the mere thought. Just the mere thought of it forces him to resort to oxygen.
pres. mex./sec. MEX./V-C O.N.A.N.: I do not anticipate what options your federal and our continental government might
consider options to this permitting, señors.
other secs.: [Tentative puzzled nods and slightly off-key agreement-noises.]
TlNE: Having been elected and conferred with a mandate on the clear and public anti-waste platform of the C.U.S.P., the
president is inexorably driven to see the only viable option being to give it away.
sec. state: Give it away?
tine: Expressly.
sec. state: You mean simply tell the truth? That Johnny's C.U.S.P. platform necessitates — given the unfeasibility of shooting
national wastes into space, since NASA hasn't put a successful launch on in over a decade and the rockets simply fall over and
blow up and become more waste — that — given the amount of additional waste annular fusion's start-up is going to start putting
in circulation the minute start-up commences — that his platform all but necessitates the second-tier option of transforming
certain vast stretches of U.S. territory into uninhabitable and probably barbed-wired landfills and fly-shrouded dumps and
saprogenic magenta-fogged toxic-disposal sites? Concede publicly that those EPA Softball games weren't casual or pick-up in the
least? That you allowed Rod the God here to convince you156146 to authorize Unspecified Services to undertake massive toxic
dumping and skull-softening against local statute for basically the same hard-choice, Greater-Good-of-the-Union reasons that
prompted Lincoln to suspend the Constitution and jail Confederate activists without charge for the duration of the last great U.S.
territorial crisis? And/or not least that these particular territories were chosen essentially because New Hampshire and Maine
didn't let C.U.S.P. on their Independent ballots and the Mayor of Syracuse had the misfortune to sneeze on the president during a
campaign swing? Give away the entire strategy the two of you have apparently huddled in some sterilized corner and mapped out?
Can this be what you mean by Give it away, Rod?
tine: Bôf. Don't be a maroon, Billingsley. The it in the president's Give it away signifies the territory.
gentle: Hhhaaaahhh.
TlNE: We're going to give away the whole benighted smirch of ground.
sec. int.: Export it, one might venture to sally.
tine: It's a novel and pro-active resource no prior statesman's had the vision or environmental cojones to envision. If there's
one natural resource we've still got in spades, it's territory.
pres. mex./sec. MEX./V-C O.N.A.N. and several other secs.: [Attempt to bring eyebrows back down below hairlines,]
tine: President Gentle's decided we're going to reinvent not just government but history. Torch the past. Manifest a new
destiny. Boys, we're going to institute some serious intra-O.N.A.N. interdependence.
gentle: Hhhaaahh hhhuuuhh.
TiNE: Gentlemen, we're going to make an unprecedented intercontinental gift of certain newly expendable northeast
American territories, in return for the faute-de-mieux continuation of U.S. waste-displacement access to those territories. Allow
me to illustrate what Lur— just what the president means.
tine places two large maps (also courtesy of Ms. Heath's crafts class) on Govt.-issue easels. They look both to be of the good
old U.S.A.. The first map is your more or less traditional standard issue, with the U.S. looking really big in white and Mexico's
northern fringes a tasteful ladies'-room pink and Canada's brooding bottom hem a garish, almost menacing red. The second North
American map looks neither old nor all that good, traditionally speaking. It has a concavity. It looks sort of like some person or
persons have taken a deep wicked canine-intensive bite out of its upper right bit, in which an ascending and then descending line
has its near-right-angle at what looks to be the historic and now hideously befouled Ticonderoga NY; and the areas north of that
jagged line look to be that pushy shade of Canadian red, now. Some little rubber practical-joke-type flies, the blue-bellied kind
that live on filth, are stapled in a raisinesque dispersal over the red Concavity. tine has a trademark telescoping weatherman's
pointer that he plays with instead of using to point at much of anything.
sec. STATE: A kind of ecological gerrymandering?
tine: The president invites you gentlemen to conceive these two visuals as a sort of before-and-after representation of
'projected intra-O.N.A.N. territorial re-allocations,' or some public term like that. Redemise-ment's probably too technical.
sec. state: Still respectfully not quite sure we at State see how inhabited territories can be sold to the public as quote
expendable when a decent slice of that public by all reports inhabits that territory, Rod.
gentle: Hhhaaahh.
tine: The president's pro-actively chosen not to hedge that high-cost tough-choice possibly unpopular lonely-at-the-top fact
one bit, guys. We've been moving forward full-bore on anticipating various highly involved relocation scenarios. Scenaria? Is it
scenarios or scenaria?157147 Marty's on-task on the scenario front. Care to bring us to speed, Marty?
sec. transp.: We foresee a whole lot of people moving south really really fast. We foresee cars, light trucks, heavier trucks,
buses, Winnebagos — Winnebaga? — commandeered vans and buses, and possibly commandeered Winnebagos or Winnebaga.
We foresee 4-wheel-drive vehicles, motorcycles, Jeeps, boats, mopeds, bicycles, canoes and the odd makeshift raft. Snowmobiles
and cross-country skiers and roller-skaters on those strange-looking roller-skates with only one line of wheels down each skate.
We foresee backpack-type folks speed-walking in walking-shorts and boots and Tyrolean hats and a stick. We foresee some folks
just outright running like hell, possibly, Rod. We foresee homemade wagons piled high with worldly goods. We foresee BMW
war-surplus motorcycles with sidecars and guys in goggles and leather helmets. We foresee the occasional skateboard. We foresee
a strictly temporary breakdown in the thin veneer of civilization over the souls of essentially frightened stampeding animals. We
foresee looting, shooting, price-gouging, ethnic tensions, promiscuous sex, births in transit.
sec. H.E.W.: Rollerblades I think you mean, Marty. 
sec. transp.: All feedback and input welcome, Trent. Someone junior in the office foresaw hang-gliders. I don't foresee
demographically significant hang-gliding, personally, at this juncture. Nor I need to stress do we foresee anything you could call
true refugees.
gentle: Hhhaaahh hhhuuuhhhhhhh.
tine: Absolutely not, Mart. No way a downer-association-rife term like refugee is going to be applicable here. I cannot
overstress this too assertively. Eminent nondomain: yes. Renewal-grade brand of sacrifice: you bet. Heroes, new era's breed of
new pioneers, striking in bravely for already-settled good old settled but unfoul American territory: bien sûr.
sec. state: Bien sûr?
press sec. [w/ queer combination of bangs and bouffant and pair of bifocals on slim bead chain around neck and resting in
cleavage]: Neil over in Spin has been poring through resource materials. Apparently the term refugee can be plausibly denied if
both — I'm quoting direct from Neil's memo here — if both, a, no homemade wagons piled high with worldly goods are pulled by
slow bovine animals with curvy horns, and b, if the percentage of children under six who are either, a, naked, or b, squalling at the
top of their lungs, or c, both, is under 20% of the total number of children under six in transit. It's true that Neil's key resource here
is Pol and Di-ang's Totalitarian's Guide to Iron-Fisted Spin, but they're thinking this fact can be spun away from without much todo, over in Spin.
gentle: Hhhuuuhh.
tine: Marty and Jay's staffs have been day-and-nighting on strategies to forestall anything like ostensible refugeeism.
press sec. [Holding brillantined head at that angle people in bifocals have to, to read]: Anything bovine with curvy horns gets
shot on sight. Rod's top U.S.O. operatives in shiny trucks at strategic intervals handing out free toddler-wear courtesy of Sears'
Winnie-the-Pooh line, to nip nakedness in the bud.
sec. treas.: Still hammering out the boilerplate on the Sears agreement, Rod.
tine: The president has every confidence, Chet. I believe Marty and Jay were just getting to the transportational coup de grace.
SEC. transp.: We're soliciting bids for signs for up there making it legal to drive really really fast in the breakdown lanes.
press sec.: South-bound breakdown lanes.
all secs.: [Harmonic murmurs.]
sec. state: Still don't see why not just retain cartographic title to the toxified areas, relocate citizenry and portable capital, use
them as our own designated disposal area. Sort of the back of the hall closet or special wastebasket underneath the national
kitchen sink as it were. Hammer out systems for delivering all national refuse and waste into the area, cordon it off, keep the rest
of the nation edible-off as per Johnny's platform.
sec. H.E.W.: Why cede vitally needed waste-disposal resources to a recalcitrant ally?
tine: Billingsley, Trent, and yet who as I stated says we can't utilize these territories for just this purpose no matter whose
nation's name they're in? Interdependence is as Interdependence does, after all.
pres. mex./sec. MEX./V-C O.N.A.N.: ¿Qué?
gentle: Hhhaaahh?
TiNE: Yet Billingsley's right that this kind of sprawling, depopulated, newly Canadian territory can accommodate the
tidiness-needs of this whole great continental alliance for decades to come. After that, look out Yukon!
pres. mex./sec. MEX./V-C O.N.A.N. [Face green and mask wetly dark over upper lip]: May I respectfully ask President
Gentle how you are proposing to ask my newly succeeded Co-Vice Chair of our continental Organization to possibly be able to
accept vast arenas of egregiously poisoned terrain on behalf of his peoples?
TINE: Valid question. Simple answer. Three answers. Statesmanship. Gamesmanship [counting, now, on fine strong white
clean fingers]. Brinksmanship.
W/ now more — and rather more jejune — journalistic f/x spinning out of the black at high-camp speeds to a 45-rpm playing
of custodian Dave ('F.D.V.') Harde's ¼-rpm disc of 'Flight of the Bumblebee':
GENTLE TO CANADIAN PM: HAVE SOME TERRITORY — Header;
CANADIAN P.M. TO GENTLE: NO, REALLY, THANKS ANYWAY — Header;
GENTLE TO CANADIAN P.M.: BUT I INSIST — Header;
BLOC QUEBECOIS TO CANADIAN P.M.: ACCEPT TOXICLY CONVEX ADDITION TO OUR PROVINCE AND WE
ARE OUT OF HERE SO FAST YOUR HEAD WILL SPIN ALL THE WAY AROUND -Header from That Guy Again;
CANADIAN P.M. TO GENTLE: LOOK, WE'RE SWIMMING IN TERRITORY ALREADY, HAVE A LOOK AT AN
ATLAS WHY DON'T YOU, WE HAVE WAY MORE TERRITORY THAN WE KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH ALREADY,
PLUS I DON'T MEAN TO BE RUDE EITHER BUT WE'RE ESPECIALLY UNKEEN ON ACCEPTING HOPELESSLY
BEFOULED TERRITORY FROM YOU GUYS, INTERDEPENDENCE RHETORIC OR NO, THERE'S REALLY JUST NO
WAY — And Again;
abon26-MEMBER EEC ACCUSES U.S. OF 'EXPERIALIST DOMINATION'— Header; THIRD-WORLD VEGETABLES
HURLED IN U.N. IMBROGLIO — 10-point Subheader;
GENTLE TO P.M.: LOOK, BABE, TAKE THE TERRITORY OR YOU'RE GOING TO BE REALLY REALLY SORRY
— Header;
SIN CITY SHRINK: NATION'S VELVETIEST VOCALIST WAS HOSPITALIZED TWICE FOR MENTAL ILLNESS —
Tabloid Header;
PRESIDENTIAL HISTORY OF 'EMOTIONAL INSTABILITY' ALLEGED BY LAS VEGAS M.D. — Respectable Header;
MY GARDEN NOW'S GOT TOMATOES I COULDN'T LIFT EVEN IF I COULD HACK THROUGH THEIR VINES
WITH A MACHETE TO EVEN REACH THEM — Tabloid Header, Dateline Montpelier VT, with Photo That Simply Has Got
to Have Been Doctored;
F.E.C. CALLED TO INVESTIGATE C.U.S.P.s — Header; 'STRATEGIC MISREPRESENTATION' OF CANDIDATE'S
PSYCH HISTORY HAS PUT NATION, CONTINENT AT RISK, DEMS CHARGE — 12-point Supersubheader;
TOP AIDES HUDDLE AS WORRIES OVER GENTLE'S 'PATHOLOGICAL INABILITY TO DEAL PROACTIVELY 
WITH ANY SORT OF REAL OR IMAGINED REJECTION' MOUNT IN FACE OF CANADIAN SHOWDOWN — MethDependent Headliner, Now at Third Daily in 17 Months;
'Both financial and diplomatic communities have reacted with increasing concern to reports that President Gentle has isolated
himself in a small private suite at Bethesda Naval Hospital with several thousand dollars' worth of sound and sterilization
equipment and is spending all day every day singing morose show-tunes in inappropriate keys to the U.S.M.C. Colonel who
stands near the Dermalatix Hypospectral sterilization appliance handcuffed to the Black Box of United States nuclear codes.
Unspecified Services Office spokespersons have declined to comment on reports of such erratic Executive directives as: ordering
the Defense Department to commandeer department store giant Searsco's entire inventory of Winnie-the-Pooh toddler wear under
National Security Emergency Proviso 414; requiring Armed Forces personnel to take target practice at cardboard silhouettes of
what appear to be oxen, water buffalo, or Texas longhorn cattle; preparing the release of a Presidential Address to the Nation cartridge that purportedly consists entirely of the president seated at his desk with his head in his gloves intoning "What's the point of
going on?" over and over; instructing silo personnel at all S.A.C. installations north of 44° to remove their missiles from the silos
and then reinsert them upside-down; and ordering the installation of massive "air displacement effectua-tors" 28 km. south of each
such silo, facing north.' — Anchor's Lead for Kind of Semi-Cheesy Weekly Lurid-News-Intensive Summary Cartridge;
'UNPRECEDENTED' WHOPPER REVENUES IN THIRD QUARTER CREDITED BY PILLSBURY/BK TO GENTLE'S
'CREATIVELY PROACTIVE' RESUSCITATION OF POST-NETWORK ADVERTISING -Ad Week 14-point Full-Color
Header;
GENTLE HAS COMPLETELY LOST MIND, CLAIMS CONFIDANT, O.U.S. CHIEF TINE AT PRESS CONFERENCE:
THREATENS TO DETONATE UPSIDE-DOWN MISSILES IN U.S. SILOS, IRRADIATE CANADA W/ AID OF ATHSCME
HELL-FANS — Header; 'WILLING TO ELIMINATE OWN MAP OUT OF SHEER PIQUE' IF CANADA NIXES
RECONFIGURATIVE TRANSFER OF 'AESTHETICALLY UNACCEPTABLE' TERRAIN — Pretty Obviously Homemade
Subheader.
This catastatic feature of the puppet-film's plot — that Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner threatens to bomb his own nation and
toxify neighbors in an insane pout over Canada's reluctance to take redemised title over O.N.A.N.'s very own vast dump —
resonates powerfully with those members of the movie's E.T.A. audience who know that this whole parodic pseudo-ONANtiad
scenario is actually a puppet-à-clef-type allusion to the dark legend of one Eric Clipperton and the Clipperton Brigade. In the very
last couple years of solar, Unsubsidized Time, this kid Eric Clipperton appeared for the first time as an unseeded sixteen-year-old
in East Coast regional tournament play. The little Town-or-Academy-Hailed-From slot after Clipperton's name on tournament
draw-sheets just said 'Ind.,' presumably for 'Independent.' Nobody'd heard of him before or knew where he came from. He'd just
sort of seepily risen, some sort of human radon, from someplace low and unknown, whence he lent the cliche 'Win or Die in the
Attempt' grotesquely literal new levels of sense.
For the Clipperton legend derived from the fact that this Clipperton kid owned a hideous and immaculately maintained Clock
17 semiautomatic sidearm that came in a classy little leather-handled blond-wood case with German High-Gothic script on it and
a velvet gun-shaped concavity inside where the Clock 17 lay nestled in plush velvet, gleaming, with another little rectangular
divot for the 17-shot clip; and that he brought the gun-case and Clock 17 out on the court with him along with his towels and
water-jug and sticks and gear bag, and from his very first appearance on the East Coast jr. tour made clear his intention to blow his
own brains out publicly, right there on court, if he should lose, ever, even once.
Thus there came to be, in most every tournament with an initial draw of 64, a group of three boys, then four, and by the
semifinals five, then finally six boys who for that tournament formed the Clipperton Brigade, players who'd had the misfortune to
draw and meet Eric Clipperton and Clipper-ton's well-oiled Clock 17, and who understandably declined to be the player to cause
Clipperton to eliminate his own map for keeps in public for something as comparatively cheesy as a tournament win over
Clipperton. A win over Clipperton had no meaning because a loss to Clipperton had no meaning and didn't hurt anybody's
regional and U.S.T.A. ranking, not once the guys in the U.S.T.A. computer center caught on to the Clipperton strategic M.O. Thus
an early exit from a tournament because of a loss to Clipperton came to be regarded as sort of like a walk in baseball, stats-wise;
and a boy who found himself in the Clipperton Brigade and defaulted his round tended to view that tournament as a kind of
unexpected vacation, a chance to rest and heal, to finally get some sun on the chest and ankles, to work on chinks in his game's
armor, to reflect a little on what it all might mean.
Clipperton's first meaningless victory ever came at sixteen, unseeded, at the Hartford Jr. Open, first round, against one Ross
Reat, of Maddox OH and the just-opened Enfield Tennis Academy. For some reason it's Struck who sort of specializes in this
story and never misses a chance to tell new E.T.A.s the tale of Clipperton v. Reat. Clipperton's an OK player, nothing spectacular
but also not like absurdly out of place at a regional-grade tourney; but Reat is at fifteen seasoned and high-ranked, and the third
seed at Hartford; and Reat is, for a while — as would be S.O.P. for a high seed in the first round — basically cleaning under his
nails with this unseeded unknown Eric Clipperton. At 1-4 in the second set, Clipperton sits down at the side-change and, instead
of toweling off, reaches into his gear bag and extracts his classy little blond-wood case and gets out the Clock 17. Fondles it.
Takes out the clip and hefts it and rams it home in its slot at the base of the grip with a chillingly solid-sounding click. Caresses
his left temple with the thing's blunt shiny barrel. Everybody watching the match agrees it is one ugly and all-business-looking
piece of personal-defense hardware. Clipper-ton climbs up the rungs of the lifeguardish chair the umpire in his blue blazer158148
sits in and uses the umpire's mike to make public his intention of blowing his personal brains out all over the court with the
hideous Clock, should he lose. The small first-round gallery stiffens and inhales and doesn't exhale for a long time. Reat audibly
gulps. Reat is tall, densely freckled, a good kid, one of Incandenza's fair-haired boys, not too bright, with the Satellite Tour so
clearly in his future that at only fifteen he's already starting cholera shots and mastering Third World exchange rates. And but for
the remainder of the match (which lasts exactly eleven more games) Clipperton plays tennis with the Clock 17 held steadily to his
left temple. The gun makes tossing kind of a hassle, on Clipperton's serve, but Reat is letting the serves go by untouched anyway.
None of the E.T.A. staff has bothered to show up and coach Reat through what was supposed to be a standard first-round
fingernail-cleaning, and so Reat is strategically and emotionally all alone out there, and he's opted for not even pretending to make
an effort, given what the unseeded Clipperton seems willing to sacrifice for a win. Ross Reat was the first and last junior player 
ever to shake Clipperton's free hand at the end of a match, and the moment's captured in a Hartford Cou-rant staff photo that some
E.T.A. wiseacre'd later glued to the door of Struck's room with so much Elmer's all over the back that taking it off would gut the
varnish, so the thing stays up for all in the hall to see, Reat here up at net on one knee, one arm over his eyes, the other hand
extended upward to a Clipperton who'd simply obliterated him psychologically. And Ross Reat was never quite exactly the same
ever again after that, both Schtitt and de Lint have assured all future potentially mercy-minded E.T.A. males.
And, the legend's story goes, Eric Clipperton never henceforth loses. No one is willing to beat him and risk going through life
with the sight of the Clock going off on his conscience. Nobody ever knows where Clipperton comes from, to play. Never seen at
airports or Interstate exit ramps or ever even spotted carb-loading at any Denny's between matches. He just starts materializing,
always alone, at increasingly high-level junior tournaments, appears on draw-sheets with 'Ind.' by his name, plays competitive
tennis with a Clock at his left temple;159149 and his opponents, unwilling to sacrifice Clipperton's hostage (Clipperton même),
barely even try, or else they go for impossible angles and spins, or else talk on mobile phones while they play or try to hit every
ball between their legs or behind their backs; and the matches' galleries tend to boo Clipperton just as much as they dare; and
Clipperton sits and hefts his 17-shot clip and takes the brass-jacketed 9-mm. cartridges out sometimes and clicks a few together
ruminatively in his hand in the sideline chair at all the odd-game breaks, and sometimes he tries little Western-gunslinger
triggerguard-spins during the breaks; but when play resumes Clipperton's deadly serious once more and has the Clock 17 at his
temple, playing, and mows through the lackadaisical Clipperton Brigade round by round, and wins the whole tournament by what
is essentially psychic default, and then right after collecting his trophy vanishes like the ground itself inhaled him. His only even
remote friend on the jr. tour is eight-year-old Mario Incandenza, whom Clipperton meets because, even though Disney Leith and
an early prorector named Cantrell are shepherding the male tournament contingent (including a solid but sort of plateau-stuck and
no longer much improving seventeen-year-old Orin Incandenza) that summer, E.T.A. Headmaster Dr. J. O. Incandenza shows up
at quite a few of the events on the domestic circuit, doing under ostensible U.S.T.A. auspices a two-part documentary on jr.
competitive tennis, stress, and light, and so Mario's tottering around with lens-cases and Tuffy tripods etc. at most of that late
summer's meaningful events, and meets Clipperton, and finds Clipperton intriguing and in ways he can't be very articulate about
hilarious, and is kind to him and seeks out his company, Clipperton's, or at any rate at least treats Clipperton like he exists,
whereas by late July everybody else's attitude toward Clipperton resembled that kind of stiffly conspicuous nonrecognition that
e.g. accompanies farts at formal functions. One of Himself's short test-cartridges — shot to check out transverse aberration at
various sun-angles, the case's little adhesive sticker says — contains the only available footage of the late Eric Clipperton160150
— from the preponderance of salt-tablet dispensers and littered Pledge husks and Dade County ambulances it was pretty likely
shot at the hideous Sunkist Jr. Inv. cramp-fest in August in Miami — just a couple overexposed meters of Clipperton, head down
and hunched on a low orange bleacher, bony-shouldered, in no shirt and untied Nikes, his Gothic-scripted case in his lap, his
elbows on his knees and his hands spidered across both cheeks, staring down between his feet and trying not to smile as a
withered-toddler-sized and forward-listing Mario stands beside him, supported by his portable police lock, holding a light-meter
and something else too halated to make out on the tape, open very wide for a homodontic laugh at something funny Clipperton has
apparently just let slip.
Hal, having smoked cannabis on four separate occasions — twice w/ others — on this continental day of rest, plus still in a
kind of guiltily sickening stomach-pit shock from the afternoon's Eschaton debacle and his failure to intervene or even get up out
of his patio-chair, Hal has lost a bit of his grip and has just gotten on the outside of his fourth chocolate cannoli in half an hour,
and is feeling the icy electric keening of some sort of incipient carie in the left-molar range, and also now as usual, after
swinishness with sugar, finds himself sinking, emotionally, into a kind of distracted funk. The puppet-film is reminiscent enough
of the late Himself that just about the only more depressing thing to pay attention to or think about would be advertising and the
repercussions of O.N.A.N.ite Reconfiguration for the U.S. advertising industry. Mario's film executes some rather over-arty flashcuts between the erections of Lucite fortifications and ATHSCME and E.W.D. displacement installations along the new U.S.
border, on the one hand, and the shadowily implied Rodney-Tine-disastrous-love-interest element with the voluptuous puppet
representing the infamous and enigmatic Québecois fatale known publicly only as 'Luria P---------,' on the other.
Tine's puppet's tiny brown felt hand is on Luria's voluptuously padded little Popsicle-stick knee in the famous Vienna,
Virginia Szechuan steakhouse where, according to dark legend, Subsidized Time was conceived on the back of a chintzy Chinesezodiac paper placemat, by R. Tine. Hal happens to know the fall and rise of millennial U.S. advertising exceptionally well,
because one of the only two academic things he's ever written about anything even remotely filmic161151 was a mammoth
research paper on the tangled fates of broadcast television and the American ad industry. This was the final and grade-determining
project in Mr. U. Ogilvie's year-long Intro to Entertainment Studies in May of Y.P.W.; and Hal, a seventh-grader and only up to R
in the Condensed O.E.D., wrote about TV-advertising's demise with a reverent tone that sounded like the events had taken place at
the misty remove of glaciers and guys in pelts instead of just four years prior, more or less overlapping with the waxing of the
Gentle Era and Experialist Reconfiguration Mario's puppet-show makes fun of.
There's no question that the Network television industry — meaning, since PBS is a whole different kettle, the Big Three plus
the fast-starting but low-endurance Fox — had already been in serious trouble. Between the exponential proliferation of cable
channels, the rise of the total-viewer-control hand-held remotes known historically as zappers, and VCR-recording advances that
used subtle volume- and hysterical-pitch-sensors to edit most commercials out of any program taped (here a rather chatty
digression on legal battles between Networks and VCR-manufacturers over the Edit-function that Mr. O. drew a big red yawning
skull next to, in the margin, out of impatience), the Networks were having problems drawing the kind of audiences they needed to
justify the ad-rates their huge overhead's slavering maw demanded. The Big Four's arch-foe was America's 100-plus regional and
national cable networks, which, in the pre-millennial Limbaugh Era of extraordinarily generous Justice Dept. interpretation of the
Sherman statutes, had coalesced into a fractious but potent Trade Association under the stewardship of TCI's Malone, TBS's
Turner, and a shadowy Albertan figure who owned the View-Out-the-Simulated-Window-of-Various-Lavish-Homes-in-ExoticLocales Channel, the Yuletide-Fireplace Channel, CBC-Cable's Educational Programming Matrix, and four of Le Groupe Videoiron's five big Canadian Shop-at-Home networks. Mounting an aggressive hearts-and-minds campaign that derided the 'passivity'
of hundreds of millions of viewers forced to choose nightly between only four statistically pussified Network broadcasters, then 
extolled the 'empoweringly American choice' of 500-plus esoteric cable options, the American Council of Disseminators of Cable
was attacking the Four right at the ideological root, the psychic matrix where viewers had been conditioned (conditioned, rather
deliciously, by the Big Four Networks and their advertisers themselves, Hal notes) to associate the Freedom to Choose and the
Right to Be Entertained with all that was U.S. and true.
The A.C.D.C. campaign, brilliantly orchestrated by Boston MA's Viney and Veals Advertising, was pummelling the Big Four
in the fiscal thorax with its ubiquitous anti-passivity slogan 'Don't Sit Still for Anything Less' when a wholly unintended coup de
grace to Network viability was delivered in the form of an unrelated Viney and Veals side-venture. V&V, like most U.S. ad
agencies, greedily buttered its bread on every conceivable side when it could, and started taking advantage of the plummeting Big
Four advertising rates to launch effective Network-ad campaigns for products and services that wouldn't previously have been
able to afford national image-proliferation. For the obscure local Nunhagen Aspirin Co. of Framingham MA, Viney and Veals got
the Enfield-based National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation to sponsor a huge touring exhibition of paintings by artists with
crippling cranio-facial pain about crippling cranio-facial pain. The resultant Network Nunhagen ads were simply silent 30-second
shots of some of the exhibits, with NUNHAGEN ASPIRIN in soothing pale pastels at lower left. The paintings themselves were
excruciating, the more so because consumer HDTV had arrived, at least in the very upscale Incandenza home. The ads with the
more dental-pain-type paintings Hal doesn't even want to think back on, what with a fragment of cannoli wedged someplace
upper-left he keeps looking around for Schacht to ask him to have an angle-mirrored look at. One he can recall was of an ordinary
middle-class American guy's regular face, but with a tornado coming out of the right eyesocket and a mouth at the vortex of that
tornado, screaming. And that was a mild one.162152 The ads cost next to nothing to produce. Nunhagen Aspirin sales went
nationally roofward even as ratings-figures for the Nunhagen ads themselves went from low to abysmal. People found the
paintings so excruciating that they were buying the product but recoiling from the ads. Now you'd think this wouldn't matter so
long as the product itself was selling so well, this fact that millions of national viewers were zapping or surfing to a different channel with their remotes the moment a silent painted twisted face with a hatchet in its forehead came on. But what made the
Nunhagen ads sort of fatally powerful was that they also compromised the ratings-figures for the ads that followed them and for
the programs that enclosed the ads, and, worse, were disastrous because they were so violently unpleasing to look at that they
awakened from their spectatorial slumbers literally millions of Network-devotees who'd hitherto been so numbed and pacified
they usually hadn't bothered to expend the thumb-muscle-energy required to zap or surf away from anything on the screen,
awakened legions of these suddenly violently repelled and disturbed viewers to the power and agency their thumbs actually
afforded them.
Viney and Veals's next broadcast cash-cow, a lurid series of spots for a national string of walk-in liposuction clinics,
reinforced the VôíV trend of high product-sales but dreadful ad-ratings; and here the Big Four were really put on the spot, because
— even though the critics and P.T.A.s and eating-disorder-oriented distaff PACs were denouncing the LipoVac spots' shots of
rippling cellulite and explicit clips of procedures that resembled crosses between hyperbolic Hoover Upright demonstrations and
filmed autopsies and cholesterol-conscious cooking shows that involved a great deal of chicken-fat drainage, and even though
audiences' flights from the LipoVac spots themselves were absolutely gutting ratings for the other ads and the shows around them
— Network execs' sweaty sleep infected with vivid REM-visions of flaccid atrophied thumbs coming twitchily to life over remote
zap and surf controls — even though the spots were again fatally potent, the LipoVac string's revenues were so obscenely
enhanced by the ads that LipoVac Unltd. could soon afford to pay obscene sums for 30-second Network spots, truly obscene,
sums the besieged Four now needed in the very worst way. And so the LipoVac ads ran and ran, and much currency changed
hands, and overall Network ratings began to slump as if punctured with something blunt. From a historical perspective it's easy to
accuse the Network corporations of being greedy and short-sighted w/r/t explicit liposuction; but Hal argued, with a compassion
Mr. Ogilvie found surprising in a seventh-grader, that it's probably hard to be restrained and far-sighted when you're fighting
against a malignant invasive V&V-backed cable kabal for your very fiscal life, day to day.
In hindsight, though, the Big Four's spinal camel-straw had to have been V&V's trio of deep-focus b&w spots for a tiny
Wisconsin cooperative firm that sold tongue-scrapers by pre-paid mail. These ads just clearly crossed some kind of
psychoaesthetic line, regardless of the fact that they single-handedly created a national tongue-scraper industry and put Fond du
Lac's NoCoat Inc. on the Fortune 500.163153 Stylistically reminiscent of those murderous mouthwash, deodorant, and dandruffshampoo scenarios that had an antihero's chance encounter with a gorgeous desire-object ending in repulsion and shame because
of an easily correctable hygiene deficiency, the NoCoat spots' chilling emotional force could be located in the exaggerated
hideousness of the near-geologic layer of gray-white material coating the tongue of the otherwise handsome pedestrian who
accepts a gorgeous meter maid's coquettish invitation to have a bit of a lick of the ice cream cone she's just bought from an
avuncular sidewalk vendor. The lingering close-up on an extended tongue that must be seen to be believed, coat-wise. The slowmotion full-frontal shot of the maid's face going slack with disgust as she recoils, the returned cone falling unfelt from her
repulsion-paralyzed fingers. The nightmarish slo-mo with which the mortified pedestrian reels away into street-traffic with his
whole arm over his mouth, the avuncular vendor's kindly face now hateful and writhing as he hurls hygienic invectives.
These ads shook viewers to the existential core, apparently. It was partly a matter of plain old taste: ad-critics argued that the
NoCoat spots were equivalent to like Preparation H filming a procto-exam, or a Depend Adult Undergarment camera panning for
floor-puddles at a church social. But Hal's paper located the level at which the Big Four's audiences reacted, here, as way closer to
the soul than mere tastelessness can get.
V&V's NoCoat campaign was a case-study in the eschatology of emotional appeals. It towered, a kind of Überad, casting a
shaggy shadow back across a whole century of broadcast persuasion. It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety
relievable by purchase. It just did it way more well than wisely, given the vulnerable psyche of an increasingly hygiene-conscious
U.S.A. in those times.
The NoCoat campaign had three major consequences. The first was that horrible year Hal vaguely recalls when a nation
became obsessed with the state of its tongue, when people would no sooner leave home without a tongue-scraper and an
emergency backup tongue-scraper than they'd fail to wash and brush and spray. The year when the sink-and-mirror areas of public
restrooms were such grim places to be. The NoCoat co-op folks traded in their B'Gosh overalls and hand-woven ponchos for 
Armani and Dior, then quickly disintegrated into various eight-figure litigations. But by this time everybody from Procter &
Gamble to Tom's of Maine had its own brand's scraper out, some of them with baroque and potentially hazardous electronic
extras.
The second consequence was that the Big Four broadcast Networks finally just plain fell off the shelf, fiscally speaking.
Riding a crest of public disaffection not seen since the days Jif commercials had strangers shoving their shiny noses in your open
jar, the Malone-Turner-and-shadowy-Albertan-led cable kabal got sponsors whose ads had been running as distant as seven or
eight spots on either side of the NoCoat gaggers to jump ship to A.C.D.C. U.S. broadcast TV's true angels of death, Malone and
Turner then immediately parlayed this fresh injection of sponsorial capital into unrefusable bids for the rights to the N.C.A.A.
Final Four, the MLB World Series, Wimbledon, and the Pro Bowlers Tour, at which point the Big Four suffered further defections
from Schick and Gillette on one side and Miller and Bud on the other. Fox filed for Ch. 11 protection Monday after A.C.D.C.'s
coup-announcements, and the Dow turned Grizzly indeed on G.E., Paramount, Disney, etc. Within days three out of the Big Four
Networks had ceased broadcasting operations, and ABC had to fall back on old 'Happy Days' marathons of such relentless
duration that bomb threats began to be received both by the Network and by poor old Henry Winkler, now hairless and sugaraddicted in La Honda CA and seriously considering giving that lurid-looking but hope-provoking LipoVac procedure a try. . . .
And but the ironic third consequence was that almost all the large slick advertising agencies with substantial Network billings
— among these the Icarian Viney and Veals — went down, too, in the Big Four's maelstrom, taking with them countless
production companies, graphic artists, account execs, computer-enhancement technicians, ruddy-tongued product-spokespersons,
horn-rimmed demographers, etc. The millions of citizens in areas for one reason or another not cable-available ran their VCRs
into meltdown, got homicidally tired of 'Happy Days,' and then began to find themselves with vast maddening blocks of utterly
choiceless and unenter-taining time; and domestic-crime rates, as well as out-and-out suicides, topped out at figures that cast a
serious pall over the penultimate year of the millennium.
But these consequences' own consequence — with all the Yankee-ingenious irony that attends true resurrections — comes
when the now-combined Big Four, muted and unseen, now, but with its remaining creditor-proof assets now supporting only those
rapaciously clever executive minds that can survive the cuts down to a skeleton of a skeleton staff, rises from the dust-heap and
has a collective last hurrah, ironically deploying V&V's old pro-choice/anti-passivity appeal to obliterate the A.C.D.C. that had
just months before obliterated the Big Four, bringing TCI's Malone down on a golden bell-shaped 'chute and sending TBS's
Turner into self-imposed nautical exile:
Because enter one Noreen Lace-Forché, the USC-educated video-rental mogulette who in the B.S. '90s had taken Phoenix's
Intermission Video chain from the middle of the Sun Belt pack to a national distribution second only to Blockbuster
Entertainment in gross receipts. The woman called by Microsoft's Gates 'The Killer-App Queen' and by Blockbuster's Huizenga
'The only woman I personally fear.’
Convincing the rapacious skeletal remains of the Big Four to consolidate its combined production, distribution, and capital
resources behind a front company she'd had incorporated and idling ever since she'd first foreseen broadcast apocalypse in the
Nunhagen ads' psycho-fiscal fallout — the front an obscure-sounding concern called InterLace TelEntertainment — Lace-Forché
then went and persuaded ad-maestro P. Tom Veals — at that time mourning his remorse-tortured partner's half-gainer off the
Tobin
Bridge by drinking himself toward pancreatitis in a Beacon Hill brownstone — to regather himself and orchestrate a profound
national dissatisfaction with the 'passivity' involved even in D.S.S.-based cable-watching:
What matter whether your 'choices' are 4 or 104, or 504? Veals's campaign argued. Because here you were — assuming of
course you were even cable-ready or dish-equipped and able to afford monthly fees that applied no matter what you 'chose' each
month — here you were, sitting here accepting only what was pumped by distant A.C.D.C. fiat into your entertainment-ken. Here
you were consoling yourself about your dependence and passivity with rapid-fire zapping and surfing that were starting to be
suspected to cause certain rather nasty types of epilepsy over the longish term. The cable kabal's promise of 'empowerment,' the
campaign argued, was still just the invitation to choose which of 504 visual spoon-feedings you'd sit there and open wide
for.164154 And so but what if, their campaign's appeal basically ran, what if, instead of sitting still for choosing the least of 504
infantile evils, the vox- and digitus-populi could choose to make its home entertainment literally and essentially adult? I.e. what
if— according to InterLace — what if a viewer could more or less 100% choose what's on at any given time? Choose and rent,
over PC and modem and fiber-optic line, from tens of thousands of second-run films, documentaries, the occasional sport, old
beloved non-'Happy Days' programs, wholly new programs, cultural stuff, and c., all prepared by the time-tested, newly lean Big
Four's mammoth vaults and production facilities and packaged and disseminated by InterLace TelEnt. in convenient fiber-optic
pulses that fit directly on the new palm-sized 4.8-mb PC-diskettes InterLace was marketing as 'cartridges'? Viewable right there
on your trusty PC's high-resolution monitor? Or, if you preferred and so chose, jackable into a good old pre-millennial widescreen TV with at most a coaxial or two? Self-selected programming, chargeable on any major card or on a special low-financecharge InterLace account available to any of the 76% of U.S. households possessed of PC, phone line, and verifiable credit? What
if, Veals's spokeswoman ruminated aloud, what if the viewer could become her/his own programming director; what if s/he could
define the very entertainment-happiness it was her/his right to pursue?
The rest, for Hal, is recent history.
By the time not only second-run Hollywood releases but a good many first-run films, plus new sitcoms and crime-dramas and
near-live sports, plus now also big-name-anchor nightly newscasts, weather, art, health, and financial-analysis cartridges were
available and pulsing nicely onto cartridges everywhere, the ranks of A.C.D.C.'s own solvent program-pumpers had been
winnowed back to the old-movie-and-afternoon-baseball major-metro regional systems of more like the B.S. '80s. Passive
pickings were slim
now. American mass-entertainment became inherently pro-active, consumer-driven. And because advertisements were now
out of the televisual question — any halfway-sensitive Power-PC's CPU could edit out anything shrill or ungratifying in the postreceipt Review Function of an entertainment-diskette — cartridge production (meaning by now both the satellitic 'spontaneous
dissemination' of viewer-selected menu-programming and the factory-recording of programming on packaged 9.6 mb diskettes 
available cheap and playable on any CD-ROM-equipped system) yes cartridge production — though tentacularly controlled by an
InterLace that had patented the digital-transmission process for moving images and held more stock than any one of the five Baby
Bells involved in the InterNet fiber-optic transmission-grid bought for . 17 on the dollar from GTE after Sprint went belly-up
trying to launch a primitively naked early mask- and Tableauxless form of videophony — became almost Hobbes-ianly freemarket. No more Network reluctance to make a program too entertaining for fear its commercials would pale in comparison. The
more pleasing a given cartridge was, the more orders there were for it from viewers; and the more orders for a given cartridge, the
more InterLace kicked back to whatever production facility they'd acquired it from. Simple. Personal pleasure and gross revenue
looked at last to lie along the same demand curve, at least as far as home entertainment went.
And as InterLace's eventual outright purchase of the Networks' production talent and facilities, of two major home-computer
conglomerates, of the cutting-edge Froxx 2100 CD-ROM licenses of Aapps Inc., of RCA's D.S.S. orbiters and hardware-patents,
and of the digital-compatible patents to the still-needing-to-come-down-in-price-a-little technology of HDTV's visually enhanced
color monitor with microprocessed circuitry and more lines of optical resolution — as these acquisitions allowed
Noreen Lace-Forché's cartridge-dissemination network to achieve vertical integration and economies of scale, viewers' pulsereception- and cartridge-fees went down markedly;165155 and then the further increased revenues from consequent increases in
order- and rental-volume were plowed presciently back into more fiber-optic-InterGrid-cable-laying, into outright purchase of
three of the five Baby Bells InterNet'd started with, into extremely attractive rebate-offers on special new InterLace-designed
R.I.S.C.166156-grade High-Def-screen PCs with mimetic-resolution cartridge-view motherboards (recognizably renamed by
Veals's boys in Recognition 'Teleputers' or 'TPs'), into fiber-only modems, and, of course, into extremely high-quality entertainments that viewers would freely desire to choose even more.167157
But there were — could be — no ads of any kind in the InterLace pulses or ROM cartridges, was the point Hal's presentation
kept struggling to return to. And so then besides e.g. a Turner who kept litigating bitterly via shortwave radio from his equatorial
yacht, the true loser in the shift from A.C.D.C. cable to InterLace Grid was an American advertising industry already reeling from
the death of broadcast's Big Four. No significant markets seemed in any hurry to open up and compensate for the capping of TV's
old gusher. Agencies, reduced to skeletal cells of their best and most rapacious creative minds, cast wildly about for new pulses to
finger and niches to fill. Billboards sprouted with near-mycological fury alongside even rural two-laners. No bus, train, trolley, or
hack went unfestooned with high-gloss ads. Commercial airliners began for a while to trail those terse translucent ad-banners
usually reserved for like Piper Cubs over football games and July beaches. Magazines (already endangered by HD-video
equivalents) got so full of those infuriating little fall-out ad cards that Fourth-Class postal rates ballooned, making the e-mail of
their video-equivalents that much more attractive, in another vicious spiral. Chicago's once-vaunted Sickengen, Smith and
Lundine went so far as to get Ford to start painting little domestic-product come-ons on their new lines' side-panels, an idea that
fizzled as U.S. customers in Nike T-shirts and Marlboro caps perversely refused to invest in 'cars that sold out.' In contrast to just
about the whole rest of the industry, a certain partnerless metro-Boston ad agency was doing so well that it was more out of ennui
and a sense of unlikely challenge that P. Tom Veals consented to manage PR for the fringe candidacy of a former crooner and
schmaltz-mogul who went around swinging a mike and ranting about literally clean streets and creatively refocused blame and
rocketing people's waste into the forgiving chill of infinite space.168158
30 APRIL / 1 MAY YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
Marathe did not quite sleep. They had remained on the shelf for some hours. He thought it a bit of much that Steeply refused
even for a brief time to sit down upon the ground. If his persona's skirt rode up above his weapon, what was the difference? Were
grotesque and humiliating undergarments also involved? Marathe's wife had been in an irreversible coma for fourteen months.
Marathe was able to refresh himself without quite sleeping. It was not a state of fugue or neural relaxation, but a type of detachment. He had learned this in the months after losing his legs to a U.S.A. train. Part of Marathe floated off and hovered somewhere
just above him, crossing its legs, nibbling at his consciousness as does a spectator at popcorn.
At some times on the outcropping Steeply went farther than crossing his arms, almost embracing himself, chilled but
unwilling to comment on the chill. Marathe noted that the gesture of self-embrace appeared convincingly feminine and
unconscious. Steeply's preparations for his returning field-assignment had been disciplined and effective. The feature of complete
un-swallowability about M. Steeply as a U.S.A. female journalist — even a massive and unfortunate-looking U.S.A. female
journalist — was his feet. These were broad and yellow-nailed, hairy and trollesque, the ugliest feet Marathe had observed
anywhere south of 60° N, and the ugliest supposedly female feet of his experience.
Both men were strangely reluctant, somehow, to broach the subject of plans for getting down off the shelf in the utter dark.
Steeply didn't even waste time wondering how Marathe could have gotten up (or down) there in the first place, short of some sort
of helicopter drop, which capricious winds and the proximity of the mountainside made unlikely. The dogma around Unspecified
Services was that if Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents had one Achilles' heel it was their penchant for showing off, making a
spectacle of denying any kind of physical limitation, etc. Steeply had field-interfaced with Rémy Marathe once on a ricketyfeeling Louisiana oil platform 50-plus clicks out of Caillou Bay, covered the whole time by armed Cajun sympathizers. Marathe
always disguised the boggling size of his arms under a long-sleeved windbreaker. His eyelids were half-closed whenever Steeply
turned to look. If he (Marathe) were a cat he would be purring. One hand stayed below the blanket at all times, Steeply noted.
Steeply himself had a small and unregistered Taurus PT9 taped to his shaved inner thigh, which was the main reason he was
reluctant to sit down on the outcrop-ping's stone; the weapon was unsafetied.
In the faint lume- and starlight Marathe found the four-limbed American's high-heeled feet compellingly grotesque, like
loaves of soft processed U.S.A. bread being slowly squeezed and mangled by the footwear's straps. The meaty compression of the
toes at the shoes' open tips, the leather faintly creaking as he bobbed up and down, hugging himself chillily in the sleeveless
summer dress, his fleshy bare arms webbed redly with mottle in the chill, one arm luridly scratched. The received wisdom among
Québecois anti-O.N.A.N. cells was that there was something latent and sadistic in the Bureau des Services sans Spécificité's
assignments of fictional personae for its field-operatives — casting men as women, women as longshoremen or Orthodox
rabbinicals, heterosexual men as homosexual men, Caucasians as Negroes or caricaturesque Haitians and Dominicans, healthy
males as degenerative-nerve-disease-sufferers, healthy women operatives as hydro-cephalic boys or epileptic public-relations
executives, nondeformed U.S.O.U.S. personnel made not only to pretend but sometimes to actually suffer actual deformity, all for
the realism of their field-personae. Steeply, silent, rose and fell absently on the toes of these feet. The feet were also visibly
unused to high U.S.A. women's heels, for they were mangled-looking, deprived of flowing blood and abundantly blistered, and the
smallest toes' nails were blackening and preparing, Marathe noted, in the future to fall off.
But Marathe knew also that something within the real M. Hugh Steeply did need the humiliations of his absurd fieldpersonae, that the more grotesque or unconvincing he seemed likely to be as a disguised persona the more nourished and
actualized his deep parts felt in the course of preparation for the humiliating attempt to portray; he (Steeply) used the mortification
he felt as a huge woman or pale Negro or palsied twit of a degenerative musician as fuel for the assignments' performance; Steeply
welcomed the subsumption of his dignity and self in the very role that offended his dignity of self .. . the psychomechanics
became too confusing for Marathe, who had not the capacity for abstractions of his A.F.R. superiors Fortier and Broullîme. But he
knew this was why Steeply was one of Services sans Spéci-ficité's finest field-operatives, once spending the better part of a year in
magenta robes, sleeping three hours nightly and allowing his large head to be shaved and teeth removed, shaking a tambourine in
airports and selling plastic flowers on median strips to infiltrate a cult-fronted 3-amino-8-hydroxytetralin169159-import ring in the
U.S.A. city Seattle.
Steeply said 'Because this is the thing about the A.F.R. that really gives them the fantods, if you're talking about fear and what
to fear.' He spoke either quietly or not, that Marathe could determine. The empty expanse they both faced off the shelf sucked all
resonance, causing every sound to sound self-enclosed and every utterance to seem flatly soft and somehow overintimate, almost
post-coital. The sounds of things said beneath blankets, winter beating at the log walls. Steeply himself appeared frightened,
perhaps, or confused. He continued: 'This disinterest, by you guys, it seems, in anything but the harm itself. Just getting the
Entertainment out there to hurt us.’
The naked aggression by us.’
Muscles beneath the nylons of the calves bulged and receded as Steeply bobbed. 'The boys in Behavioral Science say they
can't see any sort of positive political goal the A.F.R. even wants. Anything DuPlessis was having your Fortier work toward.’
'The U.S.A. fantods are meaning fear, confusion, standing hair.’
The F.L.Q. and Montcalmists — shit, even the most whacked out of Alberta's ultra-rightists —’
M. DuPlessis had once studied beneath radical Edmonton Jesuits, Marathe reflected.
'— them we can begin to understand, as political bodies. Them we can more or less get a feel for dealing with.’
Their aggression is clothed in agenda, the Bureau of you perceives.’
Steeply's was a thinking face now, in apparent puzzlement. They at least have aims. Real desires.’
'For themselves.’
Steeply appeared convincingly to ruminate. 'It's like there's a context for the whole game, then, with them. We know where
where we stand differs from where they stand. There's a sort of playing field of context.’
Causing the chair to squeak, Marathe again rotated two fingers of a hand in the air, which for Québecers signifies impatience.
'Rules of play. Rules of engagement.' The other hand was with the Sterling UL machine pistol beneath the blanket.
'Even historically — the 60s bomb-tossers, the Spic Separatists, the Ragheads —’
'Very charming. These are attractive terms.’
'Ragheads, Colombians, Brazilians — they had positive objectives.’
'Desires for self which you could understand.’
'Even if the objectives were nothing more than things we could file, pin to the board under "STATED OBJECTIVES" — the
pathetic Spies. They wanted certain things. There was a context. A compass for maneuvers against them.’
'Your guardians of National Security could understand these positive desires of self-interest. Look at them and "relate" as one
says, at least. Knowing where you stand on the field of play.’
Steeply slowly nodded, as if to only himself. 'There wasn't just pure malice. There was never the sense that here were some
people who had just all of a sudden let the air out of your tires for no reason.’
'You allege we disperse our resources deflating automobile tires?’
'A figure of speech. Or for example a serial killer. A sadist. Somebody who wants you down just for the deviant sake of
wanting you down. A deviant.’
Far south, a blinking system of tri-colored lights described a spiral over the airport's tower's pulsing tip — this was a landing
aircraft.
Steeply lit another cigarette off the butt of his previous and then tossed the butt, peering over the shelf's edge to watch its
spiralled fall. Marathe was looking up and right. Steeply said:
'Because politics are one thing. Even way-out-far-in-the-distance fringe politics are one thing. Your Fortier doesn't seem to
care much about Reconfiguration, territory, redemisement, cartography, tariffs, Finlandization, O.N.A.N.ite Anschluss or toxicwaste displacement.’
'Experialism.’
Steeply said 'Or so-called Experialism. Even Separatism. None of the other cells' agendas seem to drive you people. Most of
the Office sees it as just sheer malice with you. No agenda or story.’
'And for you there is something appalling.’
Steeply pursed his lips, as if trying to blow something off them. 'But when there are delineatable strategic political goals and
objectives. When there's some set of ends we can make sense of the malice with. Then it's just business.’
'Nothing of persons.' Marathe was looking up. Some of the stars seemed to flutter, others to burn with more steadiness.
'We know which end is up when it's business. We've got a field and a compass.' He regarded Marathe directly in a way that
was not accusing. 'This seems personal,' he said.
Marathe could not think of descriptions for the way Steeply regarded him. Neither was it sad nor inquisitive nor quite
ruminative. There were small flickers and shadows of movements around the flickers of the celebratory fire down far away on the
floor of the desert. Marathe could not determine whether Steeply was truly revealing emotions about himself. The flickers 
continually went out. Small shreds of young laughter drifted up to them in the vacuous silence. There were also sometimes rustles
in the hillside's scrub, of gravel or small living nightly things. Or whether perhaps Steeply was trying to give him something, let
him know something and determine whether it went back to M. Fortier. Marathe's arrangement with the Office of Unspecified
Services seemed most often to consist in submitting himself to numerous tests and games of truth and betrayal. He felt often with
U.S.O.U.S. like a caged rodent being regarded blandly by bland men in white coats.
Marathe shrugged. 'U.S.A. has previously been hated. Richly so. Shining Path and your Maxwell House company. The transLatin cocaine cartels and the poor late M. Kemp with his exploding home. Did not both Iraq and Iran call U.S.A. the Very Large
Satan? As you hatefully say they have Heads of Rags?’
Steeply exhumed smoke quickly to reply. 'Yes but there were still contexts and ends. Revenue, religion, spheres of influence,
Israel, petroleum, neo-Marxism, post-Cold-War power-jockeying. There was always a third thing.’
'Some desire.’
'Some piece of business. Some third thing between them and us — it wasn't just us — it was something they wanted from us,
or wanted us out of.' Steeply seemed earnestly to say it. The third thing, the goal or desire — it mediated the ill will, abstracted it
somehow.’
'For this is how one who is sane proceeds,' Marathe said, paying great concentration to aligning the blanket's hems against his
chest and wheels; 'some desire of self, and efforts expending to meet that desire.’
'Not just wanting negatives,' Steeply said, shaking the lurid head. 'Not just wanting some other's harm for no purpose.’
Marathe again found himself pretending to sniff with the congestion. 'And a U.S.A. purpose, desires?' This he asked quietly;
its sound was strange against stone.
Steeply was pinching yet a next particle of tobacco from his lipstick. He said This you can't generalize on with most of us,
since our whole system is founded on your individual's freedom to pursue his own individual desires.' His mascara had now
cooled in the formations of its past running. Marathe kept silent and fussed with the blanket as Steeply sometimes regarded him. A
whole minute passed this way. Finally Steeply said:
'Me, for me personally, as an American, Rémy, if you're really serious, I think it's probably your standard old basic American
dreams and ideals. Freedom from tyranny, from excessive want, fear, censorship of speech and thought.' He was looking with
seriousness, even in this wig. 'The old ones, tested by time. Relative plenty, meaningful work, adequate leisure-time. The ones you
might call corny.' His smiling revealed to Marathe lipstick upon one incisor. 'We want choice. A sense of efficaciousness and
choice. To be loved by someone. To freely love who you happen to love. To be loved irregardless of whether you can tell them
Classified stuff about your job. To have them just trust you and trust that you know what you're doing. To feel valued. Not to be
agendalessly despised. To have good neighborly relations. Cheap and abundant energy. Pride in your work and family, and home.'
The lipstick had been smeared onto the tooth when the finger had removed the grain of tobacco. He was 'faisait monter la
pression':170160 'The little things. Access to transport. Good digestion. Work-saving appliances. A wife who doesn't mistake your
job's requirements for your own fetishes. Reliable waste-removal and disposal. Sunsets over the Pacific. Shoes that don't cut off
circulation. Frozen yogurt. A tall lemonade on a squeak-free porch swing.’
Marathe's face, it showed nothing. 'The loyalty of a domestic pet.’
Steeply pointed the cigarette. 'There you go, friend.’
'High-quality entertainment. High value for the dollar of leisure and spectation.’
Steeply laughed agreeably, exhaling a shaped sausage of smoke. In response to this, Marathe smiled. There was some silence
for thinking until Marathe finally said, looking up and off to think: 'This U.S.A. type of person and desires appears to me like
almost the classic, how do you say, uti-litaire.’
'A French appliance?’
'Comme on dit,' Marathe said, 'utilitarienne. Maximize pleasure, minimize displeasure: result: what is good. This is the U.S.A.
of you.’
Steeply pronounced the U.S.A. English word for Marathe, then. Then a sustained pause. Steeply rose and fell upon his toes. A
bonfire of young persons was burning some k. down away on the desert floor, the flames burning in a seeming ring instead of a
sphere.
Marathe said 'But yes, but precisely whose pleasure and whose pain, in this personality type's equation of what is good?’
When Steeply removed a particle of the cigarette from the lip he would then roll it absently between his first finger and
thumb; this did not appear womanly. 'Come again?’
Mara the scratched inside the wind breaker. 'I am wondering, me, in the equations of this U.S.A. type: the best good is each
individual U.S.A. person's maximum pleasure? or it is the maximum pleasure for all the people?’
Steeply nodded in a way that indicated willing patience with someone whose wits were not too speedy. 'But there you go, but
this question itself shows how our different types of national character part ways from each other, Rémy. The American genius,
our good fortune is that someplace along the line back there in American history them realizing that each American seeking to
pursue his maximum good results together in maximizing everyone's good.’
'Ah.’
'We learn this as early as grade school, as kids.’
'I am seeing.’
'This is what lets us steer free of oppression and tyranny. Even your Greekly democratic howling-mob-type tyranny. The
United States: a community of sacred individuals which reveres the sacredness of the individual choice. The individual's right to
pursue his own vision of the best ratio of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct. Defended with teeth and bared claws all through our
history.’
'Bien sûr.’
Steeply for the first time seemed to be feeling with his hand his wig's disorder. He was attempting to straightly reposition it
without removing the wig. Marathe tried not to envision what his B.S.S. had done to the natural brown male hair of Steeply, to
accommodate the complex wig. Steeply said: 'It might be hard for you to quite understand what's so precious about this for us, 
from across this chasm of different values that separates our peoples.’
Marathe flexed his hand. 'Perhaps because it is so general and abstracted. In practice, however, you may force me to
understand.’
'We don't force. It's exactly about not-forcing, our history's genius. You are entitled to your values of maximum pleasure. So
long as you don't fuck with mine. Are you seeing?’
'Perhaps help me see by practical evidence. An instance. Suppose you are able at one moment to increase your own pleasure,
but the cost of this is the displeasuring pain of another? Another sacred individual's displeasing pain.’
Steeply said: 'Well now this is precisely what gives us the fantods about the A.F.R., why it's so important I think to remember
how we come from different cultures and value systems, Rémy. Because in our U.S. value system, anybody who derives an
increase in pleasure from somebody else's pain is a deviant, a sadistic sicko, and is thereby excluded from the community of
everybody's right to pursue their own best pleasure-to-pain ratio.
Sickos deserve compassion and the best treatment feasible. But they're not part of the big picture.’
Marathe willed himself not to rise on his stumps again. 'No, but not another's pain as a pleasurable end in itself. I did not
mean where my pleasure is in your pain. How to say better. Imagine there arises a situation in which your deprivation or pain is
merely the consequence, the price, of my own pleasure.’
'You mean you're talking a tough-choices, limited-resources-type situation.’
'But in the simplest of examples. The most child-like case.' Marathe's eyes momentarily gleamed with enthusiasm. 'Suppose
that you and I, we both wish to enjoy a hot bowl of the Habitant soupe aux pois.’
Steeply said 'You mean. . .’
'But yes. French-Canadian-type pea soup. Produit du Montreal. Saveur Maison. Prête a Servir.'171161
'What is it with you people and this stuff?’
'In this case imagining both you and I are in the worst way craving for Habitant Soup. But there is one can only, of the small
and well-known Single-Serving Size.’
'An American invention, by the way, the 3-S, let's insert.’
The part of Marathe's mind that hovered above and watched coldly, it could not know whether Steeply was being deliberately
parodically dense and annoying, to arouse Marathe to some revealing passion. Marathe made his rotary gesture of impatience,
slowly. 'But OK,' he said neutrally. 'It is simple here. We both want the soup. So me, my pleasure from eating the Habitant soupe
aux pois has the price of your pain at not eating soup when you badly crave it.' Marathe was patting his pockets for something.
'And the reverse, if you are who eats this serving. By the U.S.A. genius of for each "pursuivre le bonheur,"172162 then, who can
decide who may receive this soup?’
Steeply stood with weight on one leg. 'Example's a bit oversimplified. We bid on the soup, maybe. We negotiate. Maybe we
divide the soup.’
'No, for the ingenious Single-Serving Size of serving is notoriously for only one, and we are both large and vigorous U.S.A.
individuals who have spent the afternoon watching huge men in pads and helmets hurl themselves at one another in the High
Definition of InterLace, and we are both ravenous for the satiation of a complete hot bowl's serving. Half the bowl would only
torment this craving I have.’
The fast shadow of pain across the face of Steeply showed Marathe's choice of example was witty: the divorced U.S.A. man
has much experience with the small size of Single-Serving products. Marathe said:
'OK. OK, yes, why should I, as the sacred individual, give you half of my soup? My own pleasure over torment is what is
good, for I am a loyal U.S.A., a genius of this individual desire.’
The bonfire slowly was filling out. Another cross of colored lights circled the airport area of Tucson. Steeply's movements of
smoothing the wig and twisting fingers through the snarls of hair became perhaps more abrupt and frustrated. Steeply said 'Well
whose soup is it legally? Who actually bought the soup?’
Marathe shrugged. 'Not relevant for my question. Suppose a third party, now unfortunately deceased. He appears at our flat
with a can oísoupe aux pots to eat while watching recorded U.S.A. sporting and suddenly is clutching his heart and falls to the
carpeting deceased, holding the soup we are now both so wishing.’
'Then we bid on the soup. Whoever's got the most desire for the soup and is willing to fork over the higher price buys out the
other's half, then the other just jogs on down — jogs or rolls on down to Safeway and buys himself some more soup. Whoever's
willing to put his money where his hunger is gets the dead guy's soup.’
Marathe shook his head without any heat. 'The Safeway store and bidding, these are also not relevant to my question I hope
the example of pea soup to raise. Which perhaps this is a dull-witted question.’
Steeply was at the wig with both hands, for repair. Former perspiration had mashed its form inward on one side, as well as
small clots and small burrs from the falls of his descent to the outcropping. Presumably there was no comb or brushes in his small
evening's-wear purse. The rear of his dress was dirty. The straps of his prostheses' brassiere dug cruelly into the meat of his back
and shoulders. Again there was for Marathe the picture of something soft being slowly throttled.
Steeply was responding 'No, I know what you want to raise all right. You want to talk politics. Scarcity and allocating and
tough choices. All right. Politics we can understand. All right. Politics we can discuss. I bet I know where you're — you want to
raise the question of what prevents 310 million individual American happiness-pursuers from all going around bonking each other
over the head and taking each other's soup. A state of nature. My own pleasure and to hell with all the rest.’
Marathe had his handkerchief out. 'What does this wish to mean, this bonking?’
'Because this simplistic example shows just how far apart across the chasm our people's values are, friend.' Steeply was
saying this. 'Because a certain basic amount of respect for the wishes of other people is required, is in my interest, in order to
preserve a community where my own wishes and interests are respected. OK? My total and overall happiness is maximized by
respecting your individual sanctity and not simply kicking you in the knee and running off with the soup.' Steeply watched
Marathe blow one nostril into the handkerchief. Marathe was one of the rare types who did not examine the hankie after he blew.
Steeply said: 
'And but then I can anticipate somebody on your side of the chasm retorting with something like, quote, Yes my very good
ami, but what if your rival for the pleasurable soup is some individual outside your community, for example, you'll say, let's just
make the example that it a hapless Canadian, foreign, "mm autre," separated from me by a chasm of history and language and
value and deep respect for individual freedom — then in this wholly random instance there would be no community-minded
constraints on my natural impulse to bonk your head and commandeer the desired soup, since the poor Canadian is outside the
equation of "pursuivre le bonheur" of each individual, since he is not a part of the community whose environment of mutual
respect I depend on for pursuing my interest of maximal pleasure-to-pain.’
Marathe, during this time, was smiling up and to the left, north, rolling his head like a blind person. His favorite personal
place of off-duty in the U.S.A.'s city Boston was in the Public Garden of summer, a broad and treeless declivity leading down to
the mare des canards, the duck pond, a grassy wedge facing south and west so that the grass of the slope turns pale green and then
gold as the sun circles over the head, the pond's water cool and muddy green and overhung with impressionist willows, persons
beneath the willows, also pigeons, and ducks with tight emerald heads gliding in circles, their eyes round stones, moving as if
without effort, gliding upon the water as if legless below. Like films' idylls in cities the moment before the nuclear blast, in old
films of U.S.A. death and horror. He was missing this time in U.S.A. Boston MA of refilling the pond for the ducks' return, the
willows greening, the winelight of a northern sunset curving gently in to land without explosion. Children flew taut kites and
adults lay supine on the slope absorbing the suntan, eyes closed as if in concentration. He was giving out a small and desolate
smile, as of fatigue. His wrist's watch was unilluminated. Steeply threw a butt without turning away from Marathe to watch it fall.
'And you'll accuse me of you'll say I won't only poke him in the eye and commandeer the whole serving of soup for myself,'
Steeply said, 'but will, after eating it, I'll give him the dirty bowl and spoon and maybe even the no-deposit Habitant can to have to
deal with, saddle him with my greed's waste, all under some sham-arrangement of quote Interdependence that's really just a crude
nationalist scheme to indulge my own U.S. individual pleasure-lust without the complications or annoyance of considering some
neighbor's own desires and interests.’
Marathe said 'You will notice that I do not with sarcasm say "And herrrrrrrrrre we go off together once more," which you
enjoy saying.’
Steeply's use of the body to shelter the lighting match for his smoking was not feminine, either. His parody of Marathe's
accent sounded guttural and U.S.A.-Cajun with the cigarette in the mouth. He looked up past the flame. 'But no? Am I off-base?’
Marathe had an almost Buddhist way of studying the blanket on his lap.
For some seconds he behaved as if almost asleep, nodding very smally with the rise and fall of his lungs. The ponderous
rectangles of moving light within Tucson's nightly spread were 'Barges of Land' ministering to nests of dump-sters in the deep part
of night. Part of Marathe always felt almost a desire to shoot persons who anticipated his responses and inserted words and said
they were from Marathe, not letting him speak. Marathe suspected Steeply of knowing this, sensing this in Marathe. All two of
Marathe's older brothers from childhood had engaged in this, arguing every side and silencing Rémy by inserting his words. Both
had kissed trains head-on before reaching marriageable age;173163 Marathe had been part of the audience for the death of the
better one. Some of the Barges of Land's waste would be vectored into the Sonora region of Mexico, but much would be shipped
north for displacement-launch into the Convexity. Steeply was regarding him.
'No, Rémy? Am I off-base in terms of what you'd say?’
The smile around Marathe's mouth cost him all his training in restraint. 'The cans containing Habitant, they say boldly
"Veuillez Recycler Ce Conte-nant." You are not false, maybe. But I think I am asking less for nations' arguing and more for the
example of you and me only, we two, if we pretend we are both of your U.S.A. type, each separate, both sacred, both desiring
soupe aux pots. I am asking how is community and your respect part of my happiness in this moment, with the soup, if I am a
U.S.A. person?’
Steeply worked a finger under one strap of the brassiere to relieve the throttling pressure. T don't get you.’
'Well. We both crave badly the entire recyclable Single-Serving can of this Habitant.' Marathe sniffed. Tn my mind I know it
is true that I must not simply make a bonking of your head and take away the soup, because my overall happiness of pleasure of
the long term needs a community of "rien de bonk."174164 But this is the long term, Steeply. This is down the road of my
happiness, this respecting of you. How do I calculate this distant road of long term into my action of this moment, now, with our
dead comrade clutching the soup and both of us with spittle on our chins as we regard the soup? My question is trying to say: if
the most pleasure right now, en ce moment, is in the whole serving of Habitant, how is my self able to put aside this moment's
desire to make bonk on you and take this soup? How am I able to think past this soup to the future of soup down my road?’
Tn other words delayed gratification.’
'Good. This is well. Delayed gratification. How is my U.S.A. type able in my mind to calculate my long-term overall
pleasure, then decide to sacrifice this intense soup-craving of this moment to the long term and overall?’
Steeply sent out two hard tusks of smoke from the nostrils of his nose. His expression was one of patience together with polite
impatience. T think it's called simply being a mature and adult American instead of a childish and immature American. A term we
might use might be "enlightened self-interest."
'D'éclaisant.’
Steeply, he did not smile back. 'Enlightened. For example your example from before. The little kid who'll eat candy all day
because it's what tastes best at each individual moment.’
'Even if he knows inside his mind that it will hurt his stomach and rot his little fangs.’
'Teeth,' Steeply corrected. 'But see that here it can't be a Fascist matter of screaming at the kid or giving him electric shocks
each time he overindulges in candy. You can't induce a moral sensibility the same way you'd train a rat. The kid has to learn by his
own experience how to learn to balance the short- and long-term pursuit of what he wants.’
'He must be freely enlightened to self.’
'This is the crux of the educational system you find so appalling. Not to teach what to desire. To teach how to be free. To
teach how to make knowledgeable choices about pleasure and delay and the kid's overall down-the-road maximal interests.’
Marathe farted mildly into his cushion, nodding as if with thought. 
'And I know what you'll say,' Steeply said, 'and no, the system isn't perfect. There is greed, there is crime, there are drugs and
cruelty and ruin and infidelity and divorce and suicide. Murder.’
'To bonk the head.’
Steeply again dug at this strap. He would snap open the purse and then pause to move the brassiere's tight strap and then dig
into the purse, which sounded femininely full and cluttered. He said 'But this is just the price. This is the price of the free pursuit.
Not everybody learns it in childhood, how to balance his interests.’
Marathe tried to envision thin men with horn-rim spectacles and natural-shoulder sportcoats or white coats of the laboratory,
carefully packing with clutter the purse of a field-operative to create the female effect. Now Steeply had his pack of Flanderfumes
cigarettes and his finger of pinkie in the pack's hole, evidently trying to gauge how many were left. Venus was low in the
northeast rim. When Marathe's wife was born as an infant without a skull, there had been at first suspicion that the cause was that
her parents smoked cigarettes as a habit. The light of the stars and moon had become sullen. The moon had not yet set. It seemed
as if sometimes the bonfire of youthful mafficking was there and then when the eyes were averted in the next moment it was not
there. Time was passing in a silence. Steeply was using a nail to extract slowly one of the cigarettes. Marathe, as a small child and
with legs, had always disliked persons who made comments about how much others smoked. Steeply now had learned here just
how he must stand to keep the match alive. Some wind had died down, but there were scattered chill gusts that it seemed came
from nowhere. Marathe sniffed so deeply that it became a sigh. The struck match sounded loud; there was no echo.
Marathe sniffed again and said:
'But of these types of your persons — the different types, the mature who see down the road, the puerile type that eats the
candy and soup in the moment only. Entre nous, here on this shelf, Hugh Steeply: which do you think describes the U.S.A. of
O.N.A.N. and the Great Convexity, this U.S.A. you feel pain that others might wish to harm?' Hands which shake out matches act
always as if they are burned, this motion of snapping. Marathe sniffed. 'Are you understanding? I am asking between only us.
How could it be that A.F.R. malice could hurt all of the U.S.A. culture by making available something as momentary and free as
the choice to view only this one Entertainment? You know there can be no forcing to watch a thing. If we disseminate the
samizdat, the choice will be free, no? Free from force, no? Yes? Freely chosen?’
M. Hugh Steeply of B.S.S. was standing then with his weight on one hip and looked his most female when he smoked, with
his elbow in his arm and the hand to his mouth and the back of this hand to Marathe, a type of fussy ennui that reminded Marathe
of women in hats and padded shoulders in black-and-white films, smoking. Marathe said:
'You believe we are underestimating to see all you as selfish, decadent. But the question has been raised: are we cells of
Canada alone in this view? Aren't you afraid, you of your government and gendarmes? If not, your B.S.S., why work so hard to
prevent dissemination? Why make a simple Entertainment, no matter how seducing its pleasures, a samizdat and forbidden in the
first place, if you do not fear so many U.S.A.s cannot make the enlightened choices?’
This now was the closest large Steeply had come, to stand over Marathe to look down, looming. The rising astral body Venus
lit his left side of the face to the color of pallid cheese. 'Get real. The Entertainment isn't candy or beer. Look at Boston just now.
You can't compare this kind of insidious enslaving process to your little cases of sugar and soup.’
Marathe smiled bleakly into the chiaroscuro flesh of this round and hairless U.S.A. face. 'Perhaps the facts are true, after the
first watching: that then there seems to be no choice. But to decide to be this pleasurably entertained in the first place. This is still
a choice, no? Sacred to the viewing self, and free? No? Yes?’
During that last pre-Subsidized year, after each tournament's perfunctory final, at the little post-final award-presentations and
dance, Eric Clipperton would attend unarmed and eat maybe a little shaved turkey from the buffet and mutter out of the side of his
slot-like mouth to Mario Incandenza, and would stand there expressionless and receive his outsized first-place trophy amid
witheringly slight and scattered applause, and would melt into the crowd soon after and dematerialize back to wherever he lived
and trained and target-practiced. Clipperton by this time must have had a whole mantel plus bookcase's worth of tall U.S.T.A.
trophies, each U.S.T.A. trophy a marbled plastic base with a tall metal boy on top arched in mid-serve, looking rather like a
wedding-cake groom with a very good outside slider. Clipper-ton must have been just broke out in brass and plastic, but he had no
official ranking whatsoever: since his Clock 9 mm. and public intentions were instantly legendary, he was regarded by the
U.S.T.A. as never having had a legitimate victory, or even a legit match, in sanctioned play. People on the jr. tour sometimes
asked tiny Mario if that's why Eric Clipperton always seemed so terrifically glum and withdrawn and made such a big deal out of
materializing and dematerializing at tournaments, that the very tactic that let him win in the first place kept the wins, and in a way
Clipperton himself, from being treated as real.
All this until the erection of O.N.A.N. and the inception, in Clipperton's eighteenth summer, of Subsidized Time, the adverted
Year of the Whopper, when the U.S.T.A. became the O.N.A.N.T.A, and some Mexican systems analyst — who barely spoke
English and had never once even fondled a ball and knew from exactly zilch except for crunching raw results-data — this guy
stepped in as manager of the O.N.A.N.T.A. computer and ranking center in Forest Lawn NNY, and didn't know enough not to
treat Clipperton's string of six major junior-tournament championships that spring as sanctioned and real. And when the first
biweekly issue of the trilingual North American Junior Tennis that's replaced American Junior Tennis comes out, there's one E. R.
Clipperton, Home Town 'Ind.,' ranked #1 in Boys' Continental 18-and-Unders; and competitive eyebrows ascend at all latitudes;
and but everyone at E.T.A., from Schtitt on down, is highly amused, and some of them wonder whether maybe now Eric
Clipperton will put down his psychic cuirass and take his unarmed competitive chances with the rest of them, now that he's got
what he's surely been burning over and holding himself hostage for all along, a real and sanctioned #1; and the Continental Jr.
Clay-Courts are coming up the following week, in Indianapolis IN, and little Michael Pemulis of Allston takes his PowerBook and
odds-software and makes a killing on vig in the frenzy of locker-room wagering over whether Clipperton'll even bother to
materialize at Indy now that he's extorted himself to the sanctioned top he must have craved so terribly, or whether he'll retire
from the tour now and lie around masturbating over the Clock in one hand and the latest issue of NAJT in the other.175165 And
so everyone's taken aback when Eric Clipperton of all people suddenly appears at the E.T.A. front gate's portcullis on a rainy
warm late A.M. two days before the Clays, wearing a flap-frayed trench-type coat and toe-abraded sneakers and a five-day growth
of armpitty adolescent beard, but without any sticks or anything in the way of competitive gear, not even his Clock 17's custom-
made wooden case, and he makes the cold-eyed part-time portcullis attendant from the halfway place down the hill just about lean
on the intercom-buzzer, pleading for entry and counsel — he's in a terrible way, is the portcullis attendant's intercom diagnosis —
and rules about nonenrolled jr. players being on academies' grounds are strict and complex, and but little Mario Incandenza sways
down the steep path to the portcullis in the warm rain and interfaces with Clipperton through the bars and has the attendant hold
the intercom-button down for him and personally requests that Clipperton be admitted under a special nonplay codicil to the
regulations, saying the kid is truly in desperate psychic straits, Mario speaking first to Lateral Alice Moore and then to this
prorector Cantrell and then to the Headmaster himself as Clipperton stares wordlessly up at the little wrought-iron racquet-heads
that serve as spikes at the top of the portcullis and fencing around E.T.A., his expression so blackly haunted that even the hardboiled attendant told some of the people back at the halfway place later that the spectral trench-coated figure had given him
sobriety's worst fantods, so far; and J. O. Incandenza finally lets Clipperton in over CantrelPs and then Schtitt's vehement
objections when it's established that Clipperton wants only a few private minutes to obtain the counsel of Incandenza Sr.
himself—of whom I think we can presume Mario's spoken glowingly to Clipperton — and Incandenza, while not quite strictly
sober, is lucid, and has a very low melting-point of compassion for traumas connected with early success; and so up goes the
portcullis, and the Clipperton and the two Incandenzas go at high noon up to an unused top-floor room in Subdorm C of East
House, the structure nearest the front gate, for some sort of psycho-existential CPR-session or something — Mario has never
spoken of what he got to sit in on, not even at night to Hal when Hal's trying to go to sleep. But it's a matter of record that at some
point first E.T.A. counselor Dolores Rusk was beeped by Himself at her Winchester home and then her beep was canceled and
Lateral Alice Moore was beeped and asked with due speed to get Lyle up from the weight room/sauna and over to East House
ASAP, and that at some point while Lyle was delotusing from the dispenser and making his way with sideways Lateral Alice to
this emergency-type huddle, at some point in this interval — in front of Dr. James O. Incandenza and a Mario whose tiny
borrowed head-clamped Bolex H128 Incandenza required Clipperton to consent to having digitally record the whole crisisconversation, to protect E.T.A. from the O.N.A.N.T.A.'s Kafkaesque rules on unregistered recipients of any sort of counsel at U.S.
academies — at some point, w/ Lyle in transit, Clipperton pulls out of various pockets in his wet complicated coat an elaborately
altered copy of NAJT's biweekly ranking report, a sepia'd snapshot of some whey-faced Midwestern couple's wedding, and the
hideous blunt-barreled Clock 179 mm. semiautomatic, which even as both Incandenzas reach for the sky Clipperton places to his
right — not left — temple, as in with his good right stick-hand, closes his eyes and scrunches up his face and blows his
legitimated brains out for real and all time, eradicates his map and then some; and there's just an ungodly subsequent mess in
there, and the Incandenzas respectively stagger and totter from the room all green-gilled and red-mist-stained, and — because
reports of Lyle's appearance outside the weight room upright and walking across the grounds have spread and caused enormous
excitement and student-snapshots — it's because it was just as Lyle and L. A. Moore hit the upstairs hallway that they reeled out
of the room in a miasma of cordite and ghastly mist that they're preserved in various snapshots as resembling miners of some sort
of really grisly coal.
People in the competitive jr. tennis community somehow regarded it as healthy that Mario Incandenza's perfectly even smile
never faltered even through tears at Clipperton's funeral. The funeral was poorly attended. It turned out Eric Clipperton had hailed
from Crawfordsville, Indiana, where his Ma was a late-stage Valium addict and his ex-soybean-farmer Pa, blinded in the infamous
hailstorms of B.S. '94, now spent all day every day playing with one of those little wooden paddles with a red rubber ball attached
by elastic string, paddle-ball, with an understandable lack of success; and the tranquilized and sightless Clippertons had had no
clue about where Eric had even disappeared off to most weekends, and bought his explanation that all the tall trophies came from
an after-school job as a freelance tennis-trophy designer, the parents apparently being not exactly the two brightest bulbs in the
great U.S. parental light-show. They held the interment under a threat of rain in Veedersburg IN, where there's a budget cemetery,
and Himself skipped Indianapolis and took Mario to the first of his life's two funerals so far; and it was probably moving that
Incandenza acceded to Mario's request that nothing get filmed or documented, at the funeral, for Himself's jr.-tennis documentary.
Mario probably told Lyle all about everything, back down in the weight room, but he sure never told Hal or the Moms; and
Himself was already in and out of rehabs and hardly a credible source on much of anything by this point. But Incandenza did let
Mario insist that no one else get to clean up the scene in Subdorm C after Enfield's Finest had come and peered around and drawn
a chalk ectoplasm around Clipperton's sprawled form and written things down in little spiral notebooks which they kept checking
against one another with maddening care, and then EMTs had zipped Clipperton up in a huge rubber bag and taken him down and
out on a wheeled stretcher with retractable legs they had to retract on all the stairs. Lyle was long gone by this time. It took the
bradykinetic Mario all night and two bottles of Ajax Plus to clean the room with his tiny contractured arms and square feet; the
18's girls in the rooms on either side could hear him falling around in there and picking himself up, again and again; and the
finally spotless room in question had been locked ever since, with its tasteless sign — except G. Schtitt holds a special key, and
when an E.T.A. jr. whinges too loudly about some tennis-connected vicissitude or hardship or something, he's invited to go chill
for a bit in the Clip-perton Suite, to maybe meditate on some of the other ways to succeed besides votaried self-transcendence and
gut-sucking-in and hard daily slogging toward a distant goal you can then maybe, if you get there, live with.
It was Ennet House's Assistant Director Annie P. who coined the phrase that Don Gately 'sunlights on the side.' Five a.m.s a
week, whether he's just getting off all-night Staff duty or not, he has to be on the Inbound Green Line by 0430h. to then catch two
more trains to his other job at the Shat-tuck Shelter For Homeless Males down in bombed-out Jamaica Plain. Gately has become,
in sobriety, a janitor. He mops down broad cot-strewn floors with anti-fungal delousing solvents. Likewise the walls. He scrubs
toilets. The relative cleanliness of the Shattuck's toilets might seem surprising until you head into the shower area, with your
equipment and face-mask. Half the guys in the Shattuck are always incontinent. There's human waste in the showers on a daily
fucking basis. Stavros lets him attach an industrial hose to a nozzle and spray the worst of the shit away from a distance before
Gately has to go in there with his mop and brushes and solvents, and his mask.
Cleaning the Shattuck only takes three hours, since he and his partner got the routine down tight. Gately's partner is also the
guy that owns the company that contracts with the Commonwealth for the Shattuck's maintenance, a guy like forty or fifty,
Stavros Lobokulas, a troubling guy with a long cigarette-filter and an enormous collection of women's-shoes catalogues he keeps
piled behind the seats in the cab of his 4x4. 
So at like 0800 usually they're done and by vendor's contract still get to bill for eight hours (Stavros L. only pays Gately for
three, but it's sub-table), and Gately heads back to Government Center to take the westbound Greenie back up Commonwealth to
Ennet House to put on his black eye-patch mask thing and sleep till !2OOh. and the afternoon shift. Stavros L. himself gets a
couple hours off to footwear-browse (Gately very much needs to assume that's all he does with the catalogues, is browse), then
has to head over to Pine Street Inn, the biggest and foulest homeless shelter in all of Boston, where Stavros and two other broke
and desperate yutzes from another of the halfway houses Stavros cruises for cheap labor will spend four hours cleaning and then
bill the state for six.
The inmates at the Shattuck suffer from every kind of physical and psychological and addictive and spiritual difficulty you
could ever think of, specializing in ones that are repulsive. There are colostomy bags and projectile vomiting and cirrhotic
discharges and missing limbs and misshapen heads and incontinence and Kaposi's Sarcoma and suppurating sores and all different
levels of enfeeblement and impulse-control-deficit and damage. Schizophrenia is like the norm. Guys in D.T.s treat the heaters
like TVs and leave broad spatter-paintings of coffee over the walls of the barrackses. There are industrial buckets for a.m. puking
that they seem to treat like golfers treat the pin on like a golf course, aiming in its vague direction from a distance. There's one sort
of blocked off and more hidden corner, over near the bank of little lockers for valuables, that's always got sperm moving slowly
down the walls. And way too much sperm for just one or two guys, either. The whole place smells like death no matter what the
fuck you do. Gately gets to the shelter at 0459.9h. and just shuts his head off as if his head has a kind of control switch. He screens
input with a fucking vengeance the whole time. The barrackses's cots reek of urine and have insect-activity observable. The state
employees who supervise the shelter at night are dead-eyed and watch soft-core tapes behind the desk and are all around Gately's
size and build, and he's been approached to maybe work there himself, nights, supervising, more than once, and has said Thanks
Anyway, and always screws right out of there at O8Olh. and rides the Greenie back up the hill with his Gratitude-battery totally
recharged.
Janitoring the Shattuck for Stavros Lobokulas was the menial job Gately had landed with only three days to go on his month's
deadline to find some honest job, as a resident, and he's kept it ever since.
The males in the Shattuck are supposed to be up and out by O5OOh. regardless of weather or D.T.s, to let Gately and Stavros
L. clean. But some never screw out of there on time — and these're always the worst guys, the ones you don't want anyplace near
you, these ones that won't leave. They'll clump behind Gately and watch him jet feces off the shower-tiling, treating it like a sport
and yelling encouragement and advice. They'll cringe and ass-kiss when the supervisor heaves himself on by to tell them to get out
and then when he leaves not get out. A couple have those little shaved patches on their arms. They'll lie in the cots and hallucinate
and thrash and scream in the cots and knock army blankets off onto the floors Gately's trying to mop. They'll skulk back over to
the little dark spermy corner the minute Gately's got done scrubbing the night's sperm off and has backed away and started again
to inhale.
Maybe the worst is that there's almost always one or two guys in the Shattuck who Gately knows personally, from his days of
addiction and B&E, from before he got to the no-choice point and surrendered his will to staying straight at any cost. These guys
are always 25-30 and look 45-60 and are a better ad for sobriety at any cost than any ad agency could come up with. Gately'll slip
them a finski or a pack of Kools and maybe sometimes try and talk a little AA to them, if they seem like maybe they're ready to
give up. With everybody else in the Shattuck Gately adopts this expression where he lets them know he's ignoring them totally as
long as they keep their distance, but it's a look that says Street and Jail and not to fuck with him. If they get in his way, Gately will
stare hard at a point just behind their heads until they move off. The protective face-mask helps.
Stavros Lobokulas's great ambition — which he goes on about regularly to Gately when they're cleaning the same barracks —
Stavros's dream is to utilize his unique combination of entrepreneurial drives and janitorial savvy and flairs for creative billing and
finding desperate recovering halfway-house guys who'll scrub shit for next to nothing, to pile up enough $ to open a women's shoe
store in some mobilely upward part of Boston where the women are healthy and upscale and have good feet and can afford to take
care of their feet. Gately spends a lot of the time around Stavros nodding and not saying really much of anything. Because what is
there to really say about ambitious career-dreams involving feet? But Gately'll be paying court-scheduled restitution well into his
thirties if he stays straight, and needs the work. Foot-thing or no foot-thing. Stavros has allegedly been clean for eight years, but
Gately has his private doubts about the spiritual quality of the sobriety involved. E.g. like Stavros gets easily aggravated at the
Shattuck guys that can't get up and out like they're supposed to and clear out, and almost daily he'll make a production of throwing
down his mop in the middle of the floor and throwing his head back to scream: "Why don't you sorry motherfucks just go home?"
which so far for over thirteen months he hasn't quit finding hilarious, his own witticism, Stavros.
But the whole Clipperton saga highlights the way there are certain very talented jr. players who just cannot keep the lip stiff
and fires stoked if they ever finally do achieve a top ranking or win some important event. Next to Clipperton, the most
historically ghastly instance of this syndrome involved a kid from Fresno, in Central CA, also an unaffiliated kid (his dad, an
architect or draftsman or something, functioned as his coach; his dad had played for UC-Davís or -Irvine or one of those; all the
E.T.A. staff really emphasize is that again here was a kid w/o academy-support and -perspective), who, after upsetting two top
seeds and winning the Pacific Coast Hardcourt Boys 18's and getting toasted wildly at the post-tourney ceremony and ball and
carried off on the shoulders of his dad and Fresno teammates, came home late that night and drank a big glass of Nestlé's Quik
laced with the sodium cyanide his Dad kept around for ink for drafting, drinks cyanitic Quik in his family's home's redecorated
kitchen, and keels over dead, blue-faced and still with a ghastly mouthful of lethal Quik, and apparently his dad hears the thump
of the kid keeling over and rushes into the kitchen in his bathrobe and leather slippers and tries to give the kid mouth-to-mouth
resuscitation, and but gets the odd bit of NaCN-laced Quik in his own mouth, from the kid, and also keels over and turns bright
blue, and dies, and then the mom rushes in in a mud-mask and fluffy slippers and sees them both lying there bright blue and
stiffening, and she tries giving the architect dad mouth-to-mouth and is of course in short order also lying there keeled over and
blue, wherever she's not mud-colored, from the mask, and but anyway dead as a rivet. And since the family has six more variousaged kids who as the night wears on come in from dates or patter down the stairs in little pajamas with adorable little pajama-feet
attached to them, drawn by the noise of all the cumulative keeling over, plus I should mention the odd agonized gurgle-sound, and
but since all six kids had gone through a four-hour Rotary-sponsored CPR course at Fresno's YMCA, by the end of the night the 
whole family's lying there blue-hued and stiff as posts, with incrementally tinier amounts of lethal Quik smeared around their
rictus-grimaced mouths; and in sum this whole instance of unprepared-goal-attaintment-trauma is unbelievably gruesome and sad,
and it's one historical reason why all accredited tennis academies have to have a Ph.D.-level counselor on full-time staff, to screen
student athletes for their possibly lethal reactions to ever actually reaching the level they've been pointed at for years. E.T.A.'s
staff counselor is the bird-of-prey-faced Dr. Dolores Rusk, M.S., Ph.D., and she's regarded by the kids as whatever's just slightly
worse than useless. You go in there with an Issue and all she'll do is make a cage of her hands and look abstractly over the cage at
you and take the last dependent clause of whatever you say and repeat it back to you with an interrogative lilt — 'Possible homosexual attraction to your doubles partner?' 'Whole sense of yourself as a purposive male athlete messed with?' 'Uncontrolled
boner during semis at Cleveland?' 'Drives you bats when people just parrot you instead of responding?' 'Having trouble keeping
from twisting my twittery head off like a game-hen's?' — all with an expression she probably thinks looks blandly deep but which
really looks exactly the way a girl's face looks when she's dancing with you but would really rather be dancing with just about
anyone else in the room. Only the very newest E.T.A. players ever go to Rusk, and then not for long, and she spends her massive
blocks of free time in her Comm.-Ad. office doing involved acrostics and working on some sort of pop-psych manuscript the first
four pages of which Axford and Shaw dick-ied her lock and had a look at and counted 29 appearances of the prefix self-. Lyle, a
dewimpled Carmelite who works the kitchen day-shift, occasionally Mario Incandenza, and many times Avril herself take up most
of the psychic slack, for practical purposes, among E.T.A.s in the know.
It's possible that the only jr. tennis players who can win their way to the top and stay there without going bats are the ones
who are already bats, or else who seem to be just grim machines a la John Wayne. Wayne's sitting low on his spine in the dining
hall with the other Canadian kids, watching the screen and squeezing a ball without any readable expression. Hal's eyes are
fevered and rolling around in his head. And actually by this time a lot of the eyes in the I.-Day audience have lost a bit of that
festive sparkle. Though there's a certain chortle-momentum left over from the film's self-felonious Gentle/Clipperton
comparisons, the Rodney-Tine-Luria-P.-love-rumor-and-Tine-as-Benedict-Arnold thing seems brow-clutchingly slow and digressive.176166 Plus there's some retroactive puzzlement, because the advent of Subsidized Time is historically known to have been a
revenue-response to the heady costs of the U.S.'s Reconfigurative giveaway, which means it must have come after formal
Interdependence, and indeed in the film it does come after, but then the chronology of some of the end makes it seem like Tine
sold Johnny Gentle on his whole Sino-temporal-endorsement revenue scheme sometime in Orin Incandenza's first major-sport
year at Boston U., which ended in the Year of the Whopper, pretty obviously a Subsidized year. By this time the E.T.A.s are
eating more slowly, playing in that idle post-prandial way with the orts on their plates, and people's hats are making some people's
heads itch, and plus everybody's sugar-crashing a bit; and one of the really small E.T.A. kids crawling around with a bottle of
adhesive under the tables has whacked his head on the sharp edge of an institutional chair and is in Avril I.'s lap crying with a
desolate late-day hysteria that makes everybody feel jagged.
GENTLE AT LARGE! — Superheader; TOURS NEW 'NEW-NEW' ENGLAND BORDER AMID TIGHT SECURITY —
Header; WHACKS CHAMPAGNE BOTTLES AGAINST MASSIVE LUCITE WALLS SOUTH OF WHAT USED TO BE
SYRACUSE, CONCORD NH, SALEM MA. — 10-point Subheader;
GENTLE MORE OR LESS AT LARGE: WATCHES FROM OXYGENATED PORTABUBBLE AS CLEMSON DOWNS
BOSTON U IN LAS VEGAS'S FORSYTHIA BOWL — Header from That Guy Who's Now Reduced to Laying out Headlines
for the Rantoul IL Eagle;
CRANIALLY CHALLENGED, ACROMEGALIC INFANTS LOST IN EXPERIALIST SHUFFLE? — Editorial Header in
Ithaca NY's Daily
Odyssean;
GENTLE CABINET TO DRAFT BUDGET OVERHAUL IN LIGHT OF WALL STREET ANGST OVER COSTS OF
TERRITORIAL RECONFIGURATION'— Header; ADMINISTRATION HEADS PUT TOGETHER ON MISSILE
INVERSION EXPENDITURES, RELOCATION COSTS, LOSS OF REVENUE FROM BETTER PART OF FOUR STATES —
Subheader.
gentle [substantially muffled by both Fukoama microfiltration mask and oxygenated Lucite portabubble]: Boys.
all secs except sec. mex. & sec. can. [the Cabinet's Motown-girl puppets, decked out for climactic camp, are all in wicked
three-piecers with slicked-back-straight hair and enormous robber-baron steer-horn mustaches, which mustaches could be
straighter but are on the whole pretty impressive mustaches, for female puppets]: Chief.
sec. def.: So then how was the big game, Mr. President?
gentle: Ouster, boys: seminal, visionary. An outstanding experience. I now say things like outstanding instead of boss. But
also seminal. Ollie, men, I saw something outstandingly visional and seminary yesterday. I do not refer to the football game. I
normally don't much get into football. All that grunting. Mud everywhere. Not my scene ordinarily. The most diverting single
thing of the game was one of the two teams' punters. This one slim cat with an outsized leg and slightly less outsized arm. Never
saw punts I could hear before. Whoom. Blam. I ate an entire wiener stem to stern while one punt was in the air. People stood
around conferring and making a racket and going to the restroom and coming back and eating concessions, all while this one cat's
punts were still in the air. What was that cat's name again, R.T.?
sec. int.: May I respectfully ask whether this is to be a lunch meeting, Mr. President? Is that why these Chinese-calendarzodiac-Year-of-the-Tiger-and-like-Rat Szechuan-restaurant paper placemats are at all our places next to our water-pitchers? Are
we going to get to tuck into some Chinese takeout, Chief?
[Mario's aural background becomes something with a brisk cornet, and there's some glove-muffled finger-snapping from
J.G.F.C., who's lapsed into a visionary reverie.]
sec. transp.: Always been partial to the General Tsu's Chicken, if we're —
rodney tine, chief, united states office of unspecified services: President Gentle's asked us all here this morning to put our
collective expertise together on an issue about which we in Unspecified Services believe he's been hit with a truly seminal set of
creative insights.
gentle: Gentlemen, we're both pleased and concerned to report that our seminal experiment in the Territorial Reconfiguration 
of O.N.A.N.177167 has been a thoroughgoing logistical coup. More or less. Delaware's looking a bit crowded, and one or two
curvy-horned animals apparently got by the tactical squads, and there's rather less overall good sportsmanship in downstate New
New York than we'd like to see, but overall I think 'thoroughgoing coup' would not be out of line as a term to describe this sort of
success.
tine: Now it's time to think about how to pay for it.
all secs.: [Stiff turns to look at each other, tie- and mustache-straightenings, gulping sounds.]
gentle: Rod informs me Marty's got the preliminary figures on gross costs, while Chef's boys have provided us with some
projections on gross revenue-losses from the Reconfiguration of taxable territories and households and businesses and that there.
sec. transp. & sec. treas.: [Pass around thick bound folders, each emblazoned with the yawning red skull that emblazons all
bad-news memos in the Gentle administration. Folders opened and scanned by all secs. Sounds of jaws hitting the tabletop. A
couple mustaches fall off altogether. One sec. heard to ask whether there's even a name for a figure with this many zeroes. gentle's
portabubble on-screen is hit right over his plastic-wrapped corsage by a half-chewed Raisinette, to half-hearted audience cheers.
Another cross-dressed Motown puppet is throwing a tiny string noose over a beam at the back of the velvet-lined Cabinet Room.]
gentle: Boys. Men. Before anybody needs oxygen here [holding a placa-tive hand up against the bubble's glass], let Rod here
explain that despite a quantitative downer-type quality to these figures, all we merely have here is just what Rod might call an
exaggerated example of a quadrennial problem any administration with vision is going to have to face eventually anyway. By the
way, the unfamiliar but welcome face on my left here is Mr. P. Tom Veals, of Veals Associates Advertising, Boston, USA, N.A.
all secs.: [Not terribly placated-sounding mutterings of salutation to Veals.]
mr. P. tom veals [A tiny little caucasoid Tootsie-Pop-stick-puppet body and enormous face that's mostly front teeth and
spectacles]: Yo.
tine: And to Tom's own left may I also present the charming and delightful Ms. Luría P---------[indicating with pointer a
puppet simply beyond pulchritudinous belief; the Cabinet Room's conference table seems to ascend ever so slightly as Luria P-----
----cocks a well-pencilled eyebrow].
still tine: Gentlemen, what the president is articulating is that what we face here is a microsmic exemplar of the infamous
Democratic Triple Bind faced by visionarians from FDR and JFK on down. The American electorate, as is its every right, on one
hand demands the sort of millennial statesmanship and vision — decisive action, tough choices, lots of programs and services —
see for instance the Territorial Reconfiguration for example — that will lead a renewed community into a whole new era of
interdependent choice and freedom.
gentle: The rhetorical chapeau's off to you, babe.
tine [Rising, eyes now two glittery red points in his round face's felt, the eyes two tiny smoke-detector bulbs run off a single
AAA cell taped to the back of the puppet's surgical gown]: Now, speaking in the very most general terms, if the president's vision
dictates the tough choice of cutting certain programs and services, our statistical people predict with reasonable inductive certainty
that the American electorate will whinge.
veals: Whinge?
luria P---------[TO tine]: This is a Canadian idiom, cheri.
veals: And who is this chick?
tine [Looking momentarily blank]: Sorry Tom. Canadian idiom. Whinge. Complain. Petition for redress. Assemble. March in
those five-abreast demonstrating lines. Shake upraised fists in unison. Whinge [indicating photos on easels behind him of various
historical pressure- and advocacy groups whingeing].
sec. treas.: And we already have an all-too-good idea of what will happen if we attempt any sort of conventional revenue
enhancements.
sec. state: Tax revolt.
sec. H.E.W.: A whingeathon, Chief.
sec. def.: Tea-party.
gentle: Bullseye. Whingeville. Political whingeocide. A serious drag-caliber lapse in mandate. We've already promised no
new enhancements. I told them on Inauguration Day. I said look into my eyes: no new enhancements. I pointed at my eyes up
there and said that was one tough choice that was not going to rain on anybody's program. Rod and Tom and I had that threeplanked platform-exhibit. One: waste. Two: no new enhancements. Three: find somebody outside the borders of our community
selves to blame.
tine: So then a double bind, so far, with potential whingeing on both flanks.
sec. treas.: And yet the financial communities demand a balanced federal budget. The Reserve Board all but insists on a
balanced budget. Our balance of trade with the handful of nations we're still trading with requires a stable buck and so a balanced
budget.
tine: The third flank, Chet, of the Triple Bind. Outflows required, inflows restricted, balance demanded.
gentle: The classic executive-branch Cerberus-horned dilemma. The thorn in the Achilles' tendon of democratic process. Does
anybody here by the way hear a sort of high pitch?
all secs.: [Blank glances at one another.]
veals: [Blows nose at high volume.]
gentle [Knocking experimentally on interior surfaces of portabubble]: Sometimes I hear a pitch at a high range beyond most
people's hearing, admittedly, but this seems like a different type of high pitch.
all secs. [Necktie-knot-adjusting, polished-tabletop-studying.]
gentle: That would be a no on the pitch, then.
veals: Could this all be moved along up to at least a canter, guys?
tine: Perhaps it's the distinctive high pitch that sometimes precedes your getting ready to announce some seminal, visionary
insight you've achieved into the previously intractable Triple Bind, sir.
gentle: Babe, Rod, again a direct hit. Gentlemen: have a gander at these restaurant exhibits of the Sino-epithetic calendrical 
scheme.
tine: Meaning of course these placemats right here, bearing directly on the president's revenue vision.
gentle: Gentlemen, as you all know I've just returned, at extremely high speeds, burping up the taste of wieners I'm pretty sure
were just crawling with every sort of microbe that makes publicly vended concessions a scourge and menace that —
TlNE: flxnayish hand-signal]
gentle: But so gentlemen I'm fresh back from a goodwill appearance at a post-collegiate bowl game. At which I ingested the
pre-mentioned franks. But the real point is: do any of you guys happen to know the name of that collegiate bowl game?
sec. H.U.D.: We thought you'd said it was the Forsythia Bowl, Chief.
gentle: That, Mr. Sivnik, is because that's what I was thinking its name in fact was, en route, when we'd all interfaced on the
old scrambler. That's what the name was when I did the anthem there in '91.
luria P---------[Holding up zodiacalized placemat with a slight grease-corona'd spot of Hot and Sour Soup in the upper left
corner]: Perhaps you would care now to tell your cabinet what ze contest of football calls itself, M. President.
gentle [With a showmanlike look at veals, who's probing the gap between his mammoth incisors with the business cards of
the CEOs of Pillsbury and Pepsico]: Boys, I heard punts, burped redhots, smelled beer-foam and recoiled from public urinals at
the Ken-L-Ration-Magnavox-Kemper-Insurance-Forsythia Bowl.
YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
On a White Flag Group Commitment to the Tough Shit But You Still Can't Drink Group down in Braintree this past July,
Don G., up at the podium, revealed publicly about how he was ashamed that he still as yet had no real solid understanding of a
Higher Power. It's suggested in the 3rd of Boston AA's 12 Steps that you to turn your Diseased will over to the direction and love
of 'God as you understand Him.' It's supposed to be one of AA's major selling points that you get to choose your own God. You
get to make up your own understanding of God or a Higher Power or Whom-/Whatever. But Gately, at like ten months clean, at
the TSBYSCD podium in Braintree, opines that at this juncture he's so totally clueless and lost he's thinking that he'd maybe rather
have the White Flag Crocodiles just grab him by the lapels and just tell him what AA God to have an understanding of, and give
him totally blunt and dogmatic orders about how to turn over his Diseased will to whatever this Higher Power is. He notes how
he's observed already that some Catholics and Fundamentalists now in AA had a childhood understanding of a Stern and
Punishing-type God, and Gately's heard them express incredible Gratitude that AA let them at long last let go and change over to
an understanding of a Loving, Forgiving, Nurturing-type God. But at least these folks started out with some idea of Him/Her/It,
whether fucked up or no. You might think it'd be easier if you Came In with 0 in the way of denominational background or
preconceptions, you might think it'd be easier to sort of invent a Higher-Powerish God from scratch and then like erect an
understanding, but Don Gately complains that this has not been his experience thus far. His sole experience so far is that he takes
one of AA's very rare specific suggestions and hits the knees in the a.m. and asks for Help and then hits the knees again at bedtime
and says Thank You, whether he believes he's talking to Anything/body or not, and he somehow gets through that day clean. This,
after ten months of ear-smoking concentration and reflection, is still all he feels like he 'understands' about the 'God angle.'
Publicly, in front of a very tough and hard-ass-looking AA crowd, he sort of simultaneously confesses and complains that he feels
like a rat that's learned one route in the maze to the cheese and travels that route in a ratty-type fashion and whatnot. W/ the God
thing being the cheese in the metaphor. Gately still feels like he has no access to the Big spiritual Picture. He feels about the
ritualistic daily Please and Thank You prayers rather like like a hitter that's on a hitting streak and doesn't change his jock or socks
or pre-game routine for as long as he's on the streak. W/ sobriety being the hitting streak and whatnot, he explains. The whole
church basement is literally blue with smoke. Gately says he feels like this is a pretty limp and lame understanding of a Higher
Power: a cheese-easement or unwashed athletic supporter. He says but when he tries to go beyond the very basic rote automatic
get-me-through-this-day-please stuff, when he kneels at other times and prays or meditates or tries to achieve a Big-Picture
spiritual understanding of a God as he can understand Him, he feels Nothing — not nothing but Nothing, an edgeless blankness
that somehow feels worse than the sort of unconsidered atheism he Came In with. He says he doesn't know if any of this is coming
through or making any sense or if it's all just still symptomatic of a thoroughgoingly Diseased will and quote 'spirit.' He finds
himself telling the Tough Shit But You Still Can't Drink audience dark doubtful thoughts he wouldn't have fucking ever dared tell
Ferocious Francis man to man. He can't even look at F.F. in the Crocodile's row as he says that at this point the Godunderstanding stuff kind of makes him want to puke, from fear. Something you can't see or hear or touch or smell: OK. All right.
But something you can't even feel? Because that's what he feels when he tries to understand something to really sincerely pray to.
Nothingness. He says when he tries to pray he gets this like image in his mind's eye of the brainwaves or whatever of his prayers
going out and out, with nothing to stop them, going, going, radiating out into like space and outliving him and still going and
never hitting Anything out there, much less Something with an ear. Much much less Something with an ear that could possibly
give a rat's ass. He's both pissed off and ashamed to be talking about this instead of how just completely good it is to just be
getting through the day without ingesting a Substance, but there it is. This is what's going on. He's no closer to carrying out the
suggestion of the 3rd Step than the day the Probie drove him over to his halfway house from Peabody Holding. The idea of this
whole God thing makes him puke, still. And he is afraid.
And the same fucking thing happens again. The tough chain-smoking TSBYSCD Group all stands and applauds and the men
give two-finger whistles, and people come up at the raffle-break to pump his big hand and even sometimes try and hug on him.
It seems like every time he forgets himself and publicizes how he's fucking up in sobriety Boston AAs fall all over themselves
to tell him how good it was to hear him and to for God's sake Keep Coming, for them if not for himself, whatever the fuck that
means.
The Tough Shit But You Still Can't Drink Group seems to be over 50% bikers and biker-chicks, meaning your standard
leather vests and 10-cm. boot heels, belt-buckles with little spade-shaped knives that come out of a slot in the side, tattoos that are
more like murals, serious tits in cotton halters, big beards, Harleywear, wooden matches in mouth-corners and so forth. After the
Our Father, as Gately and the other White Flag speakers are clustered smoking outside the door to the church basement, the sound 
of high-cc. hawgs being kick-started is enough to rattle your fillings. Gately can't even start to guess what it would be like to be a
sober and drug-free biker. It's like what would be the point. He imagines these people polishing the hell out of their leather and
like playing a lot of really precise pool.
This one sober biker that can't be much older than Gately and is nearly Gately's size — though with a really small head and a
tapered jaw that makes him look kind of like a handsome mantis — as they're massed around the door he brings a car-length
chopper up alongside Gately. Says it was good to hear him. Shakes his hand in the complex way of Niggers and Harleyheads. He
introduces his name as Robert F., though on the lapel of his leather vest it says BOB DEATH. A biker-chick's got her arms around
his waist from behind, as is SOP. He tells Gately it was good to hear somebody new share from the heart about his struggles with
the God component. It's weird to hear a biker use the Boston AA word share, much less component or heart.
The other White Flaggers have stopped talking and are watching the two men sort of just awkwardly stand there, the biker
embraced from behind and straddling his throbbing hawg. The guy's got on leather spats and a leather vest with no shirt, and
Gately notices the guy's got a jailhouse tatt of AA's weird little insignia of a triangle inside a circle on one big shoulder. Robert
F./Bob Death asks Gately if by any chance he's heard the one about the fish. Glenn K. in his fucking robe overhears, and of course
he's got to put his own oar in, and breaks in and asks them all if they've heard the one What did the blind man say as he passed by
the Quincy Market fish-stall, and without waiting says He goes 'Evening, Ladies.' A couple male White Flaggers fall about, and
Tamara N. slaps at the back of Glenn K.'s head's pointy hood, but without real heat, as in like what are you going to do with this
sick fuck.
Bob Death smiles coolly (South Shore bikers are required to be extremely cool in everything they do) and manipulates a
wooden match with his lip and says No, not that fish-one. He has to assume a kind of bar-shout to clear the noise of his idling
hawg. He leans in more toward Gately and shouts that the one he was talking about was: This wise old whiskery fish swims up to
three young fish and goes, 'Morning, boys, how's the water?' and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and
look at each other and go, 'What the fuck is water?' and swim away. The young biker leans back and smiles at Gately and gives an
affable shrug and blatts away, a halter top's tits mashed against his back.
Gately's forehead was wrinkled in emotional pain all the way up Rte. 3 home. They were in the back of Ferocious Francis's
old car. Glenn K. was trying to ask what was the difference between a bottle of 15-year-old Hennessey and a human female
vagina. Crocodile Dicky N. up riding shotgun told Glenn to try to fucking remember there was ladies present. Ferocious Francis
kept moving the toothpick around in his mouth and looking at Gately in the rearview. Gately wanted to both cry and hit
somebody. Glenn's cheap pseudo-demonic robes had the faint rank oily smell of a dish towel. There was no smoking in the car:
Ferocious Francis had a little oxygen tank he had to carry around and a little thin pale-blue plastic-like tube thing that lay under
his nose and was taped there and sent oxygen up his nose. All he'd ever say about the tank and the tube is that they were not his
personal will but that he'd submitted to advice and now here he was, still sucking air and staying rabidly Active.
Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when you're new and out of your skull with desperation and ready to
eliminate your map and they tell you how it'll all get better and better as you abstain and recover: they somehow omit to mention
that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite of it. They leave this out, talking instead
about Gratitude and Release from Compulsion. There's serious pain in being sober, though, you find out, after time. Then now that
you're clean and don't even much want Substances and feeling like you want to both cry and stomp somebody into goo with pain,
these Boston AAs start in on telling you you're right where you're supposed to be and telling you to remember the pointless pain
of active addiction and telling you that at least this sober pain now has a purpose. At least this pain means you're going
somewhere, they say, instead of the repetitive gerbil-wheel of addictive pain.
They neglect to tell you that after the urge to get high magically vanishes and you've been Substanceless for maybe six or
eight months, you'll begin to start to 'Get In Touch' with why it was that you used Substances in the first place. You'll start to feel
why it was you got dependent on what was, when you get right down to it, an anesthetic. 'Getting In Touch With Your Feelings' is
another quilted-sampler-type cliche that ends up masking something ghastly deep and real, it turns out.178168 It starts to turn out
that the vapider the AA cliche, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers.
Near the end of his Ennet residency, at like eight months clean and more or less free of any chemical compulsion, going to the
Shattuck every A.M. and working the Steps and getting Active and pounding out meetings like a madman, Don Gately suddenly
started to remember things he would just as soon not have. Remembered. Actually remembered's probably not the best word. It
was more like he started to almost reexperience things that he'd barely even been there to experience, in terms of emotionally, in
the first place. A lot of it was undramatic little shit, but still somehow painful. E.g. like when he was maybe eleven, pretending to
watch TV with his mother and pretending to listen to her P.M. nightly monologue, a litany of complaint and regret whose
consonants got mushier and mushier. To the extent it's Gately's place to diagnose anybody else as an alcoholic, his mom was
pretty definitely an alcoholic. She drank Stolichnaya vodka in front of the TV. They weren't cable-ready, for reasons of $. She
drank little thin glasses with cut-up bits of carrot and pepper that she'd drop into the vodka. Her maiden name was Gately. Don's
like organic father had been an Estonian immigrant, a wrought-iron worker, which is like sort of a welder with ambition. He'd
broken Gately's mother's jaw and left Boston when Gately was in his mother's stomach. Gately had no brothers or sisters. His
mother was subsequently involved with a live-in lover, a former Navy M.P. who used to beat her up on a regular schedule, hitting
her in the vicinities between groin and breast so that nothing showed. A skill he'd picked up as a brig guard and Shore Patrol. At
about 8-10 Heinekens he used to all of a sudden throw his Readers' Digest against the wall and get her down and beat her with
measured blows, she'd go down on the floor of the apartment and he'd hit her in the hidden vicinity, timing the blows between her
arms' little waves — Gately remembered she tried to ward off the blows with a fluttered downward motion of her arms and hands,
as if she were beating out flames. Gately still hasn't ever quite gotten over to look at her in State Care in the Long-Term-Care
Medicaid place. The M.P.'s tongue was in the corner of his mouth and his little-eyed face wore a look of great concentration, as if
he were taking something delicate apart or putting it together. He'd be on one knee knelt over her with his look of sober problemsolving, timing his shots, the blows abrupt and darting, her writhing and trying to kind of shoo them away. The darting blows. Out
of the psychic blue, very detailed memories of these fights surfaced one afternoon as he was getting ready to mow the Ennet
House lawn for Pat in May Y.D.A.U., when Enfield Marine P.H.H. withheld maintenance services in reprisal for late utilities. 
After the little Salem decayed beach-cottage with Herman the Ceiling That Breathed, the little like tract house by Mrs. Waite's
tract house in Beverly's good dining room chairs had fluted legs and Gately had scratched Donad and Donold in each leg with a
pin, low down. Higher up on the legs, the scratches became correctly spelled. It's like a lot of memories of his youth sank without
bubbles when he quit school and then later only in sobriety bubbled back up to where he could Get In Touch with them. His
mother used to call the M.P. a bastuhd and sometimes go oof when he landed one in the vicinity. She drank vodka with vegetables
suspended in it, a habit she'd picked up from the missing Estonian, whose first name, Gately read on a torn and then fuckeduppedly Scotch-taped paper out of her jewelry box after his mother's cir-rhotic hemorrhage, was Bulat. The Medicaid Long-Term
place was way the fuck out the Yirrell Beach bridge in Point Shirley across the water from the Airport. The former M.P. delivered
cheese and then later worked in a chowder factory and kept weights in the Beverly house's garage and drank Heineken beer, and
logged each beer he drank carefully in a little spiral notebook he used to monitor his intake of alcohol.
His mom's special couch for TV was nubbly red chintz, and when she shifted from seated upright to lying on her side with her
arm between her head and the little protective doily on the couch's armrest and the glass held tilting on the little space her breasts
left at the cushion's edge, it was a sign she was going under. Gately at like ten or eleven used to pretend to listen and watch TV on
the floor but really be dividing his attention between how close his Mom was to unconsciousness and how much Stolichnaya was
left in the bottle. She would only drink Stolichnaya, which she called her Comrade in Arms and said Nothing but the Comrade
would do. After she went under for the evening and he'd carefully taken the tilted glass out of her hand, Don'd take the bottle and
mix the first couple vodkas with Diet Coke and drink a couple of those until it lost its fire, then drink it straight. This was like a
routine. Then he'd put the near-empty bottle back next to her glass with its vegetables darkening in the undrunk vodka, and she'd
wake up on the couch in the morning with no idea she hadn't drank the whole thing. Gately was careful to always leave her
enough for a wake-up swallow. But this gesture of leaving some, Gately's now realized, wasn't just filial kindness on his part: if
she didn't have the wake-up swallow she wouldn't get off the red couch all day, and then there would be no new bottle that night.
This was at age ten or eleven, as he now recalls. Most of the furniture was wrapped in plastic. The carpet was burnt-orange
shag that the landlord kept saying he was going to take up and go to wood floors. The M.P. worked nights or else most nights
went out, and then she'd take the plastic off the couch.
Why the couch had little protective doilies on the arms when it usually had a plastic cover on it Gately cannot recall or
explain.
For a while in Beverly they had Nimitz the kitty.
This all came burpling greasily up into memory in the space of two or three weeks in May, and now more stuff steadily like
dribbles up, for Gately to Touch.
Sober, she'd called him Bimmy or Bim because that's what she heard his little friends call him. She didn't know the
neighborhood cognomen came from an acronym for 'Big Indestructible Moron.' His head had been huge, as a child. Out of all
proportion, though with nothing especially Estonian about it, that he could see. He'd been very sensitive about it, the head, but
never told her not to call him Bim. When she was drunk and conscious she called him her Doshka or Dochka or like that.
Sometimes, well in the bag himself, when he turned off the uncabled set and covered her with the af-ghan, easing the mostly
empty Stoly bottle back onto the little TV Guide table by the bowl of darkening chopped peppers, his unconscious Mom would
groan and titter and call him her Doshka and good sir knight and last and only love, and ask him not to hit her anymore.
In June he Got In Touch with memories that their front steps in Beverly were a pocked cement painted red even in the pocks.
Their mailbox was part of a whole tract-housing complex's honeycomb of mailboxes on a like small pole, brushed-steel and gray
with a postal eagle on it. You needed a little key to get your mail out, and for a long time he thought the sign on it said 'US MAIL,'
as in us instead of U.S. His mom's hair had been dry blond-white with dark roots that never lengthened or went away. No one tells
you when they tell you you have cirrhosis that eventually you'll all of a sudden start choking on your own blood. This is called a
cirrhotic hemorrhage. Your liver won't process any more of your blood and it quote shunts the blood and it goes up your throat in
a high-pressure jet, is what they told him, is why he'd first thought the M.P.'d come back and cut his Mom or stabbed her, when he
first came in, after football, his last season, at age seventeen. She'd been Diagnosed for years. She'd go to Meetings179169 for a
few weeks, then drink on the couch, silent, telling him if the phone rang she wasn't home. After a few weeks of this she'd spend a
whole day weeping, beating at herself as if on fire. Then she'd go back to Meetings for a while. Eventually her face began to swell
and make her eyes piggy and her big breasts pointed at the floor and she turned the deep yellow of quality squash. This was all
part of the Diagnosis. At first Gately just couldn't go out to the Long-Term place, couldn't see her out there. Couldn't deal. Then
after some time passed he couldn't go because he couldn't face her and try and explain why he hadn't come before now. Ten-plus
years have gone like that. Gately hadn't probably consciously thought of her once for three years, before getting straight.
Right after their neighbor Mrs. Waite got found by the meter-guy dead, so he must have been nine, when his Mom was first
Diagnosed, Gately had gotten the Diagnosis mixed up in his head with King Arthur. He'd ride a mop-handle horse and brandish a
trashcan-lid and a batteryless plastic Light-Saber and tell the neighborhood kids he was Sir Osis of Thuliver, most fearsomely
loyal and fierce of Arthur's vessels. Since the summer now, when he mops Shattuck Shelter floors, he hears the Clopaclopaclop he
used to make with his big square tongue as Sir Osis, then, riding.
And his dreams late that night, after the Braintree/Bob Death Commitment, seem to set him under a sort of sea, at terrific
depths, the water all around him silent and dim and the same temperature he is.
VERY LATE OCTOBER Y.D.A.U.
Hal Incandenza had this horrible new recurring dream where he was losing his teeth, where his teeth had become like shale
and splintered when he tried to chew, and fragmented and melted into grit in his mouth; in the dream he was going around
squeezing a ball and spitting fragments and grit, getting more and more hungry and scared. Everything in there loosened by a
great oral rot that the nightmare's Teddy Schacht wouldn't even look at, saying he was late for his next appointment, everyone Hal
saw seeing Hal's crumbling teeth and looking at their watch and making vague excuses, a general atmosphere of the splintering
teeth being a symptom of something way more dire and distasteful that no one wanted to confront him about. He was pricing
dentures when he woke. It was about an hour before dawn drills. His keys were on the floor by the bed with his College Board
prep books. Mario's great iron bed was empty and made up tight, all five pillows neatly stacked. Mario'd been spending the last
few nights over at HmH, sleeping on an air mattress in the living room in front of Tavis's Tatsuoka receiver, listening to WYYY109 into the wee hours, weirdly agitated about Madame Psychosis's unannounced sabbatical from the '60 Minutes +/-' midnight
thing where she'd been an unvarying M-F presence for several years, it seemed like. WYYY had been evasive and unforthcoming
about the whole thing. For two days some alto grad student had tried to fill in, billing herself as Miss Diagnosis, reading
Horkheimer and Adorno against a background of Partridge Family slowed down to a narcotized slur. At no time had anyone of
managerial pitch or timbre mentioned Madame Psychosis or what her story was or her date of expected return. Hal'd told Mario
that the silence was a positive sign, that if she'd left the air for good the station would have had to say something. Hal, Coach
Schtitt, and the Moms had all remarked Mario's odd mood. Mario was usually next to impossible to agitate.180170
Now WYYY was back to running 'Sixty Minutes More or Less' without anybody at all at the helm. For the past several nights
Mario has lain there in a sarcophagally tapered sleeping bag of GoreTex and fiberfill and listened to them run the weird static
ambient musics Madame Psychosis uses for background, but now without any spoken voice as foreground; and the static,
momentumless music as subject instead of environment is somehow terribly disturbing: Hal listened to a few minutes of the stuff
and told his brother it sounded like somebody's mind coming apart right before your ears.
9 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
The Enfield Tennis Academy has an accredited capacity of 148 junior players — of whom 80 are to be male — but an actual
Fall Y.D.A.U. population of 95 paying and 41 scholarship students, so 136, of which 72 are female, right now, for some reason,
meaning that while there's room for twelve more (preferably full-tuition) junior players, there ought ideally to be fully sixteen
more males than there are, meaning Charles Tavis and Co. are wanting to fill all twelve available spots with males — plus they
wouldn't exactly mind, is the general scuttlebutt, if a half dozen or so of the better girls left before graduation and tried for the
Show, simply because housing more than 68 girls means putting some in the male dorms, which creates tensions and licensingand conservative-parent-problems, given that coed hall bathrooms are not a good idea what with all the adolescent glands firing all
over the place.
It also means that, since there are twice as many male prorectors as female, A.M. drills have to be complexly staggered, the
boys in two sets of 32, the girls in three of 24, which creates problems in terms of early-p.M. classes for the lowest-ranked Csquad girls, who drill last.
Matriculations, gender quotas, recruiting, financial aid, room-assignments, mealtimes, rankings, class v. drill schedules,
prorector-hiring, accommodating changes in drill schedule consequent to a player's movement up or down a squad. It's all the sort
of thing that's uninteresting unless you're the one responsible, in which case it's cholesterol-raisingly stressful and complex. The
stress of all the complexities and priorities to be triaged and then weighted against one another gets Charles Tavis out of bed in the
Headmaster's House at an ungodly hour most mornings, his sleep-swollen face twitching with permutations. He stands in leather
slippers at the living-room window, looking southeast past West and Center Courts at the array of A-team players assembling
stiffly in the gray glow, carrying gear with their heads down and some still asleep on their feet, the first bit of snout of the sun
protruding through the city's little skyline far beyond them, the aluminum glints of river and sea, east, Tavis's hands working
nervously around the cup of hazlenut decaf that steams upward into his face as he holds it, hair unarranged and one side hanging,
high forehead up against the window's glass so he can feel the mean chill of the dawn just outside, his lips moving slightly and
without sound, the thing it's not entirely impossible he may have fathered asleep up next to the sound system with its claws on its
chest and four pillows for bradypnea-afflicted breathing that sounds like soft repetitions of the words sky or ski, making no
unnecessary sound, not eager to wake it and have to interface with it and have it look up at him with a terrible calm and accepting
knowledge it's quite possible is nothing but Tavis's imagination, so lips moving w/o sound but breath and cup's steam spreading on
the glass, and little icicles from the rainy melt of yesterday's snow hanging from the anodized gutters just above the window and
seen by Tavis as a distant skyline upside-down. In the lightening sky the same two or three clouds seem to move back and forth
like sentries. The heat comes on with a distant whoom and the glass against his forehead trembles slightly. A hiss of low static
from the speaker it had fallen into sleep without turning off. The A-team's array keeps shifting and melding as they await Schtitt.
Permutations of complications.
Tavis watches the boys stretch and confer and sips from the cup with both hands, the concerns of the day assembling
themselves in a sort of tree-diagram of worry. Charles Tavis knows what James Incandenza could not have cared about less: the
key to the successful administration of a top-level junior tennis academy lies in cultivating a kind of reverse-Buddhism, a state of
Total Worry.
So the best E.T.A. players' special perk is they get hauled out of bed at dawn, still crusty-eyed and pale with sleep, to drill in
the first shift.
Dawn drills are of course alfresco until they erect and inflate the Lung, which Hal Incandenza hopes is soon. His circulation is
poor because of tobacco and/or marijuana, and even with his DUNLOp-down-both-legs sweatpants and a turtleneck and thick old
white alpaca tennis jacket that had been his father's and has to be rolled up at the sleeves, he's sullen and chilled, Hal is, and by the
time they've run the pre-stretch sprints up and down the E.T.A. hill four times, swinging their sticks madly in all directions and (at
A. deLint's dictate) making various half-hearted warrior-noises, Hal is both chilled and wet, and his sneakers squelch from dew as
he hops in place and looks at his breath, wincing as the cold air hits the one bad tooth.
By the time they're all stretching out, lined up in rows along the service-and baselines, flexing and bowing, genuflecting to
nothing, changing postures at the sound of a whistle, by this time the sky has lightened to the color of Kaopectate. The
ATHSCME fans are idle and the E.T.A.s can hear birds. Smoke from the stacks of the Sunstrand complex is weakly sunlit as it
hangs in plumes, completely still, as if painted on the air. Tiny cries and a repetitive scream for help come up from someplace
downhill to the east, presumably Enfield Marine. This is the one time of day the Charles doesn't look bright blue. The pines' birds
don't sound any happier than the players. The grounds' non-pines are bare and canted at circuitous hillside angles all up and down
the hill when they sprint again, four more times, then on bad days another four, maybe the most hated part of the day's
conditioning. Somebody always throws up a little; it's like the drills' reveille. The river at dawn is a strip of foil's dull side. Kyle 
Coyle keeps saying it's co-wo-wold. All the lesser players are still abed. Today there's multiple retching, from last night's sweets.
Hal's breath hangs before his face until he moves through it. Sprints produce the sick sound of much squelching; everyone wishes
the hill's grass would die.
Twenty-four girls are drilled in groups of six on four of the Center Courts. The 32 boys (minus, rather ominously, J. J. Penn)
are split by rough age into fours and take a semi-staggered eight of the East Courts. Schtitt is up in his little observational crow's
nest, a sort of apse at the end of the iron transom players call the Tower that extends west to east over the centers of all three sets
of courts and terminates w/ the nest high above the Show Courts. He has a chair and an ashtray up there. Sometimes from the
courts you can see him leaning over the railing, tapping the edge of the bullhorn with his weatherman's pointer; from the West and
Center Courts the rising sun behind him gives his white head a pinkish corona. When he's seated you just see misshapen smokerings coming up out of the nest and moving off with the wind. The sound of the bullhorn is scarier when you can't see him. The
waffled iron stairs leading up to the transom are west of the West Courts, all the way across from the nest, so sometimes Schtitt
paces back and forth along the transom with his pointer behind his back, his boots ringing out on the iron. Schtitt seems immune
to all weather and always dresses the same for drills: the warm-ups and boots. When the E.T.A.s' strokes or play's being filmed for
study, Mario Incandenza is positioned on the railing of Schtitt's nest, leaning way out and filming down, his police lock protruding
into empty air, with somebody beefy assigned to stand behind him and grip the back of the Velcro vest: it always scares hell out of
Hal because you can never see Dunkel or Nwangi behind Mario and it always looks like he's leaning way out to dive Bolex-first
down onto Court 7's net.
Except during periods of disciplinary conditioning, alfresco A.M. drills work like this. A prorector is at each relevant court
with two yellow Ball-Hopper-brand baskets of used balls, plus a ball machine, which machine looks like an open footlocker with a
blunt muzzle at one end pointed across the net at a quartet of boys and connected by long orange industrial cords to a three-prong
outdoor outlet at the base of each light-pole. Some of the light-poles cast long thin shadows across the courts as soon as the sun is
strong enough for there to be shadows; in summertime players try to sort of huddle in the thin lines of shade. Ortho Stice keeps
yawning and shivering; John Wayne wears a small cold smile. Hal hops up and down in his capacious jacket and plum turtleneck
and looks at his breath and tries a la Lyle to focus very intently on the pain of his tooth without judging it as bad or good. K. D.
Coyle, out of the infirmary after the weekend, opines that he doesn't see why the better players' reward for hard slogging to the
upper rungs is dawn drills while for instance Pemulis and the Vikemeister et al. are still horizontal and sawing logs. Coyle says
this every morning. Stice tells him he's surprised at how little they've missed him. Coyle is from the small Tucson AZ suburb of
Erythema and claims to have thin desert blood and special sensitivity to the wet chill of Boston's dawn. The WhataBurger Jr.
Invitational is a sort of double-edged Thanksgiving homecoming for Coyle, who at thirteen was lured from Tucson's own Rancho
Vista Golf and Tennis Academy by promises of self-transcendence from Schtitt.
Drills work like this. Eight different emphases on eight different courts. Each quartet starts at a different court and rotates
around. The top four traditionally start drills on the first court: backhands down the line, two boys to a side. Corbett Thorp lays
down squares of electrician's tape at the court's corners and they are strongly encouraged to hit the balls into the little squares. Hal
hits with Stice, Coyle with Wayne; Axford's been sent down with Shaw and Struck for some reason. Second court: forehands,
same deal. Stice consistently misses the square and gets a low-pH rejoinder from Tex Watson, hatless and pattern-balding at
twenty-seven. Hal's tooth hurts and his ankle is stiff and the cold balls come off his strings with a dead sound like chung. Tiny
bratwursts of smoke ascend rhythmically from Schtitt's little nest. Third court is 'Butterflies,' a complex VAPS deal where Hal hits
a backhand down the line to Stice while Coyle forehands it to Wayne and then Wayne and Stice cross-court the balls back to Hal
and Coyle, who have to switch sides without bashing into each other and hit back down the line now to Wayne and Stice,
respectively. Wayne and Hal amuse themselves by making their cross-court balls collide on every fifth exchange or so — this is
known around E.T.A. as 'atom-smashing' and is understandably hard to do — and the collided balls sprong wildly out onto the
other practice courts, and Rik Dunkel is less amused than Wayne and Hal are, so, nicely warm now and arms singing, they're
shunted quickly onto the fourth court: volleys for depth, then for angle, then lobs and overheads, which latter drill can be
converted into a disciplinary Puker if a pro-rector's feeding you the lobs: the overhead drill's called Tap & Whack': Hal pedals
back, terribly ankle-conscious, jumps, kicks out, nails Slice's lob, then has to sprint up and tap the net's tape with his Dunlop's
head as Stice lobs deep again, and Hal has to backpedal again and jump and kick and hit it, and so on. Then Hal and Coyle, both
sucking wind after twenty and trying to stand up straight, feed lobs to Wayne and Stice, neither of whom is fatiguable as far as
anyone can tell. You have to kick out on overheads to keep your balance in the air. Overhead, Schtitt uses an unamplified bullhorn
and careful enunciation to call out for everyone to hear that Mr. revenant Hal Incandenza was letting the ball get the little much
behind him on overheads, fears of the ankle maybe. Hal raises his stick in acknowledgment without looking up. To hang in past
age fourteen here is to become immune to humiliation from staff. Coyle tells Hal between the lobs they send up he'd love to see
Schtitt have to do twenty Tap & Whacks in a row. They're all flushed to a shine, all chill washed off, noses running freely and
heads squeaking with blood, the sun well above the sea's dull glint and starting to melt the frozen slush from I.-Day's snow and
rain that night-custodians had swept into little wedged lines up against the lengthwise fences, which grimy wedges are now
starting to melt and run. There's still no movement in the Sunstrand stacks' plumes. The watching prorectors stand easy with their
legs apart and their arms crossed over their racquets' faces. The same three or four booger-shaped clouds seem to pass back and
forth overhead, and when they cover the sun people's breath reappears. Stice blows on his racquet-hand and cries out thinly for the
inflation of the Lung. Mr. A. F. deLint ranges behind the fence with his clipboard and whistle, blowing his nose. The girls behind
him are too bundled up to be worth watching, their hair rubber-banded into little bouncing tails.
Fifth court: serves to both corners of both boxes, catching each others' serves and serving them back. First serves, second
serves, slice serves, shank serves, and back-snapping American Twist serves that Stice begs off of, telling the prorector — Neil
Hartigan, who's 2 m. tall and of so few words everybody fears him by default — he's having lower spasms from a mispositioned
bed. Then Coyle — he of the weak bladder and suspicious discharge — gets excused to go back into the eastern tree-line out of
sight of the distaffs and pee, so the other three get a minute to jog over to the pavilion and stand with their hands on their hips and
breathe and drink Gator-ade out of little conic paper cups you can't put down til they're empty. The way you flush out a cottony
mouth between drills is you take a mouthful of Gatorade and puff out your cheeks to make a globe of liquid that you mangle with
your teeth and tongue, then lean out and spit out into the grass and take another drink for real. The sixth court is returns of serve
down the line, down the center, cross-court for depth, then for placement, then for deep placement, w/ more taped squares; then
chipped center- and cross-returns against a server who follows his serve to the net. The server practices half-volleys off the chips,
although Wayne and Stice are so fast that they're on top of the net by the time the return gets to them and they can volley it away
at chest-height. Wayne drills with the casual economy of somebody who's in about second gear. The urns' dispensers' cups can't
stand up, their bottoms are pointy and they'll spill any liquid still in them, is why you have to empty them. Between squads
Harde's guys will sweep the pavilion of dozens of cones.
Then, blessedly, on the seventh court, physically undemanding Finesse drills. Drops, drops for angles, topspin lobs, extreme
angles, drops for extreme angles, then restful microtennis, tennis inside the service lines, very soft and precise, radical angles
much encouraged. Touch- and artistry-wise nobody comes close to Hal in microtennis. By this time Hal's turtleneck is soaked
through under the alpaca jacket, and exchanging it for a sweatshirt out of the gear bag is a kind of renewal. What wind there is
down here is out of the south. The temperature is now probably in the low 10's C.; the sun's been up an hour, and you can almost
see the light-pole and transom shadows rotating slowly northwest. The Sunstrand stacks' plumes stand there cigarette-straight, not
even seeming to spread at the top; the sky is going a glassy blue.
No (tennis) balls required on the final court. Wind sprints. Probably the less said about wind sprints the better. Then more
Gatorade, which Hal and Coyle are breathing too hard to enjoy, as Schtitt comes slowly down from the transom. It takes a while.
You can hear his steel-toed boots hit each iron step. There is something creepy about a very fit older man, to say nothing of
jackboots w/ Fila warm-ups of claret-colored silk. He's coming this way, both hands behind his back and the pointer poking out to
the side. Schtitt's crew cut and face are nacreous as he moves east in the yellowing a.m. light. This is sort of the signal for all the
quartets to gather at the Show Courts. Behind them the girls are still hitting groundstrokes in baroque combinations, much highpitched grunting and the lifeless chung of cold hit balls. Three 14's are made to squeegee the more extrusive melt back into the
little banks of frozen leaves along the fence. At the horizon to the north a bulbous cone of picric clouds that gets taller by the hour
as the Methuen-Andover border's mammoth effectuators force northern MA's combined oxides north against some sort of upperair resistance, it looks like. You can see little bits of glitter from broken monitor-glass in the frozen stuff up by the fences behind
6-9, and one or two curved shards of floppy disk, and they're a troubling sight, Penn being absent amid troubling leg-rumors,
Postal-Weight with two black eyes and his nose covered with horizontal bandages that are starting to loosen and curl at the edges
from sweat, and Otis P. Lord alleged to have come back from the emergency room at St. Elizabeth's last night with the Hitachi
monitor over his head, still, its removal, with all the sharp teeth of the broken screen's glass pointing at key parts of Lord's throat,
apparently calling for the sort of esoteric expertise you have to fly in by private medical jet, according to Axford.
They all get on the outside of three cones of Gatorade, bent or squatting, sucking wind, while Schtitt stands at a sort of Parade
Rest with his weatherman's pointer behind his back and shares overall impressions with the players on the morning's work thus
far. Certain players are singled out for special mention or humiliation. Then more wind sprints. Then a brief like strategy-clinicthing from Corbett Thorp on how approach shots down the line aren't always the very best tactic, and why. Thorp's a first-rate
tennis mind, but his terrible stutter makes the boys so uncomfortable they have a hard time listening.181171
The whole first shift's on the eighth court for the final conditioning drills.182172 First are Star Drills. A dozen-plus boys on
either side of the net, behind the baselines. Form a line. Go one at a time. Go: run up the side line, touch the net with your stick;
then backwards to the outside corner of the service box and then forward to touch the net again; backward to the middle of the
service box, forward to touch net; back to the baseline's little jut of centerline, up to net; service box's other outside corner, net,
baseline's corner, net, then turn and run like hell for the corner you started from. Schtitt has a stopwatch. There's a janitorial
bucket183173 placed in the doubles alley by the finish point, for potential distress. They each do the Star Drill three times. Hal
has 41 seconds and 38 and 48, which is average both for him and for any seventeen-year-old with a resting pulse rate in the high
50s. John Wayne's low of 33 occurs on his third Star, and he stops dead at the finish point and always just stands there, never
bending or walking it off. Stice gets a 29 and everyone gets very excited until Schtitt says he was slow starting the watch: the
arthritis in a thumb. Everyone but Wayne and Stice uses the retch-bucket in a sort of pro forma way. Sixteen-year-old Petropolis
Kahn, a.k.a. 'W.M.' for 'Woolly Mammoth' because he's so hairy, gets a 60 and then a 59 and then pitches forward onto the hard
surface and lies very still. Tony Nwangi tells people to walk around him.
The cardiovascular finale is Side-to-Sides, conceived by van der Meer in the B.S. '60s and demonic in its simplicity. Again
split into fours on eight courts. For the top 18's, prorector R. Dunkel at net with an armful of balls and more in a hopper beside
him, hitting fungoes, one to the forehand corner and then one to the backhand corner and then farther out to the forehand corner
and so on. And on. Hal Incandenza is expected at least to get a racquet on each ball; for Stice and Wayne the expectations are
higher. A very unpleasant drill fatigue-wise, and for Hal also ankle-wise, what with all the stopping and reversing. Hal wears two
bandages over a left ankle he shaves way more often than his upper lip. Over the bandages goes an Air-Stirrup inflatable ankle
brace that's very lightweight but looks a bit like a medieval torture-implement. It was in a stop-and-reverse move much like Sideto-Sides184174 that Hal tore all the soft left-ankle tissue he then owned, at fifteen, in his ankle, at Atlanta's Easter Bowl, in the
third round, which he was losing anyway. Dunkel goes fairly easy on Hal, at least on the first two go-arounds, because of the
ankle. Hal's going to be seeded in at least the top 4 at the WhataBurger Inv. in a couple weeks, and woe to the prorector who lets
Hal get hurt the way Hal let some of his Little Buddies get hurt yesterday.
What's potentially demonic about Side-to-Sides is that the duration of the drill and pace and angle of the fungoes to be chased
down from side to side are entirely at the prorector's discretion. Prorector Rik Dunkel, a former 16's-doubles runner-up at Jr.
Wimbledon and a decent enough guy, the son of some kind of plastic-packaging-systems tycoon on the South Shore, tied with
Thorp for brightest of the prorectors (more or less by default), regarded as kind of a mystic because he refers people sometimes to
Lyle and has been observed sitting at community gatherings with his eyes closed but not sleeping .. . but the point is a decent
enough guy but not much into any kind of exchange of quarter. He seems to have received instructions to put the particular hurt on
Ortho Stice this time, and by his third go-around Stice is trying to weep without breath and mewing for his aunts.185175 But
anyway everybody goes through Sides-to-Sides three times. Even Petropolis Kahn staggers through them, who after Stars had had
to be sort of lugged over by Stephan Wagenknecht and Jeff Wax with his Nikes dragging behind him and his head swinging free 
on his neck and given kind of a swingset-shove to get started. Hal feels for Kahn, who's not fat but is in the Schacht-type mold,
very thick and solid, except also carrying extra weight in terms of leg-and-back-hair, and who always tires easily no matter how
hard he conditions. Kahn makes it through but stays bent over the distress-bucket long after the third go-around, staring into it,
and stays that way while everybody else removes more soaked bottom layers of clothing and accepts clean towels from a halfwayhouse part-time black girl with a towel cart, and picks up balls.186176
It is O72Oh. and they are through with the active part of dawn drills. Nwangi, at the edge of the hillside, is whistling the next
shift over for opening sprints. Schtitt shares more overall impressions as minimum-wage aides dispense Kleenex and paper cones.
Nwangi's reedy voice carries; he's telling the B's he wishes to see nothing but assholes and elbows on these sprints. It's unclear to
Hal what this might connote. The A-players have formed those ragged rows behind the baseline again, and Schtitt paces back and
forth.
'Am seeing sluggish drilling, by sluggards. Not meaning insults. This is the fact. Motions are gone through. Barely minimal
efforts. Cold, yes? The cold hands and nose with mucus? Thoughts on getting through, going in, hot showers, water very hot. A
meal. The thoughts are drifting toward the comfort of ending. Too cold to demand the total, yes? Master Chu, too cold for tennis
at the high level, yes?’
Chu: 'It does seem pretty cold out, sir.’
'Ah.' Pacing back and forth with about-faces at every tenth step, stopwatch around his neck, pipe and pouch and pointer in his
hands behind his back, nodding to himself, clearly wishing he had a third hand so he could stroke his white chin, pretending to
ruminate. Every A.M. essentially the same, except when Schtitt does the females and the males get dressed down by deLint. All
the older boys' eyes are glazed with repetition. Hal's tooth gives off little electric shivers with each inbreath, and he feels slightly
unwell. When he moves his head slightly the monitor-glass bits' glitter shifts and dances along the opposite fence in a sort of
sickening way.
'Ah.' Turns crisply toward them, looking briefly skyward. 'And when is hot? Too pretty hot for the total self on the court? The
other hand of the spectrum? Ach. Is always something that is too. Master Incandenza who cannot quickly get behind lob's descent
so weight can move forvart into overhand,187177 please tell your thinking: it is always hot or cold, yes?’
A small smile, "s been our general observation out there, sir.’
'So then then so, Master Chu, from California's temperance regions?’
Chu brings down his hankie. 'I guess we have to learn to adjust to conditions, sir, I believe is what you're saying.’
A full sharp half-turn to face the group. 'Is what I am not saying, young LaMont Chu, is why you cease to seem to give total
effort of self since you begin with the clipping pictures of great professional figures for your adhesive tape and walls. No?
Because, privileged gentlemen and boys I am saying, is always something that is too. Cold. Hot. Wet and dry. Very bright sun and
you see the purple dots. Very bright hot and you have no salt. Outside is wind, the insects which like the sweat. Inside is smell of
heaters, echo, being jammed in together, tarp is overdose to baseline, not enough of room, bells inside clubs which ring the hour
loudly to distract, clunk of machines vomiting sweet cola for coins. Inside roof too low for the lob. Bad lighting, so. Or outside:
the bad surface. Oh no look no: crabgrass in cracks along baseline. Who could give the total, with crabgrass. Look here is low net
high net. Opponent's relatives heckle, opponent cheats, linesman in semifinal is impaired or cheats. You hurt. You have the injury.
Bad knee and back. Hurt groin area from not stretching as asked. Aches of elbow. Eyelash in eye. The throat is sore. A too pretty
girl in audience, watching. Who could play like this? Big crowd overwhelming or too small to inspire. Always something.’
His turns as he paces are crisp and used to punctuate. 'Adjust. Adjust? Stay the same. No? Is not stay the same? It is cold? It is
wind? Cold and wind is the world. Outside, yes? On the tennis court the you the player: this is not where there is cold wind. I am
saying. Different world mside. World built inside cold outside world of wind breaks the wind, shelters the player, you, if you stay
the same, stay inside.' Pacing gradually faster, the turns becoming pirouettic. The older kids stare straight ahead; some of the
younger follow every move of the pointer with wide eyes. Trevor Axford is bent at the waist and moving his head slightly, trying
to get the sweat dripping off his face to spell something out on the surface. Schtitt is silent for two fast about-faces, ranging before
them, tapping his jaw with the pointer. 'Not ever I think this adjusting. To what, this adjusting? This world inside is the same,
always, if you stay there. This is what we are making, no? New type citizen. Not of cold and wind outside. Citizens of this
sheltering second world we are working to show you every dawn, no? To make your introduction.' The Big Buddies translate
Schtitt into accessible language for the littler kids, is a big part of their assignment.
'Borders of court for singles Mr. Rader are what.’
'Twenty-four by eight sir,' sounding hoarse and thin.
'So. Second world without cold or purple dots of bright for you is 23.8 meters, 8 I think .2 meters. Yes? In that world is joy
because there is shelter of something else, of purpose past sluggardly self and complaints about uncomfort. I am speaking to not
just LaMont Chu of the temperance world. You have a chance to occur, playing. No? To make for you this second world that is
always the same: there is in this world you, and in the hand a tool, there is a ball, there is opponent with his tool, and always only
two of you, you and this other, inside the lines, with always a purpose to keep this world alive, yes?' The pointer-motions through
all this become too orchestral and intricate to describe. 'This second world inside the lines. Yes? Is this adjusting? This is not
adjusting. This is not adjusting to ignore cold and wind and tired. Not ignoring "as if." Is no cold. Is no wind. No cold wind where
you occur. No? Not "adjust to conditions." Make this second world inside the world: here there are no conditions.’
Looks around.
'So put a lid on it about the fucking cold,' says deLint, with his clipboard under his arm and his strangler-sized hands in his
pockets, hopping a little in place.
Schtitt is looking around. Like most Germans outside popular entertainment, he gets quieter when he wants to impress or
menace. (There are very few shrill Germans, actually.) 'If it is hard,' he says softly, hard to hear because of the rising wind,
'difficult, for you to move between the two worlds, from cold hot wind and sun to this inside place inside the lines where is always
the same,' he says, seeming now to study the weatherman's pointer he holds down and out with both hands, 'it can be arranged for
you gentlemen not to leave, ever here, this world inside the lines of court. You know. Can stay here until there is citizenship.
Right here.' The pointer is pointed at the spots they're standing at breathing and blotting their faces and blowing their noses. 'Can 
today put up Testar Lung, for world's shelter. Sleep bags. Meals brought to you. Never across the lines. Never leave the court.
Study here. A bucket for hygienic needs. At Gymnasium Kaiserslautern where I am privileged boy who whining about cold wind,
we live inside tennis court for months, to learn to live inside. Very lucky days when they bring us meals. Not possible to cross a
line for months of living.’
Left-hander Brian van Vleck picks a bad moment to break wind.
Schtitt shrugs, half-turning away from them to look off somewhere. 'Or else leave here into large external world where is cold
and pain without purpose or tool, eyelash in eye and pretty girl — not worry anymore about how to occur.' Looks around. 'No one
is a prisoner here. Who would like to escape into large world? Master Sweeny?’
Little eyes down.
'Mr. Coyle, with always too co-wold to give total?’
Coyle studies the vasculature on the inside of his elbow with deep interest as he shakes his head. John Wayne is joggling his
head around like a Raggedy-Andy-head, stretching out the neck hardware. John Wayne is notoriously tight and can't touch
anything below the knee with straight legs during stretches.
'Mr. Peter Beak with always the weeping to home on the telephone?’
The twelve-year-old says Not Me Sir several times.
Hal very subtly shoots in a small plug of Kodiak. Aubrey deLint has his arms crossed over the clipboard and is looking
around beadily like a crow. Hal Incandenza has an almost obsessive dislike for deLint, whom he tells Mario he sometimes cannot
quite believe is even real, and tries to get to the side of, to see whether deLint has a true z coordinate or is just a cutout or
projection. The kids of the next shift are walking downhill and sprinting back up and walking down, warrior-whooping without
conviction. The other male prorectors are drinking cones of Gatorade, clustered in the little pavilion, feet up on patio-chairs,
Dunkel's and Watson's eyes closed. Neil Hartígan, in his traditional Tahitian shirt and Gaugin-motif sweater, has to stay sitting
down to fit under the Gatorade awning.
'Simple,' Schtitt shrugs, so that the upraised pointer seems to stab at the sky. 'Hit,' he suggests. 'Move. Travel lightly. Occur.
Be here. Not in bed or shower or over baconschteam, in the mind. Be here in total. Is nothing else. Learn. Try. Drink your green
juice. Perform the Butterfly exercises on all eight of these courts, please, to warm down. Mr. deLint, please to bring them back
down, make sure of stretching the groins. Gentlemen: hit tennis balls. Fire at your will. Use a head. You are not arms. Arm in the
real tennis is like wheels of vehicles. Not engine. Legs: not either. Where is where you apply for citizenship in second world Mr.
consciousness of ankle Incan-denza, our revenant?’
Hal can lean out and spit in a way that isn't insolent. 'Head, sir.’
'Excuse?’
'The human head, sir, if I got your thrust. Where I'm going to occur as a player. The game's two heads' one world. One world,
sir.’
Schtitt sweeps the pointer in an ironic morendo arc and laughs aloud:
'Play.’
Part of Don Gately's live-in Staff job is that he hurtles here and there on selected Ennet House errands. He cooks the
communal supper on weekdays,188178 which means he does the House's weekly shopping, which means that at least a couple
times a week he gets to take Pat Montesian's black 1964 Ford Aventura and drive to the Purity Supreme Market. The Aventura is
an antique variant of the Mustang, the sort of car you usually only see waxed and static in car shows with somebody in a bikini
pointing at it. Pat's is functional and mint-reconditioned — her shadowy husband with something like ten years sober being big
into cars — with such a wicked nice multilayer paint job that its black has the bottomless quality of water at night. It has two
different alarm systems and a red metal bar you're supposed to lock across the steering wheel when you get out. The engine
sounds more like a jet engine than a piston engine, plus there's a scoop poking periscopically from the hood, and for Gately the
vehicle's so terrifically tight and sleek it's like being strapped into a missile and launched at the site of a domestic errand. He can
barely fit in the driver's seat. The steering wheel is about the size of an old video-arcade game's steering wheel, and the thin canted
six-speed shift is encased in a red leather baglet that smells strongly of leather. The height of the car's roof compromises Gately's
driving-posture, and his right ham like exceeds the seat and squeezes against the gearshift so that shifting pinches his hip. He does
not care. Some of the profoundest spiritual feelings of his sobriety so far are for this car. He'd drive this car if the driver's seat was
just a sharp pointy spike, he told John-ette Foltz. Johnette Foltz is the other live-in Staffer, though between ultra-rabid
Commitment-activity in NA and a somehow damaged NA fiance she spends a lot of time pushing around places in a wicker
wheelchair, she's around Ennet House less and less now, and there are rumblings about a possible replacement, which Gately and
the heterosexual male residents pray daily will be the leggy alumna and part-time counselor Danielle Steen-bok, who's rumored
also to attend Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, which engages everyone's imagination to the max.
It's a mark of serious regard and questionable judgment that Director Pat M. lets Don Gately drive her priceless Aventura,
even just to like the Metro Food Bank or Purity Supreme, because Gately lost his license more or less permanently back in the
Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster for getting pinched on a DUI in Peabody on a license that had already been
suspended for a previous DUI in Lowell. This was not the only Loss Don Gately incurred as his chemical careers moved toward
their life-reversing climax. Once every couple months now, still, he has to put on his brown dress slacks and slightly irregular
green sportcoat from Brighton Budget Large 'N Tall Menswear and take the commuter rail up to selected District Court venues on
the North Shore and meet with his various P.D.s and P.O.s and caseworkers and sometimes appear briefly up in front of Judges
and Review Boards to review the progress of his sobriety and reparations. When he first came to Ennet House last year, Gately
had Bad-Check and Forgery issues, he had a Malicious Destruction of Property issue, plus two D&Ds and a bullshit Public
Urination out of Tewksbury. He had a Break-and-Enter from a silent-alarmed Peabody mansion where he and a colleague got
pinched before anything could get promoted. He had a Possession With Intent from 38 50-mg. tablets of Demerol189179 in a Pez
container which he'd shoved down into the crack of the Peabody Finest's cruiser's back seat, but which got found anyway on the
routine post-transport cruiser-search all cops perform when the arrestee's pupils are unresponsive both to light and to head-slaps.
There was, too, of course, a certain darker issue, vis-à-vis a certain upscale Brookline home whose late owner had been 
eulogized at terrifying length and headline-size in both the Globe and Herald. After eight months of indescribable psychic
cringing, waiting for the legal footwear to drop on the Nuck-VIP issue — toward the end of his drug-use Gately'd gotten sloppy
and crazy and stuck idiotically with a method of straight meter-shunting that he'd learned up at MCI-Billerica and was pretty sure
now constituted a signature Gately M.O., since the older guy that'd taught it to him in the Billerica metal-shop had subsequently
got out and gone to Utah and died of a morphine overdose (and like who on earth hopes to get reliable morphine in fucking Utah?)
over two years ago — after eight months of cringing and nail-biting, the last couple months of the torment in Ennet House — even
though the House's D.S.A.S.-license put it legally off-limits to all constabulary without Pat Montesian's physical presence and
notarized permission — after he was down to the cuticles on all ten digits, Gately had very discreetly approached a certain
Percodan-devoted court stenographer an old girlfriend had once dealt to, and had the guy make equally discreet inquiries, and
found that the potential Murder-2 investigation of the botched burglary190180 had been taken over — pace the loud howls of a
certain remorseless Revere A.D.A. — by something federal the addled stenographer called 'Non-Specific Services Bureau,'
whereupon the case vanished from any sort of investigative scene the stenographer could make inquiries about, though quiet
rumor had it that current suspicions were being directed at certain shadowy Nucko-political bodies all the way up in Quebec, far
north of the Enfield MA where Gately had been cringing his way to nightly AA meetings with his fingers in his mouth.
Most of the cases Gately had had pending his P.D. had gotten Closed Without Finding,191181 contingent on Gately's entering
long-term treatment and maintaining chemical abstinence and submitting to random urinalyses and making biweekly reparation
payments out of the pathetic paychecks he earned cleaning shit and sperm under Stavros Lobokulas and now also cooking and
live-in-Staffing at Ennet House. The only issue not resolved on a Blue-File deferral was the business of driving with a DUIsuspended license. In the Commonwealth of MA, this issue carries a mandatory 90-day bit, as in like the penalty's written right
into the statute; and the case's P.D. has been up-front with Gately about it's only a matter of the time of the wheels' slow judicial
grind before some judge Red-Files the issue and the case and Gately has to do the bit at someplace MCI-Minimum like Concord
or Deer Island. Gately isn't too hinked about 90 inside. At twenty-four he'd done 17 months at Billerica for assaulting two
bouncers in a nightclub — it was more like he'd beaten the second bouncer bloody with the unconscious body of the first — and
he knew quite well he could get by in a Commonwealth lockdown. He was too big to fuck or fuck with and not interested in
fucking with anyone else: he did his time stand-up and gave nobody any provoking cause; and when the first couple hard guys had
come after him for his canteen cigarettes he'd laughed it off with ferocious jolliness, and when they came back a second time
Gately beat them half to death in the corridor behind the weight room where he could be sure plenty of other guys could hear it,
and after that one incident was out of the way he could simply get by and not get fucked with. Gately now was hinked only about
the prospect of getting just one or two AA meetings a week in jail — the only meetings sober inmates get are when an area Group
comes in on an Institutional Commitment, which Gately's been on — when Demerol and Talwin and good old weed are almost
easier to get in jail than in the outside world. Gately cringed now only at the thought of the Sergeant at Arms, the distinguishedlooking shepherd guy. Going back to ingesting Substances had become his biggest fear. Even Gately can tell this is a major
psychic turn-around. He tells the newer residents right up front that AA's somehow gotten him by the mental curlies: he'll now go
to literally Any Lengths to stay clean.
He'll tell them right out that he'd first come to Ennet House only to keep out of jail, and hadn't had much interest or hope
about actually staying clean for any length of time; and he'd been up-front with Pat Montesian about this during his application
interview. The grim honesty about his disinterest and hopelessness was one reason Pat even let such a clearly bad-news specimen
into the House on nothing but a lukewarm referral from a P.O. up at the 5th District office in Peabody. Pat told Gately that grim
honesty and hopelessness were the only things you need to start recovering from Substance-addiction, but that without these
qualities you were totally up the creek. Desperation helped also, she said. Gately scratched at her dog's stomach and said he wasn't
sure if he was desperate about anything except wanting to somehow stop getting in trouble for things he usually afterward couldn't
even remember he did them. The dog trembled and shuddered and its eyes rolled up as Gately, who hadn't been told about Pat's
thing about wanting her dogs petted, rubbed its scabby stomach. Pat had said like well that was enough, that desire for the
shitstorm to end.192182 Gately said her dog sure did like having its stomach rubbed, and Pat explained that the dog was epileptic,
and said that just a desire to stop blacking out was more than enough to start with. She pulled some Commonwealth SubstanceAbuse study in a black plastic binder off a long black plastic bookshelf filled with black plastic binders. It turned out Pat
Montesian liked the color black a lot. She was dressed — really kind of overdressed, for a halfway house — in black leather pants
and a black shirt of silk or something silky. Outside the bay window a Green Line train was laboring up the first Enfield hill in the
late-summer rain. The downhill view from the bay window over Pat's black lacquer or enamelísh desk was like the only
spectacular thing about Ennet House, which was otherwise a wicked awful dump. Pat made a sound against the binder with a
Svelte nail-extension and said that in this state study right here, conducted in the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, over 60% of
the inmates serving Life sentences in hellish MCI-Walpole and not disputing that they'd done what they'd done to get in there
nevertheless had no memory of having done it, whatever got them in there. For Life. None. Gately had to have her run it by him a
couple times before he isolated her point. They'd been in blackouts. Pat said a blackout was where you continued to function —
sometimes disastrously — but weren't aware later of what you did. It's like your mind wasn't in possession of your body, and it
was usually brought on by alcohol but could also be brought on by chronic use of other Substances, synthetic narcotics among
them. Gately said he couldn't recall ever having a real blackout, and Pat M. got it but didn't laugh. The dog was heaving and
quivering with its legs spronged out to all points of the compass and kind of spasming, and Gately didn't know whether to quit
rubbing on it. To be honest he didn't know what epilepsy was but suspected Pat was not referring to the woman's leg-shaver thing
his totally alcoholic past girlfriend Pamela Hoffman-Jeep used to scream in the bathroom when she used. Everything mental for
Gately was kind of befogged and prone to misprision for well into his first year clean.
Pat Montesian was both pretty and not. She was in maybe her late thirties. She'd supposedly been this young and pretty and
wealthy socialite out on the Cape until her husband had divorced her for being a nearly fullblown alcoholic, which seemed like
abandonment and didn't improve her subsequent drinking one jot. She'd been in and out of rehabs and halfway places in her
twenties, but then it wasn't until she'd almost died from a stroke during the D.T.s one A.M. that she'd been able to Surrender and
Come In with the requisite hopeless desperation, etc. Gately didn't wince when he heard about Pat's stroke because his mom hadn't 
had D.T.s or a classic stroke, but rather a cirrhotic hemorrhage that made her choke and deprived her brain of oxygen and had
irreparably vegetabilized her brain. The two cases were totally, like, apart in his mind. Pat M. was never in any way a motherfigure for Gately. Pat liked to smile and say, when residents pissed and moaned about their own addictions' Losses during the
weekly House Community Meeting, she'd nod and smile and say that for her, the stroke had been far and away the best thing that's
ever happened to her because it enabled her to finally Surrender. She'd come to Ennet House in an electric wheelchair at thirty-two
and been unable to communicate except via like Morse-Code blinks or something for the first six months,193183 but had even
without use of her arms demonstrated a willingness to try and eat a rock when the founding Guy Who Didn't Even Use His First
Name told her to, using her torso and neck to like chop downwardly at the rock and chipping both incisors (you can still see the
caps at the corners), and had gotten sober, and remarried a different and older South Shore like trillionaire with what sounded like
psychotic kids, and but regained an unexpected amount of function, and had been working at the House ever since. The right side
of her face was still pulled way over in this sort of rictus, and her speech took Gately some getting used to — it sounded like she
was still loaded all the time, a kind of overenunciated slurring. The half of her face that wasn't rictusized was very pretty, and she
had very long pretty red hair, and a sexually credible body even though her right arm had atrophied into a kind of semiclaw194184 and the right hand was strapped into this black plastic brace to keep its nail-extensioned fingers from curling into her
palm; and Pat walked with a dignified but godawful lurch, dragging a terribly thin right leg in black leather pants behind her like
something hanging on to her that she was trying to get away from.
During his residency, she'd gone personally with Gately on most of his bigger court-dates, driving him up to the North Shore
in the killer Aventura with its Handicapped plates — she because of the neurological right-leg thing literally had a lead foot, and
drove all the time like a maniac, and Gately had usually almost wet himself on Rte. 1 — and she'd throw all En-net House's
substantial respect and clout behind him with Judges and Boards, until every issue that could be resolved without finding was
Blue-Filed. Gately still couldn't figure out why all the personal extra attention and help. It was like he'd been Pat M.'s biggest
favorite among the residents last year. She did have favorites and nonfavorites; it was probably unavoidable. Annie Parrot and the
counselors and House Manager always had their particular favorites, too, so it all tended to work out square.
About four months into his Ennet House residency, the agonizing desire to ingest synthetic narcotics had been mysteriously
magically removed from Don Gately, just like the House Staff and the Crocodiles at the White Flag Group had said it would if he
pounded out the nightly meetings and stayed minimally open and willing to persistently ask some extremely vague Higher Power
to remove it. The desire. They said to get creakily down on his mammoth knees in the A.M. every day and ask God As He
Understood Him to remove the agonizing desire, and to hit the old knees again at night before sack and thank this God-ish figure
for the Substanceless day just ended, if he got through it. They suggested he keep his shoes and keys under the bed to help him
remember to get on his knees. The only times Gately had ever been on his knees before were to throw up or mate, or shunt a lowon-the-wall alarm, or if somebody got lucky during a beef and landed one near Gately's groin. He didn't have any God- or J.C.-
background, and the knee-stuff seemed like the limpest kind of dickless pap, and he felt like a true hypocrite just going through
the knee-motions that he went through faithfully every A.M. and p.m., without fail, motivated by a desire to get loaded so horrible
that he often found himself humbly praying for his head to just finally explode already and get it over with. Pat had said it didn't
matter at this point what he thought or believed or even said. All that mattered was what he did. If he did the right things, and kept
doing them for long enough, what Gately thought and believed would magically change. Even what he said. She'd seen it happen
again and again, and to some awfully unlikely candidates for change. She said it had happened to her. The left side of her face was
very alive and kind. And Gately's counselor, an ex-coke and -phone-bunko guy whose left ear had been one of his Losses, had hit
Gately early on with the infamous Boston AA cake analogy. The grizzled Filipino had met with the resident Don G. once a week,
driving Gately around Brighton-Allston in aimless circles in a customized Subaru 4x4 just like the ones Gately used to hotwire
and promote to use for burgling. Eugenio Martinez had this eccentric thing where he maintained he could only be in touch with
his own Higher Power when he was driving. Down near E.W.D.'s barge-docks off the Allston Spur one night he invited Gately to
think of Boston AA as a box of Betty Crocker Cake Mix. Gately had smacked himself in the forehead at yet another limp oblique
Gene M. analogy, which Gene had already bludgeoned him with several insectile tropes for thinking about the Disease. The
counselor had let him vent spleen for a while, smoking as he crawled along behind land-barges lined up to unload. He told Gately
to just imagine for a second that he's holding a box of Betty Crocker Cake Mix, which represented Boston AA. The box came with
directions on the side any eight-year-• old could read. Gately said he was waiting for the mention of some kind of damn insect
inside the cake mix. Gene M. said all Gately had to do was for fuck's sake give himself a break and relax and for once shut up and
just follow the directions on the side of the fucking box. It didn't matter one fuckola whether Gately like believed a cake would
result, or whether he understood the like fucking baking-chemistry of how a cake would result: if he just followed the
motherfucking directions, and had sense enough to get help from slightly more experienced bakers to keep from fucking the directions up if he got confused somehow, but basically the point was if he just followed the childish directions, a cake would result.
He'd have his cake. The only thing Gately knew about cake was that the frosting was the best part, and he personally found
Eugenio Martinez a smug and self-righteous prick — plus he'd always distrusted both Orientals and spies, and Gene M. managed
to seem like both — but he didn't screw out of the House or quite do anything they could Discharge him for, and he went to
meetings nightly and told the more or less truth, and he did the shoe-under-bed knee thing every a.m./p.m. 24/7, and he took the
suggestion to join a Group and get rabidly Active and clean up ashtrays and go out speaking on Commitments. He had nothing in
the way of a like God-concept, and at that point maybe even less than nothing in terms of interest in the whole thing; he treated
prayer like setting an oven-temp according to a box's direction. Thinking of it as talking to the ceiling was somehow preferable to
imagining talking to Nothing. And he found it embarrassing to get down on his knees in his underwear, and like the other guys in
the room he always pretended his sneakers were like way under the bed and he had to stay down there a while to find them and get
them out, when he prayed, but he did it, and beseeched the ceiling and thanked the ceiling, and after maybe five months Gately
was riding the Greenie at 0430 to go clean human turds out of the Shattuck shower and all of a sudden realized that quite a few
days had gone by since he'd even thought about Demerol or Talwin or even weed. Not just merely getting through those last few
days — Substances hadn't even occurred to him. I.e. the Desire and Compulsion had been Removed. More weeks went by, a blur
of Commitments and meetings and gasper-smoke and cliches, and he still didn't feel anything like his old need to get high. He 
was, in a way, Free. It was the first time he'd been out of this kind of mental cage since he was maybe ten. He couldn't believe it.
He wasn't Grateful so much as kind of suspicious about it, the Removal. How could some kind of Higher Power he didn't even
believe in magically let him out of the cage when Gately had been a total hypocrite in even asking something he didn't believe in
to let him out of a cage he had like zero hope of ever being let out of? When he could only get himself on his knees for the prayers
in the first place by pretending to look for his shoes? He couldn't for the goddamn life of him understand how this thing worked,
this thing that was working. It drove him bats. At about seven months, at the little Sunday Beginners' Mtg., he actually cracked
one of the Provident's fake-wood tabletops beating his big square head against it.195185
White Flagger ('Ferocious') Francis Gehaney, one of the most ancient and gnarled of the Crocodiles, had a white crew cut and
skallycap and suspenders over the flannel shirt that encased his gut, and an enormous cucumber-shaped red schnoz you could
actually see whole arteries in the skin of, and brown stumpy teeth and emphysema and a portable little oxygen-tank thing whose
blue tube was held under the schnoz with white tape, and the very clear bright eye-whites that went along with the extremely low
resting pulse-rate of a guy with geologic amounts of sober AA time. Ferocious Francis G., whose mouth was never without a
toothpick and who had on his right forearm a faded martini-glass-and-naked-lady tattoo of Korean-War-vintage, who'd gotten
sober under the Nixon administration and who communicated in the obscene but antiquated epigrams the Crocs all used196186 —
F.F. had taken Gately out for eye-rattling amounts of coffee, after the incident with the table and the head. He'd listened with the
slight boredom of detached Identification to Gately's complaint that there was no way something he didn't understand enough to
even start to believe in was seriously going to be interested in helping save his ass, even if He/She/It did in some sense exist.
Gately still doesn't quite know why it helped, but somehow it helped when Ferocious Francis suggested that maybe anything
minor-league enough for Don Gately to understand probably wasn't going to be major-league enough to save Gately's addled ass
from the well-dressed Sergeant at Arms, now, was it?
That was months ago. Gately usually no longer much cares whether he understands or not. He does the knee-and-ceiling thing
twice a day, and cleans shit, and listens to dreams, and stays Active, and tells the truth to the Ennet House residents, and tries to
help a couple of them if they approach him wanting help. And when Ferocious Francis G. and the White Flaggers presented him,
on the September Sunday that marked his first year sober, with a faultlessly baked and heavily frosted one-candle cake, Don
Gately had cried in front of nonrelatives for the first time in his life. He now denies that he actually did cry, saying something
about candle-fumes in his eye. But he did.
Gately is an unlikely choice for Ennet House chef, having fed for most of the last twelve years on sub-shop subs and
corporate snack foods consumed amid some sort of motion. He is 188 cm. and 128 kg. and had never once eaten broccoli or a pear
until last year. Chef-wise, he offers up an exceptionless routine of: boiled hot dogs; dense damp meat loaf with little pieces of
American cheese and half a box of cornflakes on top, for texture; Cream of Chicken soup over spirochete-shaped noodles;
ominously dark, leathery Shake 'N Bake chicken legs; queasily underdone hamburgs; and hamburg-sauce spaghetti whose pasta
he boils for almost an hour.197187 None but the most street-hardened Ennet residents would ever hazard an open crack about the
food, which appears nightly at the long dinner table still in the broad steaming pans it was cooked in, with Gately's big face
hovering lun-arly above it, flushed and beaded under the floppy chef's hat Annie Parrot had given him as a dark joke he hadn't got,
his eyes full of anxiety and hopes for everyone's full enjoyment, basically looking like a nervous bride serving her first conjugal
dish, except this bride's hands are the same size as the House's dinner plates and have jailhouse tatts on them, and this bride seems
to need no oven-mitts as he sets down massive pans on the towels that have to be laid down to keep the plastic tabletop from
searing. Any sort of culinary comments are always extremely oblique. Randy Lenz up at the northeast corner likes to raise his can
of tonic and say that Don's food is the kind of food that helps you really appreciate whatever you're drinking along with it.
Geoffrey Day talks about what a refreshing change it is to leave a dinner table not feeling bloated. Wade McDade, a young hardcore flask-alkie from Ashland KY, and Doony Glynn, who's still woozy and infirm from some horrendous Workers Comp. scam
gone awry last year, and is constantly sickly and who's probably going to get Discharged soon for losing his menial job at
Brighton Fence & Wire and not even pretending to look for another one — the two have this bit they do on spaghetti night where
McDade comes into the living room right before chow and goes 'Some of that extra-fine spay-ghetti tonight, Doonster,' and Doony
Glynn goes 'Ooo, will it be all lovely and soft?' and McDade goes 'Leave your teeth at home, boy' in the voice of a Kentucky
sheriff, leading Glynn to the table by the hand as if Glynn were a damaged child. They take care to do the bit while Gately's still in
the kitchen tossing salad and worrying about course-presentation. Though Tiny Ewell never fails to thank Gately for the meal, and
April Cortelyu is lavish in her praises, and Burt F. Smith always rolls his eyes with pleasure and makes yummy-noises whenever
he can get a fork to his mouth.
PRE-DAWN, 1 MAY — Y.D.A.U. OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON AZ U.S.A., STILL
'Do you remember hearing,' U.S.O.U.S.'s Hugh Steeply said, 'in your own country, in the late I think B.S. '70s, of an
experimental program, a biomedical experiment, involving the idea of electro-implantations in the human brain?' Steeply, at the
shelf's lip, turned to look. Marathe merely looked back at him. Steeply said: 'No? Some sort of radical advance. Stereo-taxy.
Epilepsy-treatment. They proposed to implant tiny little hair-thin electrodes in the brain. Some leading Canadian neurologist —
Elder, Elders, something — at the time had hit on evidence that certain tiny little stimulations in certain brain-areas could prevent
a seizure. As in an epileptic seizure. They implant electrodes — hair-thin, just a few millivolts or —’
'Briggs electrodes.’
'Beg pardon?’
Marathe coughed slightly. 'Also the type used in pacemakers of the heart.’
Steeply felt his lip. 'I'm thinking I'm recalling a tentative Bio-entry saying your father had had a pacemaker.’
Marathe touched his own face absently. The plutonium-239 pack of power. The Briggs electrode. The Kenbeck DC circuit. I
am recalling terms and instructions. Avoid all microwaving ovens and many transmitters. Cremation for burial forbidden — this is
because of plutonium-239.’
'So but you know of this old program with epileptics? Experiments they thought could avoid ablative surgery for severe 
epilepsy?’
Marathe said nothing and made what might be seen as slightly shaking the head.
Steeply turned back to face the east with his hands clasped before his back, wishing to speak of it one way or another way,
Marathe could tell.
'I can't remember if I read about it or heard a lecture or what. The implantation was a pretty inexact science. It was all
experimental. A whole lot of electrodes had to be implanted in an incredibly small area in the temporal lobe to hope to find the
nerve-terminals that involved epileptic seizures, and it was trial and error, stimulating each electrode and checking the reaction.’
'Temporal lobes of the brain,' Marathe said.
'What happened was that Olders and the Canadian neuroscientists happened to find, during all the trial and error, that firing
certain electrodes in certain parts of the lobes gave the brain intense feelings of pleasure.' Steeply looked back over his shoulder at
Marathe. 'I mean we're talking about intense pleasure, Rémy. I'm remembering Olders called these little strips of stimulatable
pleasure-tissue p-terminals.’
' "P" wishing to mean "the pleasure."
'And that their location seemed maddeningly inexact and unpredictable, even within brains of the same species — a pterminal'd turn out to be right up next to some other neuron whose stimulation would cause pain, or hunger, or God knows what.’
'The human brain is very dense; it is the truth.’
'The whole point is they weren't doing it on humans yet. It was regarded as radically experimental. They used animals and
animal-lobes. But soon the pleasure-stimulation phenomenon was its own separate radical experiment, while the second-string
neuro-team stuck with the epileptic animals. Older — or Elder, some Anglo-Canadian name — headed the team to map these
what he called quote "Rivers of Reward," the p-terminals in the lobes.’
Marathe idly felt at the little pills of cotton in his windbreaker's cotton pockets, pleasantly nodding. 'An experimental program
of Canada, you stated.’
'I even remember. The Brandon Psychiatric Center.’
Marathe pretended to cough in the recognition of this. 'This is a mental hospital. The far north of Manitoba. Forbidding
wastelands. The center of nothing.’
'Because they were theorizing that these quote "rivers" or terminals were also the brain's receptors for things like betaendorphins, L-dopa, Q-dopa, serotonin, all the various neurotransmitters of pleasure.’
'The Department of Euphoria, so to speak, within the human brain.’
There was no hint or suggestion yet of dawn or light.
'But not humans yet,' Steeply said. 'Older's earliest subject were rats, and the results were apparently sobering. The Nu— the
Canadians found that if they rigged an auto-stimulation lever, the rat would press the lever to stimulate his />-terminal over and
over, thousands of times an hour, over and over, ignoring food and female rats in heat, completely fixated on the lever's
stimulation, day and night, stopping only when the rat finally died of dehydration or simple fatigue.’
Marathe said 'Not of the pleasure itself, however.’
'I think dehydration. I'm fuzzy on just what the rat died of.’
Marathe shrugged. 'But the envy of all experimental rats everywhere, this rat, I think.’
'Then likewise implantations and levers for cats, dogs, swine, monkeys, primates, even a dolphin.’
'Up the evolving scale, p-terminals for each. Each died?’
'Eventually,' Steeply said, 'or else they had to be lobotomized. Because I remember even if the pleasure-electrode was
removed, the stimulation-lever removed, the subject'd run around pressing anything that could be pressed or flipped, trying to get
one more jolt.’
'The dolphin, probably it swam about and did this, I think.’
'You seem amused by this, Rémy. This was totally a Canadian show, this little neuroelectric adventure.’
'I am amused while you make a way toward your point so slowly.’
'Because then eventually Elder and company of course wanted to try human subjects, to see whether the human lobe had pterminals and so on; and because of the sobering consequences for the subject-animals in the program they couldn't legally use
prisoners or patients, they had to try to secure volunteers.’
'Because of a risk,' Marathe said.
'The whole thing was apparently a nightmare of Canadian legalities and statutes.’
Marathe pursed the lips: 'I have doubts in my mind: Ottawa could easily have asked your then CIA for, what is the term,
"Persons of Expendability" from Southeast Asia or Negroes, the subjects expended for your inspiring U.S.A.'s MK-Ultra.'198188
Steeply elected ignoring this, rummaging in the purse. 'But what apparently happened was that somehow word of the pterminal discovery and experiments had gotten out up in Manitoba — some low-level worker at Brandon had broken security and
leaked word.’
'Very little else to do in northern Manitoba besides leaking and gossiping.’
'... And suddenly the neuro-team at Brandon pull in to work one day and find human volunteers lining up literally around the
block outside the place, able-bodied and I should remember to recall mostly young Canadians, lining up and literally trampling
each other in their desire to sign up as volunteers for p-terminal-electrode implantation and stimulation.’
'In full knowledge of the rat's and dolphin's death, from pressing the lever.’
Marathe's father had always assigned it to Rémy, his youngest, to go first inside some public restaurant or shop to check for
the presence of a microwave or GC-type of transmitter. Of special concerns were stores with instruments for thwarting a
shoplifter, the shrieking instruments at doors.
Steeply said 'And of course this eagerness for implantation put a whole new disturbing spin on the study of human pleasure
and behavior, and a whole new Brandon Hospital team was hastily assembled to study the psych-profiles of all these people
willing to trample one another to undergo invasive brain surgery and foreign-object implantation —’
'To become some crazed rats.’ 
'— All just for the chance at this kind of pleasure, and the M.M.P.I.s and Millon's and Approception tests on all these hordes
of prospective volunteers — the hordes were told it was part of the screening — the scores came out fascinatingly, chillingly
average, normal.’
'In other words not any deviants.’
'Nonabnormal along every axis they could see. Just regular young people — Canadian young people.’
'Volunteering for fatal addiction to the electrical pleasure.’
'But Rémy, apparently the purest, most refined pleasure imaginable. The neural distillate of, say, orgasm, religious
enlightenment, ecstatic drugs, shiatsu, a crackling fire on a winter night — the sum of all possible pleasures refined into pure
current and deliverable at the flip of a hand-held lever. Thousands of times an hour, at will.’
Marathe gave him a bland look.
Steeply examined a cuticle. 'By free choice, of course.’
Marathe assumed an expression that lampooned a dullard's hard thought. 'Thus, but how long before these leaks and rumors
of p-terminals reach the Ottawa of government and public weal, for Canada's government reacts with horror at the prospect of
this.’
'Oh, and not just Ottawa,' Steeply said. 'You can see the implications if a technology like Elder's really became available. I
know Ottawa informed Turner, Bush, Casey, whoever it was at the time, and everyone at Langley bit their knuckle in horror.’
'The CIA chewed a hand?’
'Because surely you can see the implications for any industrialized, market-driven, high-discretionary-spending society.’
'But it would be illegalized,' Marathe said, noting to remember the various routines of movements Steeply made for keeping
warm.
'Stop with the babe-in-woods charade,' Steeply said. 'There was still the prospect of an underground market exponentially
more pernicious than narcotics or LSD. The electrode-and-lever technology looked expensive at the time, but it was easy to
foresee enormous widespread demand bringing it down to where electrodes'd be no more exotic than syringes.’
'But yes, but surgery, this would be a different matter to implant.’
'Plenty of surgeons were already willing to perform illegal procedures. Abortions. Electric penile implants.’
'The MK-Ultra surgeries.’
Steeply laughed without mirth. 'Or off-the-record amputations for daring young train-cultists, no?’
Marathe blew just one nostril of his nose. This was the Québecois way: one of the nostrils at a time. Marathe's father's
generation, they had used to bend and blow the one nostril out into the gutter in the street.
Steeply said 'Picture millions of average nonabnormal North Americans, all implanted with Briggs electrodes, all with
electronic access to their own personal p-terminals, never leaving home, thumbing their personal stimulation levers over and
over.’
'Lying upon their divans. Ignoring females in rutting. Having rivers of reward without earning reward.’
'Bug-eyed, drooling, moaning, trembling, incontinent, dehydrated. Not working, not consuming, not interacting or taking part
in community life. Finally pitching forward from sheer —’
Marathe said 'Giving away their souls and lives for p-terminal stimulation, you are saying.’
'You can maybe see the analogy,' Steeply said, over the shoulders to smile in a wry way. 'In Canada, my friend, this was.’
Marathe made a very slight version of his rotary motion of impatience: 'From the A.D. 1970s of time. This never has come to
be. There would have been no development of the Happy Patch ...’
'We both went in. Both our nations.’
Tn secret.’
'Ottawa first cutting the Brandon program's funding, which Turner or Casey or whoever howled at — our old CIA wanted the
procedure developed and perfected, then Classified — military use or something.’
Marathe said 'But the civilian guardians of the weal of the public felt differently.’
T think I'm remembering Carter was President. Both our combined nations made it a Security priority, shutting it down. Our
old N.S.A., your old C7 with the R.C.M.P.s.’
'Bright red jackets and hats with wide brims. In the 1970s still on horses.’
Steeply held his mouth of the purse half up to the faint lights of Tucson, peering for something. T recall they went in directly.
As in guns drawn. Boomed the doors. Dismantled the labs. Mercy-killed dolphins and goats. Olders disappeared somewhere.’
Marathe's slow circular gesture. 'Your point finally is Canadians also, we would choose dying for this, the total pleasure of a
passive goat.’
Steeply turned, fiddling with an emery board. 'But you don't see a more specific analogy with the Entertainment?’
Marathe tongued the inside of his cheek. 'You are saying the Entertainment, a somehow optical stimulation of the pterminals? A way to bypass Briggs electrodes for orgasm-and-massage pleasures?’
The dry rasp of the emerying a nail. 'All I'm saying is analogy. A precedent in your own nation.’
'Us, our nation is the Quebec nation. Manitoba is —’
'I'm saying that if he could get past the blind desire for harm against the U.S., your M. Fortier might be induced to see just
what it is he's proposing to let out of the cage.' His training was such that he could emery without watching the procedure. For
Steeply's most effective interviewing tactic was chis long looking down into the face without emotion of any kind. For Mar-athe
felt more uncomfortable not knowing whether Steeply believed a thing than if Steeply's emotion of face showed he did not
believe.
Then tonight, at the prospect of boiled hot dogs, the two newest residents had pulled the typically standard new-resident
princess-and-pea special-food-issue thing: the new-today girl Amy J. that just sits there on the vinyl couch shaking like an aspen
and having people bring her coffee and light her gaspers and with just short of a like HELPLESS VICTIM: PLEASE CODDLE
sign hung around her neck now claiming Red Dye #4 gives her 'cluster migraines' (Gately gives this girl like a week tops before
she's a vapor trail back to the Xanax199189; she has that look), and the weirdly-familiar-but-Southernish-sounding girl Joelle van 
D. with the past-believing bod and the linen face announcing she was a vegetarian and would 'rather eat a bug' than even get
downwind of a boiled frank. And but in an incredible move Pat M. has asked Gately, at like !8OOh., to blast down to the Purity
Supreme down in Allston and pick up some eggs and peppers so the two new delicate-tummied newcomers can make themselves
quiche or whatever. To Gately's way of thinking, this looks like catering to just the sort of classic addict's claim of special
uniqueness that it's supposed to be Pat's job to help break down. The Joelle v.D. girl seems to have like inordinate immediate
weight and pet-status with Pat, who's already making noises about exempting the girl from the menial-job requirement, and wants
Gately to look for some kind of weird Big Red Soda Water tonic for the girl, who's apparently still dehydrated. It's sure a long
way from making somebody chew feldspar. Gately has long since quit trying to figure Pat Monte-sian out.
It's a weird-weather evening, both thundering and spitting snow. Gately had finally become able to distinguish genuine
thunder from the Enfield sounds of ATHSCME fans and E.W.D. catapults, this after nine months of wearing a Goodwill rainslicker every morning on the 0430 Green Line.
One of the possible weak spots in Gately's AA recovery-program of rigorous personal honesty is that once he's jammed
himself into a black-as-water Aventura and watched the spoiler throb as he turns over the carnivorous engine, etc., he often finds
himself taking a little bit less of a direct route to a given Ennet-errand-site than he probably could. If he had to come right down to
the heart of the issue he likes to cruise around town in Pat's car. He's able to minimize the suspicious time any particular bit of
extra cruising adds to his errands by basically driving like a lunatic: ignoring lights, cutting people off, scoffing at One-Ways,
veering wildly in and out, making pedestrians drop things and lunge curbward, leaning on a horn that sounds more like an air-raid
siren. You'd think this would be judicially insane, in terms of not having a license and facing a no-license jail-bit anyway, but the
fact is that this sort of on-the-way-to-the-E.R.-with-a-passenger-in-labor driving doesn't usually raise so much as an eyebrow
among Boston's Finest, since they have more than enough other stuff to attend to, in these troubled times, and since everybody
else in metro Boston drives exactly the same socio-pathic way, including the Finest themselves, so that the only real risk Gately's
running is to his own sense of rigorous personal honesty. One cliche he's found especially serviceable w/r/t the Aventura issue is
that Recovery is about Progress Not Perfection. He likes to make a stately left onto Commonwealth and wait to get out of view of
the House's bay window and then produce what he imagines is a Rebel Yell and open her up down the serpentine tree-lined
boulevard of the Ave. as it slithers through bleak parts of Brighton and Allston and past Boston U. and toward the big triangular
CITGO neon sign and the Back Bay. He passes The Unexamined Life club, where he no longer goes, at !8OOh. already throbbing
with voices and bass under its ceaseless neon bottle, and then the great gray numbered towers of the Brighton Projects, where he
definitely no longer goes. Scenery starts to blur and distend at 70 kph. Comm. Ave. splits Enfield-Brighton-Allston from the
downscale north edge of Brookline on the right. He passes the meat-colored facades of anonymous Brookline tenements, Father &
Son Market, a dumpster-nest, Burger Kings, Blanchard's Liquors, an InterLace outlet, a land-barge alongside another dumpsternest, corner bars and clubs — Play It Again Sam's, Harper's Ferry, Bunratty's, Rathskeller, Father's First I and II — a CVS, two
InterLace outlets right next to each other, the ELLIS THE RIM MAN sign, the Marty's Liquors that they rebuilt like ants the week
after it burned down. He passes the hideous Riley's Roast Beef where the Allston Group gathers to pound coffee before
Commitments. The giant distant CITGO sign's like a triangular star to steer by. He's doing 75 k down a straightaway, keeping
abreast of an Inbound Green Line train ramming downhill on the slightly raised track that splits Comm.'s lanes into two and two.
He likes to match a Green train at 75 k all the way down Commonwealth's integral ç and see how close he can cut beating it across
the tracks at the Brighton Ave. split. It's a vestige. He'd admit it's like a dark vestige of his old low-self-esteem suicidal-thrill
behaviors. He doesn't have a license, it's not his car, it's a priceless art-object car, it's his boss's car, who he owes his life to and
sort of maybe loves, he's on a vegetable-run for shattered husks of newcomers just out of detox whose eyes are rolling around in
their heads. Has anybody mentioned Gately's head is square? It's almost perfectly square, massive and boxy and mysticetously
blunt: the head of somebody who looks like he likes to lower his head and charge. He used to let people open and close elevator
doors on his head, break things across his head. The 'Indestructible' in his childhood cognomen referred to the head. His left ear
looks a bit like a prizefighter's left ear. The head's nearly flat on top, so that his hair, long in back but with short Prince Valiant
bangs in front, looks sort of like a carpet remnant someone's tossed on the head and let slide slightly back but stay.200190 Nobody
that lives in these guano-spotted old brown buildings along Comm. with bars on the low floors' windows201191 ever goes inside,
it seems like. Even in thunder and little asterisks of snow, all kinds of olive Spanish and puke-white Irish are on every corner,
bullshitting and trying to look like they're just out there waiting for something important and drinking out of tallboys wrapped
tight in brown bags. A strange nod to discretion, the bags, wrapped so tight the outline of the cans can't be missed. A Shore boy,
Gately'd never used a paper bag around streetcorner cans: it's like a city thing. The Aventura can do 80 kph in third gear. The
engine never strains or whines, just eventually starts to sound hostile, is how you to know to hurt your hip and shift. The
Aventura's instrument panel looks more like the instrument panel of military aircraft. Something's always blinking and Indicating;
one of the blinking lights is supposed to tell you when to shift; Pat has told him to ignore the panel. He loves to make the driver'sside window go down and rest his left elbow on the jamb like a cabbie.
He's caught behind a bus whose big square ass is in both lanes and he can't get around it in time to beat the train across the
split, though, and the train crosses in front of the bus with a blast of its farty-sounding horn and what Gately sees as a kind of
swagger to its jiggle on the street-level track. He can see people bouncing around inside the train, holding on to straps and bars.
Below the split on Comm. it's Boston U., Kenmore and Fenway, Berklee School of Music. The CITGO sign's still off in the
distance ahead. You have to go a shocking long way to actually get to the big sign, which everybody says is hollow and you can
get up inside there and stick your head out in a pulsing neon sea but nobody's ever personally been up in there.
Arm out like a hack's arm, Gately blasts through B.U. country. As in backpack and personal-stereo and designer-fatigues
country. Soft-faced boys with backpacks and high hard hair and seamless foreheads. Totally lineless untroubled foreheads like
cream cheese or ironed sheets. All the storefronts here are for clothes or TP cartridges or posters. Gately's had lines in his big
forehead since he was about twelve. It's here he especially likes making people throw their packages in the air and dive for the
curb. B.U. girls who look like they've eaten nothing but dairy products their whole lives. Girls who do step-aerobics. Girls with
good combed long clean hair. Nonaddicted girls. The weird hopelessness at the heart of lust. Gately hasn't had sex in almost two
years. At the end of the Demerol he physically couldn't. Then in Boston AA they tell you not to, not in your first year clean, if you 
want to be sure to Hang In. But they like omit to tell you that after that year's gone by you're going to have forgotten how to even
talk to a girl except about Surrender and Denial and what it used to be like Out There in the cage. Gately's never had sex sober yet,
or danced, or held somebody's hand except to say the Our Father in a big circle. He's gone back to having wet dreams at age
twenty-nine.
Gately's found he can get away with smoking in the Aventura if he opens the passenger window too and makes sure no ashes
go anywhere. The cross-wind through the open car is brutal. He smokes menthols. He'd switched to menthols at four months clean
because he couldn't stand them and the only people he knew that smoked them were Niggers and he'd figured that if menthols
were the only gaspers he let himself smoke he'd be more likely to quit. And now he can't stand anything but menthols, which
Calvin T. says are even worse for you because they got little bits of asbestosy shit in the filter and whatnot. But Gately had been
living in the little male live-in Staffer's room down in the basement by the audio pay phone and tonic machines for like two
months before it turned out the Health guy came and inspected and said all the big pipes up at the room's ceiling were insulated in
ancient asbestos that was coming apart and asbestosizing the room, and Gately had to move all his shit and the furniture out into
the open basement and guys in white suits with oxygen tanks went in and stripped everything off the pipes and went over the
room with what smells like it was a flamethrower. Then hauled the decayed asbestos down to E.W.D. in a welded drum with a
skull on it. So Gately figures menthol gaspers are probably the least of his lung-worries at this point.
You can get on the Storrow 500202192 off Comm. Ave. below Kenmore via this long twiny overpass-shadowed road that
cuts across the Fens. Basically the Storrow 500 is an urban express route that runs along the bright-blue Chuck all the way along
Cambridge's spine. The Charles is vivid even under gloomy thundering skies. Gately has decided to buy the newcomers' omelette
stuff at Bread & Circus in Inman Square, Cambridge. It will explain delay, and will be a subtle nonverbal stab at unique dietary
requests in general. Bread & Circus is a socially hyperresponsible overpriced grocery full of Cambridge Green Party granolacrunchers, and everything's like micro-biotic and fertilized only with organic genuine llama-shit, etc. The Aventura's low driver's
seat and huge windshield afford your thinking man maybe a little more view of the sky than he'd like. The sky is low and gray and
loose and seems to hang. There's something baggy about the sky. It's impossible to tell whether snow is still actually falling or
whether just a little snow that's already fallen is blowing around. To get to Inman Square you veer over three lines to get off the
Storrow 500 on Prospect St.'s Ramp of Death and slalom between the sinkholes and go right, north, and take Prospect through
Central Square and all the way north through heavy ethnicity up almost into Somerville.
Inman Square, too, is someplace Gately rarely goes anymore, because it's in Cambridge's Little Lisbon, heavily Portuguese,
which means also Brazilians in the antiquated bellbottoms and flare-collared leisure suits they've never let go of, and where there
are disco-ized Brazilians can cocaine and narcotics ever be far away. The district's Brazilians are another solid rationale for
driving at excessive rates of speed, for Gately. Plus Gately's solidly pro-American, and north of Central Square's clot and snarl
Prospect St.'s a copless straight shot through eerily alien lands: billboards in Spanish, plaster madonnas in fenced front yards,
intricately latticed grape arbors looking seized and clutched at, now, by networks of finger-thick bare woody vines; ads for lottery
tickets in what isn't quite Spanish, all the houses gray, more bright plastic madonnas in nunnish getups on peeling front porches,
stores and bodegas and low-suspension cars triple-parked, an all-out full-cast creche-type scene hung from a second-floor balcony,
clotheslines hanging between houses, gray houses in rows squished right up next to each other in long rows with tiny toy-strewn
yards, and tall, the houses, like being squished in from either side distends them. A couple Canadian and Nuck-owned stores
mashed in here and there, between the propinquous Spanish three-deckers, looking subjugated and exiled and etc. The street shitty
with litter and holes. Indifferent drainage. Big-assed girls stuffed like stuffed sausage into cigarette jeans in always trios in the
twilight with that weird blond-brown hair Portuguese girls dye their hair to. A store in good old English advertising Chickens
Fresh Killed Daily. Ryle's Jazz Club's upscale pub-type bar, guys in tweed caps and briar pipes in mouths at angles taking all day
on a pint of warm stout. Gately's always thought dark beer tasted like cork. An intriguing single-decker medical-looking bldg.
with a sort of tympanum over the smoked-glass door with an ad that says COMPLETE DESTRUCTION OF CONFIDENTIAL
RECORDS that Gately's always wanted to poke the old head in and have a look at what on earth they might be up to in there.
Little Portuguese markets with food in there you can't even tell what species it's from. Once at a Portuguese take-out at Inman
Square's east end a coke-whore tried to get Gately to eat something that had tentacles. He had a sub instead. Gately now simply
blows through Inman, heading for B&C over on the upscale northwest side nearer to Harvard, every light suddenly green and
kind, the Aventura's ten-cylinder backwash raising an odd little tornado of discarded ad-leaflets and glassine bags and corporatesnack bags and a syringe's husk and filterless gasper-butts and general crud and a flattened Millennial Fizzy cup, like from a stand,
which whirls in his exhaust, the tornado of waste does, moving behind him as the last pearly curve of the sun through baggy
clouds is eaten by the countless Sancta Something and then whitewashed WASP church roofs' finials farther west, nearer Harvard,
at 60 k but sustained in its whirl by the strong west breeze as the last of the sun goes and a blue-black shadow quietly fills the
canyon of Prospect, whose streetlights don't work for the same municipal reasons the street is in such crummy repair; and one
piece of the debris Gately's raised and set spinning behind him, a thick flattened M.F. cup, caught by a sudden gust as it falls,
twirling, is caught at some aerodyne's angle and blown spinning all the way to the storefront of one 'Antitoi Enter-tainent'203193
on the street's east side, and hits, its waxed bottom making a clunk, hits the glass pane in the locked front shop door with a sound
for all the world like the rap of a knuckle, so that in a minute a burly bearded thoroughly Canadian figure in one of those
Canadianly inevitable checked-flannel shirts appears out of the dim light in the shop's back room and wipes its mouth on first one
sleeve then the other and opens up the front door with a loud hinge-squeak and looks around a bit, viz. for who knocked, looking
not overly pleased at being interrupted at what his sleeves betray as a foreign supper, and also, below that harried expression,
looking edgy and emotionally pale, which might explain the X of small-arms ammo-belts across his checked chest and the rather
absurdly large .44 revolver tucked and straining in the waistband of his jeans. Lucien Antitoi's equally burly partner and brother
Bertraund — currently still back there in the little back room where they sleep on cots with serious weaponry underneath and
listen to CQBC radio and scheme and smoke killer U.S.A. hydroponic dope and cut and mount glass and sew flags and cook over
sterno in L.L. Bean upscale survivalist cookware, he's back there eating Habitant soupe aux pois and bread with Bread & Circus
molasses and some sort of oblong blue-veined patties of a meat your thinking American wouldn't even want to try to identify —
Bertraund's forever laughing in Québecois and telling Lucien he looks forward with humorous anticipation to the day Lucien 
forgets to check the big Colt's safety before he jams it into the waistband of his pants and goes lumbering around the shop in his
hobnail boots making every reflective and blown-glass item in the place tinkle and clink. The unauto-matic revolver, it is a
souvenir of affiliation. Once or twice doing work of affiliation with the Separatist/Anti-O.N.A.N. F.L.Q., they are for the most
part a not very terrifying insurgent cell, the Antitois, more or less loners, self-contained, a monomitotic cell, eccentric and
borderline-incompetent, protected gently by their late regional patron M. Guillaume DuPlessis of the Gaspé Peninsula, spurned by
F.L.Q. after DuPlessis's assassination and also ridiculed by the more malignant anti-O.N.A.N. cells. Betraund Antitoi is in charge,
the brains of the outfit, pretty much by default, since Lucien Antitoi is one of the very few natives of Notre Rat Pays ever who
cannot understand French, just never caught on, and so has very limited veto-powers, even when it comes to such harebrained
Bertraund-schemes as hanging a sword-stemmed fleur-de-lis flag from the nose of a U.S.A. Civic War hero's Boyl-ston St. statue
when it would simply be cut down by bored O.N.A.N.ite chiens-courants gendarmes the next morning, or taping bricks to the
return-postage-paid solicitation cards of Sans-Christe Gentle's C.U.S.P. party, or fashioning Astroturf doormats with a likeness of
Sans-Christe Gentle on them and distributing them gratis to home-supply outlets throughout their insurgency-grid — puerile and
on the whole rather sad little gestures that M. DuPlessis would have interdicted with a merry laugh and a friendly hand on
Bertraund's bowling ball of a shoulder. But M. DuPlessis had been martyred, an assassination only O.N.A.N. would be stupid
enough to believe Command would be stupid enough to believe was merely an unfortunate burglary-and-mucus mishap. And
Bertraund Antitoi, after DuPlessis's death and F.L.Q.'s rejection left to his own conceptual devices for the first time since their allterrain vehicle was packed with quality Van Buskirk of Montreal exotic reflective glasswares and glass-blowing hardware and
broom and ordnance and survivalist cookware and hip postcards and black-lather gag soap and cheesy old low-demand InterLace
3rd-Grid cartridges and hand-buzzers and fraudulent but seductive X-ray spectacles and they were sent through the remains of
Provincial Autoroute 557 U.S.A. 91 in protective garb they'd shed and buried just south of the Convexity's Bellow's Falls VT
O.N.A.N.ite checkpoint, sent as a kind of primitive two-celled organism to establish a respectable front and abet more malignant
cells and to insurge and terrorize in small sad anti-experialist ways, now Bertraund has shown a previously DuPlessis-restrained
flair for stupid wastes of time, including this branching out into harmful pharmaceuticals as an attack on the fiber of New New
England's youth — as if the U.S.A. youth were not already more than fiberless enough, in Lucien's mute opinion. Bertraund had
actually been credulous enough with a wrinkled long-haired person of advanced years in a paisley Nehru jacket also of great age
and a puzzling cap with a skeleton playing at the violin emblazoned upon it, on the front, wearing also the most stupid-appearing
small round wire spectacles with salmon-colored lenses, and also continually forming the letter of V with fingers of his hand and
directing this letter of V at Bertraund and Lucien — Bertraund felt the gesture was a subtle affirmation of solidarity with patriotic
Struggle everywhere and stood for Victoire, but Lucien suspected a U.S.A. obscenity laughingly flashed at persons who would not
comprehend its insult, just as one of Lucien's sadistic école-spéciale tutors back in Ste.-Anne-des-Monts had spent weeks in
Second Form teaching Lucien to say 'Va cbier, putain!' which he (the tutor) claimed meant 'Look Maman I can speak French and
thus finally express my love and devotion to you' — Bertraund had been starry-eyed enough to agree to barter the person an
antique blue lava-lamp and a lavender-tinged apothecary's mirror for eighteen unexceptional-looking and old lozenges the longhaired old person had claimed in a jumble of West-Swiss-accented French were 650 mg. of a trop-formidable harmful
pharmaceutical no longer available and guaranteed to make one's most hair-raising psychedelic experience look like a day on the
massage-tables of a Basel hot-springs resort, throwing in as well a kitchen-can waste bag filled with crusty old mossy boot-andleg Read-Only cartridges, sans any labels, that appeared to have been stored in a person's rear yard and then run through a gaseous
dryer of clothes, as if Lucien did not have already more than plenty of crusty old cartridges which Bertraund removed from InterLace dumpsters or was cheated in barters for and brought back to the shop for Lucien's job to view and label and organize the
cartridges for storing and were never bought except the occasional cartridge in Portuguese, or porno-graphical. And the aged
person had flopped off in his cap and sandals with a lamp and an apothecary's mirror to which Lucien had been personally much
attached, particularly to the lavender mirror, flashing this covert obscenity of V and with smiles urging the brothers to write their
name and address on the palm of their hands with the drenching-sweat-proof ink before they dropped any of the so-called 'tu-saisquoi,' if they were going to be the persons who ingested these lozenges.
The front door squeaks loudly of the hinge and Lucien recloses it and drives the bolt home: squeak. The upper hinge squeaks
no matter the oil, as the shop drives Lucien crazy by becoming again dusty each time the door is opened to the street's grit, and
from the dust of the alley with so many dumpsters behind the back room which Bertraund refuses not to open the iron service door
of, to spit. The squeak functions in the place of a customer-bell, however. The front knock of the closed door clearly is once again
big-bottomed Brazilian children playing at unamusing pranks. He does not pull the window shade, but he does grab the stout
trusty homemade broom he sweeps the shop all day with and stands there, chewing anxiously the nail of a thumb, looking out.
Lucien Antitoi enjoys standing at the door's glass pane and looking blankly out at the light snow of dust bright against the blueshadowed twilight eating the American street outside. The door continues to squeak faintly even after he's driven home the bolt.
He can stand here happily for hours, leaning on the sturdy broom he'd carved from a snow-snapped limb as a boy during the
Gaspé's terrible blizzards of Quebec of a.d. 1993 and bound broom-corn onto and sharpened the tip of, as a sort of domestic
weapon, even then, before O.N.A.N.ite experialist impost made any sort of struggle or sacrifice remotely necessary, as a silent
boy, keenly interested in weapons and ammunitions of all the different sorts. Which along with the size thing helped with the
teasing. He could and does stand here for hours, complexly backlit, transparently reflected, looking at alien traffic and commerce.
He has that rare spinal appreciation for beauty in the ordinary that nature seems to bestow on those who have no native words for
what they see. 'Squeak.' The visual bulk of the shoproom of Antitoi Entertainent is devoted to glass: they have set curved and
planar mirrors at studied angles whereby each part of the room is reflected in every other part, which flusters and disorients
customers and keeps haggling to a minimum. In a sort of narrow fashioned corridor behind one gauntlet of angled glass is their
stock of gags, notions, ironic postcards, and unironic sentimental greeting cards as well.204194 Flanking another are shelf after
shelf of used and bootleg InterLace and independent and even homemade digital entertainment cartridges, in no discernible order,
since Bertraund handles acquisition and Lucien's in charge of inventory and order. Nevertheless, once he's viewed it even once, he
can identify any used cartridge in stock and will point it out to the rare customer with the sharpened whitewood tip of his
homemade broom. Some of the cartridges do not even have labels, they're so obscure or illicit. To keep up with Bertraund, Lucien 
must watch new acquisitions on the small cheap viewer beside the manual cash register as he sweeps the shop with the imposing
broom he has loved and kept sharpened and polished and floor-fuzz-free since adolescence, and which he sometimes imagines he
is conversing with, very quietly, telling it to va chier putain in tones surprisingly gentle and kind for such a large terrorist. The
viewer's screen has something wrong with its Definition and there is a wobble that makes all cartridge performers on the left
section of it appear to have Tourette's syndrome. The pornographical cartridges he finds nonsensical and views them in Fast
Forward to get them over with as quickly as possible. So but he knows all but the most recent acquisitions' colors and visual plots,
but some still have no labels. He still has not gotten to see and shelve many of the massive assortment Bertraund lugged home and
out of the all-terrain vehicle in Saturday's chilling rain, several old exercise and film cartridges a small Back Bay
TelEntertainment outlet was discarding as outdated. Also there were one or two Bertraund claimed he had picked up literally on
the street downtown from the site of the flag-draped Shaw statue from untended commercial displays that stupidly contained detachable cartridges anyone could detach and lug home in the rain. The displays' cartridges he had immediately viewed, for though
they were unlabelled save for a commercialed slogan in tiny raised letters of IL NE faut plus qu'on pursuive LE BONHEUR —
which to Lucien Antitoi signified zilch — each was stamped also with a circle and arc that resembled a disembodied smile, which
made Lucien himself smile and pop them in right away, to find to his disappointment and impatience with Bertraund that they
were blank, without even HD static, just as the old rude person's bartered tapes he had removed from the waste bag of their
storage for viewing had proved, blank beyond static, to the satisfaction of Lucien's disgust.205195 Through the door's window,
passing headlights illumine a disabled person in a wheelchair laboring along the rutted walk outside the Portuguese grocery opposite Antitoi Entertainent's storefront. Lucien forgets he was eating bread with upscale molasses and soupe aux pois; he forgets he
is eating the moment the food's taste leaves his mouth. His mind is usually as clean and transparent as anything in the shop. He
sweeps a little, absently, in front of the pane, watching his face's reflection bob against the blackening night outside. Light
snowfall almost is bouncing back and forth between sides of Prospect's canyon. The broom's bristles say 'Hush, hush.' The tinand-static sound of CQBC has been silenced, he can hear Bertraund moving about rattling some pans and dropping one, and
Lucien works his sharp-pointed broom against the chipped Portuguese tile of the nonwood floor. He is a gifted domestic, the best
125-kilo domestic ever to wear a beard and suspenders of small-arms ordnance. The shop, crammed to the acoustic-tile ceiling and
dustless, resembles a junkyard for anal retentives. He bobs and sweeps, and bobbing shafts of mirror-light gleam and dance,
backed by night, in the locked door's pane. The figure in the wheelchair still labors at his wheels, but appears, queerly, still to be
where he was before, in front of the Portuguese grocery. Moving closer to the pane, so that his face's transparent image fills the
glass and he can now see clearly beyond it, Lucien sees that what it is is it's a different figure in a different wheelchair from the
one before, this new figure's face also downcasted and queerly masked, laboring around the sidewalk's jagged holes; and that not
too far behind this seated figure is yet another figure in a wheelchair, coming this way; and as Lucien Antitoi twists his head and
presses his hairy cheek to the glass of the squeaking door — except but now how can a door's upper hinge loudly squeak when the
door is tightly closed and the bolt driven home with the solid snick of a .44 bullet slipping home in a revolver's chamber? —
looking due southeast up Prospect, Lucien can see the variegated glints of passing low-chassis headlights off a whole long singlefile column of polished metal wheels stolidly turning, being turned by swarthy hands in fingerless wheelchair-gloves. 'Squeak.'
'Squeak.' Lucien has been hearing squeaks for several minutes from what he had naively like the babe assumed was the door's
upper hinge. This hinge does truly squeak.206196 But Lucien now hears whole systems of squeaks, slow and soft but not stealthy
squeaks, the squeaks of weighted wheelchairs moving slow, implacable, calm and businesslike and yet menacing, moving with the
indifference of things at the very top of the food-chain; and, now, turning, heart loud in his head, can now see, in the carefully
placed display mirrors' angles, spikes of light off rotary metal rotating at a height about waist-level to a huge standing man w/
broom clutched to barrel chest, there are great quiet numbers of persons in wheelchairs moving in the room with him, in the
shoproom, moving calmly into position behind waist-high glass counters full of wacky notions. The street outside is flanked on
both sidewalks by defiles of wheelchaired, blanket-lapped persons whose faces are obscured by what look like large and snowdotted leaves, and the shades of the Portuguese grocery have been drawn and a ROPAS sign hung by a circumflex of twine in the
pane of the front door. Wheelchair Assassins. Lucien has been taught the glyph of a profiled wheelchair with an enormous bonecrossed skull below. It is the worst possible scenario; it is worse than O.N.A.N.ite gendarmes by far: A.F.R. Whimpering to his
broom, Lucien disengages the mammoth Colt from his pants and finds that a length of black thread from the denim panel that
surrounds his zipper has gotten looped around the barrel's sight-blade and comes ripping out with a long high squeak from the
pants with the convulsive force of his drawing the weapon, so that his pants split open alongside the zipper and the force of his
mammoth Canadian gut extends the tear all up and down the front so that the snap unsnaps and the jeans burst open and fall
immediately to his ankles, puddling around his hobnail boots, revealing red union-suit underwear beneath and forcing Lucien to
take tiny undignified shuffling steps frantically toward the back room as he tries with the thread-snagged Colt to cover every piece
of fragmented waist-high motion the mirror's shards of light reveal in the shoproom while scuttling as fast as the fallen jeans allow
toward the back room to alert, nonverbally, using the sort of demon-eyed tongue-protruded neck-corded tortured rigid bug-eyed
face a small child makes when he is playing Le Monstre, to alert Bertraund that They have come, not Bostonian gendarmes or
white-suited O.N.A.N.ite chiens but They, Them, Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, A.F.R.s, the ones who come always in the
twilight, implacably squeaking, and cannot be reasoned with or bargained with, feel no pity or remorse, or fear (except a rumored
fear of steep hills), and now they're all in here all over the shoproom like faceless rats, the devil's own hamsters, moving with
placid squeaks just beyond view of the shop's mirrored peripheries, regally serene; and Lucien, with the big broom in one hand
and the thread-webbed Colt in the other, tries to cover his little-stepped flight with a thunderous shot that goes high and shatters an
angled full-length planar door-mirror, spraying anodized glass and replacing the reflection of a blanket-lapped A.F.R. wearing a
plastic fleur-de-lis-with-sword-stem mask on his face with a jagged stelliform hole, with glittered shards and glass-dust in the air
all over the place and the unperturbable squeaks — 'squeak squeak squeak squeak,' it is awful — sounding right through clatter
and tinkle and frantic hobnailed bootfalls, and through the flying glass, aiming every which way behind him, Lucien bursts almost
falling through the curtains, bug-eyed and corded and webbed in thread, to alert Bertraund facially that the shot had signified
A.F.R.s and to break out the sub-cot weaponry and prepare to bunker for encirclement, only to horrifically see the shop's rear
service door standing agape in a gritty breeze and Bertraund still at the card table they use for their supper — used — with pea 
soup and troubling meat-patty still on his ration-tray, sitting, squinting piratically straight ahead, with a railroad spike in his eye.
The spike, its tip is both domed and squared, also rusty, and it protrudes from the socket of his brother's former blue right eye.
There are maybe about six or nine A.F.R. here in the drafty back room, silent as ever, seated with motionless wheels, flannel
blankets obscuring an absence of the legs, also of course flannel-shirted, masked in synthetic-blend heraldic-flag irises with
flaming transperçant stems at the chin and slits for eyes and round utter holes for mouths — all except for one particular of the
A.F.R., in an unpretentious sportcoat and tie and the worst mask of all, a plain yellow polyresin circle with an obscenely simple
smily-face in thin black lines, who is speculatively dipping a baguette's heel in Bertraund's metal soup-cup and popping the bread
into his mask's mouth's cheery hole with an elegantly cerise-gloved hand. Lucien, staring goggle-eyed at the only brother he's ever
had, is standing very still, face still unwittingly teratoid, the broom at an angle in his hand, the Colt dangling at his side, and the
long black zipper-thread he's pulled from his zipper caught somehow now and wrapped around his thumb and hung trailing on the
spotless floor with slack between gun and thumb, his pants woppsed around his red woolen ankles, when he hears a quick efficient
squeak and feels from behind a tremendous wallop on the backs of his knees that drives him down to his knees on the floor, the
.44 bucking as it discharges by reflex into the wood-pattern Portuguese tile, so that he's down in a supplicant's posture on his red
knees, encircled by fau-teuils des rollents, still holding his broom but now down near the broom-corn's wire binding; his face is
now of equal height to the yellow empty smiling chewing face of the A.F.R. as this leader — everything about him radiates
pitiless and remorseless command — rotates a right wheel to bring himself about and with three squeakless rotations has his
hideous blank black smile within cm. of Lucien Antitoi's face. The A.F.R. bids him "« soir, 'sieur,' which means nothing to Lucien
Antitoi, whose chin has caved and lips are quivering, though his eyes are not what you would call jacklighted or terrified eyes.
Lucien's brother's pierced and rigid profile is visible over the leader's left shoulder. The man still has some soup-sopped bread in
his glove's left hand.
'Malheureusement, ton collégue est décédé. II faisait une excellente soupe aux pois.' He looks amused. 'Non? Ou c'était toi,
faisait-elle?' The leader leans forward in the graceful way people who always sit can lean, revealing wiry hair and a small and
strangely banal bald-spot, and gently removes the hot revolver from Lucien's hand. He engages the safety without having to look
at the revolver. Spanish-language music is thinly audible from somewhere up above the alley. The A.F.R. looks warmly into
Lucien's eyes for a moment, then with a professionally vicious backhanded motion pegs the gun at Bertraund's profiled head,
striking Bertraund in the side of the head; and Bertraund rocks away and then toward and forward and slides forward-left off the
rickety camping-chair and with a ghastly and moist thump comes to rest chairless but upright, his left hip on the floor, the eye's
sturdy railroad spike's thick tip caught on the edge of the card table and tilted up as the table tilts downward and cookery slides
nautically off and onto the tile as the weight of Bertraund's large upper body is somehow held by the spike and tilted table. His
brother's face is now turned away from Lucien, and his overall posture is of some person crumpled with hilarity or regret, maybe
beer — a man overcome. Lucien, who never has apprehended what the safety-switch is or where, thinks it a small miracle that the
Colt .44 with its tail of thread does not discharge again as it wangs off Bertraund's temple and hits the slick tile and slides from
sight under a cot. Somewhere in the tall house next door a toilet flushes, and the back room's pipes sing. The black thread has
remained snagged on the Colt's sight-blade and in the middle caught somewhere on Bertraund's ear; the other remains also attached to Lucien by a persistent hangnail on his well-gnawed right thumb, so that a black filament still connects the knelt Lucien
to his hidden revolver, with a surreal angled turn at the ear of his overcome frère.
The happy-masked A.F.R. leader, politely ignoring the fact that Lucien's sphincter has failed them all in the small room, after
complimenting them both on the craftsmanship of some of the front's blown-glass notions, pulls his velvet gloves tighter and tells
Lucien that it has fallen to him, Lucien, to direct their attention without delay to an entertainment item they have come here to
acquire. And require, this Copy-Capable item. They are here on business, ne pas plaisanter, this is not the social call. They will
acquire this thing and then iront paître. They have no wish to disturb anyone's repast, but the A.F.R. fears that it is fearfully urgent
and key, this Master item they now require without delay or dissembly from Lucien — entend-il?
The vigor with which Lucien shakes his head at the leader's meaningless sounds can't help but be misinterpreted, probably.
Does this shop have the 585-rpm-drive TP somewhere about here, for running Masters?
Same vigorous negative-looking denial of comprehension.
Can a mask's drawn smile widen?
From the front of the shop come whole symphonies of squeaks and low trilled r's and the sounds of a densely packed area
being swiftly dismantled and searched. A few legless thick-armed men climb the shelves by hand and hang up near the dropceiling by special climbing equipment and suction-cups fitted to their stumps, brown arms busy in the upper shelving, dismantling
and searching upside-down like obscene industrious bugs. The outline of Lucien's quivering mouth is being traced by a mammothtorso'd A.F.R. in a Jesuitical collar who holds Lucien's own trusty broom inverted and leans in his chair to caress Lucien's full
Gaspé-provincial lips (the lips are quivering) with the handle's wicked tip, which is sharply white, whittled free of the sienna glaze
of broomstick-varnish that patinas the rest of the big stick's length. Lucien's lips are quivering not so much from fear — although
there is certainly fear — but not from fear so much as in an attempt to form words.207197 Words that are not and can never be
words are sought by Lucien here through what he guesses to be the maxillofacial movements of speech, and there is a childlike
pathos to the movements that perhaps the rigid-grinned A.F.R. leader can sense, perhaps that is why his sigh is sincere, his
complaint sincere when he complains that what will follow will be inutile, Lucien's failure to assist will be inutile, there will be no
point serviced, there are several dozen highly trained and motivated wheelchaired personnel here who will find whatever they seek
and more, anyhow, perhaps it is sincere, the Gallic shrug and fatigue of the voice through the leader's mask-hole, as Lucien's
leonine head is tilted back by a hand in his hair and his mouth opened wide by callused fingers that appear overhead and around
the sides of his head from behind and jack his writhing mouth open so wide that the tendons in his jaws tear audibly and Lucien's
first sounds are reduced from howls to a natal gargle as the pale wicked tip of the broom he loves is inserted, the wood pineytasting then white tasteless pain as the broom is shoved in and abruptly down by the big and collared A.F.R., thrust farther in
rhythmically in strokes that accompany each syllable in the wearily repeated 'In-U-Tile' of the technical interviewer, down into
Lucien's wide throat and lower, small natal cries escaping around the brown-glazed shaft, the strangled impeded sounds of
absolute aphonia, the landed-fish gasps that accompany speechlessness in a dream, the cleric-collared A.F.R. driving the broom 
home now to half its length, up on his stumps to get downward leverage as the fibers that protect the esophagal terminus resist and
then give with a crunching pop and splat of red that bathes Lucien's teeth and tongue and makes of itself in the air a spout, and his
gargled sounds now sound drowned; and behind fluttering lids the aphrasiac half-cellular insurgent who loves only to sweep and
dance in a clean pane sees snow on the round hills of his native Gaspé, pretty curls of smoke from chimneys, his mother's linen
apron, her kind red face above his crib, homemade skates and cider-steam, Chic-Choc lakes seen stretching away from the CapChat hillside they skied down to Mass, the red face's noises he knows from the tone are tender, beyond crib and rimed window
Gaspésie lake after lake after lake lit up by the near-Arctic sun and stretching out in the southeastern distance like chips of broken
glass thrown to scatter across the white Chic-Choc country, gleaming, and the river Ste.-Anne a ribbon of light, unspeakably pure;
and as the culcate handle navigates the inguinal canal and sigmoid with a queer deep full hot tickle and with a grunt and shove
completes its passage and forms an obscene erectile bulge in the back of his red sopped Johns, bursting then through the wool and
puncturing tile and floor at a police-lock's canted angle to hold him upright on his knees, completely skewered, and as the
attentions of the A.F.R.s in the little room are turned from him to the shelves and trunks of the Antitois' sad insurgents' lives, and
Lucien finally dies, rather a while after he's quit shuddering like a clubbed muskie and seemed to them to die, as he finally sheds
his body's suit, Lucien finds his gut and throat again and newly whole, clean and unimpeded, and is free, catapulted home over
fans and the Convexity's glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed callto-arms in all the world's well-known tongues.
PRE-DAWN, 1 MAY Y.D.A.U. OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON AZ U.S.A., STILL
M. Hugh Steeply spoke quietly, after a prolonged silence of both operatives alone with their thoughts, upon this mountain.
Steeply faced still out, standing on the outcropping's lip, bare arms around him for some warmth, his dress's soiled back to
Marathe. Around the bonfire, far out below upon the desert floor, rotated a ring of smaller and palsied fires, persons carrying
torches or fires.
'Do you ever think of viewing it?’
Marathe did not reply. It was not impossible that the young persons carrying the torches were dancing.
'Whether or not the A.F.R. ever even recover this alleged Master copy from the DuPlessis burglary,' Steeply said quietly;
'still, you guys have a Read-Only copy, at least one, you've told us, no?’
'Yes.’
'Nobody has this mysterious Master, but we've all got Read-Only's — all the anti-O.N.A.N. cells have at least one Read-Only,
we're pretty sure.’
Marathe said, 'M. Brullîme, he tells Fortier he thinks the CPCP of Alberta do not have any copy.’
'Fuck the Albertans,' Steeply said. 'Who's worried about the Albertans? The Albertans' idea of a blow to the U.S. plexus is
they blow up rangeland in Montana. They're wackos.’
'I have not been tempted,' Marathe said.
Steeply's sound appeared as if he did not hear. 'We have more than one. Copies. Sure we can assume your boys know this.’
Marathe dryly laughed. 'Confiscated from razzles of Berkeley, Boston. But who can know what is on them? Who can study
the Entertainment while detached?’
Steeply's scratch on the arm had become overnight puffed, and there were cross-hatches of his scratching. 'But just between
us two, though. Tête to tête. You've never been even slightly tempted? I mean personally. You the person. Wife's condition be
damned. Kids be damned. Just for a second, slip into wherever you guys keep it and load it and have a quick look? To see what's
all the fuss, the irresistible pull of the thing?' He pivoted on one heel and looked, and cocked his head in a way of cynicism that
seemed to Marathe consummately U.S.A.
Marathe coughed softly into his fist. His own dead father's Kenbeck pacemaker, it had been damaged accidentally by a
videophonic pulse of waves. This from a telephone call from the telephone company, a video call, advertising the videophony. M.
Marathe had picked up the ringing telephone; the videophonic pulse, it had come; M. Marathe had fallen, still holding a telephone
Rémy had never been instructed to answer first, to check. The advertisement, which was recorded, played its audible portion out
upon the floor beside his father's ear, audible between Marathe's mother's cries.
Steeply raised and lowered himself on his shoes' toes. 'Us, Rod the God Tine's got Tom Flatto's I/O boys running tests around
the clock. 24-dash-7.’
'Flatto, Thomas M., B.S.S. director of Input/Output testing, resident of Falls Church's community, a widower with three
children, one child with cystic fibrosis.’
'Funny as an impacted follicle, Rémy. And no doubt the insurgent cells are all each doing work of your own, you guys with
your own Dr. Brullent or whomever, trying to find out what the Entertainment's appeal could be without sacrificing any of your
own.' Steeply again turned; he did this for emphasis. 'Or maybe you're willingly sacrificing your own. Yes? Willing volunteers in
chairs. Sacrificing self for the Greater and all that. By adult choice and all that. Just for the sake of causing us harm. Wouldn't
even want to think about how the A.F.R.'s conducting tests of the thing.’
'C'est ça.’
'But not so much for content,' Steeply said. 'Input/Output's exhaustive testing. Flatto's got them working on conditions and
environments for possible nonlethal viewing. Certain departments in Virginia, the developing theory is that it's holography.’
'The samizdat.’
'The filmmaker'd been a cutting-edge optics man. Holography, diffraction. He'd used holography a couple times before, and
in the context of a kind of filmed assault on the viewer. He was of the Hostile School or some such shit.’
'Also a maker of reflecting panels for thermal weapons, and an important Annulateur, also, and amasser of the capital from
opticals, before hostility and film,' Marathe said.
Steeply embraced himself. 'Tom Flatto's personal theory is the appeal's got something to do with density. The visual
compulsion. Theory's that with a really sophisticated piece of holography you'd get the neural density of an actual stage play 
without losing the selective realism of the viewer-screen. That the density plus the realism might be too much to take. Dick Desai
in Data Production wants to go in with ALGOL and see if there are Fourier Equations in the root code's ALGOL, which would
signify holo-grammatical activity going on.’
'M. Fortier finds the theories of content irrelevant.’
Steeply cocked his head sometimes in a way that was both feminine and birdlike. He did this most often during silences. Also
he again removed something small from his painted lip. Also he spoke with more feminine inflection. Marathe committed all this
to his memories.
WINTER, B.S. 1963, SEPULVEDA CA
I remember208198 I was eating lunch and reading something dull by Bazin when my father came into the kitchen and made
himself a tomato juice beverage and said that as soon as I was finished he and my mother needed my help in their bedroom. My
father had spent the morning at the commercial studio and was still all in white, with his wig with its rigid white parted hair, and
hadn't yet removed the television makeup that gave his real face an orange cast in daylight. I hurried up and finished and rinsed
my dishes in the sink and proceeded down the hall to the master bedroom. My mother and father were both in there. The master
bedroom's valance curtains and the heavy lightproof curtain behind them were all slid back and the Venetian blinds up, and the
daylight was very bright in the room, the decor of which was white and blue and powder-blue.
My father was bent over my parents' large bed, which was stripped of bedding all the way down to the mattress protector. He
was bent over, pushing down on the bed's mattress with the heels of his hands. The bed's sheets and pillows and powder-blue
coverlet were all in a pile on the carpet next to the bed. Then my father handed me his tumbler of tomato juice to hold for him and
got all the way on top of the bed and knelt on it, pressing down vigorously on the mattress with his hands, putting all his weight
into it. He bore down hard on one area of the mattress, then let up and pivoted slightly on his knees and bore down with equal
vigor on a different area of the mattress. He did this all over the bed, sometimes actually walking around on the mattress on his
knees to get at different areas of the mattress, then bearing down on them. I remember thinking the bearing-down action looked
very much like emergency compression of a heart patient's chest. I remember my father's tomato juice had grains of pepperish
material floating on the surface. My mother was standing at the bedroom window, smoking a long cigarette and looking at the
lawn, which I had watered before I ate lunch. The uncovered window faced south. The room blazed with sunlight.
'Eureka,' my father said, pressing down several times on one particular spot.
I asked whether I could ask what was going on.
'Goddamn bed squeaks,' he said. He stayed on his knees over the one particular spot, bearing down on it repeatedly. There
was now a squeaking sound from the mattress when he bore down on the spot. My father looked up and over at my mother next to
the bedroom window. 'Do you or do you not hear that?' he said, bearing down and letting up. My mother tapped her long cigarette
into a shallow ashtray she held in her other hand. She watched my father press down on the squeaking spot.
Sweat was running in dark orange lines down my father's face from under his rigid white professional wig. My father served
for two years as the Man from Glad, representing what was then the Glad Flaccid Plastic Receptacle Co. of Zanesville, Ohio, via a
California-based advertising agency. The tunic, tight trousers, and boots the agency made him wear were also white.
My father pivoted on his knees and swung his body around and got off the mattress and put his hand at the small of his back
and straightened up, continuing to look at the mattress.
'This miserable cock-sucking bed your mother felt she needed to hang on to and bring with us out here for quote sentimental
value has started squeaking,' my father said. His saying 'your mother' indicated that he was addressing himself to me. He held his
hand out for his tumbler of tomato juice without having to look at me. He stared darkly down at the bed. 'It's driving us fucking
nuts.’
My mother balanced her cigarette in her shallow ashtray and laid the ashtray on the windowsill and bent over from the foot of
the bed and bore down on the spot my father had isolated, and it squeaked again.
'And at night this one spot here we've isolated and identified seems to spread and metastisate until the whole Goddamn bed's
replete with squeaks.' He drank some of his tomato juice. 'Areas that gibber and squeak,' my father said, 'until we both feel as if
we're being eaten by rats.' He felt along the line of his jaw. 'Boiling hordes of gibbering squeaking ravenous rapacious rats,' he
said, almost trembling with irritation.
I looked down at the mattress, at my mother's hands, which tended to flake in dry climates. She carried a small bottle of
moisturizing lotion at all times.
My father said, 'And I have personally had it with the aggravation.' He blotted his forehead on his white sleeve.
I reminded my father that he'd mentioned needing my help with something. At that age I was already taller than both my
parents. My mother was taller than my father, even in his boots, but much of her height was in her legs. My father's body was
denser and more substantial.
My mother came around to my father's side of the bed and picked the bedding up off the floor. She started folding the sheets
very precisely, using both arms and her chin. She stacked the folded bedding neatly on top of her dresser, which I remember was
white lacquer.
My father looked at me. 'What we need to do here, Jim, is take the mattress and box spring off the bed frame under here,' my
father said, 'and expose the frame.' He took time out to explain that the bed's bottom mattress was hard-framed and known
uniformly as a box spring. I was looking at my sneakers and making my feet alternately pigeon-toed and then penguin-toed on the
bedroom's blue carpet. My father drank some of his tomato juice and looked down at the edge of the bed's metal frame and felt
along the outline of his jaw, where his commercial studio makeup ended abruptly at the turtleneck collar of his white commercial
tunic.
'The frame on this bed is old,' he told me. 'It's probably older than you are. Right now I'm thinking the thing's bolts have
maybe started coming loose, and that's what's gibbering and squeaking at night.' He finished his tomato juice and held the glass
out for me to take and put somewhere. 'So we want to move all this top crap out of the way, entirely' — he gestured with one arm 
— 'entirely out of the way, get it out of the room, and expose the frame, and see if we don't maybe just need to tighten up the
bolts.’
I wasn't sure where to put my father's empty glass, which had juice residue and grains of pepper along the inside's sides. I
poked at the mattress and box spring a little bit with my foot. 'Are you sure it isn't just the mattress?' I said. The bed's frame's bolts
struck me as a rather exotic first-order explanation for the squeaking.
My father gestured broadly. 'Synchronícity surrounds me. Concord,' he said. 'Because that's what your mother thinks it is,
also.' My mother was using both hands to take the blue pillowcases off all five of their pillows, again using her chin as a clamp.
The pillows were all the overplump polyester fiberfill kind, because of my father's allergies.
'Great minds think alike,' my father said.
Neither of my parents had any interest in hard science, though a great uncle had accidentally electrocuted himself with a field
series generator he was seeking to patent.
My mother stacked the pillows on top of the neatly folded bedding on her dresser. She had to get up on her tiptoes to put the
folded pillowcases on top of the pillows. I had started to move to help her, but I couldn't decide where to put the empty tomato
juice glass.
'But you just want to hope it isn't the mattress,' father said. 'Or the box spring.’
My mother sat down on the foot of the bed and got out another long cigarette and lit it. She carried a little leatherette snapcase for both her cigarettes and her lighter.
My father said, 'Because a new frame, even if we can't get the bolts squared away on this one and I have to go get a new one.
A new frame. It wouldn't be too bad, see. Even top-shelf bed frames aren't that expensive. But new mattresses are outrageously
expensive.' He looked at my mother. 'And I mean fucking outrageous.' He looked down at the back of my mother's head. 'And we
bought a new box spring for this sad excuse for a bed not five years ago.' He was looking down at the back of my mother's head as
if he wanted to confirm that she was listening. My mother had crossed her legs and was looking with a certain concentration either
at or out the master bedroom window. Our home's whole subdivision was spread along a severe hillside, which meant that the
view from my parents' bedroom on the first floor was of just sky and sun and a foreshortened declivity of lawn. The lawn sloped
at an average angle of 55° and had to be mowed horizontally. None of the subdivision's lawns had trees yet. 'Of course that was
during a seldom-discussed point in time when your mother had to assume the burden of assuming responsibility for finances in the
household,' my father said. He was now perspiring very heavily, but still had his white professional toupee on, and still looked at
my mother.
My father acted, throughout our time in California, as both symbol and spokesman for the Glad F.P.R. Co.'s Individual
Sandwich Bag Division. He was the first of two actors to portray the Man from Glad. He was inserted several times a month in a
mock-up of a car interior, where he would be filmed in a tight trans-windshield shot receiving an emergency radio summons to
some household that was having a portable-food-storage problem. He was then inserted opposite an actress in a generic kitcheninterior set, where he would explain how a particular species of Glad Sandwich Bag was precisely what the doctor ordered for the
particular portable-food-storage problem at issue. In his vaguely medical uniform of all white, he carried an air of authority and
great evident conviction, and earned what I always gathered was an impressive salary, for those times, and received, for the first
time in his career, fan mail, some of which bordered on the disturbing, and which he sometimes liked to read out loud at night in
the living room, loudly and dramatically, sitting up with a nightcap and fan mail long after my mother and I had gone to bed.
I asked whether I could excuse myself for a moment to take my father's empty tomato juice glass out to the kitchen sink. I
was worried that the residue along the inside sides of the tumbler would harden into the kind of precipitate that would be hard to
wash off.
'For Christ's sake Jim just put the thing down,' my father said.
I put the tumbler down on the bedroom carpet over next to the base of my mother's dresser, pressing down to create a kind of
circular receptacle for it in the carpet. My mother stood up and went back over by the bedroom window with her ashtray. We
could tell she was getting out of our way.
My father cracked his knuckles and studied the path between the bed and the bedroom door.
I said I understood my part here to be to help my father move the mattress and box spring off the suspect bed frame and well
out of the way. My father cracked his knuckles and replied that I was becoming almost fright-eningly quick and perceptive. He
went around between the foot of the bed and my mother at the window. He said, 'I want to let's just stack it all out in the hall, to
get it the hell out of here and give us some room to maneuver.’
'Right,' I said.
My father and I were now on opposite sides of my parents' bed. My father rubbed his hands together and bent and worked his
hands between the mattress and box spring and began to lift the mattress up from his side of the bed. When his side of the mattress
had risen to the height of his shoulders, he somehow inverted his hands and began pushing his side up rather than lifting it. The
top of his wig disappeared behind the rising mattress, and his side rose in an arc to almost the height of the white ceiling, exceeded
90°, toppled over, and began to fall over down toward me. The mattress's overall movement was like the crest of a breaking wave,
I remember. I spread my arms and took the impact of the mattress with my chest and face, supporting the angled mattress with my
chest, outspread arms, and face. All I could see was an extreme close-up of the woodland floral pattern of the mattress protector.
The mattress, a Simmons Beauty Rest whose tag said that it could not by law be removed, now formed the hypotenuse of a
right dihedral triangle whose legs were myself and the bed's box spring. I remember visualizing and considering this triangle. My
legs were trembling under the mattress's canted weight. My father exhorted me to hold and support the mattress. The respectively
sharp plastic and meaty human smells of the mattress and protector were very distinct because my nose was mashed up against
them.
My father came around to my side of the bed, and together we pushed the mattress back up until it stood up at 90° again. We
edged carefully apart and each took one end of the upright mattress and began jockeying it off the bed and out the bedroom door
into the uncarpeted hallway.
This was a King-Size Simmons Beauty Rest mattress. It was massive but had very little structural integrity. It kept curving 
and curling and wobbling. My father exhorted both me and the mattress. It was flaccid and floppy as we tried to jockey it. My
father had an especially hard time with his half of the mattress's upright weight because of an old competitive-tennis injury.
While we were jockeying it on its side off the bed, part of the mattress on my father's end slipped and flopped over and down
onto a pair of steel reading lamps, adjustable cubes of brushed steel attached by toggle bolts to the white wall over the head of the
bed. The lamps took a solid hit from the mattress, and one cube was rotated all the way around on its toggle so that its open side
and bulb now pointed at the ceiling. The joint and toggle made a painful squeaking sound as the cube was wrenched around
upward. This was also when I became aware that even the reading lamps were on in the daylit room, because a faint square of
direct lamplight, its four sides rendered slightly concave by the distortion of projection, appeared on the white ceiling above the
skewed cube. But the lamps didn't fall off. They remained attached to the wall.
'God damn it to hell,' my father said as he regained control of his end of the mattress.
My father also said, 'Fucking son of a . . .' when the mattress's thickness made it difficult for him to squeeze through the
doorway still holding his end.
In time we were able to get my parents' giant mattress out in the narrow hallway that ran between the master bedroom and the
kitchen. I could hear another terrible squeak from the bedroom as my mother tried to realign the reading lamp whose cube had
been inverted. Drops of sweat were falling from my father's face onto his side of the mattress, darkening part of the protector's
fabric. My father and I tried to lean the mattress at a slight supporting angle against one wall of the hallway, but because the floor
of the hallway was uncarpeted and didn't provide sufficient resistance, the mattress wouldn't stay upright. Its bottom edge slid out
from the wall all the way across the width of the hallway until it met the baseboard of the opposite wall, and the upright mattress's
top edge slid down the wall until the whole mattress sagged at an extremely concave slumped angle, a dry section of the woodland
floral mattress protector stretched drum-tight over the slumped crease and the springs possibly damaged by the deforming concavity.
My father looked at the canted concave mattress sagging across the width of the hall and moved one end of it a little with the
toe of his boot and looked at me and said, 'Fuck it.’
My bow tie was rumpled and at an angle.
My father had to walk unsteadily across the mattress in his white boots to get back to my side of the mattress and the bedroom
behind me. On his way across he stopped and felt speculatively at his jaw, his boots sunk deep in woodland floral cotton. He said
'Fuck it' again, and I remember not being clear about what he was referring to. Then my father turned and started unsteadily back
the way he had come across the mattress, one hand against the wall for support. He instructed me to wait right there in the hallway
for one moment while he darted into the kitchen at the other end of the hall on a very brief errand. His steadying hand left four
faint smeared prints on the wall's white paint.
My parents' bed's box spring, though also King-Size and heavy, had just below its synthetic covering a wooden frame that
gave the box spring structural integrity, and it didn't flop or alter its shape, and after another bit of difficulty for my father — who
was too thick through the middle, even with the professional girdle beneath his Glad costume — after another bit of difficulty for
my father squeezing with his end of the box spring through the bedroom doorway, we were able to get it into the hall and lean it
vertically at something just over 70° against the wall, where it stayed upright with no problem.
'That's the way she wants doing, Jim,' my father said, clapping me on the back in exactly the ebullient way that had prompted
me to have my mother buy an elastic athletic cranial strap for my glasses. I had told my mother I needed the strap for tennis
purposes, and she had not asked any questions.
My father's hand was still on my back as we returned to the master bedroom. 'Right, then!' my father said. His mood was now
elevated. There was a brief second of confusion at the doorway as each of us tried to step back to let the other through first.
There was now nothing but the suspect frame left where the bed had been. There was something exoskeletal and frail-looking
about the bed frame, a plain low-ratio rectangle of black steel. At each corner of the rectangle was a caster. The casters' wheels
had sunk into the pile carpet under the weight of the bed and my parents and were almost completely submerged in the carpet's
fibers. Each of the frame's sides had a narrow steel shelf welded at 90° to its interior's base, so that a single rectangular narrow
shelf perpendicular to the frame's rectangle ran all around the frame's interior. This shelf was obviously there to support the bed's
occupants and King-Size box spring and mattress.
My father seemed frozen in place. I cannot remember what my mother was doing. There seemed to be a long silent interval of
my father looking closely at the exposed frame. The interval had the silence and stillness of dusty rooms immersed in sunlight. I
briefly imagined every piece of furniture in the bedroom covered with sheets and the room unoccupied for years as the sun rose
and crossed and fell outside the window, the room's daylight becoming staler and staler. I could hear two power lawnmowers of
slightly different pitch from somewhere down our subdivision's street. The direct light through the master bedroom's window
swam with rotating columns of raised dust. I remember it seemed the ideal moment for a sneeze.
Dust lay thick on the frame and even hung from the frame's interior support-shelf in little gray beards. It was impossible to
see any bolts anywhere on the frame.
My father blotted sweat and wet makeup from his forehead with the back of his sleeve, which was now dark orange with
makeup. 'Jesus will you look at that mess,' he said. He looked at my mother. 'Jesus.’
The carpeting in my parents' bedroom was deep-pile and a darker blue than the pale blue of the rest of the bedroom's color
scheme. I remember the carpet as more a royal blue, with a saturation level somewhere between moderate and strong. The
rectangular expanse of royal blue carpet that had been hidden under the bed was itself carpeted with a thick layer of clotted dust.
The rectangle of dust was gray-white and thick and unevenly layered, and the only evidence of the room's carpet below was a faint
sick bluish cast to the dust-layer. It looked as if dust had not drifted under the bed and settled on the carpet inside the frame but
rather had somehow taken root and grown on it, upon it, the way a mold will take root and gradually cover an expanse of spoiled
food. The layer of dust itself looked a little like spoiled food, bad cottage cheese. It was nauseous. Some of the dust-layer's uneven
topography was caused by certain lost- and litter-type objects that had found their way under the bed — a flyswatter, a roughly
Variety-sized magazine, some bottletops, three wadded Kleenex, and what was probably a sock — and gotten covered and
textured in dust. 
There was also a faint odor, sour and fungal, like the smell of an overused bathmat.
'Jesus, there's even a smell,' my father said. He made a show of inhaling through his nose and screwing up his face. 'There's
even a fucking smell.' He blotted his forehead and felt his jaw and looked hard at my mother. His mood was no longer elevated.
My father's mood surrounded him like a field and affected any room he occupied, like an odor or a certain cast to the light.
'When was the last time this got cleaned under here?' my father asked my mother.
My mother didn't say anything. She looked at my father as he moved the steel frame around a little with his boot, which
raised even more dust into the window's sunlight. The bed frame seemed very lightweight, moving back and forth noiselessly on
its casters' submerged wheels. My father often moved lightweight objects absently around with his foot, rather the way other men
doodle or examine their cuticles. Rugs, magazines, telephone and electrical cords, his own removed shoe. It was one of my
father's ways of musing or gathering his thoughts or trying to control his mood.
'Under what presidential administration was this room last deep-cleaned, I'm standing here prompted to fucking muse out
loud,' my father said.
I looked at my mother to see whether she was going to say anything in reply.
I said to my father, 'You know, since we're discussing squeaking beds, my bed squeaks, too.’
My father was trying to squat down to see whether he could locate any bolts on the frame, saying something to himself under
his breath. He put his hands on the frame for balance and almost fell forward when the frame rolled under his weight.
'But I don't think I even really noticed it until we began to discuss it,' I said. I looked at my mother. 'I don't think it bothers
me,' I said. 'Actually, I think I kind of like it. I think I've gradually gotten so used to it that it's become almost comforting. At this
juncture,' I said.
My mother looked at me.
'I'm not complaining about it,' I said. The discussion just made me think of it.’
'Oh, we hear your bed, don't you worry,' my father said. He was still trying to squat, which drew his corset and the hem of his
tunic up and allowed the top of his bottom's crack to appear above the the waist of his white pants. He shifted slightly to point up
at the master bedroom's ceiling. 'You so much as turn over in bed up there? We hear it down here.' He took one steel side of the
rectangle and shook the frame vigorously, sending up a shroud of dust. The bed frame seemed to weigh next to nothing under his
hands. My mother made a mustache of her finger to hold back a sneeze.
He shook the frame again. 'But it doesn't aggravate us the way this ro-dential son of a whore right here does.’
I remarked that I didn't think I'd ever once heard their bed squeak before, from upstairs. My father twisted his head around to
try to look up at me as I stood there behind him. But I said I'd definitely heard and could confirm the presence of a squeak when
he'd pressed on the mattress, and could verify that the squeak was no one's imagination.
My father held a hand up to signal me to please stop talking. He remained in a squat, rocking slightly on the balls of his feet,
using the rolling frame to keep his balance. The flesh of the top of his bottom and crack-area protruded over the waist of his pants.
There were also deep red folds in the back of his neck, below the blunt cut of the wig, because he was looking up and over at my
mother, who was resting her tail bone on the sill of the window, still holding her shallow ashtray.
'Maybe you'd like to go get the vacuum,' he said. My mother put the ashtray down on the sill and exited the master bedroom,
passing between me and the dresser piled with bedding. 'If you can ... if you can remember where it is!' my father called after her.
I could hear my mother trying to get past the King-Size mattress sagging diagonally across the hall.
My father was rocking more violently on the balls of his feet, and now the rocking had the sort of rolling, side-to-side quality
of a ship in high seas. He came very close to losing his balance as he leaned to his right to get a handkerchief from his hip pocket
and began using it to reach out and flick dust off something at one corner of the bed frame. After a moment he pointed down next
to a caster.
'Bolt,' he said, pointing at the side of a caster. 'Right there's a bolt.' I leaned in over him. Drops of my father's perspiration
made small dark coins in the dust of the frame. There was nothing but smooth lightweight black steel surface where he was
pointing, but just to the left of where he was pointing I could see what might have been a bolt, a little stalactite of clotted dust
hanging from some slight protrusion. My father's hands were broad and his fingers blunt. Another possible bolt lay several inches
to the right of where he pointed. His finger trembled badly, and I believe the trembling might have been from the muscular strain
on his bad knees, trying to hold so much new weight in a squat for an extended period. I heard the telephone ring twice. There had
been an extended silence, with my father pointing at neither protrusion and me trying to lean in over him.
Then, still squatting on the balls of his feet, my father placed both hands on the side of the frame and leaned out over the side
into the rectangle of dust inside the frame and had what at first sounded like a bad coughing fit. His hunched back and rising
bottom kept me from watching him. I remember deciding that the reason the frame was not rolling under his hands' pressure was
that my father had so much of his weight on it, and that maybe my father's nervous system's response to heavy dust was a coughsignal instead of a sneeze-signal. It was the wet sound of material hitting the dust inside the rectangle, plus the rising odor, that
signified to me that, rather than coughing, my father had been taken ill. The spasms involved made his back rise and fall and his
bottom tremble under his white commercial slacks. It was not too uncommon for my father to be taken ill shortly after coming
home from work to relax, but now he seemed to have been taken really ill. To give him some privacy, I went around the frame to
the side of the frame closest to the window where there was direct light and less odor and examined another of the frame's casters.
My father was whispering to himself in brief expletive phrases between the spasms of his illness. I squatted easily and rubbed dust
from a small area of the frame and wiped the dust on the carpet by my feet. There was a small carriage-head bolt on either side of
the plating that attached the caster to the bed frame. I knelt and felt one of the bolts. Its round smooth head made it impossible
either to tighten or loosen. Putting my cheek to the carpet and examining the bottom of the little horizontal shelf welded to the
frame's side, I observed that the bolt seemed threaded tightly and completely through its hole, and I decided it was doubtful that
any of the casters' platings' bolts were producing the sounds that reminded my father of rodents.
Just at this time, I remember, there was a loud cracking sound and my area of the frame jumped violently as my father's
illness caused him to faint and he lost his balance and pitched forward and lay prone and asleep over his side of the bed frame,
which as I rolled away from the frame and rose to my knees I saw was either broken or very badly bent. My father lay facedown 
in the mixture of the rectangle's thick dust and the material he'd brought up from his upset stomach. The dust his collapse raised
was very thick, and as the new dust rose and spread it attenuated the master bedroom's daylight as decisively as if a cloud had
moved over the sun in the window. My father's professional wig had detached and lay scalp-up in the mixture of dust and stomach
material. The stomach material appeared to be mostly gastric blood until I recalled the tomato juice my father had been drinking.
He lay face-down, with his bottom high in the air, over the side of the bed frame, which his weight had broken in half. This was
how I accounted for the loud cracking sound.
I stood out of the way of the dust and the window's dusty light, feeling along the line of my jaw and examining my prone
father from a distance. I remember that his breathing was regular and wet, and that the dust mixture bubbled somewhat. It was
then that it occurred to me that when I'd been supporting the bed's raised mattress with my chest and face preparatory to its
removal from the room, the dihedral triangle I'd imagined the mattress forming with the box spring and my body had not in fact
even been a closed figure: the box spring and the floor I had stood on did not constitute a continuous plane.
Then I could hear my mother trying to get the heavy canister vacuum cleaner past the angled Simmons Beauty Rest in the
hall, and I went to help her. My father's legs were stretched out across the clean blue carpet between his side of the frame and my
mother's white dresser. His feet's boots were at a pigeon-toed angle, and his bottom's crack all the way down to the anus itself was
now visible because the force of his fall had pulled his white slacks down even farther. I stepped carefully between his legs.
'Excuse me,' I said.
I was able to help my mother by telling her to detach the vacuum cleaner's attachments and hand them one at a time to me
over the width of the slumped mattress, where I held them. The vacuum cleaner was manufactured by Regina, and its canister,
which contained the engine, bag, and evacuating fan, was very heavy. I reassembled the vacuum and held it while my mother
made her way back across the mattress, then handed the vacuum cleaner back to her, flattening myself against the wall to let her
pass by on her way into the master bedroom.
'Thanks,' my mother said as she passed.
I stood there by the slumped mattress for several moments of a silence so complete that I could hear the street's lawnmowers
all the way out in the hall, then heard the sound of my mother pulling out the vacuum cleaner's retractable cord and plugging it
into the same bedside outlet the steel reading lamps were attached to.
I made my way over the angled mattress and quickly down the hall, made a sharp right at the entrance to the kitchen, crossed
the foyer to the staircase, and ran up to my room, taking several stairs at a time, hurrying to get some distance between myself and
the vacuum cleaner, because the sound of vacuuming has always frightened me in the same irrational way it seemed a bed's
squeak frightened my father.
I ran upstairs and pivoted left at the upstairs landing and went into my room. In my room was my bed. It was narrow, a twin
bed, with a headboard of wood and frame and slats of wood. I didn't know where it had come from, originally. The frame held the
narrow box spring and mattress much higher off the floor than my parents' bed. It was an old-fashioned bed, so high off the floor
that you had to put one knee up on the mattress and clamber up into it, or else jump.
That is what I did. For the first time since I had become taller than my parents, I took several running strides in from the
doorway, past my shelves' collection of prisms and lenses and tennis trophies and my scale-model magneto, past my bookcase, the
wall's still-posters from Powell's Peeping Tom and the closet door and my bedside's high-intensity standing lamp, and jumped,
doing a full swan dive up onto my bed. I landed with my weight on my chest with my arms and legs out from my body on the
indigo comforter on my bed, squashing my tie and bending my glasses' temples slightly. I was trying to make my bed produce a
loud squeak, which in the case of my bed I knew was caused by any lateral friction between the wooden slats and the frame's
interior's shelf-like slat-support.
But in the course of the leap and the dive, my overlong arm hit the heavy iron pole of the high-intensity standing lamp that
stood next to the bed. The lamp teetered violently and began to fall over sideways, away from the bed. It fell with a kind of
majestic slowness, resembling a felled tree. As the lamp fell, its heavy iron pole struck the brass knob on the door to my closet,
shearing the knob off completely. The round knob and half its interior hex bolt fell off and hit my room's wooden floor with a loud
noise and began then to roll around in a remarkable way, the sheared end of the hex bolt stationary and the round knob, rolling on
its circumference, circling it in a spherical orbit, describing two perfectly circular motions on two distinct axes, a non-Euclidian
figure on a planar surface, i.e., a cycloid on a sphere:
x,v
x,y
The closest conventional analogue I could derive for this figure was a cycloid, L'Hôpital's solution to Bernoulli's famous
Brachistochrone Problem, the curve traced by a fixed point on the circumference of a circle rolling along a continuous plane. But
since here, on the bedroom's floor, a circle was rolling around what was itself the circumference of a circle, the cycloid's standard
parametric equations were no longer apposite, those equations' trigonometric expressions here becoming themselves first-order
differential equations. 
Because of the lack of resistance or friction against the bare floor, the knob rolled this way for a long time as I watched over
the edge of the comforter and mattress, holding my glasses in place, completely distracted from the minor-D shriek of the vacuum
below. It occurred to me that the movement of the amputated knob perfectly schematized what it would look like for someone to
try to turn somersaults with one hand nailed to the floor. This was how I first became interested in the possibilities of annula-tion.
The night after the chilly and sort of awkward joint Interdependence Day picnic for Enfield's Ennet House Drug and Alcohol
Recovery House, Somer-ville's Phoenix House, and Dorchester's grim New Choice juvenile rehab, Ennet House staffer Johnette
Folt
 the endless symptomatic gauntlet of Withdrawal from delta-9-
tetra
is foot. Since an NA 'Beginner' is technically anybody with under a year clean, there were varying degrees of denial
and
orm, along with glazed eyes and excess spittle. A couple of the
begi
 stooped and short
peop
t had her usual lipless expression of morose distaste, but even she gave and got some hugs. But Erdedy — who'd never
part
 his pockets, pretending to study the coffee urn with great interest.
 gold incisor and perfect vertical cylinder of Afro-American hairstyle
peel
 up further so that his bottom was squashed up against the edge of
the C ture table.
ch
z took Ken Erdedy and Kate Gompert along with her to this one NA Beginners' Discussion Meeting where the focus was
always marijuana: how every addict at the meeting had gotten in terrible addictive trouble with it right from the first duBois, or
else how they'd been strung out on harder drugs and had tried switching to grass to get off the original drugs and but then had
gotten in even terribler trouble with grass than they'd been in with the original hard stuff. This was supposedly the only NA
meeting in metro Boston explicitly devoted to marijuana. Johnette Foltz said she wanted Erdedy and Gompert to see how
completely nonunique and unalone they were in terms of the Substance that had brought them both down.
There were about maybe two dozen beginning recovering addicts there in the anechoic vestry of an upscale church in what
Erdedy figured had to be either west Belmont or east Waltham. The chairs were arranged in NA's traditional huge circle, with no
tables to sit at and everybody balancing ashtrays on their knees and accidentally kicking over their cups of coffee. Everybody who
raised their hand to share concurred on the insidious ways marijuana had ravaged their bodies, minds, and spirits: marijuana
destroys slowly but thoroughly was the consensus. Ken Erdedy's joggling foot knocked over his coffee not once but twice as the
NAs took turns concurring on the hideous psychic fallout they'd all endured both in active marijuana-dependency and then in
marijuana-detox: the social isolation, anxious lassitude, and the hyperself-consciousness that then reinforced the withdrawal and
anxiety — the increasing emotional abstraction, poverty of affect, and then total emotional catalepsy — the obsessive analyzing,
finally the paralytic stasis that results from the obsessive analysis of all possible implications of both getting up from the couch
and not getting up from the couch — and then
hydrocannabinol: i.e. pot-detox: the loss of appetite, the mania and insomnia, the chronic fatigue and nightmares, the
impotence and cessation of menses and lactation, the circadian arrhythmia, the sudden sauna-type sweats and mental confusion
and fine-motor tremors, the particularly nasty excess production of saliva — several beginners still holding institutional droolcups just under their chins — the generalized anxiety and foreboding and dread, and the shame of feeling like neither M.D.s nor
the hard-drug NAs themselves showed much empathy or compassion for the 'addict' brought down by what was supposed to be
nature's humblest buzz, the benignest Substance around.
Ken Erdedy noticed that nobody came right out and used the terms melancholy or anhedonia or depression, much less clinical
depression; but this worst of symptoms, this logarithm of all suffering, seemed, though unmen-tioned, to hang fog-like just over
the room's heads, to drift between the peristyle columns and over the decorative astrolabes and candles on long prickets and
medieval knockoffs and framed Knights of Columbus charters, a gassy plasm so dreaded no beginner could bear to look up and
name it. Kate Gompert kept staring at the floor and making a revolver of her forefinger and thumb and shooting herself in the
temple and then blowing pretend-cordite off the barrel's tip until Johnette Foltz whispered to her to knock it off.
As was his custom at meetings, Ken Erdedy said nothing and observed everybody else very closely, cracking his knuckles
and joggling h
 distress and general cluelessness in this plush upscale vestry. The meeting had the usual broad demographic cross-section, but
the bulk of these grass-ravaged people looked to him urban and tough and busted-up and dressed without any color-sense at all,
people you could easily imagine smacking their kid in a supermarket or lurking with a homemade sap in the dark of a downtown
alley. Same as AA. Motley disre-spectability was like the room n
nners still had the milky plastic I.D. bracelets from psych wards they'd forgotten to cut off, or else hadn't yet gotten up the
drive to do it.
Unlike Boston AA, Boston NA has no mid-meeting raffle-break and goes for just an hour. At the close of this Monday
Beginners' Meeting everybody got up and held hands in a circle and recited the NA-Conference-Approved 'Just For Today,' then
they all recited the Our Father, not exactly in unison. Kate Gompert later swore she distinctly heard the tattered older man beside
her say 'And lead us not into Penn Station' during the Our Father.
Then, just as in AA, the NA meeting closed with everybody shouting to the air in front of them to Keep Coming Back
because It Works.
But then, kind of horrifically, everyone in the room started milling around wildly and hugging each other. It was like
somebody'd thrown a switch. There wasn't even very much conversation. It was just hugging, as far as Erdedy could see.
Rampant, indiscriminate hugging, where the point seemed to be to hug as many people as possible regardless of whether you'd
ever seen them before in your life. People went from person to person, arms out and leaning in. Big people
le got up on tiptoe. Jowls ground into other jowls. Both genders hugged both genders. And the male-to-male hugs were
straight embraces, hugs minus the vigorous little thumps on the back that Erdedy'd always seen as somehow requisite for male-tomale hugs. Johnette Foltz was almost a blur. She went from person to person. She was racking up serious numbers of hugs. Kate
Gomper
icularly liked hugging — moved way back from the throng, over up next to the NA-Conference-Approved-Literature table,
and stood there by himself with his hands in
But then a tall heavy Afro-American fellow with a
ed away from a sort of group-hug nearby, he'd spotted Erdedy, and the fellow came over and established himself right in front
of Erdedy, spreading the arms of his fatigue jacket for a hug, stooping slightly and leaning in toward Erdedy's personal trunkregion.
Erdedy raised his hands in a benign No Thanks and backed
onference-Approved-Litera
'Thanks, but I don't particularly like to hug,' he said.
The fellow had to sort of pull up out of his pre-hug lean, and stood there awkwardly frozen, with his big arms still out, whi
Erde e been awkward and embarrassing for the fellow. Erdedy found himself trying to calculate just what
rem
 his face.
slowly let his arms down but just looked at Erdedy's proffered hand. A single styptic blink. 'Roy Tony,' he said.
neck and was pretending to feel the back of his
neck
t name, hyphenated, "Roy-Tony" and
then
pointing first at Erdedy's chest and then at his own: 'So
man
call you either a hugger or a nonhugger because I
don'
ing like to go around hug on folks? You think any of us like this shit? We fucking do what they tell us. They
tell y added. He
wed
edy's nervous system. 'I done had to give four hugs my first night here and then I gone ran in the
fuck
ling-goofy-ass
mot
ut it!’
ook written up in the Staff Log.
ltz had hold of the Roy fellow's coat now with both hands and was trying to pull the fellow off, Keds scrabbling
for p Esse, Bro, Posse, Crew, Homes, Jim, Brother,
he's
ing to climb him.
 Data Analysis
yield
mong the many Read-Only copies of your stock of the Entertainment.’
oss in itself — lose some idiot-child intern. C'est la guerre. The real loss was that his supervisor tried to go in
afte mself.’
less skirt and different breasts.’
. Begging for just even a few seconds — a trailer, a snatch of
soun cking heart. In the next bed,
restr
ll of steel.’
ion.’
ed crazily about with, so. We too have lost persons. It is serious.’
ft shoulder, as if giants were looking over his shoulder, one of Castor's legs inbent in a feminine
man
dy could see must hav
ote sub-Asian locale would be the maximum possible number of km. away from this exact spot and moment as the fellow just
stood there, his arms out and the smile draining from
'Say what?' the fellow said.
Erdedy proffered a hand. 'Ken E., Ennet House, Enfield. How do you do. You are?’
The fellow
'Roy, how do you do.’
'What it is,' Roy said. The big fellow now had his handshake-hand behind his
, which Erdedy didn't know was a blatant dis.
'Well Roy, if I may call you Roy, or Mr. Tony, if you prefer, unless it's a compound firs
 a last name, but well with respect to this hugging thing, Roy, it's nothing personal, rest assured.’
'Assured?’
Erdedy's best helpless smile and an apologetic shrug of the GoreTex anorak. 'I'm afraid I just don't particularly like to hug.
Just not a hugger. Never have been. It was something of a joke among my fam—’
Now the ominous finger-pointing of street-aggression, this Roy fellow
 what you say you saying I'm a hugger? You saying you think I go around like to hug?’
Both Erdedy's hands were now up palms-out and waggling in a like bon-hommic gesture of heading off all possible
misunderstanding: 'No but see the whole point is that I wouldn't presume to
t know you. I only meant to say it's nothing personal having to do with you as an individual, and I'd be more than happy to
shake hands, even one of those intricate multiple-handed ethnic handshakes if you'll bear with my inexperience with that sort of
handshake, but I'm simply uncomfortable with the whole idea of hugging.’
By the time Johnette Foltz could break away and get over to them, the fellow had Erdedy by his anorak's insulated lapels and
was leaning him way back over the edge of the Literature table so that Erdedy's waterproof lodge boots were off the ground, and
the fellow's face was right up in Erdedy's face in a show of naked aggression:
'You think I fuck
us Hugs Not Drugs in here. We done motherfucking surrendered our wills in here,' Roy said. 'You little faggot,' Ro
ged his hand between them to point at himself, which meant he was now holding Erdedy off the ground with just one hand,
which fact was not lost on Erd
ing can and fucking puked. Puked,' he said. 'Not comfortable? Who the fuck are you? Don't even try and tell me I'm coming
over feeling comfortable about trying to hug on your James-River-Traders-wearing-Calvin-Klein-aftershave-smel
herfucking ass.’
Erdedy observed one of the Afro-American women who was looking on clap her hands and shout 'Talk abo
'And now you go and disrespect me in front of my whole clean and sober set just when I gone risk sharing my vulnerability
and discomfort with you?’
Johnette Foltz was sort of pawing at the back of Roy Tony's fatigue jacket, shuddering mentally at how the report of an Ennet
House resident assaulted at an NA meeting she'd personally brought him to would l
'Now,' Roy said, extracting his free hand and pointing to the vestry floor with a stabbing gesture, 'now,' he said, 'you gone risk
vulnerability and discomfort and hug my ass or do I gone fucking rip your head off and shit down your neck?’
Johnette Fo
urchase on the smooth parquet, saying 'Yo Roy T. man, easy there Dude, Man,
 just new is all'; but by this time Erdedy had both arms around the guy's neck and was hugging him with such vigor Kate
Gompert later told Joelle van Dyne it looked like Erdedy was try
'We've lost a couple already,' Steeply admitted. 'During the testing. Not just volunteers. Some idiot intern in
ed to temptation and wanted to see what all the fuss was for and got hold of Flatto's I/O lab's clearance card and went in and
viewed.’
'From a
'No great tragic l
r him and pull him out. Our head of Data Analysis hi
'Hoyne, Henri or pronounce "Henry," middle initial of F., with the wife, with his adult diabetes he controls.’
'Did control. Twenty-year man, Hank. Damn good man. He was a friend. He's in four-point restraints now. Nourishment
through a tube. No desire or even basic survival-type will for anything other than more viewing.’
'Of it.’
'I tried to visit.’
'With your sleeve
'I couldn't even stand to be in the same room, see him like that
dtrack, anything. His eyes wobbling around like some drug-addicted newborn. Break your fu
ained, the idiot intern: this was the sort of undisciplined selfish child you like to talk about, Rémy. But Hank Hoyne was no
child. I watched this man put down all sugar and treats when he first got diagnosed. Just put them down and walked away. Not
even a whimper or backward glance.’
'A wi
'An American adult of exemplary self-control and discret
'The samizdat is not to be play
The legs of the constellation of Perseus were amputated by the earth's horizon. Perseus, he wore the hat of a jongleur or
pantalone. Hercules' head, this head was square. It was not long to dawn also because at 32° N Pollux and Castor became visible.
They were over Marathe's le
ner. 
'But do you ever consider?' Steeply lit another cigarette.
'Fantasize, you are meaning.’
'If it's that consuming. If it somehow addresses desires that total,' Steeply said. 'Not even sure I can imagine what desires that
tota o look back at Marathe. 'You ever think of
wha
s I am intrigued. Hank Hoyne is an empty shell. The iron will, the analytic
savv
 phrase for their eyes. "Empty of intent." This appeared in a memo.’
arathe pretended to sniff. 'The temptation of the passive Reward of terminal p, this all seems complex to me. Terror seems
part f the temptation for you. Us of Quebec's cause, we have never felt this temptation for the Entertainment, or knowing. But we
resp
sque
also the overenhanced blue of the wallpaper's sky, which the wallpaper scheme was fluffy cumuli arrayed
patt
 without being able to feel it or stop it. No one's sure
wha
e was able to move only from side to side. So
hen
 nor Trevor Axford — about whom there was today not even a hint of the color blue — are in the
moo
l and utter even are.' Up and down upon the toes. Turning above the waist only t
t it'd be like, speculate?’
'Us, we think of what ends the Entertainment may serve. We find its efficacy tempting. You and we are tempted in different
ways.' Marathe could identify no other Southwest U.S.A. constellations except the Big Dipper, which at this latitude appeared
attached to the Great Bear to form something resembling the 'Big Bucket' or the 'Great Cradle.' The chair gave small squeaks
when he shifted his weight upon it.
Steeply said 'Well I can't say I've been tempted in the strictest sense of tempted.’
'Perhaps we are meaning different things by this.’
'Frankly, when I think of it I'm as much terrified a
y. His love of a fine cigar. All gone. His world's as if it has collapsed into one small bright point. Inner world. Lost to us. You
look in his eyes and there's nothing you can recognize in them. Poor Miriam.' Steeply kneaded a bare shoulder. 'Willis, on the I/O
night-shift, came up with a
M
 o
ect its power. Thus, we do not fool crazily about.’
It was not that the sky was lightening so much as that the stars' light had paled. There became a sullenness about their light.
Now, also, strange-looking U.S.A. insects whirred actively past from time to time, moving jag-gedly and making Marathe think of
many windblown sparks.
10 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
The following things in the room were blue. The blue checks in the blue-and-black-checked shag carpet. Two of the room's
six institutional-plush chairs, whose legs were steel tubes bent into big ellipses, which wobbled, so that while the chairs couldn't
really be rocked in they could be sort of bobbed in, which Michael Pemulis was doing absently as he waited and scanned a
printout of Eschaton's highly technical core ESCHAX directory, i.e. bobbing in his chair, which produced a kind of rapid rodential
aking that gave Hal Incandenza the howling fantods as he sat there kitty-corner from Pemulis, also waiting. The printout kept
rotating in Pemulis's hands. Each chair had a 105-watt reading lamp attached to the back on a flexible metal stalk that let the
reading lamp curve out from behind and shine right down on whatever magazine the waiting person was looking at, but since the
curved lamps induced this unbearable sensation of somebody feverish right there reading over your shoulder, the magazines (some
of whose covers involved the color blue) tended to stay unread, and were fanned neatly out on a low ceramic coffeetable. The
carpet was a product of something called Antron. Hal could see streaks of lividity where some-body'd vacuumed against the grain.
Though the magazines' coffeetable was nonblue — a wet-nail-polish red with E.T.A. in a kind of gray escutcheon — two of
the unsettlingly attached lamps that kept its magazines unread and neatly fanned were blue, although the two blue lamps were not
the lamps attached to the two blue chairs. Dr. Charles Tavis liked to say that you could tell a lot about an administrator by the
decor of his waiting room. The Headmaster's waiting room was part of a little hallway in the Comm.-Ad. lobby's southwest
corner. The premie violets in an asymmetrical sprig in a tennis-ball-shaped vase on the coffee-table were arguably in the blue
family. And
ernlessly against an overenhancedly blue sky, incredibly disorienting wallpaper that was by an unpleasant coincidence also the
wallpaper in the Enfield offices of a Dr. Zegarelli, D.D.S., which Hal's just come back from, after a removal: the left side of his
face still feels big and dead, with this persistent sensation that he's drooling
t C.T.'s choice of this wallpaper is supposed to communicate, especially to parents who come with prospective kids in tow to
scout out E.T.A., but Hal loathes sky-and-cloud wallpaper because it makes him feel high-altitude and disoriented and sometimes
plummeting.
The sills and crosspieces of the waiting room's two windows have always been dark blue. There was a nautical-blue border of
braid around the bill of Michael Pemulis's jaunty yachting cap. Hal was confident Pemulis would remove the insouciant hat the
minute they were called in on what was presumably going to be the carpet.
Also blue: the upper-border slices of sky in the framed informal photos of E.T.A. students that hung on the walls;209199 the
chassis of Alice Moore's Intel 972 word processor w/ modem but no cartridge-capability; also Ms. Moore's fingertips and lips. The
E.T.A. Headmaster's receptionist and administrative assistant is known to the players as Lateral Alice Moore. In her youth Lateral
Alice Moore had been a helicopter pilot and airborne traffic reporter for a major Boston radio station until a tragic collision with
another station's airborne traffic-report helicopter — plus then the cataclysmic fall to the rush hour's Jamaica Way six-laner below
— had left her with chronic oxygen debt and a neurological condition whereby sh
ce the sobriquet Lateral Alice Moore. An effective time-killer while sitting there waiting for whatever administrator's
summoned you is to have Lateral Alice Moore drum rapidly on her chest and give imitations of her old Boston rush-hour traffic
reports in a stuttered helicopterish reporter-voice. Neither Hal, continually checking his chin for drool, nor Pemulis, scanning and
bobbing, nor Ann Kittenplan
d for this right now, awaiting what they presume to be some kind of administrative fallout from Sunday's horrendous
Eschaton fiasco. The presumption is based on who's been summoned here, to wait.
The two different-sized offices that open off the waiting room (through the open and only other door of which the dusky blue
Mannington shag of the Comm.-Ad. lobby is visible) belong to Dr. Charles Tavis and to Mrs. Avril Incandenza. Tavis's office's
outer door is real oak and has his name and degree and title in (nonblue) letters so big that the total I.D. crowds the door's margins.
There's also an inner door.
Avril, whose feelings about enclosure are well known, has no door on her office. Her office is bigger than C.T.'s, though, and 
has a seminar table it's always been obvious he covets. Avril's office's blue-and-black-checkered shag is deeper than the waiting
room's shag, so that the border between the two is like a mowed v. unmowed lawn. Avril serves (pro bono) as E.T.A.'s Dean of
Academic Affairs and Dean of Females. She's in there unenclosed right now with pretty much every E.T.A. female under thirteen
exce
er his disappearance into the Humboldt County hill country with a thirteen-year-old companion — created
what
setting, etc., and nip any
pote
rackets, and bobbing, ignoring Ann Kittenplan's murderous looks and tubercular throat-clearings
at th
s going to get the lion's share of the blame for damage to
Lord
on
Avri
and maybe Mario knew he authored the hot knob,
beca ho got to the hot
kno oltage involved,
and
hort Beach CT and under enormous family pressure to continue the male
Axf
pt Ann Kittenplan, whose tattooed knuckles are bruised and who looks somehow cross-dressed in a dress and (nonblue)
barrette. Avril has vividly white hair — as of the last few months before Himself's felo de se — that looks like it never went
through the gray stage (it mostly didn't) and legs whose taper you can see T. Axford is appraising with the frankness of
adolescence as she paces a bit in front of the crowded seminar table, in full if kind of oblique-angled view of the people in the
waiting room.210200 Though it's not technically in the waiting room with Hal, the plastic fine-tip felt pen Avril taps
professionally against her incisors as she paces and considers is: blue.
Administrative diddle-checks have been required at all North American tennis academies since the infamous case of coach R.
Bill ('Touchy') Phiely at California's Rolling Hills Academy, whose hair-raising diary and collection of telephotos and tiny panties
— discovered only aft
 might be conservatively termed a climate of concern among the continent's tennis parents. At the Enfield Tennis Academy,
for the last four years, Dr. Dolores Rusk is supposed to hold a kind of distaff community meeting with all female players judged
naive and mop-petish enough to be potential diddlees — the youngest of these is Rhode Island's pint-sized Tina Echt, just seven
but a true cannibal off the backhand side — to interface in a discreet but nurturingly empowering group
ntial Phielyisms in the bud. Monthly diddle-checks are in Rusk's contract because they're in E.T.A.'s O.N.A.N.T.A.
accreditation-charter.
Dean of Females Avril M. Incandenza presides over the diddle-check when Dr. Rusk is otherwise engaged, and Rusk is so
very rarely legitimately engaged that the fact that it's the Moms doing diddle-prevention duty today leads Hal to fear that Rusk is
maybe in there in the Headmaster's office getting ready to be in on the upcoming disciplinary scene: C.T. would have to be really
upset to want to have Rusk included; Rusk might be there more for C.T. than for any studential psyches.
Axhandle has his eyes closed and is repeating a mnemonic limerick about Brewster's Angle for the Leith-taught Quadrivial
colloquium 'Reflections on Refraction.' Michael Pemulis is still scanning a serrated scroll of EndStat-axiomatic Pink2, which
looks to be all math and spiky b
e squeaking of his bobbing blue chair. You can tell Pemulis really is studying because he keeps turning something upsidedown and then rightside-up. Hal declines to share his Rusk-being-in-there-with-Tavis worries with Michael Pemulis, not just
because Hal avoids ever mentioning Rusk's name but also because Pemulis loathes Rusk with a hard and gem-like flame, and
though he'd never admit it is already clearly nauseated with worry that he'
 and Possalthwaite and not only receive corrective on-court discipline but maybe get denied a spot on the trip to Tucson's
WhataBurger, or worse.211201
Avril is indirect but syntactically crisp with the couple dozen little girls in there, probing. The girls' outfits involve blue at
many levels of hue and intensity in varied combination. Avril Incandenza's voice is higher on the register than one would expect
from a woman so imposingly tall. It is high and sort of airy. Oddly insubstantial, is the E.T.A. consensus. Orin says one reas
l dislikes music is that whenever she hums along she sounds insane.
The absence of a door to the Moms's office means you might as well be in there, in terms of being able to hear what's going
on. She has little sense of spatial privacy or boundary, having been so much alone so much when a child. Lateral Alice Moore
wears a sort of surreal combination of black Lycra Spandex and filmy green tulle. The portable-stereo headphones she wears —
entering what appear to be Response-macros for 80+ received invitations to next week's WhataBurger Invitational — are powderblue. Her typing is clearly in synch with something's backbeat. Her lips and cheek-points are the vague robin's-egg of cyanosis.
Just why Michael Pemulis hates Dr. Rusk is unclear and seems free-floating; Hal gets a different answer from Pemulis every
time. Hal himself feels uncomfortable around Dolores Rusk and avoids her but isn't aware of any particular reason for being
uncomfortable around her. But Pemulis positively detests Rusk. It was Pemulis who'd dickied in at night and hooked a Delco
battery up to the inside brass knob of her locked office door, at age fifteen, Rusk's office door, the first door over in the other little
hallway at the lobby's NE corner, next to the shift-nurses' office and infirmary, then exiting Rusk's office by a window and thorny
hedge, which Pemulis was extremely fortunate no one but Hal and Schacht
use the whole scheme turned quickly disastrous, because it was an elderly Brighton-Irish cleaning lady w
b first, at like 0500h., and it turned out Pemulis had seriously under-calculated the brass-conducted Delco v
 if the cleaning lady hadn't been wearing yellow rubber cleaning-lady gloves she would have ended up with way worse than
the permanent perm and irreversible crossed eyes she regained consciousness with, and the cleaning lady's Ward Boss was upper
Brighton's infamous F. X. ('Follow That Ambulance') Byrne, rapacious personal-injury J.D., and the Academy's Workman's
Comp. premiums had skyrocketed, and the whole thing was still in litigation.
Avril had eschewed an office door even before the cleaning-lady kert-wang, for simple enclosure-reasons.
Recrossed legs and closer inspection reveal that Trevor Axford's left sock, though not his right sock, is blue.
Sinistral, his right hand missing digits from a fireworks accident three Interdependence Days past, Axhandle is several cm.
shorter than Hal Incan-denza and is a true redheaded person, with copper-colored hair and that moist white freckle-chocked skin
that even through two layers of summer Pledge only reddens and peels, plus there's the matter of the enormous and forever
chapped lips; and as a tennis player he is like a less effective version of John Wayne — he does nothing but blast from the
baseline, w/o discernible spin. He's a junior from S
ord tradition of attending Yale and is academically so marginal that he knows his only chance to go to Yale is to play tennis
for Yale, which would effectively blow any chance at a Show-level future, and is high-ranked but has set his competitive sights on
nothing past a Ride-offer to Yale. Though Ingersoll's informally in Hal's Big Buddy contingent, he's technically in Axhandle's,
they're both aware; and Hal's a little uncomfortable about his relief that none of the real Eschaton casualties were technically his
Buddies.212202 The only real thing Axford and Hal have in common on the court is a curious habit of refusing to ask for help
from other courts when their balls go astray.213203
Pemulis has finally quit with the bobbing and folded the printout scroll of Pink2 into a big ragged square and has sidled over 
to Lateral Alice Moore's horseshoe-shaped desk and is bantering with her very casually, looking all around him as he banters,
trying subtly to feel her out re whether maybe one of these WhataBurger Jr. Invitational invitations stacked cruciform, female
athwart male, in Lateral Alice's IN box concerns anybody with the male initials M.M.P., by any chance. Pemulis and Moore
would be less tight if she knew he dickied in at night and used her WATS and modem, though she's very laid-back and easygoing
and not at all like the little framed thing by her name plaque with a scowling woman saying I'VE GOT ONE NERVE LEFT AND
YOU'RE GETTING ON IT. The little cartoon is just a standard like office-worker gag. She'd summoned them out of Sixth Hour
with the same ancient intercom-and-mike system Troeltsch et al. get to commandeer for Saturdays' WETA (Troeltsch has had to
be prohibited from playing with her chair), and her transmitted voice had not been ungentle. Hal's face's left side feels queerly
inflated, but then when he runs his right hand over it it's always regulation-size. Administrative assistants worth their health
benefits are synaptically evolved to the point where they can banter, accept compliments on a Spandex-and-tulle ensemble,
effo
luttering in and out of
view
her right now, Erica,' from someplace above the tapping foot and in-and-out arm.
Hal l it almost makes him uncomfortable. His left ankle gives a sick
sque subside as he squeezes his tennis ball. The left side of his face
feel ay that means him harm and is coming gradually closer. He can make out just the whistly fricatives of
Cha it sounds somehow like he's speaking to more than one person
in th below that his E.T.A. motto about
the
r: 'I hate that.’
r smoothed in any way.’
ittle shoves in the small of the back when he wants me to go into rooms. It's like he
influ
erhear, because things out in the waiting room right now are so comparatively silent except for the
tinn
othing more than attitude-adjusters, designed to do nothing but dramatically lower life-quality
for
rtlessly deflect unauthorized info-probes, listen to something bass-intensive on personal-stereo headphones, and word-process
effortlessly to the headphones' backbeat, all simultaneously. Lateral Alice Moore's bluish fingertips make her painted nails ten
little sunsets. Lateral Alice Moore's desk's chair's wheels fit on a track with an electrified third rail, so she can slide from one
corner of the horseshoe's arc to the other — more or less laterally — at the touch of a cerise desktop button. For post-Delcoincident legal reasons, the name-plaque on her reception desk has DANGER: THIRD RAIL instead of the name Lateral Alice
Moore.
Hal can hear Avril saying 'Now. If I speak to all of you very gently about being touched by a tall person in an uncomfortable
way, will you know what I mean? Have any of you been kissed or nuzzled or hugged or rubbed or pinched or probed or fondled or
in any way touched by a tall person in a way that's made you uncomfortable?' Hal can see one of his Moms's stockinged legs,
terminating in a trim ankle and a very white Reebok, extruding from stage-right into the frame of the empty doorway, the Reebok
tapping patiently, and one arm crossed over Avril's chest, and the other arm's elbow resting on that arm and f
 as Avril taps at her teeth with a blue pen.
'Gramma pinches my cheek,' one girl volunteers. She'd actually raised her hand to be called on, her wrist with its touching
little (blue) terry wristband. Hal hasn't seen so many pigtails and button noses and small berry-shaped mouths convened in one
indoor place in who knows how long. Very few of the sneakered feet reach all the way to the thick shag in there. Much legdangling and absent uncomfortable sneaker-swinging. A couple fingers in nostrils in absent contemplation. Ann Kittenplan, in her
blue chair, is coolly appraising the little wash-offable tattoos she applies daily to the knuckles of her hands.
'Not quite what we're trying to speak of toget
 knows the register and inflections of his mother's voice so wel
ak when he flexes it. Cords in his left forearm stand out and
s like something far aw
rles Tavis's distant voice from behind his double office doors;
ere. Charles Tavis's office's inner door also has the I.D. DR. CHARLES TAVIS on it, and
man who knows his limitations having none.
'She does it really hard,' rebuts what must be Erica Siress.
'I've seen her do it,' what sounds like Jolene Criess confirms.
Anothe
'I hate it when some adult pats my head like I'm a schnauzer.’
'The next adult that calls me adorable is in for a really unpleasant surprise let me tell you.’
'I hate it when my hair is tousled o
'Kittenplan's tall. Kittenplan gives Indian rub-burns after lights-out.’
Avril gives them verbal space, tries gently to steer the topic closer to true Phielyism; she's subtle and very good with small
children.
'. . . that my daddy gives me these small l
ences me into rooms from behind. This tiny little irritating push, that makes me want to let him have it in the shin.’
'Mmmmmm-hmm,' Avril muses.
It's impossible not to ov
y hiss of Lateral Alice Moore's disengaged headphones and the conspiratorial murmur of Michael Pemulis trying to get her to
drum on her chest and describe 1-93 South's Neponset exit-ramp as one very long thin parking lot. Things are so quiet because the
anxiety level in Tavis's waiting room is high.
'You're all in for some serious Pukers is my prediction,' Ann Kittenplan had said to Pemulis as they all first answered the
intercom's summons, which was also about the time that Pemulis started in with the rodential chair-squeaking that made one half
of Kittenplan's face spasm.
One of the tricky and sinister things about corrective discipline at a tennis academy is that punishments can take the form of
what might look like straight-out athletic conditioning. Q.v. the drill sergeant telling the recruit to drop and give him fifty, etc. So
but this is why Gerhardt Schtitt and his prorectors are way more feared than Ogilvie or Richardson-Levy-O'Byrne-Chawaf or any
of the regular academics. It's not just that Schtitt's corporal reputation preceded him here. It's that Schtitt and deLint make out the
daily schedules for A.M. drills and P.M. matches and resistance-training and conditioning runs. But especially the A.M. drills.
Certain drills are well known to be n
a few minutes. Too brutal to be assigned on the daily basis that would contribute to genuine aerobic conditioning, drills like
the disciplinary version of Tap & Whack214204 are known to the kids simply as Pukers. Puker-drills are really meant to do
nothing but hurt you and make you think long and hard before repeating whatever you did to merit them; but they're still to all
outward appearances exempt from any kind of VIII-Amendment protest or sniveling calls home to parents, insidiously, since they
can be described to parents and police215205 alike as just drills assigned for your overall cardiovascular benefit, with all the
actual sadism completely sub rosa.
Kittenplan's prediction that the upperclassmen are going to wear the whole brown helmet for the Eschaton free-for-all is 
hopefully rebuttable by Pemulis's observation that Eschaton's extracurricular impulse and structure had been firmly in place before
any of them'd even enrolled. All Michael Pemulis had done was codify basic principles and impose a sort of matrix of decidable
strat
imally rhetorical diction, which Pemulis had then embedded in a Pink2
prin
ing and somebody'll say something like 'How's Avril
gett
isgruntled or professionally suicidal or both, started training his camera on the bedroom windows and routing the
resu
SVPs. The Intel 972 is cutting-edge, but she clings to a hideous old dotmat
ike a person than like a sort of cross-section
of a
o the point is that Tavis is an odd and delicate specimen, both ineffectual and in certain ways fearsome as a Headmaster,
and
egy. Maybe helped create a mythology and established, mostly through personal example, a certain level of expectation. All
Hal'd done was act as amanuensis on a lousy manual. The I.-Day Combatants had been out there of their own volition. Pemulis
and Axford'd gotten Hal to write out most of all this in max
tout so he could carry it around and study it and have it all nailed down before Tavis tried any boom-lowering. The strategy is
to let Pemulis do all the talking but let Hal interject at will, the voice of reason, good-cop/bad. Axford's been instructed to count
the An-tron fibers between his shoes the whole time they're in there.
Hal has no idea what it might signify that the Headmaster's summons hasn't come for almost 48 hours. It might be odd that it
hadn't once occurred to him to see Tavis personally, or to go to HmH and ask the Moms for intercession or info. It's not like he
had the urge but resisted it; it hadn't even occurred to him.
For somebody who not only lives on the same institutional grounds as his family but also has his training and education and
pretty much his whole overall raíson-d'être directly overseen by relatives, Hal devotes an unusually small part of his brain and
time ever thinking about people in his family qua family-members. Sometimes when he'll be chatting with somebody in the
endless registration-line for a tournament or at a post-meet dance or someth
ing along?' or 'I saw Orin kicking the everliving shit out of the ball on an O.N.A.N.F.L. highlights cartridge last week,' there
will be this odd tense moment where Hal's mind will go utterly blank and his mouth slack and flabby, working soundlessly, as if
the names were words on the tip of his tongue. Except for Mario, about whom Hal will talk your ear off, it's almost like some ponderous creaky machine has to get up and running for Hal even to think about members of his immediate family as standing in
relation to himself. It's a possible reason Hal avoids Dr. Dolores Rusk, who always wants to probe him on issues of space and selfdefinition and something she keeps calling the 'Coatlicue Complex.'216206
Hal's maternal half-uncle Charles Tavis is a little like the late Himself in that Tavis's C.V. is a back-and-forth but not
indecisive mix of athletics and hard science. A B.A. and doctorate in engineering, an M.B.A. in athletics administration — in his
professional youth Tavis had put them together as a civil engineer, his specialty the accommodation of stress through patterned
dispersal, i.e. distributing the weight of gargantuan athletic-spectatorial crowds. I.e., he'd say, he'd handled large live audiences;
he'd been in his own small way a minor pioneer in polymer-reinforced cement and mobile fulcra. He'd been on design teams for
stadia and civic centers and grandstands and micological-looking superdomes. He'd admit up-front that he'd been a far better
team-player engineer than out there up-front stage-center in the architectural limelight. He'd apologize profusely when you had no
idea what that sentence meant and say maybe the obfuscation had been unconsciously deliberate, out of some kind of
embarrassment over his first and last limelighted architectural supervision, up in Ontario, before the rise of O.N.A.N.ite
Interdependence, when he'd designed the Toronto Blue Jays' novel and much-ballyhooed SkyDome ballpark-and-hotel complex.
Because Tavis had been the one to take the lion's share of the heat when it turned out that Blue Jays' spectators in the stands, many
of them innocent children wearing caps and pounding their little fists into the gloves they'd brought with hopes of nothing more
exotic than a speared foul ball, that spectators at a distressing number of different points all along both foul-lines could see right
into the windows of guests having various and sometimes exotic sex in the hotel bedrooms over the center-field wall. The bulk of
the call for Tavis's rolling head had come, he'd tell you, when the cameraman in charge of the SkyDome's Instant-Replay-Video
Scoreboard, d
ltant multi-limbed coital images up onto the 75-meter Scoreboard screen, etc. Sometimes in slow motion and with multiple
replays, etc. Tavis will admit his reluctance to talk about it, still, after all this time. He'll confess that his usual former-careersummary is to say just that he'd specialized in athletic venues that could safely and comfortably seat enormous numbers of live
spectators, and that the market for his services had bottomed out as more and more events were designed for cartridgedissemination and private home-viewing, which he'll point out is not technically untrue so much as just not entirely open and
forthcoming.
Lateral Alice Moore is printing out WhataBurger R
rix printer she refuses to replace as long as Dave Harde can keep it going. It's the same with the intercom system and its
antiquated iron stand-up mike that Troeltsch says is an affront to the whole broadcasting profession. Lateral Alice has queer
eccentric pockets of intransigence and Ludditism, due possibly to her helicopter-crash and neurologic deficits. The printer's needly
sound fills the waiting room. Hal finds he can be confident of his face's symmetry and saliva only when he sits there with his right
hand over his left cheek. Each line of Alice's printed response sounds like some sort of supposedly unrippa-ble fabric getting
ripped, over and over, a dental and life-denying sound.
For Hal, the general deal with his maternal uncle is that Tavis is terribly shy around people and tries to hide it by being very
open and expansive and wordy and bluff, and that it's excruciating to be around. Mario's way of looking at it is that Tavis is very
open and expansive and wordy, but so clearly uses these qualities as a kind of protective shield that it betrays a frightened
vulnerability almost impossible not to feel for. Either way, the unsettling thing about Charles Tavis is that he's possibly the
openest man of all time. Orin and Marlon Bain's view was always that C.T. was less l
 person. Even the Moms Hal could remember relating anecdotes about how as a teenager, when she'd taken the child C.T. or
been around him at Québecois functions or gatherings involving other kids, the child C.T. had been too self-conscious and
awkward to join right in with any group of the kids clustered around, talking or plotting or whatever, and so Avril said she'd watch
him just kind of drift from cluster to cluster and lurk around creepily on the fringe, listening, but that he'd always say, loudly, in
some lull in the group's conversation, something like 'I'm afraid I'm far too self-conscious really to join in here, so I'm just going
to lurk creepily at the fringe and listen, if that's all right, just so you know,' and so on.
But s
being a relative guarantees no special predictive insight or quarter, unless certain maternal connections are exploited, the
thought of doing which literally does not occur to Hal. This odd blankness about his family might be one way to manage a life
where domestic and vocational authorities sort of bleed into each other. Hal squeezes his tennis ball like a madman, sitting there in
the needly printout-noise, right palm against his left cheek and elbow hiding his mouth, wanting very much to go first to the Pump 
Room and then to brush vigorously with his portable collapsible Oral-B. A quick chew of Kodiak is out of the question for several
reasons.
The only other time this year that Hal was officially summoned to the Headmaster's waiting room had been in late August,
right before Convocation and during Orientation period, when Y.D.A.U.'s new kids were coming in and wandering around
clueless and terrified, etc., and Tavis had wanted Hal to take temporary charge of a nine-year-old kid coming in from somewhere
called Philo IL, who was allegedly blind, the kid, and apparently had cranium-issues, from having originally been one of the
infantile natives of Ticonderoga NNY evacuated too late, and had several eyes in various stages of evolutionary development in
his head but was legally blind, but still an extremely solid player, which is all kind of a long tale in itself, given that his skull was
apparently the consistency of a Chesapeake crabshell but the head itself so huge it made Booboo look microcephalic, and the kid
apparently had on-court use of only one hand because the other had to pull around beside him a kind of rolling IV-stand appliance
with a halo-shaped metal brace welded to it at head-height, to encircle and support his head; but anyway Tex Watson and Thorp
had broken C.T. down over the kid's admission and tuition-waver, and C.T, now figured the kid would need to say the least some
extra help getting oriented (literally), and he wanted Hal to be the one to take him in hand (again literally). It turned out a couple
days later that the kid had some kind of either family or cerebro-spinal-fluid crisis at home in rural IL and wasn't matriculating
now till the Spring term. But back in August Hal had sat in the very chair Trevor Axford is now nodding off in, very late in the
day, like dusk, having had an informal exhibition match with a visiting Latvian Satellite pro go an encouraging three sets that
P.M. so that he'd missed Mrs. C.'s stuffed peppers at supper, his stomach making those where's-the-food noises from around the
transverse colon, alone in the blue room, waiting, the chair bobbing reflexively, with Lateral Alice Moore gone home to her long
apartment with rooms only 2 m. wide in Newton and an opaque plastic dust-thing wrapped tight over her Intel processor and
inter
 no Echt parents or guardians anywhere in view. Some kids just get dropped off. Sometimes
the
 to the quality of perpetual frenzy about the man, a kind of locational panic
that
end to sleep, between them,
abou
vis's teeth, about which maybe the less said the better. Looking discreetly in, Hal had
felt
m, shirt wet and crew cut matted from the courts and toting his Wilsons, and
mad ent's downdraft outside Tavis's little vestibule. Slice's clothes were comped by Fila and when he played
com-console and the little red danger-light on her DANGER: THIRD RAIL plaque unlit, and the only lights besides the weak
dusk outside were the hot 105W of his chairback's creepy blue-shaded magazine-lamp, plus the multiple lamps on in Charles
Tavis's office (Tavis has a phobic thing about overhead lighting) as Tavis was doing a late-day Intake interview on impossibly tiny
little Tina Echt, who just matriculated this fall at age seven. His doors were open because it was a brutal August and F. D. V.
Harde had somehow rigged Lateral Alice's air-conditioner vent in the waiting room so it really put out. Tavis's office's outer door
opened out while the inner door opened in, which gave his little inter-door vestibule kind of a jaw-like quality, when exposed.
August Y.D.A.U. had been when Hal's chronic left ankle had been almost the worst it's ever been, after an erumpent but
grueling summer tour of getting to at least the Quarters of just about everything, mostly on hard asphalt,217207 and he could feel
his pulse in the vessels in the raw ligaments of the ankle as he sat flipping the shiny pages of a new World Tennis and watching
the little ad-cards fall out and flutter; but he also couldn't help exploiting the open-jawed view of a substantial section of Charles
Tavis at his office desk, looking as usual oddly foreshortened and small and with his hands together on the massive desktop across
from a partial-profile view of a girl who looked like she couldn't be much more than five or six, preparing to receive Intake papers
as she listened to Tavis. There'd been
parents' cars barely even stop, just slow down, throw gravel as they accelerate away. Tavis's desk drawers have squeaky
casters. Jim Struck's folks' Lincoln hadn't even much slowed. Struck had been helped to his feet and taken immediately to the
locker room to shower the gravel out of his hair. Hal had been in charge of his Orientation, too, when Struck transferred, booted
out of Palmer Academy after his pet tarantula (named Simone — another long story) escaped and wouldn't even have dreamed of
biting the Headmaster's wife if she hadn't screamed and passed out and fallen right on it, Struck explained as Hal helped pick up
suitcases tumbled all over the drive.
Like many gifted bureaucrats, Hal's mother's adoptive brother Charles Tavis is physically small in a way that seems less
endocrine than perspectival. His smallness resembles the smallness of something that's farther away from you than it wants to be,
plus is receding.218208 This weird appearance of recessive drift, together with the compulsive hand-movements that followed his
quitting smoking some years back, helped contribute
 it's easy to see explains not only Tavis's compulsive energy — he and Avril, pretty much the Dynamic Duo of compulsion,
between them, sleep, in their second-floor rooms in the Headmaster's House — separate rooms — t
t as much as any one normal insomniac — but maybe also contributes to the pathological openness of his manner, the way he
thinks out loud about thinking out loud, a manner Ortho Stice can imitate so eerily that he's been prohibited by the male 18's from
doing his Tavis-impression in front of the younger players, for fear that the littler kids will find it impossible to take the real Tavis
seriously at the times he needs to be taken seriously.
As for the older kids, Stice can make them all double up now merely by shielding his eyes with his hand and assuming a
horizon-scan expression whenever Tavis heaves into view, seeming to recede even as he bears down.
C.T. as Headmaster always has a number of introductory questions for matriculants, and Hal, now, in November, can't
remember which one of these Tavis opened with with Echt, but he remembers seeing the little girl's sucker-stick sweep the air and
a plastic Mr. Bouncety-Bounce219209 no-pierce earring swing wildly as she shook her head. Hal'd marvelled at her size. How
high could somebody this little be ranked, even regionally, in 12's?
And then yes the sumptuous squeak of Tavis's big seagrass chair coming back forward as his elbows took his weight and he
laced his fingers together out across meters of polymer-reinforced shale desktop, custom-designed. The Headmaster's smile as he
leaned back, though hidden from Hal because of the shadow of the office's enormous StairBlaster,220210 was nevertheless
audible because of the thing with Charles Ta
an involuntary rush of affection for C.T. His maternal uncle's hair was straight and very precisely combed over, and his little
mustache was never quite symmetrical. One eye was also set at a slightly different angle than the other, so that besides holding his
hand up to scan Stice would also cock his head slightly to the side whenever C.T. came near. Hal's involuntary grin is lopsided
and only half-felt, now, remembering. The Axhandle's sitting there slumped, with his fist to his chin, a posture that he thinks
makes him look meditative but that really makes him look in utero, and Kittenplan is chewing at her knuckles' tattoos, which is
what she does instead of washing them off.
Then Ortho Stice had entered the hot waiting roo
e right for the AC-v
any
e stood under the cold
air a
 candor,' Tavis said. The audible smile. 'It is one of my limitations.’
lling very intently. The way he knew suddenly that he was going to go down and get high in secret in the Pump
Roo
r to Hal, but it was noticeable and kind of
unse -night round of Family Trivia, had once described Avril as The Black Hole of Human
Atte iscomfort he was
feel
 case. Her manner always
beca
der.’
at this is
tota
u cry like this.' Tavis's voice had assumed that stressed character of issuing from the end of a
long threatening lap is available if you want a lap, is all I can think of to say.’
.
offic venues outfitted with air-filtration equipment. Her posture, that night, with her coccyx
agai oking down the length of her legs, was awfully close to the way Himself used to stand around. She
indi
ther he's been in there a while.’
t suggestion of whine that came in: 'I've been waiting here coming up on an hour.' And that
he li
u've had nothing to eat, then, yet?’
Tavis's voice in there: Til invite you right here and now to sit in my lap and let me make such soothing sounds as There There
The
y Mommy and Daddy.’
sort of match he wore all black, and at E.T.A. and on the tour was known as The Darkness. He had a crew cut and the
beginnings of jowls. He and Hal exchanged the very slight sorts of nods people use when they like each other past all need for
politeness. They had similar games, although most of Stice's touch was at the net. Stice raised one hand to his eyes and cocked his
head slightly in the direction of the office's lamplight.
'The little guy going to be a long time in there?’
'You have to ask?’
Tavis was saying 'What actually we do for you here is to break you down in very carefully selected ways, take you apart as a
little girl and put you back together again as a tennis player who can take the court against any little girl in North America without
fear of limitation. With a perspective unmarred by the eyelashes of whatever pockets you brought here. A little girl now who can
regard the court as a mirror whose reflection holds no illusions or fear for you.’
'Now the thing with the skull,' Stice said. Hal had watched gooseflesh rise on Stice's arms and legs as h
nd faced up and breathed, hugging his gear to his chest.
'One possible way of couching it is to choose to say that we will take apart your skull very gently and reconstruct a skull for
you that will have a highly developed bump of clarity and a slight concave dent where the fear-instinct used to be. I'm doing my
best to cast all this in terms the you you are right now can be comfortable with, Tina. Though I need to tell you I feel
uncomfortable adjusting a presentation toward or down toward anyone in any way, since I'm terribly vain, both as a man and an
educator, about my reputation for
Stice withdrew without even having to say goodbye to Hal. They were at complete ease with one another. It had been a bit
different the year before, when Hal was still in Boys' 16's. Hal heard Stice say something to somebody out in the lobby. Part of
C.T.'s impression of distance just past the eye's focal length was the fact that the two sides of his face didn't quite go together. It
wasn't as drastic as a stroke-victim's face or a deformity; the subtlety of it was part of it, the essential vagueness about himself that
Tavis fought by sort of peeling his skull back and exposing his brain to you without any sort of warning or invitation; it was part
of the man's preoccupied frenzy.
Between Ortho Stice's exit and the Moms's entry Hal had been flexing the ankle and watching the swelling shift slightly under
the multiple socks. He stood and put his weight on the ankle experimentally a couple times and then sat back down and flexed it,
watching the swe
m before showering was that it hadn't occurred to him to ask The Darkness about making some sort of arrangements to eat
together, since Stice had missed supper too. His viscera were putting out the sound of one of those teakettles that doesn't have a
whistle and so just rumbles as it boils. A competitive athlete cannot skip meals without terrific metabolic distress.
After a little while Avril Incandenza, E.T.A.'s Dean of Academic Affairs, had lowered her head under the waiting room's
jamb and come in, looking fresh and totally untouched by the heat. She had one of the Orientation packets in its customary redand-gray binder.
The Moms always had this way of establishing herself in the exact center of any room she was in, so that from any angle she
was somehow in the line of all sight. It was part of her, and so to that extent dea
ttling. His brother Orin, during a late
ntion. Hal had been pacing, rising up on the toes of the left foot, trying to gauge the exact level of physical d
ing. That's when she'd come in. Hal and the Moms always greeted each other kind of extravagantly. When Avril entered a
room, any sort of pacing reduced to orbiting, and Hal's pacing became vaguely circular around the waiting room's perimeter as
Avril rested her tailbone on the receptionist's desk and crossed her ankles and produced her cigarette
me very casual and almost sort of male when she and Hal were alone in a room.
She watched him walk. 'The ankle?’
He hated himself for exaggerating the limp even slightly. 'Tender. Sore at the very worst. More like ten
'No, now, now no need to cry,'' C.T. was exclaiming as he knelt at the side of the chair from which little legs dangled and
were spasming around. 'I didn't mean literally break, as in break open your bead, Tina. Please let me acknowledge th
lly my fault my dear for presenting what we'll be up to here in just exactly the wrong sort of light.’
Avril had casually produced a 100-mm. rodney from the flat brass case and tamped it on an unlined knuckle. Hal produced no
lighter. Neither of them had looked toward Tavis's office's maw. Avril's smock-type dress was blue cotton, with a kind of
scalloped white doily around the shoulders and white stockings and painfully white Reebok cross-trainers.
'I am horrified that I've made yo
 corridor. 'Just please know that a totally un
Avril always smoked with her smoking-arm up and elbow resting in the crook of the other arm. She would frequently hold a
rodney just this same way without lighting it or even putting it in her mouth. She permitted herself to smoke only in her E.T.A
e and HmH study and one or two other
nst something and lo
cated C.T.'s door with her head.
'I ga
Hal despised even the very sligh
ked it a little that she looked pained for him as her tiny eyebrows (unplucked, just naturally tiny and arched) went up.
'Yo
'I was summoned.'‘
re.’
'Want m
Avril said, 'That's the old turn making those sounds then, and not the air conditioner?' with that smile that was also a kind of
wince.
'Couldn't even start to describe the sounds coming from down there, like that whistleless kettle Himself used to leave on when 
—’
An apple appeared from a deep pocket in her smock. 'Happen to have a spare Granny Smith here, to tack body to soul while
we
 eat between 12 and 23, I happen
to k
 is
to m
 apple, pretending to pretend his reluctance to eat her supper was a pretense. Orin
beli er with an
arm
w packets?' The apple was good-sour but
perf different little informal and
actio f clippings, and three rings for the packet of guidelines and Honor-Code
pled
y short-staffed. Thierry and Donni won their qualifying round at Hartford, so they're staying over.' She
lean t here. She smiled.
id, looking at something on a printout.
arently some sort of unleavened baker, mother a public relations person for the Red Sox
A.A.
t the way females hold flat things, still trying to catch the
Hea
Bath
g about taking skulls apart and she yelled bloody murder.’
n she'll
eith
 not being able to see over the net yet, but possibly even harder
to s
n the face of the nearly limitless potential someone as young as yourself represents.’
s supposed to signify.
 was snapping her fingers silently and working her forehead. 'There's some term for coals reduced to residue after
all d
ntly. 'From klinker low German and klinckaerd old Dutch, to sound, ring, nominated to
subs
hink. See for
exam
wait.’
He smiled tiredly at the big green apple. 'Moms, that's your apple. That's all you're going to
now.’
Avril made a distended gesture. 'Stuffed. Huge lunch with a set of parents not three hours ago. I've been staggering around
since.' Looking at the apple like she had no idea where it'd even come from. Til probably pitch this out.’
'You will not.’
'Please,' rising from the desk's edge without seeming to use muscles, apple held out like something distasteful, cigarette down
at her side where it would be putting a hole in the smock if lit. 'You'd be doing us both a favor.’
'This drives me bats. You know this drives me bats.’
Orin and Hal's term for this routine is Politeness Roulette. This Moms-thing that makes you hate yourself for telling her the
truth about any kind of problem because of what the consequences will be for her. It's like to report any sort of need or problem
ug her. Orin and Hal had this bit, during Family Trivia sometimes: 'Please, I'm not using this oxygen anyway.' 'What, this old
limb? Take it. In the way all the time. Take it.' 'But it's a gorgeous bowel movement, Mario — the living room rug needed
something, I didn't know what til right this very moment.' The special fantodish chill of feeling both complicit and obliged. Hal
despised the way he always reacted, taking the
eved she did it all on purpose, which was way too easy. He said she went around with her feelings out in front of h
 around the feelings' windpipe and a Clock 9 mm. to the feelings' temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot.
The Moms held the red binder out to Hal without moving. 'Have you seen Alice's ne
umy from the pocket of the Moms's smock, and it stimulated a torrent of saliva. The binder had
n photos from the waiting-room walls, and offprints o
ges, all done up by Moore in a Gothic ital.
Hal looked up from the binder, indicating C.T.'s office with his head. 'You're taking the girl around yourself?’
'We're encouragingl
ed way forward and looked in at C.T. so he could see she was ou
Hal followed her look. 'The girl's name's Tina something and she'll come up to about your knee.’
'Echt,' Avril sa
Hal looked at her while he chewed. 'You don't like her already?’
'Tina Echt. Pawtucket. Father app
A. baseball there.’
Hal had to wipe his chin as he smiled. 'Triple-A. Not A.A.A.’
Avril was leaning forward at the waist with the binder to her breas
dmaster's eye.
Hal said 'Troeltsch finally has some competition in the repulsive-last-name department.’
'Lord she is a small one isn't she.’
'I can't see her being more than maybe five.’
'Oh golly let's see: age seven, high I.Q., somewhat impoverished-looking M.M.P.I., played out of Providence Racquet and
 in East Providence. Ranked thirty-first in Eastern 12's as of June.’
'She can't be much taller than her damn stick out there, when she plays. Schtitt's going to keep her here what, twelve years?’
'The girl's father has been calling about admission for her for over two years, Charles said.’
'He was doing that thin
Avril's laugh's onset was high-pitched and alarming and distinctive, so now at least C.T. would for sure know the Moms was
out here waiting and would wind things up and maybe get to Hal so Hal could go get high in secret. 'Well good for her,' Avril said.
The orbit took him around Lateral Alice Moore's desk in a kind of thick ellipse. Every time his left foot came down he either
dipped down or raised up briefly to tip-toe, flexing the ankle. 'Ten years here and she'll lose her mind. If she starts at seve
er be ready for the Show at fourteen or by fourteen she'll start getting that burned-out look that makes you want to wave your
hand in front of her face.’
There was the sound of Tavis's squeaky right Nunn Bush pacing faster, which meant real conclusion. 'I'm going to predict it's
probably hard to see yourself as a great athlete at this stage, Tina,
ee yourself as providing entertainment, engaging people's attention. As a high-velocity object people can project themselves
onto, forgetting their own limitations i
The apple generated tremendous amounts of saliva. 'He'll put her in the Show before menses, there'll be another enormous
fuss and high-rental cartridges of a girl no larger than her racquet beating up on hairy Slavic lesbians, and then by fourteen she'll
be like old coal in the bottom of a backyard grill.' Some old military joke about apples kept running through. Eat the Apple, Fuck
the Core. Hal couldn't remember what it wa
The Moms
ay in a grill. I'm trying to think.’
Hal hates this. 'Clinkers,' he said insta
tantive around 1769: a hard mass formed by the fusion of the earthy impurities of like coal, iron ore, limestone.' He hated it
that she could even dream he'd be taken in by the aphasiac furrowing and finger-snapping, and then that he's always so pleased to
play along. Is it showing off if you hate it?
'Clinker.’
'A grill wouldn't have clinkers. Charcoal's refined to burn right down to dust. Clinkers are sort of metallic, I t
ple the ring-dash-sound etymology.’
'I like to suspect this is why so many of our older players like to project me into this carnival-barker persona with tiny balance 
sheets revolving in my eyes, that I'm up-front with every incoming addition to our family that this is where the resources come
from stem for gifted children who want to scale the
heig and so ultimately for an Academy like this one's considerable
ope
you'd care to join us for dinner. We'll also have Ms. Echt if she can stay up that long.’
d Barry speak to Gerhardt about the ankle not getting better?’
lay'll be good to it. Schtitt knows all about the ankle.’
itchen, then.’
ver he orbits, and his plans emerged between Avril's invitations to
acce
Hal had felt the cold stab in the gum and then the slow
radi
en the integrity or
smo
gets very quiet and very still. Because then he seems,
pers
ms like it's degenerated into the girls all getting very excited and exchanging data on what kinds of
anim
 for professional tennis, and for the North American junior development sy
hts to professionalism or to a competitive college career,
rating expenses, and for scholarships like the partial one we're so happy to be able to offer your parents for you.’
'So then perhaps
The core made a very-muffled-cymbal sound in the bottom of Lateral Alice's wastebasket. 'I can't get out of dawns. Wayne
and I are supposed to play Slobodan221211 and Hartigan at some corporate-spectacle thing at Au-burndale right after lunch.’
'Have you ha
'The c
'Well best of British luck to you both.' Avril's purse looked more like soft luggage than like a purse. 'May I lend you the key
to the k
It's always the Moms's left shoulder Hal looks over, whene
pt some sort of politeness-act. 'The Darkness and I were going to blast down the hill and grab something if and when I ever
get out of here.’
'Oh.’
Then he wondered with dread what Stice might have said to her on her way in, re supper. 'Maybe Pemulis too, I think Pemulis
said.’
'Well do not, under any circumstances, enjoy yourself.’
Echt and Tavis were both standing, now, in there. Their handshake looked, for the first split-second he looked, like C.T. was
jacking off and the little girl was going Sieg Heil. Hal thought he was maybe starting to lose his mind. Even the meat of the
Granny Smith smelled like perfume.
Three months later, earlier today, before being again summoned, at the dentist's, the dentist's office had had a weird sharp
clean sweet smell about it, the olfactory equivalent of fluorescent light.
al freeze, his face ballooning to become one of the frozen cumuli against the aftershave-blue of the dental wallpaper's sky.
Zegarelli D.D.S. had dry dark green eyes that bulged above his mint-blue mask, as in like olives where eyes should be, as he
leaned in to proceed, his dental overhead light's corona giving him one of those malperspectived medieval halos that seem to stand
on end. Even masked, Zegarelli's breath is infamous — E.T.A.s forced for the first time by their E.T.A. Group Plan to recline
below Zegarelli are counselled on how to respire, to inhale when Zegarelli inhales and exhale right back out with him, to avoid
doubling the amount of suffering Hal's already gone through, just today.
Charles Tavis is not a buffoon. The thing that's keeping things so tensely quiet out here amid all this waiting-room blue is that
there are historically at least two Charles Tavises, the three older boys know. The openly cross-sectional and free-associating and
arms-waving-on-the-perspectival-horizon dithering hand-wringing Total-Worry persona is really Tavis's version of social
composure, his way of trying to get along with you. But just ask Michael Pemulis, whose sneakers have been on Tavis's carpet so
often they've left an unvacuumable impression in the checked Antron: when Tavis loses his composure, wh
oth function of the Academy or his unquestioned place at the E.T.A. tiller is God forbid threatened, Hal's openly adjustable
uncle becomes a different man, one not to be fucked with. It's not necessarily pejorative to compare a cornered bureaucrat to a cornered rat. The danger-sign to watch out for is if Tavis suddenly
pectivally, to grow. He seems, sitting there, to rush in at you, dopplering in at a whisper. Almost looming over you from
across the huge desk. If shit meets administrative fan, kids coming out of his mandible-doored office come out pale and rubbing
their eyes, not from tears but from this depth-perspective skewing that C.T. suddenly effects, when there's shit.
Another alert is when Lateral Alice Moore gets formally buzzed to bring you and the others in, instead of the office doors
ever opening from inside, and when she gets up and edges over to show you in like you're some sort of hat-holding salesman,
without once meeting your eye, as if there's shame. One big family.
The diddle-check see
als members of their own biologic families either imitate or physically resemble, and Avril's out of sight and silent and
apparently letting them go with it for a while and vent stress. Hal keeps checking for jaw-drool with the back of his hand. Pemulis,
in a Cyrillic-lettered T-shirt, takes off the hat and looks around himself and makes reflexive tie-straightening movements, taking
one last look at his lines on the printout while Axford stands there needing three tries to work the outside door's knob. Ann
Kittenplan, on the other hand, wears an expression of almost regal calm, and precedes them through the inner door like someone
stepping down off a dais.
And it also seems somehow sinister that she's apparently been in here all this time, this Clenette person, one of the ninemonth temps from down the hill, pretty-eyed and so black she's got a bluish cast, with hair ironed straight and then pinned up and
the standard E.T.A.-custodial teal-blue zip-upable jumpsuit, emptying Tavis's personal brass wastebaskets into her big cart with its
gray canvas sides. The way she stares at a point just to the side of Hal's own stare as she and her cart wait at C.T.'s inner door for
Hal and the others to be ushered sideways through by Lateral Alice Moore. The cart, like poor Otis Lord's own game-master's cart,
has a crazy wheel, and clatters a bit even buried in shag, trying to maneuver around Moore as she reverses back along the
vestibule's wall. Neither Schtitt nor deLint is in here, but from the hiss of Pemulis's inhale Hal can tell that Dr. Dolores Rusk is in
the room even before he takes his eyes from a C.T. who's sitting pulsing with swollen proximity in his seagrass swivel-chair and
almost done coolly bending a giant paper clip into a sort of cardioid or else sloppy circle: Tavis's window-lit shadow now reaches
all the way past the StairBlaster to the red-and-gray-fabric ottoman along the east wall, in which sits sure enough Rusk, her hose
laddered and face betraying nothing; and then next to her is poor old Otis P. Lord, the Hitachi monitor still over his head like the
sallet of some grotesque high-tech knight, slumped and with his sneakers pointing at each other in the blue and black shag, hands
in his lap, two crude eye-holes cut into the black plastic casing of the monitor's base, Lord not meeting Pemulis's eye, and wicked
hanging shards of glass from the screen he fell through pointing — some nearly touching, even — his slim neck and throat, so he
has to hold his head very still, despite the heavings of his shallow chest, with the day-shift E.T.A. nurse standing behind him and
inclined over the back of the sofa to hold the monitor very carefully in place, the incline producing cleavage which Hal would 
gladly choose to be the sort of person not to note. Lord's eyes move to Hal and blink dolefully through the holes, and he can be
hear sniffing moistly in there, complexly muffled; and Pemulis is just finishing moving his feet precisely into their familiar
impressions in the office carpet when C.T., seeming direly to rise from his chair without getting up, quietly asks the room's last
occu k in
the
rget its name. Oriental myth. It's a woman
cov
ody of water combing her
bod . And they have sex with her. Apparently she's simply too exotic and intriguing or seductive to resist. Even
the
aralyzed with stasis by this intimate act,' Marathe said. When now he dreamt of his father, it was of the
two
flying past the
outc
g to Steeply, Steeply's B.S.S. superiors did not
kno y held this fact back from his superiors. It
satis Marathe felt. Unless Steeply was deceiving
Mar
aking Marathe no better than M. Rodney 'the God' Tine. If Fortier knew of this, he would understandably drive a
railr
he glowing but unpink east. 'A false dawn.’
 own francophone myth of your Odalisk of Theresa.’
he rarely yielded to the temptation to correct Steeply, whose horrid pronunciation and
the ther was or was not an intentional irritant, intended to discomfit
Mar
yth being that the Odalisk's so beautiful that mortal Québecois eyes can't take it. Whoever
look
aughed.223213
s, they did not fear beauty. They feared ugliness. Hence I think beauty and pleasure, these were not
fata
 said Steeply. He was smoking either his last or one of his purse's
pack e from counting the
con en,
by t
e's a man of only actions, ends,' Steeply said, with Marathe could not tell whether irony or maybe not.
d
pant — the scrubbed young button-nosed urologist in an O.N.A.N.T.A. blazer, severely underdue at E.T.A., seated bac
shadow of the open inner door in the room's southeast corner, so he's hidden right behind them from the start and there's the
opportunity for this stagy incriminating-type whirl-and-kertwang-face from Axford and Hal as they hear Charles Tavis addressing
the urine expert behind them, asking him very quietly please to close both doors.
PRE-DAWN AND DAWN, 1 MAY Y.D.A.U. OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON AZ U.S.A., STILL
'You can't say it's only a U.S. thing,' Steeply said again. 'I went through school when mu!ticulturalism was inescapable. We
read about the Japanese and Indonesians, for example, having a mythic figure. I fo
ered with long blond hair. Entirely. Her whole body with blond down all over it.’
'This type of passive temptation, part of it seems to include a felt lack. A perceived deprivation. Orientals are not bodily a
hairy culture.’
'These multicultural Oriental myths always had young Oriental men happening upon her by some b
y-hair and singing
young Oriental men who know of the myths can't resist, according to the myths.’
'And are rendered p
 skating, young Marathe and M. Marathe, at a St. Remi-d'Amherst outdoor rink, M. Mar-athe's breath visible and his
pacemaker a boxy bulge in his Brunswickian cardigan.
'Killed outright, usually. The pleasure's too intense. No mortal can stand it. Kills them. M-o-r-t-s.’
Marathe sniffed.
'The analogous part is how even the ones who know the pleasure of it will kill them, they go ahead anyway.’
Marathe coughed.
Some of the insects flying had multiple pairs of wings and were bio-luminescent. They seemed very intent,
ropping and darting jaggedly off on a course, on their way to something urgent. The sound of them, the insects, made Marathe
think of playing cards in the bicycle spokes of the bicycle of a boy with legs. Both men were silent. This is the time of false
dawns. Venus moved east away from them. The softest light imaginable seeped into the desert and spread into the strange tan
vistas around them, something heating just below the ring of night. His blanket of the lap was covered in burrs and small spiked
seeds of some species. The U.S.A. desert began to rustle with life of which most remained hidden. In the American sky, the stars
fluttering like banked flames above a low-resolution seepage of glow. But none of the pinkening of genuine dawn.
Both the U.S.A. Office of Unspecified Services and les Assassins des Fau-teuils Rollents looked forward to these meetings of
Marathe and Steeply. They accomplished little. It was their sixth or seventh. Meeting. Steeply had volunteered to be liaison with
Marathe's betrayal, despite language.222212 The A.F.R. believed Marathe functioned as a triple agent, pretending to betray his
nation for his wife, memorizing every detail of the meetings with B.S.S. Accordin
w that Fortier knew that Steeply knew he (Fortier) knew Marathe was here. Steepl
fied some U.S.A. desire to hold some small thing back from one's superiors,
athe about this. Marathe did not know. M. Fortier did not know Marathe had reached the internal choice that he loved his
skull-deprived and heart-defective wife Gertraud Marathe more than he loved the Separatist and anti-O.N.A.N. cause of the nation
Quebec, m
oad spike through Gertraud's boneless right eye, killing her and Marathe both.
The real Marathe gestured outward at t
'No,' Steeply said, 'but your
'L'Odalisque de Sainte Thérèse.' Marat
syntax as well Marathe could never determine for sure ei
athe.
Steeply said 'The multicultural m
s at her turns into a diamond or gem.’
'In most versions an opal.’
'A Medusa in reverse, one might say.’
Both men, well versed in this, mirthlessly l
Marathe said 'The Greek
l temptations for the Greek type.’
'Or like a combination of Medusa and Circe, your Odalisk'
's last cigarettes — the American's habit to throw the butts off the outcropping had prevented Marath
sumed butts. Marathe knew that Steeply knew that filters of cigarettes did not biodegrade for the environment. The two m
his juncture of time, each knew the other.
A hidden bird twittered.
'The Greek mythic personality, it had also pregnancy by rain and rape by fowl.’
'And haven't we come a long way,' Steeply said ironically.
'This irony and contempt for selves. These also are part of your U.S.A. type's temptation, I think.’
'Whereas your typ
The desert floor was brightening by imperceptible degrees, its surface the color of overtanned hide. The saguaro cactus
reptile-hued. Potentially young forms in down sleeping bags of coffinous shape were now discernible around the black remains of
the night's bonfire. The air smelled of green wood. A tasteless odor of dust. The distant construction site's payloaders were urine-
colored and appeared frozen in the middle of various actions. It was still chill. Marathe's teeth had a palpable film on them, of
perhaps a paste of dust, especially the front teeth. No sun's top arc was appearing, and Marathe could cast no shadow yet on the
shal
 right arm to cradle the left elbow. But Marathe knew quite well that
Stee
ly lightening scene of the vistas had a stillness about it that suggested photography. Marathe had long ago placed his
watc
hosen to indulge this.
 ..." He gestured slightly.
teeply made a show of looking down and prodding at the tan stone's dust with the toes of his shoe. 'It looks like there might
be th ngs.’
 leave,’
ver you wish. Possibility of things . . .
craw
changed and so on and so forth, and we was all there with this first guy, in our like
grou t he was our boy, we're all in the crew, so we all crew up on this girl's
date
he one guy that was making the moves on her in the first place gets her to start playing strip-darts, like
taki points in darts, which the keep isn't too like thrilled but these boys are his customers, it's like family.
We'
picture. Sounds like a real nice picture.’
m?’
g one, I'm remembering a .25 somewhat, in that range, but in he comes and comes straight over to the
dart
 was shot. We are all
very n time. I remember it not seeming real. The keep's busy calling the Finest, the guy drops the Item and
the kept the guy back behind the bar, I think
most
seri
 didn't look good. We didn't even lay him down, we got this idea, one of the guys started walking him
e behind them.
Rémy Marathe's resting pulse rate was very low: no legs to require blood from the heart. He very rarely felt phantom pains,
and then only in the stump of the left. All A.F.R.s have enormous arms, particularly upper arms. Marathe was left-handed. Steeply
manipulated his cigarette with his left hand and used his
ply was right-handed. The little wens of his field-persona's electrolysis were now brightly pink against the pallor of Steeply's
face, which appeared both puffy and drawn.
The cloudless sky above the east's Mountains of Rincon range was the faint sick pink of an unhealed burn. The whole
imperceptib
h in his windbreaker's pocket, to keep from continually checking. Steeply enjoyed imagining that his interface dictated its
own period and time; Marathe had c
Marathe realized about himself that some of his pretended sniffing was for the purpose of alerting Steeply to the breaking of a
silence. 'You could seat yourself briefly, if you have fatigue. The shoes' straps
S
i
'I must soon leave.' Marathe's hand was imprinted with the texture of the Sterling's pebbled grip. Tt has been good to be in the
air for a night. Soon I must
'Crawling around. The skirt, it makes one sensitive about simply plopping down where
ling up.' He looked up at Marathe. He appeared sad. 'I'd never realized.’
0450H., 11 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT FRONT OFFICE, ENNET HOUSE
D.A.R.H., ENFIELD MA
'Didn't know whether to shit or shout Dixie after it went off. And the look on his face.’
'One of the times for me was I'm in some bar in Lowell with some guys I'm crewing around with and we were there with
some other guys, just fucking Lowell knuckleheads, your young drunks that are just getting to be your young working-type drunks
that stop off after work for just a couple and don't make it home til closing. Just putting away boilermakers and playing darts and
this and that. And this one guy on the crew starts making moves on this one guy's girl, this real ordinary-looking guy's in there
with his girl and one of our guys starts saying this and that to her, trying to pick her up, and her date got pissed off, you know,
who can blame him, and there was words ex
p, he was the one talking the shit to this guy's girl bu
 and push him around somewhat, you know how it is, say he's talking shit to our boy, he gets a little bit of a beating, dopeslaps, nothing like extreme or blood, and we kick his ass around a little bit and toss him out of this bar and get this girl to drink
boilermakers with us and t
ng off bits of clothes for
re all real drunk and playing strip-darts.’
T get the
'Except when I got a little smarter later I learned you never in a neighborhood bar fu— you don't ever mess with a local guy
with a girl and make him look small in front of the girl and then stay there where it happened if he leaves, because it's this kind of
guy always comes back.’
'You learned to leave.’
'Because this guy like a half-hour later on he comes back packing. Packing means there's a Item involved, now, see.’
'Ite
'A gun. This wasn't a bi
 game and the girl that's down to her slip and pulls it out and without saying nothing up and comes right over and shoots our
boy, that'd taken his girl and made him look small, shoots him right in the head, right in the back of the head.’
'Boy was crazy as a shithouse rat.’
'Well Joelle he'd got made small in front of his girl, and we stayed, and he came back and plugged him in the back of the
head.’
'And killed him dead.’
'Not right away he didn't die. The negativest part for me is what we do. All us guys with the guy that
 fucked up by this point i
keep grabbed him and covered him with the bar piece and called the Finest and
ly now to keep us from eliminating his map right there, out of payback. We're all blotto-zombie drunk by this juncture. The
girl, there was blood all down the side of her slip. And here our boy's shot in the head, the guy'd shot him right through the back of
the head from the side, and blood's all over. You always maybe think of individuals bleeding in this one way, like steady. But your
ous bleeding comes with the pulse, if you didn't know. It like shoots out and dies down and shoots out.’
'Don't have to tell me.’
'Well I don't know you, Joelle, am I right? I don't know what you seen or know.’
'I saw an old boy cut his hand off with a chainsaw cutting back brush back of the Cumberland when I was fishing with my
Daddy. Like to have bled to death right there. My Daddy had to use his belt. Before he got it tied off the blood came like that, with
the pulse. My Daddy got him to the hospital in his car, like to saved his life. He'd had some training. He could save lives like that.’
'I tell you, what still gets me is we was so drunk we didn't even somehow take it seriously, because everything seemed like a
movie when I got real drunk. I still wish we'd thought to take him to the hospital right away. We could of piled him in. He wasn't
dead yet even though he
arou ound in circles like some kind of O.D., thought if we could keep him walking til the wagon came
he'd ink then he was dead. Blood all over everybody. The gun wasn't more than an
old lking-him-around idea into our
head d trying to put her stockings on and we're yelling to the guy
that' e and
he w
e this. This is the best window. But you learned a lesson.’
at time.’
 of their legs shorter than the other?’
ere each leg was shorter than the other.’
han it?’
 us on. He said the point was an AA point, that it defied sense and explaining and you just had to accept it on
faith at creepy Randy guy with the white wig was backing him up with a very straight face. McDade said she walked like a
metr ing fun of us, but I still thought it was funny.’
e.’
's really interface if you're in here. How come with the veil?’
ars in.’
eformed? It's nothing that sticks way
out, an say it. Are you, like, missing something?’
ng, for Varying Lengths.
The
sked Pat and Tommy S. and still the thing I don't get is why join a fellowship just to hide? I can see if somebody
is li w, hideously — and they've been hiding away in the dark all their life, and they want to Come In and join a
fello al and everybody can Identify because they all spent their whole life hiding also, and you join a
fello
s that the urge to hide is offset by a
giga
ve, you crave connection and society, you know intellectually that
you'
when you talk about this shit.’
u hide your deep need to hide, and you do this out of the need to appear to other people as if you have the
stren
nd. We all walked him ar
 be OK. By the end we was dragging him, I th
.25. People was yelling at us to pile him in and take him to the hospital, but we'd got this wa
s, to hold him up and walk him in circles, the girl's screaming an
d shot him how we were going to off with his map and so on and so forth, till the keep called an ambulance and they cam
as dead as a stick.’
'Gately that's really bad.’
'Why are you even up, don't have to work.’
'I like it when it snows real early lik
'His name was Chuck or Chick. The one that got shot th
'Did you hear that McDade person at supper? You know how some folks have one
'I don't listen to those guys' crap.’
'It was down at the far end of the table at supper. He was telling Ken and me how he had a counselor when he was in Juvenile
in Jamaica Plain, he had this counselor he said she had this condition wh
'I don't think I follow you, Joelle.’
'Each of the woman's legs was shorter than the other.’
'How can a leg that's shorter than the other leg have the other leg shorter t
'He was having
. Th
onome. He was mak
'Maybe tell me about this veil of yours, then, Joelle, if we're talking about defied sens
'Waaaay out to one side. Then waaaay out to the other side.’
'Really. Let
'Bridal thing.’
'...’
'Aspiring Muslim.’
'I didn't mean to pry in. You can just tell me if you don't want to talk about the veil.’
'I'm also in another fellowship, with almost four ye
'U.H.I.D.’
'It's the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed. The veil is a sort of fellowship caparison.’
'What's it compared to?’
'We all wear one. Almost all of us, with some time in.’
'But if you don't mind, how come you're in it? U.H.I.D.? How're you supposed to be d
 if I c
'There's a brief ceremony. It's a bit like giving out chips over at the Better Late Than Never meeti
new U.H.I.D.s stand and receive the veil and don the veil and stand there and recite that the veil they've donned is a Type and
a Symbol, and that they are choosing freely to be bound to wear it always — a day at a time — both in light and darkness, both in
solitude and before others' gaze, and as with strangers so with familiar friends, even Daddies. That no mortal eye will see it
withdrawn. That they hereby declare openly that they wish to hide from all sight. Unquote.’
'...’
'I've also got a membership card that spells out everything you could ever want to know, and more.’
'Except I've a
ke — you kno
wship where everybody's equ
wship so you can step out of the dark and into the group and get support and finally show yourself minus eyes or with three
ti— arms or whatever and be accepted by people that know just what it's like, and like in AA they say they'll love you till you can
like love yourself and accept yourself, so you don't care what people see or think anymore, and you can finally step out of the cage
and quit hiding.’
That's AA?’
'Kind of, a little bit, I think.’
'Well Mr. Gately what people don't get about being hideously or improbably deformed i
ntic sense of shame about your urge to hide. You're at a graduate wine-tasting party and improbably deformed and you're the
object of stares that the people try to conceal because they're ashamed of wanting to stare, and you want nothing more than to hide
from the covert stares, to erase your difference, to crawl under the tablecloth or put your face under your arm, or you pray for a
power failure and for this kind of utter liberating equalizing darkness to descend so you can be reduced to nothing but a voice
among other voices, invisible, equal, no different, hidden.’
'Is this like this thing they talked about about people hating their faces on videophones?’
'But Don you're still a human being, you still want to li
re no less worthy of connection and society than anyone else simply because of how you appear, you know that hiding
yourself away out of fear of gazes is really giving in to a shame that is not required and that will keep you from the kind of life
you deserve as much as the next girl, you know that you can't help how you look but that you are supposed to be able to help how
much you care about how you look. You're supposed to be strong enough to exert some control over how much you want to hide,
and you're so desperate to feel some kind of control that you settle for the appearance of control.’
'Your voice gets different
'What you do is yo
gth not to care how you appear to others. You stick your hideous face right in there into the wine-tasting crowd's visual 
meatgrinder, you smile so wide it hurts and put out your hand and are extra gregarious and outgoing and exert yourself to appear
totally unaware of the facial struggles of people who are trying not to wince or stare or give away the fact that they can see that
you're hideously, improbably deformed. You feign acceptance of your deformity. You take your desire to hide and conceal it
under a mask of acceptance.’
'Use less words.’
'In other words you hide your hiding. And you do this out of shame, Don: you're ashamed of the fact that you want to hide
from n of powerlessness over the
need ment. In other words we don the veil. We
don
ed about the fact that how we appear to others affects us deeply, about the fact that we want to
be s ll sight. U.H.I.D. supports us in our decision to hide openly.’
 to follow.’
ept your nonacceptance, the Union, you're saying.’
 me after like three days here, then. I feel low esteem about how I think I'm not
brig
ay, to illustrate the U.H.I.D. take versus an apparently more AA take. U.H.I.D.'d say it's fine
to f bright as some others, but that the cycle becomes annular and insidious if
you
and acting as if it didn't bother you at all, pretending you didn't care
whe
n now I have to go to my other fucking job.’
here into the gnawed
ragg
k I'm not bright, unless it's you're saying it's obvious to anybody I'm not bright?’
't mean to pry. Just tell me if you don't want to speak to someone you barely know about it.’
tball?’
hey gave me a tutor and I still flunked.' 'I used to twirl a baton at halftimes. I went to a
spec
t at that
Wal
can't see you're coming out sideways all over the place about when I asked can I
ask
ay you're trapped in shame about the shame, in response, and that the shame-circle keeps you
from
 distracted up in shame and me again instead of saying Yes or No to me asking Will you tell me what
you'
 a backlight to illuminate my own inability to be open and straightforward. The best defense is a good offense
isn't
st completely opened up about my shame and my inability to be open and
strai
 sight. You're ashamed of your uncontrolled craving for shadow. U.H.I.D.'s First Step is admissio
 to hide. U.H.I.D. allows members to be open about their essential need for conceal
 the veil and wear the veil proudly and stand very straight and walk briskly wherever we wish, veiled and hidden, and but now
completely up-front and unasham
hielded from a
'You seem like you drift in and out of different ways of talking. Sometimes it's like you don't want me
'Well I've got a brand-new life, just out of the wrapper, which you all say'll take some time to fit.’
'So they teach you how to acc
'You followed very well. You didn't need fewer words at all. If you don't mind my saying so, my sense is that you think
you're not bright but you're not.’
'Not bright?’
'I put that poorly. You're not not bright. As in you're incorrect in thinking you have nothing upstairs.’
'It's a self-esteem issue, then, you're seeing in
ht enough for some people.’
'Which is fine, U.H.I.D. would s
eel inadequate and ashamed because you're not as
begin to be ashamed of the fact that being unbright shames you, if you try to hide the fact that you feel mentally inadequate,
and so go around making jokes about your own dullness
ther others perceived you as unbright or not.’
'This makes the front of my head hurt, trying to follow this.’
'Well you've been up all night.’
'The
'You're way brighter than you think, Don G., although I doubt anything anyone else says can get in t
ed place where you're afraid you're slow and dull.’
'And what makes you think I thin
'I didn
'Now you're being sarcastic on what I said before.’
'...’
'I got kicked off of football my tenth-grade year for flunking English.' 'You played American foo
'I was good til I got kicked off. T
ial camp six summers running.’
'...’
'But a lot of the forms of self-hatred there is no veil for. U.H.I.D.'s taught a lot of us to be grateful that there's at least a veil
for our form.' 'So the veil's a way to not hide it.' 'To hide openly, is more like it.’
'I'm already seeing it's very different from the drug-recovery agenda, the AA and NA program.’
'Can I ask how you're deformed?’
'The best is when the sun's coming up right through the snow and everything looks so white.’
'...’
'I almost forgot why I came on in, that that Kate girl said Ken E. like to get killed by some son of a bitch last nigh
tham NA thing and they want somebody to tell Johnette not to make them go back again if they don't want.’
'One is Kate and Ken can talk for themselves with Johnette and I don't need to pry in and you sure don't need to pry in and
rescue nobody else. Two is you're all of a sudden talking different again, and when you were talking about the veil you didn't
sound like you to me. And three is don't think I
what deformity you're not hiding the fact that you're hiding under that thing. The Staff part of me wants to say if you don't
want to answer it just say so, but don't try and go around the side and think you can distract me into forgetting I asked it.’
'The U.H.I.D. in me would s
 really being present for your Staff job, Don. You're more bugged by the possibility that I'm treating you as unbright and
distractable than you are about a resident's inability to come right out and openly exercise her right to refuse to answer an
incredibly private and drug-unrelated question.’
'And now she's back to talking like a fucking English teacher again. But ignore that. That's not the point. Look at how you're
trying to get our dialogue all
re missing behind that veil.’
'Oh you're good at hiding Mr. G. you're good. The minute we start to poke at any inadequacies you're ashamed of, see, you
drop behind your own protective mask of House Staff and start probing areas that you now know I can't bring myself to be open
about — since you got me to tell you all about U.H.I.D.'s philosophy of hiding — so that your own sense of inadequacy gets either
buried or used as
 it Mr. Football Player.’
'Aspirin-time, now, with all the words. You win. Go watch the snow come down someplace else.’
'The thing is, Mr. Staff, I've already ju
ghtforward about this. You're exposing something I've already held up to view. It's your shame about being ashamed of what
you're afraid might be seen as a lack of brightness that's getting to stay buried under this dead horse of my deformity that you're
tryin
detrack instead of just saying No to Can I ask. Just say No. Try it. It's OK. Nothing bad'll
hap
ay No? Why come in here? Did I come to you, to talk? Was I just
sittin wake and do the Log and getting ready to go mop shit with a shoe-freak and did or didn't you waltz
on i
want to look at anything else and stop carrying out normal responsibilities and believe
that t there with them at all times everything will be all right. Everything. Like I'm the solution to
thei
I am deformed.’
r trying to get her to walk through her fear to give a
strai
nal Staff face here's my Staff face. I nod and smile, I treat you like somebody I have to humor
by n e like What a fucking yutz,
like here's the net.’
elieve what you want. I'm powerless over what you believe, I know.’
ody else's issues.’
 Powerless-ness issues that beset the drug addict in his first few months of abstinence.
 else and adds to the crowd in their car. And then he always has to sit in the northernmost
seat
ill it takes him right up to 2329 to
get
 go up and address because of having to deal with Bruce Green
and
ore he even becomes aware of why or what he might be scanning
for.
g to whip.’
'And then meantime you still didn't say a straight-on Yes or No to Can I ask what's up behind there, are you cross-eyed or
have a like beard, or do you have like really bad skin under there even though your skin everyplace that isn't hidden looks —’
'Looks what? My unhidden skin is what?’
'See, this is you keep trying to si
pen. Just try it straight out.’
'Perfect. You were going to say every visible expanse of my skin is just drop-dead creamy perfect.’
'Jesus, why am I even here? Why don't you just interface with yourself if you think you know all my issues and shames and
everything I'm going to say? Why not take the suggestion to s
g in here trying to keep a
n and sit down and come to me?’
'Don, I'm perfect. I'm so beautiful I drive anybody with a nervous system out of their fucking mind. Once they've seen me
they can't think of anything else and don't
if they can only have me righ
r deep slavering need to be jowl to cheek with perfection.’
'Now with the sarcasm.’
'I am so beautiful
'Now with the nonrespectful acting-out of treating me like I'm stupid fo
ght-out No, which she isn't willing.’
'I am deformed with beauty.’
'You want to see my professio
odding and smiling, and behind the face I'm going with my finger around and around my templ
W
'B
'See the professional Staffer writing in the Meds Log: "Six extra-strong-kind aspirin for Staff after sarcasm and sideways
refusal to walk through fears and sarcastic acting out by newcomer who thinks she knows everyb
'What position did you play?’
'. . . that the Staffer wonders how come she's even here in treatment then, if she knows so much.’
It is starting to get quietly around Ennet House that Randy Lenz has found his own dark way to deal with the well-known
Rage and
The nightly AA or NA meetings get out at 2l3Oh. or 22OOh., and curfew isn't until 2330, and every Ennet resident mostly
carpools back to the House with whatever residents have cars, or some of them go out in cars for massive doses of ice cream and
coffee.
Lenz is one of the ones with a car, a heavily modified old Duster, white with what look like 12-gauge blasts of rust over the
wheelwells, with oversized rear tires and an engine so bored-out for heavy-breathing speed it's a small miracle he still has a
license.
Lenz sets loafer one outside Ennet House only after sunset, and then only in his white toupee and mustache and billowing tallcollared topcoat, and goes only to the required nightly meetings; and the thing is that he'll never drive his own car to the meetings.
He always thumbs along with somebody
 in the car, for some reason, using a compass and napkin to plot out what the night's major direction of travel'll be and then
figuring out what seat he'll have to be in to stay maximally north. Both Gately and Johnette Foltz have had to make a nightly
routine of telling the other residents that Lenz is teaching them valuable patience and tolerance.
But then after the meeting lets out, Lenz never thumbs back with anybody. He always walks back to the House after meetings.
He says it's that he needs the air, what with being shut up in the crowded House all day and avoiding doors and windows, hiding
from both sides of the Justice System.
And then one Wednesday after the Brookline Young People's AA up Beacon by Chestnut H
home, almost two hours, even though it's like a half-hour walk and even Burt Smith did it in September in under an hour; and
Lenz gets back just at curfew and without saying a word to anybody books right up to his and Glynn's and Day's room, Polo
topcoat flapping and powdered wig shedding powder, and sweating, and making an unacceptable classy-shoed racket running up
the men's side's carpetless stairs, which Gately didn't have time to
Amy J. separately both missing curfew.
Lenz abroad in the urban night, solo, on almost a nightly basis, sometimes carrying a book.
Residents who seem to make it a point to go off alone a lot are red-flagged at Thursday's All-Staff Meeting in Pat's office as
clear relapse-risks. But they've pulled spot-urines on Lenz five times, and the three times the lab didn't fuck up the E.M.I.T. test
Lenz's urine's come back clean. Gately's basically decided to just let Lenz be. Some newcomers' Higher Power is like Nature, the
sky, the stars, the cold-penny tang of the autumn air, who knows.
So Lenz abroad in the night, unaccompanied and disguised, apparently strolling. He's mastered the streets' cockeyed grid
around Enfield-Brighton-Allston. South Cambridge and East Newton and North Brookline and the hideous Spur. He takes sidestreets home from meetings, mostly. Low-rent dumpster-strewn residential streets and Projects' driveways that become alleys,
gritty passages behind stores and dumpsters and warehouses and loading docks and Empire Waste Displacement's mongo hangars,
etc. His loafers have a wicked shine and make an elegant dancerly click as he walks along with his hands in his pockets and open
coat flared wide, scanning. He scans for several nights bef
224214 He moves nightly through urban-animal territory. Liberated housecats and hard-core strays ooze in and out of 
shadows, rustle in dumpsters, fuck and fight with hellish noises all around him as he walks, senses very sharp in the downscale
night. You got your rats, your mice, your stray dogs with tongues hanging and countable ribs. Maybe the odd feral hamster and/or
raccoon. Everything slinky and furtive after sunset. Also non-stray dogs that clank their chains or bay or lunge, when he goes by
yards with dogs. He prefers to move north but will move east or west on the streets' good sides. His shoes' fine click precedes him
by several hundred meters on cement of varying texture.
Sometimes near drainage pipes he sees serious rats, or sometimes near cat-free dumpsters. The first conscious thing he did
was a rat that this one time he came on some rats in a wide W-E alley by the loading dock out behind the Svelte Nail Co. just east
of Watertown on N. Harvard St. What night was that. It'd been coming back from East Watertown, which meant More Will Be
Revealed NA with Glynn and Diehl instead of St. E.'s Better Late Than Never AA with the rest of the House's herd, so a Monday.
So on a Monday he'd been strolling through this one alley, his steps echoing trebled back off the cement sides of the docks and the
north left wall he hugged, scanning without knowing what he was scanning for. Up ahead there was the Stegosaurus-shape of a
Svelte Co. dumpster as versus your lower slimmer E.W.D.-type dumpster. There were dry skulky sounds issuing from the
dumpster's shadow. He hadn't consciously picked anything up. The alley's surface was coming apart and Lenz barely broke his
dancerly stride picking a kilo-sized chunk of tar-shot concrete. It was rats. Two big rats were going at a half-eaten wiener in a
mustardy paper tray from a Lunchwagon in a recess between the north wall and the dumpster's barge-hitch. Their hideous pink
tails were poking out into the alley's dim light. They didn't move as Randy Lenz came up behind them on the toes of his loafers.
Their tails were meaty and bald and like twitched back and forth, twitching in and out of the dim yellow light. The big flat-top
chunk came down on most of one rat and a bit of the other rat. There'd been godawful twittering squeaks, but the major hit on the
one rat also made a very solid and significant noise, some aural combination of a tomato thrown at a wall and a pocketwatch
gett
aterial and there were little beads of blood on its whiskers that looked black, the beads, in the sodium
secu
ere more chunks of dismantled
stre
ys these huge econo-size boxes of Hefty225215 bags that get stored under the
kitc
closed bag down next to the vicinity's northernmost wall
or fe
is life, Lenz felt.
n. Watching a spike-furred hissing cat run twisting away still half wrapped in a plastic bag made Lenz
adm
escribed by Ken E. as 'Irish Guccis,' extra resilient and a
busi
ing clocked with a hammer. Material came out of the rat's anus. The rat lay on its side in a very bad medical way, its tail
twitching and anus m
rity-lights along the Svelte Nail Co. roof. Its side heaved; its back legs were moving like it was running, but this rat wasn't
going anywhere. The other rat had vanished under the dumpster, dragging its rear region. There w
et lying all over. When Lenz brought another down on the head of the rat he consciously discovered what he liked to say at the
moment of issue-resolution was: 'There.’
Demapping rats became Lenz's way of resolving internal-type issues for the first couple weeks of it, walking home in the
verminal dark.
Don Gately, House chef and shopper, bu
hen sink for whoever's got Trash for their weekly chore. Ennet House generates serious waste.
So after vermin started to get a little ho-hum and insignificant, Lenz starts cabbaging a Hefty bag out from under the sink and
taking it with him to meetings and walking back home with it. He keeps a trashbag neatly folded in an inside pocket of his
topcoat, a billowing top-collared Lauren-Polo model he loves and uses a daily lint-roller on. He also takes along a little of the
House's Food-Bank tunafish in a Zip-loc baggie in another pocket, which your average drug addict has expertise in rolling baggies
into a cylinder so they're secure and odor-free.
The Ennet House residents call Hefty bags 'Irish Luggage' — even McDade — it's a street-term.
Randy Lenz found that if he could get an urban cat up close enough with some outstretched tuna he could pop the Hefty bag
over it and scoop up from the bottom so the cat was in the air in the bottom of the bag, and then he could tie the bag shut with the
complimentary wire twist-tie that comes with each bag. He could put the
nce or dumpster and light a gasper and hunker down up next to the wall to watch the wide variety of changing shapes the bag
would assume as the agitated cat got lower on air. The shapes got more and more violent and twisted and mid-air with the passage
of a minute. After it stopped assuming shapes Lenz would dab his butt with a spitty finger to save the rest for later and get up and
untie the twist-tie and look inside the bag and go: 'There.' The 'There' turned out to be crucial for the sense of brisance and closure
and resolving issues of impotent rage and powerless fear that like accrued in Lenz all day being trapped in the northeastern
portions of a squalid halfway house all day fearing for h
There evolved for Lenz a certain sportsman's hierarchy of types of cats and neighborhoods of types of your abroad cats; and
he becomes a connoisseur of cats the same way a deep-sea sportsman knows the fish-species that fight most fiercely and
excitatingly for their marine lives. The best and most fiercely alive cats could usually claw their way out of a Hefty bag, though,
which created this conundrum where the ones most worth watching assuming bagged shapes were the ones Lenz risked maybe not
getting his issues resolved o
ire the cat's fighting spirit but still feel unresolved.
So the next stage is Lenz gives Ms. Charlotte Treat or Ms. Hester Thrale some of his own $ when they go down to the Palace
Spa or Father/Son to buy smokes or LifeSavers and has them start to get him special Hefty Steel-Sak226216 trashbags, fiberreinforced for your especially sharp or uncooperative waste needs, d
nesslike gunmetal-gray in tone. Lenz has such a panoply of strange compulsive habits that a request for SteelSaks barely
raises a brow on anybody.
And then he doubles them, the special reinforced bags, and employs industrial-growth pipe-cleaners as twist-ties, and then
now the grittiest most salutary cats make the doubled bags assume all manners of wickedly abstract twisting shapes, even
sometimes moving the closed bags a couple dozen m. down the alley in a haphazard hopping-like fashion, until finally the cat runs
out of gas and resolves itself and Lenz's issues into one nightly shape.
Lenz's interval of choice for this is the interval 22l6h. to 2226h. He doesn't consciously know why this interval. Anchovies
turn out to be even more effective than tuna. A Program of Attraction, he recalls coolly, strolling along. His northern routes back
to the House are restricted by the priority to keep Brighton Best Savings Bank's rooftop digital Time and Temperature display in
view as much as possible. B.B.S.B. displays both EST and Greenwich Mean, which Lenz approves of. The liquid-crystal data sort
of melts upward into view on the screen and then disappears from the bottom up and is replaced by new data. Mr. Doony R.
Glynn said at the House's Community Meeting Monday once that one time in B.S. 1989 A.D. after he'd done a reckless amount of
a hallucinogen he'd refer to only as 'The Madame' he'd gone around for several subsequent weeks under a Boston sky that instead
of a kindly curved blue dome with your clouds and your stars and sun was a flat square coldly Euclidian grid with black axes and
a thread-fine reseau of lines creating grid-type coordinates, the whole grid the same color as a D.E.C. HD viewer-screen when the
viewer's off, that sort of dead deepwater gray-green, with the DOW Ticker running up one side of the grid and the NIKEI Index
running down the other, and the Time and Celsius Temp to like serious decimal points flashing along the bottom axis of the sky's
screen, and whenever he'd go to a real clock or get a Herald and check the like DOW the skygrid would turn out to have been
totally accurate; and that several unbroken weeks of this sky overhead had sent Glynn off first to his mother's Stoneham
apartment's fold-out couch and then into Waltham's Metropolitan State Hospital for a month of Haldol227217 and tapioca, to get
out from under the empty-grid accurate sky, and says it makes his ass wet to this day to even think about the grid-interval; but
Lenz had thought it sounded wicked nice, the sky as digital timepiece. And also between 2216 and 2226 the ATHSCME giant
fans off up at the Sunstrand Plaza within earshot were typically shut off for daily de-linting, and it was quiet except for the big
Sssh
achingly far away, and receding, calling to you across an expanding gap. Either that or they're on your ass. No
mid
t House itself, and only once in the forbidden #7 across the roadlet. And anybody with half a clue can beat an
E.M
tion and still survive a direct swung hit against a NO PARKING sign or a telephone pole without splitting open,
even
hh of a whole urban city's vehicular traffic, and maybe the odd E.W.D. airborne deliverer catapulted up off Concavityward,
its little string of lights arcing northeast; and of course also sirens, both the Eurotrochaic sirens of ambulances and the regular
U.S.-sounding sirens of the city's very Finest, Protecting and Serving, keeping the citizenry at bay; and the winsome thing about
sirens in the urban night is that unless they're right up close where the lights bathe you in red-blue-red they always sound like
they're terribly
dle distance with sirens, Lenz reflects, walking along and scanning.
Glynn hadn't come right out and said Euclidian, but Lenz had gotten the picture all right. Glynn had thin hair and an invariant
three-day growth of gray stubble and diverticulitis that made him stoop somewhat over, and remaining physique-type issues from
a load of bricks falling on his head from a Workers Comp scam gone rye that included crossed eyes that Lenz overheard the veiled
girl Joe L. tell Clenette Henderson and Didi Neaves the man was so cross-eyed he could stand in the middle of the week and see
both Sundays.
Lenz has gotten high on organic cocaine two or three, maybe half a dozen times tops, secretly, since he came into Ennet
House in the summer, just enough times to keep him from going totally out of his fucking mind, utilizing lines from the private
emergency stash he kept in a kind of rectangular bunker razor-bladed out of three hundred or so pages of Bill James's gargantuan
Large-Print Principles of Psychology and The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion. Such totally occasional Substance-ingestions
in a rundown sloppy-clocked House where he's cooped up and under terrible stress all day every day, hiding from threats from two
different legal directions, with, upstairs at all times, calling to him, a 20-gram stash from the under-reported South End two-way
attempted scam whose very bad luck had forced him into hiding in squalor and rooming with the likes of fucking Geoffrey D. —
cocaine-ingestion this occasional and last-resort is such a marked reduction of Use & Abuse for Lenz that it's a bonerfied miracle
and clearly constitutes as much miraculous sobriety as total abstinence would be for another person without Lenz's unique
sensitivities and psychological makeup and fucking intolerable daily stresses and difficulty unwinding, and he accepts his monthly
chips with a clear conscience and a head unmuddled by doubting: he knows he's sober. He's smart about it: he's never ingested
cocaine on his solo walks home from meetings, which is where the Staff'd expect him to ingest if he was going to ingest. And
never in Enne
.I.T. urine-screen: a cup of lemon juice or vinegar down the hatch'll turn the lab's reading into gibberish; a trace of powdered
bleach on the fingertips and let the stream play warmly over the fingertips on its way into the cup while you banter with Don G. A
Texas catheter's a pain to get piss for and put on, plus the obscene size of the thing's receptacle for his Unit gives Lenz
inadequacy-issues, and he's only used it twice, both times when Johnette F. took the urine and he could embarrass her into turning
away. Lenz owns a Texas Cathy from his last halfway house in Quincy, in what Lenz recalls as the Year of the Maytag
Quietmaster.
And then it turned out, when a cat aggrieved Lenz by scratching his wrist in a particularly hostile fashion on the way into the
receptacle, that doubled Hefty SteelSaks were such quality-reinforced products they could hold something razor-clawed and
frantically in-mo
 when what was inside split nicely open; and so that technique got substituted around United Nations Day, because even
though it was too quick and less meditative it allowed Randy Lenz to take a more active role in the process, and the feeling of
(temporary, nightly) issues-resolution was more definitive when Lenz could swing a twisting ten-kilo burden hard against a pole
and go: 'There,' and hear a sound. On banner nights the doubled bag would continue for a brief period of time to undergo a subtle
flux of smaller, more subtle and connoisseur-oriented shapes, even after the melony sound of hard impact, along with further
smaller sounds.
Then it was discovered that resolving them directly inside the yards and porches of the people that owned them provided
more adrenal excitation and thus more sense of what Bill James one time called a Catharsis of resolving, which Lenz felt he could
agree. A small can of oil in its own little baggie, for squeaky gates. But because SteelSak trashbags — and then also tunafish
mixed with anchovies and Raid ant poison from behind the Ennet residents' fridge — caused too much resultant noise to allow for
lighting a gasper and hunkering down to meditatively watch, Lenz developed the habit of setting the resolution in motion and then
booking on out of the yard into the urban night, his Polo topcoat billowing, hurdling fences and running over the hoods of cars and
etc. For a period during the two-week interval of give-them-poison-tuna-and-run Lenz had brief recourse to a small Caldor-brand
squeeze-bottle of kerosene, plus of course his lighter; but a Wednesday night on which the alight cat ran (as alight cats will, like
hell) but ran after Lenz, seemingly, leaping the same fences Lenz hurdled and staying on his tail and not only making an
unacceptable attention-calling racket but also illuminating Lenz to the scopophobic view of passing homes until it finally decided
to drop to the ground and expire and smolder thereupon — Lenz considered this his only really close call, and took an enormous
and partly non-north route home, with every siren sounding up-close and on his personal ass, and barely got in by 2330h., and ran
right up to the 3-Man room. This was the night Lenz had to have another recourse to the hollowed-out cavity in his Principles of
Psychology and The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion after just beating curfew home, which who wouldn't need a bit of an
unwinder after a stressful close-call-type situation with a flaming cat chasing you and screaming in a way that made porch lights
go on all up and down Sumner Blake Rd.; except but instead of an unwinder the couple or few lines of uncut Bing proved to be on
this occasion an un~unwinder — which happens, sometimes, depending on one's like spiritual condition when ingesting it through 
a rolled dollar bill off the back of the John in the men's can — and Lenz barely made it through switching his car's parking spot at
235Oh. before the verbal torrent started, and after lights-out had only gotten up to age eight in the oral autobiography that
followed in the 3-Man when Geoff D. threatened to go get Don G. and have Lenz forcibly stifled, and Lenz was scared to go
dow
's illuminated watchface in his fucking tableside drawer instead of out where anybody with some stress and
anxi
nd a point Lenz'd sharpened the clip out of when he got it and a single-edge
Bow
though more of a personal-injury risk to
appr
he meat-item just up out of reach the dog if its rope or chain will permit it it'll go up on the hind legs and
sort
dy telling each other their windbagathon stories, lying on Day's mattress with his shoes on and
tryin
 its intensity, and Lenz is now on his second R. Lauren topcoat and
third
n. Bruce
Gree
 communicate his attentions to Lenz. Which Lenz admires.
d.
nstairs to find somebody to listen and so for the rest of the night he had to lie there in the dark, mute, with his mouth twisting
and writhing — it always twisted and writhed on the times the Bing proved to be a rev-upper instead of a rough-edge-smoother —
and pretending to be asleep, with phosphenes like leaping flaming shapes dancing behind his quivering lids, listening to Day's
moist gurgles and Glynn's apnea and thinking that each siren abroad out there in the urban city was meant for him and coming
closer, with Day
ety could check the time from time to time.
So after the incident with the flaming cat from hell and before Halloween Lenz had moved on and up to the Browning X444
Serrated he even had a shoulder-holster for, from his previous life Out There. The Browning X444 has a 25-cm. overall length,
with a burl-walnut handle with a brass butt-cap a
ie-style blade with .1-mm. serrations that Lenz owns a hone for and tests by dry-shaving a little patch of his tan forearm,
which he loves.
The Browning X444, combined with blocks of Don Gately's highly portable cornflake-garnish meatloaf, were for canines,
which your urban canines tended to be nonferal and could be found within the confinement of their pet-owners' fenced yards on a
regularer basis than the urban-cat species, and who are less suspicious of food and,
oach, do not scratch the hand that feeds them.
For when the dense square of meatloaf is taken out and unwrapped from the Zip-loc and proffered from the edgelet of yard
out past the fence by the sidewalk, the dog at issue invariably stops with the barking and/or lunging and its nose flares and it
becomes totally uncynical and friendly and comes to the end of its chain or the fence Lenz stands behind and makes interested
noises and if Lenz holds t
 of play the fence with its front paws, jumping eagerly, as Lenz dangles the meat.
Day had had some Recovery-Issue paperback he was reading that Lenz had a look at one P.M. in their room when Day was
downstairs with Ewell and Erde
g to fart into the mattress as much as possible: some line in the book had arrested Lenz's attention: something about the more
basically Powerless an individual feels, the more the likelihood for the propensity for violent acting-out — and Lenz found the
observation to be sound.
The only serious challenge to using the Browning X444 is that Lenz has to make sure to get around behind the dog before he
cuts the dog's throat, because the bleeding is far-reaching in
 pair of dark wool slacks.
Then once near Halloween in an alley behind Blanchard's Liquors off Allston's Union Square Lenz comes across a street
drunk in a chewed-looking old topcoat in the deserted alley taking a public leak against the side of a dumpster, and Lenz
envisualizes the old guy both cut and on fire and dancing jaggedly around hitting at himself while Lenz goes 'There/ but that's as
close as Lenz comes to that kind of level of resolution; and it's maybe to his credit that he's a little off his psychic feed for a few
days after that close call, and inactive with pets circa 22l6h.
Lenz has nothing much against his newer fellow resident Bruce Green, and when one Sunday night after the White Flag
Green asks can he walk along with Lenz on the walk back after the Our Father Lenz says Whatever and lets Green walk with him,
and is inactive during this night's 2216 interval as well. Except after a couple nights of Green strolling home along with him, first
from the White Flag and then from St. Columbkill's on Tuesday and a double 1900-2200 shot of St. E.'s Sharing and Caring NA
and then BYP on Wed., Green following him around like a terrier from mtg. to mtg. and then home, it begins to like emerge on
Lenz that Bruce G. is starting to treat this walking-through-the-urban-P.M.-with-Randy-Lenz thing as like a regular fucking thing,
and Lenz starts to Jones about it, the unresolved Powerless Rage issues that the thing is now he's gotten so he's used to resolving
them on a more or less nightly basis, so that being unable to be freely alone to be active with the Browning X444 or even a
SteelSak during the 2216-2226h. interval causes this pressure to build up like almost a Withdrawal-grade pressure. But on the
other side of the hand, walking with Green has its positive aspects as well. Like that Green doesn't complain about lengthy detours
to keep a mainly north/northeastern orientation to the walks when possible. And Lenz enjoys a sympathetic and listening ear to
have around; he has numerous aspects and experiences to mull over and issues to organize and mull, and (like many people
hardwired for organic stimulants) talking is sort of Lenz's way of thinking. And but most of the ears of the other residents at Ennet
House are not only unsympathetic but are attached to great gaping flapping oral mouths which keep horning into the conversation
with the mouths' own opinions and issues and aspects — most of the residents are the worst listeners Lenz has ever see
n, on the hand's positive side, hardly says anything. Bruce Green is quiet the way certain stand-up type guys you want to have
there with you beside you if a beef starts going down are quiet, like self-contained. Yet Green is not so quiet and unresponding
that it's like with some silent people where you start to wonder if he's listening with a sympathizing ear or if he's really drifting
around in his own self-oriented thoughts and not even listening to Lenz, etc., treating Lenz like a radio you can tune in or out.
Lenz has a keen antenna for people like this and their stock is low on his personal exchange. Bruce Green inserts low affirmatives
and 'No shit's and 'Fucking-A's, etc., at just the right places to
So it's not like Lenz just wants to blow Green off and tell him to go peddle his papers and let him the fuck alone after
Meetings so he can solo. It would have to be handled in a more diplomatic fashion. Plus Lenz finds himself nervous at the
prospect of offending Green. It's not like he's scared of Green in terms of physically. And it's not like he's concerned Green would
be the Ewell- or Day-type you have to stressfully worry about maybe going and ratting out on Lenz's place of whereabouts to the
Finest and everything like that. Green has a strong air of non-rat about him which Lenz admires. So it's not like he's frightened to
blow Green off; it's more like very tense and tightly woun
Plus it agitates Lenz that he has the feeling that it really wouldn't be any big deal to Green that much one way or the other,
and that Lenz feels like he's spending all this stress tensely worrying about his side of something that Green would barely think
about for more than a couple seconds, and it enrages Lenz that he can know in his head that the tense worry about how to 
diplomatize Green into leaving him alone is unnecessary and a waste of time and tension and yet still not be able to stop worrying
about it, which all only increases the sense of Powerlessness that Lenz is impotent to resolve with his Browning and meatloaf as
long as Green continues to walk home with him.
And the schizoid cats with clotted fur that lurk around Ennet House cringing and neurotic and afraid of their own shadow are
too risky, for the female residents are always formulating attachments to them. And Pat M.'s Golden Retrievers would be
tattlemount to legal suicide. On a Saturday c. 222lh., Lenz found a miniature bird that had fallen out of some nest and was sitting
bald nd pencil-necked on the lawn of Unit #3 flapping ineffectually, and went in with Green and ducked Green and went back
outs garbage disposal in the kitchen sink of the
kitc
e lethality of whatever they'd
caug
ced dopamine-surges.
Attempts to trace the matrix of the samizdat without viewing it — from induction on postal codes, e-micros-copíes on the brown
pad d mailers, immolation and chromatography on the unlabelled cartridge-cases, extensive and maddening interviews of those
civi ith routing hubs in metro
Bost
lvement in the lethally compelling
Ente
nt, after our work together on your fear of weights, would be that your presenting maladjustment, Ortho,
like
 a
ide to #3's lawn and put the thing in a pocket and went in and put it down the
hen, but still felt largely impotent and unresolved.
Except for Pat Montesian's bay-windowed front office and the House Manager's phone-booth-sized back office and the two
live-in Staff bedrooms down in the basement, none of the doors inside Ennet House have locks, for predictable reasons.
EARLY NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
The only bona fide blackmailable thing about Rodney Tine, Chief, U.S. Office of Unspecified Services: his special metric
ruler. In a locked drawer of his bathroom cabinets at home on Connecticut Ave. NW in the District is kept a special metric ruler,
and Tine measures his penis every A.M., like clockwork; has since twelve; still does. Plus a special telescoping travelling model
of the ruler he travels with, for on-the-road-A.M.-penis-measurement. President Gentle has no N.S.A.228218 as such. Tine's in
metro Boston because of the N.S. implications of what they'd first come to Unspecified Services about two summers past, both the
head of D.E.A. and the Chair of the Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, now both here standing on one foot and then the other
and twidgelling the brims of their hats. This unwatchable underground Entertainment-cartridge that at first seemed to be just
popping haphazardly up in random locales: a film with certain he's given to understand from briefings quote 'qualities' such that
whoever saw it wanted nothing else ever in life but to see it again, and then again, and so on. It had popped up in Berkeley NCA,
in the home of a film-scholar and his male companion, neither of whom had appeared for appointments for days; and now lost to
meaningful human activity henceforward, by all appearances, were the scholar and companion, the two cops dispatched to the
Berkeley home, the six cops dispatched after the two cops never followed up their Code-Five, the watch sergeant and partner
dispatched after them — seventeen police, paramedics, and teleputer-technicians in all, until th
ht sight of presented itself with enough clarity for somebody to think to go around back and kill the Berkeley home's power.
The Entertainment had popped up in New Iberia LA. Tempe AZ had lost two-thirds of the attendees of an avant-garde film
festival in Arizona State U.'s Entertainment Studies amphitheater before a level-headed custodian killed the building's whole grid.
J. Gentle had been apprised about the thing only after it had popped up and taken out a diplomatically immune Near Eastern
medical attache and a dozen incidentals here in Boston MA late last spring. These persons now all in wards. Docile and continent
but blank, as if on some deep reptile-brain level pithed. Tine had toured a ward. The persons' lives’
meanings had collapsed to such a narrow focus that no other activity or connection could hold their attention. Possessed of
roughly the mental/ spiritual energies of a moth, now, according to a diagnostician out of C.D.C. The Berkeley cartridge had
vanished from an S.F.P.D. Evidence Room an electron-microscopy toss of which had revealed flannel fibers. The D.E.A. had lost
four field researchers and a consultant before they'd bowed to the intractable problems involved in trying to have somebody view
the confiscated Tempe cartridge and articulate the thing's lethal charms. The strongest possible language had been necessary to
restrain a certain Famous Crooner from attempting a personal review of the thing's qualities. Neither C.D.C. nor the entertainment
pros wanted any part of any controlled-viewing tests. Three members of the Academy of D.A.S. had received unlabelled copies in
the mail, and the one who'd actually sat down to have a look now needed a receptacle under his chin at all times. Reports of the
thing popping up yet again in metro Boston MA remain unsubstantiated. Tine's been dispatched here in part to coordinate
substantiation. There's also the special pocket-Franklin-Planner-sized chart he charts the daily A.M. penis-measurement in, daily,
though to the uninitiated the little leather notebook could look like almost anything statistical at all. By now several U.S.O. testsubjects, volunteers from the federal and military penal systems, have been lost in attempts to produce a description of the
cartridge's contents. The Tempe and New Iberia cartridges are in custody, vaulted. A sociopathic and mentally retarded Lance
Corporal at Leaven-worth, strapped down with electrode appliques and headset-recorder, was able to report that the thing
apparently opens with an engaging and high-quality cinematic shot of a veiled woman going through a large building's revolving
doors and catching a glimpse of someone else in the revolving doors, somebody the sight of whom makes her veil billow, before
the subject's mental and spiritual energies abruptly declined to a point where even near-lethal voltages through the electrodes
couldn't divert his attention from the Entertainment. Tine's staff had sifted through dozens of entries before deciding that the
intelligence community's terse little name for the allegedly enslaving Entertainment would be 'the samizdat.' P.E.T.s on sacrificed
subjects revealed unexceptional wave-activity, with not near enough alpha to indicate hypnosis or indu
de
lians exposed — place the likely dissemination-point someplace along the U.S. north border, w
on/New Bedford and/or somewhere in the desert Southwest. The U.S.'s Canadian Problem is U.S.O.U.S. Anti-Anti-O.N.A.N.
Activities' Agency's229219 special province. So to speak. The possibility of Canadian invo
rtainment's dissemination is what has brought to metro Boston Rodney Tine, his retinue, and his ruler.
LATE P.M., MONDAY 9 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
For reasons that Pemulis couldn't for the life of him, Ortho Stice seemed to be in there in Dr. Dolores Rusk's office,
interfacing with Dr. Rusk well after regular hours. Pemulis paused at the door on his way by.
'— nical assessme
 many males and athletes, is that you're suffering from counterphobia.’ 
'Fear of linoleum?' It was unmistakably the flat twang of The Darkness in there through the door's wood.
'On the level of objects and a projective infantile omnipotence where you experience magical thinking about your thoughts
and c wishes, the counterphobia presents as the delusion of some special agency
or c
th no goddamn Action-Figurines.’
f the potent but antagonistic father, the "military" man, with "GI" representing
at o
n the Oedipal phase's desire to control the
bow
 the mother to an archetype of sexual function and availability, the Barbie as image of the Oedipal
mot
nst his ear. Jim Troeltsch had been coming down B's hall just as Pemulis was leaving and
said
 squeaking as he opened it and entered the administrative
reception area, snapping his fingers softly to himself. A loose music played in his head. Tavis's reception area was empty and dim,
the
airßlaster, and Ta vis's breathless
rece
ike
eith ision Tavis's round belly and little titties
of f
 the behavior of objects' relation to your narcissisti
ontrol to compensate for some repressed wounded inner trauma having to do with absence of control.’
'Over linoleum?’
'My suggestion might be to forget linoleum and objects in general. In for instance an analytic model, the types of traumas
counterphobic reactions cover are almost always pre-Oedipal, at which stage objects' cathexis is Oedipal and symbolic. For
example small children's dolls and Action-Figurines.’
'I don't play wi
'GI Joe typically being cathected as an image o
nce the "General Issue" of a "weapon" the Oedipal child both covets and fears and a well-known medical acronym for the
gastro-intestinal tract, with all the attendant anal anxieties that require repression i
els in order to impress or quote "win" the mother, of whom the Barbie might be seen as the most obviously reductive and
phallocentric reduction of
her as image.’
'So you're saying I'm overestimating objects?’
'I'm saying there's a very young Ortho in there with some very real abandonment-issues who needs some nurturing and
championing from the older Ortho instead of indulging in fantasies of omnipotence.’
'I ain't omnipotent and I don't want to X no Goddamn Barbiedoll.' Then Dark's voice went way up and cracked as he said
something about his bed.
Dr. Rusk's office door had a nonconducting rubberized sheath on the knob, and Dr. Rusk's name and degrees and title, and a
needlepoint sampler with a little heart inside a big heart and a cursive exhortation to Champion An Inner Child Today, which the
little kids at E.T.A. find puzzling and upsetting. Pemulis, pausing by habit first at the silent locked infirmary door and then Rusk's
bottom-crack-lit door on his way across the Comm.-Ad. lobby, was wearing the most insolent ensemble he could throw together.
He wore maroon paratrooper's pants with green stovepipe stripes down the sides. The pants' cuffs were tucked into fuchsia socks
above ancient and radically uncool Clark's Wallabies with dirty soles of eraserish gum. He wore an orange fake-silk turtleneck
under an English-cut sportcoat in a purple-and-tan windowpane check. He wore naval shoulder-braid at the level of ensign. He
wore his yachting cap, but with the bill bent up at a bumpkinish angle. He looked less insolent than just extremely poorly dressed,
really. Dr. Rusk's door was cool agai
 Pemulis looked like a hangover. Through the door, Rusk was urging Stice to name his anger and Stice was proposing to name
his anger Horace after his old man's late pointer that had got into some coyote bait when The Darkness was nine and was much
missed by the whole Stice brood, back in Kansas. The old Wallabies were from Pemulis's older brother's incomplete public-school
career and had boogerish little greebles of dirty gum all around the soles' perimeter. The socks belonged to Jennie Bash and she
made it explicit she wanted them back laundered. The sportcoat's checked arms were several cm. too short and exposed ribbed
cuffs of shiny orange acetate esters.
The Community & Administration Bldg.'s downstairs was real quiet. It was like 2100h., supposedly mandatory Study Period,
and Harde's crew had gone home but the custodial graveyard shift hadn't come on yet. Pemulis moved noiselessly NE-SW across
the lobby's shag. Except for lines of lamplight from under a couple doors the E.T.A. lobby was pitch-black, and the outer
Academy doors locked. There was an odd vehicular shape near the north wall's trophy case that Pemulis didn't pause to
investigate. He lifted up slightly to keep the little SW hall's door from
wallpaper's clouds now stormy-dark. It wasn't totally quiet. Light came from Mrs. Inc's doorway and from the crack under
Tavis's inner door. Lateral Alice Moore had gone home. Pemulis activated her Third Rail and played with her chair as he made a
very quick survey of the material on her desk. Activating the P.A. mike was out of all question. Two of her five drawers were still
locked. Pemulis scanned behind him and popped another breath mint and sat quietly for a moment as Moore's chair slid back and
forth along the rail, his fingers in a steeple under his nose, considering.
Light shone from the crack of Tavis's inner door because the outer door stood open. Pemulis didn't even have to put any kind
of ear to the wood of the inside door. He could hear the hiss and high-speed grind of Ta vis's St
ssive voice. You could tell there was nobody else in there. You could tell Tavis had no shirt on and an E.T.A. towel around
his neck and his hair a sweaty curtain down one side of his little head as he ran to keep up with what reminded everybody of a
Satanishly-possessed Filene's escalator. He was exhorting himself in a kind of fast rhythmic chant that sounded to Pemulis l
er Total worry total worry' or 'No don't worry no don't worry' and c. Pemulis could env
at bouncing with the action of the Stairßlaster. You could hear the sudden muffling when he probably brought the towel up to
dab at his slanted mustache. Tavis's doorknob had no insulating rubber sheath, Pemulis noticed.
Pemulis's ensemble's belt was a plastic thing with chintzy fake-Navajo beading, purchased by little Chip Sweeny at one of last
fall's Whataßurger's souvenir stands and subsequently transferred to Pemulis during a Big Buddy tennis-as-game-of-chance
exercise. The beading-patterns were in Gila-monster orange and black, the orange a different shade than Pemulis's tur-tleneck.
He could never resist biting down once a mint'd melted to a certain size and texture.
The doorless Dean of Academic Affairs's office was a blazing rectangle of light. The light didn't spill very far into the
reception area, however. At close-range, sounds issued from the office, but not exactly words. Pemulis checked his fly and
snapped his fingers under his own nose and assumed a businesslike stride and rapped firmly on the doorless jamb without
breaking stride. The heavier blue shag of the office itself slowed him down a bit. He stopped once he was all the way in. 18-A
John Wayne and Hal's Mumsly-Wumsly were both in the front of the office. They were about maybe two meters apart. The room
was lit overhead and by four standing lamps. The seminar table and chairs cast a complicated shadow. Two homemade pompoms
of shredded paper and what looked like the amputated handles of wooden tennis racquets were on the seminar table, which was 
otherwise bare. John Wayne wore a football helmet and light shoulderpads and a Russell athletic supporter and socks and shoes
and edibly tall and well-preserved mother
Dr.
pkin-billed yachting hat back to scratch his head, blinking. Mrs. Inc was the only one looking at him.
s still up in the air, fine fingers splayed. Wayne craned his neck to look
over
ard with his weight on his knuckles. There was way less time passing in the office than there seemed
to b
posture did look insolent.
ask and hung from it when removed. The chin strap had several
snap
ice-looking helmet,' Pemulis told him.
ayne, pulling hard on his sweatpants' cuffs to fit them over a shoe, didn't reply. He was so fit that his supporter's straps
didn
wo minutes at most,' Pemulis said, smiling.
u man this is when you find out your like what like true character, is when it's pointed right at you and some
bug
nothing else. He was down in the classic three-point stance of U.S. football. Inc's incr
Avril Incandenza wore a little green-and-white cheerleader's outfit and had one of deLint's big brass whistles hanging around
her neck. She was blowing on the whistle, which appeared to be minus the little inside pellet because no whistling sound resulted.
She was about two meters from Wayne, facing him, doing near-splits on the heavy shag, one arm up and pretending to blow the
whistle while Wayne produced the classic low-register growling sounds of U.S. football. Pemulis made rather a show of pushing
the bum
'I probably won't even waste everybody's time asking if I'm interrupting,' Pemulis said.
Mrs. Inc seemed frozen in place. Her one hand wa
 at Pemulis from under his helmet without changing his three-point stance. The football-noises trailed off. Wayne's got a
narrow nose and close-set witchy eyes. He wore a plastic mouthguard. The musculature of his legs and buttocks was clearly
outlined as he squatted forw
e.
'Hoping for a second of your time,' Pemulis told Mrs. Inc. He was standing schoolboy-straight, hands clasped demurely over
his fly, which on Pemulis this
Wayne straightened up and moved toward his clothing with no little dignity. His sweats were neatly folded on the Dean's desk
at the rear of the office. The mouthguard was attached to the facem
s Wayne had to undo.
'N
W
't even dent his buttocks.
Mrs. Incandenza removed the mute whistle. She was still split down on the floor. Pemulis made rather a show of not looking
south of her face. She pursed her lips to chuff hair out of her eyes.
'I predict this'll take about t
WEDNESDAY 11 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
Lenz wears a worsted topcoat and dark slacks and Brazilian loafers with a high-wattage shine and a disguise that makes him
look like Andy Warhol with a tan. Bruce Green wears a cheesy off-the-rack leather jacket of stiff cheap leather that makes the
jacket creak when he breathes.
'This is when yo
eyed fucking spic's not five mitts230220 away pointing it, and I strangely I get real calm see and said I said Pepito I said I
Pepito man you go on and do what you need to do man go on and shoot but man you better I mean fucking better kill me with the
first shot man or you won't get another one I said. Not even bullshitting man I'm serious it's like I found right then I meant it. You
know what I'm saying?' Green lights both their smokes. Lenz exhales with that hiss of people in a rush to drive their point home.
'You know what I'm saying?’
'I don't know.’
It's an urban November P.M.: very last leaves down, dry gray hairy grass, brittle bushes, gap-toothed trees. The rising moon
looks like it doesn't feel very well. The click of Lenz's loafers and the crunchy thud of Green's old asphalt-spreader's boots with
the thick black soles. Green's little noises of attention and assent. He says he's been broken by life, is all he'll personally say.
Green. Life has kicked his ass, and he's regrouping. Lenz likes him, and there's always this slight hangnail of fear, like clinging,
whenever he likes somebody. It's like something terrible could happen at any time. Less fear than a kind of tension in the region of
stomach and ass, an all-body wince. Deciding to go ahead and think somebody's a stand-up guy: it's like you drop something, you
give up all of your power over it: you have to stand there impotent waiting for it to hit the ground: all you can do is brace and
wince. It kind of enrages Lenz to like somebody. There would be no way to say any of this out loud to Green. As it gets past
22OOh. and the meatloaf in his pocket's baggie's gotten dark and hard from disuse the pressure to exploit the c. 2216 interval for
resolution builds to a terrible pitch, but Lenz still can't yet quite get it up to ask Green to walk back some other way at least once
in a while. How does he do it and still have Green know he thinks he's OK? But you don't come right out there and let somebody
hear you say you think they're OK. When it's a girl you're just trying to X it's a different thing, straightforwarder; but like for
instance where do you look with your eyes when you tell somebody you like them and mean what you say? You can't look right at
them, because then what if their eyes look at you as your eyes look at them and you lock eyes as you're saying it, and then there'd
be some awful like voltage or energy there, hanging between you. But you can't look away like you're nervous, like some nervous
kid asking for a date or something. You can't go around giving that kind of thing of yourself away. Plus the knowing that the
whole fucking thing's not worth this kind of wince and stress: the whole thing's enraging. The afternoon of tonight earlier at circa
1610h. Lenz'd sprayed RIJID-brand male hairspray in the face of a one-eyed Ennet House stray cat that had wandered by
mischance into the men's head upstairs, but the result: unsatisfying. The cat had just run away downstairs, clunking into the
bannister only once. Lenz then got diarrhea, which always disgusts him, and he had to stay in the head and open the little warped
frosted-glass window and run the shower on C until the smell's evidence cleared, with fucking Glynn pounding on the door and attracting attention howling about who's flailing the whale in there all this time is it by any chance Lenz. But then how would he be
supposed to act henceforward toward Green if he blows him off and says to let him walk solo home? How would he be supposed
to act if it'd seemed like he'd like spurned Green? What does he henceforward say if he and Green pass each other in the aisle at
Saturday Night Lively or both reach for the same sandwich at the raffle-break at White Flag, or get caught standing there halfnaked in towels in the hall waiting for somebody to get out of the shower? What if he like spurns Green and Green ends up in the
3-Man room while Lenz is still in there and they have to room together and interface constantly? And if Lenz tries to temper the
spurning by telling Green he likes him, where the fuck is he supposed to look when he says it? If trying to X a female species
Lenz would have nullo problemo with where to look. He'd have no problem with looking deep into some bitch's eyes and looking 
so sincere it's like he's dying inside him. Or if like assuring a bad-complected Brazilian he hadn't stepped on a half-kilo three
separate times with Ino-sitol.231221 Or if high: zero problem. If he got high, he'd have no problem telling somebody he liked him
even if he really did. For it'd give his spirits a voltage that'd more than overweigh whatever upsetting voltage might hang in the air
between somebody. A few lineskers and there'd be no stress-issues about telling Bruce G. with all due respects to screw, go peddle
his papers, go play in the freeway, go play with a chain saw, go find a short pier, that no disrespect but Lenz needed to fly solo in
the
leaning it thoroughly with his finger and rubbing his gums
with
ten hemispasm of the mouth and right eye he hides via the old sunglasses and pretendcou
ir own
nois
reen he's a blue-chip commodity on Lenz's Exchange but to please screw and let Lenz stroll home solo with
his
uch every experience and thought he's ever had, to give each
datu
trak train conductor with deeply unresolved
issu aily with a chamois cloth and nightly make sure his
watc f Track and
Flan
reen the plots of several books he's read, confabulating them.
urban night. So after the incident with the cat and diarrhea and some hard words with D. R. Glynn, who was slumped holding
his abdomen down against the south wall of the upstairs hall, Lenz decides enough is enough and goes and gets a little square of
foil off the industrial roll Don G. keeps under the Ennet sink and goes and takes a half-gram, maybe a gram at most out of the
emergency stash out of the vault-thing he's razored out of the Principles of Natural Lectures. Far from your scenario of relapsing,
the Bing is medicinal support for assertively sharing his need for aloneness with Green, so that issues of early sobriety can get
resolved before standing in the way of spiritual growth — Lenz will use cocaine in the very interests of sobriety and growth itself.
So then like strategically, at the Brookline Young People's Mtg. over on Beacon near the Newton line on a Wednesday, at the
raffle-break, at 2109h., Lenz moistens his half-gasper and puts it carefully back in the pack and yawns and stretches and does a
quick pulse-check and gets up and saunters casually into the Handicapped head with the lockable door and the big sort of crib
built around the shitter itself for crippled lowering onto the toilet and does like maybe two, maybe three generous lines of Bing off
the top of the toilet-tank and wipes the tank-top off both before and after with wet paper towels, ironically rolling up the same
crisp buck he'd brought for the meeting's collection and utilizing it and c
 the finger and then putting his head way back in the mirror to check the kidney-shaped nostrils of his fine aqua-line nose for
clinging evidence in the trim hair up there and tasting the bitter drip in the back of his frozen throat and taking the clean rolled
buck and back-rolling it and smoothing it out and hammering it with his fist on the lip of the sink and folding it neatly into half of
half its original Treasury Dept. size so that all evidence anybody ever even had a passing thought of rolling the buck into a hard
tight tube is, like, anìleated. Then sauntered back out like butter wouldn't soften anywhere on his body, knowing just where to
look at all times and casually hefting his balls before he sat back down.
And then aside from the every so of
gh tactic the second half of the mtg.'s endless oratory goes fine, he supposes, even though he did smoke almost a whole
expensive pack of gaspers in 34 minutes, and the holier-than-you Young-People AAs over in what were supposed to be the
Nonsmoking rows of chairs against the east wall to his right shot him over some negative-type looks when perchance he happened
to find he had one going in the little tin ashtray and two at once going in his mouth, but Lenz was able to play the whole thing off
with insousistent aplomb, sitting there in his aviator sunglasses with his legs crossed and his topcoated arms resting out along the
backs of the empty chairs on either side.
The night-noises of the metro night: harbor-wind skirling on angled cement, the shush and sheen of overpass traffic, TPs'
laughter in interior rooms, the yowl of unresolved cat-life. Horns blatting off in the harbor. Receding sirens. Confused inland
gulls' cries. Broken glass from far away. Car horns in gridlock, arguments in languages, more broken glass, running shoes, a
woman's either laugh or scream from who can tell how far, coming off the grid. Dogs defending whatever dog-yards they pass by,
the sounds of chains and risen hackles. The podiatric click and thud, the visible breath, gravel's crunch, creak of Green's leather,
the snick of a million urban lighters, the gauzy far-off humming ATHSCMEs pointing out true plumb north, the clunk and tinkle
of stuff going into dumpsters and rustle of stuff in dumpsters settling and skirl of wind on the sharp edges of dumpsters and
unmistakable clanks and tinkles of dumpster-divers and can-miners going after dumpsters' cans and bottles, the district
Redemption Center down in West Brighton and actually even boldly sharing a storefront with Liquor World liquor store, so the
can-miners can do like one-stop redeeming and shopping. Which Lenz finds repellent to the maximus, and shares the feelings with
Green. Lenz observes to Green how myriadly ironic are the devices by which the Famous Crooner's promise to Clean Up Our
Urban Cities has come to be kept. The noises parallaxing in from out over the city's winking grid, at night. The wooly haze of
monoxides. You got your faint cuntstink of the wind off the Bay. Planes' little crucifi of landing lights well ahead of the
e. Crows in trees. You got your standard crepuscular rustles. Ground floors' lit windows laying little rugs of light out into their
lawns. Porch lights that go on automatically when you stroll by. A threnody of sirens somewhere north of the Charles. Bare trees
creaking in the wind. The State Bird of Massachusetts, he shares to Green, is the police siren. To Project and to Swerve. The cries
and screams from out across who knows how many blocks, who knows the screams' intent. Sometimes the end of the scream is at
the sound of the start of the scream, he opines. The visible breath and the rainbowed rings of streetlights and headlights through
that breath. Unless the screams are really laughing. Lenz's own mother's laugh had sounded like she was being eaten alive.
Except — after the maybe five total lines hoovered in a totally purposive medicinal nonrecreational spirit — except then
instead of assuring G
meatloaf and agenda, it eventuates that Lenz has again miscalculated the effect the Bing's hydrolysis232222 will have, he
always like previsions the effect as cool nonchalant verbal sangfroid, but instead Lenz on the way home finds himself under huge
hydrolystic compulsion to have Green right there by his side — or basically anyone who can't get away or won't go away — right
there with him, and to share with Green or any compliant ear pretty m
m of the case of R. Lenz shape and visible breath as his whole life (and then some) tear-asses across his mind's arctic horizon,
trailing phosphenes.
He tells Green that his phobic fear of timepieces stems from his stepfather, an Am
es which he used to make Lenz wind his pocketwatch and polish his fob d
h's displayed time was correct to the second or else he'd lay into the pint-sized Randy with a rolled-up copy o
ge, a slick and wicked-heavy coffee-table-sized trade periodical.
Lenz tells Green how spectacularly obese his own late mother had been, using his arms to dramatically illustrate the
dimensions involved.
He breathes between about every third or fourth fact, ergo about once a block.
Lenz tells G
Lenz doesn't notice the way Green's face sort of crumples blankly when Lenz mentions the issue of late mothers. 
Lenz euphorically tells Green how he once got the tip of his left finger cut off in a minibike chain once and how but within
day
mon men, and began to accept his uniqueness and all
that
sement
from
frag
rned about the lethality of his
wha
halic woman wore a necklace made of dead gulls.
 chair wearing an L.L. Bean
safa
liva-monger, breaking the move down into slo-mo constituent movements so that Green's untrained eye could
follo
deskulled head-region supported and, like (shuddering), contained in
a so
 the total head had like conformed to the
insi roughly square in overall outline, the head, and the
wom
 Lenz know the time at roughly two-minute intervals, maybe once a block, from his cheap but digital watch, when
the
n vitro.
enz details that robes and mass weddings and head-shaving and pamphleteering in
airp ng and marrying whoever they tell
you eing who you marry are small potatoes in terms of bizarre-cult criterion. Lenz tells Green he knows
indi
ndenza was lying on his bunk in bright sunlight through the window with his hands laced over his
ches tsch poked his head in and asked Hal what he was doing, and Hal told him photosynthesizing and then didn't
say went away.
eaths later, Michael Pemulis stuck his head in where Troeltsch's had been.
s of intensive concentration the finger had grown back and regenerated itself like a lizard's tail, confounding doctoral
authorities. Lenz says that was the incident in youth after which he got in touch with his own unusual life-force and energois de
vivre and knew and accepted that he was somehow not like the run of com
 it entailed.
Lenz clues Green in on it's a myth the Nile crocodile is the most dreaded species of crocodile, that the dreaded Estuarial
crocodile of saltwater habits is a billion times more dreaded by those in the know.
Lenz theorizes that his compulsive need to know the time with microspic precision is also a function of his stepfather's
dysfunctional abuse regarding the pocketwatch and Track and Flange. This segues into an analysis of the term dysfunction and its
revelance to the distinctions between, say, psychology and natural religion.
Lenz tells how once in the Back Bay on Boylston outside Bonwit's a pushy prosthesis-vendor gave him a hard time about a
glass-eye item of jewelry and got his issues' juices flowing and then down the prosthesis-vendor line another vendor simply would
not take No of any sort about a bottle of A.D.A.-Approved Xero-Lube Saliva Substitute with a confabulated celeb-endor
 J. Gentle F. Crooner on it and Lenz utilized akido to break the man's nose with one blow and then drive the bone's shards and
ments up into the vendor's brain with the follow-up heel of his hand, a maneuver known by a secret ancient Chinese term
meaning The Old One-Two, eliminating the saliva guy's map on the spot, so that Lenz had lea
tever-was-beyond-black belt in akido and his hands' deadliness as weapons when his issues were provoked and tells Green
how he'd taken a solemn vow right there, running like hell down Boylston for the Auditorium T-Stop to evade prosecution, vowed
never to use his lethally adept akido skills except in the most compulsory situation of defending the innocent and/or weak.
Lenz tells Green how once he was at a Halloween party where a hydro-cep
Lenz shares about this recurving dream where he's seated under a tropical ceiling fan in a cane
ri hat and holding a wickerware valise in his lap, and that's all, and that's the recurving dream.
On the 400 block of W. Beacon, around 22O2h., Lenz demonstrates for Bruce Green the secret akido 1-2 with which he'd
demapped the sa
w. He says there's another recurving nightmare about a clock with hands frozen eternally at 1830 that's so trouser-foulingly
scary he won't even burden Green's fragile psychology with the explicits of it.
Green, lighting both their smokes, says he either doesn't remember his dreams or doesn't dream.
Lenz adjusts his white toupee and mustache in a darkened InterLace outlet's window, does the odd bit of t'ai-chi stretching,
and blows his nose into W. Beacon's cluttered gutter Euro-style, one nostril at a time, arching to keep his coatfront well back from
what he expels.
Green's one of these muscle-shirt types that carries his next gasper tucked up over his ear, which the use of RIJID or other
brands of quality hair-fixative makes impossible for the reason that residues of spray on the cigarette cause it to burst
unexpectedly into flame at points along its length. Lenz regales how at that Halloween Party with the necklace of birds there'd
been allegedly a Concavity-refugee infant there, at the party, at the home of a South Boston orthodontist that dealt Lidocaine to
Bing-retailers on the prescriptional dicky,233223 a normal-size and unferal infant but totally without a skull, lying in a kind of
raised platform or dais by the fireplace with its shapeless and
rt of lidless plastic box, and its eyes were sunk way down in its face, which was the consistency of like quicksand, the face,
and its nose concave and its mouth hanging out over either side of the boneless face, and
de of the containing box it was contained in, the head, and appeared
an with the lei of gull-heads and other persons in costumes had ingested hallucinogens and drank mescal and ate the little
worms in the mescal and had performed circled rituals around the box and platform around 2355h., worshipping the infant, or as
they termed it simply The Infant, as if there were only One.
Green lets
critical B.B.S.B. liquid-crystal sign is obscured by the urban night's strolling skyline.
Lenz's labial writhing occurs worst on diphthongs involving o-sounds.
Lenz clues Green in that AA/NA works all right but there's no fucking question it's a cult, he and Green've apparently got
themselves to the point where the only way out of the addictive tailspin is to enlist in a fucking cult and let them try and brainwash
your ass, and that the first person tries to lay a saffron robe or tambourine on Lenz is going to be one very sorry cableyar-row
indeed, is all.
Lenz claims to remember some experiences which he says happened to him i
Lenz says the Ennet graduates who often come back and take up living-room space sitting around comparing horror stories
about former religious cults they'd tried joining as part of their struggle to try to quit with the drugs and alcohol are not w/o a
certain naïve charm but are basically naïve. L
orts and selling flowers on median strips and signing away inheritances and never sleepi
 and then never se
viduals who've heard shit that would blow Green's mind out his ear-sockets.
At lunchtime, Hal Inca
t, and Jim Troel
anything else until Troeltsch
Then, 41 br
'Did you eat yet?’
Hal made his stomach bulge up and patted it, still looking at the ceiling. 'The beast has killed and gorged and now lies in the
shade of the Baobob tree.’
'Gotcha.’
'Surveying his loyal pride.’
'I gotcha.’ 
Over 200 breaths later, John ('N.R.') Wayne opened up the ajar door a little more and put his whole head in and stayed like
that, with just his head in. He didn't say anything and Hal didn't say anything, and they stayed like that for a while, and then
Wayne's head smoothly withdrew.
Under a streetlamp on Faneuil St. off W. Beacon, Randy Lenz shares a vulnerable personal thing and tilts his head back to
show Bruce Green where his septum used to be.
Randy Lenz reguiles Bruce Green about certain real-estate cults in S. Cal. and the West Coast. Of Delawareans that still
believed Virtual-Reality pornography even though it'd been found to cause bleeding from the eye-corners and real-world
permanent impotence was still the key to Shrangi-la and believed that some sort of perfect piece of digito-holographic porn was
circu es to snuffling
arou
omething called Stelliform Cultism that Bruce Green isn't even near
read
 blue-vested gut had preceded the conductor into rooms by several seconds, fob glinting
abov
or te
 who's hoovered his share, says cocaine always seemed like it grabbed you by the throat and just didn't let go, and he
coul
 that's confronted the ins and outs of his own
char
are purportaged to be whole packs and herds of feral animals operating in locust-like
fashi
 snowshoes and ventured northward, trailing smoke, past the walls and
fans
y winter, never heard
or s
lum-colored, finally breathing) worse.
enz shudders just at the thought of the raging Powerlessness he'd feel, he shares, lost and disorientated, wandering in circles
in bl ng white frozen points due north of all domesticated men, forget the time not even knowing what fucking date it was, his
brea
t if Boston AA is a cult that like brainwashes you, he guesses he'd got himself to the point where his brain
need , being exactly what big blockheaded Don Gately repeats
abo
IPPETS FROM THE INDIVIDUAL-RESIDENT-INFORMAL-INTERFACE MOMENTS OF D. W.
GA N
lating somewhere in the form of a bootleg Write-Protect-notched software diskette and devoted their cultic liv
nd trying to get hold of the virtual kamasupra diskette and getting together in dim Wilmington-area venues and talking very
obliquely about rumors of where and just what the software was and how their snufflings for it were going, and watching Virtual
fuckfilms and mopping the corner of their eyes, etc. Or of s
y to hear about, Lenz opines. Or like e.g. of a suicidal Nuck cult of Nucks that worshipped a form of Russian Roulette that
involved jumping in front of trains and seeing which Nuck could come the closest to the train's front without getting demapped.
What sounds like Lenz chewing gum is really Lenz trying to talk and grind his teeth together at the same time.
Lenz recalls orally that his stepfather's
e the watch-pocket's sinister slit. How Lenz's mother back in Fall River had made it a point of utilizing Greyhound for
voyages and sojourns, basically to piss her stephusband off.
Lenz discusses how a serious disadvantage to dealing Bing retail is the way customers'll show up pounding on your door at
0300 sporting lint in the terms of resources and putting their arms around your shins and ankles and begging for just a half-gram
nth of a gram and offering to give Lenz their kids, like Lenz wants to fucking deal with anybody's kids, which these scenes
were always constant drags on his spirits.
Green,
d relate to why the Boston AAs call Bing the 'Express Elevator To AA.’
In a dumpster-lined easement between Faneuil St. and Brighton Ave., Brighton, right after Green almost steps in what he's
pretty sure is human vomit, Lenz proves logically why it's all too likely that Ennet House resident Geoffrey D. is a closet poofta.
Lenz reports how he's been approached in the past to male-model and act, but that the male-model and acting profession is
pretty much crawling with your closet pooftas, and it's no kind of work for a man
acter.
Lenz speculates openly on how there
on in the rhythmic lushness of parts of the Great Concavity to the due northeast, descended reputedly from domestic pets and
abandoned during the relocational transition to an O.N.A.N.ite map, and how teams of pro researchers and amateur explorers and
intrepid hearts and cultists have ventured northeast of Checkpoints along the Lucited ATHSCMulated walls and never returned,
vanishing in toto from the short-wave E.M. bands, as in like dropping off the radar.
Green turns out to have no conceptions or views on the issues of fauna of the Concavity at all. He literally says he's never
given it one thought one way or the other.
Whole NNE cults and stelliform subcults Lenz reports as existing around belief systems about the metaphysics of the
Concavity and annular fusion and B.S.-1950s-B-cartridge-type-radiation-affected fauna and overfertiliza-tion and verdant forests
with periodic oasises of purportaged desert and whatever east of the former Montpelier VT area of where the annulated Shawshine
River feeds the Charles and tints it the exact same tint of blue as the blue on boxes of Hefty SteelSaks and the ideas of ravacious
herds of feral domesticated housepets and oversized insects not only taking over the abandoned homes of relocated Americans but
actually setting up house and keeping them in model repair and impressive equity, allegedly, and the idea of infants the size of
prehistoric beasts roaming the overfertilized east Concavity quadrants, leaving enormous scat-piles and keening for the abortive
parents who'd left or lost them in the general geopolitical shuffle of mass migration and really fast packing, or, as some of your
more Limbaugh-era-type cultists sharingly believe, originating from abortions hastily disposed of in barrels in ditches that got
breached and mixed ghastly contents with other barrels that reanimated the abortive fed and brought them to a kind of repelsive
oversized B-cartridge life thundering around due north of where yrstruly and Green strolled through the urban grid. Of one local
underground stelliform offshoot from the Bob Hope-worshipping Rastafarians who smoked enormous doobsters and wove their
negroid hair into clusters of wet cigars like the Rastafarians but instead of Rastafarians these post-Rastas worshipped the Infant
and every New Year donned tie-dyed parkas and cardboard
 of Checkpoint Pongo into the former areas of VT and NH, seeking The Infant they called it, as if there were only One, and
toting paraphernalia for performing a cultish ritual referred to in oblique tones only as Propitiating The Infant, whole posses of
these stelliform pot-head reggae-swaying Infant-cultists disappearing forever off the human race's radar ever
melled again, regarded by fellow cultists as martyrs and/or lambs, possibly too addled by blimp-sized doobsters to find their
way back out of the Concavity and freezing to death, or en-swarmed by herds of feral pets, or shot by property-value-conscious
insects, or ... (face p
L
indi
th an ice-beard, with just his tinder and wits and character to live by, armed just with a Browning blade.
Green opines tha
ed a good brisk washing, which Lenz knows is not an original view
ut once a diem.
SELECTED SN
TELY, LIVE-I
STAFF, ENNET HOUSE DRUG AND ALCOHOL RECOVERY
'm not going to make my goddamn
mus
 Chair, the Sudbury Half-Measures Avail Us Nothing Group, he had a
pow . The Chair, he said he used to be a nuclear auditor. For the Defense industry. This man who was very quiet and
brok
. I can I.D.’
at seemed fatherly somehow.’
ite Flag.’
other's dead. Worm-farming. My own personal Daddy's still sucking air, though. That's how he puts it — still
suck
ed to wear a four-piece suit and the fourth piece was him.’
 all the time, that joke.’
lored pants and loafers without socks,
whi
n to be taking somebody's inventory about weird ways they dress, under there,
may
t have we Foss?’
e asking them to think about if their Higher Power is omni-potent enough to make a suitcase that's too heavy for
him hey're doing it to everybody that's new. And that skittery kid Dingley —’
n closet with his legs sticking out of the linen closet with his eyes bugging out with like
smo
thing Day's doing and Erdedy says I'm Senior Res. and to go to Staff with it
and
.’
ly good like tollhouse-butterscotch cookie thing Hanley made a plate of, which Erdedy said it's not
like onplace decency.’
ell to like waltz on in if
they
t's OK with you, Don.’
lax a little, kid.’
 by the way nice shirt. My dad used to bowl, too, when he still
had
on your knees in the A.M. to Ask For Help does not mean
gett
I'm thing why same-sex sponsors only are a suggestion. Is that
ther
HOUSE, ENFIELD MA, ON AND OFF FROM JUST AFTER the BROOKLINE YOUNG PEOPLE'S AA MTNG. UP TO
ABOUT 2329H., WEDNESDAY 11 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U.
'I don't know why all this shit about wanting to hear about the football all the time. And I
cle. It's stupid.’
'Okey-doke.’
'It's inappropriate, since you like words like that.’
'But this Sharing and Caring Commitment guy, the
er about him
en-seeming and fatherly and strange. There was this kind of broken authority about him.’
'I know what you mean
'... th
'The sponsor type. My sponsor's like that, Joelle, in Wh
'Can I ask? Is your own personal Daddy still alive?’
'I dunno.’
'Oh. Oh. My m
ing air. In Kentucky.’
'...’
'My mother's a worm-farmer from way back, though.’
'But so what about this Half Measures guy hit you so hard?’
'Harrd. Harrrrrd. Sound it out.’
'Real funny.’
'Don well it started out as that he spoke about himself like he used to be somebody else. Like a whole different person. He
said he us
'An Allston Group guy says that
'He had on a real nice white thick-weave cotton shirt opened at the throat and wheat-co
ch I'm up here ten years Don and I still can't follow this thing up here about y'all all wearing nice shoes and then wrecking
them by wearing them without socks.’
'Joelle, you're maybe about the last perso
be.’
'Kiss my rosy red ass, maybe.’
'Remind me to Log how it's real positive to see you coming out of this shell of yours.’
'Well and I got reservations on this Don but Diehl and Ken are telling me to come in to you with this issue of what's like
occurring out there which Erdedy says it's a Staff-type issue and duh-duh duh-duh.’
'Had a little coffee tonigh
'Well Don and like you know and duh-duh.’
'Take a second. Inhale and blow out. I'm not going anywheres.’
'Well Don I hate a cheese-nibbler much as the next man but Geoff D. and Nell G. are out in the living room going around to
all the new peopl
 to lift. T
'Tingley. The new kid.’
'Well Don he's sitting in the line
ke coming out his ears and duh-duh duh-duh going like He Can but He Can't but He Can, respecting the suitcase and duh-duh,
and Diehl says it's a matter for Staff, it's a negative
eat cheese.’
'Shit.’
'Diehl said a case this negative and duh-duh, no way it's like ratting
'No, I appreciate. It ain't ratting.’
'Plus I brought in this real
 kissing ass so much as comm
'Erdedy's a community pillar. I got to stay in here with the phone. Maybe you could tell Geoff and N
 can take time out from torturing the new people.’
Til probably leave out the torturing part if i
'Which by the way here I am looking at this cookie still in your hand, notice.’
'Jesus, the cookie. Jesus.’
'Try and re
'I got to stay down with the phones till 2200. Try a plunger and let me know and I can call Services.’
'I'm thinking it'd be doing a favor if Staff clued in anybody new that comes in on the fact that the H-faucet in the shower that
its H really stands for Holy Cow That's Cold.’
'Are you saying in a sideways way there's some trouble with the water-temp in the head, McDade?’
'Don, I'm saying just what I came in here to say. And can I say
a thumb.’
'I don't care what the sick bastard told you, Yolanda. Getting
ing on your knees in the A.M. while this sick yutz stands in front of you and unzips his fly and you Ask For Help into his fly.
praying this is not a male resident said this. This is the sort of
e's some sick bastards around the rooms, you get me? Any AA tells a new female in the Program to use his Unit for her Higher 
Power, I'd give that guy a wide detour. You get what I'm saying?’
a.’
aid how I always have to be on the south of him, like stay on his south side, and I have to buy a digital watch.’
illing at a great height without even idiotic red wings strapped to his back and the universe were sending this lovely
stea
er, now has won her as if from someone or
som
e loves him too much
to st
e and need. Because he needs them, needs her,
beca s her he fears her and so hates her a little, hates all of them, a hatred that comes out disguised as a contempt he
disg nder attention with which he does the thing with her buttons, touches the blouse as if it too were part of her, and
him y. Her mouth is glued to his mouth; she is his breath, his eyes shut
agai are stripped in the mirror and she, in a kind of virtuoso jitterbug that is 100% New World, uses O.'s
une is neck with her legs, and she arches her back and is supported, her weight, by just
one r to bed as would a waiter a tray.
at you?’
.
Whe any odors.’
n the little hall off the tunnel that isn't the little hall that goes to the sauna. Why the
blin
d. Lyle's trying to buck him up. Some of the crueler guys are in
ther e it's entertainment. I got disgusted. Somebody in pain isn't entertainment. I did my sets, now I'm a vapor-trail.’
'And I didn't even tell you yet how he suggested I should thank the Higher Power at night.’
'I'd cross a broad street to avoid an AA like this guy, Yoland
'And how he s
'Holy Christ this is Lenz. Is this Lenz you're telling me about?’
'I ain't use no names in here. All I say he seemed real friendly and fly at first, and helpful, when I first came, this dude I ain't
say no name.’
'You have trouble with the part of the Second Step that's about insanity and you've been using Randy Lenz for a sponsor?’
'This is a nomonous Program, you know what I'm saying?’
'Jesus, kid.’
Orin ('O.') Incandenza stands embracing a putatively Swiss hand-model in a rented room. They embrace. Their faces become
sexual faces. It seems clear evidence of a kind of benign fate or world-spirit that this incredible specimen had appeared at Sky
Harbor Int. Airp. just as Orin stood with his fine forehead against the glass of the Gate overlooking the tarmac after actually
volunteering to drive Helen Steeply all the nightmarish way down I-17/-10 to the ghastly glittering unnavigable airport and the
Subject seemed, in the car, not only not especially grateful, and hadn't let him so much as place a friendly and supportive palm on
her incredible quadricep during the ride, but had been irritatingly all-business and had continued to pursue lines of family-linen
inquiry he'd all but begged her to quit subjecting him to the inappropriateness of234224 — that, as he stood there after having
received little other than a cool smile and a promise to try to say hello to Hallie, with his forehead against the glass of the Weston
back door — or rather the Delta gate window — this incredible specimen had — unbidden, unStrategized — come up to him and
started a lush foreign-accented conversation and revealed professionally lovely hands as she rooted in her tripolymer bag to ask
him to autograph for her toddler-age son a Cardinal-souvenir football she had right there (!) in her bag, along with her Swiss
passport — as if the universe were reaching out a hand to pluck him from the rim of the abyss of despair that any real sort of
rejection or frustration of his need for some Subject he'd picked out always threatened him with, as if he'd been teetering with his
arms windm
dying left hand to pull him gently back and embrace him and not so much console him as remind him of who and what he was
about, standing there embracing a Subject with a sexual face for his sexual face, no longer speaking, the football and pen on the
neatly made bed, the two of them embracing between the bed and the mirror with the woman facing the bed so that Orin can see
past her head the large hanging mirror and the small framed photos of her Swiss family arrayed along the wood-grain dresser
below the window,235225 the tubby-faced man and Swiss-looking kids all smiling trustingly into a nothing somewhere up and to
their right.
They have shifted into a sexual mode. Her lids flutter; his close. There's a concentrated tactile languor. She is left-handed. It is
not about consolation. They start the thing with each other's buttons. It is not about conquest or forced capture. It is not about
glands or instincts or the split-second shiver and clench of leaving yourself; nor about love or about whose love you deep-down
desire, by whom you feel betrayed. Not and never love, which kills what needs it. It feels to the punter rather to be about hope, an
immense, wide-as-the-sky hope of finding a something in each Subject's fluttering face, a something the same that will propitiate
hope, somehow, pay its tribute, the need to be assured that for a moment he has h
ething else, something other than he, but that he has her and is what she sees and all she sees, that it is not conquest but
surrender, that he is both offense and defense and she neither, nothing but this one second's love of her, of-her, spinning as it arcs
his way, not his but her love, that he has it, this love (his shirt off now, in the mirror), that for one second sh
and it, that she must (she feels) have him, must take him inside or else dissolve into worse than nothing; that all else is gone:
that her sense of humor is gone, her petty griefs, triumphs, memories, hands, career, betrayals, the deaths of pets — that there is
now inside her a vividness vacuumed of all but his name: O., O. That he is the One.
(This is why, maybe, one Subject is never enough, why hand after hand must descend to pull him back from the endless fall.
For were there for him just one, now, special and only, the One would be not he or she but what was between them, the
obliterating trinity of You and I into We. Orin felt that once and has never recovered, and will never again.)
And about contempt, it is about a kind of hatred, too, along with the hop
use he need
uises in the te
. As if it could feel. They have stripped each other neatl
nst the sight of hers. They
ven shoulders as support to leap and circle h
 hand at the small of her back as he bears he
'Hoompf.’
'Herrmmp.’
'Well in excess of a thousand pardons for my collision.’
'Arslanian? Is th
'It is I, Idris Arslanian. Who is this other?’
'It's Ted Schacht, Id. Why the blindfold?’
'Where have I come, please. I became disoriented upon a set of stairs. I became panicked. I nearly removed my blindfold
re are we? I detect m
'You're just off the weight room, i
dfold, though?’
'And the origin of this sound of hysterical weeping and moans, this is —?’
'It's Anton Doucette in there. He's in there clinically depresse
e watching lik
'You exude vapor?’ 
'Always nice running into you, Id.’
'Await. Please conduct me upstairs or into the locker for a lavatory visit. The blindfold I am wearing is experimental on the
part
owheresburg, Iowa? Dempster?’
Belows highly ranked. Coach Thorp tells this.’
led kid he's real high-ranked, Id, yeah.’
 there if I were you.’
to me that this excellence in anticipation in the blind is because of hearing and sounds, because sounds are merely
. . . h
tions In Intensity' — Throp." Throp?’
y the ear than the eye. This is experimental theory of Thorp. This is explaining why the highly ranked Dymphna appears to
alwa ll is soon to land. Thorp tells this in a convincing manner.’
ching the contact and then imaginatively extending the beginning of its flight, like those of us hobbled by
sight
 of intensity in play. Today versus Whale I was
wea to play.’
as well as hoped. I frequently faced the wrong direction for play. I frequently judged by the intensity of balls struck on
adja ourts, intruding on play.’
t the 14's end.’
ng the ear is a process of time, in encouragement.’
ere? I very —’
f as a blindfold over my features. I am disoriented and wishing badly for a
lava g inside the weight room, where Schacht alleges you are all watching Doucette weep in
clin
. It's really Mike Pemulis.’
re wearing a fucking blindfold too?’
anging on you, brother.’
ond see the amount of high-stress sweat Lyle's taking off Anton ("The
Boo
 a nostril, clinically depressing Doucette at its
app
 young, Ars. The Booger's got himself convinced he's going to get the academic Boot. He's been on proby this
who
rm's end, if he really does flunk. He's thought himself into a brainlock of anxiety. He's in there clutching
his s n there have a pool going on whether Lyle can pull him back
from
he prorector, teaching of energy in models of resource-scarcity and resource-plenty.’
of Thorp. You are told of the visually challenged player who will matriculate?’
The blind kid? From like N
'Dymphna.’
'He's not coming in til next term. He delayed, Inc said they said. Dural edema or something.’
'Though age only nine, he is in his Midwest region's ranking of Twelve and
'Well, I'd say for a blind, soft-skul
'But Dymphna. I hear Thorp tell that the highness of the ranking may be due to the blindness itself. Thorp and Texas Watson
were who scouted this player.’
'I wouldn't mention the name Watson near that weight room in
'Thorp tells that his excellence of play is scouted by them to be his anticipation. As in the player Dymphna arrives at the
necessary location well before the opponent player's ball, through anticipation.’
'I know what anticipation is, Id.’
'Thorp tells
ere. Please read the comment I have carefully notated upon this folded piece of paper.’
' "Sound Merely 'Varia
'It was meaning Thorp, in excitement. He tells that one may, perforce, judge the opponent player's VAPS236226 in more
detail b
ys have floated by magic to the necessary spot where a ba
'Perforce?’
That this blind person is able to judge the necessary spot of landing by the intensity of the sound of the ball against the
opponent player's string.’
'Instead of wat
.’
T, Idris Arslanian, am compelled with Thorp's telling.’
'Which helps explain the blindfold.’
'I therefore experiment with volunteer blindness. Training the ear in degrees
ring the blindfold
'How'd it go?’
'Not
cent courts and ran onto adjacent c
'We sort of wondered what all the ruckus was down there a
'Thorp tells that traini
'Well, later, Id.’
'Stop. Wait before leaving. Please conduct me to a lavatory. Ted Schacht? Are you as yet there?’
'...’
'Are you as yet th
'Whuffff watch where you're going kid for Christ's sake.’
'Who is this please.’
'Troeltsch, James L., slightly doubled over.’
'It is I, Idris Arslanian, wearing a rayon handkerchie
tory. Wondering also what is ensuin
ical depression.’
'Kertwannnggg! Just kidding, Ars
Then you, Mike Pemulis, may even now be questioning why is this blindfold upon Idris Arslanian.’
'What blindfold? Ars, no, you'
'You, Mike Pemulis, are also wearing a blindfold?’
'Just kertw
'I became disoriented on a stairway, then conversed with Ted Schacht. I am suspecting I do not trust your sense of laughter
enough to conduct me back upstairs.’
'You should feel your way in and just for one sec
ger") Doucette in there, Ars.’
'Doucette is the two-hand player whose mole appears to be material from
earance.’
'Rog on the mole. Except that's not what's depressing the Booger this time. This one we decided we'd describe him as more
like anxiously depressed than depressed.’
'One can be depressed of different types?’
'Boy are you
le year, since apparently some trouble last year with Thorp's cubular trig —’
'I am sympathizing with this in toto.’
'— and but except now he claims he's close to flunking in Watson's laughable Energy survey class, which would obviously
mean the old Boot at te
kull with Lyle and Mario, and some of the like less kind guys i
 the brink.’
'Texas Watson t
'Ars, I'm nodding in confirmation. Fossil fuels all the way up to annular fusion/fission cycles, DT-lithiumization, so on and so
forth
duct me to micturate, please.’
s like the brain recoils.’
hin the skull, resulting in clutching the head.’
possible tennis career as with these little wings on it,
flyin
nd Mario trying to talk him out of the crazy washed-up-at-fifteen-type depressed talk, Mario exploiting a
prev
 from the sauna all through this. Finally taking
him ill doing circuits in there. Lyle's working with the Booger now. Between the anxiety and the
mar 's a real feeding frenzy for old Lyle let me tell you.’
gh I am Trivially thirteen and not yet required to
grap
lot.’
't paralyze your brain with careerwith
really flies, kid, let me tell you.’
system, much of the output of which is waste U-239, which gets piped
or c y up to what used to be Loring A.F.B. — Air Force Base near what used to be Presque Isle
Mai
 down to Montpelier as raw materiel for the massive poisons needed for toxic
lithi
n the old Eschaton map for a little geopolitical sparring, Ars, what with those hands and wicked lob? Incidentally, the
arrh
nsely populous and waste-impacted nation
such usion to be self-sufficient and wasteless perpetuation. Alas, my need to visit the lavatory is becoming
diste
o-conceptual that this is where your Third World educational system's real
sadl astelessness
prob
e science after he quit designing neutron-
. All on a real superficial-type level, since Watson's basically got like a little liquid-filled nubbin at the top of his spine where
his brain ought to be.’
'Texas Watson does not overwhelm with brightness, it is true.’
'But Doucette's got himself convinced he's got this insurmagulate conceptual block that keeps him from grasping annulation,
even superficially.’
'After we converse you will con
'It's the same sort of block some people get with the Mean-Value Theorem. Or in Optics when we get to color fields. At a
certain level of abstraction it'
'Causing pain of impact wit
'Watson's gone the extra click with him. Watson's good-hearted if nothing else. He's tried flash-cards, mnemonic rhymes,
even claymation filmstrips from over at Rindge-Latin Remedial.’
'You are saying without avail.’
'I'm saying apparently the Boogster just sits there in class, eyes bugging out, stomach in fucking knots, dope-slapped by
anxiety. I'm saying frozen.’
'You are saying recoiling.’
'The right side of his face frozen in this anxiety-tic. Envisioning any
g off. Talking all kinds of crazy self-injuring anxious-depression talk. It all started with him and Mario and me in the sauna,
him breaking down, me a
ious like therapeutic bond with the kid from about the mole, then with me putting DT-annulation in broad-stroke terms a
freaking invertebrate could have understood for Christ's sake. Just about passing out
 in to Lyle even with the 18 's st
athon sauna-time it
'I too confess experiences of anxiety for annulation with Tex Watson, thou
ple in hard science.’
'Mario in the sauna kept telling Doucette to just imagine somebody doing somersaults with one hand nailed to the ground,
which what the fuck is that, and lo and surprise didn't help the Booger a whole
'Did not part the veil of Maya.’
'Didn't do jack.’
'Annular energy cycles are intensively abstract, my home nation believes.’
'But my whole message to Boog was that DT-cycles aren't all that fucking hard if you don
-wings brain-cartoons. The extra-hot breedering and lithiumization stuff gets hairy, but the whole fusion/fission wasteannulation thing in toto you can imagine as nothing but a huge right triangle.’
'You are presaging to give the thumbnail lecture.’
'Commit this one simple model to your little Pakistani RAM-cells, and you'll tapdance right through Watson's kiddie-physics
and up into Optics, which is where the abstracto-conceptual fur
'I am one of the seldom of my home nation whose talents are weak in science, unhappily.’
'This is why God also gave you quick hands and a wicked lob off the backhand, though. Just picture a kind of massive
pseudocartographic right triangle.237227 You've got your central, impregnately-guarded O.N.A.N.- Sun-strand waste-intensive
fusion facility up in what used to be Montpelier in what used to be Vermont, in the Concavity. From Montpelier the process's
waste's piped to two sites, one of which is that blue glow at night up by the Methuen Fan-Complex, just south of the Concavity,
right flush up against the Wall and Checkpoint Pongo —’
'Which our tall and sleep-depriving fans in our area point at to blow away from the south.’
'— Roger that, where the toxo-fusion's waste's plutonium fluoride's refined into plutonium-239 and uranium-238 and
fissioned in a standard if somewhat hot and risky breederatapulted or long-shiny-trucked wa
ne — where it's allowed to decay naturally into nep-tunium-239 and then plutonium-239 and then added to the UF4 fractional
waste also piped up from Montpelier, then fissioned in a purposely ugly way in such a way as to create like hellacious amounts of
highly poisonous radioactive wastes, which are mixed with heavy water and specially heated-zirconium-piped through special
heavily guarded heated zirconium pipes back
umization and waste-intenseness and annular fusion.’
'My head is spinning on its axis.’
'Just a moving right-triangular cycle of interdependence and waste-creation and -utilization. See? And when are we going to
get you out o
ythmic meaty whacking sound is Booger hitting himself in the thigh and chest in there, which self-abuse is a textbook
symptom of an anxiously depressed episode.’
'With this I can create sympathy. For, confusingly to me, fusion produces no waste. This we are taught in the science of my
home nation. This is the very essence of the promise of the attraction of fusion for a de
 as mine, we are taught f
nded.’
'But except no, although this was the very roadblock that'd stymified annulation, and what had to be overcome, and was
overcome, though in a way so unintuitive and abstract
y in need of like a massive up-to-date-textbook airlift or something. It's also at just this point in the fusion-w
lem where our own glorious optical Founder, Inc's ex-Da, Mrs. Inc's poor cue —’
'I know who you refer.’
'The man himself, at just this point, makes his final lasting contribution to stat
diffu rom the A.E.C., for the Incster's Da's,
like
h I was upon the stairs and became disoriented was to visit a lavatory. This was long ago.’
ehavior of
suba ithout getting poisoned themselves.’
e.’
atic just a couple decades back.’
one beef and diet soda, forced to chain-smoke
micr
 more toxic than the
radi produces relatively stable plutonium fluoride and uranium tetra-fluoride.
All
 site in the Great Concavity.’
hl. Here things get abstractly furry and I'll just skim through the fact that the only kertwang in the whole
proc
o organic growth for hundreds of radial clicks in every direction.’
 and insects of Volkswagen size and infantile giganticism and the unmacheteable regions of
fore
at everything hyperventilates. And thus and
such e north.’
t if I resort to remove my blindfold to locate a lavatory.’
 you have to take Watson is the
cycl
ntil the toxins are fused and utilized. The satellite scenario is that the eastern part of Grid 3
goes
s eating him alive the worst, conceptually. He says he's toast if he can't wrap his head
arou
gs there staring like a
bunn ic kiddie-physical principles of the
relat
nce Watson's forehead gets all mottled and prunylook
tical wastes of the western Concavity, let me tell you.’
g as it is told to me over the porcelain of a lavatory.’
ste.'
'Hm
tational art and carnality in all its fourthou
sion reflectors for Defense. You've seen the coprolite placque in Tavis's office. This is f
, lasting contribution to the energy of waste.’
'The purpose for whic
'Hold your water one second is all this'll take. You wouldn't even fucking be here without Inc's Da, you know. What the guy
did was he helped design these special holographic conversions so the team that worked on annulation could study the b
tomics in highly poisonous environments. W
'They thus are studying holographic conversions of the poisons instead of the poisons.’
'Men's Sanity in Corporate Sterno, Ars. Like an optical glove-box. The ultimate prophylactic.’
'Please conduct m
'Like but for instance did your nation know that the whole annular theory behind a type of fusion that can produce waste that's
fuel for a process whose waste is fuel for the fusion: the whole theory behind the physics of it comes out of medicine?’
'This means what? A bottle of medicine?’
'The study of medicine, Ars. Your part of the world takes annular medicine for granted now, but the whole idea of treating
cancer by giving the cancer cells themselves cancer was anathem
'Anathematic?’
'As in like radical, fringe. Wacko. Laughed out of town on a rail by quote mainstream established science. Whose idea of
treatment was to like poison the whole body and see what was left. Though annular chemotherapy did start out kind of wacko.
You can see these early microphotos Schacht's got that poster of that he won't take down even after you're sick of it, the early
microphotos of cancer cells getting force-fed micromassive quantities of overd
osized Marlboros near tiny little cellular phones —'238228
'I am standing first upon one foot then upon another foot.’
'— except and corollarying out of the micromedical model was this equally radical idea that maybe you could achieve a highwaste annulating fusion by bombarding highly toxic radioactive particles with massive doses of stuff even
oactive particles. A fusion that feeds on poisons and
you turn out to need is access to mind-staggering volumes of toxic material.’
'Therefore placing the natural fusion
'Roger and Jawo
ess environmentally is that the resultant fusion turns out so greedily efficient that it sucks every last toxin and poison out of
the surrounding ecosystem, all inhibitors t
'Hence the eastern Concavity of anxiety and myth.’
'You end up with a surrounding environment so fertilely lush it's practically unlivable.’
'A rain forest on sterebolic anoids.’
'Close enough.’
'Therefore rapacial feral hamsters
sts of the mythic eastern Concavity.’
'Yes Ars and you find you need to keep steadily dumping in toxins to keep the uninhibited ecosystem from spreading and
overrunning more ecologically stable areas, exhausting the atmosphere's poisons so th
. So this is why E.W.D.'s major catapulting is from the metro area du
'Into the eastern Concavity, keeping it at bay.’
'See how it all comes together?’
'Mr. Thorp will evince keen disappointmen
'Ars, I hear you. I hear fine. You don't need to go on and on. The thing to keep in mind for if
ic effects of the waste-delivery and fusion. Major catapulting is on what days?’
'The dates which are in each month prime numbers, until midnight.’
'Which eradicates the overgrowth u
 from overgrown to wasteland to overgrown several times a month. With the first week of the month being especially barren
and the last week being like nothing on earth.’
'As if time itself were vastly sped up. As if nature itself had desperately to visit the lavatory.’
'Accelerated phenomena, which is actually equivalent to an incredible slowing down of time. The mnemonic rhyme Watson
tried to get the Boog to remember here is "Wasteland to lush: time's in no rush."
'Decelerated time, I have got you.’
'And this is what the Boog's saying i
nd the concept of time in flux, conceptually. It jacklights him for the whole annular model overall. Granted, it's abstract. But
you should see him. One half of the face is like spasming around while the half with the mole just like han
y you're about to run over. Lyle's trying to walk him real slowly through the most bas
ivity of time in extreme organic environments. In between Booger's trips back to the sauna. The irony for the Boogerman is
you don't really even have to know that much about the temporal-flux stuff, si
ing when he thinks about it himself.’
'Do not please necessitate begging from me, Idris Arslanian.' The eastern Concavity of course being a whole different kettle
of colored horses from what Inc calls the barren Elio
'I will let you tell me anything as lon
'Interesting step you're doing there, Id, I have to say.' 'I beg without frequency. My home culture views begging as low-ca
m. Ars, I'm standing here thinking we could work something out, maybe.’
'I commit no illegal or degrading acts. But I will, if forced, beg.' 'Forget that. I'm just thinking. You're Muslimic, isn't that
right?' 'Devoutly. I pray five times daily in the prescribed fashion. I eschew represen
sand-four-hundred-and-four forms and guises.’ 
'Body a temple and suchlike?
'I eschew. Neither stimulants nor depressing compounds pass my lips, as is prescribed in the holy teachings of my faith.’
'I'm wondering if you had any specific plans for this urine you're so anxious to get rid of, Ars, then.' 'I am not following.’
'What say we hash it all out over some porcelain, then, brother.' 'Mike Pemulis, you are in motion a prince and in repose a
sage.' 'Brother, it'll be a cold day in a warm climate when this kid right here's in repose.’
It was strange upon strange; it was almost as if the legless and pathologically shy punting-groupies were somehow afraid of
Moment's Junoesque Ms. Steeply — Orin had seen his last wheelchair the day before she came up, and now (he realized, driving)
it was only hours after she'd left that they were now back, with their shy ruses. The Excitement-Hope-Acquisition-Contempt cycle
of seduction always left Orin stunned and wrung out and not at his quickest on the uptake. It was only after he'd cleaned up and
dres
 himself into the teeming arteries of Rt. 85 and Bell
Rd.
surv
ls how the vegetarian new Joel girl's veil is because of this condition people get where she's got only one eye that's
righ
bite, and received such a morbidly obese settlement from the Dukakis-appointed 18th-Circus Civil Court that
whe
sed and exchanged the standard compliments and assurances, taken the elevator's glass pod down the tall hotel's round glass
core into the lobby, gone out through the pressurized revolving door into the scalp-crackling gust of Phoenix heat, waited for the
car's directional AC to render the steering wheel touchable, and then injected
west, back out toward Sun City, ruminating as he drove, that it kertwanged on him that the handicapped man at the hotel
room's door had had a wheelchair, that it was the first wheelchair he'd seen since Hal'd hit him with his theory, and that the legless
eyer had had (stranger) the same Swiss accent as the hand-model.
En route, R. Lenz's mouth writhes and he scratches at the little rhy-nophemic rash and sniffs terribly and complains of terrible
late-autumn leaf-mold allergies, forgetting that Bruce Green knows all too well what coke-hydrolysis's symptoms are from having
done so many lines himself, back when life with M. Bonk was one big party.
Lenz detai
t in the middle of her forehead, from birth, like a seahorse, and asks Green not even to think of asking how he knows this fact.
While Green acts as lookout while Lenz relieves himself against a Market St. dumpster, Lenz swears Green to secrecy about
how poor old scarred-up diseased Charlotte Treat had sworn him to secrecy about her secret dream in sobriety was to someday get
her G.E.D. and become a dental hygienist specializing in educating youngsters pathologically frightened of dental anesthesia,
because her dream was to help youngsters, and but how she feared her Virus has placed her secret dream forever out of
reach.239229
All the way up the Spur's Harvard St. toward Union Square, in a barely NW vector, Lenz consumes several minutes and less
than twenty breaths sharing with Green some painful Family-Of-Origin Issues about how Lenz's mother Mrs. Lenz, a thricedivorcée and Data Processor, was so unspeakably obese she had to make her own mumus out of brocade drapes and cotton
tablecloths and never once did come to Parents' Day at Bishop Anthony McDiardama Elementary School in Fall River MA
because of the parents had to sit in the youngsters' little liftable-desktop desks during the Parents' Day presentations and skits, and
the one time Mrs. L. hove her way down to B.A.M.E.S. for Parents' Day and tried to seat herself at little Randall L.'s desk between
Mrs. Lamb and Mrs. Leroux she broke the desk into kindling and needed four stocky cranberry-farmer dads and a textbook-dolly
to arise back up from the classroom floor, and never went back, fabricating thin excuses of busyness with Data Processing and
basic disinterest in Randy L.'s schoolwork. Lenz shares how then in adolescence (his), his mother died because one day she was
riding a Greyhound bus from Fall River MA north to Quincy MA to visit her son in a Commonwealth Youth Corrections facility
Lenz was doing research for a possible screenplay in, and during the voyage on the bus she had to go potty, and she was in the
bus's tiny potty in the rear of the bus going about her private business of going potty, as she later testified, and even though it was
the height of winter she had the little window of the potty wide open, for reasons Lenz predicts Green doesn't want to hear about,
on the northbound bus, and how this was one of the last years of Unsubsidized ordinational year-dating, and the final fiscal year
that actual maintenance-work had ever been done on the infernous six-lane commuter-ravaged Commonwealth Route 24 from Fall
River to Boston's South Shore by the pre-O.N.A.N.ite Governor Claprood's Commonwealth Highway Authority, and the
Greyhound bus encountered a poorly marked UNDER CONSTRUCTION area where 24 was all stripped down to the dimplediron sheeting below and was tooth-rattlingly striated and chuckholed and torn up and just in general basically a mess, and the
poorly marked and unflag-manned debris plus the excessive speed of the northbound bus made it jounce godawfully, the bus, and
swerve violently to and forth, fighting to maintain control of what there was of the road, and passengers were hurled violently
from their seats while, meanwhile, back in the closet-sized rear potty, Mrs. Lenz, right in the process of going potty, was hurled
from the toilet by the first swerve and proceeded to do some high-velocity and human-waste-flinging pinballing back and forth
against the potty's plastic walls; and when the bus finally regained total control and resumed course Mrs. Lenz had, freakishly
enough, ended up her human pinballing with her bare and unspeakably huge backside wedged tight in the open window of the
potty, so forcefully ensconced into the recesstacle that she was unable to extricate, and the bus continued on its northward sojourn
the rest of the way up 24 with Mrs. Lenz's bare backside protruding from the ensconcing window, prompting car horns and
derisive oratory from other vehicles; and Mrs. Lenz's plaintiff shouts for Help were unavailed by the passengers that were arising
back up off the floor and rubbing their sore noggins and hearing Mrs. Lenz's mortified screams from behind the potty's locked
reinforced plastic door, but were unable to excretate her because the potty's door locked from the interior by sliding across a
deadbolt that made the door's outside say occupied/occupado/occupé, and the door was locked, and Mrs. Lenz was wedged
beyond the reach of arm-length and couldn't reach the deadbolt no matter how plaintiffly she reached out her mammoth fatwattled arm; and, like fully 88% of all clinically obese Americans, Mrs. Lenz was diagnosed clinically claustrophobic and took
prescription medication for anxiety and ensconcement-phobias, and she ended up successfully filing a Seven-Figure suit against
Greyhound Lines and the almost-defunct Commonwealth Highway Authority for psychiatric trauma, public mortification, and
second-degree frost
n the check arrived, in an extra-long-size envelope to accommodate all the zeroes, Mrs. L. lost all will to Data Process or cook
or clean, or nurture, or finally even move, simply reclining in a custom-designed 1.5-meter-wide re-cliner watching InterLace
Gothic Romances and consuming mammoth volumes of high-lipid pastry brought on gold trays by a pastry chef she'd had put at
her individual 24-hour disposal and outfitted with a cellular beeper, until four months after the huge settlement she ruptured and
died, her mouth so crammed with peach cobbler the paramedics were hapless to administer C.P.R., which Lenz says he knows, by
the way — C.P.R. 
By the time they hit the Spur, their northwest tacking has wheeled broadly right to become more truly north. Their route down
here is a Mon-drian of alleys narrowed to near-defiles from all the dumpsters. Lenz goes first, blaze-trailing. Lenz gives these sort
of smoky looks to every female that passes within eyeshot. Their vector is now mostly N/NW. They stroll through the rich smell
of dryer-exhaust from the backside of a laundromat off Dustin and Comm. The city of metro Boston MA at night. The ding and
trundle of the B and C Greenie trains heading up Comm. Ave.'s hill, west. Street-drunks sitting with their backs to sooted walls,
seeming to study their laps, even the mist of their breath discolored. The complex hiss of bus-brakes. The jagged shadows
distending with headlights' passage. Latin music drifting through the Spur's Projects, twined around some 5/4 'shine stuff from a
boombox over off Feeny Park, and in between these a haunting plasm of Hawaiian-type music that sounds at once top-volume and
far far away. The zithery drifting Polynesian strains make Bruce Green's face spread in a flat mask of psychic pain he doesn't even
feel
ing a testament
tow
e in sobriety for Green even to remember how, on his fifth Xmas Eve, in
Wal
t bitterly to work
for
cocoa and hazelnut decaf and watch each other taking turns opening gifts.
 is there, and then the music's gone. Lenz asks Green what it's like to work with ice all day at Leisure Time Ice and then
himself theorizes on what it must be like, he'll bet, with your crushed ice and ice cubes in pale-blue plastic bags with a staple for a
Twistie and dry ice in wood tubs pouring out white smoke and then your huge blocks of industrial ice packed in fragrant sawdust,
the huge blocks of man-sized ice with flaws way inside like trapped white faces, white flames of internal cracks. Your picks and
hatchets and really big tongs, red knuckles and rimed windows and thin bitter freezer-smell with runny-nosed Poles in plaid coats
and kalpacs, your older ones with a chronic cant to one side from all the time lugging ice.
They crunch through iridescent chunks of what Lenz I.D.s as a busted windshield. Lenz shares feelings on how between three
ex-husbands and feral attorneys and a pastry-chef that used pastry-dependence to warp and twist her into distort
ard the chef and Lenz's being through red-tape still in Quincy's Y.C.A. hold and in a weak litigational vantage, the ruptured
Mrs. L.'s will had left him out in the cold to self-fend by his urban wits while ex-husbands and patissiers lay on Riviera beachfurniture fanning themselves with high-denomination currency, about all which Lenz says he grapples with the Issues of on a like
daily basis; leaving Green a gap to make understanding sounds. Green's jacket creaks as he breathes. The windshield-glass is in an
alley whose fire escapes are hung with what look like wet frozen tarps. The alley's tight-packed dumpsters and knobless steel
doors and the dull black of total grime. The blunt snout of a bus protrudes into the frame of the alley's end, idling.
Dumpsters' garbage doesn't have just one smell, depending. The urban lume makes the urban night only semidark, as in
licoricey, a luminescence just under the skin of the dark, and swelling. Green keeps them updated re time. Lenz has begun to refer
to Green as 'brother.' Lenz says he has to piss like a racehorse. He says the nice thing about the urban city is that it's one big
commode. The way Lenz pronounces brother involves one r. Green moves up to stand in the mouth of the alley, facing out, giving
Lenz a little privacy several dumpsters behind. Green stands there in the start of the alley's shadow, in the bus's warm backwash,
his elbows out and hands in the jacket's little pockets, looking out. It's unclear whether Green knows Lenz is under the influence
of Bing. All he feels is a moment of deep wrenching loss, of wishing getting high was still pleasurable for him so he could get
high. This feeling comes and goes all day every day, still. Green takes a gasper from behind his ear and lights it and puts a fresh
one on-deck behind the ear. Union Square, Allston: Kiss me where it smells, she said, so I took her to Allston, unquote. Union
Square's lights throb. Whenever somebody stops blowing their horn somebody else starts blowing their horn. There's three
Chinese women waiting at the light across the street from the guy with the lobsters. Each of them's got a shopping bag. An old
VW Bug like Doony Glynn's VW Bug idling mufflerless outside Riley's Roast Beef, except Doony's Bug's engine is exposed
where the back hood got removed to expose the Bug's guts. It's like impossible to ever spot a Chinese woman on a Boston street
that's under sixty or over 1.5 m. or not carrying a shopping bag, except never more than one bag. If you close your eyes on a busy
urban sidewalk the sound of everybody's different footwear's footsteps all put together sounds like something getting chewed by
something huge and tireless and patient. The searing facts of the case of Bruce Green's natural parents' deaths when he was a
toddler are so deeply repressed inside Green that whole strata and substrata of silence and mute dumb animal suffering will have
to be strip-mined up and dealt with a Day at a Tim
tham MA, his Pop had taken the hydrant-sized little Brucie Green aside and given him, to give his beloved Mama for Xmas, a
gaily Gauguin-colored can of Polynesian Mauna Loa-brand240230 macadamia nuts, said cylindrical can of nuts then toted
upstairs by the child and painstakingly wrapped in so much foil-sheen paper that the final wrapped present looked like an
oversized dachshund that had required first bludgeoning and then restraint at both ends with two rolls each of Scotch tape and
garish fuchsia ribbon to be subdued and wrapped and placed under the gaily lit pine, and even then the package seemed mushily to
struggle as the substrata of paper shifted and settled.
Bruce Green's Pop Mr. Green had at one time been one of New England's most influential aerobics instructors — even
costarring once or twice, in the decade before digital dissemination, on the widely rented Buns of Steel aerobics home-video series
— and had been in high demand and very influential until, to his horror, in his late twenties, the absolute prime of an aerobics
instructor's working life, either one of Mr. Green's legs began spontaneously to grow or the other leg began spontaneously to
retract, because within weeks one leg was all of a sudden nearly six inches longer than the other — Bruce Green's one unrepressed
visual memory of the man is of a man who progressively and perilously leaned as he hobbled from specialist to specialist — and
he had to get outfitted with a specialized orthopedic boot, black as a cauldron, that seemed to be 90% sole and resembled an
asphalt-spreader's clunky boot, and weighed several pounds, and looked absurd with Spandex leggings; and the long and short of
it was that Brucie Green's Pop was aerobically washed up by the leg and boot, and had to career-change, and wen
a Waltham novelty or notions concern, something with 'N in the name, Acme Novelties 'N Notions or some such, where Mr.
Green designed sort of sadistic practical-joke supplies, specializing in the Jolly Jolt Hand Buzzer and Blammo Cigar productlines, with a sideline in entomological icecubes and artificial dandruff, etc. Demoralizing, sedentary, character-twisting work, is
what an older child would have been able to understand, peering from his nightlit doorway at an unshaven man who clunkily
paced away the wee hours on a nightly basis down in the living room, his gait like a bosun's in heavy seas, occasionally breaking
into a tiny tentative gluteal-thruster squat-and-kick, almost falling, muttering bitterly, carrying a Falstaff tallboy.
Something touching about a gift that a toddler's so awfully overwrapped makes a sickly-pale and neurasthenic but doting Mrs.
Green, Bruce's beloved Mama, choose the mugged-dachshund-foíl-sheen-cylinder present first, of course, to open, on Xmas
morning, as they sit before the crackling fireplace in different chairs by different windows with views of Waltham sleet, with
bowls of Xmas snacks and Acme-'N-logoed mugs of 
Bru
imitation-crystal chandelier overhead, where the snake gets caught and hangs with
quiv
rs, and has this
silen
cie's little face aglow in the firelight as the unwrapping of the nuts proceeds through layer and stratum, Mrs. Green a couple
times having to use her teeth on the rinds of tape. Finally the last layer is off and the gay-colored can in view. Mauna Loa: Mrs.
Green's favorite and most decadent special-treat food. World's highest-calorie food except for like pure suet. Nuts so yummy they
should be spelled S-I-N, she says. Brucie excitedly bobbing in his chair, spilling cocoa and Gummi Bears, a loving toddler, more
excited about his gift's receipt than what he's going to get himself. His mother's clasped hands before her sunken bosom. Sighs of
delight and protest. And an EZ-Open Lid, on the can.
Which the contents of the macadamia-labelled can is really a coiled cloth snake with an ejaculatory spring. The snake sprongs
out as Mrs. G. screams, a hand to her throat. Mr. Green howls with bitterly professional practical-gag mirth and clunks over and
slaps little Bruce on the back so hard that Brucie expels a lime Gummi Bear he'd been eating — this too a visual memory,
contextless and creepy — which arcs across the living room and lands in the fireplace's fire with a little green siss of flame. The
cloth snake's arc has terminated at the
ering spring as the chandelier swings and tinkles and Mr. Green's thigh-slapping laughter takes a while to run down even as
Brucie's Mama's hand at her delicate throat becomes claw-shaped and she claws at her throat and gurgles and slumps over to
starboard with a fatal cardiac, her cyanotic mouth still open in surprise. For the first couple minutes Mr. Green thinks she's putting
them on, and he keeps rating her performance on an Acme interdepartmental 1-8 Gag Scale until he finally gets pissed off and
starts saying she's drawing the gag out too long, that she's going to scare their little Brucie who's sitting there under the swinging
crystal, wide-eyed and silent.
And Bruce Green uttered not another out-loud word until his last year of grade school, living by then in Winchester with his
late mother's sister, a decent but Dustbowly-looking Seventh-Day Adventist who never once pressed Brucie to speak, probably out
of sympathy, probably sympathizing with the searing pain the opaque-eyed child must have felt over not only giving his Mama a
lethal Xmas present but over then having to watch his widowed asymetrical Pop cave psycho-spiritually in after the wake, watching Mr. Green pace-and-clunk around the living room all night every night after work and an undermicrowaved supper-for-two, in
his Frankensteinian boot, clunking around in circles, scratching slowly at his face and arms until he looked less scourged than
brambled, and in loosely associated mutters cursing God and himself and Acme Nuts 'N Serpents or whatever, and leaving the
fatal snake up hanging from the fake-crystal fixture and the fatal Xmas tree up in its little red metal stand until all the strings of
lights went out and the strings of popcorn got dark and hard and the stand's bowl of water evaporated so the tree's needles died and
fell brownly off onto the rest of the still-unopened Xmas presents clustered below, one of which was a package of Nebraska cornfed steaks whose cherub-motif wrapping was beginning ominously to swell...; and then finally the even more searing childhood
pain of the public arrest and media-scandal and Sanity Hearing and Midwest trial as it was established after the fact that the postXmas Mr. Green — whose one encouraging sign of holding some tattered remnants of himself together after the funeral had been
the fact that he still went faithfully every day to work at Acme Inc. — had gone in and packed a totally random case of the
company's outgoing Blammo Cigars with vengefully lethal tetryl-based high explosives, and a V.F.W., three Rotarians, and 24
Shriners had been grotesquely decapitated across Southeastern Ohio before the federal A.T.F. traced the grisly forensic fragments
back to B. Green Sr.'s Blammo lab, in Waltham; and then the extradition and horribly complex Sanity Hearing and trial and
controversial sentencing; and then the appeals and deathwatch and Lethal Injection, Bruce Green's aunt handing out poorly
reproduced W. Miller tracts to the crowds outside the Ohio prison as the clock ticked down to Injection, little Bruce in tow, blankfaced and watching, the crowd of media and anti-Capital activists and Defarge-like picnickers milling and roiling, many T-shirts
for sale, and the red-faced men in sportcoats and fezzes, oh their rage-twisted faces the same red as their fezzes as the men
careened this way and that in their little cars, formations of motorized Shriners buzzing the gates of the O.D.C.-Maximum facility
and shouting Burn Baby Burn or the more timely Get Lethally Injected Baby Get Lethally Injected, Bruce Green's aunt with her
center-parted hair visibly graying under the pillbox hat and face obscured for three Ohio months behind the black mesh veil that
fluttered from the pillbox hat, clutching little Bruce's head to her underwired bosom day after day until his blank face was
smooshed in on one side.... Green's guilt, pain, fear and self-loathing have over years of unprescribed medication been compressed
to the igneous point where he now knows only that he compulsively avoids any product or service with 'N in its name, always
checks a palm before a handshake, will go blocks out of his way to avoid any parade involving fezzes in little ca
t, substratified fascination/horror ge-stalt about all things even remotely Polynesian. It's probably the distant and attenuated
luau-music echoing erratically back and forth through angled blocks of Allston cement that causes Bruce Green to wander as if
mesmerized out of Union Square and all the way up Comm. Ave. into Brighton and up to like the corner of Comm. Ave. and
Brainerd Road, the home of The Unexamined Life nightclub with its tilted flickering bottle of blue neon over the entrance, before
he realizes that Lenz is no longer beside him asking the time, that Lenz hadn't followed him up the hill even though Green had
stood there outside the Union Square alley way longer than anybody could have needed to take a legitimate whiz.
He and Lenz have become separated, he realizes. Now way southwest of Union on Comm., Green looks around at traffic and
T-tracks and bar-patrons and T.U.L.'s huge bottle's low-neon flutter. He wonders whether he's somehow blown Lenz off or
whether Lenz's blown him off, and that's all he wonders, that's the total complexity the speculation assumes, that's his thought for
the minute. It's like the whole nut-can-and-cigar traumas drained into some psychic sump at puberty, sank and left only an oily
slick that catches the light in distorted ways. The warbly Polynesian music's way clearer up here. He starts up the steep hill on
Brainerd Rd., which terminates at the Enfield line. Maybe Lenz can't move straightforwardly south at all past a certain time. The
acclivity is not kind to asphalt-spreader's boots. After the initial crazed-gerbil-in-brain phase of early Withdrawal and detox, Bruce
Green has now returned to his normal psychorepressed cerebral state where he has about one fully developed thought every sixty
seconds, and then just one at a time, a thought, each materializing already fully developed and sitting there and then melting back
away like a languid liquid-crystal display. His Ennet House counselor, the extremely tough-loving Calvin T., complains that
listening to Green is like listening to a faucet with a very slow drip. His rap is that Green seems not serene or detached but totally
shut down, disassociated, and Calvin T. tries weekly to draw Green out by pissing him off. Green's next full thought is the
realization that even though the hideous Hawaiian music had sounded like it was drifting up northward from down at the Allston
Spur, it's somewhat louder now the farther west he moves toward Enfield's Cambridge St. dogleg and St. Elizabeth's Hospital.
Brainerd between Commonwealth and Cambridge St. is a sine wave of lung-busting hills through neighborhoods Tiny Ewell had 
described as Depressed Residential, unending rows of crammed-together triple-decker houses with those tiny sad architectural
differences that seem to highlight the essential sameness, with sagging porches and psoriatic paint-jobs or aluminum siding gone
carbuncular from violent temperature-swings, yard-litter and dishes and patchy grass and fenced pets and children's toys lying
around in discarded attitudes and eclectic food-smells and wildly different-patterned curtains or blinds in a house's different
windows due to these old houses are carved up inside into apartments for like alienated B.U. students or Canadian and Concavitydisplaced families or even more alienated B.C. students, or probably it looks like the bulk of the lease-holders are Green-andBonkesque younger blue-collar hard-partying types that have posters of the Fiends In Human Shape or Choosy Mothers or Snout
or the Bioavaílable Five241231 in the bathroom and black lights in the bedroom and oil-change stains in the driveway and that
throw their supper dishes into the yard and buy new dishes at Caldor instead of washing their dishes and that still, in their
twenties, ingest Substances nightly and use party as a verb and put their sound-systems' speakers in their apartments' windows
facing out and crank the volume out of sheer high-spirit obnoxiousness because they still have their girlfriends to pound beers
with and do shotguns of dope into the mouth of and do lines of Bing off various parts of the naked body of, and still find pounding
beers and doing bongs and lines fun and get to have fun on a nightly after-work basis, cranking the tunes out into the
neighborhood air. The street's bare trees are densely limbed, they're a certain type of tree, they look like inverted brooms in the
residential dark, Green doesn't know his tree-names. The Hawaiian music is what's pulled him southwest, it emerges: it's
originating from someplace in this very neighborhood somewhere around W. Brainerd, and Green moves upriver toward what
sounds like the source of the sound with a blankly horrified fascination. Most of the yards are fenced in stainless-steel chain-link
fencing, and occasional yard-dogs whine or more commonly bark and snarl and leap territorially at Green from behind their
fences, the fences shivering from the impact and the chain-link stuff dented outward from previous impacts from previous
passersby. The thought that he isn't scared of dogs develops and recedes in Green's midbrain. His jacket creaks with every step.
The temperature is steadily dropping. The fenced front yards are the toy-and-beer-can-strewn type where the brown grass grows in
uneven tufts and the leaves haven't been raked and are piled in wind-blown lines of force along the base of the fence and unpruned
hedges and overfull wastebaskets and untwisted trash-bags are on the sagging porch because nobody's gotten around to taking
them down to the E.W.D. dumpster at the corner and garbage from the overfull receptacles blows out into the yard and mixes with
the leaves along the fences' base and some gets out into the street and is never picked up and eventually becomes part of the
composition of the street. A nonpeanut M&M box is like intaglioed into the concrete of the sidewalk under Green, so bleached by
the elements it's turned bone-white and is only barely identifiable as a nonpeanut M&M box, for instance. And, looking up from
identifying the M&M box's make, Green now espies Randy Lenz. Green has happened upon Lenz, way up here on Brainerd, now
strolling briskly alone up ahead of Green, not close but visible under a functioning streetlight about a block farther uphill on
Brainerd. There's some disincentive to call out. The incline on this block isn't bad. It's cold enough now so his breath looks the
same whether he's smoking or not. The tall curved streetlamps here look to Green just like the weaponish part of the Martian
vessels that fired fatal rays in their conquest of the planet in an ancient cartridge Tommy Doocy'd never tired of that he labelled
the case 'War of the Welles.' The Hawaiian music dominates the aural landscape by this point, now, coming from someplace up
near where he sees the back of Lenz's coat. Someone has put Polynesian-music speakers in their window, pretty clearly. Creepy
slack-key steel guitar balloons across the dim street, booms off the sagging facades opposite, it's Don Ho and the Sol Hoopi
Players, the grass-skirt-and-foamy-breakers sound that makes Green put his fingers in his ears while at the same time he moves
more urgently toward the Hawaiian-music source, a pink or aqua three-decker with a second-floor dormer and red-shingled roof
with a blue and white Quenucker flag on a pole protruding from a window in the dormer and serious JBL speakers facing outward
in the two windows on either side of the flag, with the screens off so you can see the woofers throbbing like brown bellies hulaing, bathing the 1700 block of W. Brainerd in dreadful ukuleles and hollow-log percussives. All the blunt fingers in his ears do is
add the squeak of Green's pulse and the underwater sound of his respiration to the music, though. Figures in plaid-flannel or else
floral Hawaiian shirts and those flower necklaces melt in and out of lit view behind and over the window-speakers with the oozing
quality of large-group chemical fun and dancing and social intercoursing. The lit windows make slender rectangles of light out
across the yard, which the yard is a sty. Something about Randy Lenz's movements up ahead, the high-kneed tiptoed skulk of a
vaudeville fiend up to no good at all, keeps Green from calling out to him even if he could have made himself heard over what to
him is a roar of blood and breath and Ho. Lenz moves through the one operative streetlight's cone across the sidewalk and over to
the stainless chain-link of the same Que-nucker house, holding something out to a Shetland-sized dog whose leash is attached to a
fluorescent-plastic clothesliney thing by a pulley, and can slide. It's cold and the air is thin and keen and his fingers are icy in his
ears, which ache with cold. Green watches, rapt on levels he doesn't know he has, drawn slowly forward, moving his head from
side to side to keep from losing Lenz in the fog of his breath, not calling out, but transfixed. Green and Mildred Bonk and the
other couple they'd shared a trailer with T. Doocy with had gone through a phase one time where they'd crash various collegiate
parties and mix with the upper-scale collegiates, and once in one February Green found himself at a Harvard U. dorm where they
were having a like Beach-Theme Party, with a dumptruck's worth of sand on the common-room floor and everybody with flower
necklaces and skin bronzed with cream or UV-booth-salon visits, all the towheaded guys in floral untucked shirts walking around
with lockjawed noblest oblige and drinking drinks with umbrellas in them or else wearing Speedos with no shirts and not one
fucking pimple anyplace on their back and pretending to surf on a surfboard somebody had nailed to a hump-shaped wave made
of blue and white papier mâché with a motor inside that made the fake wave sort of undulate, and all the girls in grass skirts
oozing around the room trying to hula in a shimmying way that showed their thighs' LipoVac scars through the shimmying grass
of their skirts, and Mildred Bonk had donned a grass skirt and bikini-top out of the pile by the keggers and even though almost
seven months pregnant had oozed and shimmied right into the mainstream of the swing of things, but Bruce Green had felt
awkward and out of place in his cheap leather jacket and haircut he'd dyed orange with gasoline in a blackout and the EAT THE
RICH patch he'd perversely let Mildred Bonk sew onto the groin of his police-pants, and then they'd finally got tired of the
'Hawaii Five-0' theme and started in with the Don Ho and Sol Hoopi CDs, and Green had gotten so uncomfortably fascinated and
repelled and paralyzed by the Polynesian tunes that he'd set up a cabana-chair right by the kegs and had sat there overworking the
pump on the kegs and downing one plastic cup after another of beer-foam until he got so blind drunk his sphincter had failed and
he'd not only pissed but also actually shit his pants, for only the second time ever, and the first public time ever, and was mortified 
with complexly layered shame, and had to ease very gingerly into the nearest-by head and remove his pants and wipe himself off
like a fucking baby, having to shut one eye to make sure which him he saw was him, and then there'd been nothing to do with the
fouled police-pants but crack the bathroom door and reach a tattooed arm out with the pants and bury them in the living room's
sand like a housecat's litterbox, and then of course what was he supposed to put on if he ever wanted to leave that head or dorm
again, to get home, so he'd had to hold one eye shut and reach one arm out again and like strain to reach the pile of grass skirts and
bikini-tops and snatch a grass skirt, and put it on, and slip out of the Hawaiian dorm out a side door without letting anybody see
him, and then ride the Red Line and C-Greenie and then a bus all the way home in February in a cheap leather jacket and asphaltspreader's boots and a grass skirt, the grass of which rode up in the most horrifying way, and he'd spent the next three days not
leaving the trailer in the Spur, in a paralyzing depression of unknown etiology, lying on Tommy D.'s crusty-stained sofa and
drinking Southern Comfort straight out of the bottle and watching Doocy's snakes not move once in three days, in their tank, and
Mildred had given him two days of high-volume shit for first sulking antisocially by the keg and then screwing out and
abandoning her at seven months gone to a sandy room full of tanly anomic blondes who said catty things about her tattoos and
creepy boys who talked without moving their lower jaw and asked her things like where she 'summered' and kept offering her
advice on no-load funds and inviting her upstairs to check out their Dürer prints and saying they found overweight girls terribly
compelling in their defiance of culturo-ascetic norms, and Bruce Green lay there with a head full of Hoopi and unresolved pain
and didn't say a word or even have a fully developed thought for three days, and had hidden the grass skirt under the dustruffle of
the couch and later savagely torn it to shreds and sprinkled the clippings over Doocy's hydroponic-marijuana development in the
tub, for mulch. Lenz goes in and out of Green's focus several times within a dozen andante strides, still out in front of the
Canadian-refugee-type house that's drawn Green on, Lenz holding a little can of something up over one side of the fence's gate
and dribbling something onto the gate, holding something else that suddenly engages the dog's full attention. For some reason
Green thinks to check his watch. The pink or orange clothesline quivers as the leash's pulley runs along it as the dog comes up to
meet Lenz inside the gate he's slowly opened. The huge dog seems neither friendly nor unfriendly toward Lenz, but his attention is
engaged. The leash and pulley could never hold him if he decided Lenz was food. There's bitter-smelling material from his ear on
Green's finger, which he can't help but sniff. He's forgotten and left the other finger in his ear. He's now pretty close, standing in a
van's shadow just outside the pyramid of sodium light from the streetlight, like two houses down from the source of the grisly
sound, which all of a sudden is in the silence between cuts of Ho's early Don Ho: From Hawaii With All My Love, so that Green
can hear baritone Canadianese party-voices through the open windows and also the low lalations of baby-talk of some sort from
Lenz, 'Pooty ooty doggy woggy' and whatnot, presumably directed at the dog, who's coming over to Lenz in a sort of neutrally
cautious but attentive way. Green has no clue what kind of dog it is, but it's big. Green can remember not the sight but the two
very different sounds of the footfalls of his Pop the late Mr. Green pacing the Waltham living room, the crinkle of the paper bag
around the tallboy in his hand. It's well after 2245h. The dog's leash slides hissing to the end of the Day-Glo line and stops the dog
a couple paces from the inside of the gate, where Lenz is standing, inclined in the slight forward way of somebody who's talking
baby-talk to a dog. Green can see that Lenz has a slightly gnawed square of Don G.'s hard old meatloaf out in front of him,
holding it toward the straining dog. Lenz has the blankly intent look of a short-haired man with a Geiger counter. The hideously
compelling Ho starts again with the total abruptness that makes CDs so creepy. Green's got one finger in one ear, shifting around
slightly to keep Lenz's lampshadow from blocking the view. The music balloons and booms. The Nucks have turned it way up for
'My Lovely Launa-Una Luau Lady,' a song that's always made Green want to put his head through a window. Part of the instrumentals sounds like a harp on acid. The hollow-log percussives are like a heart in your extremest-type terror. Green fancies he
can see windows in the houses opposite vibrate from the horrific vibration. Green's having way more than one thought p.m. now,
the squeak of the gerbil-wheel starting to crank deep inside. The undulating shiver is a slack-steel guitar that fills little Brucie's
head with white sand and undulating tummies and heads that resemble New Year's subsidized parade balloons, huge soft shiny
baggy wrinkled grinning heads nodding and bobbing as they slowly inflate to the shape of a giant head, tilted forward, straining at
the ropes they're pulled by. Green hasn't watched a New Year's parade since the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad's, which had
been obscene. Green's close enough to see that the Hawaiianized Nuck house is 412 W. Brainerd. Blue-collar-type cars and 4x4s
and vans are all up and down the street packed in in a somehow partyish attitude, as in parked in a hurry, some of them with
Canadian lettering on the plates. Fleur-de-lis stickers and slogans in Canadian on some of the windows also. An old Montego
cammed out into a slingshot dragster is parked square in front of 412 in a sort of menacing way with two wheels up on the curb
and a circle of flowers hung jauntily over the antenna, and the ellipses of dull fade in the paintjob of the hood that show the
engine's been bored out and the hood gets real hot, and Lenz has gotten down on one knee and breaks off some of the meatloaf
and tosses it underhand to the ground inside the leash's range. The dog goes over and lowers its head to the meat. The distinctive
sound of Gately's meatloaf getting chewed plus the ghastly music's zithery warbling roar. Lenz now rises and his movements in
the he lit window farthest from the limp flag has
solid
yard have a melting and wraithlike quality in the different shades of shadow. T
 swarthy guys in beards and loud shirts passing back and forth snapping their fingers under their elbows with flower-strewn
females in tow. Many of the heads are thrown back and attached to Molson bottles. Green's jacket creaks as he tries to breathe.
The snake had leapt from the can with a sound like: spronnnnng. His aunt at the Winchester breakfast nook, in dazzling winter
dawnlight, quietly doing a word-search puzzle. Two dormer windows are half-blocked by the throbbing rectangles of the JBLs.
Green's the type that can recognize a JBL speaker and Molson-green bottle from way far away.
A developed thought coheres: Ho's voice has the quality of a type of: ointment.
Any displaced and shaggy Nuck head in these windows chancing to look out into the yard now would be able to probably see
Lenz depositing another chunk of meat in front of the pet and removing something from up near his shoulder under his topcoat as
he's melting stealthily all the way around behind the dog to sort of straddle the big dog from the rear, easing the last of the loaf
down in front of the dog, the big dog hunched, the crunch of Don's cornflake topping and the goopy sound of a dog eating institutional meat. The arm comes out from under the coat and goes up with something that looks like it would glitter if the windows'
yardlight reached far enough. Bruce Green keeps trying to wave his breath out of the way. Lenz's fine coat billows around the
dog's flanks as Lenz braces and leans and gathers the hunched thing's scruff in one hand and straightens up with a mighty grunting
hoist that brings the animal up onto its hind legs as its front legs dig frantically at empty air, and the dog's whine brings a lei-and-
flannel shape to the lit space above one speaker overhead. Green doesn't even think of calling out from his shadowed spot, and the
moment hangs there with the dog upright and Lenz behind it, bringing the upraised hand down in front and hard across the dog's
throat. There's a lightless arc from the spot Lenz's hand crossed; the arc splatters the gate and the sidewalk outside it. The music
balloons without cease but Green hears Lenz say what sounds like 'How dare you' with great emphasis as he drops the dog
forward onto the yard as there's a high-pitched male sound from the form at the window and the dog goes down and hits the
ground on its side with the meaty crunch of a 32-kilo bag of Party-Size Cubelets, all four legs dog-paddling uselessly, the dark
surface of the lawn blackening in a pulsing curve before its jaws that open and close. Green has moved unthinking out of the
vanshadow toward Lenz and now thinks and stops between two trees by the street in front of 416 wanting to call to Lenz and
feeling the strangled aphasia people feel in bad dreams, and so just stands there between the treetrunks with a finger in one ear,
looking. The way Lenz stands over the hull of the big dog is like you stand over a punished child, at full height and radiating
authority, and the moment hangs there distended like that until there's the shriek of long-shut windows opening against the Ho and
the dire sound of numerous high-tempo logger's boots rushing down stairs inside 412. The creepily friendly bachelor that lived
next to his aunt had had two big groomed dogs and when Bruce passed the house the dogs' toenails would scrabble on the wood of
the front porch and run with their tails up to the anodized fence as Bruce came by and jump up and like sort of play the metal
fence with their paws, excited to see him. To just like set eyes on him. Lenz's arm with the knife is up again and ungleaming in the
streetlight's light as Lenz uses his other hand on the top of the fence to vault the fence sideways and tear-ass uphill up Brainerd
Rd. in the southwest direction of Enfield, his loafers making a quality sound on the pavement and his open coat filling like a sail.
Green retreats to behind one of the trees as beefy flannel forms with leis shedding petals, their speech grunty-foreign and
unmistakably Canadian, a couple with ukuleles, spill out like ants over the sagging porch and into the yard, mill and jabber, a
couple kneel by the form of the former dog. A bearded guy so huge a Hawaiian shirt looks tight on him has picked up the meatloaf's baggie. Another guy without very much hair picks what looks like a white caterpillar out of the dark grass and holds it up
delicately between his thumb and finger, looking at it. Yet another huge guy in suspenders drops his beer and picks up the limp
dog and it lies across his arms on its back with its head way back like a swooned girl, dripping and with one leg still going, and
the guy is either screaming or singing. The original massive Nuck with the baggie clutches his head to signal agitation as he and
two other Nucks run heavily to the slingshot Montego. A first-floor light in the house across Brainerd lights up and backlights a
figure in a sort of suit and metal wheelchair sitting right up next to the window in the sideways way of wheelchairs that want to
get right up next to something, scanning the street and Nuck-swarmed yard. The Hawaiian music has apparently stopped, but not
abruptly, it's not like somebody took it off in the middle. Green has retreated to behind a tree, which he sort of one-arm-hugs. A
thick girl in a horrible grass skirt is saying 'Dyu!' several times. There are obscenities and heavily accented stock phrases like
'Stop!' and 'There he goes!,' with pointing. Several guys are running up the sidewalk after Lenz, but they're in boots, and Lenz is
way ahead and now disappears as he cuts like a tailback left and disappears down either an alley or a serious driveway, though
you can still hear his fine shoes. One of the guys actually shakes his fist as he gives chase. The Montego with the twin cam reveals
muffler problems and clunks down off the curb and lays two parentheses as it 180s professionally around in the middle of the
street and peels out up in Lenz's direction, a very low and fast and no-shit car, its antenna's gay lei tugged by speed into a strained
ellipse and leaving a wake of white petals that take forever to stop falling. Green thinks his finger might be frozen to his ear's
inside. Nobody seems to be gesticulating about anything about maybe an accomplice. There's no evidence they're looking around
for a
breath won't plume out from behind the tree and be seen as an accomplice's breath, potentially.
against a hot steel stove talking to Mrs. Clarke. His hip is swaddled in bandages
und
dangerous, see for instance the burnt pelvis, which wasn't even discovered until Mrs. Clarke
thou
e big east
wind rill and drawn out, from
whe
dren and apparently also adults who eat the
day'
and not saying anything for days, resting. But it doesn't work very well.
ny other unwittingly guilty accessory-type party. Another wheelchaired form has appeared just behind and to the right of the
first seated backlit form across the street, and they're both in a position to see Green up against the tree with his hand to his ear so
it looks like he's maybe receiving communiques from some kind of earpiece. The Nucks are still milling around the yard in a way
that's indescribably foreign as the one Nuck staggers in circles under the weight of the expired dog, saying something to the sky.
Green is getting to know this one tree very well, spread out against its lee side and breathing into the bark of the tree so his
exhaled
Mario Incandenza's nineteenth birthday will be Wednesday 25 November, the day before Thanksgiving. His insomnia
worsens as Madame Psychosis's hiatus enters its third week and WYYY tries bringing back poor Miss Diagnosis again, who's
started in on a Pig-Latin reading of the Revelation of John that makes you so embarrassed for her it's uncomfortable. For a couple
nights in the HmH living room he tries falling asleep to WODS, an AM-fringe outfit that plays narcotizing orchestral
arrangements of old Carpenters songs. It makes things worse. It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you
know.
He gets a serious burn on his pelvis leaning
er Orin's old corduroys, and there's a sucking sound of salve when he walks, late at night, unable to sleep. The birth-related
disability that wasn't even definitively diagnosed until Mario was six and had let Orin tattoo his shoulder with the red coil of an
immersion heater is called Familial Dysautonomia, a neurological deficit whereby he can't feel physical pain very well. A lot of
the E.T.A.s kid him about they should have such problems, and even Hal's sometimes felt a twinge of envy about it, but the defect
is a serious hassle and actually very
ght she smelled her eggplant overcooking.
At HmH he lies on the air mattress in a tight down bag on the edge of the violet plant-light with the wind rattling th
ow, listening to buttery violins and what sounds like a zither. There's sometimes a scream upstairs, sh
re C.T.'s and the Moms's rooms are. Mario listens closely for whether the sound ends up as Avril laughing or Avril screaming.
She gets night terrors, which are like nightmares but worse, and which afflict small chil
s biggest meal right before bed.
His nighttime prayers take almost an hour and sometimes more and are not a chore. He doesn't kneel; it's more like a
conversation. And he's not crazy, it's not like he hears anybody or anything conversing back with him, Hal's established.
Hal had asked him when he'll start coming back to their room to sleep, which made Mario feel good.
He keeps trying to imagine Madame Psychosis — whom he imagines as being very tall — lying in an XL beach chair on a
beach smiling
He can't tell if Hal is sad. He is having a harder and harder time reading Hal's states of mind or whether he's in good spirits. 
This worries him. He used to be able to sort of preverbally know in his stomach generally where Hal was and what he was doing,
even if Hal was far away and playing or if Mario was away, and now he can't anymore. Feel it. This worries him and feels like
when you've lost something important in a dream and you can't even remember what it was but it's important. Mario loves Hal so
much it makes his heart beat hard. He doesn't have to wonder if the difference now is him or his brother because Mario never
changes.
He hadn't told the Moms he was going to walk around after he left her office after their interface: Avril usually tries in a
nonintrusive way to discourage Mario from taking walks at night, because he doesn't see well at night, and the areas around the
E.T.A. hill are not the best neighborhood, and there's no skirting the fact that Mario would be easy prey for just about anybody,
physically. And, though one perk of Familial Dysautonomia is a relative physical fearlessness,242232 Mario keeps to a pretty
limited area during insomniacal strolls, out of deference to Avril's worry.243233 He'll sometimes walk around the grounds of the
Enfield Marine P.H.H. at the bottom of the hill's east side because they're pretty much enclosed, the grounds are, and he knows a
couple of the E.M. Security officers from when his father got them to portray Boston police in his whimsical Dial C for
Concupiscence; and he likes the E.M. grounds at night because the different brick houses' window-light is yellow
lamplight244234 and he can see people on the ground floors all together playing cards or talking or watching TP. He also likes
whitewashed brick regardless of its state of upkeep. And a lot of the people in the different brick houses are damaged or askew
and lean hard to one side or are twisted into themselves, through the windows, and he can feel his heart going out into the world
through them, which is good for insomnia. A woman's voice, calling for help without any real urgency — not like the screams that
signify the Moms laughing or screaming at night — sounds from a darkened upper window. And across the little street that's
crammed with cars everybody has to move at 0000h. is Ennet's House, where the Headmistress has a disability and had had a
whe
ervice for
athe
ng to be very patient about helping him change.
elchair ramp installed and has twice invited Mario in during the day for a Caffeine-Free Millennial Fizzy, and Mario likes the
place: it's crowded and noisy and none of the furniture has protective plastic wrap, but nobody notices anybody else or comments
on a disability and the Headmistress is kind to the people and the people cry in front of each other. The inside of it smells like an
ashtray, but Mario's felt good both times in Ennet's House because it's very real; people are crying and making noise and getting
less unhappy, and once he heard somebody say God with a straight face and nobody looked at them or looked down or smiled in
any sort of way where you could tell they were worried inside.
People from the public can't be in there after 2300, though, because they have a Curfew, so Mario just totters past on the
broken sidewalk and looks in the ground windows at all the different people. Every window is lit up with light and some are slid
partly open, and there is the noise of being outside a house full of people. From one of the upstairs windows facing the street
comes a voice going 'Give it here, give it here.' Someone is crying and someone else is either laughing or coughing very hard. An
irritable man's voice from a kitchen window at the side says something to somebody else that just said something like 'So get
dentures,' followed by curse words. Another upstairs window, over at the side by the wheelchair ramp and the kitchen window
where the ground is soft enough to take the stress of a police lock and lead block nicely, the upper window has a billowing
lengthwise flag for a curtain and an old bumper sticker on the glass half scraped off so it says ONE DAY A in cursive, and Mario
is arrested by the quiet but unmistakable sound of a recording of a broadcast of 'Sixty Minutes More or Less with Madame
Psychosis,' which Mario has never taped a show of because he feels it wouldn't be right for him but is strangely thrilled to hear
someone in Ennet's thinking enough of to tape and replay. What's coming from behind the open window with a billowing flag for
a curtain is one of the old ones, from the Year of the Wonderchicken, Madame's inaugural year, when she'd sometimes talk all
hour and had an accent. A hard east wind blows Mario's thin hair straight back off his head. His standing angle is 50°. A female
girl in a little fur coat and uncomfortable-looking bluejeans and tall shoes clicks past on the sidewalk and goes up the ramp into
Ennet's back door without indicating she saw somebody with a really big head standing braced by a police lock on the lawn
outside the kitchen window. The lady had had on so much makeup she'd looked unwell but the wake of her passage smells very
good. For some reason Mario felt like the person behind the flag in the window was also a female. Mario thinks it might not be
out of the question that she might lend tapes to a fellow listener if he could ask. He usually checks etiquette questions with Hal,
who is incredibly knowledgeable and smart. When he thinks of Hal his heart beats and his forehead's thick skin becomes wrinkled.
Hal will also know the term for private tapes made of broadcast things on the air. Perhaps this lady owns multiple tapes. This one
is from 'Sixty Minutes +/-' 's first year, when Madame still had a slight accent and often spoke on the show as if she were talking
exclusively to one person or character who was very important to her. The Moms revealed that if you're not crazy then speaking to
someone who isn't there is termed apostrophe and is valid art. Mario'd fallen in love with the first Madame Psychosis programs
because he felt like he was listening to someone sad read out loud from yellow letters she'd taken out of a shoebox on a rainy p.m.,
stuff about heartbreak and people you loved dying and U.S. woe, stuff that was real. It is increasingly hard to find valid art that is
about stuff that is real in this way. The older Mario gets, the more confused he gets about the fact that everyone at E.T.A. over the
age of about Kent Blott finds stuff that's really real uncomfortable and they get embarrassed. It's like there's some rule that real
stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn't happy. The worst-feeling thing that
happened today was at lunch when Michael Pemulis told Mario he had an idea for setting up a Dial-a-Prayer telephone s
ists in which the atheist dials the number and the line just rings and rings and no one answers. It was a joke and a good one,
and Mario got it; what was unpleasant was that Mario was the only one at the big table whose laugh was a happy laugh;
everybody else sort of looked down like they were laughing at somebody with a disability. The whole issue was far above Mario's
head, and he was unable to understand Lyle's replies when he tried to bring the confusion up. And Hal was for once no help,
because Hal seemed even more uncomfortable and embarrassed than the fellows at lunch, and when Mario brought up real stuff
Hal called him Booboo and acted like he'd wet himself and Hal was goi
A lot of people are appearing out of the dark and walking by to go in for the Curfew. They all seem afraid and scowl to
pretend they're not shy. The men have their hands in their coat pockets and the females have their hands at their coats' throats,
keeping them shut. One young person Mario's never seen sees him struggling with the police lock and helps him disengage the bar
and get the lead block into his backpack. Just that little bit of help that makes the difference. Mario is suddenly so sleepy he's not
sure he can get up the hill to go home. The musics that played at the beginning of Madame Psychosis's career are the exact same
that played to the end, what sounds so unacceptable without her there. 
Mario's forward list is perfect for walking up hills, however. His pelvis's salve makes a sound but doesn't hurt. In the big
prot
t. E.'s Sharing and Caring and Brookline's
B.Y
 stairway by the back
offic
hore in the women's two bathrooms smashed his longstanding delusion that
wom
 disgusting marshmallowy Rice Krispie things in the kitchen and then not cleaned up after
them
orrow's All-Staff Meeting, where the Staff gets together in Pat's office and
inte
and beefs; every conversation is life-and-death; crisis down there 24/7. There's a
ruding window of Ennet's House's Headmistress's office that the window overlooks the Avenue and the train tracks and the
Ngs' clean Father and Son Grocery, where they give Mario yellow tea in the A.M. when he comes by when it's cold, the last thing
Mario can see, before the hillside's trees close behind him and reduce the Ennet House to shattered yellow lighting, is a wide
square-headed boy bent over something he's writing at the Headmistress's black desk, licking a pencil-end and hunched all
uncomfortably with one arm curled out around what he's writing in, like a slow boy over a class theme at Rindge and Latin
Special.
Live-in Staffers' evening duties are divided pretty evenly between the picayune and the unpleasant. Somebody has to hit the
area meetings to verify residents' attendance, while somebody else has to miss a nightly meeting to man the empty House and
phones and do the picayune Daily Log. After the meetings let out, Gately's supposed to do a head-count every hour and make a
Log-entry on who all's there and what's going on. Gately has to do a Chore-patrol and Log-entry on Chore-performance and nail
down tomorrow's Chore-assignments off the weekly sheet. The residents need to have everything expected of them spelled out in
advance so they can't bitch if they get popped for something. Then people who haven't performed on their Chore have to be told
they're on a week's Restriction, which tends to be unpleasant. Gately has to unlock Pat's cabinets and get the key to the meds
locker and open the meds locker. Residents on meds respond to the sound of the meds locker the way a cat will respond to the
sound of a can-opener. They just like materialize. Gately has to dispense oral insulin and Virus-meds and pimple medicine and
antidepressants and lithium to the residents who materialize for meds, and then he has to enter everything in the Medical Log,
which the M. Log is an incredible fucking mess. He has to get out Pat's Week-At-A-Glance book and print out her next day's
appointments on a sheet of paper in block letters, because Pat finds her own palsied handwriting impossible to read. Gately has to
confer with Johnette Foltz about how different residents conducted themselves at S
.P. and a Women's NA Step down in East Cambridge they let a couple of the senior females go to, and then Log all the data.
Gately has to go up and check on Kate G., who claimed to be too sick to hit AA again tonight and has been in bed in her room
more or less steadily for three days, reading somebody called Sylvia Plate. Going up onto the women's side of the upstairs is an
incredible pain in the ass because he has to unlock a little steel cage over a little button at the bottom of their
e and press the button to sound an upstairs buzzer and shout up the stairs 'Male on the floor' and then give the female
residents as much time as they need to get decent or whatever before he can come up.
Going up there has been educational for Gately because he'd always had this idea that women's areas were essentially cleaner
and pleasanter than men's areas. Having to verify the C
en didn't go to the bathroom with the same appalling vigor that men did. Gately'd done a fair amount of cleaning up after his
mother, but he'd never much thought of her as a woman. So the whole unpleasant thing's been an education.
Gately has to check on Doony Glynn, who has recurrent diverticulitis and has to lie fetal on his bunk when he gets an attack
and has to be brought Motrin and a SlimFast shake that Gately had to make with 2% milk because there was no skim left, and then
Food Bank crackers and a tonic out of the basement's machine when Glynn can't drink the 2% shake, and then Log Glynn's
comments and condition, neither of which are good.
Somebody has made those
selves, and Gately has to clomp around finding out who's responsible and get them to clean it up, and the code about ratting
among the residents is such that you'd think he was a narc all of a sudden. The daily bullshit here is hip-deep and not so much
annoying as soul-sucking; a double-shift here now empties him out by dawn, just in time to clean real shit. It hadn't been this way
at the start, the soul-sucking aspect, and Gately every couple minutes wonders again what he'll end up doing when his year's Staff
term is up and his soul is sucked out and he's sober but without any money and still clueless and has to leave here and do
something back Out There.
Kate Gompert, when he buzzed and went up to the 5-Woman room to look in, had made a possible sideways comment about
hurting herself,245235 and Gately has to call Pat at home about it, and she's out or not picking up, so then he has to call the House
Manager and relay the verbatim comment and let her interpret it and tell Gately what action to take and how the comment stands
in relation to Gompert's Suicide Contract and how the whole thing should be Logged. A resident at Ennet had hung herself from a
heating pipe in the basement a couple years before Gately arrived, and there are now baroque procedures for monitoring ideation
among residents with psych issues. The number of 5-East at St. Elizabeth's is on a red card in Pat's Rolodex.
Gately has to collect the previous week's counselor-reports and collate them and get the residents' files together and get any
updates or changes printed out and into the files for tom
rfaces on how each resident seems to be doing. Residents have a pretty good idea that their alumni counselors basically rat
them out in toto at each Staff meeting, which is why counselling sessions tend to be so incredibly dull that only really grateful
giving Ennet alumni are willing to serve as counselors. Filing-organization is picayune, and for Gately using the back office's TP
array to print stuff out is unpleasant, mostly because each of his fingers covers almost three keys of the keyboard and he has to hit
each key carefully with the tip of a pen, which sometimes he forgets to retract the nub of, leaving blue smears on the keys that the
House Manager always gives him an ass-chewing for.
And Gately has to have each newer resident in to the office for at least a couple minutes to like touch base and see how
they're doing and make it clear they're regarded as existing so they can't just melt into the living room's decor and disappear. The
newest guy's still sitting in the linen closet claiming he's comfortablest there with the door open and the new 'helpless' Amy
Johnson hasn't come back yet. A brand-new Court-Ordered female, Ruth van Cleve, who looks like one of those people you see in
pictures of African famine, has to fill out Intake forms and go through Orientation, and Gately goes over the House rules with her
and gives her a copy of the Ennet House Survival Guide, which some resident years gone had written for Pat.
Gately has to answer the phone and tell people who call the office for a resident that residents can receive calls only on the
pay phone in the basement, which he has to say yes is frequently busy all the time. The House prohibits cellular/mobiles and has a
Boundary about the office phone for residents. Gately has to kick residents off down there when other residents in line come and
complain they've exceeded their five minutes. This also tends to be unpleasant: the pay phone down there is undigital and unshutoffable and a constant source of aggravation 
spec
 and again saw
evid
 rat out another resident on here is picking up a Substance. All other-type issues it's supposed to be Staff's
job t
 blew so-and-so on the
couc
 made Krispie Treats and then she weaseled out, and etc. Almost all of it's picayune and, over time, as it
accr
ive, pleasure, and this makes a contemptible number of them think he is a wonderful lover, almost
a dr
is face that of a gorged predator:
not
ent from the edge of the bedding and felt the floor for shoes and clothes, the
han
pposite,
and n medical attaches,
zaft
e little fellow's wheelchair shiny
and y the clipboard he held to his chest with a curled and motherly arm.
ggling the clipboard a little like an infant, presenting it as evidence.
 lying there hidden and trying to hear, and despite a sort of mild disappointment he felt
touc He felt for the Subject the sort of
ial way to kick somebody off a pay phone that's respectful and nonshaming but also firm. Gately has gotten good at assuming
a blank but not passive expression when residents are abusive. There's this look of weary expertise the House Staffers cultivate,
then have to flex their face to get rid of when they're off-duty. Gately's gotten so stoic in the face of abuse that a resident has to
mention actual unnatural acts in connection with his name for Gately to Log the abuse and give out a Restriction. He's respected
and well-liked by almost all the residents, which the House Manager says causes the veteran Staff some concern, because Gately's
job is not to be these people's friend all the time.
Then in the kitchen with the fucking Krispie-treat bowls and pans still a fucking mess Wade McDade and some other
residents were standing around waiting for various things to toast and boil and McDade was using his finger and pushing the tip of
his nose up so that his nostrils faced straight out at everybody. He was looking piggishly around and asking if people knew any
people where their nose looked like this right here, and some people said yes, sure, why. Gately checked the fridge
ence that his special meatloaf had a secret admirer, it looked like, another big rectangle cut out of the leftovers he'd carefully
wrapped and laid out on the sturdiest shelf in there. McDade, who Gately struggles daily with the urge to hit McDade so hard
there'd be nothing but eyes and a nose down over the tops of his cowboy boots, McDade's telling everybody he's constructing a
Gratitude List at Calvin T.'s tough-love suggestion and he says he's decided one of the things he's grateful for is his nose don't
look like this here. Gately tries not to judge on the basis of who laughs and who doesn't. When Pat's phone rings and Gately
leaves, McDade's squunching his upper lip up in his hand and asking people about acquaintance with cleft palates.
Gately has to monitor the like emotional barometer in the House and put a wet finger to the wind for potential conflicts and
issues and rumors. A subtle art here is maintaining access to the residents' gossip-grapevine and keeping on top of rumors without
seeming like you're inducing a resident to cross the line and actually eat cheese on another resident. The only thing a resident is
actually encouraged to
o glean and ferret out etc., to decoct legitimate infractions out of the tides of innuendo and bullshit complaint 20+ bored
crammed-together street-canny people in detox from wrecked lives can generate. Rumors that so-and-so
h at 0300, that thus-and-such's got a knife, that X was using what had to be some kind of code on the pay phone, that Y's gone
back to carrying a beeper, that so-and-so's making book on football out of the 5-Man room, that Belbin had led Diehl to believe
she'd clean up if he
etes, unpleasant.
Rarely a feeling of outright unalloyed sadness as such, afterward — just an abrupt loss of hope. Plus there is the contempt he
belies so well with gentleness and caring during that post-coital period of small sounds and adjustments.
Orin can only give, not rece
eam-type lover; and this fuels the contempt. But he cannot show the contempt, since this would pretty clearly detract from the
Subject's pleasure.
Because the Subject's pleasure in him has become his food, he is conscientious in the consideration and gentleness he shows
after coitus, making clear his desire to stay right there very close and be intimate, when so many other male lovers, the Subjects
say, seem afterward to become uneasy, contemptuous, or distant, rolling over to stare at the wall or tamping down a smoke before
they've even stopped twitching.
The hand-model told him very softly how the photograph's big pink Swiss husband after coitus hove himself off her and lay
there stunned under his stomach's weight, his eyes narrowed to piggy slits and the faint smirk on h
like the punter: uncaring. As was S.O.P. with Subjects she became then briefly stricken and anxious and said no one must ever
know, she could lose her children. Orin administered the standard assurances in a very soft intimate voice. Orin was resoundingly
gentle and caring afterward, as she could somehow just intuitively tell he would be. It was true. It gave him real pleasure to give
the impression of care and intimacy in this interval; if someone asked about his favorite part of the anticlimactic time after the
Subject lay back and glisteningly opened and he could see her eyes holding him whole, Orin would say his #2 favorite is this postseminal interval of clingy vulnerability on the Subject's part and gentle intimate care on his own.
When the knock on the room door came it seemed like a further grace, for the Subject had been up on an elbow in bed,
exhaling slim tusks of cigarette-smoke from her nose and starting to ask him to tell her things about his own family, and Orin was
stroking her very tenderly and watching the twin curves of smoke pale and spread and trying not to shudder at the thought of what
the inside of the Subject's fine nose must look like, what gray-white tangles of necrotic snot must hang and twine up in there, from
the smoke, whether she had the stomach to look at a hankie she'd used or whether she balled the thing up and flung it from her
with the sort of shudder O. knew he'd feel; and when the brisk action of male knuckles sounded against the room's door he
watched her face whiten from the forehead down as she pleaded that no one must know of her whoever was there and stabbed out
her butt and dove beneath the blankets as he called out for patience to the door and veered to the bathroom to wrap a towel around
him before he went to it, the sort of bland hotel door you used a card and not a key for. The defiled, guilty, and frightened married
hand-model's wrist and hand protruded for a mom
d moving like a blind spider and sucking things up under the blankets. Orin didn't ask who it was at the door; be had nothing to
hide. His mood at the door became extraordinarily fine. When the wife and mother had erased all evidence of herself and heaped
the bedding over her so she could lie there sniffing grayly and imagining that she was hidden from view, just one lumpy part of a
celibate napper's dishevelled bed, Orin checked the door's fish-eye peeper, saw only the hallway's claret-colored wall o
 opened the door with a smile he felt all the way down to his bare soles. Swiss cuckolds, furtive near-Easter
ig print-journalists: he felt ready for anything.
The man in the hall at the door was handicapped, challenged, in a wheelchair, looking up at him from well below peepholerange, bushy-haired and mostly nose and looking up into the swell of Orin's pectorals, making no attempt to see around him into
the room. One of the disabled. Orin looked down and felt both let down and almost touched. Th
 his lap blanketed and his string tie half-hidden b
'Survey,' the man said, nothing else, jo
Orin imagined the terrified Subject
hed at whatever this shy ruse of an excuse for proximity to his leg and autograph might be. 
clin
 in the wheelchair, 'Goody.’
 cocked his head in that way people in wheelchairs do. 'Scholarly academic study.’
et's hem. The guy was like totally legless. Orin's
risin
 time involved. Government study. Ad council demographic
asse nymity. Minimum in terms of time or trouble.’
ng my mind to be of maximum help.’
is pen with a flourish and looked down at his board Orin got a look at the yarmulke of skin in
the c the seated man's hair. There was something almost unbearably touching about a bald spot on a handicapped man.
se?’
ery little, I like to think.’
tizen?’
ember from Mario's childhood how long under blankets before it got unbearably hot and you
start
otate. 'Employed, self-employed, unemployed?’
iss.’
t lack, and miss.’
 page over to check. 'Pine, yearn, winsome, nostalgia. Lump of throat.' Flipping one more sheet. 'Wistful, as
wel
aze now was up at the ceiling's acoustic tile, the little blinking disk of the hall's smoke detector, as if memories were
alw vein. Orin's face changed a little.
Behi
ulnerable throb. 'Some of this may sound stupid. I miss commercials that were louder than the programs. I miss
the ght" and "Save up to fifty percent and more." I miss being told things were filmed before a
live chiefs crying at litter. I
mis told how many megahertz something's transmitter was
broa
cated airwave-haunters. You
kno
ical contempt you feel for an insect you've looked down and seen and know you're going to torture for a while. From the way
she smoked and performed certain other manual operations, Orin'd noted she was left-handed.
He said to the man
'Plus or minus three percent sample.’
'Eager to cooperate in any way.’
The man
'Pisser.' Leaning against the jamb with arms crossed, watching the man try to process the dissimilarity in the size of his limbs.
No shins or extremities, however withery, extended below the wheelchair's blank
g heart went out.
'Chamber of Commerce survey. Concerned veterans' group systematic inquiry. Consumer advocacy polling operation. Three
percentage points error on either of two sides of the issue.’
'Bully.’
'Consumer-advocacy group opinion sweep. Very little
ssment. Sweeps. Random ano
'I'm cleari
When the man had taken out h
enter of
'What do you miss, plea
Orin smiled coolly. 'V
'Backtrack. U.S.A. ci
'Yes.’
'You have how many years?’
'Age?’
'You have which age?’
'Age is twenty-six.’
'Over twenty-five?’
'That'd follow.' Orin was waiting for the ruse involving the pen that'd get him to sign something so the very shy fan club'd get
their autograph. He tried to rem
ed to smother and thrash.
The man pretended to n
Orin smiled. 'The first.’
'Please list what you m
The whisper of the vent, hush of the wine-colored hallway, vaguest whisper of rustling sheets behind, imagining the growing
bubble of CO2 under the sheets.
'Please list lifestyle elements of your U.S.A. lifetime you recall, and/or at presen
Tm not sure I follow.’
The man flipped a
l.’
'You mean childhood memories. You mean like cocoa with half-melted marshmallows floating on top in a checker-tiled
kitchen warmed by an enamel gas range, that sort of thing. Or omnissent doors at airports and Star Markets that somehow knew
you were there and slid open. Before they disappeared. Where did those doors go?’
'Enamel is with the e?’
'And then some.’
Orin's g
ays lighter than air. The seated man stared blandly up at the throb of Orin's internal jugular
nd him, under the blankets, the non-Swiss woman lay very calmly and patiently on her side, breathing silently into the
portable Oz-mask w/ canister from the purse beside her, one hand in the purse on the Schmeisser GBF miniature machine pistol.
'I miss TV,' Orin said, looking back down. He no longer smiled coolly.
'The former television of commercial broadcast.’
'I do.’
'Reason in several words or less, please, for the box after REASON,' displaying the board.
'Oh, man.' Orin looked back up and away at what seemed to be nothing, feeling at his jaw around the retromandibular's much
tinier and more v
phrases "Order before midnight toni
 studio audience. I miss late-night anthems and shots of flags and fighter jets and leathery-faced Indian
s "Sermonette" and "Evensong" and test patterns and being
dcasting at.' He felt his face. 'I miss sneering at something I love. How we used to love to gather in the checker-tiled kitchen
in front of the old boxy cathode-ray Sony whose reception was sensitive to airplanes and sneer at the commercial vapidity of
broadcast stuff.’
'Vapid ditty,' pretending to notate.
'I miss stuff so low-denominator I could watch and know in advance what people were going to say.’
'Emotions of mastery and control and superiority. And pleasure.’
'You can say that again, boy. I miss summer reruns. I miss reruns hastily inserted to fill the intervals of writers' strikes, Actors'
Guild strikes. I miss Jeannie, Samantha, Sam and Diane, Gilligan, Hawkeye, Hazel, Jed, all the syndi
w? I miss seeing the same things over and over again.’
There were two muffled sneezes from the bed behind him that the handicapped man didn't even acknowledge, pretending to 
writ is string tie's dangle away again and again as he wrote. Orin tried not to imagine the topography of the sheets the
Sub
 'You can of course view
ente rcease on TelEntertainment disks of storage and retrieval.’
ing up as he remembered was nothing like the seated guy's way of looking up. 'But not the same. The
choi how. With television you were subjected to repetition. The familiarity was inflicted. Different now.’
now,' Orin said, suddenly dimly stunned and sad inside. The terrible sense as in dreams of something
vital
time do we have here?’
pack the girl's stuff up in the same Irish Luggage she'd brought it in Monday, and Gately has to
put t
e, brushing h
ject'd sneezed into. He no longer cared about the ruse. He did feel tender, somehow, toward him.
The man tended to look up at him like people with legs look up at buildings and planes.
rtainments again and again without su
Orin's way of look
ce, see. It ruins it some
'Inflicted.’
'I don't think I exactly k
 you've forgotten to do. The inclined head's bald spot was freckled and tan. 'Is there a next item?’
'Things to tell me you do not miss.’
'For symmetry.’
'Balance of opinion.’
Orin smiled. 'Plus or minus.’
'Just so,' the man said.
Orin resisted an urge to lay his hand tenderly over the arc of the disabled man's skull. 'Well how much
The skyscraper-gawking aspect was only when the man's gaze went higher than Orin's neck. They were not shy or indirect or
even the eyes of someone in any way disabled, was what struck Orin later as odd — besides the Swiss accent, the absence of a
signature-ruse, the Subject's patience with the wait and the absence of gasping when O. pulled the covers abruptly back, later. The
man had looked up at Orin and flicked his eyes slightly past him, at the room behind with pantyless floor and humped covers.
Orin was meant to see the glance past him. 'Can return at later time which we specify. You are, comme on dit, engaged?’
Orin's smile wasn't as cool as he thought as he told the seated figure that that was a matter of opinion.
As at all D.S.A.S.-certified halfway facilities, Ennet House's resident curfew is 2330h. From 2300 to 2330, the Staffer on
night-duty has to do head-counts and sit around like somebody's mom waiting for different residents to come in. There's always
ones that always like to cut it close and play with the idea of getting Discharged for something picayune so it won't be their fault.
Tonight Clenette H. and the deeply whacked-out Yolanda W. come back in from Footprints246236 around 2315 in purple skirts
and purple lipstick and ironed hair, tottering on heels and telling each other what a wicked time they just had. Hester Thrale
undulates in in a false fox jacket at 2320 as usual even though she has to be up at like 0430 for the breakfast-shift at the Provident
Nursing Home and sometimes eats breakfast with Gately, both of their faces nodding down perilously close to their Frosted
Flakes. Chandler Foss and the spectrally thin April Cortelyu come in from someplace with postures and expressions that arouse
comments and force Gately to Log a possible issue about an in-House relationship. Gately has to bid goodnight to two craggyfaced brunette ex-residents who've been planted on the couch all night talking cults. Emil Minty and Nell Gunther and sometimes
Gavin Diehl (who Gately did three weeks of a municipal bit with, once, at Concord Farm) make a nightly point of going to smoke
outside on the front porch and coming in only after Gately says twice he's got to lock the door, just as some limp rebellious
gesture. Tonight they're closely followed by a mus-tacheless Lenz, who sort of oozes through the door just as Gately's going
through his keys to get the key to lock it, and kind of brushes by and goes up to the 3-Man without a word, which he's been doing
a lot lately, which Gately has to Log, plus the fact that it's now after 2330 and he can't account for either the semi-new girl Amy J.
or — more upsetting — Bruce Green. Then Green knocks at the front door at 2336 — Gately has to Log the exact time and then
it's his call whether to unlock the door. After curfew Staff doesn't have to unlock the door. Many a bad-news resident gets
effectively bounced this way. Gately lets him in. Green's never come close to missing curfew before and looks godawful, skin
potato-white and eyes vacant. And a big quiet kid is one thing, but Green looks at the floor of Pat's office like it's a loved one
while Gately gives him the required ass-chewing; and Green takes the standard dreaded week's Full House Restriction247237 in
such a vacantly hangdog way, and is so lamely vague when Gately asks does he want to tell him where he's been at and why he
couldn't make 2330 and whether there's anything that's an issue that he might want to share with Staff, so unresponsive that Gately
feels like he has no choice but to pull an immediate spot-urine on Green, which Gately hates doing not only because he plays
cribbage with Green and feels like he's taken Green under the old Gately wing and is probably the closest thing to a sponsor the
kid's got but also because urine samples taken after Unit #2's clinic's closed248238 have to be stored overnight in the little Staff
miniature fridgelette in Don Gately's basement room — the only fridge in the House that no resident could conceivably dicky into
— and Gately hates to have a warm blue-lidded cup of somebody's goddamn urine in his fridgelette with his pears and Polar seltzer, etc. Green submits to Gately's cross-armed presence in the men's head as Green produces a urine so efficiently and with so
little bullshit that Gately is able to take the lidded cup between gloved thumb and finger and get it downstairs and tagged and
Logged and down in the fridgelette in time to not be late for getting the residents' cars moved, the night-shift's biggest pain in the
ass; but then his final head-count at 2345 reminds Gately that Amy J. isn't back, and she hasn't called, and Pat has told him the
decision to Discharge after a missed curfew is his call, and at 2350 Gately makes the decision, and has to get Treat and Belbin to
go up into the 5-Woman room and
he trashbags on the front porch with a quick note explaining the Discharge and wishing the girl good luck, and has to call
Pat's answering device down in Milton and leave word of a mandatory Curfew-Discharge at 2350h., so Pat can hear about it first
thing in the a.m. and schedule interviews to fill the available bed ASAP, and then with a hissed curse Gately remembers the antibig-hanging-gut situps he's sworn to himself to do every night before 0000, and it's 2356, and he has time to do only 20 with his
huge discolored sneakers wedged under the frame of the office's black vinyl couch before it's unavoidably time to supervise
moving the residents' cars around.
Gately's predecessor as male live-in Staff, a designer-narcotics man who's now (via Mass Rehab) learning to repair jet engines
at East Coast AeroTech, once described residents' vehicles to Gately as a continuing boil on the ass of night Staff. Ennet House
Jets any resident with a legally registered vehicle and insurance keep their car at the House, if they want, during residency, to use
for work and nightly meetings, etc., and the Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital goes along, except they put authorized parking
for all the Units' clients out in the little street right outside the House. And since metro Boston's serious fiscal troubles in the third
year of Subsidized Time there's been this hellish municipal deal where only one side of any street is legal for parking, and the 
legal side switches abruptly at 0000h., and cruisers and municipal tow trucks prowl the streets from 0001h. on, writing $95.00
tickets and/or towing suddenly-illegally-parked vehicles to a region of the South End so blasted and dangerous no cabbie with
anyt
uilding — the lot's
spac
from Day's pillow and farting in rhythm to the pushups' downstrokes, as Day lies there in pajamas and Lone Ranger
slee
hing to live for will even go there. So the interval 2355h.-OOO5h. in Boston is a time of total but not very spiritual
community, with guys in skivvies and ladies in mud-masks staggering out yawning into the crowded midnight streets and
disabling their alarms and revving and all trying to pull out and do a U and find a parallel-parking place facing the other way.
There's nothing very mysterious about the fact that metro Boston's battery- and homicide-rates during this ten-minute interval are
the highest per diem, so that ambulances and paddy wagons are especially aprowl at this hour, too, adding to the general clot and
snarl.
Since the E.M.P.H.H. Units' catatonics and enfeebled people rarely own registered vehicles, it's generally pretty easy to find
places along the little road to switch to, but it's a constant sore point between Pat Montesian and the E.M.P.H.H. Board of Regents
that Ennet House residents don't get to park overnight in the big off-street lot by the condemned hospital b
es are reserved for all the different Units' professional staff starting at 0600h., and E.M. Security got sick of staffs' complaints
about drug addicts' poorly maintained autos still sitting there taking up their spots in the A.M. — and that Security won't consider
changing the little E.M. streetlet's nightly side-switch to 2300h., before Ennet Houses's D.S.A.S.-required curfew; E.M.'s Board
claims it's a municipal ordinance that they can't be expected to mess with just to accommodate one tenant, while Pat's memos keep
pointing out that the Enfield Marine Hospital complex is state- not city-owned, and that Ennet House residents are the only tenants
who face the nightly car-moving problem, since just about everyone else is catatonic or enfeebled. And so on.
But so every P.M. at like 2359 Gately has to lock up the lockers and Pat's cabinets and desk drawers and the door to the front
office and put the phone console's answering machine on and personally escort all residents who own cars out post-curfew outside
into the little nameless streetlet, and for somebody with Gately's real limited managerial skills the headaches involved are
daunting: he has to herd the vehicular residents together just inside the locked front door; he has to threaten the residents he's
herded together into staying together by the door while he clomps upstairs to get the one or two drivers who always forget and fall
asleep before 0000 — and this straggler-collecting is a particular pain in the ass if the straggler's a female, because he has to
unlock and press the Male Coming Up button by the kitchen, and the 'buzzer' sounds more like a klaxon, and wakes the edgiest
female residents up with an ugly surge of adrenaline, and Gately as he clomps up the stairs gets roundly bitched out by all the
mud-masked heads sticking out into the female hall, and he by regulation can't go into the sleeper's bedroom but has to pound on
the door and keep shouting out his gender and get one of the straggler's roommates to wake her up and get her dressed and to the
bedroom door; so he has to retrieve the stragglers and chew them out and threaten them with both a Restriction and a possible tow
while herding them quick-walking down the staircase to join the main car-owner herd as quickly as possible before the main herd
can like disperse. They'll always disperse if he takes too long getting stragglers; they'll get distracted or hungry or need an ashtray
or just get impatient and start looking at the whole car-moving-after-curfew thing as an imposition on their time. Their earlyrecovery Denial makes it impossible for them to imagine their own car getting towed instead of, say, somebody else's car. It's the
same Denial Gately can see at work in the younger B.U. or -C. students when he's driving Pat's Aventura to the Food Bank or
Purity Supreme when they'll fucking walk right out in the street against the light in front of the car, whose brakes are fortunately
in top shape. Gately's snapped to the fact that people of a certain age and level of like life-experience believe they're immortal:
college students and alcoholics/addicts are the worst: they deep-down believe they're exempt from the laws of physics and
statistics that ironly govern everybody else. They'll piss and moan your ear off if somebody else fucks with the rules, but they
don't deep down see themselves subject to them, the same rules. And they're constitutionally unable to learn from anybody else's
experience: if some jaywalking B.U. student does get splattered on Comm. or some House resident does get his car towed at 0005,
your other student's or addict's response to this will be to ponder just what imponderable difference makes it possible for that other
guy to get splattered or towed and not him, the ponderer. They never doubt the difference — they just ponder it. It's like a kind of
idolatry of uniqueness. It's unvarying and kind of spirit-killing for a Staffer to watch, that the only way your addict ever learns
anything is the hard way. It has to happen to them to like upset the idolatry. Eugenio M. and Annie Parrot always recommend
letting everybody get towed at least once, early on in their residency, to help make believers out of them in terms of laws and
rules; but Gately for some reason on his night-shifts can't do it, cannot fucking stand to have one of his people get towed as long
as there's something he can do to prevent it, and then plus if they do get towed there's the nail-chewing hassle of arranging their
transport to the South End's municipal lot the next day, fielding calls from bosses and supplying verification of residents'
carlessness in terms of getting to work without letting the boss know that the earless employee is a resident of a halfway house,
which is totally sacred private residents' private information to give out or not — Gately breaks a full-body sweat just thinking
about the managerial headaches involved in a fucking tow, so he'll spend time herding and regathering and chewing the
absentminded asses of residents who Gene M. says have such calloused asses still it's a waste of Gately's time and spirit: you have
to let them learn for themselves.249239 Gately alerts Thrale and Foss and Erdedy and Henderson,250240 and Morris Hanley, and
drags the new kid Tingley out of the linen closet, and Nell Gunther — who's fucking sacked out slack-mouthed on the couch, in
violation — and lets them all get coats and herds them together by the locked front door. Yolanda W. says she left personal items
in Clenette's car and can she come. Lenz owns a car but doesn't answer Gately's yell up the stairs. Gately tells the herd to stay put
and that if anybody leaves the herd he's going to take a personal interest in their discomfort. Gately clomps up the stairs and into
the 3-Man room, plotting different fun ways to wake Lenz up without bruises that'd show. Lenz is not asleep but is wearing
personal-stereo headphones, plus a jock strap, doing handstand-pushups up against the wall by Geoffrey Day's rack, his bottom
only inches
p mask, hands folded over his heaving chest, lips moving soundlessly. Gately's maybe a little rough about grabbing Lenz's calf
and lifting him off his hands and using his other big hand on Lenz's hip to twirl him around upright like a drill-team's rifle, but
Lenz's cry is of over-ebullient greeting, not pain, but it sends both Day and Gavin Diehl bolt-upright in their racks, and then they
curse as Lenz hits the floor. Lenz starts saying he'd let time completely get away from him and didn't know what time it was.
Gately can hear the herd down by the front door at the bottom of the stairs stamping and chuffing and getting ready to maybe
disperse.
Up this close, Gately doesn't even need his Staffer's eerie seventh sense to sense that Lenz is clearly wired on either 'drines or 
Bing. That Lenz has been visited by the Sergeant at Arms. Lenz's right eyeball is wobbling around in its socket and his mouth
writhing in that way and he has that Nietzschean supercharged aura of a wired individual, and all the time he's throwing on slacks
and topcoat and incognitoizing wig and getting almost pitched headfirst down the stairs by Gately he's telling this insane
breathless whopper about his finger once getting cut off and then spontaneously regentrifying itself back on, and his mouth is
writhing in that fish-on-a-gaff way distinctive of a sustained L-Dopa surge, and Gately wants to pull an immediate urine,
immediate, but meanwhile the cars' herd's edges are just starting to widen in that way that precedes distraction and dispersal, and
they're angry not at Lenz for straggling but at Gately for even bothering with him, and Lenz pantomimes the akido Serene But
Deadly Crane stance at Ken Erdedy, and it's 0004h. and Gately can see tow trucks aprowl way down on Comm. Ave., coming this
way, and he jangles his keys and unlocks all three curfew-locks on the front door and gets everybody out in the scrotum-tightening
November cold and out down the walk to the line of their cars in the little street and stands there on the porch watching in just
orange shirtsleeves, making sure Lenz doesn't bolt before he can pull a spot-urine and extract an admission and Discharge him
officially, feeling a twinge of conscience at so looking forward to giving Lenz the administrative shoe, and Lenz jabbers nonstop
to whoever's closest all the way to his Duster, and everybody goes to their car, and the backwash around Gately from the open
House door is hot and people in the living room provide loud feedback on the draft from the open door, the sky overhead immense
and dimensional and the night so clear you can see stars hanging in a kind of lacteal goo, and out on the streetlet a couple car
doors are squeaking and slamming and some people are conversing and delaying just to make Staff have to stand there in
shirtsleeves on the cold porch, a small nightly sideways ball-busting rebellious gesture, when Gately's eye falls on Doony R.
Glynn's specialty-disembowelled old dusty-black VW Bug parked with the other cars on the now-illicit street-side, its rear-mount
engine's guts on full glittered display under the little street's lights, and Glynn's upstairs in bed tonight legitimately prostrate with
diverticulitis, which for insurance reasons means Gately has to go back in and ask some resident with a driver's license to come
move Glynn's VW across the street, which is humiliating because it means admitting publicly to these specimens that he, Gately,
doesn't have a valid license, and the sudden heat of the living room confuses his goose-pimples, and nobody in the living room
will admit to have a driver's license, and it turns out the only licensed resident who's still vertical and downstairs is Bruce Green,
who's in the kitchen expressionlessly stirring a huge amount of sugar into a cup of coffee with his bare blunt finger, and Gately
finds himself having to ask for managerial assistance from a kid he likes and has just bitched out and extracted urine from, which
Green minimizes the humiliation of the whole thing by volunteering to help the second he hears the words Glynn and fucking car,
and goes to the living room closet to get out his cheap leather jacket and fingerless gloves, and but Gately now has to leave the
residents outside still unsupervised for a second to go clomping upstairs and verify that it's kosher with Glynn for Bruce Green to
move his car.251241 The 2-Man seniorest males' bedroom has a bunch of old AA bumper-stickers on it and a calligraphic poster
saying EVERYTHING I'VE EVER LET GO OF HAS CLAW MARKS ON IT, and the answer to Gately's knock is a moan, and
Glynn's little naked-lady bedside lamp he brought in with him is on, he's in his rack curled on his side clutching his abdomen like
a kicked man. McDade is illicitly sitting on Foss's rack reading one of Foss's motorcycle magazines and drinking Glynn's
Mill eadphones on, and he hurriedly puts out his cigarette when Gately enters and closes the little drawer
in th
ine. Gately looks quickly out the west window over
Glyn o verify that all the unsupervised headlights going down the little street are Uing and coming back the right way to
repa headache, from managerial stress. Glynn's crossed eyes are
glas verish and he's softly singing the lyrics to a Choosy Mothers song to a tune that isn't the song's tune.
eet a little fast for Gately's taste. Anything involving residents that happens on the
grou sponsibility, the House Manager's made clear.
itch is dead.’
over, brother, it's midnight.’
onize my baby when I'm gone, Don Doon.’
t one point elements of Staff thought Glynn might be playing sick to get out of
look culitis is that Pat said it's
inte lics can get it in recovery from impurities in bottom-shelf blends that the body's trying to expel. Glynn's had
phy hrough his residency, but nothing like this here. His face is gray and waxy with pain and there's a
yello
, do you think?’
ennial Fizzy with stereo h
e bedside table where Foss keeps his ashtray just like everybody else.252242 The street outside sounds like Daytona — a
drug addict is like physically unable to start a car without gunning the eng
n's rack t
rk. Gately's forehead is wet and he feels the start of a greasy
sy and fe
'Doon,' Gately whispers.
One of the cars is coming back down the str
nds after curfew is his re
'Doon.’
It's the bottom eye, grotesquely, that rolls up at Gately. 'Don.’
'Doon.’
'Don Doon the w
'Doon, I need to let Green move your car.’
'Vehicle's black, Don.’
'Brucie Green needs your keys so's we can switch your car
'My Black Bug. My baby. The Roachmobile. The Doonulater's wheels. His mobility. His exposed baby. His slice of the
American Pie. Sim
'Keys, Doony.’
'Take them. Take it. Want you to have it. One true friend. Brought me Ritz crackers and a Fizz. Treat it like a roachlady.
Shiny, black, hard, mobile. Needs Premium and a weekly wax.’
'Doon. You got to show me where's the keys, brother.’
'And the bowel. Gotta weekly shine the pipes in the bowel. Exposed to view. With a soft cloth. The mobile roach. The
bowelmobile.’
The heat coming off Glynn is face-tightening.
'You feel like you got a fever, Doon?' A
ing for a job after losing his menial job at Brighton Fence & Wire. All Gately knows about diverti
stinal and alcoho
sical complaints all t
wish crust on his lips. Glynn's got a real severe adtorsion, and the bottom eye is rolled up at Gately with a terrible delirious
glitter, the top eye rolling around like a cow's eye. Gately still cannot bring himself to feel another man's forehead. He settles for
punching Glynn very lightly on the shoulder.
'You think we need to take you over to St. E.'s to get your intestine looked at, Doon
'Hoits, Don.’ 
'You think you —?’
Because he's worrying about what if a resident comas or dies on his shift, and then feeling shame that this is his worry, the
sque
o's carnivorous idle. Two almost Gately-sized bearded
guy
al of brakes and raised voices' noises down out front hasn't registered on Gately right away, but Hester Thrale's unmistakable
high-B# scream does — i.e. register — and now serious feet running up the stairs:
Green's face in the doorway, red in round patches high on his cheeks: 'Come out.’
'The fuck's the problem out —’
Green: 'Come now Gately.’
Glynn sotto: 'Mother.’
Gately doesn't get to even ask Green what the fuck again on the stairs because Green is down ahead out the door so fast; the
damn front door's been open all this time. A watercolor of a retrieverish dog cants and then falls from the wall on the staircase
from the vibrations of Gately taking two stairs down at a time. He doesn't take time to grab his coat off Pat's couch. All he's got on
is a donated orange bowling shirt with the name Moose cursive-stitched on the breast and SHUCO-MIST M.P.S. in ghastly aqua
blocks across the back,253243 and he feels every follicle on his body hump up again as the cold encases him on the front porch
and the wheelchair-ramp down to the little walkway. The night is cold and glycerine-clear and quite still. Very distant sounds of
car horns and raised voices down on Comm. Green's receding at a run off up the little streetlet into a glare of highbeams that
diffracts in the clouds of Gately's breath, so even as Gately walks briskly254244 in Green's leather-smelling backwash toward a
rising hubbub of curses and Lenz's high-speed voice and Thrale's glass-shattering cries and Henderson and Willis talking shit
angrily to somebody and the sound of Joelle v.D.'s veiled head in an upstairs window that isn't the 5-Women room's shouting
something down to Gately as he appears in the street, even as he closes in it takes a while for the scene to decoct out of the fog of
his breath and its shifting spears of color against the headlights. He passes Glynn's disembowelled and illegally parked Bug.
Several of the residents' cars are idling at haphazard angles of mid-U-turn in the middle of the street, and in front of them is a
modified dark Montego with highbeams and jacked rear wheels and a turb
s in loose like bowling-wear shirts with flowers or suns on them and what look like big faggy necklaces of flowers around
what would be their necks if they had necks turn out to be chasing Randy Lenz around this Montego car. Yet another guy with a
necklace and a plaid Donegal is holding the rest of the residents at bay on the lawn of #4 with a nasty-looking Item255245
expertly held. Everything now slightly slows down; at the sight of an Item held on his residents there's almost a kind of
mechanistic click as Gately's mind shifts into a different kind of drive. He gets very cool and clear and his headache recedes and
his breathing slows. It's not so much that things slow as break into frames.
The ruckus has aroused the old nurse in #4 who Asks For Help, and her spectral figure is splayed in a nightie against an
upstairs #4 window yelling 'Eeeeeeeyelp!' Hester Thrale now has her pink-nailed hands over her eyes and is screaming over and
over for nobody to hurt nobody especially her. It's the Bulldog Item that holds the attention. The two guys chasing Lenz around
the Montego are unarmed but look coldly determined in a way Gately recognizes. They're not wearing coats either but they don't
look cold. All this appraisal's taking only seconds; it only takes time to list it. They have vaguely non-U.S. beards and are each
about 4/s Gately's size. They take turns coming around the car and running past the headlights' glare and Gately can see they have
similar froggy lippy pale foreign faces. Lenz is talking at the guys nonstop, mostly imprecating. They're all three going around and
around the car like a cartoon. Gately's still walking up as he sees all this. It's obvious to appraisal the foreignish guys aren't real
bright because of they're chasing Lenz in tandem instead of heading around the car in opposite directions to trap him in like a
pincer. They all three stop and start, Lenz across the car from them. Some of the at-bay residents are yelling to Lenz. Like most
coke-dealers Lenz is quick on his feet, his topcoat billowing and then settling whenever he stops. Lenz's voice is nonstop — he's
alternately inviting the guy to perform impossible acts and advancing baroque arguments for how whatever they think he did
there's no way he was even in the same area code as whatever happened that they think he did. The guys keep speeding up like
they want to catch Lenz just to shut him up. Ken Erdedy has his hands up and his car keys in his hand; his legs look like he's about
to wet himself. Clenette and the new black girl, clearly veterans at gunpoint-etiquette, are prone on the lawn with their fingers
laced behind their heads. Nell Gunther's assumed Lenz's old martial-arts Crane stance, hands twisted into flat claws, eyeing the
guy's .44, which pans coolly back and forth over the residents. This smaller guy gets the most frames the slowest. He's got on a
plaid hunting cap that keeps Gately from seeing if he's foreign also. But the guy's holding the weapon in the classic Weaver stance
of somebody that can really shoot — left foot slightly forward, slightly hunched, a two-handed grip with the right arm cocked
elbow-out so the Item's held high up in front of the guy's face, up to his sighting eye. This is how policemen and Made Guys from
the North End shoot. Gately knows weapons way better than sobriety, still. And the Item — if the guy trig-pulls on some resident
that resident's going down — the Item's some customized version of a U.S. .44 Bulldog Special, or maybe a Nuck or Brazilian
clone, blunt and ugly and with a bore like the mouth of a cave. The stout alcoholic kid Tingley has both hands to his cheeks and is
100% at bay. The piece's been modified, Gately can appraise. The barrel's been vented out near the muzzle to cut your Bulldog's
infamous recoil, the hammer's bobbed, and the thing's got a fat Mag Na Port or -clone grip like the metro Finest favor. This is not
a weekend-warrior or liquor-store-holdup type Item; it's one that's made real specifically for putting projectiles into people. It's not
a semiauto but is throated for a fucking speed-loader, which Gately can't see if the guy's got a speed-loader under the loose floral
shirt but needs to assume the guy's got near-unlimited shots with a speed-loader. The North Shore Finest on the other hand wrap
their grips in this like colored gauze that wicks sweat. Gately tries to recall a past associate's insufferable ammo-lectures when
under the influence — your Bulldog and clones can take anything from light target loads and wadcutter to Colt SofTip dum-dums
and worse. He's pretty sure this thing could put him down with one round; he's not sure. Gately's never been shot but he's seen
guys shot. He feels something that is neither fear nor excitement. Joelle van D. is shouting stuff you can't make out, and Erdedy at
bay on the lawn's calling out to her to get her head out of the whole picture. Gately's been bearing down this whole brief time,
both seeing his breath and hearing it, beating his arms across his chest to keep some feeling in his hands. You could almost call
what he feels a kind of jolly calm. The unAmerican guys chase Lenz and then stop across the car facing him for a second and then
get furious again and chase him. Gately guesses he ought to be grateful the third guy doesn't come over and just shoot him. Lenz
puts both hands on whatever part of the car he stops at and sends language out across the car at the two guys. Lenz's white wig is
askew and he's got no mustache, you can see. E.M. Security, normally so scrupulous with their fucking trucks at 0005h., is 
nowhere around, lending weight to yet another cliche. If you asked Gately what he was feeling right this second he'd have no idea.
He's got a hand up shading his eyes and closes on the Montego as things further clarify. One of the guys now you can see has
Lenz's disguise's mustache in two fingers and keeps holding it up and brandishing it at Lenz. The other guy issues stilted but
colorful threats in a Canadian accent, so it emerges on Gately it's Nucks, the trio Lenz has managed to somehow enrage is Nucks.
Gately cops a black surge of Remember-Whenning, the babbling little football-head Québecer he'd killed by gagging a man with a
bad cold. This line of thinking is intolerable. Joelle's overhead shout to for Christ's sake somebody call Pat mixes in and out of the
Help lady's cries. It occurs to Gately that the Help lady has cried Wolf for so many years that real shouts for real help are all going
to be ignored. The residents all look to Gately as he crosses the street directly into the Montego's wash of light. Hester Thrale
screams out Look out there's a Item. The plaid-hat Nuck pans stiffly to sight at Gately, his elbow up around his ear. It occurs to
Gately if you fire with an Item right up to your sighting-eye like that won't you get a face full of cordite. There's a break in the
circular action around the throbbing car as Lenz shouts Don with great gusto just as the Help lady shouts for Help. The Nuck with
the Item has backed up several steps to keep the residents in his peripheral vision while he sights square on Gately as the massive
Nuck holding the mustache across the car tells Gately if he was him he'd return to whence he came, him, to avoid the trouble.
Gately nods and beams. Nucks really do pronounce the with a z. Both the car and Lenz are between Gately and the large Nucks,
Lenz's back to Gately. Gately stands quietly, wishing he felt different about potential trouble, less almost jolly. Late in Gately's
Substance and burglary careers, when he'd felt so low about himself, he'd had sick little fantasies of saving somebody from harm,
some innocent party, and getting killed in the process and getting eulogized at great length in bold-faced Globe print. Now Lenz
breaks away from the hood of the car and dashes Gately's way and around behind him to stand behind him, spreading his arms
wide to put a hand on each of Gately's shoulders, using Don Gately like a shield. Gately's stance has the kind of weary resolution
of like You'll Have to Go Through Me. The only anxious part of him can see the Log entry he'll have to make if residents come to
phy
 killed
som
sical grief on his shift. For a moment he can almost smell the smells of the penitentiary, armpits and Pomade and sour food
and cribbage-board-wood and reefer and mopwater, the rich piss stink of a zoo's lion house, the smell of the bars you lace your
hands through and stand there, looking out. This line of thinking is intolerable. He's neither goosepimpled nor sweating. His
senses haven't been this keen in over a year. The stars in their jelly and dirty sodium lamplight and stark white steer-horns of
headlights splayed at residents' different angles. Star-chocked sky, his breath, faraway horns, low trill of ATHSCMEs way to the
north. Thin keen cold air in his wide-open nose. Motionless heads at #5's windows.
The Nuck duo with flowers chasing Lenz come around this side and now break away from the car toward them. Now Hester
Thrale at Gately's right periphery breaks away from the cluster and runs for it off into the night across the lawn and behind #4,
waving her arms and screaming, and Minty and McDade and Parias-Carbo and Charlotte Treat appear out of Ennet House's back
door across the hedge and mill and jostle amid the mops and old furniture on Ennet's back porch, watching, and a couple of the
more mobile catatonics appear on the porch of the Shed across the little street, staring at the spect-op, all this flummoxing the
smaller one so he keeps swinging the Item stiffly this way and that way, trying to keep way more people at potential bay. The two
alien foreigners that want Lenz's map bear down slowly across the Montego's headlights toward where Lenz is holding Gately like
a shield. The larger one that's so large his luauish shirt won't even button all the way holding out the mustache adopts the overly
reasonable tone that always precedes a serious-type beef. He reads Gately's bowling shirt in the headlight and says reasonably that
Moose still has a chance to keep out of what they've got no beef with him, them. Lenz is pouring a diarrheatic spatter of
disclaimers and exhortations into Gately's right ear. Gately shrugs at the Nucks like he's got no choice but to be here. Green's just
looking at them. It occurs to Gately by White Flag suggestion that who gives a fuck how it'd look, he ought to hit his knees right
here on the headlit blacktop and ask for guidance on this from a Higher Power. But he stands there, Lenz chattering in his shadow.
The fingernails of Lenz's hand on Gately's shoulder have horseshoes of dried blood in the creases between nail and finger, and
there's a coppery smell off Lenz that isn't just fear. It occurs to Gately that if he'd pulled the instant spot-urine he'd wanted on Lenz
this whole snafu wouldn't maybe be happening. The one Nuck is holding Lenz's disguise's mustache out at them like a blade. Lenz
hasn't asked the time once, notice. Then the other Nuck's got his hand down at his side and a real blade's gleam appears in that
hand with the familiar snick. At the blade's sound the situation becomes even more automatic and Gately feels adrenaline's
warmth spread through him as his subdural hardware clicks deeper into a worn familiar long-past track. Having no choice now not
to fight and things simplify radically, divisions collapse. Gately's just one part of something bigger he can't control. His face in the
left headlight has dropped into its fight-expression of ferocious good cheer. He says he's responsible for these people on these
private grounds tonight and is part of this whether he wants to be or not, and can they talk this out because he doesn't want to have
to fight them. He says twice very distinctly that he does not want to fight them. He's no longer divided enough to think about
whether this is true. His eyes are on the two men's maple-leaf belt buckles, the part of the body where you can't get suckered by a
feint. The guys shake their manes and say they're going to unembowel this craven bâtard here like this sans-Christe bâtard
ebody they call either Pépé or Bébé, and if Moose has any self-interest he'll backpedal away from there's no way it is his duty
to get frapped or fropped for this sick gutless U.S.A. bâtard in his womanly wig. Lenz, apparently thinking they're Brazilian, pops
his head around Gately's flank and calls them marìcones and tells them they can suck his bâtard is what they can do. Gately has
just division enough to almost wish he didn't feel such a glow of familiar warmth, a surge of almost sexual competence, as the two
shriek at Lenz's taunts and split and curve in at them an arm's length apart, walking gradually faster, like unstoppable inertia, but
stupidly too close together. At two meters off they charge, shedding petals and unisonly bellowing something in Canadian.
It's always that everything always speeds up and slows down both. Gately's smile broadens as he's shoved slightly forward by
Lenz as Lenz recoils backward off him to run from the guys' shrieking charge. Gately takes the shove's momentum and
bodychecks the enormous Nuck holding the mustache into the Nuck holding the blade, who goes down with an euf of expelled air.
The first Nuck has hold of Gately's bowling shirt and rips it and punches Gately in the forehead and audibly breaks his hand,
letting go of Gately to grab his hand. The punch makes Gately stop thinking in any sort of spiritual terms at all. Gately takes the
man's broken hand's arm he's holding out and with his eyes on the ground's other Nuck breaks the arm over his knee, and as the
guy goes down on one knee Gately takes the arm and pirouettes around twisting the broken arm behind the guy's back and plants
his sneaker on the guy's floral back and forces him forward so there's a sick crack and he feels the arm come out of the socket, and
there's a high foreign scream. The Nuck with the blade who was down slashes Gately's calf through his jeans as the guy rolls 
gracefully left and starts to rise, up on one knee, knife out front, a guy that knows his knives and can't be closed with while he's
got the blade up. Gately feints and takes one giant step and gets all his weight into a Rockette kick that lands high up under the
Nuck's beard's chin and audibly breaks Gately's big toe in the sneaker and sends the man curving out back into the dazzle of the
highbeams, and there's a metallic boom of him landing on the Montego's hood and the click and skitter of the blade landing
somewhere on the street beyond the car. Gately on one foot, holding his toe, and his slashed calf feels hot. His smile is broad but
impersonal. It's impossible, outside choreographed entertainment, to fight two guys together at once; they'll kill you; the trick to
fighting two is to make sure and put one down for long enough that he's out of the picture long enough to put the other guy down.
And this first larger one with the extreme arm-trouble is clutching himself as he rolls, trying to rise, still perversely holding the
white mustache. You can tell this is a real beef because nobody's saying anything and the sounds from everybody else have
receded to the sounds stands' crowds make and Gately hops over and uses the good foot to kick the Nuck twice in the side of the
big head and then without a thought in his head moves down the guy and lines it up and drops to one knee with all his weight on
the guy's groin, resulting in an indescribable sound from the guy and a shout from J.v.D. overhead and a flat crack from the lawn
and Gately's punched so hard in the shoulder he's spun around on one knee and almost goes over backwards and the shoulder goes
hotly numb, which tells Gately he's gotten shot instead of punched in the shoulder. He never got shot before. SHOT IN
SOBRIETY in bold headline caps goes across his mind's eye like a slow train as he sees the third Nuck with his cap pushed back
and Nuck face contorted with cordite in his good stance with elbow back up drawing a second bead on Don's big head from #4's
lawn with the bore's lightless eye and a little pubic curl of smoke coming up from the vented muzzle, and Gately can't move and
forgets to pray, and then the bore zagging up and away as it blooms orange as good old Bruce Green's got the Nuck from behind
in a half-nelson with his hand in the necklace of flowers and with the other hand is forcing the cocked elbow down and the Item
skyward away from Gately's head as it blooms with that flat crack of a vented muzzle. The first thing somebody's who's shot
wants to do is throw up, which by the way the larger Nuck with the breezeblocked crotch under Gately's doing all over his beard
and flower necklace and Gately's leg's thigh as Gately weaves on one knee on the guy's groin still. The lady yells for Help. Now a
meaty thwack as Nell Gunther on the lawn leaps several twirling meters and kicks the Nuck Green's half-nelsoning in the face
with her paratrooper-boot's heel, and the guy's hat flies off and his head snaps back and hits Green's face, and there's the pop of
Green's nose breaking but he doesn't let go, and the guy's slumped forward in the Parkin-sonian half-bow of a guy in a quality
half-nelson, with the guy's Item-hand's arm still up in the air with Green's arm like they're dancing, and good old Green doesn't
even let go to hold his spurting nose, and now that the Nuck's restrained, notice, here comes Lenz barrelling in howling from the
hedge's shadows and leaping and he tackles the Nuck and Green both, and they're a roil of clothes and legs on the lawn, the Item
not in sight. Ken Erdedy still has his hands up. Gately, still kneeling shot on the Nuck's sickeningly softened groin, Gately hears
the second Nuck trying to slide himself off the hood of the Montego and hops and wobbles over. Joelle v.D. keeps yelling
something monosyllabic from what can't be her window. Don goes to the Montego's front bumper and punches the large man
carefully in the kidneys with his good arm and takes him by the thick foreign hair and slides him back up the hood and begins
banging his head off the Montego's windshield. He remembers how he'd stay in luxury furnished North Shore apts. with G.
Fackelmann and T. Kite and they'd gradually strip the place and sell the appointments off until they were sleeping in a totally bare
apartment. Green has risen bloody-faced, and Lenz is on the lawn with his heaving topcoat covering him and the third Nuck, and
Clenette H. and Yolanda W. are now up and not at bay and circling them and getting solid high-heel kicks into the Nuck's and
sometimes hopefully Lenz's ribs, reciting 'Motha-fucka' and landing a kick each time they get to fu. Gately, canted way over to the
side, methodically beats his Nuck's shaggy head against the windshield so hard that spidered stars are appearing in the shatterproof
glass until something in the head gives with a sort of liquid crunch. Petals from the guy's necklace are all over the hood and
Gately's torn shirt. Joelle v.D. in her terry robe and gauze veil and still clutching a toothbrush has climbed out onto the little
balcony outside the 5-Woman's window and into a skinny ailanthus beside it and is coming down, showing about two meters of
spectacularly undeformed thigh, shouting Gately's name by the first name, which he likes. Gately leaves the largest Nuck prone on
the idling hood, his head resting in a shatter-frosted head-shaped recession in the windshield. It occurs to Ken Erdedy, looking up
into the oak past his upraised hands, that this deformed veiled girl likes Don Gately in an extracurricular way, it would seem.
Gately, toe and shoulder or no, has looked strictly all-business this whole time. He's projected a sort of white-collar attitude of
cheery competence and sangfroid. Erdedy's found he rather likes standing there with his hands up in a gesture of noncombatant
status while the Afro-American girls curse and kick and Lenz continues to roll around with the unconscious man hitting him and
going 'There, there,' and Gately moves backward between the second fellow in the windshield and the first fellow he'd originally
disarmed, his smile now as empty as a pumpkin's grin. Chandler Foss is trying on the third fellow's plaid hunting cap. There's a
sound in #4 of somebody trying to force a warped window. An Empire W.D.V. is launched with a kind of spronging thud and
whistles overhead, climbing, its warning-light wrap of like Xmas lights winking red and green as Don Gately starts to come over
in the direction of the lawn and the fellow who appears to have winged him and then veers drunkenly and changes direction and in
three one-foot hops is over to the vomit-covered first Nuck, the one who'd called Gately Moose and punched him in the forehead.
There's the slow trundle of the Green T and exhortations from Minty as Gately begins stomping on the supine face of the Nuck
with the heel of his good foot as if he were killing cockroaches. The guy's movable arm is waggling pathetically in the air around
Gately's shoe as it rises and falls. Gately's hideous torn orange shirt's whole right side is dark and his right arm drips blackly and
seems weirdly set in its socket. Lenz is up and adjusting his wig and brushing off. The veiled girl has hit a rough part some three
meters up and is hanging from a limb and kicking, Erdedy staring Copernicanly up her flapping robe. The new Tingley kid sits
cross-legged in the grass and rocks as the black ladies continue stomping the inert Nuck. You can hear Emil Minty and Wade
McDade exhorting Yolanda W. to use the spike heel. Charlotte Treat is reciting the Serenity Prayer over and over. Bruce Green
has
ately wobbles back from the Nuck's map and sits heavily down in the little street, in shadow except for his
hug
cDade come down off the back porch, finally, McDade for some reason wielding a mop.
Ever
his head back and his finger held like a mustache under his nostrils. Hester Thrale can still be heard way off down Warren
Street, receding, as G
e head in the Nucks' car's lights, sitting there with his head on his knees. Lenz and Green move in toward him the cautious way
you approach a big animal that's hurt. Joelle van Dyne lands on her feet. The lady at the high warped window shouts for
Helphelphelphelphelp. Minty and M
ybody except Lenz and Minty looks unwell. 
Joelle runs just like a girl, Erdedy notes.256246 She gets out through the many-angled cars into the street just as Gately
deci
It's just a decision Gately makes to like lie back with his knees bent and pointing up into the sky's
dept d recede with the pulse in his right shoulder, which has now gone dead cold, which means there
will
give ouble-chin, he can feel, and pulls his big face into a smile. His big present fear is throwing up in front of and maybe
part ted.
oes. 'Don what can I say.’
up. 'You got fucking armed Nucks wanting your ass too?’
obe into a kind of
trap ately's shoulder, straddling his arm, pressing down on the pad with the heels of her hands.
n.’
 Lenz.’
high-tops, his voice breathy with awe.
gh it man look at that shit.’
at her to shut up. She leans down and
in, s lower lip under the veil's billowing hem.
'Wh him.
g at Ken E.
 and do some like strategic thing.’
 is Security when it isn't just innocent recovering cars to get towed?’
 Pat,' Gately says.
d shins all around him, and heads too high to see. Lenz screaming back to somebody in
the
t five ambulances is more like it.’
ng he just likes it better lying down. 'Don't call one for me.’
 fide.’
le plastic shower-thongs. Somebody has on Clearasil, he can smell.
ckings in my past, brother, but —’
't touch nothing.’
irl's eyes would be. Her thighs are forked way wide to straddle his arm, which is numb
and She's bearing down on him. She smells strange but good. She's got all her weight on her bathrobe's pad.
She
le's heads.
des to lie down.
It's not like passing out.
h, which seems to bulge an
 very soon be pain, he predicts.
He waves off concern with the left hand and goes 'Flesh-wound' the second Joelle's bare feet and robe's hem are in view.
'Son of a fucking bitch.’
'Flesh-wound.’
'Are you ever bleeding.’
'Thanks for the feedback.’
You can hear Henderson and Willis off in the background still going 'fu.’
'I think you can tell them he's probably subdued,' Gately pointing off in what he thinks is #4's lawn's direction. His lying flat
s him a d
ly on Joelle v.D., whose calves he's no
Now Lenz's lizard-skin loafers with grass stains at the t
Gately struggles to sit back
Revealing a kind of blackly kimonoish thing under, Joelle has taken off the terry robe and folds the r
ezoidal pad and is kneeling over G
'Owie.’
'Lenz he's really bleeding bad here.’
'I'm groping to even know what to begin to say, Do
'You owe me urine,
'I think there's two of them, like, desisted.' Wade McD.'s unlaced
'He's bleeding really bad I said.’
'You mean deceased.’
'There's one of their shoes in one of them's fucking eye.’
'Tell Ken to put his hands down for Christ's sake.’
'Oh fucking God.’
Gately can feel his eyes crossing and uncrossing by themselves.
'He soaking right throu
'This man needs an ambulance.’
Somebody else female says God again and Gately's hearing warbles a bit as Joelle snaps
o Gately can see up at what looks like a regular human female chin and makeupless
om should we call?' she asks
'Call Pat's machine and Calvin. You have to dial 9. Tell them to come down.’
'I'm going to be sick.’
'Airdaddy!' Minty is shoutin
'Tell her to call Annie and the E.M. office down there
'Where the fuck
'And call
A forest of footwear and bare feet an
House: 'Call a fucking ambulance already.’
'Regulate the voice, man.’
'Fucking call abou
'Mothafucka.’
'Ssshh.’
'I just never saw anything like that.’
'Nuh-uh,' Gately gasps, trying to rise and decidi
'This is the straight and narrow?’
'By doze is
'He doesn't want one he said.’
Green's and Minty's boots, Treat's purp
'Seen some righteous ass-ki
Somebody male screams back off to the right.
'Just don't try and walk me around,' Gately grins up.
'Dipshit.’
'He can't go in no E.R. with a gunshot,' Minty says to Lenz, whose shoes keep moving to get himself north of everybody.
'Somebody turn off the car will you?’
'I wouldn
Gately focuses at where the Joelle g
doesn't feel like his.
 weighs roughly nothing. The first threads of pain are starting to radiate out of the shoulder and down the side and into the
neck. Gately hasn't looked down at the shoulder, on purpose, and he tries to wedge his left hand's finger under the shoulder to see
if anything went through. The night's so clear the stars shine right through peop
'Green.’
Tb dot touchig dothig, dud worry.’ 
'Look at his bead.'‘
Her kimono's shoulders are humped and glassy black in the Montego's light. Gately's brain keeps wanting to go away inside
himself. When you start to feel deeply cold that's shock and blood-loss. Gately sort of wills himself to stay right here, looks over
past Joelle's hand at Lenz's fine shoes. 'Lenz. You and Green. Get me inside.’
'Green!’
l faceless from the headlights' shadows. Some car engines have shut off and some
have has a twittering fan-belt. Somebody's suggesting to call the genuine Finest — Erdedy — which everybody
gree
hink one of these guys is, like, expired.’
reen's leather jacket overhead. Bits of grass and whatnot drifting down onto him from where Lenz is
still een's nose. Joelle tells Lenz if he doesn't cut something out
she' his ass. Gately's whole right side had gone deadly cold. To Joelle he says, 'I'm Supervised. I'll go to jail
sure
n says, but it can't be Glynn, for some
reas ng to get in Pat's office to call but
Gate
 inside,' she says to the circle. 'Lenz.’
d the sound of a serious set of keys.
at one Madame lady's voice on no-subscription radio, from out of nowhere he's all of a sudden sure, is where
he h d voice before.
t playing with his service baton and singing sea chanties off-key, that's
just
’
ble at him. Verbalize at him. Distract
him e before the real ones come.’
g shiny or something. Get your thumb out of your
ass a
adame on the FM, is how I knew you.’
 and keys. 'Who hold it? As in desist?’
ked through. He wants somebody to congratulate him for not having thrown up. You can tell some of
the s wn there. What Gately's always thought of as the Big Question Mark is really the Big Dipper.
he Purity Supreme and always asks Gately how it's hanging. His
shoe eet's in-sides the way fat men that have to walk a lot's are; his ex-ballplayer's col-lops and big
hang his head to throw up a little on both Green and
Joel
arm wake, the hand, and then gently squeezes as much of the
wris
us his leg's all bloody too.’
know guys loved that show you did.' A tiny bit more throwing up.
ow we're going to lift him very gently and get the feet under.’
ere Green man get over here on the south why don't you.’
ht thaah wheyaah.’
The circle of stars' heads' faces above are al
n't. One of the cars
ts with scorn at his naïveté. Gately's figuring Staff from the Shed or #4 has called them or at least dialed down to Security. By
the time he was ten only his pinkie-finger would fit in the dialer's holes of his mother's old princess phone; he exerts will to uncross his eyes and stay right here; he in the worst way does not want to be lying here with a gunshot in shock trying to deal with
the Finest.
'I t
'No shit Shylock.’
'Nobody call.' Gately yells it up and out. He's afraid he's going to vomit when they stand him up. 'Nobody call nobody til you
get me in.' He can smell G
 brushing off his clothes, and coins of blood on the street from Gr
s going to hand him
.’
'You got fucking eyewitnesses out the ass behind you Don man,' either McDade or Glyn
on he tries to bring up inside him. And it seems like Charlotte T.'s voice saying Ewell's tryi
ly locked Pat's door.
'Nobody call anyone!' Joelle shouts up and out. She smells good.
'They're calling!’
'Get him off the phone! Say prank for Christ's sake! You hear me?' Her kimono smells good. Her voice has a Staff-like
authority. The scene out here has changed: Gately's down, Madame Psychosis is in charge.
'We're going to get him up and we're going to get him
There's impending static-crackle an
Her voice is th
eard that odd empty half-accente
'Secyotty! Hold it right thaah.' It's at least luckily one of the ex-football E.M. Security guys, that spends half his shift down at
the Life and then goes up and down the streetlet all nigh
impressively qualified to Come In to AA with them.
Joelle: 'Erdedy — deal with him.’
'Pardon me?
'It's the drunk,' Gately gets out.
Joelle's looking up at presumably Ken E. 'Go over and look high-income and respecta
 while we get him insid
'How am I supposed to explain all these prone figures draped over cars?’
'For Christ's sake Ken he's not a mental titan — distract him with somethin
nd move.’
Gately's smile has reached his eyes. 'You're M
Erdedy's squeaky shoe and the obese guy's radio
'Secyotty I said halt!’
Green and Lenz bending in, white breath all over and Green's dripping nose the same copper smell as Lenz.
'I knew I knew you,' Gately says to Joelle, whose veil remains inscrutable.
'If I could ask you to specify halt from what.’
'Get his back up here first,' Green tells Lenz.
'Not crazy about all this blood,' Lenz is saying.
Many hands slide under his back; the shoulder blooms with colorless fire. The sky looks so 3-D you could like dive in. The
stars distend and sprout spikes. Joelle's warm legs shift with her weight to keep pressure on the pad. The squishing sound Gately
knows means the robe's soa
tars are nearer and some far, do
'I'm oddering desist until who's in change that I can repot the sichation.' The Security guy's hammered, his name's Sidney or
Stanley and he wears his Security-hat and baton shopping in t
s' uppers are blasted along the f
ing gut are one of Gately's great motivators for nightly situps. Gately turns
le, who both ignore it.
'Oh sorry. Oh shit I hate that.’
Joelle v.D. runs a hand down Gately's wet arm that leaves a w
t as she can get her hand around. 'And Lo,' she says softly.
'Jes
'Boy do I
'N
'H
'I'm oddering the whole sitchation halt it rig
Lenz and Green's shoes coming together and moving apart at either side of Gately, faces coming down in a fish-eye lens, 
lifting:
'Ready?’
Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment:
InterLace TelEntertainment, 932/1864 R.I.S.C. power-TPs w/ or w/o console, Pink2, post-Primestar D.S.S. dissemination,
menus and icons, pixel-free InterNet Fax, tri- and quad-modems w/ adjustable baud, post-Web Dissemination-Grids, screens so
hígh-def you might as well be there, cost-effective videophonic conferencing, internal Froxx CD-ROM, electronic couture, all-inone consoles, Yushityu ceramic nanoprocessors, laser chromatography, Virtual-capable media-cards, fiber-optic pulse, digital
encoding, killer apps; carpal neuralgia, phosphenic migraine, gluteal hyperadiposity, lumbar stressae. Half of all metro Bostonians
now work at home via some digital link. 50% of all public education disseminated through accredited encoded pulses, absorb-able
at home on couches. Ms. Tawni Kondo's immensely popular exercise program spontaneously disseminated daily in all three
O.N
g and genuflecting with Tawni Kondo, a mass
chor
they wished. And (get this) 94% of all O.N.A.N.ite paid entertainment now absorbed at home: pulses, storage cartridges,
digi
gures
in w
four
eryone in metro Boston's seen at least one pond-draining. It's always the same
sort
.A.N. time zones at 0700h., a combination of low-impact aerobics, Canadian Air Force calisthenics, and what might be termed
'cosmetic psychology' — upwards of 60 million North Americans daily kickin
eography somewhat similar to those compulsory A.M. tai chi slo-mo exercise assemblies in post-Mao China — except that
the Chinese assemble publicly together. One-third of those 50% of metro Bostonians who still leave home to work could work at
home if
tal displays, domestic decor — an entertainment-market of sofas and eyes.
Saying this is bad is like saying traffic is bad, or health-care surtaxes, or the hazards of annular fusion: nobody but Ludditic
granola-crunching freaks would call bad what no one can imagine being without.
But so very much private watching of customized screens behind drawn curtains in the dreamy familiarity of home. A
floating no-space world of personal spectation. Whole new millennial era, under Gentle and Lace-Forché. Total freedom, privacy,
choice.
Hence the new millennium's passion for standing live witness to things. A whole sub-rosa schedule of public spectation
opportunities, 'spect-ops,' the priceless chance to be part of a live crowd, watching. Thus the Gapers' Blocks at traffic accidents,
sewer-gas explosions, muggings, purse-snatchings, the occasional Empire W.D.V. with an incomplete vector splat-ting into North
Shore suburbs and planned communities and people leaving their front doors agape in their rush to get out and mill around and
spectate at the circle of impacted waste drawing sober and studious crowds, milling in rings around the impact, earnestly
comparing mental notes on just what it is they all see. Hence the apotheosis and intricate pecking-order of Boston street
musicians, the best of whom now commute to work in foreign autos. The nightly chance to crank back the drapes and face out into
the streets at 0000h., when all street-parked vehicles have to switch sides and everyone goes nuts and mills, either switching or
watching. Street fights, supermarket-checkout confrontations, tax-auctions, speeders stopped for ticketing, coprolaliac Touretters
on downtown corners, all drawing liquid crowds. The fellowship and anonymous communion of being part of a watching crowd, a
mass of eyes all not at home, all out in the world and pointed the same way. Q.v. the crowd-control headaches at crime-scenes,
fires, demonstrations, rallies, marches, displays of Canadian insurgency; crowds brought together now so quickly, too quickly
even to see them, a kind of visual inversion of watching something melt, the crowds collect and are held tight by an almost
seemingly nucleic force, watching together. Almost anything can do it. Street vendors are back. Homeless vets and twisted fi
heelchairs with hand-lettered signs outlining entitlement. Jugglers, freaks, magicians, mimes, charismatic preachers with
portable PAs. Hardcore panhandlers stem like they're selling nostrums to small crowds; the best panhandling now verges on standup comedy, and is rewarded by watching crowds. Cultists in saffron with much percussion and laser-jet leaflets. Even some oldstyle Eurobeggars, black-browed persons in striped leggings, mute and aloof. Even local candidates, activists, advocates and
grass-roots aides have returned full-circle to the public stump — the bunting-hung platform, the dumpster-lid, vehicles' roofs,
awnings, anything overhead, anything raised to a crowd-collecting public view: people climb and declaim, drawing crowds.
One top Back Bay public spect-op every November is watching expressionless men in federal white and municipal cadet-blue
drain and scrub the Public Gardens' man-made duck pond for the upcoming winter. They drain it sometime in November every
year. It's publicly unannounced; there's no fixed schedule; long shiny trucks just all of a sudden appear in a ring at pond's rim; it's
always a weekday c. mid-November; it's also always somehow a gray raw sad windy Boston day, gulls cartwheeling in a sky the
color of dirty glass, people mufflered and with new gloves on. Not your ideal sylvan-type day for conventional lounging or public
spectation. But a massive crowd always collects and thickens in a dense ring along the banks of the Public Gardens' pond. The
pond has ducks. The pond is perfectly round, its surface roughened to elephant skin by the wind, geometrically round and banked
with lawn-quality grass and shrubbery in even-spaced clumps, with park-type benches between the shrubs overhung by whitebarked willows who've now wept their yellow autumn grit onto the green benches and grass banks where an arc of crowd now
forms and thickens, watching duly designated authorities commence to drain the pond. Some of the pond's flightier ducks have
already decamped for points south, and more leave on some phylogenic cue just as the shiny trucks pull up, but the main herd
remains. Two private planes fly in lazy ellipses just under the cloud-cover overhead, banners strung out behind them advertising
 different levels of comfort and protection from Depend. The wind keeps blowing the banners sideways, möbiusizing them
and then straightening them back out with the loud pop of flags unfurling. From the ground the engines and banners' pops are too
faint to hear above the crowd-noise and ducks and wind's mean whistle. The swirling groundwind's so bad that U.S. Chief of
Unspecified Services Rodney Tine, standing with his hands at the small of his back at a window on the eighth floor of the State
House Annex on Beacon and Joy Sts., looking southwest and down at the concentric rings of pond and crowd and trucks, can see
wind-driven leaves and street-grit swirling right outside and pecking at this very window he stands before, massaging his coccyx.
Dr. James O. Incandenza, filmmaker and almost a scopophile about spect-ops and crowds, never once missed this spectacle,
when alive and in town. Hal and Mario have both been to a few. So have several Ennet residents, though some of them weren't in
much of a position to remember. It seems as if ev
 of grim windy Northeast November day where if you were at home you'd be eating earth-tone soups in a warm kitchen,
listening to the wind and glad of home and hearth. Every year Himself came was the same. The deciduous trees were always 
skeletal, the pines palsied, the willows wind-whipped and nubbly, the grass dun and crunchy underfoot, the water-rats always
seeing the big drainage-picture first and gliding like night to the cement sides to flee. Always a crowd in thickening rings. Always
rollerblades on the Gardens' paths, lovers joined at the hand, Frisbee in the distance on the rim of the Gardens' other side's
hillside's slope, which faces away from the pond.
U.S. Office of Unspecified Services Chief Rodney Tine stands at the unclean window for much of the morning, ruminative,
his p
an is spotless and twinkly with wax to about halfway up its panelled side, but above that line dirty and rustsauc
osture a martial at-ease. A stenographer and an aide and a Deputy Mayor and the Director of the Massachusetts Division for
Substance Abuse Services, and Unspecified Services Regional Operatives Rodney Tine Jr.257247 and Hugh Steeply258248 all sit
silently in the conference room behind him, the stenographer's Gregg pen poised in mid-dictation. The eighth-floor window's
purview goes all the way to the ridge of the hillside at the Gardens' other end. Two Frisbees and what looks like a disembowelled
ring of Frisbee float back and forth along this ridge, dreamily floating back and forth, sometimes dipping below the ridge and lost,
for a moment, to the specular vision of Tine.
Trying at the same time to give his bad skin some quality UV and a good chill's chap, the grad-work-study engineer of
M.I.T.'s WYYY-109 lies bare-chested on a silvery NASA-souvenir space blanket, supine and cruciform at about the angle of a
living-room recliner on the Public Gardens' far hillside. This is out by Arlington St., in the Gardens' southwest corner, hidden by
its ridge from the pond's basin and tourism booth and pavilion and the hub of radial paths and the giant verdigrised statues of
ducklings in a row commemorating Robert McCloskey's beloved and timeless Make Way for Ducklings. The Gardens' only other
slope is now the bowl of the former pond. The hillside's grassy decline, not too steep, runs at a wedge's angle down toward
Arlington St. and is one broad greensward, free of dog droppings because dogs won't go to the bathroom on inclined terrain.
Frisbees float on the ridge behind the engineer's head, and four lithe boys on the ridge play a game with a small beanbaggy ball
and bare blue feet. It is 5° C. The sun has the attenuated autumn quality of seeming to be behind several panes of glass. The wind
is bitter and keeps flopping unmoored sections of NASA blanket over parts of the engineer's body. Goose-pimples and real
pimples jostle each other for space on his exposed flesh. The student engineer's is the hillside's only metallic space blanket and
bare torso. He lies there splayed, wholly open to the weak sun. The WYYY student engineer is one of roughly three dozen human
forms scattered over the steep slope, a human collection without pattern or cohesion or anything to bind them, looking rather like
firewood before it's been gathered. Wind-bronzed sooty men in zipperless parkas and mismatched shoes, some of the Gardens'
permanent residents, sleeping or in stupors of various origin. Curled on their sides, knees drawn up, unopen to anything. In other
words huddled. From the great height of one of Arlington St.'s office buildings, the forms look like things dumped onto the
hillside from a great height. An overhead veteran'd be apt to see a post-battle-battlefield aspect to the array of forms. Except for
the WYYY engineer, all the men are textured in urban scuz, unshaven, yellow-fingered and exposure-bronzed. They have coats
and bedrolls for blankets and old twine-handle shopping bags and Glad bags for recyclable cans and bottles. Also huge camper's
packs without any color to them. Their clothes and appurtenances are the same color as the men, in other words. A few have steel
supermarket-carts filled with possessions and wedged by their owners' bodies against a downhill roll. One of the cart-owners has
vomited in his sleep, and the vomit has assumed a lava-like course toward the huddled form of another man curled just downhill.
One of the shopping carts, from upscale Bread & Circus, has an ingeniously convenient little calculator on its handlebar, designed
to let shoppers subtotal their groceries as they select them. The men have sepia nails and all somehow look toothless whether they
have teeth or not. Every so often a Frisbee lands among them. The loose ball makes a beanbaggy sound against players' feet above
and behind them. Two skinny and knit-capped boys descend very close to the engineer, chanting very softly 'Smoke,' ignoring all
the other forms, which anyone could tell are undercapitalized for purchasing Smoke. When his eyes are open he's the only one on
the hillside to see the round bellies of ascending ducks pass low overhead, catching a thermal off the hillside and rising to wheel
away left, due south. His WYYY-109 T-shirt and inhaler and glasses and M. Fizzy and spine-split copy of Metallurgy of Annular
Isotopes are just off the edge of the reflecting blanket. His torso is pale and ribby, his chest covered with tough little buttons of
acne scar. The hillside's grass is still pretty viable. One or two of the scattered fetal forms have black cans of burnt-out Sterno
beside them. Bits of the hillside are reflected in Arlington's storefronts and office windows and the glass of passing cars. An
unexceptional white Dodge or Chevy-type van pulls out of Arlington's traffic and does some pretty impressive parallel parking
along the curb at the hillside's bottom. A man in an ancient NATO-surplus wool greatcoat is up on his hands and knees to the
engineer's lower left, throwing up. Bits of chyme hang from his mouth and refuse to detach. There's little bloody threads in it. His
hunched form looks somehow canine on the uneven slope. The fetal figure wedged unconscious under the front wheels of the
shopping cart nearest the engineer has only one shoe, and that shoe's without laces. The exposed sock is ash-colored. Besides the
handicapped license plate, the only exceptional things about the van now idling at the curb far below are the tinted windows and
the fact that the v
ered and shamefully neglected-looking. The engineer has been turning his head this way and that, trying to tan evenly along
his whole jawline. The curbside van idles at a distant little point between his heels. Some of the hillside's forms have curled
themselves around bottles and pipes. A smell comes off them, rich and agricultural. The student engineer doesn't usually try to sun
and chap his skin at the same time, but chapping-ops have lately been scarce: since Madame Psychosis of '60+/-' took her sudden
leave of medical absence, the student engineer hasn't once had the heart to sit out on the Union's convoluted roof and monitor the
substitute shows.
The engineer moves his upturned face back and forth. First, Madame was replaced by a Mass Comm. graduate student who
proved a crushing disappointment as a Miss Diagnosis; then Madame was publicly deemed irreplaceable by management, and the
engineer is now paid simply to cue her background music and then sit monitoring a live mike for a noiseless 60 minutes, which
means he has to stay in his booth maintaining 0-levels with a live mike and can't ascend with his receiver and cigarettes even if he
wanted to. The station's student manager's given the engineer written instructions on just what to say when people phone in during
the hour to inquire and wish Psychosis a speedy recovery from whatever might ail her. At once denying and encouraging rumors
of suicide, institutionalization, spiritual crisis, silent retreat, pilgrimage to the snow-capped East. the disappearance of someone
who's been only a voice is somehow worse instead of better. A terrible silence now, weeknights. A different silence altogether
from the radio-silence-type silence that used to take up over half her nightly show. Silence of presence v. silence of absence,
maybe. The silences on the tapes are the worst. Some listeners have actually come in and down through the deep cortex and into 
the cold pink studio itself, to inquire. Some to allay this firm conviction that Madame was still actually still showing up and sitting
there by the mike but not saying anything. Another of the men sleeping nearby keeps punching at the air in his sleep. Almost all
the personal wee-hour inquiries are from listeners somehow bent, misshapen, speech-defective, vacantly grinning, damaged in
some way. The type whose spectacles have been repaired with electrician's tape. Shyly inquiring. Apologies for bothering
someone they can clearly see is not even there. Before the student manager's written instructions, the student engineer'd
wordlessly directed their attention to Madame's triptych screen with no silhouette behind it. Another white Dodge van, just as
unevenly clean and opaque-windowed, has appeared on the ridge above and behind the hillside's littered forms. It casts no visible
shadow. A Frisbee-ring caroms off the clean grille of its snout. It idles, its panel door facing the declivity and the other white van's
panel door far below. One hideous little inquirer had had a hat with a lens on it and seemed about to fall forward into the
engineer's lap. His attendant wanting some address where they might send something supportive and floral. The NASA blanket's
micronized aluminumoid coating is designed to refract every possible UV ray into the student engineer's bare skin. The engineer
knows about the ambulance and the Brigham and Women's ICU and five-day rehab ward from the thick swart girl Notkin, the one
with the disreputable hat and Film-Dept. I.D. who came down via the Basilar elevator late at night to retrieve some old tapes of
the program for the Madame's personal listening use, she said, and was fortunate enough to know the Madame in private life, she
said. The term is Treatment, Madame Psychosis is in long-term Treatment at something the bearded girl in the sooty hat obliquely
described as only half a house in some unbelievably unpleasant and low-rent part of the metro-area. This is the precise total of
what the WYYY engineer knows. He is shortly to have occasion to wish he knew a great deal more. Q.v. the dimpled steel ramp
now
ng back down and up
agai the snatched engineer in the chair's scoop appearing to the hillside's roused figures mostly as a hallucinatory waggle of bare
limb and strangely wheezy shrieks for Help or at least to Look Out Below, all as the modified chair squeaks frantically straight
dow now idling in gear, its pipe's exhaust beating the
stre
tly sour smell of bulkprep
e way to 7-5 in the third in an off-record nonchallenge exhibitionish engagement
Sch
 protruding from the squeakily opened panel door of the van on the ridge above and behind him. Q.v. the utter darkness inside
the idling van down along the Arlington St. curb, whose side panel's also been slid open from within. The southwest hillside is
copless: the Gardens' platoon of M.D.C. Finest are all in their souped-up golf carts over at the drained pond, throwing curved
sections of glazed doughnut into the ducks' shrubbery and telling a largely-dispersed-already crowd to please move along. The
ridge's Frisbees and hackysackers have abruptly vanished; there's now an eerie stillness like a reef when a shark cruises through;
the ridge's van's idling maw open and black, silver-tongued.
Q.v. also the wheelchair that now all of a sudden shoots down the hillside's van's ramp as a madly squeaking brass-colored
blur, a snowplow-like scoop-type thing welded to it and out front skimming the ground and throwing off chaff from the swath of
grass it's mowing, moving terrifically fast, brakes unapplied, the legless figure up on burly stumps in the chair fleur-de-lis-withsword-stem-masked and bent far forward for a skier's pure speed, the huddled fetal hillside figures the speeding chair slaloms, the
dim glittered movements of arrangement for reception deep within the curbside van way at the bottom of the steep grade, the
engineer arching his neck way out to capture sun on the scarred hollows under his jaw, the shopping cart with the calculator
clipped by a squeaking rubberized wheel at an angle and sent clattering off down the hillside, spraying possessions, the homeless
shoe to which it had been roped skittering empty behind it and the cart's now shoeless unconscious owner just waving at the air in
front of his face in sleep as if at a bad D.T.-dream of lost shoe and worldly goods, the calculating cart whumping into the side of
the hunched man vomiting and flipping over and bouncing several times and the vomiting man rolling and yelping, vulgarities
echoing, the WYYY engineer now to be seen hiking himself up on a chill-reddened elbow with a start and starting to turn and
look above and behind him up at the ridge just as the speeding wheelchair with the hunched figure reaches him and the chair's
shovel scoops the engineer and his NASA blanket and shirt and book up and runs over the glasses and bottle of M. Fizzy with one
wheel and bears the engineer in the scoop up and away and down the steep grade toward the idling van at the bottom, a van whose
own angled ramp now slides out like a tongue or Autoteller's transaction-receipt, the NASA blanket blowing away from the
scooped engineer's flailing form about halfway down and suddenly aloft in a hillside thermal and blown far out over Arlington St.
traffic by the keen November wind, the madly squeaking wheelchair aloft over hillside moguls and comi
n,
s
n the hillside's most efficient downward line toward the van with the ramp
et in high-rpm idle, the NASA blanket twisting co-ruscant in the air high above the street, and the shriek-roused figures on the
hillside lying there still bent in and barely moving, stiff with cold and general woe, except for the hunched man, the unwell man
who'd been hit by the dislodged cart, who's rolled to a stop and is thrashing, holding the parts that were hit.
11 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
1810h.,133 kids and thirteen assorted staff sitting down at suppertime, the E.T.A. dining hall taking most of the first floor of
West House, a sort of airy atrium-like commons, broad and knotty-pine-panelled, the east wall hugely fenestrated and columns
running the length of the room at center, with ceiling fans high overhead circulating the rich and sligh
ared food, the oceanic sound of 20 different tables' conversation, the flat clink of utensils on plates, much chewing, the clank
and tinkle of the dishwasher's conveyor belt behind the tray-bus window with its sign saying YR MOTHER DOES NOT LIVE
HERE; BUS YR TRAY, the muffled shouts of kitchen workers in steam. The top upperclassmen get the best table, an unspoken
tradition, the one nearest the gas fireplace in winter and the AC venting in July, the one whose chairs' legs are all pretty much
even, both seats and backs with thin corduroy cushions in E.T.A. red and gray. The prorectors have their own permanent table
near the carbs bar; the Syrian Satelliter and enormous peasant-skirted Moment soft-profiler are with them.
The players can all do some very serious eating, some of them still in sweaty sweats with salt-stiff hair, too hungry after
three-set P.M.s to shower before refueling. Coed tables are quietly discouraged. The Boys 18's and the cream of the 16's are all at
the best table. Ortho ('The Darkness') Stice, E.T.A.'s 16's A-l, has just this P.M. gone three sets with Hal Incandenza, seventeen,
E.T.A.'s second-best overall boy, taking Hal all th
titt had them play out on the West Courts that afternoon for reasons no one has yet pinned down. The match's audience had
grown steadily as other challenges got done and people came up from the weight room and showers. News that Stice had very
nearly beaten an Inc nobody but John Wayne has been able to beat has made its figure-eight way around the tables and serving
line and salad bar, and lots of younger kids keep looking to the best table and Stice, sixteen, crew-cutted and still in his black Fila 
sweats with no shirt under the unzipped top, assembling a complex sandwich on his plate, and they let their eyes widen and
postures sag to communicate awe: R.H.I.P.
Stice, oblivious, bites into his sandwich like it's the wrist of an assailant. The only sound at the table for the first few minutes
is of forkwork and mastication and the slight gasping sounds of people trying to breathe while they eat. You rarely speak for the
first few minutes here, eating. Supper is deadly-serious. Some of the kids even start in on their trays while still in line at the milk
dispenser. Now Coyle bites in. Wayne has made his entree into a sandwich and lowers and bites. Keith Freer's eyes are half closed
as his jaw muscles bulge and slacken. Some of the players' inclined heads are hard to see over the height of their food. Struck and
Schacht, side by side, bite in sync and chew. The only one at the table not eating like a refugee is Trevor Axford, who as a small
child back in Short Beach CT once fell off his bike onto his head and received a tiny lesion-type brain injury after which all food
everywhere tastes horrible to him. His clearest explanation of the way food tastes to him is that it tastes the way vomit smells. He's
discouraged from speaking at meals and holds his nose while he eats and eats with the neutral joyless expression of somebody
disp
d. They'd been divorced and remarried four or five
time
ghts of their connubial battles so he can regale the E.T.A. upperclass-men with them, mostly at meals, after
the
Troeltsch and Pemulis are arguing about whether
E.T
. urology guy, plus now this loss to Shaw and near-loss to Ortho Stice, might not have shaken Inc and
Axh rankings calculating the permuted advantages to
them
seriously at Troeltsch. 'Not a chance, brother.’
th Father's OK. Father knuckling
und
ensing fuel into his car. Hal Incandenza dismantles the stelliform-mold shape E.T.A. mashed potatoes come in, mixing babyboileds in with the mashed. Petropolis Kahn and Eliot Kornspan eat with such horrible P.O.W.ish gusto that nobody else will sit
with them — they're by themselves at a small table behind Schacht and Struck, utensils glittering amid a kind of fine mist or
spray. Jim Troeltsch keeps holding a clear tumbler of milk up to the ceiling's full-spectrum lights and swirling the milk around in
the light, looking at it. Pemulis chews with his mouth open, producing moist noises, a habit so family-of-origin-ingrained no
amount of peer pressure can break him of it.
Eventually The Darkness clears his throat to speak. In the showers he'd gotten up to the middle of an Xmas story about one of
his parents' epic rows. His parents had met and fallen in love in a Country/Western bar in Partridge KS — just outside Liberal KS
on the Oklahoma border — met and fallen in star-crossed love in a bar playing this popular Kansas C/W-bar-game where they put
their bare forearms together and laid a lit cigarette in the little valley between the two forearms' flesh and kept it there till one of
them finally jerked their arm away and reeled away holding their arm. Mr. and Mrs. Stice each discovered somebody else that
wouldn't jerk away and reel away, Stice explained. Their forearms were still to this day covered with little white slugs of burnscar. They'd toppled like pines for each other from the git-go, Stice explaine
s, depending on how you defined certain juris-prudential precepts. When they were on good domestic terms they stayed in
their bedroom for days of squeaking springs with the door locked except for brief sallies out for Beefeater gin and Chinese takeout in little white cardboard pails with wire handles, with the Stice children wandering ghostlike through the clapboard house in
sagging diapers or woolen underwear subsisting on potato chips out of econobags bigger than most of them were, the Stice kids.
The kids did somewhat physically better during periods of nuptial strife, when a stony-faced Mr. Stice slammed the kitchen door
and went off daily to sell crop insurance while Mrs. Stice — whom both Mr.
Stice and The Darkness called 'The Bride' — while The Bride spent all day and evening cooking intricate multicourse meals
she'd feed bits of to The Brood (Stice refers to both himself and his six siblings as 'The Brood') and then keep warm in quietly
rattling-lidded pots and then hurl at the kitchen walls when Mr. Stice came home smelling of gin and of cigarette-brands and
toilet-eau not The Bride's own. Ortho Stice loves his folks to distraction, but not blindly, and every holiday home to Partridge KS
he memorizes highli
initial forkwork and gasping have died down and people have returned to sufficient levels of blood-sugar and awareness of
their surroundings to be regaled. Some of them listen, drifting in and out.
.A.'s kitchen staff has started trying to slip them powdered milk on the sly. Freer and Wayne are still hunched and chewing,
very intent. Hal's making some sort of structure out of his food. Struck keeps both elbows on the table at all times and utensils in
his clenched fists like a parody of a man eating. Pemulis always listens to Stice's tales, often repeating little phrases, shaking his
head in admiration.
'I'm just going to go up and refuse to eat one more thing with a utensil that's gone down the disposal.' Schacht is holding up a
fork with crazy tines. 'Just look at it. Who could eat with something like that.’
'The old man is a son of a bitch that is cool under fire, in terms of The Bride,' Stice says, leaning in to bite and chew. The
tendency at E.T.A. is to take the entree and unless it's a wet entree to take wheat bread and make it a sandwich, for the extra carbs.
It's like Pemulis can't really taste his food unless he mashes it against his palate. The Academy's wheat bread is bicycled in by
guys in Birkenstock sandals from Bread & Circus Quality Provisions in Cambridge, because it's got to be not only sugarless but
low in glutens, which Tavis and Schtitt believe promote torpor and excess mucus. Axford, who lost to Tall Paul Shaw in straight
sets and if he loses to him again tomorrow goes down to #5-A, stares stonily into space, his motions less like somebody eating
than like somebody miming eating. Hal's made an intricate fortification-structure of his food, complete with turrets and archerslits, and even though he's not much eating or drinking his six cranberry juices he keeps swallowing a lot, studying his structure.
As the eating slows down at the best table the more observant of them give Hal and Ax-ford tiny sideways looks, the players'
different CPUs humming through Decision Trees on whether a still-publicly-undiscussed but much-rumored showdown with Dr.
Tavis and the O.N.A.N.T.A
andle along some psychic competitive fault-line, different guys with different
selves of Hal and Axford having a deeply distracted and anxious week. Though Michael Pemulis, the other rumored
O.N.A.N.T.A. urine-scannee, ignores Axford's expression and Hal's excessive swallowing altogether, though possibly studiously
ignoring them, staring meditatively at the squeegees259249 taken down off the wall and leaning against the unlit fireplace, fingers
steepled before his lips, hearing out Troeltsch, who blows his nose with one hand and rattles his tumbler of half-drunk milk on the
tabletop with the other.
Pemulis shakes his head very
'I'm telling you man this milk is powdered.' Troeltsch peering down into the tumbler, probing the milk's surface with a thick
finger. 'Me I can tell from powdered. I have growing-up domestic confirmed traumas around powdered. The day Mother
announced milk was too heavy to keep lugging back from the store and switched to powdered, wi
er like Roosevelt at Yalta. My big sister ran away from home, and the rest of us were traumatized around it, this switch to
powdered, which is unmistakable if you know what to look for.’ 
Freer makes a snoring noise.
'And do I ever know what to look for, to verify.' Troeltsch is hoarse, and one of these people who speaks to more than one
person at once by looking from one person to one person to one person; he's not a born public speaker. 'Namely your telltale
residues along the sides of the glass, when swished.' W/ great flourished swishings of the milk.
ser every twenty minutes. Bags
of m
rger overall kertwang. Possible punishment for the Eschaton thing.'
Eye
.’
acht clears his mouth and swallows mightily. 'Tavis can't even regrout tile in the locker room without calling a
Com
ceiling fan. Girls laughing crumpled against
thei
eith Freer stroll purposefully through the serpentine crowd
and selves in front of a little boy who's tearing at a held bagel with great violent
mov ck. The 18-A's get free buttinskis: R.H.I, literal P., at E.T.A. Jim Struck spears one of the cherry
tom salad bowl with a savage fork-gesture; Hal makes no comment.
 holding the digit out at different guys around the
tabl
se tuition of 21,700 scooters, not counting,' Troeltsch says, moving the finger back and forth in the air — the stuff drying
on t
s'-complaints, and today's lunch a total déjà vu of yesterday's lunch, and the bread and bagels they've started
gett
ing by the fireplace. The inappropriate found objects have had a tektitic and sinister
aspe rying degrees they've given everyone the fantods.
Mrs f again, was why the repeat-lunch. Stice's eyes are back on his plate, which is nearly clean.
Unm at lunch went over the whole part of the north wall the black girls said
they ble means of attachment. The whole
'Except Troeltsch you can turn around and see them fucking loading the bags into the dispen
ilk. That say MILK on them, the bags. Liquid, sloshy, hard to handle. It's milk.’
'You see bags, you see the word MILK. They're counting on the packaging. Image management. Sensory management.'
Responding to Pemulis but looking at Struck. 'Part of some la
s going briefly to Hal. 'Covert vitamins possibly next. Let's not even mention saltpeter. Put aside deductions from bags a
second. I'm sticking to facts. Fact: this is verifiably powdered milk
'You're saying they mix powdered milk and then try and pour it into milk-bags, all to allay?’
Sch
munity Meeting or appointing a committee. The Regrouting Committee's been dragging along since May. Suddenly they're
pulling secret 03 00 milk-switches ? It doesn't ring true, Jim.’
'And Troeltsch has a cold, he said,' Freer observes, indicating the little bottle of Seldane next to Troeltsch's squeezing-ball, by
his plate. 'You can't even taste, Troeltsch, if you got a real cold.’
'Trevor should have the cold, Axhandle, no?' Schacht says, tapping carminative capsules onto his palm from his own amber
bottle.
With supper they can choose milk or else cranberry juice, that most carbcaloric of juices, which froths redly in its own clear
dispenser by the salad bar. The milk dispenser stands alone against the west wall, a big huge 24-liter three-bagger, the milk
inserted in ovaloid mammarial bags into its refrigerated cabinet of brushed steel, with three receptacles for tumblers and three
levers for controlled dispensing. There's two levers for skim and one for supposedly high-lecithin chocolate skim, which every
new E.T.A. tries exactly once and discovers tastes like skim with a brown crayon melted into it. There's a sign in a kitchenstaffer's crude black block caps taped to the dispenser's facade that says MILK IS FILLING; DRINK WHAT YOU TAKE. The
sign used to say MILK IS FILLING, DRINK WHAT YOU TAKE until the comma was semicolonized by the insertion of a blue
dot by a fairly obvious person.260250 The line for seconds on entrees now stretches out past the milk dispenser. The best thing
about satiation and slowing down on the eating is leaning back and feeling autolysis start in on what you ate and tending to your
teeth while you gaze around the airy room at crowds and clumps of kids, observing behaviors and pathologies with a clear and
sated head. The littler kids running in tight circles trying to follow the shadow of the
r seatmates' shoulders. People protecting their plates. The blurred sexuality and indecisive postures of puberty. Two marginal
male 16's have their heads directly in the bowls in the salad bar, and some of the surrounding females are commenting. Different
kids are illustrating points with different gestures. John Wayne and K
 up to the front of the Seconds line and insert them
ements of head and ne
atoes out of Hal's
Troeltsch has run his thick finger around the inside of the tumbler and is
e. 'Note a certain bluish cast to it. Traces and remains. Suspicious foam. Minute grains of not quite altogether dissolved
particulate powdered stuff. Powdered always leaves its telltale signs.’
'Your fucking head is a minute grain, Troeltsch.’
'Put that finger away.’
'Tryna eat here.’
'Paranoia,' Pemulis says, scooping up stray peas with the flat of his knife.
'Ba
he finger does not, admittedly, exactly look appetite-whetting — 'and yet let's note how the Lung's not up in spite of rampant
weather and Achille
ing us Day-Old with the yellow stickers on the bags, and there's dinette sets in the tunnels and acoustic tiles in the halls and
lawn-mowers in the kitchen and tripods in the grass and squeegees on the wall and Stice's bed moves around, and there's a ball
machine in the girls' lockers, Longley reports, that for this kind of tuition none of this stuff the staff can get around to cleaning up
bef—’
Stice's head has jerked up, a trace of mashed potato on his nose. 'Who says my bed moves? How's it you know anything about
any beds moving?’
But it's true. The Husky VI tripod of Mario's near-fatal encounter with the U.S.S. Millicent Kent was only the beginning.
Starting with the mysterious and continuing fall of acoustic ceiling-tiles from their places in the subdorms' drop ceilings,
inanimate objects have either been moved into or just out of nowhere appearing in wildly inappropriate places around E.T.A. for
the past couple months in a steadily accelerating and troubling cycle. Last week a grounds-crew lawnmower sitting clean and
silent and somehow menacing in the middle of the dawn kitchen gave Mrs. Clarke the fantods and resulted in Eggplant Parmesan
for two suppers in a row, which sent shock waves. Yesterday A.M. there'd been a cannonesque ball machine — no small feat to
move around anywhere or get through doors — in the Females' Sauna, which machine some of the upperclass girls had found and
screamed at when they went in for the dawn saunas that help alleviate some vague female-type problem that none of the guys
quite fathom. And two black girls on the breakfast crew reportedly found a set of squeegees on the dining hall's north wall, several
meters up and hung crossed in a kind of saltire, placed there by parties unknown. F. D. V. Harde's A.M. groundsmen reportedly
took the things down, and now they're lean
ct: none of the cheery odor of regular pranksterism; they're not funny. To va
. Clarke had taken the morning of
entioned is the fact that Schacht and Tall Paul Shaw
 found the squeegees on and could find neither nails nor holes from nails, as in no visi
thin
 are otherwise routine.
 dietary cluster-fuck: attempted powdered milk.’
 protest?' says Pemulis.
 hear about it. We look the other way with our
head
-shifts can be seen against the
shad se thing for
wret e shadow and trees' tangle.
The lenette
Hal
s brother's late-in-college thing of seeing if he could take a girl out somewhere public and then meet
and was after the girl Orin had been wildly in
love
 to fall so terribly in love with him they'd never be
able
erflowing with spit. He should by all rights have lost to Stice today, and he knows it. Stice was in
phy
d Axford know
it's ed up a
gorg
g's been studiously not talked about, adding to everybody's discomfort at Troeltsch's hoarse complaints about tuition, which
vary in specifics but
'And then now the ultimate
'Trying to foist it you're saying.’
'I'm saying and look at us and what do we do?’
'Fake a cold and stay in bed playing sportscaster with the TP, in
Troeltsch uses the bottle of Seldane to point for emphasis. 'We don't want to
s in the sand.’
'Sounds fucking painful.’
'Go find some fucking synonyms for beat.’
Slice swallows hugely: 'Never open your eyes underground: my old man's dictum.’
'And so we distract ourselves,' Troeltsch says; 'we yuck it up.’
Pemulis makes a k-sound. 'Here's the real question: how dumb is Troeltsch?’
'Troeltsch's so dumb he thinks a manila folder's a Filipino contortionist.’
'Troeltsch, who's buried in Grant's Tomb?’
Kyle Coyle says surely they've all heard the one about what do Canadian girls put behind their ears to attract boys. John
Wayne gives him not a look. Wayne's peering inside his own tumbler, where there does seem to be some sort of residue. There are
fragments of lettuce in his eyelashes. Ortho Stice's cheeks are ballooned with food, his eyes on his own salad's remains, expression
abstract and furrowed. A terrible kind of community energy in the whole dining hall, a kind of anxious sound-carpet under the
surf of voices and the tinkle of flatware, and The Darkness is at some vague center of this energy, somehow, you can feel. Neither
Wayne nor Hal's been approachable all fall, on-court. Kids at other tables say low-toned things to their seatmates, and then the
seatmate looks covertly over at Stice's table. Forehead purply crumpled, Slice stares hard at his salad and tries to block input from
his phenomenal peripheral vision. Two 14's are contending over toast. Petropolis Kahn is preparing to catapult a chickpea at
somebody. Jim Struck points out Bridgette Boone and the U.S.S. Millicent Kent returning for what Struck counts as Fourths, and
Stice blocks the sight out. The sad pretty sunset out over the hilltops of Newton cannot be seen because the room's big windows
face east, out over the hillside and the Enfield Marine complex that the Academy has bathed in shadow, so E.M.'s porch lights are
already on, and tall cubist bits of the old metropolis beyond that, east, with shadows encroaching. The afternoon just past was a
glory, scrubbed and cool and windless, cloud-free, the sun a disk, the sky a dome, soaked in light, even the northern horizons bellclear against a faint green-yellow cast. Schacht has about eight amber bottles of various medicines for his Crohn's Disease, and a
whole ritual of administration. A couple of the black girls who work kitchen and custodial day
owy tree-line, making their way down the steep hillside's unauthorized path back down to the halfway-hou
ched people who come up here to work short-time. The girls' bright cheap jackets are vivid in th
 girls are having to hold hands against the grade, walking sideways and digging heavily in at each step. The black girl C
had read fear in as she left C.T.'s office with his litter now has a bulging backpack on her back, as in bulging maybe with
dumpster-pilferage,261251 her arms strung way out between the other black girl Didi and the trees she grabs and digging in
sideways with each step, the hesitancy of steep dark slopes, rooty and shot through with briers.
A girl with bangs rises and tings her tumbler with a spoon to make an announcement; nobody pays any attention.
Now Kahn's by custom allowed to come over and sit with them at the best table, post-prandially.
Wayne and Stice both shiver at the same time as the overhead lighting suddenly becomes the big room's primary light.
There's a brief and sort of ignorant discussion on why girls who hit backhands one-handed seem prone to having differentsized breasts. Hal recalls hi
have covert sex with a whole different girl while still out with the first girl. This
 with and Himself had compulsively used in films had been disfigured. Orin kept a record of Subjects that was sort of a cross
between a chart and a journal. He used to come home and leave it out just pleading to be read. This was back when his brother
Orin needed only to have sexual intercourse with them instead of getting them
 to want anyone else. He'd taken obscure massage and psych courses and read tantric books whose illustrations seemed about
as sexy to Hal as Twister.
Coyle says 'Their ankles'; everybody ignores him. Wayne's already left the table.
Little 14-C Bernard Makulic, two tables over from the milk dispenser and constitutionally delicate and not long for E.T.A.,
throws up in a silky tan cataract onto the floor by his chair, and there is the shriek of the feet of other chairs being scooted in a star
pattern away from the table, and the protracted vowels of repulsed children.
Struck, Pemulis, Schacht and Freer have all had sexual intercourse. Coyle's a probable, but reticent. Axford has trouble even
publicly showering, much less submitting nude to a female's inspection. Hal is maybe the one male E.T.A. for whom lifetime
virginity is a conscious goal. He sort of feels like O.'s having enough acrobatic coitus for all three of them. Freer even has a like
souvenir-colposcope bolted to the inside of his locker door where a pin-up'd have been in days of yore, and Pemulis and Struck
have allegedly patronized the Combat Zone after the fiscally pressed city'd buckled and rehung the Combat Zone's red lights, east
of the Common. But Jim Troeltsch and sex: no way. And with Wayne and Stice the question seems somehow beside the point.
Hal's mouth feels like it's ov
sical control of the third set. Stice choked it away only because he didn't believe he could beat Hal yet, deep down, since Hal's
competitive explosion. But the crisis of faith that cost Stice the match had concerned a different Hal, Hal can tell. It's now a whole
new Hal, a Hal who does not get high, or hide, a Hal who in 29 days is going to hand his own personal urine over to authority
figures with a wide smile and exemplary posture and not a secretive thought in his head. No one except Pemulis an
a whole new and chemical-free Hal who should by all rights have lost to a 16-year-old out there in public on what end
eous NNE autumn day.
Wayne had gotten up and bussed his tray in the middle of the jejune breast thing. Ortho ('The Darkness') Stice is still staring
into his salad. If you could open Stice's head you'd see a wheel inside another wheel, gears and cogs being widgeted into place. 
Stice has a secret suspicion about a secret that has more to do with the actual table than with the people at the table. A lot of the
guys interpret his intense distraction as Stice's still being in the magic can't-miss Zone from this p.m.'s match.
'The idea being that Nuck girls can only attract guys by being really easy to X, is the joke,' Coyle says into the noise.
Then there's a brief rippling lull in the whole dining hall as little Evan Ingersoll emerges from the Entree Line's end on
crutches, his cast new and sailor-hat-white, unsigned, prorector Tony Nwangi behind him with his hatchet-face stony, carrying the
kid's tray for him. The hall's unease is almost visible, a corona around Ingersoll and the ruptured patellar tendon that'll cost him at
least six months of competitive development. Penn, whose femoral fracture'll cost him a year, isn't even back yet from St. E.'s
orthopedic. But at least Ingersoll's back. Hal gets up to go over, Troeltsch rising to accompany him after a long look at Trevor
Axford, Ingersoll's B.B. of record, who's sitting in his chair with his eyes shut tight, unable to make any sort of conciliatory
gesture. A match-sore Hal not limping but stiff-legged and shoulders slightly rolling as he and Troeltsch move serpentine around
tables, steering way clear of the custodian and dull-steel bucket on rollers and the mop spreading and diluting Makulic's chyme
out in a thinning circle that clears three tables, which Hal and Troeltsch avoid with practiced curves around tables whose layout
they all know well, Hal to say Hey and How's the Limb, Troeltsch to say Hey and be basically relieved he's away from a
discussion of females as sexual objects. Troeltsch's never come close to even dating anybody. Some guys here never do. It's the
same at all the academies, this asexual contingent. Some junior players don't have the emotional juice left over after tennis to face
what dating requires. Bold nerveless guys on the court who go slack and pale at the thought of approaching a female in any social
context. Certain things not only can't be taught but can be retarded by other stuff that can be taught. The whole Tavis/Schtitt program here is supposedly a progression toward self-forgetting; some find the whole girl-issue thing brings them face to face with
something in themselves they need to believe they've left far behind in order to hang in and develop. Troeltsch, Shaw, Axford: any
sort of sexual tension makes them feel like they need more oxygen than is available right then. A couple of the girls at E.T.A. are
kind of slutty, and some of the more aggressive Freer-type guys can break some of the girls down and get them to have sex —
there's nothing if not time and proximity here. But E.T.A. is mostly a comparatively unsexual place, maybe almost surprisingly so,
considering the constant roar and gurgle here of adolescent glands, the emphasis on physicality, the fears of mediocrity, the backand-forth struggles with ego, the loneliness and close proximity. There's scattered homosexuality, much of it emotional and
unconsummated. Keith Freer's pet theory is that the bulk of E.T.A. females are nascent lesbians who don't know it yet. That like
any
ite direction. Hal had given
Stic
me well of his own private troubles;
and
avis- or
urin
serious female athletes they're basically vigorously male inside, and so Sapphic-tending. The ones that get to the
W.T.A.262252 Show'll probably be the only ones who find out that they are, he believes — dykes that is. The rest will marry and
spend a lifetime by the club pool wondering why the hair on their husbands' backs makes them shudder. E.g. the U.S.S. Millicent
Kent, sixteen and phenomenal on the incline bench-press, with breasts like artillery and a butt like two bulldogs in a bag (Stice's
term, which caught on), already looks like a Penal Matron, Freer likes to observe. And no one likes the fact that Carol Spodek's
carried and prized the same single large-grip Donnay stick for going on five straight years.
Ortho Stice of southwest Kansas looks briefly up at Hal and Troeltsch's departure before returning his attention to a certain
cherry tomato perched somehow halfway up the shallow incline of his salad bowl. It's possible that the cherry tomato is attached
halfway up the incline by an adhesive bit of yogurt dressing rather than just sitting there defying gravity on its own. Stice doesn't
use a finger to move the tomato and check this. He's using only his concentrated will. He's trying to will the cherry tomato to roll
of its own objectile power down the incline and into the bowl's center. He stares at the cherry tomato with enormous
concentration, chewing his tri-level skinless-chicken-fillet sandwich. The chewing makes overlapping plates of muscle all the way
up one side of his face and crew-cut scalp bulge and roll. He's trying to flex some kind of psychic muscle he's not sure he even
has. The crew cut lends his head an anvil-like aspect. Complete concentration makes his round red fleshy face look crumpled.
Stice is one of those athletes whose body you know is an unearned divine gift because its conjunction with his face is so
incongruous. He resembles a poorly spliced photo, some superhuman cardboard persona with a hole for your human face. A
beautiful sports body, lithe and tapered and sleekly muscled, smooth — like a Polycleitos body, Hermes or Theseus before his
trials — on whose graceful neck sits the face of a ravaged Winston Churchill, broad and slab-featured, swart, fleshy, large-pored,
with a mottled forehead under the crew cut's V-shaped hairline, and eye-pouches, and jowls that hang and whenever he moves
suddenly or lithely make a sort of meaty staccato sound like a wet dog shaking itself dry. Tony Nwangi is saying something
acerbic to Hal, who looks like he's kneeling penitent before Ingersoll, everyone at the surrounding tables inclined very subtly
away from Hal. Troeltsch is signing Ingersoll's cast as he speaks into his fist. Off the court, Ortho Slice's flattop crew cut and
penchant for cuff-rolled bluejeans and button-down short-sleeves with a checkered pattern are strictly from hick. The facial
scrunching that attends concentration adds crevices and seams and an uneven flush to the bulldog face. His cheeks are ballooned
with food as he stares at the perched cherry tomato, trying to respect this object with all his might. Summoning the sort of
coercive reverence he'd felt this P.M. as several balls' sudden anomalous swerves against wind and their own vectors half convinced Stice they'd become sensitive to his inner will, at crucial times. He'd mishit one cross-court volley and seen the thing head
for an area wide even of the doubles sideline and then curve like a drenched spitter back to land just inside the singles corner, and
this at a time when the grounds' pines behind Hal Incandenza were breeze-leaning in the exact oppos
e a little bit of a look on that one. Stice couldn't finally tell whether Hal noticed anything amiss in the mysterious curves and
downdrafts that seemed to favor The Darkness alone; Hal had played with the wide-eyed but unfocused look of a tennis player
right on the verge of falling apart out there, and yet strangely affectless, as if deep inside so
Stice wills himself again not to wonder what had passed with the Headmaster and the O.N.A.N.T.A. urologist, whose labequipped van's unscheduled appearance in the E.T.A. parking lot yesterday afternoon had caused a tsunami of panic just before
supper, especially since Pemulis and his supply of lab-ready Visine bottles were nowhere to be found.
Even among the small circle who know Hal gets secretly high, it doesn't make much sense that Hal's misery'd be T
e-related, since Pemulis has never seemed blither than today; and if anyone were going to get the boot, chemically or
otherwise, it was not going to be the E.T.A. administration's relative and second-best boy.
Hal and his brother Mario both know that the skim milk at E.T.A. has been pre-mixed powdered milk since Charles Tavis
assumed the helm four years back and told Mrs. Clarke he wanted the kids' animal-fat intake halved in a month by any and all
means. The kitchen's graveyard shift power-mixes it in enormous steel bowls and then strains out the foam and pours the milk into 
real-milk milk-dispenser bags for a kind of placebo effect; it's mostly just the concept of powdered milk that gags people.
Struck has traded his shiny clean plate for the absent Incandenza's fortification-structured plate of uneaten fillets, low-gluten
bread, corn-bread, baby boileds, a pea-chickpea-based olla, half a fresh squash, mashed potatoes packed in a stelliform gelatin
mold, and a shallow bowl of dessert-tsimmes featuring mostly it seemed like plums. Hal is still down on one knee by Ingersoll's
chair, his elbows on his knee, listening across Ingersoll and a blindfolded Idris Arslanian to Tony Nwangi. Keith Freer remarks
blandly on how Hal seems like he's feeling sort of punk this evening, checking Stice for a reaction. Struck utters truisms about
wasting food and global hunger through a full mouth. Struck is wearing a Sox cap to the side so the bill shadows half his face. The
bread is unkind to his braces. Freer is wearing the leather vest with no shirt under, which is what he favors after weights have
pumped his torso full of air. Stice had had a traumatic psychic experience at fourteen when he'd set the weight on the pull-down
station too high, and Dr. Dolores Rusk has authorized his exemption from all but very basic weights, pending resolution of his fear
of weights. The joke around E.T.A. is that Stice, who's surely Show-bound after graduation, has no fear of heights, but does fear
weights. Keith Freer, though kind of a second-rank junior player, does look beautiful in his calfskin vest — his face and body
match. Troeltsch wants a sportscasting career, but Freer is the E.T.A. with looks InterLace would favor. Freer's from inland Maryland in the B.S. '90s with his now-deceased father's
inve
ets the remembered gag, though, so few things needing cords anymore. But Freer's old man had
inve
UCSON AZ U.S.A.
ut and a hand on that hip. The scratch on his triceps was
now
rathe that Steeply would undergo electrolysis but not take trouble to fix
his
 was about.’
it? — the passivity.’
are
of s
ey used to broadcast this, to alert you to when to watch, or if you were going to tape it.' Marathe watched the
big
ay around the show, to an
exte ve. He was, yes, always home from work by 2050 on Thursdays. And
he a
her a heating-oil-delivery dispatcher, Cheery Oil, Troy, New York.’
prior to Reconfiguration.’
A*S*H." The
show arted also to run daily, during the day, or late at night,
som
.’
ed and enjoyed them before, these reruns.’
ferent local stations in the Capital District. Albany and environs. For a while, this one station
even
 some wens of the face, Steeply said 'He started to keep a small television down at work.
Dow
, originally, his family's riches nouveaux, a family Amway business that hit big
ntion of a Pet-Rockish novelty that was ubiquitous in stockings for two straight pre-millennial Xmases — the so-called
Phoneless Cord. Stice dimly recalls his old man getting a Phoneless Cord in his stocking, ostentatiously packaged, on Ortho's first
recallable Xmas, back in Partridge KS, the old man cocking an eyebrow and The Bride laughing and slapping her big knee.
Nobody now much even g
sted his windfall shrewdly.
1 MAY Y.D.A.U. OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF T
'My own father,' Steeply said. Steeply again faced outward, one hip o
 ugly and puffed. Also, an area of Steeply's left finger was whiter than the skin around it. The removal of a university ring, or
more probably a wedding band. It seemed curious to Ma
finger's annular pallor.
Steeply said 'My own father, sometime around midlife. We watched him get consumed with a sort of entertainment. It wasn't
pretty. I was never sure how it started or what it
'You are now imparting a personal anecdote of you,' Marathe stated.
Steeply did not shrug. He was pretending to study something particular out on the floor of the desert. 'But nothing like this
sort of Entertainment — a plain old television program.’
'Television of broadcasting and — how did one express
'Yes. Broadcast television. The program in question was called "M*A*S*H." The title was an acronym, not a command. As a
boy I can recall some confusion on this point.’
'I am knowing of the U.S.A. historical broadcast television comedy program "M*A*S*H," ' Marathe stated.
'The fucking thing ran forever, it seemed. The program that would not die. B.S. '70s and '80s before it finally died, mercifully.
Set in a military hospital during the U.N.'s action on Korea.’
Marathe remained without expression. 'Police Action.’
Many small birds of the mountain of the outcropping had begun to whistle and twitter somewhere off above and behind them.
Also maybe the tentative rattle of some serpent. Marathe pretended to search for the watch in his pocket.
Steeply said 'Now, nothing prima facie exceptional about getting attached to a show. God knows I was attached to my sh
hows. That's all it started as. An attachment or habit. Thursday nights at 2lOOh. "Nine O'Clock Eastern, Eight O'Clock Central
and Mountain." Th
man shrug from behind. 'So the show was important to him. So, fine. OK. So he took pleasure in the program. God knows the
guy was entitled — he'd worked like a dog his whole life. So OK, so at the start he scheduled his Thursd
nt. It was hard to pinpoint anything wrong or consumpti
lways had his supper watching the program. It seemed almost cute. Mummykins used to tease him, think it was adorable.’
'Cuteness in fathers, this is rare.' There was no way Marathe was going to touch the evident U.S.A. childhood expression
Mummykins.
'My old man worked for a heating-oil distributorship. Home heating-oil. Have your files got this? A tidbit for M. Fortier:
U.S.O.U.S.'s Steeply, H.H.: late fat
'State of New York, U.S.A.,
Hugh Steeply turned around but not all the way, scratching absently at his wens. 'But then: syndication. "M*
 was incredibly popular, and after a few years of Thursday nights it st
etimes, in what I remember all too well was called syndication, where local stations bought old episodes and chopped them up
and loaded them with ads, and ran them. And this, note, was while all-new episodes of the show were still appearing on Thursdays
at 2100. I think this was the start
'The cuteness, it was over.’
'My old man started to find the syndicated reruns extremely important to him, too. As in like not to be missed.’
'Even though he had view
'The fucking show ran on two dif
 had a "M*A*S*H" hour, two of them, back to back, every night, from 2300. Plus another half an hour in the early P.M., for
the unemployed or something.’
Marathe said 'Virtually a bombardment of this U.S.A. broadcast comedy program.’
After a brief pause of attention to
n at the distributorship.’
'For the broadcast of afternoon.’
Steeply appeared to Marathe uncalculating in his statements. 'Broadcast TVs, toward the end they made some of them really 
small. Kind of a pathetic try at keeping cable down. Some as small as like wrist-size. You'd be too young to remember.’
'I remember well a pre-digital television.' Marathe, if Steeply's anecdote of himself had a political point or communique,
Mar
 moved his foul Belgian cigarette into his right hand to flick it out into the space below. 'It progressed very slowly.
The
d toward the screen.’
id, recalling his second-oldest of brothers and the Canadiens of the
N.L
d he'd get ugly if you pointed out he'd
alre t them out of engagements that would
have
ing an entertainment,' Steeply said. He sounded to Marathe uncalculated and somewhat
you
t some point during this gradual shift the notebook first appeared. He began writing notes in a notebook as he viewed.
But
rathe was holding his thumb and forefinger
up a over the Mountains of Rincon and craning his neck to see his shadow behind them on
the h
ut the notebook, and the secrecy about the secrecy. The
scru in careful order, for purposes you could just tell were both urgent and furtive.’
 question yourself, whether you were maybe yourself the one out of balance, attaching too much
imp
de above the outcropping, and in general pathetic and small. There would be no titanic or menacing
Bröc he sunrise of dawn. Marathe said 'The whole organism of family becomes out of balance,
ques
ured the
telev
 sniff.
erse or communicate on any topic without bringing it back to the
prog
as gradual and slow. He started at some point I remember to refer to the kitchen as the Mess Tent and his den as the
Mar the show. He began renting films with even crowd-extra or cameo
appe
 organizing them
in b
*H" throughout the night, probably
over , using a crude white plastic earplug to hide the noise, scribbling feverishly in his notebook.’
timent; and
U.S t
Mar
’
athe could not yet determine this.
Steeply
 gradual immersion. The withdrawal from life. I remember guys from his bowling league calling, that he'd quit. Our
Mummykins found out he'd dropped out of Knights of Columbus. Thursdays the jokes and cuteness stopped — him all hunched in
front of the set, barely even eating from his tray. And every night late at night, for the nightly hour, the old man too wide awake,
and hunched over weirdly, head out, as if pulle
'I too have seen this posture of viewing,' Marathe grimly sa
. of H.
'And he got anxious, ugly, if something made him miss even one. Even one episode. An
ady seen most of them about seven times before. Mummykins began to have to lie to ge
 infringed. Neither of them talked about it. I don't remember any of us trying to name the thing out loud — this dark shift in
his attachment to the program "M*A*S*H." ‘
'The organism of family simply shifted to accommodate.’
'Which it wasn't even all that consum
nger. 'I mean it was OK. But it was broadcast TV. Broad comedy and canned laughter.’
'I am remembering well this rerunning program, do not worry about me,' said Marathe.
'It was a
only when viewing "M*A*S*H." And he never left the notebook lying around where you could get any kind of look at it. He
wasn't openly secretive about it; you couldn't even point to that and say something was wrong. The "M*A*S*H" notebook just
never seemed to be lying around.’
With the hand that was not below the blanket still gripping the Sterling UL35, Ma
gainst the smear of red which was just
illside.
Steeply changed the hip which was out, in his standing, to his other hip. 'As a child, this is when it became impossible to
ignore the odor of obsession about the whole thing. The secrecy abo
pulous recording of tiny details,
'This is unbalance,' Marathe concurred. 'This attaching of excessive importance.’
'Jesus, you don't know the half of it.’
'And for you also,' Marathe said, 'excessive unbalance. For your father progresses downhill in this obsessing, but always so
slowly that always you could
ortance to any one thing — a notebook, a posture. Crazy making.’
'And the toll on Mummykins.’
Marathe had turned the chair to a slight angle to be able to see his shadow, which appeared blunt and deformed by the
topography of the steep hillsi
kengespenstphänom with t
tioning its perceptions.’
'The old man — then he started developing this habit of quoting little lines and scenes from "M*A*S*H," to illustrate some
idea, make some point in conversation. At the beginning of the habit he seemed casual about it, as if the little bits and scenes
simply occurred to him. But this changed, but slowly. Plus I remember he started seeking out feature films that also feat
ision program's actors.’
Marathe pretended to
'Then at some point it was as if he was no longer able to conv
ram. The topic. Without some system of references to the program.' Steeply gave small indications of paying attention to the
small squeaks as Marathe turned his chair slightly this way and that way, achieving different angles of sight on his small shadow.
Steeply exhaled air through the nostrils with a forceful sound. 'Though it wasn't as though he was wholly uncritical of it.’
It sometimes from somewhere blue occurred to Marathe that he did not dislike this Steeply, though like or respect would be
too far in going, to say.
'It was not that type of obsession with it, it, you are saying.’
'It w
sh or Swamp. These were fictional locations on
arances by the program's actors. He bought what was then called a Betamixer,263253 a kind of early magnetic-video recorder. He began a practice of magnetically recording each week's 29 broadcasts and reruns. He stored the tapes,
aroque systems of cross-reference that had nothing discernible to do with dates of recording. I remember Mummykins didn't
say anything when he moved his bedding and began to sleep at night in the easy chair in his den, the Swamp. Or pretend to.
Sleep.’
'But you had your suspicions of not real sleeping.’
'It was gradually obvious he was viewing his magnetic recordings of the program "M*A*S
 and over again
In contrast with the violence and transperçant puncturing of the sunset, the dawn sun seemed slowly exhaled from the more
rounded salience of the Mountains of Rincon, its heat a moister heat and the light the vague red of a type of fond sen
.O.U.S.'s Steeply's standing shadow was cast back over the outcropping toward Marathe behind him, close enough tha
athe might reach his arm out and touch the shadow.
'You can tell I don't have a good recall of the exact progression of the thing,' Steeply said.
'The gradual.
'I do know that Mummykins, I remember one day in the garbage can out behind the house she found a number of letters
addr
 For evidence of unbalance.’
didn't search through the garbage. Mumkinsky had too much
clas
4 of newspapers.’
 a glare. He wore the look of concentrating. This character — this I remember, too well —
was
or wherever,
but a Seoul routing code.’
-type theme that was slowly assembling itself on the program and progressively being
hint ly felt at his lip. 'I remember Mum-mykins
neve
rom fun to obsession — crucial distinctions had collapsed, I think, now. Between the fictional Burns
and
 a brow for concurring: 'This is signifying a severe loss of balance.’
character Burns also somehow hiddenly signified the
Engl
 receptacle, you stated,
inste
ent.’
lanket's brightening colors of plaid.
ry'd come by the house, view
mag show with the old man a while, listen to the old man's theories and views, then on his way out he'd collar
Mum
, looking a little bit of embarrassed.
program were getting
gray onal themes. According to my kid sister, who
bore
ent on and some actors retired and characters were replaced by other characters, the
old
next thing was one or two of the letters started to appear,
canc
essed to a "M*A*S*H" character named — this I fucking-A sure remember — Major Burns. She found them.’
Marathe did not allow himself the chuckle. 'While searching inside the can of waste in the back.
Steeply waved Marathe off. He was incapable of amused. 'She
s. She probably forgot and threw away the day's Troy Record before she'd clipped her food-coupons. She was an inveterate
coupon-clipper.’
'This was prior to the days of North American laws of recircling26425
Steeply did not wave off or give
portrayed by I remember the actor Maury Linville, a plain old employee of 20th Century Fox.’
'Which later upstarted the fourth network of the Large Four.’
Steeply's luridly run makeup from the heat of the day before had now over the night hardened into a configuration of almost
horror. 'But the letters, the letters were addressed to Major Burns. Not to Maury Linville. And not c/o Fox Studios
addressed to an involved military address, with
'In the South Korea of history.’
'The letters were hostile, savage, and lavishly descriptive. He'd come to think the show's character Major Burns embodied
some type of cataclysmic, Armageddon
ed at and emerging in the gradual succession of seasons of this "M*A*S*H." ' Steep
r mentioned the letters. From the garbage. She just left them around where my kid sister and I would see them.’
'You are not meaning your sister was a goat.’
Steeply was not provokable into some different emotion, however, Marathe observed. 'Younger sister. But my old man, the
progression of the program f
 this Linville who portrayed Burns.’
Marathe raised
'I remember something about he seemed to believe the name of the
ish verb for the promise of the consuming fire of apocalypse.’
Marathe looked puzzled or else squinted because of a rising sun. 'But he threw the letters into the waste
ad of the Snail's Mail.’
'He'd already started missing whole weeks at a time from work. He'd been at Cheery for decades. He was only a few years
from retirem
Marathe was looking at his lap's b
'Mo Cheery and the old man — they'd bowled together, they were in Knights of Columbus together. Missing all the weeks of
work made things awkward. Mo didn't want to can the old man. He wanted the old man to see somebody.’
'A professional person.’
'A lot of this I wasn't even there for. The "M*A*S*H" thing. I was at college by the time the really crucial distinctions had
collapsed.’
'Studying the multiple cultures.’
'My kid sister had to keep me abreast of developments during the term. Good old Mo Chee
netic tapes of the
mykins and take her out into the garage and talk to her very quietly about the fact that the old man was in a high-angle
psychic nose-dive and needed with all due regard in his opinion to see somebody in the direst fucking way. My kid sister said the
Mumkinsky always acted like she had no idea what Mo Cheery was talking about.’
Marathe smoothed at his blanket.
'Mumkinsky being a type of pet family name,' Steeply said
Marathe nodded.
'I'm trying to reconstruct this out of memory,' Steeply said. 'The old man is by this time pretty much unable to converse about
anything except the television program "M*A*S*H." The theory of the theme of this Burns-slash-Burning apocalypse now sort of
spreads out to become huge and complex theories about wide-ranging and deeply hidden themes having to do with death and time,
on the show. Like evidence of some sort of coded communication to certain viewers about an end to our familiar type of worldtime and the advent of a whole different order of world-time.’
'Your mother continues to play-act at normalcy, however.’
Tm trying to reconstruct things that weren't even clear at the time,' Steeply said, his wet and then dried makeup now grotesque
in his concentration in the sunrise, like a mask of a mentally ill clown. He said 'One theory involved the fact, which the old man
found extremely significant, that the historical Korean Police Action of the U.N. lasted only roughly two-odd years, but that
"M*A*S*H" itself was by then into something like its seventh year of new episodes. Some characters of the
 hair, receding hair, face-lifts. The old man was convinced this signified intenti
 the brunt of time spent with him, watching,' Steeply said, 'the old man's theories were almost inconceivably complex and
wide-ranging. As the years of new seasons w
man generated baroquoco theories about what it was that had quote-underline '''really" happened to the absent characters.
Where they'd gone, where they were, what it all augured. Then the
eled and returned, stamped as unde-liverable, or to addresses that were not just nonexistent but absurd.’
'Unbalanced letters were no longer being discarded as waste, but now mailed.’
'And Mummykins was uncomplaining throughout. It was enough to break your heart. She was a rock. She did, granted, begin
taking prescription anti-anxiety medication.’
Land of the freely brave: Marathe did not say this aloud. He looked at his pocket's watch and was trying to remember a time
when he had ever with Steeply had to consider the tact of departing.
Steeply, at this time, gave the impression somehow of having several cigarettes going at one time. 'Somewhere along late in 
the
ould stand on one foot to raise the other foot to look at a shoe's inflicted damage, all the time smoking. 'Even when he
wen
 20th Century Fox. Certain letters had been apparently rerouted by do-goodnik military postal clerks to
Fox rent past and present "M*A*S*H" personas in letters the family never saw
get
teeply raised the foot to look, his face in pain. He said, 'Then the program's final episode ran. Late autumn of B.S.
1983 ho'd by this time left home herself, and who
coul
 Marathe. 'As in even to go to the bathroom, now, the
not l
es ran constantly. He was haggard and spectral and his easy chair was all but unrecognizable. Cheery Oil was keeping
him y kid sister and I started reluctantly discussing intervening on
Mum
.’
tching an episode in which Alda's Hawkeye
can'
 I can recall of it is the army professional telling Alda not to worry, that if he was truly crazy he'd sleep like a newborn, as
did t
ally well, I remember.’
ooks tumbled out. The whole thing was written in a kind of medical-slash-military-looking
code and I spent some time trying to decode them. After his death in the
chai
m life. An otherwise harmless U.S.A. broadcast television program took his life, because
of th
y shook the head. 'It must have been hell on the poor old Mumkinsky.’
, and the site's bright loaders had not yet been started in movement. All was
calm n the shelf was squat and blunt, already shorter than the living figure of Steeply himself,
who yed no more finally
to sm
ey got like that, too, the old man's, like Hoyne's. Periodically.’
ppeared when Marathe had first arrived and found his shadow so entrancing in
its si
ncons. Steeply hawked and spat, still holding the last crumpled pack of
Flan
d this. Every change of his postures brought small squeaks of leather and
meta
 still not quite aligned. He spoke with the
progression the old man let it be known he was working on a secret book that revised and explicated much of the world's
military, medical, philosophical and religious history by analogies to certain subtle and complex thematic codes in "M*A*S*H." '
Steeply w
t in to work, there were problems. Heating-oil customers who called for deliveries or information or whatever began to
complain that the old man kept trying to engage them in bizarre theoretical discussions of the thematics of "M*A*S*H." ‘
'Because it is necessary that I leave soon, a central point must be soon emerging,' Marathe worked in as gracefully as possible.
Steeply seemed not to hear this other man. He seemed not only uncalcu-lated and self-enmeshed; his demeanor itself seemed
more young, that of some young person. This unless this was part of some performance beyond Marathe, Marathe knew he must
consider.
'Then the double blow,' Steeply said. 'In B.S. 1983. My memory's clear on this. The Mumkinsky opened an alarming letter
from attorneys for CBS and
. The old man'd been trying to correspond with diffe
mailed but whose content, the attorneys said, raised quote grave concern and could quote constitute grounds for strenuous
legal action.' S
.1 was on an ROTC marching-band trip to Fort Ticonderoga. My kid sister, w
d blame the kid, she reported that the Mumkinsky was talking very casually and uncomplainingly of the old man's now
refusing to leave his den.’
'This, the final enclosing isolation of obsession.’
Steeply looked over his shoulder on one awkward foot to look slightly at
eaving.’
'Your mother's prescriptions prevented some episodes of great anxiety, I think.’
'He'd gotten a special A.C.D.C. cable hook-up that brought in extra syndication. When reruns weren't running, the videomagnetic tap
 on the books until he could get his thirty years in at age sixty. M
mykins to intervene on the old man and force him to see somebody.’
'Yourselves, you could not reach him
'He died just before his birthday. He died in his easy chair, set at full Recline, wa
t stop sleepwalking and fears he's going out of his fucking mind until a professional military therapist reassures him, I
remember.’
'Me, I too have seen this episode rerunning, in my childhood.’
'All
he notorious Burns-slash-Linville.’
'The program's character of Burns slept exception
'His secret book's manuscript filled scores of notebooks. This is what the notebooks turned out to be. One closet in the den
had to be forced open. All these noteb
, though, indecipherable — Sis and her first husband
r.’
'His unbalance of temptation cost hi
e consuming obsession. This is your anecdote.’
'No. It was a transmural infarction. Blew out a whole ventricle. His whole family had a history: the heart. The pathologist said
it was amazing he'd lasted this long.’
Marathe shrugged. 'The obsessed frequently endure.’
Steepl
'She never complained, however.’
Already the sun was up and pulsing. Light ran over everything in a sickening yellow way like gravy. All birds and living
animals had been silenced, stunned already by heat
. All was bright. Steeply's shadow o
 was leaning outward to try to find a spot far below to litter with a crumpled Belgian packing with one pra
oke.
Marathe took his watch from out of the windbreaker's pocket.
Steeply shrugged. 'I think you're right, that it's part of both the horror and the pull. When I'm east and thinking of Flatto's lab
and I sort of look up and find myself tempted.’
'About the Entertainment of now.’
'And I kind of half-picture Hank Hoyne in the old man's old recliner, hunched and scribbling feverishly.’
'In military coding.’
'His eyes, th
Heat began to shimmer, as well, off the lionhide floor of a desert. The mesquite and cactus wobbled, and Tucson AZ resumed
once more the appearance of the mirage, as it had a
ze and reach. The sun of A.M. had no radial knives of light. It appeared brutal and businesslike and harmful to look upon.
Marathe allowed himself a few diverting seconds of watching the Mountains of the Rincons' widening shadows melt slowly
backward into the base of the Mountains of the Ri
derfumes.
'My time is sharply finite to remain.' Marathe sai
l. 'I would feel gratitude if you departed first.’
Steeply figured Marathe wanted him to have no idea how he got up and down, in and out. To no real purpose; a personal point
of pride. Steeply squatted for adjusting the straps of his high heels. His prostheses were
fain :
. Captures it. The eye-factor. Hoyne, the Arab
inte
 would say it does not capture these eyes' expression.’
Steeply said in concentration.
in some way.’
?
Glue
ked polish. 'Stuck. Fixed. Held. Trapped. As in trapped in some sort of middle.
Between two things. Pulled apart in different directions.’
arathe's eyes searched the sky, which this was already too light blue for his pleasure, filmed with a sort of eggy plura of
heat
moke
ciga
ross-legged on the couch with her head all the way forward so her forehead touches her foot. It looks like some kind
of s been sitting on the sofa
all n nz and Gately in the streetlet, from which the whole
Hou
ks and a velour bathrobe, but Day's proven kind of admirably resistant to caring what other people think, in a way.
 formed by her
cros
 incline over to the side toward her. 'When I was a little boy —’
 exhaust fans, believe you me.’
 some certain set of notes I was practicing on the violin, and the two vibrations set up
a re appen in my head. It is impossible really to explain it, but it was a certain quality of this
reso
ut of some corner in my mind. I
can out of some backwater of my psyche I
had
n form. It rose in me, out of me,
sum se notes. It rose and grew larger and became engulfing and more
horri
tly breathless quality of large men trying to bend
'Well. Rémy, but I don't think Dick Willis's "empty of intent" quite does it
rnist. The old man. Not for eyes like that.’
'You
Looking up while squatting, this made Steeply's neck appear thick. He stared past Marathe, at the shale. He said 'The
expressions seem more like — fuck, how to say it. Fuck,'
'Petrified,' Marathe said. 'Ossified. Inanimate.’
'No. Not inanimate. More like the opposite. More as if... stuck
Marathe's neck itself was stiff from so much time looking out and down from a height. 'What is it this wishes here to mean
d?’
Steeply was doing something to a toenail's crac
M
. 'Meaning between different cravings of great intensity, this.’
'Not even cravings so much. Emptier than that. As if he were stuck wondering. As if there was something he'd forgotten.’
'Misplaced. Lost.’
'Misplaced.' 'Lost.' 'Misplaced.' 'As you wish.’
13 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
0245h., Ennet House, the hours that are truly wee. Eugenio M., voluntarily filling in for Johnette Foltz on Dream Duty, is out
in the office playing some sort of hand-held sports game that blips and tweets. Kate Gompert and Geoffrey Day and Ken Erdedy
and Bruce Green are in the living room with the lights mostly out and the old jumpy-picture D.E.C. viewer on. Cartridges not
allowed after 0000h., to encourage sleep. Sober cocaine-and stimulant-addicts sleep pretty well by the second month, straight
alcoholics by the fourth. Abstinent pot- and tranq-addicts can pretty much forget about sleep for the first year. Though Bruce
Green is asleep and would be in violation of the no-lying-on-the-couch rule if his legs weren't twisted over and his feet on the
floor. All the Ennet House viewer gets on Spontaneous Dissemination is basic InterLace, and from 0200 to 0400 InterLace NNE
downloads for the next dissemination-day and cuts all transmissions except one line's four straight redissemms of 'The Mr.
Bouncety-Bounce Daily Program,' and when Mr. Bouncety-Bounce appears in his old cloth-and-safety-pin diaper and paunch and
rubber infant-head mask he is not a soothing or pleasant figure at all, for the sleepless adult. Ken Erdedy has started to s
rettes and sits smoking, joggling one leather slipper. Kate Gompert and Geoffrey Day are on the nonleather couch. Kate
Gompert sits c
piritually advanced yoga position or stretching exercise, but it's really just the way Kate Gompert has
ight every night since Wednesday's free-for-all unpleasantness with Le
se is still reeling and spiritually palsied. Day's bare calves are completely hairless and look sort of absurd with dress shoes and
black soc
'Like you really care.' Kate Gompert's voice is toneless and hard to hear because it issues from out of the circle
sed legs.
'It isn't a question of caring or not caring,' Day says quietly. 'I meant only that I identify to an extent.’
Gompert's sarcastic chuff of air raises a section of her unwashed bangs.
Bruce Green doesn't snore, even with his nose broken and cross-hatched in white tape. Neither he nor Erdedy is listening to
them.
Day speaks softly and doesn't cross his legs to
Gompert chuffs air again.
'— just a boy with a violin and a dream and special roundabout routes to school to avoid the boys who took my violin case
and played keep-away over my head with it, one summer afternoon I was upstairs in the bedroom I shared with my younger
brother, alone, practicing my violin. It was very hot, and there was an electric fan in the window, blowing out, acting as an
exhaust fan.’
'I know from
'The direction of flow is beside the point. It was on, and its position in the window made the glass of the upraised pane vibrate
somehow. It produced an odd high-pitched vibration, invariant and constant. By itself it was strange but benign. But on this one
afternoon, the fan's vibration combined with
sonance that made something h
nance that produced it.’
'A thing.’
'As the two vibrations combined, it was as if a large dark billowing shape came billowing o
be no more precise than to say large, dark, shape, and billowing, what came flapping
not had the slightest inkling was there.’
'But it was inside you, though.’
'Katherine, Kate, it was total horror. It was all horror everywhere, distilled and give
moned somehow by the odd confluence of the fan and tho
ble than I shall ever have the power to convey. I dropped my violin and ran from the room.’
'Was it triangular? The shape? When you say billowing, do you mean like a triangle?’
'Shapeless. Shapelessness was one of the horrible things about it. I can say and mean only shape, dark, and either billowing or
flapping. But because the horror receded the moment I left the room, within minutes it had become unreal. The shape and horror.
It seemed to have been my imagination, some random bit of psychic flatulence, an anomaly.’ 
A mirthless laugh into the ankle. 'Alcoholics Anomalous.’
Day hasn't switched legs or moved, and he isn't looking at her ear or her scalp, which are in view. 'In just the way any child
will probe a wound or pick at a scab I returned shortly to the room and the fan and picked up the violin again. And produced the
reso
malevolent lonely voided space. It was the worst thing I have ever confronted.’
went back up there and brought it back. And it was inside you.’
pe began rising out of my mind's corner on
its o
nt for a year. I lived in horror of it for a year, as a child,
neve
ften. Every few months it would rise inside me.’
ace or conversation. Day doesn't seem to be addressing anybody in particular. 'The last time it ever rose
up b laude. One
soph
orse now that I was older.’
e didn't try to comfort me. He spoke very little, just sat up with me. We didn't become friends. By
grad
n his sleep cries out something that sounds like 'For God's sake no Mr. Ho don't light it!' His swollen black eyes and
R.E iturs, plus the capering 130-kilo infant on the viewer, plus Day and Gompert conversing while both staring into
spac ne M.'s hand-held game in the office, give the dark living room a dreamy and
alm
r twenty years. But I've not forgotten. And the
wor
erstood the term hell as of that summer day and that night in the sophomore dormitory. I understood what people meant
by h ings.’
hey mean a place.' Kate Gompert is now looking at him. Her face doesn't look
bett from having been contorted.
rom that day, whether I could articulate it satisfactorily or not,' Day says, holding the knee of the leg just crossed, 'I
und d on an intuitive level why people killed themselves. If I had to go for any length of time with that feeling I'd surely kill
mys
up from Schtitt's crow's nest high overhead, and sometimes you could hear the weatherman's pointer
nance again immediately. And immediately again the black flapping shape rose in my mind again. It was a bit like a sail, or a
small part of the wing of something far too large to be seen in totality. It was total psychic horror: death, decay, dissolution, cold
empty black
'But you still forgot and
Completely incongruously, Ken Erdedy says 'His head's shaped like a mushroom.' Day has no idea what he was referring to
or talking about.
'Set free somehow by that one-day-only resonance of violin and fan, the dark sha
wn. I dropped the violin again and ran from the room once again, clutching my head at the front and back, but this time it did
not recede.’
'The triangular horror.’
'It was as if I'd awakened it and now it was active. It came and we
r knowing when it would rise up billowing and blot out all light. After a year it receded. I think I was ten. But not all the way.
I'd awakened it somehow. Every so o
It isn't like a real interf
illowing was my second year of college. I attended Brown University in Providence RI, graduating magna cum
omore night it came up out of nowhere, the black shape, for the first time in years.’
'But there was an inevitability-feeling about it, too, when it came.’
'It is the most horrible feeling I have ever imagined, much less felt. There is no possible way death can feel as bad. It rose up.
It was w
'Tell me all about it.’
'I thought I'd have to hurl myself out of my dormitory's window. I simply could not live with how it felt.’
Gompert's head isn't all the way up, but now it's about halfway up; her forehead has a major red impression-spot from her
ankle-bone. She's looking roughly halfway between straight ahead and Day beside her. 'And there was this idea underneath that
you'd brought it on, that you'd wakened it up. You went back up to the fan that second time. You like despised yourself for waking
it up.’
Day is looking straight ahead. Mr. Bouncety-Bounce's head is in no way mushroom-shaped, though it is large and — in the
rubber infant-mask — apt to appear to the adult viewer kind of grotesque. 'Some boy I hardly knew in the room below mine heard
me staggering around whimpering at the top of my lungs. He came up and sat up with me until it went away. It took most of the
night. We didn't converse; h
uation I'd forgotten his name and major. But on that night he seemed to be the piece of string by which I hung suspended over
hell itself.’
Green i
.M.'s non sequ
e, all backed by the blurps and wonks of Ge
ost surreal atmosphere.
Day finally uncrosses his legs and switches them. 'It's never come back. Ove
st times I have felt since then were like a day at the foot-masseur's compared to the feeling of that black sail or wing rising
inside me.’
'Billowing.’
'Not the nuts Jesus God not the nutsss.’
'I und
ell. They did not mean the black sail. They meant the associated feel
'Or the corner it came up out of, inside, if t
er but does look different. Her neck's clearly stiff
'F
erstoo
elf.’
'Time in the shadow of the wing of the thing too big to see, rising.’
'Oh God please,' Green says very distinctly.
Day says: 'There is no way it could feel worse.’
11 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
Apparently some higher-up had sent Mary Esther Thode out on her little yellow Vespa with the order for their match; she'd
pulled up alongside Stice and Wayne just as they cleared the Hammond golf course, Hal a good half km. behind them with
galumphers Kornspan and Kahn. Schtitt was inscrutable about the whole thing. The match wasn't like a ladder-challenge; Stice
and Hal were in different age-divisions this year. The match was more like maybe an exhibition, and by the second set, as people
got done with the weight room and showers, it was attended like one. The match. Helen Steeply of Moment, possessed of a certain
thuggish allure but hardly the pericardium-piercer that Orin had made her sound like, to Hal, sat through the whole thing,
accompanied for the first set by Aubrey deLint before Thierry Poutrincourt stole his spot on the bleacher. It was the first highcaliber junior tennis she'd ever seen, she said, the massive journalist. They played on #6, the best of the east Show Courts. Also
the scene of some of the recent Eschaton's worst carnage. It was a conditioning-heavy day, a very light schedule of matches. Bags
of smoke burped steadily 
tapp
io's police lock protruding and casting a weird needly shadow slanted
nort
as almost more like a grimace. Orders that deLint keep the mammoth soft-profiler
in d
ld, the
sun
thected profiler,
who
dow covered the north halves of the courts around noon and all through the P.M. wheeled around
grad
f waited as long as possible before its erection. There was no indication Hal even saw it, the shadow,
hun
rhit the
first
 a box on
ing absently on the transom's iron. The only other thing nearby was down on #10, a challenge in Girls' 14's, two baseliners
sending parabolas back and forth: ponytails, an air of baseline attrition, the ball's high heavy arc that of a loogy spat for distance.
Shaw and Axford were also way out on =0=23, warming up. No one paid them or the 14's much mind. The bleachers behind the
Show Court filled steadily up. Schtitt had Mario film the whole first set from above, leaning way out over the transom's railing
with Watson braced and gripping his vest from behind, Mar
heast of Court 9's net.
'This is the first real match I've seen, after hearing so much about the junior tour,' Helen Steeply told deLint, trying to cross
her legs on a cramped bleacher a few tiers from the top. Aubrey deLint's smile was notoriously bad, his face seeming to break into
crescents and shards, wholly without cheer. It w
irect sight at all times were explicit and emphatic. Helen Steeply had a notebook, and deLint was filling in both players' names
on performance charts Schtitt won't ever let anyone look at.
The P.M. was moving fast from a chilly noon cloud-cover into blue autumn glory, but in the first set it was still very co
still pale and seeming to flutter as if poorly wired. Hal and Stice didn't have to stretch and barely warmed up at all, after the
run. They'd changed clothes and were both expressionless. Stice was in all-black, Hal in E.T.A. sweats with his left shoe's upper
bulging distended around his AirStirrup brace.
A born net-man, Ortho Stice played with a kind of rigid, liquid grace, like a panther in a back-brace. He was shorter than Hal
but better-built and with quicker feet. A southpaw with factory-painted W's on his Wilson Pro Staff 5.8 si's.
Hal was left-handed too, which complicated strategy and percentages hideously, deLint told the journalist beside him.
The Darkness's service motion was in the McEnroe-Esconja tradition, legs splayed, feet parallel, a figure off an Egyptian
frieze, side so severely to the net he's almost facing away. Both arms out straight and stiff on the serve's downswing. Hal bobbed
on his feet's balls a little in the ad court, waiting. Stice started his service-motion motion in little segments — it looks a little like
bad animation — then grimaced, tossed, pivoted netward and served it with a hard flat spang way out to Hal's forehand, pulling
Hal wide. The finish of Stice's pivot lets his momentum carry him naturally up to net, following the serve. Hal lunged for the serve
and chipped a little forehand return down the line and scrambled right to get back into court. The return was lucky, a feeble chip
that just cleared the net's tape, so shallow that Stice had to half-volley it at the service line, still moving in, his backhand twohanded and clumsy for half-volleys; he had to sort of scoop it and hit up soft so it wouldn't float out deep. Axiom: the man who
has to hit up from the net is going to get passed. And Stice's half-volley landed in the ad court squishy and slow and sat up for Hal,
who was waiting for it. Hal's stick was back for the forehand, waiting, and there was a moment of total mentation as the ball hung
there. Statistically, Hal was book to pass a left-handed volleyer cross-court off a ball this ripe, though he also always loved a good
humiliating topspin lob, and Stice's fractional chance at saving the point was to guess what Hal would do — Stice couldn't crowd
the net because Hal would put it up over him; he stayed a couple stick-lengths off the net, leaning for a cross. Everything seemed
to hang distended in air now so clear it seemed washed, after the clouds. The bleachers' people could feel Hal feel Stice letting the
point go, inside, figuring it lost, knowing he could only guess and stab, hoping. Little hope of Hal fucking up: Hal Incandenza
does not fuck up passes off floater half-volleys. Hal's forehand's wind-up was nicely disguised, prepped for either lob or pass.
When he hit it so hard his forearm's musculature stood starkly out it was a pass but not cross-court; he went inside-out on it, a flat
forehand as hard as he could from the baseline's center back toward Stice's deuce-sideline. Stice had finally guessed lob at the start
of the stroke and had half-turned to sprint back for where it would land, and the inside-out pass wrong-footed him; he could do no
more than stand there flat-footed and watching as the fresh ball landed a meter fair to get Hal back to deuce in the fifth game.
There was applause off thirty hands for the point as a whole, which was faultless and on Hal's part imaginative, anti-book. One of
very few total inspired points from Incandenza, deLint's chart would show. Neither player's face moved as a couple people
shouted for Hal. The basic ten-level R.A.S.U.265255 from the Universal Bleacher Co. sat right behind the court. At the start it was
mostly staff and the A's who were running alongside when Thode brought Stice and Hal the directive to play. But the stands
gradually filled as word got down to the locker rooms that The Darkness was playing 18's A-2 dead-even in the first set of
something Schtitt had actually dispatched a scooter to order. The bleachers' E.T.A.s hunched forward with hands warmed in the
crease between hamstrings and calves, or else gloved and layered and stretched out with their heads and bottoms and heels on
three different levels, watching both sky and play. The lozenges of shadow from the court's mesh fences elongated as the sun
wheeled southwest to west. Several sets of legs and sneakers hung swinging from the transom above. Mario allowed himself
several reaction-shots from staff and partisans in the bleachers. Aubrey deLint spent the set with the punter's ca-
 allegedly came to see Hal only about Orin but whom Charles Tavis won't let see Hal yet, even chaperoned, Tavis's reasons
for the reticence too detailed for Helen Steeply to understand, probably, but she was watching from the Show-bleachers' top row,
poised over a notebook, wearing a fuchsia ski cap with a rooster-comb top instead of a pompom top, blowing into her fist, her
weight making the bleacher below her bow and inclining deLint oddly toward her. For the spectators not perched on the transom
overhead, the players looked waffle-cut by the chain-link fencing. The green windscreens that wrecked spectation were used only
in the spring in the weeks right after the Lung's disassembly. DeLint hadn't stopped talking into the big lady's ear.
All the E.T.A. players loved the Show Courts 6-9 because they loved to be watched, and also hated the Show Courts because
the transom's crow's-nested sha
ually east like some giant hooded shadowed moving presence, brooding. Sometimes just the sight of Schtitt's little head's
shadow could make a younger kid on the Show Courts clutch and freeze. By Hal and Stice's seventh game, the sky was cloudless,
and the transom's monolithic shadow, black as ink, gave everyone watching the fantods as it elongated along the nets, completely
obscuring Slice when he followed a serve in. Another advantage of the Lung was that it afforded no overhead view, which was
one more reason why staf
ched and waiting for Stice.
The Darkness splayed out stiff on the deuce side of the center line, ratcheting slowly into his service motion. He ove
 serve long and Hal angled it softly off-court, moving two steps in for the second ball. Stice hit his second serve as hard as he
could again and netted it, and pursed his thick lips a little as he walked into the net's shadow to retrieve the ball, and Hal jogged
over to the fence behind the next court to get the ball he'd angled over. DeLint was putting a pejorative hieroglyphic in
his c
's ceiling.
Arsenal, Poor Tony Krause hunched forward in a stall in his ghastly suspenders and purloined cap, his elbows on his
knee
down Commonwealth on Comm. and Cook St. and were seated at a table in Reference,
Pem er to turn pages.
ere was no talking — the only sound was the vent and their breath.
Orin
ach, and there was a solid pock as this
Stic
o track. Hal's awkward return had too much slice, and floated, and Stice hurtled
forw r. There was mild applause. DeLint invited
Hel
e, two off double-faults; but deLint still maintained Stice was wise.
l several times, leaning forward, lined up splayed and violently sideways. He went
into rom the pocket of her fiberfill parka; Stice cracked it flat
dow
thing hit and skidded, pausing before indicating his
call
either.’
 'You hit it too hard to see, you deserve the point.’
d and nodded, chewing. 'You take the next gimme then.' He sliced two balls soft so they ended their roll down
near
hart marked STICE.
At just this moment, @1200 meters east and downhill and one level below ground, Ennet House live-in Staff Don Gately lay
deeply asleep in his Lone-Rangerish sleeping mask, his snores rattling the deinsulated pipes along his little room
Four-odd clicks to the northwest in the men's room of the Armenian Foundation Library, right near the onion-domed
Watertown
s and his face in his hands, getting a whole new perspective on time and the various passages and personae of time.
M. M. Pemulis and J. G. Struck, wet-haired after their p.m. runs, had blarneyed their way past the library-attendant at the
B.U. School of Pharmacy 2.8 clicks
ulis's yachting cap pushed way back to accommodate his rising eyebrows, licking his fing
H. Steeply's green sedan with its neuralgiac full-front Nunhagen ad on the side sat in an Authorized Guest parking spot in the
E.T.A. lot.
Between appointments,266256 in an office whose west windows yielded no view of the match, Charles Tavis had his head
mashed up against the upholstered seat-rail of his sofa, his arm under the gray-and-red ruffle and sweeping back and forth for the
bathroom scale he keeps under there.
Avril Incandenza's whereabouts on the grounds were throughout this interval unknown.
At just this moment M.S.T., Orin Incandenza was once again embracing a certain 'Swiss' hand-model before a wall-width
window in a rented suite halfway up a different tall hotel (from before) in Phoenix AZ. The win-dowlight was fiery with heat.
Way below, tiny cars' roofs glared so bright with reflected light their colors were obscured. Pedestrians hunched and sprinted
between different areas of shade and refrigeration. The cityscape's glass and metal twinkled but seemed to sag — the whole vista
looked somehow stunned. The cool air through the room's vent whispered. They'd put down their glasses of ice and come together
upright and embraced. The embrace was not like a hug. Th
's linen knee probed the deltoid fork of the hand-model's parted legs. He let the 'Swiss' woman grind against the muscular
knee of his good leg. They got so close no light shone between them, and ground together. Her lids fluttered; his closed; their
breath became somehow coded. Again the concentrated tactile languor of the sexual mode. Again they stripped each other to the
waist and she, in that same kind of jitterbug jape they didn't have the breath to laugh at, she hopped up at him and forked her legs
the same way over his shoulders and arched back until his arm stopped her fall and he supported her like that, the left hand horned
with old callus at the small of her satiny back, and bore her.
Sometimes it's hard to believe the sun's the same sun over all different parts of the planet. The NNE sun was at this same
moment the color of hollandaise and gave off no heat. Between points, both Hal and Slice switched their sticks to their right hands
and clamped their left hands tight under their arms to keep from losing sensation in the chill. Stice was double-faulting more than
his average because he was trying to get enough on his second serve to follow it credibly to net. DeLint estimated he was charting
Stice at one double-fault per 1.3 games, and his a./d.f. ratio267257 was an undistinguished .6, but he, deLint, told Helen Steeply of
Moment, spread way out next to him on the third row from the top and using Gregg shorthand, deLint told this Ms. Steeply that
Stice was nevertheless wise to crank the second serve and eat the occasional double-fault. Stice wound up to serve so stiff, his
motion so sprocketed and serial, that the journalist told deLint Stice looked to her as if he'd learned to serve by studying still
photos of the motion's different stages, no offense intended. There was none of real highspeed motion's liquid flow until the very
end, when Stice pivoted toward the net and seemed to sort of fall out into the court, his tennis racquet whirling behind his back
and snapping upward to impact the yellow ball hanging at just the height of his maximum re
e cracked it flat into Orin's brother's body, handcuffing Hal at such speeds the ball's movement presented only as afterimage,
the creamy retinal trail of something too fast t
ard to volley it chest-high, blocking it acute into open court for a clean winne
en Steeply to note that The Darkness really won that point on the serve itself. Hal Incandenza walked to the fence to retrieve
the ball, impassive, wiping his nose against his sweatshirt's sleeve; ad-in. Hal was up 5-4 in the first and had saved three ads off
Stice's fifth service gam
'Hal's got to the point in the last year here where a kid's only real chance is to totally press, attack at all times, whale the serve,
haul ass to the net, assume the aggressor role.’
'Does Herr Schtitt wear eye makeup?' Helen Steeply asked him. 'I was noticing.’
'You stay back against this Hal kid, you try to out-think him and move him around, he'll yank you back and forth and chew
you up and spit you out and step on the remains. We've spent years getting him to this point. Nobody stays back and out-controls
Incandenza anymore.’
Pretending to flip to a fresh page, Helen Steeply dropped her pen, which fell into the bleachers' struts and supports and
clattered as only something dropped into a system of metal bleachers can clatter. The prolonged noise made Stice take some extra
bounces before he served. He bounced the bal
 his odd segmented windup; Helen Steeply produced another pen f
n the center, aiming for an ace on the service lines' T. It went by Hal unplayable and literally too close to call. There are no
linesmen for internal E.T.A. matches. Hal looked down the line at where the
, the hand to his cheek indicating deliberation. He shrugged and shook his head and laid a hand out flat in the air before him to
signify to Slice he was calling the serve good. This meant game Stice. The Darkness was walking toward the net, kneading his
neck, looking at where Hal was still standing.
'We can go on and play two,' Stice said. 'Didn't see it n
Hal was coming in closer to Stice because he was going to the net-post for his towel. 'Not your job to see it.' He looked
unhappy and tried to smile.
Stice shrugge
 the opposite baseline, where Hal could use them to serve. The Darkness still made huge man-dibular chewing faces on-court
even though he hadn't been allowed to chew gum in play since he accidentally inhaled gum and had to be Heimliched by his
opponent in the semis of last spring's Easter Bowl. 
'Ortho's saying how the next debatable call goes immediately to Hal; they don't take two,' deLint said, darkening in halfsqua
 hair in an
anch
 Hal dry off his leather grip with a white towel as
Stic
and thoroughly unchildlike, his gaze somehow
exte
lling out wide after it hit Stice's ad sideline, carrying it away from the boy in black's outstretched
racq ice at a dead run might get his strings on the ball, but the ball stayed tantalizingly just
out ourt diagonal, and it passed Slice's racquet half a meter past its rim, and Slice's
mom
 or three shots ahead. He won that point on the deep forehand after the
serv the angle open up. Though the serve set the whole thing up in
adva out the risk of much pace on it. The kid doesn't need pace, we've helped him find.’
long. He didn't used to quite have the complete game to be able to do this. Slice the court
up i dden you see light through one of the chinks and you see he's been setting up the angle
sinc It makes you think of chess.’
, filling in a square.
res on the two charts.
'Take two?’
'Play a let, babe. Do it over. Two serves: one point.' Aubrey deLint was a lightly pockmarked man with thick yellow
orman's helmety style and a hypertensive flush, and eyes, oval and close-set and lightless, that seemed like a second set of
nostrils in his face. 'Do a whole lot of sports at Moment do you?’
'So they're being sporting,' Steeply said. 'Generous, fair.’
'We inculcate that as a priority here,' deLint said, gesturing vaguely at the space around them, head bent to his charts.
'They seem like friends.’
'The angle here for Moment might be the good-friends-off-the-court-and-remorseless-pitiless-foes-on-court angle.’
'I mean they seem like friends even playing,' Helen Steeply said, watching
e jumped up and down in place back at his deuce corner, one hand in his armpit.
DeLint's laugh sounded to Steeply's keen ear like the laugh of a much older and less fit man, the mucoidal fist-at-chest laugh
of a lap-blanketed old man in a lawn chair on his gravel backyard in Scottsdale AZ, hearing his son say his wife claimed no longer
to know who he was. 'Don't kid yourself, babe,' de Lint got out. The Vaught twins on the bleacher below looked up and around
and pretended to shush him, the left mouth grinning, deLint with that bad cold-eyed shard of a smile back at them as Hal
Incandenza bounced the ball three times and went into his own service motion.
Several little boys were strung busily out along the sides of a small utility tunnel twenty-six meters below the Show Courts.
Steeply's face looked as if the journalist were trying to think of pithy images for a motion as unexceptional and fluid as Hal
Incandenza's serve. At the start a violinist maybe, standing alert with his sleek head cocked and racket up in front and the hand
with the ball at the racket's throat like a bow. The down-together-up-together of the downswing and toss could be a child making
angels in the snow, cheeks rosy and eyes at the sky. But Hal's face was pale
nding only half a meter in front of him. He looked nothing like the punter. The service motion's middle might be a man at a
precipice, falling forward, giving in sweetly to his own weight, and the serve's terminus and impact a hammering man, the driven
nail just within range at the top of his tiptoed reach. But all these were only parts, and made the motion seem segmented, when the
smaller crew-cutted jowly boy was the one with the stuttered motion, the man of parts. Steeply had played tennis only a couple
times, with his wife, and had felt ungainly and simian out there. The punter's discourses on the game had been lengthy but not
much use. It was unlikely that any one game figured much in the Entertainment.
Hal ïncandenza's first serve was a tactically aggressive shot but not immediately identifiable as such. Stice wanted to serve so
hard he could set himself up to put the ball away on the next shot, up at net. Hal's serve seemed to set in motion a much more
involved mechanism, one that took several exchanges to reveal itself as aggressive. His first serve hadn't Stice's pace, but it had
depth, plus a topspin Hal achieved with an arched back and faint brushing action over the back of the ball that made the serve
curve visibly in the air, egg-shaped with spin, to land deep in the box and hop up high, so that Stice couldn't do more than send
back a deep backhand chip from shoulder-height, and then couldn't come in behind a return that'd been robbed of all pace. Stice
moved to the baseline's center as the chip floated back to Hal. Hal's pivot moved him right so he could take it on the forehand,268258 another looper dripping with top, right back in the same corner he'd served to, so that Stice had to stop and sprint
back the same way he'd come. Stice drove this backhand hard down the line to Hal's forehand, a blazing thing that made the
audience inhale, but as the samizdat's director's other son glided a few strides left Steeply could see that he now had a whole open
court to hit cross-court into, Stice having hit so hard he'd backpedalled a bit off the shot and was now scrambling to get back out
of the deuce corner, arid Hal hit the flat textbook drive cross-court into green lined space, hard but not flamboyantly so, and the
diagonal of the ball kept it trave
uet, and for a second it looked as if St
of reach, still travelling at a severe cross-c
entum carried him almost halfway into the next court. Stice slowed to a jog to go retrieve the ball. Hal stood slightly hipshot
on the ad side, waiting for Stice to get back and let him serve again. DeLint, whose peripheral vision's acuity and disguise was an
E.T.A. legend, observed the big journalist chew her nib for a second and then put down nothing more than the Gregg ideogram for
pretty, shaking her fuchsia cap.
'Wasn't that pretty,' he said blandly.
Steeply rooted for a hankie. 'Not exactly.’
'Hal's in essence a torturer, if you want his essence as a player, instead of a straight-out killer like Stice or the Canadian
Wayne,' deLint said. 'This is why you don't stay back or play safe against Hal. This way of the ball seeming just in reach, to keep
you trying, running. He yanks you around. Always two
e — the second he had Stice wrong-footed you could see
nce, and with
'When might I get a chance to talk to him?’
'Incandenza took a lot of bringing a
nto sections and chinks, then all of a su
e the start of the point.
The journalist blew her red nose. ' "Chess on the run."
'Nice term.’
Hal went into his service motion to the ad court.
'Do the students play chess here?’
A mirthless chuckle. 'No time.’
'Do you play chess?’
Stice hit a backhand winner off Hal's second serve; mild applause.
'I don't have time to play anything,' deLint said
You could tell by the sound that the other boy's racquet was strung tighter than Hal's.
'When do I get to sit down with Hal directly?’
terviewed. The Founder let you guys on the grounds, versus Tavis this is an exception your
even
 for your alumnus, the punter.’
ike he was whistling even though no whistling-sound was emerging. 'We've never let
som
y that was supposed to let you know you had very little of his
atte
 up how to do questions with him after a while. Tavis you have to back into a Yes-No corner where you can finally
say
t, they get
mat
' gesturing at Stice running madly up for a drop-volley that
stop
t. Then they show talent, start winning, become big
fish junior's head,
tale back to being little fish and to get savaged and feel small and see and develop. To
forg
 smiled coolly at his charts. 'Never had the sort of ranking or promise this issue'd even come up for me.’
did.’
nswing. Now his little brother's
got A couple of the girls — Kent, Caryn and Sharyn here,' indicating
the he really gifted ones, the ones that make it out of here still on the upswing, if they get to the
Sho
ofessional you mean.’
d Academy. I say you do not get it. The point here
for t culcate their sense that it's never about being seen. It's never. If they can get that inculcated, the Show
won
o stop getting poked at or profiled, when their blossom starts to
fade
o profile somebody.’
 flew off his frame and way down to where the girls were sending each other squeaks and
lobs
'I don't know. I don't think you do.’
The journalist's rapid head-movement reconfigured the flesh of her neck. 'Pardon me?’
'It's not my decision. My guess is you don't. Dr. Tavis didn't already tell you?’
T really couldn't tell what he was telling me.’
'We've never had a kid here in
 getting in.’
'I'm here for background only,
DeLint was making his lips look l
ebody do any kind of interview on a kid here while he's still in training and inculcation.’
'Does the student have some sort of say in who he talks to and why? What if the boy wants to chat with me about his brother's
transition from tennis to football?’
DeLint kept his concentration on the match and the chart in a wa
ntion. 'Talk to Tavis about it.’
'I was in there for over two hours.’
'You pick
I need a Yes or a No. It takes about twenty minutes if you're sharp. This is your whole business, getting answers out of people.
The answer's not for me to officially say, but I'm guessing a No. The Boston press guys come around after a big even
ch results and physical stats and hometowns and nothing more.’
'Moment is a national magazine for and about exceptional people, not some sportswriter with a cigar and a deadline.’
'It's a command-decision, babe. I'm not in command. I know they teach us to teach that this place is about seeing instead of
being seen.’
'I'm here only for the human-interest perspective of a talented boy on his talented brother's bold transition to a major sport
where he's shown himself to be even more talented. One exceptional brother on another. Hal is not the profile's focus.’
'Get Tavis in the right corner and he'll tell you about seeing and being seen. These kids, the best of them are here to learn to
see. Schtitt's thing is self-transcendence through pain. These kids —
ped rolling well inside the service line; mild applause — 'they're here to get lost in something bigger than them. To have it
stay the way it was when they started, the game as something bigger, at firs
 in their ponds out there in their hometowns, stop being able to get lost inside the game and see. Fucks with a
nt. They pay top dollar to come here and go
et themselves as objects of attention for a few years and see what they can do when the eyes are off them. They didn't come
here to get read about as some soft-news item or background. Babe.’
DeLint read Steeply's expression as some kind of tic. The tiniest tuft of nostril-hair protruded from one of her nostrils, which
deLint found repellent. She said, 'Were you ever written about, as a player?’
DeLint
'But some of these do. Hal's brother
DeLint felt along his lip's outline with his pencil, sniffed. 'Orin was OK. Orin was essentially a one-trick pony as a player.
And between you and me and the fence he was kind of a head-case. His game left here on the dow
a future in tennis if he wants. And Ortho. Wayne for sure.
Vaught-apparition below them. 'T
w — ‘
'Meaning pr
'In the Show they'll get all they want of being made into statues to be looked at and poked at and discussed, and then some.
For now they're here to get to be the ones who look and see and forget getting looked at, for now.’
'But even you call it "The Show." They'll be entertainers.’
'You bet your ass they will be.’
'So audiences will be the whole point. Why not also prepare them for the stresses of entertaining an audience, get them used
to being seen?’
The two boys were at the near net-post, Stice blowing his nose into a towel. DeLint made kind of a show of putting his
clipboard down. 'Assume wrongly for a second that I can speak for the Enfiel
he best kids is to in
't fuck them up, Schtitt thinks. If they can forget everything but the game when all of you out there outside the fence see only
them and want only them and the game's incidental to you, for you it's about entertainment and personality, it's about the statue,
but if they can get inculcated right they'll never be slaves to the statue, they'll never blow their brains out after winning an event
when they win, or dive out a third-story window when they start t
. Whether or not you mean to, babe, you chew them up, it's what you do.’
'We chew statues?’
'Whether you mean to or no. You, Moment, World Tennis, Self, Inter-Lace, the audiences. The crowds in Italy fucking
literally. It's the nature of the game. It's the machine they're all dying to throw themselves into. They don't know the machine. But
we do. Gerhardt's teaching them to see the ball out of a place inside that can't be chewed. It takes time and total focus. The man's a
fucking genius. Profile Schtitt, if you want t
'And I'm not going to be allowed even to ask the students what it looks like, this inside chew-proof place. It's a secret place.’
Hal mishit a second serve and it
, and Stice had now broken him to go up 6-5, and the murmurs in the bleachers were like a courtroom at an unpleasant
revelation. DeLint rounded his lips and made a kind of bovine sound in Ortho Stice's direction. Hal chipped his balls out along the 
baseline and made some small adjustments in his cross-hatched strings as he walked around for the side-change. A couple of the
nastier kids applauded Hal's mishit a little.
'Get sardonic with me all you want. I already said it's not my command-decision. I wouldn't get sardonic with Tavis, though.’
'But if it were. Your command.’
'Lady, if it was me you'd be pressing your nose between the bars of the gate down there is as far in as you'd get. You're
coming into a little slice of space and/or time that's been carved out to protect talented kids from exactly the kind of activities you
guy nyway? The kid appears four times a game, never gets hit, doesn't even wear pads. A onetrick Wayne? A more dramatic story, geopolitics, privation, exile, drama. A better player than Hal even. A
mor med like a fucking missile at the Show, maybe the Top Five if he doesn't fuck up or burn down. Wayne's
your y we'll keep you off him as long as he's here.’
ound at the scalps and knees in the stands, the bags of gear and a couple incongruous cans of
furn
 Helen Steeply
tor
iness, it has been my good fortune to meet your adolescent friend, Mr. Orin J. Incandenza, and to have
beco mplishments in not only sports but widerang
riting to ask for your cooperation in contacting you with questions which you could answer in writing, as I am
info le outside your home and office.
 response to this request at your earliest convenience, Etc. etc. etc.
tings*
FESSIONAL SAY IT FOR YOU
 Family of Gags 'N Notions, Pre-Packaged Emotions, Jokes and Surprises and Wacky
Disg
nd So On November Y.D.A.U.
 Helen Steeply
tor
 Tallat-Kelpsa, Philip Traub, Tim ('Sleepy T.P.') Peterson, Carl Whale,
Kie
 w/ parget-layer, sound rather like the stealthy dry scuttle of rodents, vermin. And this heightens the
exci
s come in here to do. Why Orin, a
 pony. Why not John
e complete game. Ai
 ideal food-group. Which is wh
The soft-profiler looked ar
iture polish. 'Carved out of what, though, this place?’
From the Desk of
Contributing Edi
Moment Magazine
13473 Blasted Expanse Blvd.
Tucson, AZ, 857048787/2
Mr. Marlon K. Bain Saprogenic Greetings, Inc. BPL-Waltham Bldg. 1214 Totten Pond Road Waltham, MA, 021549872/4.
November Y.D.A.U.
Dear Mr. Bain:
In Phoenix on other bus
me intrigued with the possibilities of a profile of the Incandenza family and its acco
ing topics such as independent film circa metropolitan Boston, past and present.
I am w
rmed by Mr. Orin Incandenza you dislike to meet peop
I am hoping to hear from you in
Saprogenic Gree
WHEN YOU CARE ENOUGH TO LET A PRO
*a proud member of the ACME
uises
Ms. Helen Steepley A
Dear Ms. Steepley: Fire away.
V.D., MK Bain
Saprogenic Greetings/ACME
From the Desk of
Contributing Edi
Moment Magazine
13473 Blasted Expanse Blvd.
Tucson, AZ, 857048787/2
Mr. MK Bain Saprogenic Greetings Inc. BPL-Waltham Bldg. 1214 Totten Pond Road Waltham, MA, 021549872/4.
November Y.D.A.U.
Dear Mr. Bain:
Q, Q, Q (Q, Q[Q], Q, Q, Q), Q, Q (Q), Q, Q.269259
Carved out of sedimentary shale and ferrous granite and generic morphic crud — at more or less the same time the hilltop's
bulge was shaved off and rolled and impacted level for tennis — are E.T.A.'s abundant tunnels. There are access tunnels and
hallway tunnels, with rooms and labs and Pump Room's Lung-nexus off both sides, utility tunnels and storage tunnels and little
blunt off-tunnels connecting tunnels to other tunnels. Maybe about sixteen different tunnels in all, in a shape that's more generally
ovoid than anything else.
11/11, 1625h., LaMont Chu, Josh Gopnik, Audern
ran McKenna — the bulk of the ambulatory sub-14 male Eschatonites — plus ten-year-old Kent Blott — are 26 meters
directly below the Hal/Darkness match's Show Court with Glad Handle-Tie270260 trashbags and B.P. low-diffusion compact
mercuric flashlights. Plus Chu has a clipboard with a pen attached to its clamp with twine. The sounds of competitive sneakermovement and spectatorial bleacher-squeaks on the surface, travelling down through meters of compacted crud and polymerized
cement tunnel-ceiling
tement that's part of why they're really down here.
One part of the reason they're down here is that small U.S. boys seem to have this fetish for getting down in the enclosed
fundaments underneath things — tunnels, caves, ventilator-shafts, the horrific areas beneath wooden porches — rather the way
older U.S. boys like great perspectival heights and spectacular views encompassing huge swaths of territory, this latter fetish
accounting for why E.T.A.'s hilltop site is one of its trump-cards in the recruiting war with Port Washington and other Easternseaboard academies.
Another part is a semi-punitive shit detail in which certain players — judged to have been involved in the recent Eschaton
nonstrategic-combat debacle, but who are uninjured271261 and not in the much severer hot water that the Big Buddies on the
scene are in — have been punitively remanded below ground in P.M. shifts on what's supposed to constitute an unpleasant chore,
to scout out the tunnelled route the TesTar Ail-Weather Inflatable Structures Corp.'s professional guys will have to take as they
haul out from the Lung-Storage Room the fiberglass struts and crosspieces and dendri-urethane folds that compose the Lung, for
erection of the Lung, when the E.T.A. administration finally decides that the late-fall weather has gone beyond character-building 
and become an impediment to development and morale. This will be soon. Because the prorectors live in rooms off the larger
tunnels and F. D. V. Harde's Physical Plant and Maintenance guys have their offices and supplies down here, and because Dr.
James Incandenza's old optics and editing facilities are down here off one of the main tunnels and get used for Leith/Ogilvie
classes in entertainment production and for optical science tutorials etc., and because a couple of the secondary and off-tunnels are
used for temporary storage by departing seniors who can't tote eight or more years' worth of accumulated stuff in one postgraduate load — especially if they jet off to some novitiate-pro Satellite circuit for the summer, because that means air travel, two
bags plus gear, max — some of the tunnels become badly littered in the warm season with trash-type material. And sometimes
there's bulky-possession-type overflow from the little curved storage tunnels off the prorectors' hallway. Smaller kids are perfect
for recons into low narrow tunnels partly blocked with dross, and even though it's no secret around E.T.A. that the smaller boys
spend a fair amount of time down in the tunnels anyway, a retributive aspect is lent to this recon-detail by making the kids take
down Handle-Tie trashbags to clear away littered exam papers and lab-handouts, calculator-batteries and banana peels and Kodiak
smokeless-tobacco tins and spirals of synthetic-gut racquet-string, and Maintenance guys' hideous cigar-butts — Sleepy T.P. finds
two bright Trojan wrappers just off the prorectors' hallway-tunnel, and then a couple meters farther along the floor the vermiform
glea
t's a used condom — and empty boxes of
com
hem on edge. Philip Traub keeps making little squeaky
nois
rfait glasses, fruit peels and AminoPal
ener
ed to like to keep around to watch the static, and, along
the y half-decayed into
m of an actual condom, and there's some high-register debate about whether it's a used condom or not, and poor old Kent
Blott is finally put in charge of picking it up and putting it in a trashbag, just in case i
plimentary corporate gear, and full boxes of faggy or poorly-absorbent gear nobody wants, and Habitant can-wrappers, and
senior trunks and dorm-sized fridgelettes, etc.; and also to move whatever boxes they can heft, clear them out of the TesTar guys'
access-route into the Lung-Storage and Pump Rooms; and LaMont Chu is supposed to note the location of any boxes or objects
too bulky for them to move out of the way, and beefy custodial guys will be dispatched to handle them as they see fit.
This is why a fair number of the smaller E.T.A. males don't see Stice take a set off Hal Incandenza and nearly beat him, is that
they were remanded down here by Neil Hartigan right after post-conditioning showers.
As noted already, they don't much mind it, being down here, now in one of the child-size-diametered off-tunnels between the
prorectors' hallway and the Lung-Storage Room. The Eschatonites are down here quite a lot anyway. In fact the sub-14 E.T.A.s
historically have a kind of Tunnel Club. Like many small boys' clubs, the Tunnel Club's unifying raison d'etre is kind of vague.
Tunnel Club activities mostly involve congregating informally in the better-lit main tunnels and hanging out and catching each
other in lies about their lives and careers before E.T.A., and recapitulating the most recent Eschaton (usually only about five a
term); and the Club's only formal activity is sitting around with a yellowed copy of Robert's Rules endlessly refining and
amending the rules for who can and can't join the Tunnel Club. A true boy-type club, the Tunnel Club's least vague raison d'etre
has to do with exclusion. The vital No-Girls exclusion is the only ironclad part of the Tunnel Club's charter.272262 With the
exception of Kent Blott, every boy down here on this detail is an Eschatonite and a member of the Tunnel Club. Kent Blott,
ineligible for Eschaton because he's a humanities-type kid and hasn't even taken quadrivial Algebra yet, and excluded from the
Club under every incarnation of the eligibility requirements thus far, is down here solely because he was heard to maintain at
lunch that he was in the north part of the main tunnel between the Comm.-Ad. locker rooms and the subterranean laundry room
this a.m., short-cutting back to his room in West House after drills and a sauna, and claimed to have espied — scuttling out of his
mercuric light toward one of the secondary tunnels to Subdorms C and D and the East Courts and this same general tunnel-area
they're now in — to have sighted what was either a rat or, he said, what looked even more like a Concavitated feral hamster. So
the Es-chatonites are also enthusiastic to be down here for potential rodent-recon, checking out Blott's claim, and they've brought
what's either a very nervous or very excited Blott down with them, so they can trace the possible routes Blott said he saw the
rodent maybe take, filling their Glad Handle-Ties and noting heavy items along the way, and also so they can immediately
encircle and discipline Kent Blott if it turns out he was yanking people's chains. Plus they make Blott be the one to take full
trashbags and tie their plastic handles together and drag them back to where the expedition started — the entrance to the large
smooth main tunnel by the boys' sauna — since none of them enjoys dragging full trashbags solo through dark tunnels with the
rodential squeaking of match play and spectation far above. Chu holds a penlight in his teeth and writes heavy stuff down. They've
filled several bags and gotten the lighter shit stacked off back enough to create a narrow route almost all the way to the Pump
Room, around which Room hangs a strange sweet stale burny smell that none of them can place. The applause as Hal Incandenza
barely takes the first set above sounds down here like faraway rain. The off-tunnel's dark as a pocket, but warm and dry, and
there's surprisingly little dust. Ducts and coaxials running along the low ceiling make Whale and Tallat-Kelpsa have to crouch as
they walk Point, clearing boxes and trying unsuccessfully to move fridgelettes back out of the way. There are several pockets of
small but heavy dorm-size Maytag fridgelettes, the kind of thing no graduate takes with him, panelled in dark wood-grain plastic,
some of them old models with three-prong plugs instead of chargers. Some of the empty fridgelettes have been indifferently
scrubbed out and have their doors partway open and smell stale. Most of Chu's inventory for beefy-adult removal are either
fridgelettes or locked trunks full of what sound like magazines and eight-year accumulations of pennies. The muffled rodential
squeak of sneakers far overhead excites the Tunnel Club boys and puts t
es and secretly tickling the back of people's necks, causing enormous excitement and much stopping and starting and tightlyenclosed whirling around, until Kieran McKenna captures Traub tickling Josh Gopnik in the bright beam of his P.B. light and
Gopnik punches Traub in the radial nerve, and Traub clutches his arm and weeps and says he's quitting and going topside —
Traub's the youngest kid here except for Blott and is a probationary second-string launcher in most Eschatons — and they have to
stop and let Chu note and mark two discarded fridgelettes while Peterson and Gopnik try to distract and amuse Traub into staying
and not retreating back up to Nwangi and making a high-pitched stink.
Discarded fridgelettes, empty boxes, immovable and complexly-address-labelled trunks, used athletic tape and Ace bandages,
the occasional empty Visine bottle (which Blott stashes in his sweatshirt-pouch, for Mike Pemulis's next contest), Optics I & II lab
reports, broken ball machines and stray tennis balls too dead even for the repressurization machine, broken or discarded TP
cartridges of stroke-analysis filmings or worn-out entertainments, an anomalous set of pa
gy-bar-wrappers that the Club itself had left down here after meetings, discarded curls of grip and tensile string, several
incongruous barrettes, several old broadcast televisions some older kids us
seam of wall and floor, brittle limb-shaped husks of exfoliated Pledge, expanses of arm and leg alread
frag
 their Units, in which case look out Blott, is the consensus.
b does.
ows from rodents, says only a complete booger-eating
mor
-scale public-health disaster, would cause simply no end of adult running-in-circles and knuckle-biting,
and
e thing actually
head t seemed to suggest a tendency or like probability of
head
 way. Plus hamsterincu laces,
whi
erall facility hygiene, and Orkin men with beer-bellies and playing cards with naked girls in high-heeled
shoe out of the E.T.A. grounds twice a semester. None of the younger E.T.A.
boy rranean access and exclusive Clubs — none of
them en
con sy rat could give the whole Club a legit raison, an
expl d for no
goo
xt to whatever that is much less touch it.’
an be heard from far away, returning, and the distant squeak of overhead sneakers.
ying on faces. 'OK. Somebody farted.’
xt to it, Sleeps?' Chu backing up to widen his light's beam on something broad and squat and dark.
guys?’
is little unventilated space?’
hat's all.’
om fridges.’
rant dust — this comprising the bulk of the crud down here, and the kids don't much mind scanning and inventorying and
bagging it, because their minds are diverted by something else very exciting, a kind of possible raison d'etre for the Club itself,
unless Blott had been tweaking
Gopnik to a sniffling Traub, while Peterson shines his flashlight on the clipboard for Chu: 'Mary had a little lamb, its fleece
electrostatic / And everywhere that Mary went, the lights became erratic.’
Carl Whale pretends to be immensely fat and moves along the wall with a blimpish splay-legged waddle.
Peterson to Traub, while Gopnik holds the light: 'Eighteen-year-old top-ranked John Wayne / Had sex with Herr Schtitt on a
train / They had sex again/And again and again/And again and again and again,' which the slightly older kids find more
entertaining than Trau
Kent Blott asks why a wispy-dicked blubberer like Phil gets to be in the Tunnel Club while his own applications get turned
down, and Tallat-Kelpsa cuts him short by doing something to him in the dark that makes Blott shriek.
It's utterly dark except for the dime-sized discs of their low-diffusion B.P.s, because they've left the tunnels' strings of bare
overhead bulbs off, because Gopnik, who's originally from Brooklyn and kn
on would do rat-reconnaissance in the light, and it seems reasonable to assume that feral hamsters, also, have a basically ratty
attitude toward light.
Chu has Blott see whether he can lift a bulky old doorless microwave oven that's lying on its side up next to one wall, and
Blott tries and barely lifts it, and pules, and Chu marks the oven down for the adults to lift and tells Blott to drop it, which
invitation Blott takes literally, and the crash and tinkle infuriate Gopnik and McKenna, who say that scanning for rodents with
Blott is like fly-fishing with an epileptic, which cheers Traub up quite a bit.
Feral hamsters — bogey-wise right up there with mile-high toddlers, skull-deprived wraiths, carnivorous flora, and marsh-gas
that melts your face off and leaves you with exposed gray-and-red facial musculature for the rest of your ghoulish-pariah life, in
terms of late-night hair-raising Concavity narratives — are rarely sighted south of the Lucíte walls and ATH-SCME'd checkpoints
that delimit the Great Concavity, and only once in a blue moon anywhere south of like the new-border burg of Methuen MA,
whose Chamber of Commerce calls it 'The City That Interdependence Rebuilt,' and anyway pace Blott are hardly ever seen solo,
being the sort of rapacious locust-like mass-movement creature that Canadian agronomists call 'Piranha of the Plains.' An
infestation of feral hamsters in the waste-rich terrain of metro Boston, to say nothing of the clutter-tunnelled E.T.A. grounds,
would be an almost grand
 would consume megacalories of displaced pre-adolescent stress for the E.T.A. players. Every ear-cocked eye-peeled bagtoting kid in the off-tunnel this afternoon is hoping hamster in a big way, except for Kent Blott, who's hoping simply and fervently
for some sort of rodential sighting or scat-sample that'll keep him from being disciplinarily hung upside-down in a lavatory stall to
shriek until a staff-member finds him. He reminds the Tunnel Clubbers that it's not like he'd claimed he espied th
ing in this direction, he'd only seen the thing scuttling in a way tha
ing in this direction.
One whole box on its side with its frayed strapping tape split has spilled part of a load of old TP-cartridges, old and mostly
unlabelled, out onto the tunnel floor in a fannish pattern, and Gopnik and Peterson complain that the cartridge-cases' sharp edges
put holes in their Glad bags, and Blott is dispatched with three bags of cartridges and fruit rinds, each only about half full, back to
the lit vestibule outside the Comm.-Ad. tunnel's start, where a serious pile of bags is starting to pile fragrantly up.
Plus a confirmed feral-hamster sighting, Chu and Gopnik and 'S.T.P.’
Peterson have agreed, could well distract the Headmaster's office from post-Eschaton reprisals against Big Buddies Pemulis,
Incandenza and Axford, whom the Club's Eschatonite faction doesn't want to see reprised against, particularly, though the
consensus is nobody would much mind seeing the malefic Ann Kittenplan hung out to dry in a serious
rsions could be posited to account for the occult appearance of large and incongruous E.T.A. objects in inappropriate p
ch started in August with the thousands of practice balls found scattered all over the blue lobby carpeting and the carefully
arranged pyramid of AminoPal energy bars found on Court 6 at dawn drills in mid-September and has gained momentum in a way
no one cares for one bit — feral hamsters being notorious draggers and rearrangers of stuff they can't eat but feel compelled to
fuck with anyway, somehow — and so ease the communal near-hysteria the objects have caused among aboriginal blue-collar
staff and sub-16 E.T.A. alike. Which would make the Tunnel Club guys something like heroes, fore-seeably.
They move along the tunnel, their mercuric lights Xing and separating and forming jagged angles, colored faintly pink.
But even a confirmed rat would be a coup. Dean of Academic Affairs Mrs. Inc has a violent phobic thing about vermin and
waste and insects and ov
s on the backs (McKenna's claim) spray the bejeesus
s — who have the same post-latency fetish for vermin they have about subte
 has ever once gotten to see or trap a rat or roach or even so much as a lousy silverfish anyplace around here. So the unspok
sensus is that a ham-ster'd be optimal but they'd settle for a rat. Just one lou
icable reason for congregating underground — all of them are a bit uneasy about liking to congregate undergroun
d or clear reason.
'Sleeps, you think you could lift that and carry it?’
'Chu man I wouldn't even get up ne
Blott's footfalls and tuneless whistling c
Gopnik stops and his light pans, pla
'What's this up ne
'Could I get some lights over here on this you
'Because did somebody go ahead and cut one in th
'Chu, it's a room fridge, t
'But it's bigger than the ro
'But it's not as big as a real fridge.’ 
'It's in-between.’
'I do smell something, though, Gop, I admit.’
'There is a smell. If somebody farted, speak up.’
'Otherwise it's a smell.’
k and staggered down here just to cut one.’
 midsized brown fridge. 'You don't possibly think Chu says 'No way. No way.’
hat bad, Chu.’
 of their faces pale in the mercuric light. 'No way somebody'd graduate and leave and put their
fridg
idge last year?’
like, a like decay-element?’
e tunnel ceiling from upraised hands.
heck?' Chu says. 'Blott's hamster might be in there.’
e.’
th.’
f up here so I can jump way back if anything like flies out.’
' says Carl Whale, his light receding.
mph.’
 'Eeeeeeeyu.' 'Hhhhwwwww.' 'Oh my God.' 'Bllaaaaarrr.’
 mayonnaise in there.' 'Why the bulge in the top of the lid?' 'The ballooning carton of orange
juic andwich-meat moving?' 'Maggots?' 'Maggots!’
 it shut!’
etting to that fridge ever again, Chu.’
panding!’
 enjoying this at all.’
arped crashing sounds on the tiers as he walked down the bleachers
and
y-browed kid was at the end of the top bleacher behind them,
hunc
f. He is a strange and unhappy,'
Pou
re large of size. It is difficult to be large.’
 let all size-references pass as if there was some ability to screen out any reference to
size
'Don't try to describe it.’
'Sleeps, that's no human fart I've ever smelled.’
'It's too powerful for a fart.’
'Maybe Teddy Schacht was having an attac
Peterson trains his light on the
'What?'Blott says.
'Don't even think it,' Chu says.
'I don't even think any kind of mammal could fart t
Peterson's looking at Chu, both
e down here without taking the food out.’
Blott goes 'Is that the smell?’
'Was this Pearson's fr
Sleepy T.P. turns around. 'Who smells a,
Lights on th
'Quorum on decay-type odor.’
'Should we c
'Gnawing on something unspeakable, mayb
'You mean open it?’
'Pearson had a bigger than usual fridge.’
"Open it?’
Chu scratches behind his ear. 'Me and Gop'11 light it up, Peterson opens it.’
'Why me?’
'You're closest, Sleeps. Hold your brea
'Jesus. Well back of
'Nobody could be so low. Who would go off and leave a full fridge?’
'Happy to back way, way off,
'Not even Pearson could be that low, leaving food in an unplugged fridge.’
'This could explain rodent-attraction and then some.’
'Now look out ... ready? ... hum
'Ow! Get off!’
'Put the light ov— oh my God.'
'Such a smell I'm smelling!’
'There's mayonnaise! He left
e!' 'Nothing could live in that, rodent or otherwise.' 'So why's that s
'Shut it! Sleeps! Kick
'This right here is exactly as close as I'm ever g
'The smell's ex
'I can smell it from here!': Whale's tiny distant voice.
'I'm not
'This is Death. Woe unto those that gazeth on Death. The Bible.’
'What're maggots?’
'Should we just run really fast the other way?’
'Second that.’
'This is probably what the rat or hamster smelled,' Blott ventures.
'Run!’
High receding voices, bobbing lights, Whale's light way out front.
After Stice and Incandenza split the first two sets and Hal dashed into the locker room at the break to put Collyrium-brand
eyewash in eyes that were bothering him and deLint made w
 over to have a word with Stice, who was squatting against the net-post holding his left arm up like a scrubbed surgeon and
applying a towel to the arm, deLint's place up next to Helen Steeply was taken by female prorector Thierry Poutrincourt, freshly
showered, long-faced, a non-U.S. citizen, a tall Québecer former Satellite pro in rimless specs and a violetish ski cap just enough
of a shade away from the journalist's hat to make the people behind them pretend to shield their eyes from the clash. The putative
newshound introduced herself and asked Poutrincourt who the heav
hed over and gesturing and speaking into his empty fist.
'James Troeltsch of Philadelphia is better to leave alone to play the broadcaster to himsel
trincourt said, her face long and cavern-cheeked and not terribly happy-looking itself. Her slight shrugs and way of looking
elsewhere while speaking were not unlike Rémy Marathe's. 'When we hear you are the journalist for shiny perfumed magazines of
fad and trend we are told be unfriendly, but me, I think I am friendly.' Her smile was rictal and showed confused teeth. 'My
family's loved ones also a
Steeply's pre-assignment decision was to
 or girth, originating possibly in adolescence. 'Your Mr. deLint certainly held himself aloof.’
'DeLint, when we prorectors are suggested to do a thing, he asks to himself only: how can I perfectly do this thing so the 
superiors will smile with pleasure at deLint.' Poutrincourt's right forearm was almost twice the size of her left. She wore white
snea glowing neutron-blue that clashed hideously with both their caps. The circles beneath
her also blue.
dly?’
nd, ankle-brace or no, displayed a slow loose thoroughbred trot past
the
logne on their pages
say
ind of frenzied over-cooperation that's a technical interviewer's worst nightmare for
an i
expl
ble of bleachers as deLint walked back up, stacked charts against his chest like a
scho
s parlons en français? Serait plus facile, ça?' This invitation because Poutrincourt's eyes had gone hooded
the m
g was blase: Francophones are never impressed that anyone else can speak French. 'Very well then look:'
she is sport. Lenglen, Rosewall. In a.d. 1887 a fifteenyear
ure skating,
com
ole on Poutrincourt's long cheek. Poutrincourt's thick rimless specs were like a scary nun's. She looked more male
than
basketball nor the American football, for example.’
 athlete anything
alre
rticular importance for the male. But all these are achievable by the period of puberty, for
som
ys — therefore, so, they do not feel
the This is every story of the teenager appearing from no location to
upse lay with abandon, they are
with ile. Sunlight blazed on her lenses. 'At the beginning. At the beginning they are without pressure or fear,
and
he English expression of the child in the store of candy.’
 a thing from the étoile.’
kers and a Donnay warmup of a deep
eyes were
'Why the instructions to be unfrien
Poutrincourt always nodded for a while before she replied to anything, as if things had to go through various translationcircuits. She nodded and scratched at her long jaw, thinking. 'You are here to make publicity a child player, one of our
étoiles,273263 and Dr. Tavis, he is how you say quantified — ‘
'Quarantined. Suspicious. Guarded.’
'No....’
'Confused. Torn. In a quandary.’
'Quandary is how. Because this is a good place, and Hal is good, better since before the present, perhaps now he is étoile.' A
shrug, long arms akimbo. Hal reemerged from Comm.-Ad. a
pavilion and bleachers and to the gate in #i2.'s southern fence, acting as if unwatched by people in bleachers, and tapped two
of his big-headed tennis racquets together to listen for the strings' pitch, exchanging some neutral words with deLint, who was
standing with Stice at the edge of the transom's shadow, Stice breaking into a half-laugh at something, twirling his racquet and
walking back to serve as Hal retrieved a ball along the north fence. Both players' racquets had large heads and thick frames.
Thierry Poutrincourt said 'And by nature who does not wish the shiny attention, that the magazines with co
this is étoile, Enfield Tennis Academy it is good?’
'I'm here to do a soft inoffensive profile on his brother, with Hal mentioned only as part of an American family exceptional in
several respects. I don't see what's quandariacal for Dr. Tavis about this.' The tiny plump officious man who seemed to have a
phone tucked under his chin at all times, the k
nterrogation; the little man's monologue had done to Steeply's brain kind of what a flashbulb does to your eyes, and if he'd
icitly denied him access to the brother then the denial had been slipped in after he'd worn Steeply down.
There was the slight shaken-saw wob
olgirl's books, his smile at the Québecois player in his seat as if he'd never met her before, settling in heavily on Steeply's
other side, glancing down at where the profiler'd bracketed notes on the possible sounds a string-hit ball sounds like in cold air:
cut, king, ping, pons, pock, cop, thwa, thwat.
The samizdat Entertainment's director's other son chipped a return that caught the tape and sat there a moment and fell back.
"Veux que nous nou
inute the de-Lint person joined them.
Poutrincourt's shru
said (Poutrincourt did, in Québecois), 'pubescent stars are nothing new to th
-old girl won Wimbledon, she was the first. Evert in the semifinals of the US Open at sixteen, '71 or '2. Austin, Jaeger, Graff,
Sawamatsu, Venus Williams. Borg. Wilander, Chang, Treffert, Med-vedev, Esconja. Becker of the A.D. '8os. Now this new
Argentinean Kleckner.’
Steeply lit a Flanderfume that made deLint's face spread with distaste. 'You compare it is like gymnastics, fig
petitive to-swim.’
Poutrincourt made no comment on Steeply's syntax. 'Just so, then. Good.’
Steeply was adjusting the long peasant skirt and crossing legs so he was inclined away from deLint, gazing at a kind of
translucent m
 anything, long and hard and breastless. Steeply tried to exhale away from everyone. 'The world-plateau tennis not being
required to have neither the size and muscle of the hockey nor the
Poutrincourt nodded. 'But yes, nor the millimetric precision of your baseball's hitting, nor how the Italians say the senza
errori, the never-miss consistency, that keeps the golfers from true mastery until they have thirty or more years.' The prorector
switched for just a moment to English, possibly for deLint's benefit: 'Your French is Parisian but possible. Me, mine is
Québecois.’
Steeply now got to give that same sour Gallic shrug. 'You're saying to me serious tennis doesn't need of an
ady adolescents do not possess, if they are exceptional for it.’
'The medicinists of sports science know well what top tennis requires,' Poutrincourt said, back in French. 'Too well, which are
the agility, the reflexes,274264 the short-range speed, the balance, some coordination between the hand and the eye, and very
much endurance. Some strength, with pa
e. But yes, but wait,' she said, putting a hand on the notebook as Steeply started to pretend to inscribe. 'The thing you have put
as the question to me. This is why the quandary. The young players, they have the advantage in psyche, also.’
'The edge of mentality,' Steeply said, trying to ignore the boy speaking into his hand several seats over. DeLint seemed to be
ignoring everything around him, engrossed in the match and his statistics. The Canadian prorec-tor's hands moved in small circles
out front to indicate engagement in the conversation. Americans' conversational hands sit like lumps of dough most of the time,
Rémy Marathe had pointed out once.
'But yes, so, the formidable mental edge that their psyches are still not yet adult in all wa
anxiety and pressure in the way it is felt by adult players.
t the famous adult in professional play — the ephebic, they do not feel the pressure, they can p
out fear.' A cold sm
they burst from seemingly no location onto the professional stage, instant étoiles, phenomenal, fearless, immunized to
pressure, numb to anxiety — at first. They seem as if they are like the adult players only better — better in emotion, more
abandoned, not human to the stress or fatigue or the airplaning without end, to the publicity.’
'T
'Seemingly unfeeling of the loneliness and alienation and everyone wants
'The money, also.’
'But it is soon you start to see the burning out which the place like ours is hoping to prevent. You remember Jaeger, burned
out at sixteen, Austin at twenty. Arias and Krickstein, Esconja and Treffert, too injured to play on by their late teenage years. The
much-promising Capriati, the well-known tragedy. Pat Cash of Australia, fourth on earth at eighteen, vanished by the twenties of
age.
 back?' Steeply said.
ese upset wins.
The ence of love and endorsements and the shiny
mag
d.
that winning is the expected. And all alone,
in th
e. Slice's body seemed to elongate
as h
ess chipped a lob right
over as Hal gave it up halfway back, Stice not rubbing it in but exhorting
him
stick
roughout was the heavy-browed red-nostriled kid James Troeltsch at the very end of the top bleacher,
spea her, pretending to be two people:
 at Incandenza standing there waiting for Ortho Stice to finish futzing with his socks so he can serve. The
rese d.
The
me trouble controlling his volleys.
f with his old midsized graphite stick than that large head the creepy Dunlop guy got
him
head is all The Darkness knows.
pted his game to a large head.
r-matrix of the junior game, too, Jim.
d Match of the Week. Brought to you.
t in seeing Troeltsch suffer.
, and absolutely crunched the serve, spinless and
wick and hitting the backhand cramped, down the line and
shal
angl
 game,' deLint said as the boys changed ends of the court,
Stic
on with the lens and metal pole was gone, overhead.
now, watching juniors at this level,' deLint says, still back on an elbow so his upper body was out of sight
’
'Not to be mentioning the large money. The endorsings and appearings.’
'Always so, for the young étoile. And now worse in today, that the sponsors have no broadcasting to advertise with. Now the
ephebe who is famous étoile, who is in magazines and the sports reports aux disques, he is pursued to become the Billboard Who
Walks. Use this, wear this, for money. Millions thrown at you before you can drive the cars you buy. The head swells to the size
of a balloon, why not?’
'But can pressure be far behind the
'Many times the same. Winning two and three upset matches, feeling suddenly so loved, so many talking to you as if there is
love. But always the same, then. For then you awaken to the fact that you are loved for winning only. The two and three wins
created you, for people. It is not that the wins made them recognize something that existed unrecognized before th
 from-noplace winning created you. You must keep winning to keep the exist
azines wanting your profile.’
'Enter the pressure,' Steeply sai
'Pressure such as one could not imagine, now that to maintain you must win. Now
e hotels and the airplanes, with any other player you could speak to of the pressure to exist wanting to beat you, wanting to be
exist above and not below. Or the others, wanting from you, and only so long as you play with abandon, winning.’
'Hence the suicides. The burn-out. The drugs, the self-indulging, the spoilage.’
'What is the instruction if we shape the ephebe into the athlete who can win fearlessly to be loved, yet we do not prepare her
for the time after fear comes, no?’
'Therefore the terrible pressure here. They are being tempered. Oven-toughened.’
Hal served wide and this time followed it in, the serve, taking a stutter-step at the service lin
e reached and got the stick up over the return, driving a forehand. Hal volleyed it too short and took a couple steps off the net
as Stice came in, winding up for an easy pass. Hal guessed a direction and started to his left, and The Darkn
 him and hit the heel of his hand against his strings
self. Hal's sweat was way heavier than the Kansan's, but Slice's face was almost maroon with flush. Each player twirled his
 in his hand as Hal walked back to retrieve the ball. Stice took his position in the deuce court, pulling up his socks.
'Still smart for Hal to follow the serve in once a game or so,' deLint said into Steeply's ear.
And irritating th
king into his fist, coming at the fist from first one angle and then anot
'Incandenza the controller. Incandenza the tactician.
'Rare tactical lapse for Incandenza, following the serve in when he's just finally started establishing control from the baseline.
'Have a look
mblance to statues of Augustus of Rome. The regal bearing, the set of the head, the face impassive and emanating comman
 chilly blue eyes.
'The chilly reptilian film of concentration in the cold blue eyes, Jim.
'The Halster's been having so
'Personally, Jim, I think he'd be better of
 to switch to.
'Stice being the younger player out there, he's grown up with the extra-large head. A large
'You could say Stice was born with a large head, and that Incandenza's a man who's ada
'Hal's career dating back to before your polycarbonate resins changed the whole powe
'And what a day for tennis.
'What a day for family fun of all kinds.
This Bud's for the Whole Family. It's the Bu
'Incandenza even reported to have modified his grip, all to accommodate the large head.
'And by the Multiphasix family of fine graphite-reinforced polycarbonate resins, Ray.
'Jim, Ortho Stice — impossible to even visualize Stice without his trusty large head.
'It's all they know, these kids.’
DeLint hiked back onto an elbow on the tier above and told James Troeltsch to regulate the volume or he was going to take a
personal interes
Hal bounced the ball three times, tossed, rocked farther back on the toss
edly angled out wide, Stice grotesquely off-balance, lunging too far
low. Hal moved in to the service line for it, hunched and with his stick cocked up behind him, looking somehow insec-tile.
Stice stood in the middle of the baseline awaiting pace and was helpless when Hal shortened the stroke and dribbled it at an angle
cross-court, barely clearing the net and distorted with backspin and falling into the half-meter of fair space the acuteness of the
e allowed.
'Hal Incandenza has the greater tennis brain,' Poutrincourt said in English.
Hal aced Stice down the center to go up either 2-1 or 3-2 in the third.
'The thing you want to know about Hal, babe, is he's got a complete
e holding two balls out before him on the face of his racquet. Hal went to the towel again. The children along the bottom tier
were leaning left and then right in tandem, amusing themselves. The appariti
'What you want to k
and
com
at the living shit out of Pemulis is Pemulis's strengths don't give him a complete game.
Vol or volley from the baseline.’
w Todd Possalthwaite, the littler kid
with
ure age and power Possalthwaite's the technically superior player with the better future, because Todd's
buil
salthwaite hangs back at any cost, and unlike Pemulis he works to develop
the g
d if he grows strong and wishes to attack he will never be
able
 in an intersticial diamond in the chain-link fencing, and
Hal
 fit together. He's got a great serve, a great return of serve, and great, great groundstrokes, with great control and great
touc
other's face registered nothing as he stood at the ad corner, adjusting something on his
strin
e prejudice — is that you must have also — so, leave to one side for a moment the talent and work
to b
les, the lucky who become profiled and photographed for
read
, one of two things we see will happen.’
eep breathing on the pen to keep the point thawed.
ey become celebrities instead of players, and
beca
suffer, and play is always suffering, just so.’
gestalt because Wayne's simply got everything, and everything with him's
got t
m, the punter Incan-denza's father, who also I am being told dabbled in
he was just legs and a voice in Steeply's cold ear. 'They all have different strengths, areas of the game they're better at, and
you can drown in profiling a match or a player in terms of the different strengths and the number of individual strengths.’
'I am not here to profile the boy,' Steeply said, but in French again.
DeLint ignored him. 'It's not just the strengths or the number of strengths. It's do they come together to make a game. How
plete is a kid. Has he got a game. Those kids at lunch you got to meet.’
'But not speak to.’
'The kid in the idiotic hat, Pemulis, Mike's got great, great volleys, he's a natural at net, great, great hand-eye. Mike's other
strength is he's got the best lob in East Coast juniors bar none. These are his strengths. The reason both of these kids you're
looking at out here right now can be
leys're an offensive shot. A lob's a baseliner's weapon, counterpuncher. You can't lob from the net
'He says Michael Pemulis's abilities cancel each other out,'275265 Poutrin-court said in the other ear.
DeLint made the small salaam of iteration. 'Pemulis's strengths cancel each other out. No
 the bandage on his nose from the soap-and-shower-slipping thing, Possalthwaite's also got a great lob, and while Pemulis'd
take him right now on p
t a complete game out of his lob.’
'This deLint is wrong,' Poutrincourt said in Québecois, smiling rictally across Steeply at deLint.
'Because Possalthwaite won't come in to net. Pos
roundstrokes to let him stay back and draw the other guy in and use that venomous lob.’
'Which means at fourteen his game, it will never change or grow, an
,' Poutrincourt said.
DeLint displayed so little curiosity about what Poutrincourt inserted that Steeply wondered if he had some French on the sly,
and made a private ideogram to this effect. 'Possalthwaite's a pure defensive strategist. He's got a gestalt. The term we use here for
a complete game is either gestalt or complete game.’
Stice aced Hal out wide on the ad court again, and the ball got stuck
had to put his stick down and use both hands to force the thing out.
'Maybe for your article, though, the poop on this kid, the punter's brother — Hal can't lob half as good as even Possalthwaite,
and compared to Ortho or Mike his net-play's pedestrian. But unlike his brother when he was here, see, Hal's strengths have
started to
h, great command of touch and spin; and he can take a defensive player and yank the kid around with his superior control, and
he can take an attacking player and use the guy's own pace against him.’
Hal passed Stice off the backhand down the line and the ball looked sure to land fair, and then at the last possible second it
veered out, an abrupt tight curve out of bounds as if some freak gust came out of nowhere and blew it out, and Stice looked more
surprised than Hal did. The punter's br
gs.
'But perhaps one does attain this, to win. Imagine you. You become just what you have given your life to be. Not merely very
good but the best. The good philosophy of here and Schtitt — I believe this philosophy of Enfield is more Canadian than
American, so you may see I hav
ecome best — that you are doomed276266 if you do not have also within you some ability to transcend the goal, transcend the
success of the best, if you get to there.’
Steeply could see, off in the parking lot behind the hideous bulging neo-Georgian cube of the Community and Administration
Building, several small boys carrying and dragging white plastic bags to the nest of dumpsters that abutted the pines at the parking
lot's rear, the children pale and wild-eyed and conferring among themselves and casting anxious looks across the grounds at the
crowd behind the Show Court.
'Then,' Poutrincourt said, 'and for the ones who do become the étoi
ers and in the U.S.A. religion make it, they must have something built into them along the path that will let them transcend it,
or they are doomed. We see this in experience. One sees this in all obsessive goal-based cultures of pursuit. Look at the Japonois,
the suicide rates of their later years. This task of us at the Enfield is more delicate still, with the étoiles. For, you, if you attain your
goal and cannot find some way to transcend the experience of having that goal be your entire existence, your raison de
faire,277267 so, then
Steeply had to k
'One, one is that you attain the goal and realize the shocking realization that attaining the goal does not complete or redeem
you, does not make everything for your life "OK" as you are, in the culture, educated to assume it will do this, the goal. And then
you face this fact that what you had thought would have the meaning does not have the meaning when you get it, and you are
impaled by shock. We see suicides in history by people at these pinnacles; the children here are versed in what is called the saga
of Eric Clipperton.’
'With two p's?’
'Just so. Or the other possibility of doom, for the étoiles who attain. They attain the goal, thus, and put as much equal passion
into celebrating their attainment as they had put into pursuing the attainment. This is called here the Syndrome of the Endless
Party. The celebrity, money, sexual behaviors, drugs and substances. The glitter. Th
use they are celebrities only as long as they feed the culture-of-goal's hunger for the make-it, the winning, they are doomed,
because you cannot both celebrate and
'Our best boy is better than Hal, you'll see him play tomorrow if you want, John Wayne. No relation to the real John Wayne.
A fellow compatriot of Terry here.' Aubrey deLint was sitting back up beside them, the cold giving his pitted cheeks a second
flush, two feverish harlequin ovals. 'John Wayne's got a
he sort of pace that a touch-artist and thinker like Hal just can't handle.’
'This was the Founder's philosophy, too, of doo
film
court's shrug could have meant too many things to note. 'I came after. M. Schtitt, his different goal for the étoiles is to
walk
of the success.’
t have everything, and constructing a
gam
eply pretended to arrange the cap but was really adjusting the wig. 'It all sounds awfully abstract for something so
phy
t
the t t — if he's down or things aren't going his way, he just hits harder.
His t attack against North American juniors. But in the
Sho
stalt's chief edge over Hal is the head. Wayne is pure force. He doesn't feel fear, pity,
rem
 could have Wayne's pace if he wanted. But the reason Wayne is Three continentally and Hal's Six is the head. Hal
look
nd then comes back.’
elf.
his emotional susceptibility in terms of forgetting being more commonly a female thing. Schtitt and I think it's a will issue.
Susceptible wills are more common to the top girls here. We see it in Longley, we see it in Millie Kent and Frannie Unwin. We
don' ou want.’
r herself to the pavement and move her scaggly old bowels right
ther lidly out of view.
The
ng to Wipe it off.
reet-fight, one walking forward and one walking backward, facing off as they move, each missing the dollop of
bow
ing?' Steeply asked the Canadian.
Poutrin
 between these.' Nor did Steeply quite notice the woman's shifts between dialects. 'To map out some path between needing
the success and mockery-making
DeLint leaned in. 'Wayne's got everything. Hal's strength has become knowing he doesn'
e as much out of what's missing as what's there.’
Ste
sical.’
Poutrincourt's shrug pushed her glasses slightly up. 'It is contradictory. Two selves, one not there. M. Schtitt, when the
Academy Founder died . . .’
'The punter's father, who dabbled in films.' Steeply's raglan sweater had been his wife's.
Again nodding blandly, Poutrincourt: 'This academic Founder, M. Schtitt tells that this Founder was a student of types of
sight.’
DeLint said 'Wayne's only possible limits being also his strength, the tungsten-steel will and resolve, the insistence on
imposing his game and his will on his man, totally unwilling to change the pace of his game if he's not doing good. Wayne's go
ouch and the lobs to hang back on an off-day, but he won'
pace is so overwhelming he can get away with being uncompromising abou
w, which Wayne'll go pro maybe as soon as next year, in the Show flexibility is more important, he'll find. What do you call, a
humility.’
Poutrincourt was looking at Steeply almost too carelessly, it almost seemed. 'The studying was not so much how one sees a
thing, but this relation between oneself and what one sees. He translated this numerously across different fields, M. Schtitt tells.’
The son described his father as quote "genre-dysphoric."
Poutrincourt cocked her head. 'This does not sound like Hal Incan-denza.’
DeLint sniffed meatily. 'But Wayne's ge
orse — when a point's over, it might as well have never happened. For Wayne. Hal actually has finer groundstrokes than
Wayne, and he
s just as perfectly dead out there, but he's more vulnerable in terms of, like, emotionally. Hal remembers points, senses trends
in a match. Wayne doesn't. Hal's susceptible to fluctuations. Discouragement. Set-long lapses in concentration. Some days you
can almost see Hal like flit in and out of a match, like some part of him leaves and hovers a
The Troeltsch person said 'Holy crow.’
'So to survive here for later is, finally, to have it both ways,' Thierry Poutrincourt said quietly, in nearly accentless English, as
if to hers
'T
t see this forgetful will in the Vaughts, or in Spodek, who you can watch if y
The Troeltsch person said 'Could we see that again, Ray, do you think?’
Steeply was looking at the side of Poutrincourt's face as deLint on the other side was saying 'But the one we see this most in
is Hal.’
14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
The Man o' War Grille on Prospect: Matty sat in the hot clatter of the Portuguese restaurant with his hands in his lap, looking
at nothing. A waiter brought his soup. The waiter had bits of either bloodstain or soup on his apron, and for no discernible reason
wore a fez. Matty ate his soup without once slurping. He'd been the neat eater in the family. Matty Pemulis was a prostitute and
today he was twenty-three.
The Man o' War Grille is on Prospect Street in Cambridge and its front windows overlook the heavy foot traffic between
Inman and Central Squares. As Matty waited for his soup he'd seen across the restaurant and out the front's glass a bag-lady-type
older female in several clothing-layers lift her skirts and lowe
e in full view of passersby and diners both, then gather all her plastic shopping bags together and walk sto
 pile of bowel movement sat there on the pavement, steaming slightly. Matty'd heard the college kids at the next table say they
didn't know whether to be totally illed or totally awed.
A big rangy kid, with a big sharp face and tight short hair and a smile and a shave-twice jaw since he was fourteen. Now
balding smoothly back from a high clear forehead. A permanent smile that always seemed like he was trying not to but just
couldn't help it. His Da always formerly sayi
Inman Square: Little Lisbon. The soup has bits of calamari that make the muscles in his face flex, chewing.
Now two Brazilians in bell bottoms and tall shoes along the sidewalk across the window over the diners' heads, what might be
a brewing st
el-movement on the walk, speaking high-volume street-Portuguese muffled by windows and hot clatter, but each looking
around and then pointing at his own chest like: 'You saying this shit to me?' Then the forward man's sudden charge carrying them
both past the window's right frame.
Matty's Da'd come over on a boat from Louth in Lenster in 1989. Matty'd been three or four. Da'd worked on the Southie
docks, coiling lengths of rope as big around as phone poles into tall cones, and had died when Matty was seventeen, of pancreatic
complaints.
Matty looked up from the roll he was dipping in the soup and saw two underweight interracial girls moving across the
window, one a nigger, neither even looking at the shit everyone's stepping around; and then a few seconds behind them Poor Tony
Krause, who because of the trousers and cap Matty didn't even recognize as Poor Tony Krause until he'd looked back down and 
then up again: Poor Tony Krause looked godawful: sucked-out, hollow-eyed, past ill, grave-ready, his face's skin the greenish
whi
histles. Mickey over in the cot by the window always silent as a tomb, on his side, face to the wall and hidden. Never a
wor
e oval sound of the cap coming off the jar of petroleum jelly, that special
ston
reatitis and thinks of the subject clutching his middle like an old film's gutshot actor
and slumping quietly over to eternal rest with lids shut and face composed. Matty's Da'd died choking on aspirated blood, a
veri ble fountain of the darkest possible blood, Matty coated a spray-paint-russet as he held the man's yellow wrists and Mum
lum bly fine, like almost atomized, so that they
hun
te of extreme-depth marine life, looking less alive than undead, identifiable as poor old Poor Tony only by the boa and red
leather coat and the certain way he held his hand to his throat's hollow as he walked, that way Equus Reese always said always
reminded him of black-and-white-era starlets descending curved stairs into some black-tie function, Krause never so much
walking as making an infinite series of grand entrances into pocket after pocket of space, a queenly hauteur now both sickening
and awesome given Krause's spectral mien, passing across the Grille's window, his eyes either on or looking right through the two
skinny girls plodding ahead of him, following them out of the window's right-hand side.
His Da'd begun fucking Matty up the ass when Matty was ten. A fook in t'boom. Matty had complete recall of the whole
thing. He'd seen sometimes where persons that had unpleasant things happen to them as children blocked the unpleasantness out in
their mentality as adults and forgot it. Not so with Matty Pemulis. He remembered every inch and pimple of every single time. His
father outside the little room Matt and Micky slept in, late at night, the cat's-eye sliver of lit hallway through the crack in the door
Da'd opened, the door on well-oiled hinges opening with the implacable slowness of a rising moon, Da's shadow lengthening
across the floor and then the man his very self weaving in behind it, crossing the moonlit floor in darned socks and that smell
about him that later Matty'd know was malt liquor but at that age he and Mickey called something else, when they smelled it.
Matty lay and pretended to sleep; he didn't know why tonight he pretended not to know the man was there; he was afraid. Even
the first time. Micky just five. All the times were the same. Da drunk. Tacking across the bedroom floor. A certain stealth.
Managing somehow never to break his neck on the toy trucks and tiny cars scattered on the floor, left there that first time by
accident. Sitting on the edge of the bed so his weight changed the bed's angle. A big man smelling of tobacco and something else,
his breath always audible when drunk. Sitting on the edge of the bed. Shaking Matty 'awake' to the point where Matty'd have to
pretend to wake up. Asking if he'd been asleep, sleeping, there, was he. Tenderness, caresses that were somehow just over the line
from true ethnic-Irish fatherly affection, the emotional largesse of a man without a Green Card who daily broke his back for his
family's food. Caresses that were in some vague way just over the line from that and from the emotional largesse of something
else, drunk, when all the rules of mood were suspended and you never knew from minute to minute whether you were to be kissed
or hit — impossible to say how or even know how they were just over those lines. But they were, the caresses. Tenderness,
caresses, low soft oversweet hot bad breath, soft apologies for some flash of savagery or discipline from the day. A way of
cupping the pillow-warm cheek and jaw in the hollow of the hand, the huge pinkie finger tracing the hollow between throat and
jaw. Matty'd shrink away: shy are we sone scared are we? Matty'd shrink away even after he knew the shrinking fear was part of
what brought it on, for Da'd get angry: who are we scared of, then? Then who are we, a sone, to be scared so of our own Da? As if
the Da that broke daily his back were nothing more than a. Can't a Da show his son some love without being taken for a. As if
Matty could lie here with his food inside him under bedding he'd paid for and think his Da were no better than a. Is it a fookin
you're scared of, then. You think a Da what comes in to speak to his sone and holds him as a Da has nought on his mind but a
fook? As if the sone were some forty-dollar whore off the docks? As if the Da were a. Is that what you take me for. Is that what
you take me for then. Matty shrinking back into a flattening pillow the Da'd paid for, the springs of the convertible bed singing
with his fear; he shook. Why then so then I've a mind to give you just what you're thinking t'fear. Take me for. Matty knew early
on that his being afraid fueled the thing somehow, made his Da want to. He was unable not to be afraid. He tried and tried, cursed
himself for a coward and deserving, all but calling his father a. It was years before he snapped to the fact that his Da'd have fooked
him in t'boom no matter what he'd done. That the event was laid out before the first slim line of doorlight broadened, and whatever
Matty'd felt or betrayed made no difference. An advantage to not blocking it out is you can snap to things later, with ma-turer
perspective; you can come to see no sone on the planet could in any way ask for that, regardless. At a certain later age he started
lying there when his Da shook him and pretended to sleep on, even when the shakes got to where his teeth clacked together in a
mouth that wore the slight smile Matty'd decided truly sleeping people's faces always wore. The harder his father shook him, the
tighter Matty'd shut his eyes and the more set the slight smile and the louder the rasps of the cartoon snores he alternated with
exhaled w
d between them about anything more than the chances of being kissed v. hit. Finally Da'd grab both his shoulders and flip him
over with a sound of disgust and frustration. Matty thought just the smell of the fear was maybe enough to deserve it, until (later
on) he got some maturer perspective. He remembered th
e-in-pond plop of a Vaseline cap (not Child-Proof even in an era of Child-Proof caps), hearing his Da muttering as he applied
it to himself, feeling the ice-cold awful cold finger between him as his Da smeared the stuff roughly around Matty's rosebud, his
dark star.
It was only the maturer perspective of years and experience that let Matty find something to be thankful for, that the Da'd at
least used a lube. The origins of the big man's clear familiarity with the stuff and its nighttime use not even adult perspective could
illuminate, let Matty snap to, still, now, at twenty-three.
One hears, say, cirrhosis and acute panc
ta
bered off down the ward in search of a crash-cart team. Particles aspirated so terri
g in the air like the air itself over the cribbed bed as the man expired, cat-yellow eyes wide open and face screwed into the
very most godawful rictusized grin of pain, his last thoughts (if any) unknowable. Matty still toasted the man's final memory with
his first shot, whenever he indulged.278268
11 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
First thing after supper Hal drops around to Schtitt's room off the Comm.-Ad. lobby to go through the motions of getting
some input on just what had gone so terribly wrong against Stice. Also to get maybe some kind of bead on why he'd had to play
The Darkness publicly in the first place, so close to the WhataBurger. I.e. like what the exhibition might have signified. This
endless tension among E.T.A.s about how the coaches are seeing you, gauging your progress — is your stock going up or down. 
But A. deLint's the only one in there, working on some sort of oversized spreadsheetish chart, lying prone and shirtless on the bare
floor with his chin in his hand and a pungent Magic Marker, and says Schtitt has gone off on the cycle somewhere after
confections, but to sit down. Presumably meaning in a chair. So Hal's subjected to several minutes of deLint's take on the match,
complete with stats out of the prorector's head. DeLint's back is pale and constellated with red pits of old pimples, though the
back
rlit and there's no dust anywhere, not even in the very corners. Schtitt's
soun
 American Century as Seen Through a Brick and Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell and then part of
Val
f's work but whose
nam
in. The Viewing Room has insulated panelling behind the wallpaper and is essentially
soun
imself by imagining swarthy leering types threatening to torture various loved ones if Hal can't come up with
the
and asks if he's OK and says it'll all be OK. He cleans the kid's spectacles with his pocket handkerchief,
's nothing compared to Struck's or Shaw's back. There's a cane chair and a wood chair. DeLint's liquid-crystal laptop screen
pulses grayly on the floor next to him. Schtitt's room's ove
d system's lights are on but nothing's playing. Neither Hal nor deLint mentions Orin's profiler's presence in the match's
stands, nor the big lady's long interchange with Poutrincourt, which had been conspicuous. Stice's and Wayne's names are at the
top of the huge chart on the floor, but Hal's name isn't. Hal says he can't tell whether he'd made some sort of basic tactical error or
whether he just wasn't quite up to snuff this afternoon or what.
'You just never quite occurred out there, kid,' deLint apprises him. He has regressed certain figures to back this up, this
nonoccurrence. His choice of words chills Hal to the root.
After which, during what's supposed to be mandatory P.M. Study Period, and despite the three chapters of Boards-prep his
Boards-prep schedule calls for, Hal sits alone up in Viewing Room 6, the bad leg out along the couch in front of him, flexing the
bad ankle idly, holding the other leg's knee to his chest, squeezing a ball but with the hand he doesn't play with, chewing Kodiak
and spitting directly into an unlined wastebasket, his expression neutral, watching some cartridges of his late father's
entertainments. Anyone else looking at him in there tonight would call Hal depressed. He watches several cartridges all in a row.
He watches The
uable Coupon Has Been Removed, which is maddening because it's all a monologue from some bespectacled little
contemporary of Miles Penn and Heath Pearson who was almost as ubiquitous as Reat and Bain in Himsel
e right now Hal can't for the life of him recall. He watches parts of Death in Scarsdale and Union of Publicly Hidden in Lynn
and Various Small Flames and Kinds of Pa
dproof. Hal watches half of the 'Medusa v. Odalisque' thing but takes it out abruptly when people in the audience start getting
turned to stone.
Hal tortures h
name of the kid in Valuable Coupon and Low-Temperature Civics and Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat.
There are two cartridges on V.R. 6's glass shelves of Himself getting interviewed in various arty Community-Access-cabletype forums, which Hal declines to watch.
The lights' slight flicker and subtle change in the pressure of the room is from the E.T.A. furnaces kicking on way down in the
tunnels below Comm.-Ad. Hal shifts uneasily on the couch, spitting into the wastecan. The very faint smell of burnt dust is also
from the furnace.
A minor short didactic one Hal likes and runs twice in a row is Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat. A bureaucrat in some kind
of sterile fluorescent-lit office complex is a fantastically efficient worker when awake, but he has this terrible problem waking up
in the A.M., and is consistently late to work, which in a bureaucracy is idiosyncratic and disorderly and wholly unacceptable, and
we see this bureaucrat getting called in to his supervisor's pebbled-glass cubicle, and the supervisor, who wears a severely dated
leisure suit with his shirt-collar flaring out on either side of its rust-colored lapels, tells the bureaucrat that's he's a good worker
and a fine man, but that this chronic tardiness in the A.M. is simply not going to fly, and if it happens one more time the
bureaucrat is going to have to find another fluorescent-lit office complex to work in. It's no accident that in a bureaucracy getting
fired is called 'termination,' as in ontological erasure, and the bureaucrat leaves his supervisor's cubicle duly shaken. That night he
and his wife go through their Bauhaus condominium collecting every alarm clock they own, each one of which is electric and
digital and extremely precise, and they festoon their bedroom with them, so there are like a dozen timepieces with their digital
alarms all set for 0615h. But that night there's a power failure, and all the clocks lose an hour or just sit there blinking 0000h. over
and over, and the bureaucrat still oversleeps the next A.M. He wakes late, lies there for a moment staring at a blinking 0000. He
shrieks, clutches his head, throws on wrinkled clothes, ties his shoes in the elevator, shaves in the car, blasting through red lights
on the way to the commuter rail. The 0816 train to the City pulls in to the station's lower level just as the crazed bureaucrat's car
screeches into the station's parking lot, and the bureaucrat can see the top of the train sitting there idling from across the open lot.
This is the very last temporally feasible train: if the bureaucrat misses this train he'll be late again, and terminated. He hauls into a
Handicapped spot and leaves the car there at a crazy angle, vaults the turnstile, and takes the stairs down to the platform seven at a
time, sweaty and bug-eyed. People scream and dive out of his way. As he careers down the long stairway he keeps his crazed eyes
on the open doors of the 0816 train, willing them to stay open just a little longer. Finally, filmed in a glacial slo-mo, the bureaucrat
leaps from the seventh-to-the-bottom step and lunges toward the train's open doors, and right in mid-lunge smashes headlong into
an earnest-faced little kid with thick glasses and a bow-tie and those nerdy little schoolboy-shorts who's tottering along the
platform under a tall armful of carefully wrapped packages. Kerwham, they collide. Bureaucrat and kid both stagger back from the
impact. The kid's packages go flying all over the place. The kid recovers his balance and stands there stunned, glasses and bow-tie
askew.279269 The bureaucrat looks frantically from the kid to the litter of packages to the kid to the train's doors, which are still
open. The train thrums. Its interior is fluorescent-lit and filled with employed, ontologically secure bureaucrats. You can hear the
station's PA announcer saying something tinny and garbled about departure. The stream of platform foot-traffic opens around the
bureaucrat and the stunned boy and the litter of packages. Ogilvie'd once lectured for a whole period on this kid's character as an
instance of the difference between an antagonist and a deuteragonist in moral drama; he'd mentioned the child-actor's name over
and over. Hal tries whacking himself just over the right eye several times, to dislodge the name. The film's bureaucrat's buggy
eyes keep going back and forth between the train's open doors and the little kid, who's looking steadily up at him, almost studious,
his eyes big and liquid behind the lenses. Hal doesn't remember who played the bureaucrat, either, but it's the kid's name that's
driving him bats. The bureaucrat's leaning away, inclined way over toward the train doors, as if his very cells were being pulled
that way. But he keeps looking at the kid, the gifts, struggling with himself. It's a clear internal-conflict moment, one of Himself's
films' very few. The bureaucrat's eyes suddenly recede back into their normal places in his sockets. He turns from the fluorescent
doors and bends to the kid 
pick hrough the packages the PA issues something final and the train's doors close with a
pres
o when they're ministering to a child, and tells him he's sorry about the impact and that it's OK. He turns to go.
The
s, when
Him f lasted two and a half months and then drifted gradually away, turned off by the simplistic God-stuff and covert dogma.
Bob-Hopeless, Hal spits way more than is his norm, now, and also likes having the wastecan right nearby in case he might throw
up. el the ball on his stick. His nausea has nothing to
do w
RGARMENT
'd the paramedic's warning that post-seizure
feel
nately not a free hospital but it is a free
cou
ay on its own, steady eyes meeting with blase dignity the eyes of whoever passes. The dignity of a man risen by will
from
s the kid's packages up. About halfway t
surized hiss. The bureaucrat gently loads the kid back up with packages, neatens them. The train pulls out. The bureaucrat
watches the train pull out, expressionless. It's anybody's guess what he's thinking. He straightens the kid's bow-tie, kneeling down
the way adults d
 platform's mostly empty now. Now the strange moment. The kid cranes his neck around the packages and looks up at the guy
as he starts to walk away:
'Mister?' the kid says. 'Are you Jesus?’
'Don't I wish,' the ex-bureaucrat says over his shoulder, walking away, as the kid shifts the packages and frees one little hand
to wave Bye at the guy's topcoat's back as the camera, revealed now as mounted on the 0816's rear, recedes from the platform and
picks up speed.
Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat remains Mario's favorite of all their late father's entertainments, possibly because of its
unhip earnestness. Though to Mario he always maintains it's basically goo, Hal secretly likes it, too, the cartridge, and likes to
project himself imaginatively into the ex-bureaucrat's character on the leisurely drive home toward ontological erasure.
As a kind of weird self-punishment, Hal also plans to subject himself to the horrific Fun with Teeth and Baby Pictures of
Famous Dictators, then finally to one of Himself's posthumous hits, a cartridge called Blood Sister: One Tough Nun that he'd
always found kind of gratuitously nasty and overwrought, but which Hal has no idea that this piece of entertainment actually
germinated out of James O. Incandenza's one brief and unpleasant experience with Boston AA, in the B.S. mid-'90
sel
That afternoon he'd had zilch in the way of a kinesthetic sense: he couldn't fe
ith watching his father's cartridges. For the last year his arm's been an extension of his mind and the stick an extension of the
arm, acutely sensitive. Each of the cartridges is a carefully labelled black diskette; they're all signed neatly out on the clipboard by
the egg-shaped glass bookshelf and are loaded in the cueing slots and waiting to drop, in order, and be digitally decoded.
14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDE
P. T. Krause: N. Cambridge: that infamous deceptive post-seizure feeling of well-being. That broken-fever, reversal-offortune-type highhearted feeling after a neuroelectric event. Poor Tony Krause awoke in the ambulance lizardless and continent
and feeling right as rain. Lay there and flirted with the blue-jawed paramedic leaning over him, certain bawdy entendres on
expressions like vital signs and dilation until the paramedic radioed ahead to Cambridge City's E. Room to cancel the crash-cart.
Manipulated his skinny arms in a parodic Minimal Mambo, lying there. Fiddle-de-dee
ings of well-being were notoriously deceptive and transient.
And then also the little-mentioned advantage to being destitute and in possession of a Health Card that's expired and not even
in your name: hospitals show you a kind of inverted respect; a place like Cambridge City Hospital bows to your will not to stay;
they all of a sudden defer to your subjective diagnostic knowledge of your own condition, which post-seizure condition you feel
has turned the corner toward improvement: they bow to your quixotic will: it's unfortu
ntry: they honor your wishes and compliment your mambo and say Go with God.
It's a good thing you can't see what you look like, though.
And the serendipity of Cambridge City Hospital being just an eight-block stroll east on Cambridge St. and then south on
Prospect, through mentholated autumn air, through Inman Square and up to Antitoi Entertainment, maybe the one last place where
a renewed, post-seizure, on-the-diagnostic-upswing if still slightly shaky young gender-dysphoric might yet expect a bit of
kindness, pharmacological credit, since the affairs of Wo and Copley Library and heart.
The big brick cake of the hospital behind Krause in purple twilight. The brisk click of his heels on pavement, boa semiformally loose on his shoulders and down beneath each arm, hand holding red leather collar closed at the throat, head up and
staying that w
 the ashes of Withdrawal and now on the upswing and with places to go and potentially considerate Canadians to see. A
charming and potentially once again in the not-too-distant future gorgeous creature with the renewed wherewithal to now meet the
eyes of Inman Sq. pedestrians veering sharply away from the residual smells of men's room stall and subway vomit, the ashes
from which he's been rescued and risen once again, feeling righter than rain. A rind of moon hanging cocked above a four-spired
church. And the emergent stars are yo-yos, you feel, after a seizure: Poor Tony feels as if he could cast them out, draw them in
again at will.
The way Poor Tony Krause, Lolasister, and Susan T. Cheese became mercenary adjuncts to something dour Bertraund Antitoi
had invited them to call the "Front-Contre-O.N.A.N.isme' was that, for a heavily cut bundle to split six ways, Lolasister, Susan T.
Cheese, P. T. Krause, Bridget Tenderhole, Equus Reese, and the late Stokely ('Dark Star') McNair had had to wear identical red
leather coats and auburn wigs and spike heels and go and hang around the lobby of Harvard Square's Sheraton Commander Hotel
with six mannish-looking women in the same wigs and coats while an androgynous Québecer insurgent who filled out h/his red
leather coat in a way that made Bridget Tenderhole dig his nails into his palms in sheer green envy came through the
Commander's revolving Lucite doors and strode purposefully into the crowded Epaulet Ballroom and threw foul semi-liquid violet
waste from a souvenir miniature waste-displacement barrel in the face of the Canadian Minister of Inter-O.N.A.N. Trade, who was
addressing the U.S. press from a leaf-shaped rostrum. The decoys were then required to mill hysterically in the lobby, all twelve
of them, and then hit the revolving doors and disperse in a dozen different vectors as the androgynous waste-wielding Québecer
legged it out of the Epaulet Ballroom and lobby pursued by white-suited men with earplugs and Cobray M-l 1 subautomatics, so
the security guys'd see identical epicene figures high-heeling it away in different directions and get fuddled about who to chase.
Susan T. Cheese and Poor Tony'd met the Antitoi Bros. — only one of whom could or would speak, and who'd been in charge of
the diversionary aspects of the Sheraton Commander operation, and had clearly been subordinate to still other Québecers of way
higher I.Q. — Krause and S.T.C. had met them at Inman Square's Ryle's Tavern, which had Gender-Dysphoric Night every 
second Wednesday, and attracted comely and unrough trade, and which Poor Tony passed now (Ryle's), just after the Man o' War
Grille, now only a block or so from the Antitois' glass-and-novelty-shop front, feeling not so much quite ill again as just deeply
tired, after only five or so blocks — that post-fever, sleep-for-a-week-type cellular fatigue — and is debating with himself about
whether to have a go at the purses of the two young and unstriking women walking just a few steps ahead, both of their purses
hanging only by the flimsiest of evening-gown-width straps from slumped shoulders, the duo interracial, rare and disquieting in
metro Boston, the black girl talking a click a minute and the white one not responding, her weary stolid plod and air of inattention
fairly begging for a purse-snatch, both of them with an air about them of routine victimization, the sort of demoralized lassitude
Poor Tony felt always guaranteed a minimum of protest or pursuit — though the white girl wore formidable-looking running
shoe
thick and blunt, and Lenz described the Hog as a prímo example of what he called the Polish Curse, viz. undistinguished
leng
f stuff that used to have affective
cont
the E.T.A. paths. The idea that achievement doesn't
auto
 exchange you hear in the
bath
.S. anhedonia. Hal himself hasn't had a bona fide
inte
s under her tartan skirt. So intent was Poor Tony Krause on the logistics and implications of the possible purses dangled as if
by God right before him — how different to hit the Antitois' doorstep with liquid assets, to request a transaction rather than bare
charity, more almost a social call than a contemptible Withdrawn snivel for compassion — so intent as he sidestepped an
impressive pile of dog-droppings and passed across the broad windows of the Man o' War that he never saw his old former
crewmate Mad Matty Pemulis, a sure source of compassion, looking up and out and down and back up, aghast in recognition of
what Poor Tony has come through the corridor to resemble.
Geoffrey Day's noted the way most of the male residents of Ennet House have special little cognomens for their genitals. E.g.
'Bruno,' 'Jake,' 'Fang' (Minty), 'The One-Eyed Monk,' 'Fritzie,' 'Russell the Love Muscle.' He speculates this could be a class thing:
neither he nor Ewell nor Ken Erdedy have named their Units. Like Ewell, Day enters a certain amount of comparative-class data
in his journal. Doony Glynn called his penis 'Poor Richard'; Chandler Foss confessed to the moniker 'Barn-Bam.' Lenz had
referred to his own Unit as 'the Frightful Hog.' Day would die before admitting he missed either Lenz or his soliloquies about the
Hog, which had been frequent. The penis in question had been that curious two or three shades darker than the rest of Lenz that
people's penises sometimes are. Lenz had brandished it at his roommates whenever he wished to emphasize a point. It had been
short and
th but sobering circumference: 'Easy on the bottom but tears hell out of the sides, brother.' This had been his description of the
Polish Curse. A surprising amount of Day's Recovery Journal is filled with quotations from R. Lenz. Lenz's discharge had moved
the tax-attorney Tiny Ewell up into the 3-Man room with Day. Ewell was the one man here with whom a conversation of anything
remotely approaching depth could be held, so Day was nonplussed when he found himself, after a couple long nights, almost
missing Lenz, his obsession with time, his patter, his way of leaning up against the wall upside-down in his briefs, or brandishing
the Hog.
And re Ennet House resident Kate Gompert and this depression issue: Some psychiatric patients — plus a certain percentage
of people who've gotten so dependent on chemicals for feelings of well-being that when the chemicals have to be abandoned they
undergo a loss-trauma that reaches way down deep into the soul's core systems — these persons know firsthand that there's more
than one kind of so-called 'depression.' One kind is low-grade and sometimes gets called anhedonia280270 or simple melancholy.
It's a kind of spiritual torpor in which one loses the ability to feel pleasure or attachment to things formerly important. The avid
bowler drops out of his league and stays home at night staring dully at kick-boxing cartridges. The gourmand is off his feed. The
sensualist finds his beloved Unit all of a sudden to be so much feelingless gristle, just hanging there. The devoted wife and mother
finds the thought of her family about as moving, all of a sudden, as a theorem of Euclid. It's a kind of emotional novocaine, this
form of depression, and while it's not overtly painful its deadness is disconcerting and . .. well, depressing. Kate Gompert's always
thought of this anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out o
ent. Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy — happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love —
are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic
can still speak about happiness and meaning et ah, but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding
anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts. Everything
becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate,
but has no location. I.e. the anhedonic becomes, in the lingo of Boston AA, Unable To Identify.
It's worth noting that, among younger E.T.A.s, the standard take on Dr. J. O. Incandenza's suicide attributes his putting his
head in the microwave to this kind of anhedonia. This is maybe because anhedonia's often associated with the crises that afflict
extremely goal-oriented people who reach a certain age having achieved all or more than all than they'd hoped for. The what-doesit-all-mean-type crisis of middle-aged Americans. In fact this is in fact not what killed Incandenza at all. In fact the presumption
that he'd achieved all his goals and found that the achievement didn't confer meaning or joy on his existence says more about the
students at E.T.A. than it says about Orin's and Hal's father: still under the influence of the deLint-like carrot-and-stick
philosophies of their hometown coaches rather than the more paradoxical Schtitt/Incandenza/Lyle school, younger athletes who
can't help gauging their whole worth by their place in an ordinal ranking use the idea that achieving their goals and finding the
gnawing sense of worthlessness still there in their own gut as a kind of psychic bogey, something that they can use to justify
stopping on their way down to dawn drills to smell flowers along
matically confer interior worth is, to them, still, at this age, an abstraction, rather like the prospect of their own death — 'Caius
Is Mortal' and so on. Deep down, they all still view the competitive carrot as the grail. They're mostly going through the motions
when they invoke anhedonia. They're mostly small children, keep in mind. Listen to any sort of sub-16
room or food line: 'Hey there, how are you?' 'Number eight this week, is how I am.' They all still worship the carrot. With the
possible exception of the tormented LaMont Chu, they all still subscribe to the delusive idea that the continent's second-ranked
fourteen-year-old feels exactly twice as worthwhile as the continent's #4.
Deluded or not, it's still a lucky way to live. Even though it's temporary. It may well be that the lower-ranked little kids at
E.T.A. are proportionally happier than the higher-ranked kids, since we (who are mostly not small children) know it's more
invigorating to want than to have, it seems. Though maybe this is just the inverse of the same delusion.
Hal Incandenza, though he has no idea yet of why his father really put his head in a specially-dickied microwave in the Year
of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, is pretty sure that it wasn't because of standard U
nsity-of-interior-life-type emotion since he was tiny; he finds terms like joie and value to be like so many variables in rarified 
equations, and he can manipulate them well enough to satisfy everyone but himself that he's in there, inside his own hull, as a
human being — but in fact he's far more robotic than John Wayne. One of his troubles with his Moms is the fact that Avril
Incandenza believes she knows him inside and out as a human being, and an internally worthy one at that, when in fact inside Hal
there's pretty much nothing at all, he knows. His Moms Avril hears her own echoes inside him and thinks what she hears is him,
and this makes Hal feel the one thing he feels to the limit, lately: he is lonely.
It's of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It's
maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it's the fact
that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who
not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip — and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip
and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like
peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded
encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone,
we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a
young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism
that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals na-ïveté on this continent (at least since the
Reconfiguration). One of the things sophisticated viewers have always liked about J. O. Incandenza's The American Century as
Seen Through a Brick is its unsubtle thesis that naïveté is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America. And since
sin is the sort of thing that can be talked about only figuratively, it's natural that Himself's dark little cartridge was mostly about a
myth, viz. that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive. Hal, who's empty but not dumb,
theo
o string the high sweet sound immediately dies. And the silence that follows is
excr
elf's most
elem
ing or dying — are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.
 of them is being tortured with electric current. The other is not. The
scre
person will eventually jump
rizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human,
since to be really human fat least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and
generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself
anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things
about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he's really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and
need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.281271
The American Century as Seen Through a Brick's main and famous key-image is of a piano-string vibrating — a high D, it
looks like — vibrating, and making a very sweet unadorned solo sound indeed, and then a little thumb comes into the frame, a
blunt moist pale and yet dingy thumb, with disreputable stuff crusted in one of the nail-corners, small and unlined, clearly an
infantile thumb, and as it touches the pian
uciating. Later in the film, after much mordant and didactic panoramic brick-following, we're back at the piano-string, and the
thumb is removed, and the high sweet sound recommences, extremely pure and solo, and yet now somehow, as the volume
increases, now with something rotten about it underneath, there's something sick-sweet and overripe and potentially putrid about
the one clear high D as its volume increases and increases, the sound getting purer and louder and more dysphoric until after a
surprisingly few seconds we find ourselves right in the middle of the pure undampered sound longing and even maybe praying for
the return of the natal thumb, to shut it up.
Hal isn't old enough yet to know that this is because numb emptiness isn't the worst kind of depression. That dead-eyed
anhedonia is but a rem-ora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain. Authorities term this condition
clinical depression or involutional depression or unipolar dysphoria. Instead of just an incapacity for feeling, a deadening of soul,
the predator-grade depression Kate Gompert always feels as she Withdraws from secret marijuana is itself a feeling. It goes by
many names — anguish, despair, torment, or q.v. Burton's melancholia or Yev-tuschenko's more authoritative psychotic
depression — but Kate Gompert, down in the trenches with the thing itself, knows it simply as It.
It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil
not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the s
entary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and
un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and
coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world
every constituent of which means painful harm to the self. Its emotional character, the feeling Gompert describes It as, is probably
mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency — sitting
or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, liv
It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed. There is no way Kate Gompert could ever even begin to make someone
else understand what clinical depression feels like, not even another person who is herself clinically depressed, because a person
in such a state is incapable of empathy with any other living thing. This anhedonic Inability To Identify is also an integral part of
It. If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain,282272 a clinically depressed person cannot
even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell. Everything is part of
the problem, and there is no solution. It is a hell for one.
The authoritative term psychotic depression makes Kate Gompert feel especially lonely. Specifically the psychotic part.
Think of it this way. Two people are screaming in pain. One
amer who's being tortured with electric current is not psychotic: her screams are circumstantially appropriate. The screaming
person who's not being tortured, however, is psychotic, since the outside parties making the diagnoses can see no electrodes or
measurable amperage. One of the least pleasant things about being psychotically depressed on a ward full of psychotically
depressed patients is coming to see that none of them is really psychotic, that their screams are entirely appropriate to certain
circumstances part of whose special charm is that they are undetectable by any outside party. Thus the loneliness: it's a closed
circuit: the current is both applied and received from within.
The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract
conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in
whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped 
from
es.
And
ing to work and to Mass and
buil
an was finally transferred to a place on Long Island to be evaluated for a radical
new
, and she him. He went to bed every night at home holding her, weeping for it to be over, while
she prayed or did that devout thing with beads.
he couple had gotten Kate Gompert's mother's address and had sent Kate an Xmas card the last two years, Mr. and Mrs.
Erne ishing her all available joy. Kate Gompert doesn't
know
depr
les the lazy tack of a boat
in n
ntree MA alley swaddled in WalMart advertising circulars whose Harvest Moon Value
Spe
 the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling
from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing spec-ulatively at the same window just checking out
the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get
close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flam
 yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and 'Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. You'd
have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.
But and so the idea of a person in the grip of It being bound by a 'Suicide Contract' some well-meaning Substance-abuse
halfway house makes her sign is simply absurd. Because such a contract will constrain such a person only until the exact psychic
circumstances that made the contract necessary in the first place assert themselves, invisibly and indescribably. That the wellmeaning halfway-house Staff does not understand Its overriding terror will only make the depressed resident feel more alone.
One fellow psychotically depressed patient Kate Gompert came to know at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Newton two years
ago was a man in his fifties. He was a civil engineer whose hobby was model trains — like from Lionel Trains Inc., etc. — for
which he erected incredibly intricate systems of switching and track that filled his basement recreation room. His wife brought
photographs of the trains and networks of trellis and track into the locked ward, to help remind him. The man said he had been
suffering from psychotic depression for seventeen straight years, and Kate Gompert had had no reason to disbelieve him. He was
stocky and swart with thinning hair and hands that he held very still in his lap as he sat. Twenty years ago he had slipped on a
patch of 3-In-l-brand oil from his model-train tracks and bonked his head on the cement floor of his basement rec room in
Wellesley Hills, and when he woke up in the E.R. he was depressed beyond all human endurance, and stayed that way. He'd never
once tried suicide, though he confessed that he yearned for unconsciousness without end. His wife was very devoted and loving.
She went to Catholic Mass every day. She was very devout. The psychotically depressed man, too, went to daily Mass when he
was not institutionalized. He prayed for relief. He still had his job and his hobby. He went to work regularly, taking medical leaves
only when the invisible torment got too bad for him to trust himself, or when there was some radical new treatment the
psychiatrists wanted him to try. They'd tried Tricyciics, M.A.O.I.s, insulin-comas, Selective-Serotonin-Reuptake
Inhibitors,283273 the new and side-effect-laden Quadracyclics. They'd scanned his lobes and affective matrices for lesions and
scars. Nothing worked. Not even high-amperage E.C.T. relieved It. This happens sometimes. Some cases of depression are
beyond human aid. The man's case gave Kate Gompert the howling fantods. The idea of this man go
ding miniaturized railroad networks day after day after day while feeling anything like what Kate Gompert felt in that ward
was simply beyond her ability to imagine. The rationo-spintual part of her knew this man and his wife must be possessed of a
courage way off any sort of known courage-chart. But in her toxified soul Kate Gompert felt only a paralyzing horror at the idea
of the squat dead-eyed man laying toy track slowly and carefully in the silence of his wood-panelled rec room, the silence total
except for the sounds of the track being oiled and snapped together and laid into place, the man's head full of poison and worms
and every cell in his body screaming for relief from flames no one else could help with or even feel.
The permanently psychotically depressed m
 type of psychosurg-ery where they supposedly went in and yanked out your whole limbic system, which is the part of the
brain that causes all sentiment and feeling. The man's fondest dream was anhedonia, complete psychic numbing. I.e. death in life.
The prospect of radical psychosurgery was the dangled carrot that Kate guessed still gave the man's life enough meaning for him
to hang onto the windowsill by his fingernails, which were probably black and gnarled from the flames. That and his wife: he
seemed genuinely to love his wife
T
st Feaster of Wellesley Hills MA, stating that she was in their prayers and w
 whether Mr. Ernest Feaster's limbic system got yanked out or not. Whether he achieved anhedonia. The Xmas cards had had
excruciating little watercolor pictures of locomotives on them. She could barely stand to think about them, even at the best of
times, which the present was not.
14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
Ms. Ruth van Cleve's first day off new residents' three-day House Restriction. Allowed now to hit meetings outside Enfield if
accompanied by some more senior resident the Staff judges safe. Ruth van Cleve in spike heels walking alongside a psychotically
essed Kate Gompert on Prospect just south of Inman Square, Cambridge, a little after 2200h., yammering nonstop.
Ruth van Cleve is shaping up to be excruciating for Kate Gompert to be around. Ruth van Cleve hails from Braintree on the
South Shore, is many kilos underweight, wears brass-colored lipstick, and has dry hair teased out in the big-hair fashion of
decades past. Her face has the late-stage Ice284274-addict's concave long-jawed insectile look. Her hair is a dry tangled cloud,
with tiny little eyes and bones and projecting beak underneath. Joelle v.D.'d said it almost looked like Ruth van Cleve's hair grew
her head instead of the other way around. Kate Gompert's hair is butcher-block cut and has recognizable color, at least.
Kate Gompert hasn't slept in four nights, and her slumped progress up the Prospect sidewalk resemb
o rush. Ruth van Cleve talks nonstop into her right ear. It's around 22OOh. on Saturday and the sodium streetlights keep going
off and then on again with a stuttered hum, some connection in them loose somewhere. Foot-traffic is dense, and the undead and
drunks who live in the streets around Inman Square also crowd the sidewalk's edges, and if Kate G. looks at the images of
passersby in the darkened shop windows they become (pedestrians and undead stem-artists) just heads that seem to float across
each window unconnected to anything. As in disconnected floating heads. In doorways by shops are incomplete persons in
wheelchairs with creative receptacles where limbs should be and hand-lettered invitations to help them.
An oral narrative begins to emerge. Ms. Ruth v.C. has been remanded to Ennet House by D.S.S. and Family Court after her
newborn baby was discovered in a Brai
cials had expired 11/01, a Sunday. Ruth van Cleve had rather unshrewdly left the hospital I.D. bracelet with its D.O.B. and her
own name and Health Card # on the discarded infant's wrist. The infant is apparently now in a South Shore hospital incubator, 
attached to machines and tapering off the Clonidine285275 it received for in-utero addictions to substances Kate Gompert can
only speculate about.286276 The father of Ruth van Cleve's child, she reports, is under the protection and care of the Norfolk
County Correctional Authority, awaiting sentencing for what Ruth van Cleve describes several times as operating a pharmaceutical company without a license.
bein
, which was who knows how many days or weeks ago.
d and Ruth van Cleve's cloud of hair, is the gaunt and spectral hollow-eyed head of Poor Tony
Krau
wer and dons his tackiest sportcoat and wet-combs his hair down smooth so it looks toupeeish and settles back on his
bun
 W. Commonwealth on Schtitt's old BMW, bound for Evangeline's LowTem sually gets called Heartbreak Hill, Schtitt intense-faced
and
od Sister: One
Tou d bleeds lurid blood-colored light down into the performance credits rolling across the
scre
d frozen yogurt from a
cyli itle and credits make their faces glow redly. Bridget Boone
exte in an inviting way, and by way of declining Hal points to the lump of Kodiak
in hi
points around the tennis ball he's squeezing
at th still trickling redly over the credits and frozen scene.
f.’
ason this has always gotten under Hal's skin.
What's remarkable to Kate Gompert is that she seems to be able to move forward without any sort of conscious movingforward-type volitions. She puts her left foot in front of her right foot and then her right foot in front of her left foot, and she's
moving forward, her whole self, when all she's capable of concentrating on is one foot and then the other foot. Heads glide by in
the darkened windows. Some of the Latino males in the vicinity do a kind of sexual checking-out as they pass — even though
underweight and dry-haired and kind of haggish, Ruth van Cleve's manner and attire and big hair broadcast that she's all about
sexuality and sex.
A negative thing about opting for recovery in NA instead of AA is availability and location of meetings. In other words fewer
NA meetings. On a Saturday night you could stand on the roof of Ennet House in Enfield and be hard-pressed to spit in any
direction without hitting some AA venue nearby. Whereas the closest Saturday-P.M. NA meeting is N. Cambridge's Clean and
Serene Group, infamous for cross-talk and chair-throwing, and the thing's Beginner's Mtng. goes from 2000 to 2l00h. and the
regular from 2100 to 2200h., purposely late, to offset the Saturday-night jones so many drug addicts suffer weekly, Saturday still
g the week's special mythic Party-Night even for persons who long ago ceased to be able to do anything but Party 24/7/365.
But from Inman Square back to Ennet House is a ghastly hike — hoof up Prospect to Central Sq. and take the Red Line all the
way to Park Street station and then the maddening Green Line B Train forever west on Comm. Ave. — and it's now after 22l5h.,
meaning Kate Gompert has 75 minutes to get herself and this hideous, despair-producing, slutty and yammering newcomer beside
her back for Curfew. Ruth van Cleve's chatter is as listener-interest-independent as anything Kate Gom-pert's heard since Randy
Lenz got invited to ingest Substances and abuse animals elsewhere, and left
The two move in and out of cones of epileptic light from fluttering street-lamps. Kate Gompert is trying not to shudder as
Ruth van Cleve asks her if she knows someplace you can pick up a good toothbrush cheap. Kate Gom-pert's entire spiritual energy
and attention are focused on first her left foot and then her right foot. One of the heads she does not see, floating in the windows
with her own unrecognizable hea
se, who's several steps behind them and matching their slightly serpentine course step for step, eyeing string purses he
imagines contain more than just train-fare and NA Newcomers' keychains.
The vaporizer chugs and seethes and makes the room's windows weep as Jim Troeltsch inserts a pro-wrestling cartridge in the
little TP's vie
k, surrounded by Seldane-bottles and two-ply facial tissue, preparing to call the action. His roommates have long since seen
what was coming, and screwed.
Standing on tiptoe in Subdorm B's curved hallway, using the handle of an inverted tennis racquet whose vinyl cover he can
absently zip and unzip as he moves the handle around, Michael Pemulis is gently raising one of the panels in the drop-ceiling and
shifting it on its aluminum strut, the panel, changing its lie on the strut from square-shaped to diamond-shaped, being careful not
to let it fall.
Lyle hovers cross-legged just a couple mm. above the top of the towel dispenser in the unlit weight room, eyes rolled up
white, lips barely moving and making no sound.
Coach Schtitt and Mario tear-ass downhill on
perature Confections in Newton Center, right at the bottom of what u
leaning forward like a skier, his white scarf whipping around and whipping Mario's face, in the sidecar, as Mario too leans
way forward into their downhill flight, preparing to whoop when they bottom out.
Ms. Avril Incandenza, seeming somehow to have three or four cigarettes all going at once, secures from Information the
phone and e-mail #s of a journalistic business address on East Tucson AZ's Blasted Expanse Blvd., then begins to dial, using the
stern of a blue felt pen to stab at the console's keys.
'AIYEE!' cries the man, rushing at the nun, wielding a power tool.
The tough-looking nun yells 'AIYEE!' right back as she kicks at him expertly, her habit's skirts whipping complexly around
her. The combatants circle each other warily in the abandoned warehouse, both growling. The nun's wimple is askew and soiled;
the back of her hand, held out in a bladish martial-art fist, displays part of a faded tattoo, some wicked-clawed bird of prey. The
cartridge opens like this, in violent medias res, then freezes in the middle of the nun's leaping kick, and its title, Blo
gh Nun, gets matte-dissolved in an
en's bottom. Bridget Boone and Frances L. Unwin have come in uninvited and joined Hal in V.R. 6 and are curled up against
the arms of the room's other recumbency, their feet touching at the soles, Boone eating unauthorize
ndrical carton. Hal's turned the rheostat down low, and the film's t
nds the confection-carton over in Hal's direction
s cheek and makes a display of leaning out to spit. He appears to be studying the scrolling credits very closely.
'So what is this?' Fran Unwin says.
Hal looks over at her very slowly, then even more slowly raises his right arm and
e monitor, where the cartridge's 50-point title is
Bridget ßoone gives him a look. 'What's up your particular butt?’
'I'm isolating. I came in here to be by mysel
She has this way that gets to Hal of digging the chocolate yogurt out with the spoon and then inverting the spoon, turning the
spoon over, so that it always enters her mouth upside-down and her tongue gets to contact the confection immediately, without the
mediation of cold spoon, and for some re
'So then you should've locked the door.’
'Except there aren't locks on the V.R. doors,287277 as you quite well know.’
Round-faced Frannie Unwin says 'Sshhh.’ 
Then too sometimes Boone plays with the laden spoon, makes it fly around in front of her face like a child's plane before
inve king it in. 'Maybe this is partly because this is a public room, for everybody, that your thinking person
prob
g for a while before he lets it go, so it hangs there slowly distending.
s the clean spoon just as slowly. 'No matter how sullen and pouty that person is over that person's play or
near
 with Jennie Bash in tow.
h looks at the large screen. The cartridge's theme-music is female-choral and very heavy and ironic on the descants.
Bern s a totally huge lady cruising the halls looking for you, with a notebook and a
very
ing. He won't respond and is spitting extra repulsively to get
acro
ing coming from Struck and
Sha
thin its life,' Boone says, barrel-rolling the spoon. Hal can tell she's done a couple one-hitters. He's looking
stra
wn someplace where people are already gathered. He's aware that they sense he's somehow there only in a
very
hartic final bloodbath the audience is brought to applaud instead of mourn.
Him
 at all times. Blood Sister: One Tough Nun was a supposedly
iron
mbency, and are
rting it and stic
ably wouldn't choose to isolate in.’
Hal leans over to spit and lets the spit han
Boone withdraw
-loss in full view of a whole crowd that day, I hear.’
'Bridget, I forgot to tell you I saw that Rite Aid's having an enormous clearance on emetics. If I were you I'd scoot right over.’
'You are vile.’
Bernadette Longley sticks her long boxy head in the door and sees Bridget Boone and says 'I thought I heard you in here' and
comes in uninvited
Hal whimpers.
Jennie Bas
adette Long-ley looks at Hal. 'You know there'
 determined expression.’
Boone banks the spoon back and forth absently. 'He's isolat
ss the point.’
Jennie Bash says 'Haven't you got a huge paper due for Thierry tomorrow? There was moan
w's room.’
Hal packs chew down with his tongue. 'Done.’
'Figures,' Bridget Boone says.
'Done, redone, formatted, printed, proofed, collated, stapled.’
'Proofed to wi
ight at the wall's screen, squeezing the ball so hard his forearm keeps swelling to twice its size.
'Plus I hear your best friend in the whole world did something really funny today,' Longley says.
'She means Pemulis,' Fran Unwin tells Hal.
Bridget Boone makes dive-bomber sounds and swoops the spoon around.
'Sounds like too good a story not to save and let my craving for it build and build until finally it's like I have to hear it or die
right on the spot.’
'What is up his butt?' Jennie Bash asks Fran Unwin. Fran Unwin's a sort of hanuman-faced girl with a torso and trunk about
twice as long as her legs, and a scuttly, vaguely simian style of play. Bernadette Longley wears knee-length candy-cane trousers
and a sweatshirt with the fleecy inside out. All the girls are now in socks. Hal notes that girls always seem to slip out of their shoes
when they assume any kind of spectatorial posture. Eight empty white sneakers now sit mute and weird at various points, slightly
sunk in carpet pile. No two of the shoes face quite the same exact direction. Male players, on the other hand, tend to leave the
footwear on when they come in and sit down somewhere. Girls literally embody the idea of making yourself at home. Males,
when they come in somewhere and sit down, project an air of transience. Remain suited up and mobile. It's the same whenever
Hal comes in and sits do
 technical sense, that he's got an air of moment's-notice readiness to leave about him. Boone extends her carton of
TCBY288278 toward Longley in an inviting way, even tilting it invitingly back and forth. Longley puffs her cheeks and blows air
out with a fatigued sound. At least three different smells of cologne and skin-cream struggle for primacy in here. Bridget Boone's
free LA Gear shoes are both on their sides from the force of having been almost kicked off her feet. Hal's spit makes a sound
against the bottom of the wastebasket. Jennie Bash has bigger arms than Hal. The Viewing Room is redly dim. Bash asks Unwin
what they're watching.
Blood Sister: One Tough Nun, one of Himself's few commercial successes, wouldn't have made near the money it made if it
hadn't come out just as InterLace was starting to purchase first-run features for its rental menus and hyping the cartridges with
one-time Spontaneous Disseminations. It was the sort of sleazy-looking shocksploitation film that would have had a two-week run
in multiplex theaters 8 and above and then gone right to the featureless brown boxes of magnetic-video limbo. Hal's critical take
on the film is that Himself, at certain dark points when abstract theory-issues seemed to provide an escape from the far more
wrenching creative work of making humanly true or entertaining cartridges, had made films in certain commercial-type genre
modes that so grotesquely exaggerated the formulaic schticks of the genres that they became ironic metacinematic parodies on the
genres: 'sub/inversions of the genres,' cognoscenti taken in were wont to call them. The metacinematic-parody idea itself was aloof
and over-clever, to Hal's way of thinking, and he's not comfortable with the way Himself always seemed to get seduced by the
very commercial formulae he was trying to invert, especially the seductive formulae of violent payback, i.e. the cathartic
bloodbath, i.e. the hero trying with every will-fiber to eschew the generic world of the stick and fist and but driven by unjust
circumstance back to the violence again, to the cat
self's best in this vein was The Night Wears a Sombrero, a Langesque metaWestern but also a really good Western, with
chintzy homemade interior sets but breathtaking exteriors shot outside Tucson AZ, an ambivalent-but-finaliy-avenging-son story
played out against dust-colored skies and big angles of flesh-colored mountain, plus with minimal splatter, shot men clutching
their chests and falling deliciously sideways, all hats staying on
ic lampoon of the avenging-cleric splatter-films of the late B.S. '90s. Nor did Himself make any friends on either side of the
Concavity, trying to shoot the thing in Canada.
Hal tries to imagine the tall slumped tremulous stork-shape of Himself inclined at an osteoporotic angle over digital editing
equipment for hours on end, deleting and inserting code, arranging Blood Sister: One Tough Nun into subversive/inversion, and
can't summon one shadowy idea of what Himself might have been feeling as he patiently labored. Maybe that was the point of the
thing's metasilliness, to have nothing really felt going on.289279
Jennie Bash has left V.R. 6's door agape, and Idris Arslanian and Todd ('Postal Weight') Possalthwaite and Kent Blott all drift
in and sit Indian-style in a loose hemisphere on the thick carpet between the girls' recumbency and Hal's recu
mor
robbed of her leather jacket outside the portcullis of a downtown convent and is rescued, nursed, befriended,
spir
 cuts wise), Blood Sister eventually takes on a burn-scarred, deeply troubled adolescent
punk
ings,
timi
 the substitution-of-onecrut
e or less considerately quiet. They all keep their sneakers on. Postal Weight's nose is a massive proboscoid bandaged thing.
Kent Blott wears a sportfisherman's cap with an extremely long bill. That queer faint smell of hot dogs that seems to follow Idris
Arslanian around begins to insinuate itself into the room's colognes. He isn't wearing the rayon handkerchief as a blindfold but
does have it tied around his neck; no one asks him about it. All the littler kids are consummate spectators and are sucked
immediately into Blood Sister's unfolding narrative, and the older females seem to take some kind of psychic cue from the little
boys and subside, too, and watch, until after a while Hal's the only person in the room who isn't 100% absorbed.
The entertainment's uptake is that a tough biker-chick-type girl from the mean streets of Toronto is found O.D.'d, beaten up,
molested, and
itually guided, and converted — 'saved' is the weak entendre made much of in the first act's dialogue — by a tough-looking
older nun who it turns out, she reveals (the tough older nun), had herself been hauled up out of a life of Harleys, narcotics-dealing
and -addiction by an even tougher even older nun, a nun who had herself been saved by a tough ex-biker nun, and so on. The
latest saved biker-chick becomes a tough and street-smart nun in the same urban order, and is known on the mean streets as Blood
Sister, and wimple or not still rides her Hawg from parish to parish and still knows akido and is not to be fucked with, is the word
on the streets.
The motivational crux here being that almost this whole order of nuns is staffed by nuns who'd been saved from Toronto's
mean, dead-end streets by other older tougher saved nuns. So, endless novenas later, Blood Sister eventually feels this transitive
spiritual urge to go out and find a troubled adolescent female of her own, to 'save' and bring into the order, thereby discharging her
soul's debt to the old tough nun who'd saved her. Through processes obscure (a Toronto troubled-but-savable-adolescent-girldirectory of some sort? Bridget Boone
er-type Toronto girl who is sullen and, yes, reasonably tough, but is also vulnerable and emotionally tormented (the girl's
pink shiny burn-scarred face tends to writhe in misery whenever she thinks Blood Sister's not looking) by the terrible depredations
she's endured as a result of her rapacious and unshakable addiction to crank cocaine, the kind you have to convert and cook up
yourself, and with ether, which is highly combustible, and which people used before somebody found out baking soda and
temperature-flux would do the same thing, which dates the film's B.S. time-period even more clearly than the tough tortured punk
girl's violet stelliform coiffure.290280
But so Blood Sister eventually gets the girl clean, by nurturing her through Withdrawal in a locked sacristy; and the girl
becomes less sullen by degrees that almost have audible clicks to them — the girl stops trying to dicky the lock of the
sacramental-wine cabinet, stops farting on purpose during matins and vespers, stops going up to the Trappists who hang around
the convent and asking them for the time and other sly little things to try to make them slip up and speak aloud, etc. A couple
times the girl's face writhes in emotional torment and vulnerability even when Blood Sister's looking. The girl gets a severe and
somewhat lesbianic haircut, and her roots establish themselves as softly brown. Blood Sister, revealing biceps like nobody's
business, beats the girl at arm-wrestling; they both laugh; they compare tattoos: this marks the start of a brutally drawn-out
Getting-to-Know-and-Trust-You montage, a genre-convention, this montage involving Harley-rides at such speeds that the girl
has to keep her hand on Blood Sister's head to keep B.S.'s wimple from flying off, and long conversational walks filmed at wideangle, and protracted and basically unwinnable games of charades with the Trappists, plus some quick scenes of Blood Sister finding the girl's Marlboros and dildo-facsimile lighter in the wastebasket, of the girl doing chores unsullenly under B.S.'s grudgingly
approving eye, of candle-lit scripture-study sessions with the girl's finger under each word she reads, of the girl carefully snipping
the last bits of split violet ends from her soft brown hair, of the more senior tough nuns punching Blood Sister's shoulder
approvingly as the girl's eyes start to get that impending-conversion gleam in them, then, finally, of Blood Sister and the girl habitshopping, the girl's burned lantern jaw and hairless Promethean brow frozen in a sunlit montage-climax shot under a novitiate
wimple's gull-wings — all accompanied by — no kidding — 'Getting to Know You,' which Hal imagines the Stork justified to
himself as subversively saccharine. This all takes about half an hour. Bridget Boone, of the Indianapolis archdiocese, begins to
declaim briefly on Blood Sister: One Tough Nun's ironic anti-Catholic subthesis — that the deformed addicted girl's 'salvation'
here seemed simply the exchange of one will-obliterating 'habit' for another, substituting one sort of outlandish head-decoration
for another — and gets pinched by Jennie Bash and shushed by just about everyone in the room but Hal, who could pass for
asleep except for the brief lists to port over the wastebasket, to spit, and in fact is experiencing some of the radical loss of
concentration that attends THC-Withdrawal and is thinking about another, even more familiar J. O. Incandenza cartridge even
while he watches this one with the other E.T.A.s. This other attention-object is the late Himself's so-called 'inversion' of the
corporate-politics genre, Low-Temperature Civics, an executive-suite soap opera filled with power plays, position-jockey
d adulteries, martinis, and malignantly pretty female executives in elegant tight-fitting dress-for-successwear who eat their
paunched and muddled male counterparts for political lunch. Hal knows that L-TC wasn't an inversion or lampoon at all, but
derived right from the dark B.S. '8os period when Himself had changed careers from government service to private
entreprenurism, when a sudden infusion of patent-receipts left him feeling post-carrot anhedonic and existentially unmoored, and
Himself took an entire year off to drink Wild Turkey and watch broadcast-television tycoon-operas like Lorimar's Dynasty et al. in
a remote spa off Canada's Northwest coast, where he supposedly met and bonded with Lyle, now of the E.T.A. weight room.
What's intriguing but unknown to everyone in V.R. 6 is the way Boone's take on Himself's take on
ch-for-another interpretation of substituting Catholic devotion for chemical dependence is very close to the way many not-yetdesperate-enough newcomers to Boston AA see Boston AA as just an exchange of slavish dependence on the bottle/pipe for
slavish dependence on meetings and banal shibboleths and robotic piety, an 'Attitude of Platitude,' and use this idea that it's still
slavish dependence as an excuse to stop trying Boston AA, and to go back to the original slavish Substance-dependence, until that
dependence has finally beaten them into such a double-bound desperation that they finally come back in with their faces hanging
off their skulls and beg to be told just what platitudes to shout, and how high to adjust their vacant grins.
Some Substance-dependent persons, though, have already been so broken by the time they first Come In that they don't care
about stuff like substitution or banality, they'll give their left nut to trade their original dependence in for robotic platitudes and
pep-rally cheer. They're the ones with the gun to their head, the ones who stick and Hang. It remains to be determined whether
Joelle van Dyne, whose first appearance in a James O. Incan-denza project occurred in this very Low-Temperature Civics, is one 
of these people who've come into AA/NA shattered enough to stick, but she's starting to I.D. more and more with the
Commitment speakers she hears who did come in shattered enough to know it's get straight or die. A click and a half straight
downhill from E.T.A., Joelle is hitting the Reality Is For People That Can't Handle Drugs Group, a meeting of the NA-splinter
Cocaine Anonymous,291281 mostly because the meeting's in the St. Elizabeth's Hospital Grand Rounds Auditorium, just a couple
floors down from where Don Gately, whom she just got done visiting and mopping the massive unconscious forehead of, is lying
in the Trauma Wing in a truly bad way. CA meetings have a long preamble and endless little Xeroxed formalities they read aloud
at the start, is one reason Joelle avoids CA, but the opening stuff is done by the time she gets down and comes in and gets some
burnt urn-bottom coffee and finds an available seat. The only empty seats are in the meeting's back row — 'Denial Aisle,' the back
rows are usually called — and Joelle is surrounded by catexic newcomers crossing and uncrossing their legs every few seconds
and sniffing compulsively and looking like they're wearing everything they own. Plus there's the row of standing men — there's a
certain hard-faced type of male in Boston fellowships who refuses ever to sit for meetings — standing behind the back row, legs
set wide and arms crossed and talking to each other out the sides of their mouths, and she can tell the standing men are looking at
her bare knees over her shoulder, making little comments about the knees and the veil. She thinks with fearful sentiment292282 of
Don Gately, a tube down his throat, torn by fever and guilt and shoulder-pain, offered Demerol by well-meaning but clueless
M.D.s, in and out of delirium, torn, convinced that certain men with hats wished him ill, looking at his room's semi-private ceiling
like it would eat him if he dropped his guard. The big blackboard up on the stage says the Reality Is For People That Can't Handle
Drugs Group welcomes tonight's Commitment speakers, the Freeway Access Group from Mattapan, which is deep in the colored
part of Boston where Cocaine Anonymous tends to be most heavily concentrated. The speaker just starting in at the podium when
Joelle sits down is a tall yellowish colored man with a weightlifter's build and frightening eyes, sloe and a kind of tannin-brown.
He's been in CA seven months, he says. He eschews the normal CA drugologue's macho war-stories and gets right to his Bottom,
his jumping-off place. Joelle can tell he's trying to tell the truth and not just posturing and performing the way so many CAs seem
like they do. His story's full of colored idioms and those annoying little colored hand-motions and gestures, but to Joelle it doesn't
seem like she cares that much anymore. She can Identify. The truth has a kind of irresistible unconscious attraction at meetings, no
matter what the color or fellowship. Even Denial Aisle and the standing men are absorbed by the colored man's story. The colored
man says his thing is he'd had a wife and a little baby daughter at home in Mattapan's Perry Hill Projects, and another baby on the
way. He'd managed to hang on to his menial riveter's-assistant job at Universal Bleacher right up the street from here in Enfield
because his addiction to crank cocaine wasn't everyday; he smoked on your binge-type basis, mostly weekends. Hellacious,
psychopathic, bank-account-emptying binges, though. Like getting strapped to a Raytheon missile and you don't stop till that
missile stops, Jim. He says his wife had got temp work cleaning houses, but when she worked they had to put their little girl in a
day-care that just about ate her day's pay. So his paycheck was like their total float, and his weekend binges with the glass pipe
caused them no end of Financial Insecurity, which he mispronounces. Which brings him to his last binge, the Bottom, which,
predictably, occurred on a payday. This check just had to go for groceries and rent. They were two months back, and there was not
jack-shit in the house in the way of to eat. At a smoke-break at Universal Bleacher he'd made sure and bought just one single vial,
for ce and groceries and quality time with his pregnant wife and
little
out of touch with the whole seize-the-opportunity concept could pass that shit up. In short
it w
84
mpty
bisc
ocket-picture in the back of his head swelled and became a sharp-focused scene of his wife and little girl and little unborn
chil
just a tensky, for a Sunday-night treat after a weekend of abstinen
 daughter. The wife and little daughter were to meet him after work right off the bus stop at Brighton Best Savings, right
under the big clock, to 'help' him deposit the paycheck right then and there. He'd let his wife stipulate the meeting at the bank
because he knew in a self-disgusted way even then that there was this hazard of paycheck-type incidents from binges he'd pulled
in the past, and their Financial Insecurity was now whatever word's past the word deep shit, and he knew goddamn well he could
not afford to fuck up this time.
He says that's how he used to think of it to himself: fucking up.
He didn't even make it to the bus after clocking out, he said. Two other Holmeses293283 in Riveting had three vials each,
which vials they had, like, brandished at him, and he'd kicked in his one vial because two-and-a-third vials v. one thin-ass Sundaynight vial was only a fucking fool way
as the familiar insanity of money in the pocket and no defense against the urge, and the thought of his woman holding his little
girl in her little knit cap and mittens standing under the big clock in cold March dusk didn't so much get pushed aside as somehow
shrink to a tiny locket-size picture in the center of a part of him he and the Holmeses had set out busily to kill, with the pipe.
He says he never made the bus. They passed a bottle of rye around the old Ford Mystique one of the Holmeses profiled, and
fired up, right in the car, and after he once fired up with $ in his pocket the fat woman with the little helmet with horns on it done
already like fucking sang, Jim.2942
The man's hands grip the sides of the podium and he rests his weight on his elbow-locked arms in a way that conveys both
abjection and pluck. He invites the CAs to let's just draw the curtain of charity over the rest of the night's scene, which after the
check-cashing stop got hazy with missile-exhaust anyhow; but so he finally did get home to Mattapan the next morning, Saturday
morning, sick and green-yellow and on that mean post-crank slide, dying for more and willing to kill for more and yet so mortified
and ashamed of having done fucked up (again) that just going up the elevator to their apartment was maybe the bravest thing he'd
ever done, up to that point, he felt.
It was like 0600 in the A.M. and they weren't there. There was nobody home, and in the sort of way where the place's
emptiness pulsed and breathed. An envelope was slid under the door from the B.H.A.,295285 not the salmon color of an Eviction
Notice but a green Last Warning re rent. And he went into the kitchen and opened up the fridge, hating himself for hoping there
was a beer. In the fridge was a jar of grape jelly near-empty and a half a can of biscuit mix, and that, plus a sour empty-fridge
odor, was all, Jim. A little plastic jar of labelless Food-Bank peanut butter so empty its insides had knife-scrapes on the sides and a
little clotted box of salt was all there was in the whole rest of the kitchen.
But what sent his face clear down off his skull and broke him in two, though, was he said when he saw the Pam-shiny e
uit pan on top of the stove and the plastic rind of the peanut butter's safety-seal wrap on top of the wastebasket's tall pile. The
little l
d eating what he now could see they must have eaten, last night and this morning, while he was out ingesting their groceries
and rent. This was his cliff-edge, his personal intersection of choice, standing there loose-faced in the kitchen, running his finger 
around a shiny pan with not one little crumb of biscuit left in it. He sat down on the kitchen tile with his scary eyes shut tight but
still seeing his little girl's face. They'd ate some charity peanut butter on biscuits washed down with tapwater and a grimace.
Their apartment was six floors up in Perry Hill's Bldg. 5. The window didn't open but could be broke through with a running
star
eaker got taken to his first
CA
kes another line
dow
e phone just last month. And he's now straight, from Giving Up and joining the
Free
t.
He didn't kill himself, though, he says. He just got up and walked out. He didn't leave his wife a note. Not nothing. He went
and walked the whole four clicks to Shattuck Shelter in Jamaica Plain. He felt like for sure they'd of been better off without him,
he said. But he said he didn't know why but he didn't kill himself. But he didn't. He figures there was some God-involvement,
sitting there on the floor. He just decided to go to Shattuck and Surrender and get straight and never ever have his little girl's
grimacing face in his hung-over head ever again, James.
And Shattuck Shelter — by coincidence — that usually had a waiting list every March until it got warm, they'd just kicked
out some sorry-ass specimen for defecating in the shower, and they took him, the speaker. He asked for a CA Meeting right away.
And a Shattuck Staff guy called somebody Afro-American with a lot of clean recovered time, and the sp
Meeting. That was 224 days ago tonight. That night, when the colored CA Crocodile dropped him off back at the Shattuck —
after he'd wept in front of other colored men at his first meeting and told men he didn't know from shit about the big clock and
glass pipe and paycheck and the biscuits and his little girl's face — and after he come back to the Shattuck and got buzzed through
and the buzzer sounded for supper, it turned out — by coincidence — that the Saturday-night Shattuck supper was coffee and
peanut butter sandwiches. It was the end of the week and the Shelter's donated food had run out, they only had PB on cheap-ass
white bread and Sunny Square instant coffee, the cheap shit that doesn't even quite dissolve all the way.
He's got your autodidactic orator's way with emotional dramatic pauses that don't seem affected. Joelle ma
n the Styrofoam coffee cup with her fingernail and chooses consciously to believe it isn't affected, the story's emotive drama.
Her eyes feel sandy from forgetting to blink. This always happens when you don't expect it, when it's a meeting you have to drag
yourself to and are all but sure will suck. The speaker's face has lost its color, shape, everything distinctive. Something has taken
the tight ratchet in Joelle's belly and turned it three turns to the good. It's the first time she's felt sure she wants to keep straight no
matter what it means facing. No matter if Don Gately takes Demerol or goes to jail or rejects her if she can't show him the face.
It's the first time in a long time — tonight, 11/14—Joelle's even considered possibly showing somebody the face.
After the pause the speaker says all the other sorry motherfuckers in the Shattuck Shelter in there started in to bitching about
what was this shit, peanut butter sandwiches for fucking supper. The speaker says how whatever he silently thanked for just that
particular sandwich he held and chewed, washing it down with gritty Sunny Square coffee, that thing became his Higher Power.
He's now seven-plus months clean. Universal Bleacher let him go, but he's got steady work at Logan, pushing a third-shift mop,
and a Holmes on his crew's also in the Program — by coincidence. His pregnant wife, it turned out, had gone to a Unwed Mothers
Shelter with Shantel, that night. She was still in there. D.S.S. still wouldn't let him appeal his wife's Restraining Order and see
Shantel, but he got to talk to his little girl on th
way Access Group and getting Active and taking the voluntary suggestions of the Fellowship of Cocaine Anonymous. His
wife was due to have her baby around Xmas. He said he didn't know what was going to happen to him or his family. But he says
he has received certain promises from his new family — the Freeway Access Group of Cocaine Anonymous — and so he had
certain hope-type emotions about the future, inside. He didn't so much conclude or make obligatory reference to Gratitude or any
of that usual shit as grip the lectern and shrug and say he'd started feeling just last month that the choice he made on the kitchen
floor was the right choice, personally speaking.
Entertainment-wise, things take a rapid turn for the splattery once the tough girl Blood Sister seemed to have saved is found
bluely dead in her novitiate's cot, her habit's interior pockets stuffed with all kinds of substances and paraphernalia and her arm a
veritable forest of syringes. Tight shot of B.S., face working purply, staring down at the ex-ex-punker. Suspecting foul play
instead of spiritual recidivism, Blood Sister, disregarding first the Other-Cheek pieties and then the impassioned pleas and then the
direct orders of the Vice-Mother Superior — who happens now to be the tough nun who'd saved Blood Sister, way back — begins
reverting to her former Toronto-mean-street pre-salvation tough-biker-chick ways: de-mufflering her Harley Hawg, hauling an
age-faded stud-covered leather bike-jacket out of storage and squeezing it over her pectoral-swollen habit, unbandaging her most
lurid tattoos, shaking down former altar boys for information, flipping off motorists who get in her bike's way, meeting old streetcontacts in dim saloons and tossing back jiggers with even the most cirrhotic of them, beating, bludgeoning, akido-ing, disarming
thugs of power tools, avenging the desalvation and demapping of her young charge, determined to prove that the girl's death was
no accident or backslide, that Blood Sister had not failed with the soul she'd chosen to save to discharge her own soul's debt to the
tough old Vice-Mother Superior who'd saved her, Blood Sister, so far back. Several thuggish stuntmen and countless liters of
potassium thiocyanate296286 later, the truth does out: the novitiate girl had been murdered by the Mother Superior, the order's top
and toughest nun. This M.S. is the nun who'd saved the Vice-M.S. who'd saved Blood Sister, meaning, ironically, that the
evidence Blood Sister needs to prove that her salvation-debt really was discharged is also evidence inimical to the legal interests
of the tough nun to whom Blood Sister's own saviour is obligated, so Blood Sister gets increasingly tortured and ill-tempered as
evidence of the Mother Superior's guilt accretes. In one scene she says fuck. In another she swings a censer like a mace and brains
an old verger who's one of the Mother Superior's stooges, knocking his toothless head clean off. Then, in Act III, a veritable orgy
of retribution follows the full emergence of the sordid truth: it seems that the tough old Vice-Mother Superior, viz. the nun who'd
saved Blood Sister, had in fact not been saved, truly, after all — had in fact, during 20+ years of exemplary novena-saying and
wafer-baking, been suffering a kind of hidden degenerative recidivist soul-rot, and had resumed, the Více-M.S., at about the time
Blood Sister had donned the habit of full nunhood, had not only resumed Substance-dependence but had started actually dealing in
serious weights of whatever at the time was most profitable (which after 20+ years had changed from Marseillese heroin to
Colombian freebaseable-grade Bing Crosby) to support her own hidden habit, covertly operating a high-volume retail operation
out of the order's Community Outreach Rescue Mission's little-used confessionals. This nun's superior, the top tough Mother
Superior nun, stumbling onto the drug-operation after the now-demapped verger informed her that a suspicious number of
limousines were discharging gold-chained and not very penitent-looking persons into the order's Community Outreach Rescue
Mission, and disastrously unable to summon the pious humility to accept the fact that she'd failed, it seemed, at truly and forever 
saving the ex-dealer whose salvation the Mother Superior required to discharge the debt to the now-retired octogenarian nun
who'd saved her — this Mother Superior herself is the one who murdered Blood Sister's ex-punk novitiate, to silence the girl.
What emerges is that Blood Sister's addicted punk-girl's Substance-copping venue, when she was Out There pre-salvation, had
been nothing other than the Vice-Mother Superior's infamous Community Outreach Rescue Mission. In other words, the nun
who
following the tough nun (or ex-nun). The fact
that
st, but the huge sign of a discount Harley-muffler outlet juts just at the horizon she's
roar
ases are clearly labelled.
view of Prospect St. and pavement and dumpsters
and
o clear a path on the sidewalk before it. Kate
Gom
r a storefront awning right nearby somewhere said: 'Seen it!’
ably swelling shut,
and
le thing!' it said, then repeated it. 'I'm a
witn
'd saved Blood Sister but had herself been secretly unsaved had been the tough girl's Bing-dealer, is why the tough nonCatholic girl'd been so mysteriously adept at the Confiteor. The order's Mother Superior had figured that it was only a matter of
time before the girl's conversion and salvation reached the sort of spiritual pitch where her guarded silence broke and she told
Blood Sister the seamy truth about the nun she (Blood Sister) thought had saved her (Blood Sister). So she (the Mother Superior)
had eliminated the girl's map — ostensibly, she (the Mother Superior) told her lieutenant, the Vice-Mother Superior, to save her
(the Vice-Mother Superior) from exposure and excommunication and maybe worse, if the girl weren't silenced.297287
This narratively prolix and tangled stuff all gets explicated at near-Kabuki volume during an appalling free-for-all in the
office of the Mother Superior who hadn't saved the Vice-M.S. who'd saved Blood Sister, with the two senior nuns — who'd been
tough and unsaved back in the Ontarian days when men were men and so were drug-addicted bike-chicks — teaming up and
kicking Blood Sister's ass, the fight-scene a blur of swirling habite-ments and serious martial arts against the spot-lit backdrop of
the wall's huge decorative mahogany crucifix, with Blood Sister giving a good account of herself but still getting her wimple beat
in and finally, after several whirling kicks to the forehead, starting to bid adieu to her corporeal map and commend herself to the
arms of God; until the unsaved recidivist Vice-Mother Superior nun who'd saved Blood Sister, wiping blood from her eyes after a
head-butt and seeing the Mother Superior about to decapitate Blood Sister with the souvenir Champlain-era tomahawk the Huron
nun who'd been saved by the original founder of the Toronto tough-girl-saving order had used to decapitate Jesuit missionaries
before she (the tough Huron nun) had been saved, seeing the tomahawk raised with both arms before the normally pious-eyed old
Mother Superior's face — a face now rendered indescribable in aspect by the absence of humility and the passion for truthsilencing that add up to pure and radical evil — seeing now the upraised hatchet and demonized face of the M.S., the unsaved
Vice-nun has a moment of epiphanic anti-recidivist spiritual clarity, and averts Blood Sister's demapping by leaping across the
office and cold-cocking the Mother Superior with a large decorative mahogany Christian object so symbolically obvious it needn't
even be named, the object's symbolic unsubtlety making both Hal and Bridget Boone cringe. Now Blood Sister has the
Champlain-era hatchet, and the unsaved nun who'd saved her has an unnamed object whose mahogany's no match for a hatchet,
and they stand facing each other over the prone Mother Superior's puddle of skirts, chests heaving, and the Vice-M.S. has a
writhing expression under her askew wimple like Go ahead, make the circle of recidivist retribution against the nun you thought
had saved you but ultimately couldn't even save herself complete, complete the lapsarian circuit or whatever. They stare at each
other for countless frames, the office wall behind them cruciformly pale where the unnamed object'd hung. Then Blood Sister
shrugs in resignation and drops the tomahawk, and turns and with an ironic little obeisance walks out the Mother Superior's office
door and through the little sacristy and over the altar and down the little convent nave (bike boots echoing on the tile, emphasizing
the silence) and out the big doors whose tympanum overhead is carved with a sword and a ploughshare and a syringe and a soupladle and the motto CON-TRARIA SUNT COMPLEMENTA, the heaviness of which makes Hal cringe so severely it's Boone
who has to supply the translation Kent Blott asks for.298288 On-screen, we're still
 the hatchet she resignedly dropped fetched the prone Mother Superior a pretty healthy knock is presented as clearly
accidental... because she (Blood Sister) is still walking away from the convent, moving emphatically and in a gradually deepening
focus. Limping toughly eastward into the twittering Toronto dawn. The cartridge's closing sequence shows her astride her Hawg
on Toronto's meanest street. About to lapse? Backslide back into her tough pre-saved ways? It's unclear in a way that's supposed
to be rich: her expression is agnostic at be
ing toward. The closing credits are the odd lime-green of bugs on a windshield.
It's hard to tell whether Boone and Bash's applause is sarcastic. There's that post-entertainment flurry of changed positions
and stretched limbs and critical sallies. Out of nowhere Hal remembers: Smothergill. Possalthwaite says he and the Id-man
brought Blott in to speak to Hal about something disturbing they encountered during their disciplinary shit-detail in the tunnels
that P.M. Hal holds up a hand for the kids to hang on, flipping through cartridge cases to see whether Low-Temperature Civics is
up here. All the c
The apparition receded, the red of its coat shrinking against the swinging
 looming storefronts, Ruth van Cleve on its lurid tail and receding also, screaming bits of urban argot that became less faint
than swallowed. Kate Gompert held her hurt head and heard it roar. Ruth van Cleve's pursuit was slowed by her arms, which were
waving around as she screamed; and the apparition was swinging their purses t
pert could see pedestrians leaping out into the street way up ahead to avoid getting clocked. The whole visual scene seemed
tinged in violet.
A voice unde
Kate Gompert leaned over again and held the part of her head that surrounded her eye. The eye was palp
 her whole vision was queerly violet. A sound in her head like a drawbridge being drawn up, implacable trundle and squeaks.
Hot watery spit was flooding her mouth, and she kept swallowing against nausea.
'Seen it? Bet your ever-living goddamn life I seen it!' A kind of gargoyle seemed to detach itself from a storefront hardware
display and moved in, its motions oddly jerky, as in a film missing frames. 'Seen the who
ess!' it said.
Kate Gompert put her other arm out against the lightpost and hauled herself mostly upright, looking at it.
'Witnessed the whole godfdamn thing,' it said. In the eye that wasn't swelling shut the thing resolved violetly into a bearded
man in an army coat and a sleeveless army coat over that coat, spittle in his beard. One eye had a system of exploded arteries in it.
He shook like an old machine. There was a smell involved. The old man got right up close, looming in, so that pedestrians had to
curve out around both of them together. Kate Gompert could feel her pulse in her eye.
'Witness! Eyewitness! The whole thing!' But he was looking someplace else, like more around at people passing. 'Seen it? I'm
him!' Not clear who he was shouting at. It wasn't her, and the passersby were paying that studious, urban kind of no-attention as 
they broke and melted around them at the lightpost and then reformed. Kate Gompert had the idea that supporting herself against
the lightpost would keep her from throwing up. Concussion is really another word for a bruised brain. She tried not to think about
it, that the impact had maybe sent one part of her brain slamming against her skull, and now that part was purply swelling, mashed
up against the inside of her skull. The lightpost she held herself up with was what had hit her. 'Fellow? I'm your fellow. Witness?
Saw it all!' And the old fellow was holding a trembling palm up just under Kate Gompert's face, as if he wanted it thrown up into.
The palm was violet, with splotches of some sort of possible fungal decay, and with dark branching lines where the pink palmlines of people who don't live in dumpsters usually are, and Kate Gompert studied the palm abstractly, and the weather-bleached
GIGABUCKS299289 ticket on the pavement below it. The ticket seemed to recede into a violet mist and then move back up.
Pedestrians barely glanced at them and then looked studiously elsewhere: a drunk-looking pale girl and a street bum showing her
something in his hand. 'Witnessed the whole thing being committed,' the man remarked to a passerby with a cellular on his belt.
Kate Gompert couldn't summon the juice to tell him to go screw. That's the way it was said down here in the real city, Go Screw,
with a deft little thumb-gesture. She couldn't even say Go Away, though the smell involved in the man made it worse, the nausea.
It seemed terribly important not to vomit. She could feel her pulse in the eye the pole had hit. As if the strain of vomiting could
aggravate the spongy purpling of the part of her brain the pole had bruised. The thought made her want to vomit in this horrid
palm that wouldn't stay still. She tried to reason. If the man had witnessed the whole thing then how could he think she'd have
change to put in his hand. Ruth van Cleve had been listing some of her baby's jailed father's wittier aliases when Kate Gompert
had felt a hand strike her back and close around the strap of her purse. Ruth van Cleve had cried out as the apparition of just about
the most unattractive woman Kate Gompert had ever seen crashed forward between them, knocking them apart. Ruth van Cleve's
vinyl purse's strap gave right away, but Kate Gompert's thin but densely macramé'd strap held around her shoulder and she was
pulled wrenchingly forward by the womanly apparition's momentum as it tried to sprint up Prospect St., and the red hag-like
figure was yanked wrenchingly back as the quality Filene's all-cotton French-braidedly macramé'd purse-strap held, and Kate
Gompert had got a whiff of something danker than the dankest municipal sewage and a glimpse of what looked like a five-day
facial growth on the hag's face as street-tough Ruth van Cleve got a grip on her/his/its red leather coat, proclaiming the thief a son
of a mafun ho. Kate Gompert was staggering forward, trying to get her arm out of the strap's loop. They all three moved forward
together this way. The apparition spun itself violently around, trying to shake off Ruth van Cleve, and her/its spin with her purse
took the strap-attached Kate Gompert (who didn't weigh very much) out around in a wide circle (she'd had a flashback of
rem iscence back to Crack-the-Whip at the Wellesley Hills Skating Club's rink's 'Wee Blades' Toddler Skating Hour, as a child),
gain so gaining speed, and the sound was somewhere
betw
owed ten or thirty paces behind, eyes on the twine handles of the shopping bags. The Chinese women were about
the
he'd
with promoted Krazy Glue and made even glossier
by t
in
ing speed; and then a rust-pocked curbside lightpost rotated toward her, al
een a bonk and a clang, and the sky and the sidewalk switched places, and a violet sun exploded outward, and the whole
street turned violet and swung like a clanging bell; and then she was alone and purseless and watching the two recede, both
seeming to be shrieking for help.
14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
A disadvantage of your nasally ingested cocaine being that at a certain point somewhere past the euphoric crest — if you
haven't got the sense left to stop and just ride the crest, and instead keep going, nasally — it takes you into regions of almost
interstellar cold and nasal numbness. Randy Lenz's sinuses were frozen against his skull, numb and hung with crystal frost. His
legs felt like they ended at the knees. He was trailing two very small-sized Chinese women as they lugged enormous paper
shopping bags east on Bishop Allen Dr. under Central. His heart sounded like a shoe in the Ennet House basement's dryer. His
heart was beating that loud. The Chinese women scuttled at an amazing rate, given their size and the bags' size. It was c. 2212:30-
40h., smack in the middle of the former Interval of Issues-Resolution. The Chinese women didn't walk so much as scuttle with a
kind of insectile rapidity, and Lenz was heart-pressed to both keep up and seem to casually saunter, numb from the knee down and
the nostril back. They made the turn onto Prospect St. two or a few blocks below Central Square, moving in the direction of Inman
Square. Lenz foll
size of fire hydrants and moved like they had more than the normal amount of legs, conversing in their anxious and highpitched monkey-language. Evolution proved your Orientoid tongues were closer to your primatal languages than not. At first, on
the brick sidewalks of the stretch of Mass. Ave. between Harvard and Central, Lenz had thought they might be following him —
he'd been followed a great deal in his time, and like the well-read Geoffrey D. he knew only too well thank you that the most
fearsome surveillance got carried out by unlikely-looking people that followed you by walking in front of you with small mirrors
in their glasses’
temples or elaborate systems of cellular communicators for reporting to the Command Center — or else also by helicopters,
also, that flew too high to see, hovering, the tiny chop of their rotors disguised as your own drumming heart. But after he'd had
success at successfully shaking the Chinese women twice — the second time so successfully he'd had to tear-ass around through
alleys and vault wooden fences to pick them up again a couple blocks north on Bishop Allen Dr., scuttling along, jabbering —
 settled down in his conviction about who was trailing who, here. As in just who had the controlling discretion over the
general situation right here. The ejection from the House, which the ejection had at first seemed like the kiss of a death sentence,
had turned out to maybe be just the thing. He'd tried the Straight On Narrow and for his pains had been threatened and
dismissively sent off; he'd given it his best, and for the most part impressively; and he had been sent Away, Alone, and at least
now could openly hide. R. Lenz lived by his wits out here, deeply disguised, on the amonymous streets of N. Cambridge and
Somerville, never sleeping, ever moving, hiding in bright-lit and public plain sight, the last place They would think to find him.
Lenz wore fluorescent-yellow snowpants, the slightly shiny coat to a long-tailed tux, a sombrero with little wooden balls
hanging off the brim, oversize tortoise-shell glasses that darkened automatically in response to bright light, and a glossy black
mustache promoted from the upper lip of a mannequin at Lechmere's in Cambridgeside — the ensemble the result of bold snatchand-sprints all up and down the nighttime Charles, when he'd first gone Overground northeast from Enfield several-odd days back.
The absolute blackness of the mannequin's mustache — very securely attached
he discharge from a nose Lenz can't feel running — gives his pallor an almost ghostly aspect in the sombrero's portable shade 
— another both advantage and disadvantage of nasal cocaine is that eating becomes otiose and optional, and one forgets to for
extended periods of time, to eat — in his gaudy pastiche of disguise he passes easily for one of metro Boston's homeless and
wandering mad, the walking dead and dying, and is given a wide berth by all comers. The trick, he's found, is to not sleep or eat,
to stay up and moving at all times, alert in all six directions at all times, heading for under the cover of T-station or enclosed mall
whenever the invisible rotors' cardiac chop betrayed surveillance at altitude.
He'd got quickly familiarized with Little Lisbon's networks of alleys and transoms and back trash-lots, and its (dwindling)
population of feral cats and dogs. The area was fertile in overhead clocks of banks and churches, dictating movements. He carried
his Browning X444 Serrated in its shoulder-holster strapped inside his one sock just above the spats of the formal footwear he'd
taken off the same A Formal Affair, Ltd. sidewalk display as the tux's coat. His lighter was in a fluorescent zip-uppable slash
pocket; quality trashbags were plentiful in dumpsters and Land Barges stopped at lights. The James Principles of the Gifford
Lectures, its razored-out recep-tacled heart now quite a bit closer to empty than Lenz would be comfortable thinking about
directly, he had in his hand tucked up under one formal arm. And the Chinese women scuttled centipedishly abreast, their
mammoth shopping bags held in a right hand and left, respective, so the bags were side by side between them. Lenz was closing
the gap behind them, but gradually and with no little nonchalant stealth, considering it was hard to walk stealthily when one
couldn't feel one's feet, and when one's eyeglasses darkened automatically whenever one went under a streetlight and then took
their time lightening up again, after, so that no less than two of Lenz's vital sensory street-senses were disorientated; but he still
managed both stealth and nonchalance both. He had no clue how he really looked. Like many of the itinerant mad of metro
Boston, he tended to confuse a wide berth with invisibility. The shopping bags looked heavy and impressive, their weight making
the Chinese women lean in slightly toward each other. Call it 22l4:lOh. The Chinese women and then Lenz all passed a gray-faced
woman squatting back between two dumpsters, her multiple skirts hiked up. Vehicles were packed bumper-flush all along the
curb, with myriad double parking also. The Chinese women passed a man lined up at the curb with a toy bow and arrows, and
when the glasses undarkened Lenz could see him as well as he passed also — the guy wore a rat-colored suit and was shooting a
suction-cup arrow at the side of a For Lease building and then going up and drawing a miniature chalk circle on the brick around
the arrow, and then another circle around that circle, and etc., as in a what's the word. The women paid him no Orientoid mind.
The
ould shortly occur dried his nose and helped his mouth stop moving around on his face. The
Frig
here were two ways of going, and Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents were prepared to pursue both these. Less better was
the indirect route: surveillance and infiltrating the surviving associates of the Entertainment's au-teur, its actress and rumored
perf ical interview, leading with hope to the original
aute
suit's string tie was also brown in tone, unlike a rat's tail. His wall's chalk was more pinkish. One of the women said
something high-pitched, like an exclamation to the other. Your monkey-languages' exclamatories have an explosive ricocheting
sound to them. As in a component of boing to every word. A window up across the street was producing The Star-Spanned
Banner all this time. The man had a string tie and fingerless little gloves, and he stepped back from the wall to examine his pink
circles and almost collided with Lenz, and they both looked at each other and shook their heads like Look at this poor son of an
urban bitch I'm on the same street with.
It was universally well known that your basic Orientoid types carried their earthly sum-total of personal wealth with them at
all times. As in on their person while they scuttled around. The Orientoid religion prohibited banks, and Lenz had seen mammoth
double-width twine-handled shopping bags in too many tiny Chinese women's hands not to have deducted that the Chinese female
species of Oriental used shopping bags to carry their personal wealth. He felt the energy required for the snatch-and-sprint
increasing now with each stride, drawing nonchalantly closer, able now to distinguish different patterns in the clear like plastic
flags they wrapped their little hair in. The Chinese women. His heartrate speedened to a steady warming gallop. He began to feel
his feet. Adrenaline about what w
htful Hog was not and never numb, and now it stirred in the snowpants slightly with excitement of wits and the thrill of the
hunt. Far from cutting-edge surveillance: the shoe was on the other foot: the unwitting Oriental women had no idea who they were
dealing with, behind them, no idea he was back there surveilling them and closing the nonchalant gap, stumbling only slightly
after each streetlight's light. He was in total control of this situation. And they did not even know there was a situation. Bull's-eye.
Lenz straightened the mustache with one finger and gave a tiny little Yellow-Brick-Road stutter-skip of pure controlling glee, his
adrenaline invisible for all to see.
T
ormer, relatives — if necessary, taking them and subjecting them to techn
ur's cartridge of the Entertainment. This had risks and exposures and was held abeyant until the directer route — to locate and
secure a Master copy of the Entertainment on their own — had been exhausted. It was this way that thus they were now still here,
in the Antitois' shop of Cambridge, to — comme on dit — be turning all the stones.
14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
The secret to sprinting in high heels, Poor Tony Krause knew, was to run on one's toes, inclined way forward, with so much
forward momentum that one stayed well up on her toes and the heels never came into play. Evidently the wretched Creature
behind him knew this trade-secret too. They careered up Prospect, the Creature's clutching hand just mm. away from the trailing
boa. Poor Tony held the two purses together tucked away against his side like a football in U.S. football. Pedestrians moved
artfully aside, long-practiced. Poor Tony saw the pedestrians' faces very clearly as his odor preceded him like a shock-wave. A
man in a car coat made a smell-face and did a kind of artful veronica to let the two of them career past. Poor Tony's breath came in
great ragged stitchy gasps. He had not banked on victim-pursuit. He felt the Creature's hand grope for purchase on the remains of
his boa. The Donegal cap flew off and was not mourned. The Thing's own breathing was also ragged, but the obscenities she
hurled still came from the diaphragm, with conviction and vigor. The other Thing had impacted a pole with a meaty sound Tony
had shuddered to hear. His own father had struck himself about the head and shoulders as he grieved for his symbolically dead
son. The moment after the impact and the strap gave way, Tony was up on his toes and in full flight, not banking on pursuit from
the other one, this black Creature screaming and just off his tail. For the first couple blocks the Creature had shouted for Help and
to Stop The Bitch, and Poor Tony, then with a decent lead, had countered by also yelling Help! and For God's Sake Stop Her,
flummoxing any would-be citizens. An ancient trade-device among Harvard Square crews. But now the black Creature had closed 
to within mm., and now it had real hold of the boa as they careered breathing at full speed on their toes, and Krause unlooped the
thing from his neck with a flourish and sacrificed the boa to the Thing, but the loathsome Creature's hand came right back,
clutching at the air just over his leather collar, its ragged breath in his ear, cursing him. Poor Tony grieved in mid-stride at the
thought that the Thing had doubtless just tossed the boa carelessly aside into the street or gutter. Their shoes' toes formed complex
and variable rhythms on the pavement; sometimes their footfalls were in sync, then they were not. The Thing stayed agonizingly
just behind. Bold-print signs for FRESH-KILLED CHICKEN and COMPLETE DESTRUCTION flashed past; Antitoi
Entertainment was just over two long north-south blocks distant. Krause and pursuer both jay-ran through a gridlocked
intersection. Poor Tony shouted Help! and Please! The hand and hissed breath just behind him was like one of those simply horrid
dreams where something unimaginable is chasing you for km. after km. and just before its talons close on the back of your collar
you wake up sitting bolt upright; except this horrid Creature's-clutching-hand-just-behind-him scenario went on and on, storefront
and curb and leaping pedestrians all melting together at the periphery due right. Antitoi Ent.'s discreet back door was accessible by
a parking alley that cut west off Prospect just before Broadway and went west to intersect a smaller and dumpster-lined northsouth alley, one of whose dumpsters (in which Poor Tony had occasionally slept, when out late and short of train-fare) was within
underhand-toss distance of the Canadian brothers' rear exit. Poor Tony, purses under arm and the other hand clamped tight to the
wig, calculated that if he could get a reasonable lead on the Creature by the time they hit the smaller alley the dumpsters would
keep It from seeing just which hopefully unlocked rear door P.T. sought basic human kindly refuge behind. He feinted around a
bodega's sidewalk fruit display and shot a quick look back, hoping the Creature would crash itself ass-over-teakettle into the
stacked fruit. It did not. It was still right there, breathing. Its stutter-step around two cardboard tiers of Cape cranberries was
discouragingly deft. This Thing had all too clearly chased persons before. Its breath had a ragged implacability about it. It was all
too clearly in this for the long haul. It was no longer shouting Stop or gutterish obscenities. Poor Tony's breaths felt flamish. It
sounded as if he were weeping, almost. He tried to shout Help! and could not; he hadn't the breath to spare; black specks floated
upward through his vision; only certain of the streetlamps worked; his heartbeat was zuckungzuckungzuckung. Poor Tony hurdled
a queerly placed cardboard display for something wheelchaired and heard the Creature vault it also and land lightly on its toes. Its
uppers were not straps and could not dig like the fine Aigners; Tony felt blood on his feet. The entrance to the parking alley west
was between a Tax Preparer's and something else; it was right around here; Krause squinted; the black specks were tiny rings with
opaque centers and floated upward through his sight like balloons, lazily; Poor Tony was post-seizure, infirm, not to mention
Withdrawn; his breath came in stitches and half-sobs; he could barely stay on his toes; he had not consumed food since before the
library's men's room stall, which was how many days; he scanned the blurred storefronts ripping past; an elderly person went
down with a noise as the Creature stiff-armed him; somewhere a rape-whistle blew; the Tax Preparer's had the odd storefront
announcement ON PARLE LE POR-TUGAIS ICI. Its hand's finger knocked the rim of Tony's leather collar with each footfall
until it moved up and Poor Tony could feel its fingers in the hair of the chignon he held clamped to his head with a hand. Poor
Tony's father used to come home to 412 Mount Auburn Street Watertown at the completion of a long day of cesareans and sit in a
chai
ting broken glass
and
rly, with time
take
hus.
 could this copy of DuPlessis itself be
copi
tertainment, Quebec would be not so much allowed as required by Ottawa to secede, to face on its own the
r in the darkening kitchen, scratching at his head where his mask's green strings had dug into the head. Its doubtlessly luridly
long-nailed fingers were twining for purchase in his wig's hair when they hit the Preparer's and Tony cut a sharp right, breaking a
heel on the pivot but gaining several steps toward a lead as the Creature's momentum carried it past the alley's recessed mouth.
Krause whimpered raggedly and flew west, up on his bloody toes, hearing his breath off both alley walls, negotia
the homeless supine, hearing it back behind him several steps crying a tight-echoed Stop Motherfucking Stop!, with a supine
person Krause vaulted lifting a decayed head from the alley floor to counter with: Go.
Having traced — through the strenuous technical interview of the sar-torially eccentric cranio-facial-pain-specialist, whom
they had traced through the regrettably fatal technical interview of the young burglar300290 whose electrical-surge-tolerance
proved considerably lower than that of his room's computer's machinery — having traced their best chances at a copy to the
hapless Antitois' establishment, it had taken the A.F.R. then several days to find it there, the real Entertainment.
A.F.R.'s U.S.A. cell's leader, Fortier, the son of a Glen Almond glass-blower, had allowed none of the mirrors to be broken or
dismantled. In all other respects, the search had been methodical and thorough. It was a neat search and also orde
n. Because the viewer of the shop was visually dysfunctional, a consumer TP had been purchased and set up for volunteer
viewing in the room of storage off the shop's back room. Each cartridge of the shop's exhaustive shelves was sampled by a
volunteer, then discarded in one of the huge metal coffre d'amas in the alley outside the shop's rear door. A detail had been
assigned to roll the extinguished Antitoi brothers in construction-plastic and place them in a room of storage off the back room.
This was for hygienic purposes. A detail also had procured an oilskin windowshade for the front door's glass, also some printed
signs which read CLOSED, ROPAS, and RELACHE. No person had knocked at the door after the first hours, t
Quickly, on the first day, in a liquor box which was damp and smelled, they had found an example of the rival F.L.Q.'s
tactical street-display cartridges, with its crudely stamped smiling face and the 'il NE FAUT plus qu'on pursuive le BONHEUR'
embossed upon it. And young Tassigny, with characteristic valor, volunteered to be rolled into the room of storage and strapped
in, in order to verify this, and Fortier allowed this. All had drunk the gesture of a toast to Tassigny and promised to look after his
aged father and fur-traps, and M. Fortier had embraced the young volunteer and kissed both his face's cheeks as he was rolled in
and fitted by M. Broullîme with EEG wires and strapped in before the viewer placed in the room of storage.
Then the cartridge of the street-display turned out to be blank, void. Then another from this box, also wet: also blank. Two
blanks. Done. D'accord. Fortier, philosophical, counselled against disappointment or damage from a frustration — he and Marathe
had counselled all along that the F.L.Q. displays of the Entertainment and the wheelchaired man were probably the hoax, instilling
of terror only. The fact of the displays which featured wheelchairs, a smack to the testicles of A.F.R. — this was ignored. A.F.R.
wanted only to repossess this copy of the Entertainment. As well, chiefly, now to determine:
ed? This was the real objective: a Master cartridge.301291 Unlike the F.L.Q., les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents had no
interest in blackmail or cartographic extortings for the Convexity's return. Not in re-Reconfiguration of O.N.A.N. or even its
charter's dissolution. The A.F.R. were interested only in dealing the sort of testicular frappe to the underbelly of U.S.A. selfinterests that would render Canada itself unwilling to face the U.S.A. retaliation for this — if A.F.R. could secure, copy, and
disseminate the En
wrat
arch and inventory proceeded in a painstaking
and
he solicitude that the weak substitute for respect. As if he were a sickly
chil ortier. Buses knelt, smooth ramps flanked steps, attendants pushed him aboard flights in full solicitous view of those
standing upon legs. Fortier owned attachable legs of flesh-tone polymer resins whose interior circuitry was responsive to largebun ets locked to his wrists allowed a sort of swirling
paro
 which Don Gately got hurt, Joelle had begun to worry obsessively about her teeth. Smoking 'base
coca
 of the teeth are all sharp and strong and unblackened but tinged at the tips with an odd kind
of r
d as her spread mouth spreads farther to cry out in
fear
ey had located a third cartridge emblazed with the
emb
m pains
in hi
lent behind the door except when the watch-detail reported the
h of a neighbor struck down by its own inability to say 'Now' to fatal pleasures.302292
Fortier bid the A.F.R. methodically to continue the search. Younger volunteers were rolled into the room of storage on a
rotating basis to sample each set of cartridges. Aside from some bickering over the Portuguese pornography, the rotation
proceeded with valor and care. The plastic-wrapped cadavers began to swell, but the plastic maintained hygienic conditions adequately for viewing samples of the many cartridges in the room of storage. The se
slow fashion.
M. Fortier was required to absent himself for a period, in the search's middle, to help facilitate Southwest ops, the infiltration
of that relative of the auteur felt most strongly (according to Marathe) to have knowledge or possession of a duplicable copy.
There was reason to think M. DuPlessis had received his original copies from this relative, an athlete. Marathe felt U.S.B.S.S. felt
this person may have borne responsibility for the razzles and dazzles of Berkeley and Boston, U.S.A. The Americans' fieldoperative, jutting with prostheses, had been clinging to this person like a bad odor.
The nation U.S.A. treated wheelchaired persons with t
d, F
dle neural stimuli from his stumps, which with metal crutches whose bracel
dy of perambulation. But Fortier, he rarely wore the prostheses, not in U.S.A., and never for public transit. He preferred the
condescension, the pretense of institutional 'sensitivity' to his 'right' of the 'equal access'; it honed the edge of his senses of
purpose. Like all of them, Fortier was willing to sacrifice.
14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
After so long not caring, and then now the caring crashes back in and turns so easily into obsessive worry, in sobriety. A few
days before the debacle in
ine eats teeth, corrodes teeth, attacks the enamel directly. Chandler Foss had explained all this to her at supper, showing her
his corroded stumps. In her Latin cloth purse now she carried a traveller's brush and expensive toothpaste with alleged enamelrevitalizers and anti-corrosives. Several of the Ennet House residents who'd hit bottom with the glass pipe had no teeth or
blackened and disintegrating teeth; the sight of Wade McDade's or Chandler Foss's teeth gave Joelle the fantods like nothing at
meetings could. The toothpaste was only recently available over the counter and was a whole level of power and expense above
standard smoker's polish.
As she lies on her side beside Kate Gompert's empty bunk, her veil's selvage tucked secure between pillow and jaw, and
Charlotte Treat also asleep across the lit room, Joelle dreams that Don Gately, unhurt and mid-South-accented, is ministering to
her teeth. He is bibbed in dental white, humming softly to himself, his big hands deft as he plucks instruments from the gleaming
chair-side tray. Her chair is dental and canted back, yielding her face up to him, her legs shut tight and stretching up and out
before her. Dr. Don's eyes are abstractly kind, concerned for her teeth; and his thick fingers, as he inserts things to hold her open,
are gloveless and taste warm and clean. Even the light seems sterilely clean. There is no assistant; the dentist is solo, leaning in
above her, humming absent chords as he probes. His head is massive and vaguely square. In the dream she is concerned for her
teeth and feels Gately shares her concern. She feels good that he makes no chitchat and probably doesn't know her name. There's
very little eye-contact. He is completely intent on her teeth. He is there to help if possible, is his whole demeanor's message. His
bib hangs by a necklace of tiny steel balls and could not be whiter, his head haloed with a strap and a polished metal disk attached
to the strap just above his eyes, a tiny mirror of stainless steel, clean as the instruments' tray; and the dream's yielding and trustful
quality of calm is undercut only by the view of her face in the halo's mirror, the disk like a third eye in Gately's broad clean
forehead: because she can see her face, convexly distorted and ravaged by years of cocaine and not caring, her face all bug-eyes
and sunken cheeks, lampblack-smudges beneath the pop-eyes; and as the dentist's warm thick fingers gently draw her lips back
she looks up into his head's mirror at long rows of all canine teeth, tapered and sharp, with then more rows of canines behind
them, in reserve. The countless rows
ed, as of old blood, the teeth of a creature that carelessly tears at meat. These are teeth that have been up to things she hasn't
known about, she tries to say around the fingers. The dentist hums, probing. In the dream Joelle looks up into Don Gately's
forehead's dental mirror's disk and is seized with a fear of her teeth, a terror, an
 all she can see in the little round mirror are endless red-stained rows of teeth leading back and away down a pitch-black pipe,
and the image of all these rows of teeth in the disk blots out the big dentist's good face as he probes with a hook and says he
assures her that these can be saved.
Then, by the time Fortier was able to return to the dismantled shop, th
ossed smile and letters disclaiming need of happy pursuit, and, after some regretful losses, they had secured and verified it,
the samizdat cartridge of Entertainment burglared from the death of DuPlessis.
Fortier was told the story. The cell's young Desjardins had been taking his turn in the viewing rotation, seated with young
Tassigny in the room of storage during the hours of early morning, sampling the dregs of unshelved entertainments found in
kitchen-can waste bags in the same closet the Anti-tois' cadavers were swelling within. Desjardins had just moments before
complained of the wasted time of cartridges scheduled for the coffre d'amas.
Tassigny, who had been in the room of storage with Desjardins, then was saved by the need to leave this room to change the
bag of his partial colos-tomy. But, Marathe reported, they had lost Desjardins, and the older and valued Joubet also, who rolled
against orders into the room of storage to see why Desjardins had not been sending out the tapes for more tapes to sample. Both
were lost. They had not lost more only because someone had thought to wake up Broullîme, whom Fortier had briefed with care
on procedures for if the actual Entertainment was found by this viewing. But two were lost — Joubet the red-bearded workhorse,
who loved to pop wheelies, and young Desjardins, so filled with the idealism and so young as to be still feeling the phanto
s stumps. Rémy Marathe reported that the two had been made comfortable since their loss, allowed to remain in the locked
room of storage and view the Entertainment again and again, si
hear
been required: all viewing details had taken their chances at random in the rotation of viewing.
or the more indirect task of forfeiting hopes of securing a
Mas
not
ct phase, and reviewed tactics also.
Subject's former department of the M.I.T. University had reported the Enterta
f radio had been acquired in a public
but
ix could be created to
com
nding disappointment. Fortier had been able to see the admitted addicts of Phoenix House holding a gathering in the
room
ing of cries of impatience at the player's rewinder, to rewind. Marathe reported they had declined to come out for water or
food, or Joubet — who was diabétique — for his insulin. M. Broullîme estimated that it would be a matter of hours now for
Joubet, perhaps maybe one day or two days for Desjardins. Fortier had sadly said 'Bôf and acceptingly shrugged: all knew the
sacrifices that might have
On Fortier's return, Marathe delivered also the expected bad news of the finding of it: there was no need yet for high-rpm
hardware of duplication: the found copy was Read-Only.303293
Philosophical, Fortier reminded the A.F.R. that they did now encouragingly know the Entertainment of such power did truly
exist, for themselves, and could thus gird their courage and fortitude f
ter copy and instead striving to secure the original Master, the auteur's own cartridge, from which all Read-Only copies had
presumably been copied.
Thus, he said, now the more arduous and risky task of taking for technical interview known persons associated with the
Entertainment and locating the original maker's duplicable Master copy. None of this would have been worthy of the risk had they
now determined, through the heroic sacrifices of Joubet and Desjardins, that the device for extending O.N.A.N.'s selfdestructing logic to its final conclusion lay within their arduous grasp.
Fortier gave numerous orders. The platoon of A.F.R. remained in the closed Anritoi Entertainent shop, behind their lingual
window shade. Surveillance on the hated F.L.Q.'s bureau centrale, in the poorly disciplined house on Allston's Rue de Brainerd —
this was suspended, the A.F.R. personnel pulled in and relocated to this commandeered Inman Square shop, where Fortier and
Marathe and M. Broullîme coordinated phases of activity in this next more arduous and indire
The deceased auteur's colleagues and relations were under consistent surveillance. Their concentration of place worked in the
favor of this. An employee at the Academy of Tennis of Enfield had been recruited and joined the Canadian instructor and student
already inside for closer work of surveillance. In the Desert, the redoubtable Mile. Luria P------was winning necessary confidences
with her usual alacrity. An expensive source in the
inment's probable performer's last known employment — the small Cambridge radio station which Marathe and Beausoleil
had pronounced Weee — where she had donned the defacing veil of O.N.A.N.ite deformity.
Attentions were to be focused on the cartridge's performer and on the Academy of Tennis of the auteur's estate. The fact that
the players of the Academy were to play a provincially-selected team from Quebec would have been easier to exploit had the
A.F.R. possessed a tennis player of talent and lower extremities. Inquiries into the composition and travel of the Québecois team
were under way from sources at home in Papineau.
On the day of Fortier's return also, the performer's radio program's technical engineer o
low-risk operation whose success had raised hopeful spirits for the acquisitions of more directly related persons to the
Entertainment in this next phase. This person of U.S.A. radio had divulged all he professed to know under the mere descriptive
threat of technical-interview procedures. Marathe, the best lay judge of Americans' veracity which the cell possessed, believed the
veracity of the engineer; but nevertheless a formal technical interview had proceeded, justified in order to verify. The young and
eruption-studded person's report remained consistent two levels past average U.S.A. endurance, the only variance involving
several curious claims that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was defensive in bed.
Today, Fortier himself, and Marathe, young Balbalis, R. Ossowiecke — all those with the better English — were thus now
therefore making the rounds of all Substance-Difficulty-Rehabilitation facilities in hospitals, psychiatric institutions, and demimaisons within a 25-km. radius. Procedures for expanding the radius of inquiry by factors of two and three had been preformulated, teams assembled, lines rehearsed. Joubet and then Desjardins had succumbed and been transported north by van as
well with the remains of the Antitois' remains. The U.S.A. student radio engineering person, the veracity of whose limited
statements of the Subject's whereabouts Broullîme had verified to within +/— (.35) of assurance well before debriefing-levels
incompatible with physical existence, had been allowed several hours to recover, then had become of service as the A.F.R.'s first
Subject in field-tests of the samizdat cartridge's motivational range. The room of storage again was utilized for this. His head
immobilized with some straps, the test Subject had viewed the Entertainment twice at gratis, without the application of any
motivational inquiry. For inquiry into the degree of motivation the cartridge will induce, M. Broullîme had rolled himself
blindfolded into the room of storage holding an orthopedic saw and informed the Subject of the test that, as of beginning now,
each subsequent reviewing of the Entertainment now would have the price of one digit from the Subject's extremities. And handed
the Subject the orthopedic saw in question, also. Broullîme's explanation to Fortier was that thus a matr
pute the statistical relation between (n) the number of times the Subject replayed the Entertainment and (t) the amount of time
he took to decide and remove a digit for each subsequent (n +1) viewing. The goal was to confirm with statistical assurance the
Subject's desire for viewing and reviewing as incapable of satiation. There could be no index of diminishing satisfaction as in the
econometrics of normal U.S.A. commodities. For the samizdat Entertainment's allure to be macro-politically lethal, the ninth digit
of extremities had to come off as quickly and willingly as the second. Broullîme, personally he had some skepticism about this.
But this was Broullîme's function in his role in the cell: expertise in combination with skepticism de coeur.
And then naturally also a wider range of field-test Subjects would then be required, to verify that this Subject's responses
were not merely subjective and typical only of a certain sensibility of entertainment-consumer. The bus window yielded a faint
and ghostly reflection of Fortier, and, through that faint view, the lights of urban life outside the bus. Somerville Massachusetts
U.S.A.'s Phoenix House administrative person had listened to Fortier's delivery with shows of great compassion, then explained
with patience that they were unable to admit addicted persons for whom English was the secondary language. D 'accord, though
he was prete
 of living outside the office door: no person among them wore a veil of facial concealment, and so c'est ça. Four small teams
were at this moment rolling through the streets and small streets and alleys of the unpleasant district of the Antitoi establishment,
for the purpose of acquiring additional Subjects for M. Broullîme for the time when the Subject's digits were expended. The
Subjects for suitability had to be passively undefended enough to be acquired publicly with quiet, yet not damaged in the brains or
under the influence of the many of the district's intoxicant compounds. The A.F.R. were highly trained in patience and to be
disciplined. 
The southbound bus, empty and (which he detested) fluorescently lit, climbs a thin hill off Winter Park, north Cambridge,
heading for the Squares Inman and Central. Fortier looks out at the lights passing. He can smell snow coming; it soon will snow.
He sees in his imagination two-thirds of NNE's largest urban city inert, sybaritically entranced, staring, without bodily movement,
home-bounded, fouling their divans and the chairs which may recline. He sees the district of business's towers of buildings and
luxu
d rodents both; he did not stop to reflect why.
A ro junior crack-jockeys back there landed behind him and skittered past and rang out against
som ried out aloud, a sexless figure lying back against a maybe duffel bag or pack against a dump-ster, its
han
uld hear as he stepped gingerly over the rot-smelling legs as 'Pretty, pretty, pretty.'
Len s what a lot of fucked-up ass-eating fucking losers.’
ocated thrift. We'd bring them to Him at the stove. There was one stove. We had to
brin nd fed it Ones.
We ncy was new.’
ys played a drum.’
 drove a Rolls. In neutral. We pushed him wherever he was Called to like be at. He never
turn
ur bellies. We had to embrace our snake-nature. It was a cleansing.’
ur arms and legs.’
felt too cleansed to stay.’
ally.’
ake.’
eling the Identification all over, this is —’
 day, at the end.’
ry apartments striated as two of every three floors is darkened to lightless black. With here and there the vaguely blue flicker
of expensive digital entertainment equipment flickering through darkened windows. He imagines M. Tine holding the hand
holding the pen of President J. Gentle as the O.N.A.N.ite President signs declaring War. He imagines teacups clinking thinly
beneath trembling hands in the interior sanctums of Ottawa's sanctum of power. He adjusts his sportcoat's lapel over his sweater
and smooths the wiry hair that tends to bulge unsmoothly around the bare spot. He watches the back of the bus driver's neck as the
driver stares straight ahead.
Sure enough the Chinkette women had been strengthless and lightweight, flew aside like dolls, and their bags were indeed
treasure-heavy, hard to heft; but as Lenz cut left down the north-south alley he could hold the bags by their twine handles out
slightly before him, so their weight's momentum kind of pulled him along. The cruciform alleys through the blocks between
Central and Inman in Little Lisbon were a kind of second city. Lenz ran. His breath came easy and he could feel himself from
scalp to sole. Green and green-with-red dumpsters lined both walls and made the going narrow. He vaulted two sitting figures in
khaki sharing a can of Sterno on the alley floor. He glided through the foul air above them, untouched by it. The sounds behind
him were his footfalls' echo off dumpsters and fire-escapes' iron. His left hand ached nicely from holding both a bag's handle and
his large-print volume. A dumpster up ahead had been hitched to an E.W.D. truck and just left to sit: probably quitting time. The
Empire guys had an incredible union. In the recess of the hitch's bar a small blue light flickered and died. This was a dozen
dumpsters up ahead. Lenz slowed to a brisk walk. His topcoat had slipped slightly off one of his shoulders but he had no free hand
to fix it and wasn't going to take time to put a bag down. His left hand felt cramped. It was somewhere vague between 2224 and
2226h. The alley was dark as a pocket. A tiny crash off somewhere south down the network of alleys was actually Poor Tony
Krause rolling the steel waste-barrel that tripped up Ruth van Cleve. The tiny blue flame came on, hung still, flickered, moved,
hung there, went back out. Its glow was dark blue against the back of the huge E.W.D. truck. Empire trucks were unstoppable,
hitches were valuable but locked down with a Kryptonite device thing you needed welding stuff to cut through. From the recess of
the hitch there were small sounds. When the lighter lit again Lenz was almost on them, two boys on the hitch and two squatting
down by the hitch facing them, four of them, a fire-escape's pull-ladder distended like a tongue and hanging just above them.
None of the boys was over like twelve. They used a M. Fizzy bottle instead of a pipe, and the smell of burnt plastic hung mixed
with the sicksweet smell of overcarbonated rock. The boys were all small and slight and either black or spic, greedily hunching
over the flame; they looked ratty. Lenz kept them in peripheral view as he strode briskly by, carrying his bags, spine straight and
extruding dignified purpose. The lighter went out. The boys on the hitch eyed Lenz's bags. The squatting boys turned their heads
to look. Lenz kept them in peripheral view. None of them wore watches. One of them wore a knit cap and watched steadily. He
locked eyes with Lenz's left eye, made a gun of his thin hand, pretended to draw a slow bead. Like performing for the others. Lenz
walked by with urban dignity, like he both saw them and didn't. The smell was intense but real local, of the rock and bottle. He
had to veer out to miss the Empire truck's side mirror on its steel strut. He heard them say things as the truck's grille fell behind,
and unkind laughter, and then something called out in a minority agnate he didn't know. He heard the lighter's flint. He thought to
himself Assholes. He was looking for someplace empty and a bit more lit, to go through the bags. And cleaner than this one northsouth alley here, which smelled of ripe waste and rotting skin. He would separate the bags' valuables from the nonvaluables and
transfer the valuables to a single bag. He would fence the nonnegotiable valuables in Little Lisbon and refill the receptacle in his
medical dictionary, and buy some attractiver shoes. The alley was devroid of cats an
ck or bit of brick courtesy of the
ething, and someone c
d moving furiously in its groin and its feet pointed out into the alley and turned out like a dead body's, its shoes two different
shoes, its hair a clotted mass around its face, looking up over at Lenz going past in the faint start of light from a broader alley's
intersection ahead, chanting softly what Lenz co
z whispered to himself 'Jesu
'Our cult burned money for fuel.’
'As in like currency.’
'We used Ones. The Semi Divine One adv
g them to Him on our knees with no part of our feet could touch the floor. He sat by the stove in our blankets a
got an extra slap if the curre
'As in like crisp and new.’
'It was a cleansing. Somebody alwa
'Our cult's Divinely Chosen Leader
ed it on. The Rolls. I got all muscled up.’
'In summer then they made us slither on o
'As in like slithering.’
'Serious slithering. They took wire and bound o
'At least your wire wasn't barbed.’
'I finally
'Meaning over-pure, I can I.D. tot
'It was too much love somehow to t
'I'm like fe
'Plus I was up to three bags a
'And then our Divinely Chosen's Love Squads made us chop wood with our teeth when it got cold. As in like subzero
wintertime.’ 
'Yours let you keep your teeth?’
'Only the ones for gnawing. See?’
'Sheesh.’
'Just the ones for gnawing.’
Rémy Marathe sat veiled and blanket-lapped in the much crowded living room evening of this Ennet House Drug and
Alcohol Recovery House, the last demi-maison on his portion of the list for this day. The hills of upper Enfield, they were de
I'infere of difficulty, but the demi-maison itself had a ramp. A person with authority was conducting interviews to fill some vacancies of recent time in the place's Office, of which its locked door was visible from this sitting. Marathe and others were invited
to sit in the living room with a cup of unpleasant coffee. Urged to smoke if he liked. Everyone else was smoking. The living room
smelled like an ashtray, and its ceiling was yellow like the fingers of long smokers. Also the living room evening resembled an
anthill which had been stirred with a stick; it was too full of persons, all of them restless and loud. There were demi-maison
patients viewing a cartridge of martial arts conflict, former patients and persons of the upper Enfield area cohabiting on the
furniture, conversing. A damaged woman, also in a fauteuil de rollent like Marathe, slumped inutile next to the cartridge's viewer,
while a male person of advanced pallor mimed the kicks and thrusts of martial arts at her motionless head, trying to force the
woman to twitch or cry out. Also a man without hands and feet trying to negotiate the stairway. Other persons, presumably
addicted, waiting in the room to seek admittance to the Recovery House. The room was loud and hot. Marathe could hear a person
who will seek admittance vomiting in the shrubberies just outside the window. Marathe's chair was locked down next to a divan's
arm
f jumping over him.
Pers
young girl seemed to remove her eye from her head and placed it in her mouth. No other in the room
wor
m addicted and deformed, seeking residential treatment for addiction, desperately.' Persons' responses to his introductory
line
s several times in a kind of
exci
 A clatter and two shrieks: these came from one end of the dining room, in the demi-maison's floor plans a large
kitc
oughing that would not cease. The two patients in neckties and the girl whose
eye
 prices in the windows like a
good u think the cars are going to start falling out all
over
 of his four-limbed childhood, before Le Culte du Prochain Train.304294 The pallor of the things
 and directly before a window. The window, one could wish it was open more than a crack, he felt. Upon the dull-colored
carpet a tormented-appearing man scuttling like the crab while two hooligans in leather played a cruel game o
ons reading cartoon books and painting the nails of their extremities. A tall-haired woman brought her foot to her mouth to
blow upon her toes. Another
e the veil of the Entertainment's performer's organization U.H.I.D. The smell of the U.S.A. cigarettes permeated his veil and
made Marathe's eyes water, and he thought of vomiting also. Two additional windows were open, but the room lacked all air.
During the time of his sitting, several persons approached Marathe, but they would say to him only the whispers 'Pet the dogs'
or 'Make sure and pet the dogs.' This idiomatic expression was not in Marathe's knowledge of U.S.A. idiom.
Also one person approached of a face whose skin seemed that it was rotting away from him in some way and asked him if he,
Marathe, was court-ordered.
Marathe was one of few persons not smoking. He noted that none of the room's persons appeared to regard the cheesecloth
veil he wore over his face as unusual or curious or to be questioned. The old sportcoat he wore over a turtleneck sweater of
Desjardin's made Marathe more formally dressed than other of the applicants for treatment. Two of the Ennet House demi-maison
current patients wore neckties, however. Marathe kept pretending to sniff; he did not know why. He sat up next to a divan of false
velour at whose end beside him two women who had sought previous treatment of addiction in religious cults were meeting and
speaking together of their unenjoyable existences when in cults.
To whomever approached, Marathe carefully recited the introductory lines he and M. Fortier quickly had developed: 'Good
night, I a
s were difficult to interpret. One of the older two men in neckties who had approached, he had clapped a hand to his soft face's
cheek and responded 'How extraordinarily nice for you,' in which Marathe could detect sarcasm. The two women of cult
experience were inclined closely toward each other upon the divan. They touched each other's arm
tement as they conversed. When they laughed in delight they seemed to chew at the air. One's laughter involved also a
snorting noise.
hen.
The sounds were then followed by a roiling cloud of steam, with repeated obscenities from unseen persons. A bald large black
man in a white cotton undershirt's laughing became c
could be removed spoke together intensively and also audibly at the end of one other divan.
'But consider this quality of portability with respect to, say, a car. Is a car portable? With respect to a car it's more as though
I'm portable.’
'They're portable when they're on one of them semis where they got new cars stacked on with
 couple dozen on them semis that swing all to fuck all over 1-93 and make yo
 the road when you're wanting to try and pass.’
The plump one who had been ironic toward Marathe, he was nodding: 'Or, say, too, with respect to a tow truck or wrecker, if
you suffer a breakdown. One might be in a position to say that a deactivated car can be quote portable, but that with respect to a
functional car it is I who am portable.’
The girl's nod caused the particular eye to wheel queasily in the socket of it. Til buy that, Day.’
'If we're jot-and-titiling with all possible precision regarding portable, that is.’
The other man continually rubbed at his shine of the shoes with a facial tissue, causing his necktie to touch the floor.
These conversers formed this triad on an unevenly sloped divan of leather-colored plastic across the room, which was now
more airless yet from the roiling steam from the kitchen, infiltrating. Directly facing Marathe in a yellow chair against the wall by
these conversers' divan most directly across the living room from Marathe was an addicted man waiting for seeking treatment by
admission. This one, he appeared to have several cigarettes burning at one time. He held a metal ashtray in his lap and jiggled the
boot of his crossed leg with vigor. For Marathe, it was not difficult to ignore the fact that the addicted man was glaring at him. He
noted it, and did not understand because of what the man glared, but he was unconcerned. Marathe was prepared to die violently at
any time, which rendered him free to choose among emotions. U.S.A.'s B.S.S.'s M. Steeply had verified that U.S.A.s did not
comprehend this or appreciate it; it was foreign to them. The veil allowed Marathe the liberty of staring calmly back at the
addicted man without the man's knowledge, which Marathe found he enjoyed. Marathe felt sick to his body, from the smoky
room's smoke. Marathe had once, as a child, with legs, bent himself over and overturned a decaying log in the forests of the Lac
de Deux Montaignes region
whi
red white strings which showed the pallor of the knees; the torn holes had the size
and
very detail of all things, for both his reports. The addicted man kneeling before him, he leaned in closer,
tryin
nt intensity of those who have violently died.
y.
uproaring room before leaning once
mor
th intelligence professionals. One of his eyes had an exploded vein within it. 'But that's just the layer,'
he s
a fish in a
ven , studying nothing. The man's smell suggested livestock on a hot day, a goatish, even through the smoke of the
room aterial, M. Broullîme had lectured to pass times in long surveillances, a chemical
mat ble timing his breath so his exhalation matched the addicted
man
Get right up close. Like right up flush next to: you can hear a whir. Micro-faint. This
whi
ing the veil move with the man's breath, waiting patiently to inhale. The women with experiences in cults had smelled the
odo an's face smiled with one knowing side only of
his
ese and the under of an
arm ulses to impale the eyesockets with one two-finger motion. The man had his hand
to hi
 the lip of his mouth. 'I'm here to tell you. Listen. You ain't here.’
e Swiss.’
e, this and that. That's just
they all the time. They fool your mind with machines to think you're moving,
eati
room. These so-called people, so-called' — with again the flourish — 'they're everybody you know.
You
ch had writhed and scuttled beneath the wet log was the pallor of this addicted man, who wore a square of the facial hair
between lower lip and chin and had also a needle run through the flesh of the top of an ear, which the needle, it glistened and did
not glisten rapidly in succession as it vibrated with the jiggle of the jiggling boot. Marathe gazed at him calmly through the veil
while rehearsing his prepared lines within his head. The more idiomatic would be that the needle jiggled sympathetically with the
jiggle of the boot, which was dull black and square-heeled, the motorcycle boot of persons who did not own motorcycles but wore
the boots of those who did.
The addicted man rose slowly and carried the burning ashtray with him nearer to Marathe, trying to kneel. His Blue Jeans of
Levi #501 were strangely torn in spots with tatte
perimeter-damage of holes that Marathe recognized had been made by shotgun-blasts of the high gauge. Marathe was
mentally memorizing e
g to remove something he believed was on his lip. Close in, the expression that through the veil had appeared as glaring
corrected itself: the expression was more truly that the man's eyes had the vaca
The man whispered: 'You real?' Marathe looked through the veil at his facial square. 'Are you real?' again the man whispered.
All the time leaning more and more in, slowl
'You're real I can tell ain't you,' the man whispered. Quickly he looked behind him at the
e in. 'Listen then.’
Marathe kept his hands calmly in his lap, his machine pistol bolstered securely to his right stump beneath the blanket. The
whispering man's searching fingers were leaving small bits of filth on the lip.
"s these poor fuckers' — the man gestured slightly with indicating the room — 'most of them ain't real. So watch your six.
Most of these fuckers are—: metal people.’
'I am Swiss," Marathe experimentally said. It was the second of his lines of introduction.
'Walking around, make you think they're alive.' The addicted man had the way with subtleness of looking all around himself
which Marathe associated wi
aid. He leaned in so far Marathe could see pores through the veil. 'There's a micro-thin layer of skin. But underneath, it's
metal. Heads full of parts. Under a organic layer that's micro-thin.' The eyes of men violently dead were also the eye of
dor's crushed ice
. Trans-3-methyl-2 hexenoic acid was a m
erial in the sweat of grave mental illness. Marathe, he had no trou
's, who leaned more in.
'There's one way to tell,' he said. '
rring. It's the processors' gears. It's their flaw. Machines always whir. They're good. They can quiet down the whir.’
'I have no six.’
'But they can't — can not — eliminate it.’
T am Swiss, seeking residential treatment with desperation.’
'Not under no micro-thin tissue-layer they can't.' If the gaze were not vacant the gaze would be grim, frightened. Marathe
distantly remembered the emotion fear.
'Did you hear what she said?' the ironic man on the divan laughed. 'Potable means drinkable. It's not even the same root. Did
you hear what she said?’
The man's breath, it smelled of trans-3-methyl acid as well. 'I'm clueing y'in,' he whispered. 'They're there to fool you. The
real ones of us're getting fooled. Nine-nine-plus per cent of the time.' The flesh of the knees through the holes in the Blue Jeans
was the white of long death. 'But you, I could tell you were real.' He indicated the veil. 'No micro-thin layer. The metal ones —
have faces.' The smoke of his cigarette in the ashtray rose in a motion of corkscrewing. 'Which this is why' — feeling the lip —
'why the ones on the T or in the street — they won't let you right up close. Try it. They'll never let you right up close. It's
programming. They know to look scared and — like — offended and back away and move to another seat. The real advanced
ones, they'll give you change, even, to let 'em back off. Try it. Get right — up — like this — close.' Marathe sat calmly behind the
veil, feel
r of the man's trans-3 odor and relocated farther away upon the divan. The m
mouth, acknowledging their movement away. He was so close that the nose of him touched the veil when Marathe finally
inhaled. Marathe was prepared for death in all forms. The smells were trans-3-methyl-2 and of digested che
, from the facial skin. Marathe ignored imp
s ear in a mime of to listen closely. His smile disclosed what might have once been teeth. 'Nothing,' he smiled. 'I knew. Not a
sound.’
'The Swiss, we are a quiet people, and reserved. In addition, I am deformed.’
The man waved his cigarette with impatience. 'Listen up. This is why. You're how come I was here. I only thought it was the
habit. They can fool you.' He scrubbed at
'I have emigrated from my nativ
Still whispering: 'You ain't here. These fuckers are metal. Us — us that are real — there's not many — they're fooling us.
We're all in one room. The real ones. One room all the time. Everything's pro — jected. They can do it with machines. They pro
— ject. To fool us. The pictures on the walls change so's we think we're going places. Here and ther
 change the pro — jections. It's all the same place
ng, cooking up, doing this and that.’
'I have come desperately here.’
'The real world's one
've met 'em before, hunnerts times, with different faces. There's only 26 total. They play different characters, that you think
you know. They wear different faces with different pictures they pro — ject on the wall. You get me?’
'This Recovery House was recommended highly.’ 
'You follow? Count. Coincidence? There's 26 here, counting the one without feet on the stairs. Coincidence? Chance? This
here' hey take the machines in the back
room
ipboard.
The ed and leaned far to a side, though was attractive in the blond stereotype of the U.S.A. image-culture.
ith the clipboard.
t with its trusty left wheel. 'I must be excused to plead for treatment.’
ould use damp Kleenex to get
up m
 able to pick, say, dropped popcorn up off the rug and ingest it with total confidence. An aura of steely
inde
le to disapprove of them, Orin had said — or dislike. It was just how The
Mad
s every machine that's played everbody you ever met. Are you hearin' me? They fool us. T
 and they — like —’
The visible door of the locked Office opened and an addicted patient emerged with a person in authority holding a cl
 addicted patient limp
'— change them. The thin organic layers. All the different people you know. So-called. They're the same machines’
'Physically challenged foreign person with unpronounceable name!' the authority called w
'I am being indicated,' Marathe said, bending to release the clamps on his fauteuil's wheels.
'— why I'm in this pro — jection, to clue you. So that now you know.’
Marathe manipulated the fauteuil to the righ
'Get right up close.’
'Good night,' over his left shoulder. The inutile woman seemed to twitch slightly in her heavy fauteuil as he passed.
'You only think you're goin' someplace!' the addicted man called, still one-half kneeling.
Marathe rolled up to the person in authority as slowly as possible, hunched deep into the sportcoat and pathetically tacking.
With significance, the large and clipboarded woman seemed without faze at the veil of U.H.I.D. Marathe extended a large hand in
greeting which he made tremble. 'Good night.’
The insane-smelling man on the carpet called out after: 'Make sure and pet the dogs!’
Joelle used to like to get really high and then clean. Now she was finding she just liked to clean. She dusted the top of the
fiberboard dresser she and Nell Gunther shared. She dusted the oval top of the dresser's mirror's frame and cleaned off the mirror
as best she could. She was using Kleenex and stale water from a glass by Kate Gompert's bed. She felt oddly averse to putting on
socks and clogs and going down to the kitchen for real cleaning supplies. She could hear the noise of all the post-meeting
nighttime residents and visitors and applicants down there. She could feel their voices in the floor. When the dental nightmare tore
her upright awake her mouth was open to scream out, but the scream was Nell G. down in the living room, whose laugh always
sounds like she's being eviscerated. Nell preempted Joelle's own scream. Then Joelle cleaned. Cleaning is maybe a form of
meditation for addicts too new in recovery to sit still. The 5-Woman's scarred wood floor had so much grit all over she could
sweep a pile of grit together with just an unappliquéd bumper sticker she'd won at B.Y.P. Then she c
ost of the pile. She had only Kate G.'s little bedside lamp on, and she wasn't listening to any YYY tapes, out of consideration
for Charlotte Treat, who was unwell and missed her Saturday Night Lively Mtng. on Pat's OK and was now asleep, wearing a
sleep mask but not her foam earplugs. Expandable foam earplugs were issued to every new Ennet resident, for reasons the Staff
said would clarify for them real quick, but Joelle hated to wear them — they shut out exterior noise, but they made your head's
pulse audible, and your breath sounded like someone in a space suit — and Charlotte Treat, Kate Gompert, April Cortelyu, and
the former Amy Johnson had all felt the same way. April said the foam plugs made her brain itch.
It had started with Orin Incandenza, the cleaning. When relations were strained, or she was seized with anxiety at the
seriousness and possible im-permanence of the thing in the Back Bay's co-op, the getting high and cleaning became an important
exercise, like creative visualization, a preview of the discipline and order with which she could survive alone if it came to that.
She would get high and visualize herself solo in a dazzlingly clean space, every surface twinkling, every possession in place. She
saw herself being
pendence surrounded her when she cleaned the co-op, even with the little whimpers and anxious moans that exited her
writhing mouth when she cleaned high. The place had been provided nearly gratis by Jim, who said so little to Joelle on their first
several meetings that Orin kept having to reassure her that it wasn't disapproval — Himself was missing the part of the human
brain that allowed for being aware enough of other peop
 Stork was. Orin had referred to Jim as 'Himself or 'The Mad Stork' — family nicknames, both of which gave Joelle the
creeps even then.
It'd been Orin who introduced her to his father's films. The Work was then so obscure not even local students of serious film
knew the name. The reason Jim kept forming his own distribution companies was to ensure distribution. He didn't become
notorious until after Joelle'd met him. By then she was closer to Jim than Orin had ever been, part of which caused part of the
strains that kept the brownstone co-op so terribly clean.
She'd barely thought consciously of any Incandenzas for four years before Don Gately, who for some reason kept bringing
them bubbling up to mind. They were the second-saddest family Joelle'd ever seen. Orin felt Jim disliked him to the precise extent
that Jim was even aware of him. Orin had spoken about his family at length, usually at night. On how no amount of punting
success could erase the psychic stain of basic fatherly dislike, failure to be seen or acknowledged. Orin'd had no idea how banal
and average his same-sex-parent-issues were; he'd felt they were some hideous exceptional thing. Joelle'd known her mother didn't
much like her from the first time her own personal Daddy'd told her he'd rather take Pokie to the pictures alone. Much of the stuff
Orin said about his family was dull, gone stale from years of never daring to say it. He credited Joelle with some strange
generosity for not screaming and fleeing the room when he revealed the banal stuff. Pokie had been Joelle's family nickname,
though her mother'd never called her anything but Joelle. The Orin she knew first felt his mother was the family's pulse and
center, a ray of light incarnate, with enough depth of love and open maternal concern to almost make up for a father who barely
existed, parentally. Jim's internal life was to Orin a black hole, Orin said, his father's face any room's fifth wall. Joelle had
struggled to stay awake and attentive, listening, letting Orin get the stale stuff out. Orin had no idea what his father thought or felt
about anything. He thought Jim wore the opaque blank facial expression his mother in French sometimes jokingly called Le
Masque. The man was so blankly and irretrievably hidden that Orin said he'd come to see him as like autistic, almost catatonic.
Jim opened himself only to the mother. They all did, he said. She was there for them all, psychically. She was the family's light
and pulse and the center that held tight. Joelle could yawn in bed without looking like she was yawning. The children's name for
their mother was 'the Moms.' As if there were more than one of her. His younger brother was a hopeless retard, Orin had said.
Orin recalled the Moms used to tell him she loved him about a hundred times a day. It nearly made up for Himself's blank stare.
Orin's basic childhood memory of Jim had been of an expressionless stare from a great height. His mother had been really tall, 
too, for a girl. He'd said he'd found it secretly odd that none of the brothers were taller. His retarded brother was stunted to about
the size of a fire hydrant, Orin reported. Joelle cleaned behind the filthy room's radiator as far as she could reach, being careful not
to touch the radiator. Orin described his childhood's mother as his emotional sun. Joelle remembered her own personal Daddy's
Uncle T.S. talking about how her own personal Daddy'd thought his own Momma 'Hung the God Damn Moon,' he'd said. The
radiators on Ennet House's female side stayed on at all times, 24/7/365. At first Joelle had thought Mrs. Avril Incandenza's highwatt maternal love had maybe damaged Orin by bringing into sharper relief Jim's remote self-absorption, which would have
looked, by comparison, like neglect or dislike. That it had maybe made Orin too emotionally dependent on his mother — why else
would he have been so traumatized when a younger brother had suddenly appeared, specially challenged from birth and in need of
even more maternal attention than Orin? Orin, late one night on the co-op's futon, recalled to Joelle his skulking in and dragging a
wastebasket over and inverting it next to his infant brother's special crib, holding a heavy box of Quaker Oats high above his head,
preparing to brain the needy infant. Joelle had gotten an A- in Developmental Psych, the semester before. And also dependent
psychologically, Orin, it seemed, or even metaphysically — Orin said he'd grown up, first in a regular house in Weston and then at
the Academy in Enfield, grown up dividing the human world into those who were open, readable, trustworthy, v. those so closed
and hidden that you had no clue what they thought of you but could pretty damn well imagine it couldn't be anything all that
mar
ayer, toward the end of his junior career, despite all the Moms's frantic attempts to keep him from hiddenness. Joelle
had
ous boy — all this was before she came to know Jim and the
Wor
leenex disintegrated into
gree
 eyes' corners. Her own personal
Dad
aside for until she'd shot down to the kitchen to toss out different
box
ver seemed to be out of the room for more than a few seconds. Her mother said she hardly
even
l-arrest-wise. Plus she felt — only a little less than she made it sound, on the futon at night, protesting —
she'
velous or else why hide it? Orin had recounted that he'd started to see himself getting closed and blank and hidden like that, as
a tennis pl
thought of B.U.'s Nickerson Field's 30,000 voices' openly roared endorsement, the sound rising with the punt to a kind of
amniotic pulse of pure positive noise. Versus tennis's staid and reserved applause. It had all been so easy to figure and see, then,
listening, loving Orin and feeling for him, poor little rich and prodigi
k.
Joelle scrubbed at the discolored square of fingerprints around the light-switch until the wet K
bles.
Never trust a man on the subject of his own parents. As tall and basso as a man might be on the outside, he nevertheless sees
his parents from the perspective of a tiny child, still, and will always. And the unhappier his childhood was, the more arrested will
be his perspective on it. She's learned this through sheer experience.
Greebles had been her own mother's word for the little bits of sleepy goo you got in your
dy called them 'eye-boogers' and used to get them out for her with the twisted corner of his hankie.
Though it's not as if you could trust parents on the subject of their memory of their children either.
The cheap glass shade over the ceiling's light was black with interior grime and dead bugs. Some of the bugs looked like they
might have been from long-extinct species. The loose grime alone filled half an empty Carefree box. The more stubborn crud
would take a scouring pad and ammonia. Joelle put the shade
es of crud and wet Kleenex and grab some serious Chore-type supplies from under the sink.
Orin had said she was the third-neatnikest person he knew after his Moms and a former player he'd played with with
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, a dual diagnosis with which the U.H.I.D. membership was rife. But at the time the import had
missed her. At that time it had never occurred to her that Orin's pull toward her could have had anything either pro or con to do
with his mother. Her biggest worry was that Orin was pulled only by what she looked like, which her personal Daddy'd warned
her the sweetest syrup draws the nastiest flies, so to watch out.
Orin hadn't been anything like her own personal Daddy. When Orin was out of the room it had never seemed like a relief.
When she was home, her own Daddy ne
 tried to talk to him when his Pokie was home. He kind of trailed her around from room to room, kind of pathetically, talking
batons and low-pH chemistry. It was like when she exhaled he inhaled and vice versa. He was all through the house. He was real
present at all times. His presence penetrated a room and outlasted him there. Orin's absence, whether for class or practice, emptied
the co-op out. The place seemed vacuumed and buffed sterile before the cleaning even started, when he went. She didn't feel
lonely in the place without him, but she did feel alone, what alone was going to feel like, and she, no one's fool,305295 was
erecting fortifications real early into it.
It was Orin, of course, who'd introduced them. He'd had this stubborn idea that Himself would want to use her. In the Work.
She was too pretty for somebody not to want to arrange, capture. Better Himself than some weak-chinned academic. Joelle'd
protested the whole idea. She had a brainy girl's discomfort about her own beauty and its effect on folks, a caution intensified by
the repeated warnings of her personal Daddy. Even more to the immediate point, her filmic interests lay behind the lens. She'd do
the capturing thank you very much. She wanted to make things, not appear in them. She had a student filmmaker's vague disdain
for actors. Worst, Orin's idea's real project was developmentally obvious: he thought he could somehow get to his father through
her. That he pictured himself having weighty, steeple-fingered conversations with the man, Joelle's appearance and performance
the subjects. A three-way bond. It made her real uneasy. She theorized that Orin unconsciously wished her to mediate between
himself and 'Himself,' just as it sounded like his mother had. She was uneasy about the excited way Orin predicted that his father
wouldn't be able to ''resist using' her. She was extra uneasy about how Orin referred to his father as 'Himself.' It seemed painfully
blatant, developmenta
d felt uneasy at the prospect of any sort of connection with the man who had hurt Orin so, a man so monstrously tall and cold
and remotely hidden. Joelle heard a howl and a crash from the kitchen, followed by McDade's tubercular laugh. Twice Charlotte
Treat sat up in sleep, glistening with fever, and said in a flat dead voice something that sounded for all the world like 'Trances in
which she did not breathe,' and then fell back, out. Joelle was trying to pin down a queer rancid-cinnamon smell that came from
the back of a closet stuffed with luggage. It was especially hard to clean when you weren't supposed to be allowed to touch any
other resident's stuff.
She might have known from the Work. The man's Work was amateurish, she'd seen, when Orin had had his brother — the
unretarded one — lend them some of The Mad Stork's Read-Only copies. Was amateurish the right word? More like the work of a
brilliant optician and technician who was an amateur at any kind of real communication. Technically gorgeous, the Work, with
lighting and angles planned out to the frame. But oddly hollow, empty, no sense of dramatic towardness — no narrative 
movement toward a real story; no emotional movement toward an audience. Like conversing with a prisoner through that plastic
screen using phones, the upperclassman Molly Notkin had said of Incandenza's early oeuvre. Joelle thought them more like a very
smart person conversing with himself. She thought of the significance of the moniker 'Himself.' Cold. Pre-Nuptial Agreement of
Heaven and Hell — mordant, sophisticated, campy, hip, cynical, technically mind-bending; but cold, amateurish, hidden: no risk
of empathy with the Job-like protagonist, whom she felt like the audience was induced to regard like somebody sitting atop a
dun
t three flashes, each almost
subl
most splashing her when he threw up, that she was just too Goddamn-all petrifyingly
pret
uard spray, hear the squeals of the
stoc
e
orga
d at
the
k-tank. The lampoons of 'inverted' genres: archly funny and sometimes insightful but with something provisional about them,
like the finger-exercises of someone promising who refused to really sit down and play something to test that promise. Even as an
under-grad Joelle'd been convinced that parodists were no better than camp-followers in ironic masks, satires usually the work of
people with nothing new themselves to say.306296 'The Medusa v. the Odalisque' — cold, allusive, inbent, hostile: the only
feeling for the audience one of contempt, the meta-audience in the film's theater presented as objects long before they turn to blind
stone.
But there had been flashes of something else. Even in the early oeuvre, before Himself made the leap to narratively
anticonfluential but unironic melodrama she helped prolong the arc of, where he dropped the technical fireworks and tried to make
characters move, however inconclusively, and showed courage, abandoned everything he did well and willingly took the risk of
appearing amateurish (which he had). But even in the early Work — flashes of something. Very hidden and quick. Almost furtive.
She noticed them only when alone, watching, without Orin and his rheostat's dimmer, the living room's lights up high like she
liked them, liked to see herself and everything else in the room with the viewer — Orin liked to sit in the dark and enter what he
watched, his jaw slackening, a child raised on multichannel cable TV. But Joelle began — on repeated viewing whose original
purpose was to study how the man had blocked out scenes, for an Advanced Storyboard course she went the extra click in — she
began to see little flashes of something. The M v. O.'s three quick cuts to the sides of the gorgeous combatants' faces, twisted past
recognition with some kind of torment. Each cut to a flash of pained face had followed the crash of a petrified spectator toppling
over in her chair. Three split-seconds, no more, of glimpses of facial pain. And not pain at wounds — they never touched each
other, whirling with mirrors and blades; the defenses of both were impenetrable. More like as if what their beauty was doing to
those drawn to watch it ate them alive, up there on stage, the flashes seemed to suggest. But jus
iminally quick. Accidents? But not one shot or cut in the whole queer cold film was accidental — the thing was clearly sboarded frame by frame. Must have taken hundreds of hours. Astounding technical anality. Joelle kept trying to Pause the
cartridge on the flashes of facial torment, but these were the early days of InterLace cartridges, and the Pause still distorted the
screen just enough to keep her from seeing what she wanted to study. Plus she got the creepy feeling the man had upped the filmspeed in these few-frame human flashes, to thwart just such study. It was like he couldn't help putting human flashes in, but he
wanted to get them in as quickly and unstudyably as possible, as if they compromised him somehow.
Orin Incandenza had been only the second boy ever to approach her in a male-female way.307297 The first had been shinychinned and half blind on Everclear punch, an All-Kentucky lineman for the Shiny Prize Biting Shoats team back in Shiny Prize
KY, at a cookout to which the Boosters had invited the Pep and Baton girls; and the lineman had looked like a little shy boy as he
confessed, by way of apologizing for al
ty to approach any other way but liquored up past all horror. The lineman'd confessed the whole team's paralyzing horror of
the prettiness of varsity Pep's top twirler, Joelle. Orin confessed to his private name for her. The memory of that H.S. afternoon
remained real strong. She could smell the mesquite smoke and the blue pines and the YardG
k they butchered and cleaned in symbolic prep for the opener against the N. Paducah Technical H.S. Rivermen. She could still
see the swooning lineman, wet-lipped and confessing, keeping himself upright against an immature blue pine until the blue pine's
trunk finally gave with a snap and crash.
Until that cookout and confession she'd somehow thought it was her own personal Daddy, somehow, discouraging dates and
male-female approaches. The whole thing had been queer, and lonely, until she'd been approached by Orin, who made no secret of
the fact that he had balls of unrejectable steel where horrifyingly pretty girls were concerned.
But it wasn't even the subjective identification she felt, watching, she felt, somehow, for the flashes and seeming non-seqs
that betrayed something more than cold hip technical abstraction. Like e.g. the 240-second motionless low-angle shot of
Gianlorenzo Bernini's 'Ecstasy of St. Teresa,' which — yes — ground Pre-Nuptial... '$ dramatic movement to an annoying halt and
added nothing that a 15- or 30-second still shot wouldn't have added just as well; but on the fifth or sixth reviewing Joelle started
to see the four-minute motionless shot as important for what was absent: the whole film was from the alcoholic sandwich-bag
salesman's POV,308298 and the alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman — or rather his head — was on-screen every moment, even
when split-screened against the titanic celestial marathon seven-card-stud-with-Tarot-cards game — his rolling eyes and temples'
dents and rosary of upper-lip sweat was imposed nonstop on the screen and viewer . . . except for the four narrative minutes the
alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman stood in the Vittorio's Bernini room, and the climactic statue filled the screen and pressed
against all four edges. The statue, the sensuous presence of the thing, let the alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman escape himself, his
tiresome ubiquitous involuted head, she saw, was the thing. The four-minute still shot maybe wasn't just a heavy-art gesture or
audience-hostile herring. Freedom from one's own head, one's inescapable P.O.V. —Joelle started to see here, oblique to the point
of being hidden, an emotional thrust, since the mediated transcendence of self was just what the apparently decadent statue of th
smic nun claimed for itself as subject. Here then, after studious (and admittedly kind of boring) review, was an un-ironic,
almost moral thesis to the campy abstract mordant cartridge: the film's climactic statue's stasis presented the theoretical subject as
the emotional effect — self-forgetting as the Grail — and — in a covert gesture almost moralistic, Joelle thought as she glance
room-lit screen, very high, mouth writhing as she cleaned — presented the self-forgetting of alcohol as inferior to that of
religion/art (since the consumption of bourbon made the salesman's head progressively swell, horrendously, until by the film's end
its dimensions exceeded the frame, and he had a nasty and humiliating time squeezing it through the front door of the Vittorio).
It didn't much matter once she'd met the whole family anyhow, though. The Work and reviewings were just an inkling —
usually felt on the small manageable bits of coke that helped her see deeper, harder, and so maybe not even objectively accessible
in the Work itself— a lower-belly intuition that the punter's hurt take on his father was limited and arrested and maybe unreal.
With Joelle makeupless and stone-sober and hair up in a sloppy knot, the introductory supper with Orin and Himself at Legal 
Seafood up in Brookline309299 betrayed nothing much at all, save that the director seemed more than able to resist 'using' Joelle
in a
pletely shut down in Jim's presence that the
silen e the boy had been too
dam
ferred to the Work's various films as 'entertainments.' He did this ironically about half the time.
t have one fucking clue how Himself felt about his abandoning a decade's tennis for punting, Orin wept. Or about
Orin
ny capacity — she saw the tall man slump and cringe when Orin told him the P.G.O.A.T. majored in F&C310300—Jim'd told
her later she'd seemed too conventionally, commercially pretty to consider using in any of that period's Work, part of whose
theoretical project was to militate against received U.S. commercial-prettiness-conventions — and that Orin was so tense in
'Himself 's presence that there wasn't room for any other real emotion at the table, Orin gradually beginning to fill up silences with
more and faster nonstop blather until both Joelle and Jim were embarrassed at the fact that the punter hadn't touched his steamed
grouper or given anyone else space for a word of reply.
Jim later told Joelle that he simply didn't know how to speak with either of his undamaged sons without their mother's
presence and mediation. Orin could not be made to shut up, and Hal was so com
ces were excruciating. Jim said he suspected he and Mario were so easy with each other only becaus
aged and arrested even to speak to until he was six, so that both he and Jim had got a chance to become comfortable in mutual
silence, though Mario did have an interest in lenses and film that had nothing to do with fathers or needs to please, so that the
interest was something truly to share, the two of them; and even when Mario was allowed to work crew on some of Jim's later
Work it was without any of the sort of pressures to interact or bond via film that there'd been with Orin and Hal and tennis, at
which Jim (Orin informed her) had been a late-blooming junior but a top collegian.
Jim re
In the cab (that Jim had hailed for them), on the way back home from Legal Seafood, Orin had beaten his fine forehead
against the plastic partition and wept that he couldn't seem to communicate with Himself without his mother's presence and
mediation. It wasn't clear how the Moms mediated or facilitated communication between different family-members, he said. But
she did. He didn'
's being truly great at it, at something, finally. Was he proud, or jealously threatened, or judgmental that Orin had quit tennis,
or what?
The 5-Woman's room's mattresses were too skinny for their frames, and the rims of the frames between the slats were
appallingly clotted with dust, with female hair entwined and involved in the dust, so that it took one Kleenex just to wet the stuff
down, several dry ones to wipe the muck out. Charlotte Treat had been too sick to shower for days, and her frame and slats were
hard to be near.
At Joelle's first interface with the whole sad family unit — Thanksgiving, Headmaster's House, E.T.A., straight up Comm.
Ave. in Enfield — Orin's Moms Mrs. Incandenza ('Please do call me Avril, Joelle') had been gracious and warm and attentive
without obtruding, and worked unobtrusively hard to put everyone at ease and to facilitate communication, and to make Joelle feel
like a welcomed and esteemed part of the family gathering — and something about the woman made every follicle on Joelle's
body pucker and distend. It wasn't that Avril Incandenza was one of the tallest women Joelle had ever seen, and definitely the
tallest pretty older woman with immaculate posture (Dr. Incandenza slumped something awful) she'd ever met. It wasn't that her
syntax was so artless and fluid and imposing. Nor the near-sterile cleanliness of the home's downstairs (the bathroom's toilet
seemed not only scrubbed but waxed to a high shine). And it wasn't that Avril's graciousness was in any conventional way fake. It
took a long time for Joelle even to start to put a finger on what gave her the howling fantods about Orin's mother. The dinner
itself— no turkey; some politico-familial in-joke about no turkey on Thanksgiving — was delicious without being grandiose.
They didn't even sit down to eat until 2300h. Avril drank champagne out of a little fluted glass whose level somehow never went
down. Dr. Incandenza (no invitation to call him Jim, she noticed) drank at a tri-faceted tumbler of something that made the air
above it shimmer slightly. Avril put everyone at ease. Orin did credible impressions of famous figures. He and little Hal made dry
fun of Avril's Canadian pronunciation of certain diphthongs. Avril and Dr. Incandenza took turns cutting up Mario's salmon.
Joelle had a weird half-vision of Avril hiking her knife up hilt-first and plunging it into Joelle's breast. Hal Incandenza and two
other lopsidedly muscular boys from the tennis school ate like refugees and were regarded with gentle amusement. Avril dabbed
her mouth in a patrician way after every bite. Joelle wore girl-clothes, her dress's neckline very high. Hal and Orin looked vaguely
alike. Avril directed every fourth comment to Joelle, to include her. Orin's brother Mario was stunted and complexly deformed.
There was a spotless doggie-dish under the table, but no dog, and no mention was ever made of a dog. Joelle noticed Avril also
directed every fourth comment to Orin, Hal, and Mario, like a cycle of even inclusion. There was New York white and Albertan
champagne. Dr. Incandenza drank his drink instead of wine, and got up several times to freshen his drink in the kitchen. A
massive hanging garden behind Avril's and Hal's captains' chairs cut complex shadows into the UV light that made the table's
candles' glow a weird bright blue. The director was so tall he seemed to rise forever, when he rose with his tumbler. Joelle had the
queerest indefensible feeling that Avril wished her ill; she kept feeling different areas of hair stand up. Everybody Please-andThank-You'd in a way that was sheer Yankee WASP. After his second trip to the kitchen, Dr. Incandenza molded his twice-baked
potatoes into an intricate futuristic cityscape and suddenly started to discourse animatedly on the 1946 breakup of Hollywood's
monolithic Studio system and the subsequent rise of the Method actors Brando, Dean, Clift et al., arguing for a causal connection.
His voice was mid-range and mild and devoid of accent. Orin's Moms had to be over two meters tall, way taller than Joelle's own
personal Daddy. Joelle could somehow tell Avril was the sort of female who'd been ungainly as a girl and then blossomed and but
who'd only become really beautiful later in life, like thirty-five. She'd decided Dr. Incandenza looked like an ecologically
poisoned crane, she told him later. Mrs. Incandenza put everyone at ease. Joelle imagined her with a conductor's baton. She never
did tell Jim that Orin called him The Mad or Sad Stork. The whole Thanksgiving table inclined very subtly toward Avril, very
slightly and subtly, like heliotropes. Joelle found herself doing it too, the inclining. Dr. Incandenza kept shading his eyes from the
UV plant-light in a gesture that resembled a salute. Avril referred to her plants as her Green Babies. At some point out of nowhere,
little Hal Incandenza, maybe ten, announced that the basic unit of luminous intensity is the Candela, which he defined for no one
in particular as the luminous intensity of 1/600,000 of a square meter of a cavity at the freezing-temperature of platinum. All the
table's males wore coats and ties. The larger of Hal's two tennis partners passed out dental stimulators, and no one made fun of
him. Mario's grin seemed both obscene and sincere. Hal, whom Joelle wasn't crazy about, kept asking wasn't anybody going to ask
him the freezing-temperature of platinum. Joelle and Dr. Incandenza found themselves in a small conversation about Bazin, a
film-theorist Himself detested, making a tormented face at the name. Joelle intrigued the optical scientist and director by 
explaining Ba-zin's disparagement of self-conscious directorial expression as historically connected to the neo-Thomist Realism of
the 'Personalistes,' an aesthetic school of great influence over French Catholic intellectuals circa 1930-1940 — many of Bazin's
teachers had been eminent Personalistes. Avril encouraged Joelle to describe rural Kentucky. Orín did a long impression of late
pop-astronomer Carl Sagan expressing televisual awe at the cosmos' scale. 'Billions and billions,' he said. One of the tennis friends
burped just awfully, and no one reacted to the sound in any way. Orin said 'Billions and billions and billions' in the voice of
Sagan. Avril and Hal had a brief good-natured argument about whether the term circa could modify an interval or only a specific
year. Then Hal asked for several examples of something called Haplology. Joelle kept fighting urges to slap the sleek little showoffy kid upside the head so hard his bow-tie would spin. 'The universe:' — Orin continued long after the wit had worn thin —
'cold, immense, incredibly universal.' The subjects of tennis, baton-twirling, and punting never came up: organized sports were
never once mentioned. Joelle noticed that nobody seemed to look directly at Dr. Incandenza except her. A curious flabby white
mammarial dome covered part of the Academy's grounds outside the dining room's window. Mario plunged his special fork into
Dr. Incandenza's potato-cityscape, to general applause and certain grating puns on the term deconstruction from the insufferable
Hal kid. Everyone's teeth were dazzling in the candlelight and UV. Hal wiped Mario's snout, which seemed to run continuously.
Avril invited Joelle by all means to make a Thanksgiving call home to her family in rural Kentucky if she wished. Orin said the
Moms was herself originally from rural Quebec. Joelle was on her seventh glass of wine. Orin's fingering his half-Windsor kept
looking more and more like a signal to somebody. Avril urged Dr. Incandenza to find a way to include Joelle in a production,
since she was both a film student and a now a heartily welcome honorary addition to the family. Mario, reaching for the salad, fell
out of his chair, and was helped up by one of the tennis players amid much hilarity. Mario's deformities seemed wide-ranging and
hard to name. Joelle decided he looked like a cross between a puppet and one of the big-headed carnivores from Spielberg's old
special-effects orgies about reptiles. Hal and Avril hashed out whether misspoke was a bona fide word. Dr. Incandenza's tall
narrow head kept inclining toward his plate and then slowly rising back up in a way that was either meditative or tipsy. Deformed
Mario's broad smile was so constant you could have hung things from the corners of it. In a fake Southern-belle accent that was
clearly no jab at Joelle, more like a Scarlett O'Hara accent, Avril said she did declare that Albertan champagne always gave her
'the vapors.' Joelle noticed that pretty much everybody at the table was smiling, broadly and constantly, eyes shiny in the plants'
odd light. She was doing it herself, too, she noticed; her cheek muscles were starting to ache. Hal's larger friend kept pausing to
use
ecularly for a
mom made a special point of asking Joelle to include her hands in the handhold
Avril made a show of gazing at Orin in mock-horror as he produced a cigar and clipper. There was also a blancmange.
The
one-number Hal had summoned from memory, Orin hung his leg over
Joel
st pre-Subsidized Thanksgiving was the first historical time Joelle intentionally did lines of
coca U.'s major-sport teams
Tes
fore. How many times. No. Mars, because it'll
end ing her.' The other side's man's voice came loudly, and the authority stopped a sobbing with
the
r a moment. Two dogs lay on the floor between her chair
and
adness, giving her seat the rotation to
face
 whenever we're doing group intakes.’
his dental stimulator. Nobody else was using their dental stimulator, but everyone held one politely, as if getting ready to use
it. Hal and the two friends made odd spasmic one-handed squeezing motions, periodically. No one seemed to notice. Not once in
Orin's presence did anyone mention the word tennis. He had been up half the previous night vomiting with anxiety. Now he
challenged Hal to name the freezing-point of platinum. Joelle couldn't for the life of her remember either of the names of poor old
Spielberg's old computer-enhanced celluloid dinosaur things, though her own Daddy'd personally taken her to each one. At some
point Orin's father got up to go freshen his drink and never returned.
Just before dessert — which was on fire — Orin's Moms had asked whether they could perhaps all join hands s
ent and simply be grateful for all being together. She
ing. Joelle held Orin's hand and Hal's smaller friend's hand, which was so callused up it felt like some sort of rind. Dessert
was Cherries Jubilee with gourmet New Brunswick ice cream. Dr. Incandenza's absence from the table went unmentioned, almost
unnoticed, it seemed. Both Hal and his nonstimulating friend pleaded for Kahlua, and Mario flapped pathetically at the tabletop in
imitation.
 coffee was decaf with chickory. When Joelle looked over again, Orin had put his cigar away without lighting it.
The dinner ended in a kind of explosion of goodwill.
Joelle'd felt half-crazed. She could detect nothing fake about the lady's grace and cheer toward her, the goodwill. And at the
same time felt sure in her guts' pit that the woman could have sat there and cut out Joelle's pancreas and thymus and minced them
and prepared sweetbreads and eaten them chilled and patted her mouth without batting an eye. And unremarked by all who leaned
her way.
On the way back home, in a cab whose company's ph
le's crossed legs and said that if anybody could have been counted on to see that the Stork needed to use Joelle somehow, it
was the Moms. He asked Joelle twice how she'd liked her. Joelle's cheek muscles ached something awful. When they got back to
the brownstone co-op on that la
ine to keep from sleeping. Orin couldn't ingest anything during the season even if he wanted to: B.
ted randomly. So Joelle was awake at 0400, cleaning back behind the refrigerator for the second time, when Orin cried out in
the nightmare she'd somehow felt should have been hers.
Shaking to the confidence of his judgment of these persons, the one Marathe had believed a desperate addict was revealed as
the woman in authority for the demi-maison of Ennet. The clip boarded woman was a mere subaltern. Marathe very seldom
misjudged persons or their roles.
The woman in authority was negative on the telephone. 'No, no. No,' she said into the telephone. 'No.’
T am sorry,' she spoke to Marathe over the telephone's speaker without placing the hand of privacy over the speaker. 'This
won't take a second. No she can't, Mars. Promises don't matter. She's promised be
up hurting us again and just enabl
back of her wrist, then stiffened. Marathe watched expres-sionlessly. He had the great fatigue, a time at which English was
straining, There were dogs upon the floor. 'I know, but no. For today, no. Next time she calls, ask her to call me here. Yes.’
She deactivated this transmission and stared at her top of the desk fo
Marathe's fau-teuil, one dog of which was licking its private organs. Marathe stifled a shudder and pulled up his blanket
slightly, hunching to minimalize the musculature of health of his upper torso, also.
'Good night. . .,' Marathe began.
'Well, don't go,' the woman of authority ejaculated from coming out of her reverie of s
 him. She tried to smile in the professional manner of U.S.A. 'After you waited all that time out there. I saw you sharing with
Selwyn. Selwyn tends to show up
'Me, I think he suffers with mental illness.' Marathe noticed one leg of the woman was thinner by far of her other leg. He was
bein nowhere.
esk.
dicted to smack, to scag, and to H, seeking desperately the residential treatment.’
 in with issues, Henry,' she said.
aff here, we've had aliens, resident aliens, E.S.L.'s whose English was
wor
 office's door had a decoration of a triangle within a
circ
e windows had no small ends of wires about their frames. This left the possibility only
of a as difficult to jumper but also possible. Marathe felt himself missing his wife intensely,
whi
sdale, something?’
ile saying allowed
that
ger that he was concerned that this woman of authority — except for — but it was difficult
of s e of U.S.A., and the cabinet's mouth in the shadow of the lid and
the ces of embossed smiles upon the brown cases. Marathe
felt
use demi-maison. He
in a
it. 'This is happy,' finally he said.
g driven distracted also by this habit to pretend to sniff. The false sniffs came from
She crossed these legs. Two autos' horns mightily blew upon the avenue far beyond the concave window of her d
'This Selwyn, he advised me to stroke your animals, which I have regret but I will not.’
This woman quietly laughed and leaned forward above the crossed legs. In addition, one of the dogs had flatulence. 'You
listed your citizenship as Swiss.’
'I am a residing alien ad
'But legally residing? With a Green Card? An O.I.N.S.311301 Residency Code?’
Marathe from his sportcoat produced the documents M. DuPlessis had arranged with foresight in the long past.
'Disabled, also. Also deformed,' Marathe said, shrugging stoically, inclining his veil at the dark carpet.
The woman was examining his O.I.N.S. documents with the pursed mouth and face for poker of O.N.A.N. authorities in all
places. One of her hands was twisted in the manner of a claw. 'We all come
'Henri. Pardon. Henn.’
Some woman just outside the door near the demi-maison's front door, she laughed in the manner of an automatic weapon.
Wet sounds were audible from beneath the rear leg of the dog with private organs, of which the head hid beneath the raised leg.
The woman of authority had to support the body by placing the hands on the desk to rise and unlock and lift the door of a black
metal cabinet over her TP and console of her desk. The door of old black metal lifted outward. Marathe committed to memory the
model numbers of this teleputer, which was Indonesian and of cheap cost.
'Well Henri, Ennet House, in the years I've been on St
se than yours by a long shot.' She stood on the thicker leg to reach into this cabinet deeply for some item. Marathe took the
opportunity of her inattention to commit to his memory the office's facts. The
le, and no bolt of death for locking, but merely a sadly cheap recess-lock in the knob. Nowhere the small nozzle of standard
10.525 GHz microwave alarming. The larg
 magnet-contact alarm, which if so w
ch always signalled his deep fatigue. Twice he sniffed.
The woman was speaking into the cabinet to him: '. . . get you to sign some releases for me so we can make copies of your
O.I.N.S. proofs and get an Outtake faxed from your detox, which was in ... ?’
'The Chit Chat Farms Rehabilitation of Pennsylvania State. Last month.' The A.F.R.'s data liaison in Montreal had promised
to arrange all records without some delay.
'In, what, Werner
Marathe cocked his veiled head ever so slightly. 'Wernersberg of Pennsylvania.’
'Well we know Chit Chat, we've had some Chit Chat graduates come through the House. Highest ... respect.' Her head was
inside the cabinet, with an arm. It appeared difficult for her to rummage inside the cabinet and keep at the same time her balance.
Deciding the bay windows were the optimal office's entry if required, Marathe looked at the woman's attempt to balance and the
old cabinet. Then he blinked slowly. In this cabinet visibly, in twin stacks near the front of the open cabinet, were many cartridges
of TP entertainment.
The woman said 'And we've been Disabled-Accessible since the beginning. One of only a handful of Houses in the metro area
that are fully equipped to take disabled clients, I assume they told you down at Chit Chat.' The wall banged with the impact of
boisterousness in the outside room, and somebody either laughed or was in pain. Marathe sniffed. The woman was continuing to
speak: '. . . why I got to come here in the first place. Which I came in in a chair, too, originally, by the way.' She teetered back out
from the cabinet with a folder of Manila. 'At the time I declared up and down I was too disabled to kneel and pray, to give you an
idea of where I was at.' She laughed gaily. She was attractive.
'Me,' Marathe responded, 'I will attempt to pray at a moment's order.' Aiding the ruse of application, he and Fortier
discovered, was that U.S.A. recovery from the addictions was somewhat paramilitary in nature. There were orders and the obeying
of orders. The A.F.R. had reviewed cartridges of antique U.S.A. programming, which they had found through luck in the
inventory of Antitoi, and had watched to learn many things. But casting his veiled face desperately upward wh
 Marathe could scan along the plastic cases of cartridges' spines. Among the small-of-font titles such as Focal Length
Parameters X-XL and Drop Volley Ex. II were two cases of plain brown plastic, blank, except for — this was why his veil, it
remained tilted upward for so much lon
ureness, for the office's light was the deadening fluorescenc
cheesecloth veil made less his focus — except maybe for tiny round fa
suddenly the excitement of himself — M. Hugh Steeply's wording for this had been from somewhere blue.
The authority spoke also: 'Not to mention U.H.I.D. members, you might want to know.' Gesturing then at the veil of Marathe
neither was mentioning. The woman attempted to affix a sheet of faint toner to a board with a clip. 'In fact we have a U.H.I.D.
member in early residency right now.’
Marathe blinked twice more. He said 'I am deformed, me.’
'She might be able to help you adjust, identify. Be good for her, too.’
Marathe had begun locking down in RAM every detail of every moment since his entering the Ennet Ho
nother part of his brain considered whether he would report truly first to M. Fortier or to the Steeply of U.S.B.S.S., whose
contact number had always the prefix of 8000, he had jested. In another part was whether to seem eager for meeting the
Entertainment's performer here now, a fellow veil. To think of what a desperate addict would have eagerness in. Marathe was
throughout this thinking smiling largely at the woman, forgetting she could not witness
'Your facial issues —' the person stated, leaning in over the crossed legs in her chair. 'Are they connected to your use and
abuse? Did they work with you on progression and Y.E.T.s312302 and owning consequences at Chit Chat?’
Marathe was in little hurry now to leave for returning to chez Antitoi. He utilized his abilities to recite complex lines of
covering-story on addiction while also at the time reviewed locking down the face and locations of every person at the Ennet 
House he had regarded. For they would come here again, the A.F.R., and maybe Services Without Specificity of Steeply and Tine,
as well. He had the ability of splitting his mind's thinking along several parallel tracks.
hich is in my home of Switzerland, while alone, and I fall down face-down while
my
g from the head, he
imag
 level surface over short distance. The authority figure liked to comb at the bright hair
with
 are about our own families, she knew. Charlotte Treat's face
glist
reatment is revealed as the disguised performer. The engineer of
radi
d be comfortably rewarded once
Not
cle
and breathing easily through expensive tubes. The
vari o the safety of American welcome.
'The legs — I do an overdose in Berne, w
legs, they remain how you say tangle, tangled in the chair on which occurred this injection, fix. A stupid. I lie down without
conscious or to move for many days, and my legs, they — comment-on-dití — they are sleepy, lose the circulating, suffer
gangrene, become infectious.' Marathe sniffed while stoically shrugging. 'As well the nose and mouth, from facial squishing of
lying face-down in a position without conscious for days. I die almost. All is amputated, for my life. I withdraw from the scag,
smack, and H, in I'infirmière. A result of abuse of the drugs.’
'This is your story. This is your first step.’
Marathe shrugged. 'My legs, my nose and oral. All as a consequence of the progression. At the Chit Chat, I admit all the
things, I realize I am addicted desperately.' Marathe was trying to decide if to find ways to make the authority woman briefly leave
the office, so that Marathe might rapidly arm-climb up to the cabinet to regard the smiling cases of cartridge closely before the
cabinet's locking. Or instead also to return on pretext to remain and hang roundly in the living room for waiting persons, to find a
glimpse of who is this mentioned resident with her female U.H.I.D. veil; for this is the purpose of coming to demi-maisons M.
Fortier gave. Marathe could give the fact of the cartridges to Fortier and the veiled girl to Steeply, or oppositely. The fatigue
returned. But Steeply, before committing to overt action, will wish for confirmation that those in the cabinet were items of the true
Entertainment, not the blank and joking F.L.Q. displays. There was truly a faint whirring noise comin
ined. Marathe's sidearm sat in its holster under the seat of him, hidden by the plaid-colored blanket of his lap. To easily kill
the person in authority was inutile at this time of not glimpsing the girl, he had decided, plus impractical of surrounding witness.
Marathe's fauteuil could travel 45 kph on a
 her claw of the deformed hand. She was telling Marathe the false addict that she found his honesty encouraging and saying to
sign these forms, for releasing. As Marathe signed slowly the name of a deceased Health-Benefits administrator at the Caisse de
Depot et Placement,312303 the woman began to ask about what lengths he believed he was willing to go to.
The whole family was lousy with secrets, she'd decided, was part of the nonturkey dinner's sadness. From each other,
themselves, itself. A big one being this pretense that overt eccentricity was the same as openness. I.e. that they were all 'exactly as
crazy as they seem' — the punter's phrase.
We're all a lot more intuitive about our lovers' families than we
ened; her cheek's deep scars were a more violent red than the rest. Her ribs under the wet Michelob Dry T-shirt were starting
to stand out, her neck to get that skinny stemmy look of katexia. She looked like a ravaged fowl. Kate Gompert's bed sat unmade,
a copy of some yellow paperback called Feeling Good open facedown on the mattress and starting to curl. Joelle had this weird
fear that Gompert, who made Joelle extremely nervous at the best of times, would come home and walk in and find Joelle
cleaning with her hair in a kerchief and veil damply clinging. She used the last of the room's Kleenex dusting all five bedside
tables, wiping in careful rings around objects she wasn't to touch.
There was then some trickiness in the situation when the demi-maison's woman offered the extension of a place for Marathe.
Desperately addicted Henri the Swiss could sleep upon the Convertisofa in the rear office this very p.m., she said, if he was
willing to endure the mess and sometimes insects of the rear office. The woman had a ripe spot of sympathique for the disableds,
Marathe could see. For trickiness in the situation, no lines had been prepared by Fortier to defer this offer of the extension of the
spot of treatment in the demi-maìson. The woman in authority smiled that she could see in his playing with the fauteuil's wheels
the addicted struggle between desperation and denial, she said. Marathe was rapidly calculating should he falsely accept and
remain here for one night to observe for himself the description of the veiled patient from U.H.I.D., against should he exit and roll
like no person's business to the nearest place of private telephoning to alert the A.F.R. at the shop that here at this demi-maison
were of possibility real cartridges of the Entertainment, perhaps including a duplicatable Master or the anti-samizdat remedy
cartridge of F.L.Q.'s allegation, to return to chez Antitoi and return later in squeaking force to the demi-maison and acquire both
the cartridges and the veiled performer, if the U.H.I.D. patient of t
o had spoken volubly of this person's veil and screen. Or calculating also whether to telephone not Antitoi Entertainent but the
24-hour costless prefix of M./Mlle. Steeply and convey the very same information instead, finally, first, to Bureau des Services
sans Spécificité, placing bets on O.N.A.N. and against Fortier, casting his lots finally with one side only, conveying his restenotic
wife and entertainment-hungry children down from St.-Remi-d'Amherst's Convexity-ravaged wastes to live with him the rest of
their lives down here among U.S.A.'s confusion of choices, demanding hidden protection from Steeply and high-income medical
care for the heart- and head-difficulties of beloved Gertraude.
Or to tell this figure of medical authority to look out behind for a large spider and thereupon snap her slim neck with one hand
and use the telephone console in this office to summon Fortier and an A.F.R. elite detail directly to this demi-maison. Or else to
summon directly Steeply and the white-suiting forces of O.N.A.N.. The authority made a spire of her fingers beneath her chin and
gazed at Marathe's cocked head with a face of respect and sympathy but not solicitude, also which made snapping her neck with
one hand seem a sad choice for Marathe. He pretended that it was necessary to sniff. Mssrs. Fortier and Broullîme, the A.F.R.
others he had known well since the days of when they stood together tensed at the crossings of many trains, beneath the sky's
moon — none of them sensed truly that Marathe has lost the belly for this type of work. That Marathe, he must fight the nausea of
the stomach as he pushed the sharpened handle of the manche a balai broomstick through the Antitoi's insides during the technical
interview of the Antitoi, and later had vomited out into the alley under secrecy. One of the Office's dogs chewed at its haunch with
great ferocity, in misery. In the U.S.A. of O.N.A.N., M./Mlle. Hugh/Helen Steeply of the clandestine U.S.O.U.S./U.S.B.S.S.
would hide the family of Marathe in obscure suburban locales, with papers of identity fashioned by specialists in above reproach
and no suspicion; and Marathe, his familiarity with the knowledge of Québecois insurgency woul
re Rai Pays seceded to alone draw down the wrath of chanteur-fou Gentle's anger. The A.F.R.'s triumph of dissemination of
the lethal Entertainment would ensure Marathe's valuable welcome by Gentle and his wife's beloved treatments for the ventri
 lack of skull. Marathe pictured Gertraude with a helmet and hook of gold,
able of calculus was how long to remain and work for dissemination against when to jump t
Fort would be implacable at Marathe's 'perdant son coeur,'314304 and it may be far wiser of waiting until Quebec had
been .A.N., Marathe.
odded her slim head. In a nostril a generic diaper-pin was transpercé, which glittered in the
fluo now and any message for her before she goes.'
The the and said 'Hey' or 'Eh' in a
gree otions. Marathe smiled with desperation and pretended to sniff. Visible smoke's odor came through the open
door ping of any necks upon this visit, because of bodies
leani suddenly the authority looked
up a
e a favor? Clenette H. brought some donie-cartridges down from E.T.A. this afternoon?’
ives are restless.' The authority laughed aloud. 'Something new.’
ances, light drinking only,' the young girl said in the manner of reviewing the rehearsal of something
lear
desk, and I'll have her put them out at the start of the day-shift
tom
de a curious circle with two of her fingers in the air of the doorway. Some kind of
sign pe. 'The natives'll be
grat
ou please?’
upted. 'I
do n
e's living315305 staff. We've got two living staff, alums of the house. One's under
the weather, but Johnette's — you'll like Johnette. Johnette's a keeper. E.T.A. is letters, E-T-A.’
arathe pretended to laugh aloud. 'I beg a pardon, for I thought some etier in the pronunciation of my native Swiss.’
ly get some residents on up there, part-time. It's
just
rts of the Academy with the Bolex H64 camera strapped to his head and joined by coax cable to the foot-treadle, which
he h
ly one court is being used, Gretchen Holt and Jolene Criess still winding up some sort of marathon challenge
from
ere is nothing upholstered, no pillow on the cot,
noth
ier's wrath
 evicted and the A.F.R. were fully engaged to reveal his quadrupling for O.N
Knocking at the Office's door at the same time as entering came a young girl with missing teeth, radiating coldness from the
exterior outside the demi-maison, leaning only her upper half of the body into the office through the doorway she had opened.
'Clocking in, boss,' the young girl stated in the flat nasality of Boston U.S.A.
The woman in authority smiled in return. 'Two more to interview, John-ette, then I'm off.’
'Pisser.’
'Can you let the people in from the shed when they come for Mrs. Lopate?’
The young and inclined girl n
rescence of the light as she nodded. 'And Janice says she's screwing out of here
 authority negated with her head at this. The young girl in the door looked down upon Mara
ting of neutral em
 from the noisy salon beyond it. Marathe decided firmly against the snap
ng with suddenness into the office unexpectedly. The torso of the person began to withdraw as
nd stated 'Oh and Johnette?’
The door swung more open once more as the returned upper half replied 'Yo.’
'Do m
'Let me guess.’
'The nat
The torso laughed as well. 'Did you see McDade's watching that Korean thing again out here?’
'So can you just run them through after lights-out, as many as you can, check and make sure they're appropriate?’
'No skin, no subst
ned.
'As many as you can get through, and leave them on Janice's
orrow.’
The young girl of substitute authority ma
al of the hand to the chief authority. Every finger of the hand of the girl wore a ring of different ty
eful, for once.’
'They're in the cabinet with the intakes,' the authority told her.
'I'll watch them during Dream Duty, as many as there's time.’
'And Johnette?’
Once more the torso reextended inward.
The woman with authority said 'And keep Emil and Wade from tormenting David K., will y
Marathe smiled largely as the door closed entirely and the authority made a small motion of apologies for being interr
ot have these meanings donie and natives, if I may boldly ask,' he said. 'Nor etier.’
A laugh of friendliness. It occurred to Marathe that this was a happy person. 'Donies are donated goods. Which we depend on
more than we'd like. The residents and alums are always on the lookout. Sometimes we call the current residents the natives; we
mean it as affectionate. That was Johnette, sh
M
The authority smiled with understanding. 'E.T.A.'s a private school. We usual
up the hill.' Seeing the deep intake of veil which his inhaling caused for one moment only, the authority expressed surprise of
the face and said 'But you did know Ennet's a working house. Residents have a month to find work, normally.' Exhaling with care,
Marathe gestured faintly as in But of course.
11 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
Part of Mario's footage for the documentary they're letting him do on this fall's E.T.A. consists of Mario just walking around
different pa
olds against his sweatered chest with one hand and operates with the other. At 2100 at night it's cold out. The Center Courts
are brightly lit, but on
 the P.M. session, the hands around their grips bluish and sweaty hair frozen into electrified spikes, pausing between points to
blow noses on sleeves, wearing so many layers of sweats they look barrel-bodied out there, and Mario doesn't bother with the
change in film-speed he'd need to record them through the steamed window of Schtitt's room, where he is. The room's noise is
deafening.
Coach Schtitt's room is 106, next to his office on the first floor of Comm.-Ad., past Dr. Rusk's office and down a two-corner
hall from the lobby.
It's a big empty room, built for its stereo. Hardwood floor in need of sanding, a wooden chair and a cane chair, an army cot. A
little low table just big enough for Schtitt's pipe rack. A folding card table folded up and leaning against the wall. Acoustic
damping-tile on all the walls and nothing decorative hanging or mounted on the walls. Acoustic tiling on the ceiling also, with a
bare overhead light with a long chain mounted in a dirty ceiling fan with a short chain. The fan never rotates but sometimes emits
a sound of faulty wiring. There's a faint odor of Magic Marker in the room. Th
ing soft to absorb or deflect the sound of the equipment stacked on the floor, the black Germanness of a top-shelf sound
system, a Mario-sized speaker in each corner of the room with the cloth cover removed so each woofer's cone is exposed and
mightily throbbing. Schtitt's room is soundproofed. The window faces the Center Courts, the transom and observatory directly
overhead and mangling the shadows of the courts' lights. The window is right over the radiator, which when the stereo is off 
makes odd hollow ringing clanky clunks as if someone deep underground were having at the pipes with a hammer. The cold
window over the radiator is steamed and trembles slightly with Wagnerian bass.
Gerhardt Schtitt is asleep in the cane chair in the middle of the empty room, his head thrown back and arms hanging, hands
treed with arteries you can see his slow pulse in. His feet are stolidly on the floor, his knees spread way out wide, the way Schtitt
always has to sit, on account of his varicoceles. His mouth is partly open and a dead pipe hangs at an alarming angle from its
corner. Mario records him sleeping for a little while, looking very old and white and frail, yet also obscenely fit. What's on and
mak
ip, and squunched salve from the bandage is starting to darken the corduroys at
that gh there is zero pain. Three tense voices behind Carol Spodek and Shoshana Abram's door, lists of
degr 's voice from he can't
tell p hot beach sea' twice very distinctly and then is still. Mario is leaning back against a wall in the
hall
ario on her way to the head. She puts her hand out straight at his head's
cam
the expanses of wall between doors hung with posters of professional players endorsing gear. Someone has drawn a
goat gs on an old Donnay poster of Mats Wilander, and the poster of Gilbert Treffert is defaced with anti-Canadian slurs.
Otis
 talking low to someone who's sobbing from Beak, Whale, and Virgilio's room, and Mario resists an impulse to
knoc r next door is completely covered with magazines' action-shots of matches. Mario is leaning back to get
foot Mont Chu exits the bathroom at this end in a terry robe and thongs and wet hair, literally whistling
'Dix
'LaM ’
quares his shoulders and looks into the camera atop Mario's head. 'You want me to say something for posterity?’
way up and looks penetrating. Mario checks the meter on his belt and uses the treadle to shorten the focal
leng downward, right at Chu, and there are tiny grinding adjustment-sounds
from
 mind went blank.’
.’
t, the camera's mechanism emitting a tiny whir.
can tell.’
ing the window shiver and condensed droplets gather and run in little bullet-headed lines down the glass is a duet that keeps
climbing in pitch and emotion: a German second tenor and a German soprano are either very happy or very unhappy or both.
Mario's ears are extremely sensitive. Schtitt sleeps only amid excruciatingly loud European opera. He's shared with Mario several
different tales of grim childhood experiences at a BMW-sponsored 'Quality-Control-Orientated' Austrian Akademie to account for
his REM-peculiarities. The soprano leaves the baritone and goes up to a high D and just hangs there, either shattered or ecstatic.
Schtitt doesn't stir, not even when Mario falls twice, loudly, trying to get to the door with his hands over his ears.
The Community-Administration stairwells are narrow and no-nonsense. Red railings of cold iron whose red is one coat of
primer. Steps and walls of raw-colored rough cement. The sort of sandy echo in there that makes you take stairs as fast as
possible. The salve makes a sucking sound. The upper halls are empty. Low voices and lights from under the doors on the second
floor. 2100 is still mandatory Study Period. There won't be serious movement till 2200, when the girls will drift from room to
room, congregating, doing whatever packs of girls in robes and furry slippers do late at night, until deLint kills all the dormitory
lights at the dorms' main breaker around 2300. Isolated movement: a door down the hall opens and shuts, the Vaught twins are
heading down the hall to the bathroom at the far end, wearing only an enormous towel, one of their heads in curlers. One of the
falls in Mr. Schtitt's room had been on the burnt h
 side of the pelvis, thou
ees and focal lengths, a study group for Mr. Ogilvie's 'Reflections on Refraction' exam tomorrow. A girl
which room says 'Stee
way, panning idly. Felicity Zweig emerges from her door by the stairwell carrying a soap-dish and wearing a towel tied at that
breast-level, as if there were breasts, moving toward M
era, a kind of distant stiff-arm as she passes:
'I'm wearing a towel.’
'I understand,' Mario says, using his arms to turn himself around and pointing the lens at the bare wall.
'I'm wearing a towel.’
Brisk controlled sounds of retching from behind Diane Prins's door. Mario gets a couple seconds of Zweig hurrying away in
the towel, tiny little bird steps, looking terribly fragile.
The stairwells smell like the cement they're made of.
Behind 310, Ingersoll and Penn's door, is the faint rubbery squeak of somebody moving around on crutches. Someone in 311
is yelling 'Boner check! Boner check!' A lot of the third floor is for boys under fourteen. The hall carpet up here is ectoplasmically
stained,
ee and fan
 Lord's door has Infirmary next to his name on the door's name-card. Penn's room's door's card's name also had Infirmary.
Sounds of someone
k. LaMont Chu's doo
age of the door when La
ie.’
'Mario!’
Mario gets him bearing down, his calves hairless and muscular, hair-water dripping onto his robe's shoulders with each step.
ont Chu!
'What's happening?’
'Nothing's happening!’
Chu stands there just within conversation-range. He's only slightly taller than Mario. A door down the hall opens and a head
sticks out and scans and then withdraws.
'Well.' Chu s
'Sure!’
'What should I say?’
'You can say anything you want!’
Chu draws himself
th and adjust the angle of the camera's lens slightly
 the Bolex.
Chu's still just standing there. 'I can't think what to say.’
'That happens to me all the time.’
'The minute your invitation became official my
'That can happen
'There's just this staticky blank field in there now.’
'I know just what you mean.’
They stand there silen
Mario says 'You just got out of the shower, I
'I was talking with good old Lyle downstairs.’
'Lyle's terrific!’
'I was going to just whip right over into the showers, but the locker room's got this, like, odor.’ 
'It's always great to talk with good old Lyle.’
'So I came up here.’
'Everything you're saying is very good.’
LaMont Chu stands there a moment looking at Mario, who's smiling and Chu can tell wants to nod furiously, but can't,
beca
th concerns,' Mario says, fighting not to nod furiously.
f you've heard from Hal what they're going to do, if he's in on the blame from Tavis. Pemulis and Kittenplan I can
see, iscipline for what happened out there. They were
stric Bud is Spodek, and she wasn't even out there.’
 all this, you'll be glad to know.’
t Mario it looks to Mario like he's looking down south somewhere along
Mar
ybody.’
 even seem like he was conscious for the debacle itself.’
 here.’
 standing here dripping asking you for Hal's impressions of when Tavis called them in, as in
did w Pemulis and Hal coming out of Tavis's office with the
Asso
ook over the viewfmder at Chu. 'Are you saying this, or is this what
happ
at I'm asking you, Mario, if Hal told you what happened.’
as asking, and I'm asking you about it.’
down the hill. Lateral Alice Moore's desk's plaque's DANGER: THIRD RAIL light is unillum
arette on fire in the big clay
asht w
behi n-style under her chin and holding up a stapler,
chec
rio doesn't look at this time, trying to film the cock of the Moms's head and the
phon
 in a V, stapler open in one hand, facing the window.
st the seminar table and viewer and portable blackboard to the far part of the office
whe rious, Mario resembling a very old brittle-boned man or someone
carr k hill.
use he needs to keep the Bolex steady. 'What I was doing, I was filling Lyle in on the Eschaton debacle, telling him about the
lack of hard info, the conflicted rumors that are going around, about how Kittenplan and some of the Big Buds are going to get
blamed. About disciplinary action for the Buds.’
'Lyle's just an outstanding person to go to wi
'Lord's head and Penn's leg, the Postman's broken nose. What's going to happen to the Incster?’
'You're acting perfectly natural. This is very good.’
'I'm asking i
 but I'm having trouble with the idea of Struck or your brother taking d
tly from spectation for the whole thing. Kittenplan's
'I'm getting
Chu is now looking at Mario, which for Mario is weird because he's looking through the viewfinder, a lens-eye view, which
means when Chu looks down from the lens to look a
io's thorax.
'Mario, I'm asking if Hal's told you what they're going to do to an
'Is this what you're saying, or are you asking me?’
'Asking.’
Chu's face looks slightly oval and convex through the lens's fish-eye, a jutting aspect. 'So what if I want to use this that you're
saying for the documentary I've been asked to make?’
'Jesus, Mario, use whatever you want. I'm just saying I have conscience-trouble with the idea of Hal and Troeltsch. And
Struck didn't
'I should tell you I feel like we're getting the totally real LaMont Chu
'Mario, camera to one side, I'm
he give you impressions. Van Vleck at lunch said he yesterday sa
ciation urine-guy holding them both by the ear. Van Vleck said Hal's face was the color of Kaopectate.’
Mario directs the lens at Chu's shower-thongs so he can l
ened?’
'That's wh
'I follow what you're saying.’
'So you asked whether I w
Mario zooms in very tight: Chu's complexion is a kind of creamy green, with not one follicle in view. 'LaMont, I'm going to
find you and tell you whatever Hal tells me, this is so good.’
'So then you haven't talked to Hal?’
'When?’
'Jesus, Mario, it's like trying to talk to a rock with you sometimes.’
'This is going very well!’
Someone gargling. Guglielmo Redondo's voice going through the rosary, it sounds like, just inside his and Esteban Reynes's
door. The Clipperton Suite in East House had had a bright-yellow strip of B.P.D. plastic for over a month, he remembers. The
Boys Room door a different kind of wood than the room doors. The Clipperton Suite had a glued picture of Ross Reat pretending
to kiss Clipperton's ring at the net. The roar of a toilet and a stall door's squeak. The Academy's plumbing is high-pressure. It takes
Mario longer to walk down a set of stairs than to walk up. Red primer stains his hand, he has to hold the railing so tight.
The special hush of lobby carpet, and smells of Benson ôt Hedges brand cigarettes in the reception area off the lobby. The
little hall doors that are always closed and never locked. The rubber sheaths on the knobs. Benson & Hedges cost $5.60 O.N.A.N.
a pack at Father & Son grocery
inated, and her word-processing setup wears its cover of frosted plastic. The blue chairs have the faint imprints of people's
bottoms. The waiting room is empty and dim. Some light from the lit courts outside. From under double doors is lamplight, much
attenuated by double doors, from the Headmaster's office, which Mario doesn't explore; Tavis is unnerved into such gregarity
around Mario it's awkward for all parties.316306 If you asked Mario whether he got on with his Uncle C.T. he'd say: Sure. The
Bolex's light-meter is in the No Way range. Most of the waiting area's available light comes from the doorless Dean of Females's
office. Meaning the Moms is: In.
Heavy shag carpet is especially treacherous for Mario when he's top-heavy with equipment. Avril Incandenza, a fiend for
light, has the whole bank of overheads going, two torcheres and some desk lamps, and a B&H cig
ray Mario 'd made her at Rindge and Latin School. She is swivelled around in her swivel-chair, facing out the big windo
nd her desk, listening to someone on the phone, holding the transmitter violi
king its load. Her desk has what looks like a skyline of stacks of file folders and books in neat cross-hatched stacks; nothing
teeters. The open book on top facing Mario is Dowty, Wall and Peters's seminal Introduction to Montague Semantics,317307
which has very fascinating illustrations that Ma
e's extended antenna against the cumulus of her hair from behind, capturing her back unawares.
But the sound of Mario entering even a shag-carpeted room is unmistakable, plus she can see his reflection in the window.
'Mario!' Her arms go up
'The Moms!' It's a good ten meters pa
re the desk is, and each step on the deep shag is preca
ying a load of breakables down a slic
'Hel/o/' She's addressing his reflection in the quartered window, watching him put the treadle down carefully on the desk and
struggle with the pack on his back. 'Not you,' she tells the phone. She points the stapler at the image of the Bolex on the image of
his head. 'Are we On-Air?’
Mario laughs. 'Would you like to be?’
She tells the phone she's still here, that Mario's come in.
'I don't want to intercept your call.’
'Don't be absurd.' She talks past the phone at the window. She rotates her swivel-chair to face Mario, the receiver's antenna
describing a half moon and now pointing up at the window behind her. There are two blue chairs like the reception-area chairs in
front of her desk; she doesn't indicate to Mario to sit. Mario's most comfortable standing and leaning into the support of the police
lock he's trying to detach from his canvas plastron and lower, shucking the pack off his back at the same time. Avril looks at him
like
ese two
sons nd support-yoke and
view lice lock, are at
once Center Courts, now empty, are visible out the left side of Avril's window, if you lean far forward
and has forgotten a gear bag and pile of sticks out by the net-post of Court 17.
hone down. She still holds the black stapler. Its jaws are open and it looks alli-gatorish in her hand.
ssing through the neighborhood poking a head in to say hello? Or am I a subject, tonight?’
ig head around in a weary circle. 'I get tired from wearing this.’
nd touching the antenna. Her hair has been pure white since Mario can first remember seeing her looking down at
him
s, hanging off the arms near the elbow. Its part shows her pink scalp. She keeps the hair very clean and
well
 either side of the window; in an
extr
de the girl Felicity, the really thin one — she got upset.
She
goodbye to the man as she put down the phone so the antenna now points at Mario's chest. She's putting out the nub of the
Ben b holder he'd squeezed and karate-chopped and put down the bowl's center, when he
mad wanted it to be an ashtray. 'You give me such pleasure standing there, all outfitted for work,' she said.
'Apr l. She had the idea that her smoking around Mario made him worry, though
he'd e to do final
swo
 two persons were related, one sitting and one standing canted forward.
you. I don't even know what there might be for dinner. Many
Won nference, I believe, he said.’
e Eschaton and the Postman's nose?’
 like.’
 and this magazine person since this afternoon.’
. The Pemulis person was seen by Mary Esther taking their
truc
 the sort of stellar mother where just looking at her kid gives her joy. She doesn't offer to help him get the lock's lead brace out
of the pack because she knows he'd feel completely comfortable asking for her help if he needed it. It's like she feels th
 are the people in her life with whom so little important needs to be said that she loves it. The Bolex a
finder over his forehead and eyes give Mario an underwater look. His movements, setting and bracing his po
 graceless and deft. The lit
 look. Someone
Silences between them are totally comfortable. Mario can't tell if the person on the phone is still talking or if Avril just hasn't
put the dead p
'Is this you pa
'You can be a subject, Moms.' He moves the b
'It gets heavy. I've held it.’
'It's good.’
'I remember his making that. He took such care making that. It's the last time I believe he enjoyed himself on something,
thoroughly.’
'It's terrific!’
'He took weeks putting everything together.’
He likes to look at her, too, leaning in and letting her know he likes looking. They are the two least embarrassable people
either of them knows. She's rarely here this late; she has a big study at the HmH. The only thing that ever shows she's tired is that
her hair gets a sort of huge white cowlick, like a rolling ocean comber of hair, and just on one side, the side with the phone,
sticking up a
 through the incubator's glass. Pictures of her own father's hair were like that. It goes down the middle of her back against the
chair and down both arm
-combed. She has one of Mr. deLint's big whistles around her neck. The big cowlick casts a bent shadow on the sill of the
window. There's a maple-leaf flag and a 50-star U.S.A. flag hanging limp off brass poles on
eme corner are fleur-de-lis pennons on tall sharp polished sticks. C.T.'s office has an O.N.A.N. flag and a 49-star U.S.A.
flag.318308
'I had quality interface dialogue with LaMont Chu upstairs. But I ma
 said only a towel.’
'Felicity will be just fine. So you're just strolling. Peripatetic footage.' She refuses to adjust syntax, to speak in any way down
to him, it'd be beneath him, though he seems not to mind when most people do it, speak down.
Nor will she ask about the burn on his pelvis unless he brings it up. She's careful to keep her oar out of Mario's health stuff
unless he brings things up, out of concern that it might be taken as intrusive or smothering.
'I saw your lights. Why is the Moms here, still, I thought to myself.’
She made as if to clutch her head. 'Don't ask. I'll starting whingeing. Tomorrow's going to be hellishly busy.' Mario didn't hear
her say
son & Hedge against the rooster-com
e it, after she'd said she
owl.' She ground individual sparks out in the bow
 never said anything about it one way or the other. 'I have a breakfast engagement at 07, which means I hav
tting and whacking for morning classes now, so I just lurched back over here to do it instead of carrying everything back and
forth.’
'Are you tired?’
She just smiled at him.
'This is off.' Pointing at his head. 'I turned it off.’
To look at them, you'd never guess these
'Will you eat with us? I hadn't even thought of dinner until I saw
ders.319309 Turkey cartilage. Your bag is by the radio. Will you stay again? Charles is still in co
'About the debracle with th
'A person from a magazine has come to do a piece of reportage on your brother. Charles is speaking to her in lieu of any of
the students. You may speak to her about Orin if you
'She's been aprowl for Hal, Ortho said.’
Avril has a certain way of cocking her fine head at him.
'Your poor Uncle Charles has been with Thierry
'Have you talked to him?’
'I've been trying to buttonhole your brother. He's not in your room
k before Study Period. Is Hal with him, Mario?’ 
'I haven't seen Hal since lunchtime. He said he'd had a tooth thing.’
set? Was that C.T. on the phone you were with?' Mario can't see why the Moms
wou he phone when he was in there right across the hall behind his doors. When she didn't smoke a lot of the time
she
ng posture. She looks like
som thinking the word typhoon. He knows she's not trying to consciously be
com
 hear.’
at my position needs to be that I trust my children, and I'd never traffic in third-party hearsay when
the
 no problem waiting to hear about Eschaton, teeth, and urine from your brother, who'll come to me the moment it's
appropriate for him to come to me.’
 Love-o.’
ests, grasping her chair, a pen clamped in her teeth like a
busi arpet-prints in the heavy shag.
.’
 about something. In my mind.’
h other.' She
gest
 whether someone's sad.’
 time for the smoking, a habit she despises. Hal
inhe is teeth were bridges.
sitive when it comes to people, Love-o,' she says.
nts in the deep shag he can see are shoes, and some are different, almost like knuckles. His
lord
an?’
But you still have
a su they're sad.’
gar. 'He or she might alternatively sigh, mope, frown, smile
half
 may present with
wha
ario leans all his weight into his police lock, which makes his head jut, his expression the sort of mangled one that
exp ta-Search Face, which Mario liked.
me they might act even less low than normal. But still these suspicions are in your mind.’
ing forward. Now neither of them is quite looking at the other,
both ple degrees off. Avril taps the pen against her front teeth. Her phone light is blinking, but there's no ringing. The
thin he executive chair back slightly to cross her
legs
’
'I didn't even find out he'd been to see Zeggarelli until today.’
'He asked about how the burn on my pelvis is.’
'Which I won't ask about unless you'd care to discuss how it's coming along.’
'It's fine. Plus Hal said he wishes I'd come back and sleep there.’
'I left two messages asking him to let me know how the tooth was. Love-o, I feel bad I wasn't there for him. Hal and his
teeth.’
'Did C.T. tell what happened? Was he up
ld call C.T. on t
held a pen in her mouth; Mario didn't know why. Her college mug has about a hundred blue pens in it, on the desk. She likes
to square herself in her chair, sitting up extra straight and grasping the chair's arms in a commandi
ething Mario can't place when she does this. He keeps
manding with him.
'How was your own day, I want to
'Hey Moms?’
'I determined years ago th
lines of communication with my children are as open and judgment-free as I'm fortunate they are.’
'That seems like a really good position. Hey Moms?’
'So I have
'Hey Moms?’
'I'm right here,
Tycoon is the term her commanding way of sitting sugg
nessman's cigar. There were other c
'Moms?’
'Yes.’
'Can I ask you a thing?’
'Please do
'This is off,' again indicating the silent apparatus on his head.
'Is this a confidential thing, then?’
'There isn't any secret. My day was I was wondering
'I'm right here for you anytime day or night, Mario, as you are for me, as I am for Hal and we all are for eac
ures in a hard-to-describe way. 'Right here.’
'Moms?’
'I am right here with my attention completely focused on you.’
'How can you tell if somebody's sad?’
A quick smile. 'You mean
A smile back, but still earnest: 'That improves it a lot. Whether someone's sad, how can you tell so you're sure?’
Her teeth are not discolored; she gets them cleaned at the dentist all the
rited the dental problems from Himself; Himself had horrible dental problems; half h
'You're not exactly insen
'What if you, like, only suspect somebody's sad. How do you reinforce the suspicion?’
'Confirm the suspicion?’
'In your mind.' Some of the pri
otic posture makes him acute and observant about things like carpet-prints.
'How would I, for my part, confirm a suspicion of sadness in someone, you me
'Yes. Good. All right.’
'Well, the person in question may cry, sob, weep, or, in certain cultures, wail, keen, or rend his or her garments.’
Mario nods encouragingly, so the headgear clanks a little. 'But say in a case where they don't weep or rend.
spicion which
She uses a hand to rotate the pen in her mouth like a fine ci
heartedly, appear downcast, slump, look at the floor more than is appropriate.’
'But what if they don't?’
'Well, he or she may act out by seeming distracted, losing enthusiasm for previous interests. The person
t appears to be laziness, lethargy, fatigue, sluggishness, a certain passive reluctance to engage you. Torpor.’
'What else?’
'They may seem unusually subdued, quiet, literally "low."
M
resses puzzlement, an attempt to reason out something hard. Pemulis called it Mario's Da
'What if someti
She's about the same height sitting as Mario upright and lean
 just a cou
g's handset's antenna still points at Mario. Her hands are not her age. She hoists t
.
'Would you feel comfortable telling me whether we're discussing a particular person?
'Hey Moms?’ 
'Is there someone specific in whom you're intuiting sadness?’
'Moms?’
'Is this about Hal? Is Hal sad and for some reason not yet able to speak about it?’
'I''m just saying how to be generally sure.’
'And you have no idea where he is or whether he left the grounds this evening sad?’
Lunch today was the exact same as lunch yesterday: pasta with tuna and garlic, and thick wheaty bread, and required salad,
and cause when she came in this morning
Pem
g how the brooms were there or why or
who set Mrs. Clarke's nerves, who'd been with the Incandenzas since long before E.T.A., and had nerves.
r. Schtitt is asleep in his chair in his room. Hey Moms?’
.’
midgeons of cocaine, which was the subject of much controversy in those days. My father's father chose
Del of which folded. And then his next two
pota
r hours, until he fell out of the chair. And then one
day
e's pretty, he knows. Orin and Hal both have parts of her prettiness in different ways. Mario likes to look
at H
fied even to poke a big toe into genuinely felt regret or sadness, or to
get id to live. They are imprisoned in something, I think. Frozen inside, emotionally. Why is this.
No
 may be sad people right here at the Academy who are like this, Mario, and perhaps you're sensitive to it.
You
 milk or juice, and pears in juice in a dish. Mrs. Clark had taken a Sick Morning off be
ulis at lunch said one of the breakfast girls had said there'd been brooms on the wall in an X of brooms, out of nowhere, on the
wall, when she'd come in very early to fire up the Wheatina-cauldron, and nobody knowin
 glued them on had up
'I didn't see Hal since lunchtime. He had an apple he cut into chunks and put peanut butter on, instead of pears in juice.’
Avril nods with vigor.
'LaMont didn't know either. M
Avril Incandenza can switch a Bic from one side of her mouth to the other without using her hand; she never knows she's
doing it when she's doing it. 'Whether or not we're discussing anyone in particular, then.’
Mario smiles at her.
'Hypothetically, then, you may be picking up in someone a certain very strange type of sadness that appears as a kind of
disassociation from itself, maybe, Love-o.’
'I don't know disassociation
'Well, love, but you know the idiom "not yourself" — "He's not himself today," for example,' crooking and uncrooking
fingers to form quotes on either side of what she says, which Mario adores. 'There are, apparently, persons who are deeply afraid
of their own emotions, particularly the painful ones. Grief, regret, sadness. Sadness especially, perhaps. Dolores describes these
persons as afraid of obliteration, emotional engulfment. As if something truly and thoroughly felt would have no end or bottom.
Would become infinite and engulf them.’
'Engulf means obliterate.’
'I am saying that such persons usually have a very fragile sense of themselves as persons. As existing at all. This
interpretation is "existential," Mario, which means vague and slightly flaky. But I think it may hold true in certain cases. My own
father told stories of his own father, whose potato farm had been in St. Pamphile and very much larger than my father's. My
grandfather had had a marvelous harvest one season, and he wanted to invest money. This was in the early 1920s, when there was
a great deal of money to be made on upstart companies and new American products. He apparently narrowed the field to two
choices — Delaware-brand Punch, or an obscure sweet fizzy coffee substitute that sold out of pharmacy soda fountains and was
rumored to contain s
aware Punch, which apparently tasted like rancid cranberry juice, and the manufacturer
to harvests were decimated by blight, resulting in the forced sale of his farm. Coca-Cola is now Coca-Cola. My father said his
father showed very little emotion or anger or sadness about this, though. That he somehow couldn't. My father said his father was
frozen, and could feel emotion only when he was drunk. He would apparently get drunk four times a year, weep about his life,
throw my father through the living room window, and disappear for several days, roaming the countryside of L'Islet Province,
drunk and enraged.’
She's not been looking at Mario this whole time, though Mario's been looking at her.
She smiled. 'My father, of course, could himself tell this story only when be was drunk. He never threw anyone through any
windows. He simply sat in his chair, drinking ale and reading the newspaper, fo
 he fell out of the chair and didn't get up again, and that was how your maternal grandfather passed away. I'd never have gotten
to go to University had he not died when I was a girl. He believed education was a waste for girls. It was a function of his era; it
wasn't his fault. His inheritance to Charles and me paid for university,’
She's been smiling pleasantly this whole time, emptying the butt from the ashtray into the wastebasket, wiping the bowl's
inside with a Kleenex, straightening straight piles of folders on her desk. A couple odd long crinkly paper strips of bright red hung
over the side of the wastebasket, which was normally totally empty and clean.
Avril Incandenza is the sort of tall beautiful woman who wasn't ever quite world-class, shiny-magazine-class beautiful, but
who early on hit a certain pretty high point on the beauty scale and has stayed right at that point as she ages and lots of other
beautiful women age too and get less beautiful. She's 56 years old, and Mario gets pleasure out of just getting to look at her face,
still. She doesn't think sh
al and at their mother and try to see just what slendering and spacing of different features makes a woman's face different
from a man's, in attractive people. A male face versus a face you can just tell is female. Avril thinks she's much too tall to be
pretty. She'd seemed much less tall when compared to Himself, who was seriously tall. Mario wears small special shoes, almost
perfectly square, with weights at the heel and Velcro straps instead of laces, and a pair of the corduroys Orin Incandenza had worn
in elementary school, which Mario still favors and wears instead of brand-new pants he's given, and a warm crewneck sweater
that's striped like a flea.
'My point here is that certain types of persons are terri
angry. This means they are afra
one knows, Love-o. It's sometimes called "suppression," ' with the fingers out to the sides again. 'Dolores believes it derives
from childhood trauma, but I suspect not always. There may be some persons who are born imprisoned. The irony, of course,
being that the very imprisonment that prohibits sadness's expression must itself feel intensely sad and painful. For the hypothetical
person in question. There
 are not exactly insensitive when it comes to people.’
Mario scratches his lip again.
She says 'What I'll do' — leaning forward to write something on a Post-It note with a different pen than the one she has in her
mouth — 'is to write down for you the terms disassociation, engulfment, and suppression, which I'll put next to another word,
repression, with an underlined unequal sign between them, because they denote entirely different things and should not be
rega ms.’
d, or express it, the sadness, I'm trying rather clunkily to say,
thes
r one
mem
 wheat or rye, that says TO A WOMAN OUTSTANDING IN HER FIELD.
A bl .N.T.A. insignia is hung very neatly and straight on a wooden hanger from the metal tree of the
coat e's always had her coffee out of the OUTSTANDING FIELD mug, even in Weston. The Moms hangs up
stuff
. His father and later Hal had changed him for years, never once
judg
bed and asked him to forgive her and to assure her that he understood it
didn
ly likes to hold the coffee's mug in both hands. 'Pardon me?’
lped a lot. Except what if it's that they're almost like even more themselves than normal?
Tha k or dead. If he's himself even more than before a sad thing happened. What if that
happ ill think he's sad, inside, somewhere?’
 the same little line, and she's twenty-eight. T don't follow you. How can someone be too
muc
 sad?’
Enfield Marine Complex below, and
beyo mmonwealth's cars' headers and store lights and the robed lit lady's downcast-looking statue atop St. Elizabeth's
Hos e right to the north over lots of different lights is the red rotating tip of the WYYY transmitter, its spin's ring of red
refle isible Charles River, the Charles tumid with rain and snowmelt, illumined in patches by headlights on Memorial
and t w 500, the river unwinding, swollen and humped, its top a mosaic of oil rainbows and dead branches, gulls asleep or
broo obbing, head under wing.
. The room's ceiling might as well have been clouds.
ant to wake you up if you were.’
?’
rded as synony
Mario shifts slightly forward. 'Sometimes I get afraid when you forget you have to talk more simply to me.’
'Well then I'm both sorry for that and grateful that you can tell me about it. I do forget things. Particularly when I'm tired. I
forget and just get going.' Lining the edges up and folding the little sticky note in half and then half again and dropping it into the
waste basket without having to look for where the wastebasket is. Her chair is a fine executive leather swivelling chair but it
shrieks a little when she leans back or forward. Mario can tell she's making herself not look at her watch, which is all right.
'Hey Moms?’
'People, then, who are sad, but who can't let themselves feel sa
e persons may strike someone who's sensitive as somehow just not quite right. Not quite there. Blank. Distant. Muted. Distant.
Spacey was an American term we grew up with. Wooden. Deadened. Disconnected. Distant. Or they may drink alcohol or take
other drugs. The drugs both blunt the real sadness and allow some skewed version of the sadness some sort of expression, like
throwing someone through a living room window out into the flowerbeds she'd so very carefully repaired after the last incident.’
'Moms, I think I get it.’
'Is that better, then, instead of my maundering on and on?’
She's risen to pour herself coffee from the last black bit in the glass pot. So her back is almost to him as she stands there at the
little sideboard. An old folded pair of U.S.A. football pants and a helmet are on top of one of the file cabinets by the flag. He
ento of Orin, who won't talk to them or contact them in any way. She has an old mug with a cartoon of someone in a dress
small and perspectivally distant in a knee-high field of
ue blazer with an O.N.A
rack in the corner. Sh
 like shirts and blazers neater and more wrinkle-free than anyone alive. The mug has a hair-thin brown crack down one side,
but it's not dirty or stained, and she never gets lipstick on the rim the way other ladies over fifty years old pinken cups' rims.
Mario was involuntarily incontinent up to his early teens
ing or wrinkling their face or acting upset or sad.
'But except hey Moms?’
'I'm still right here.’
Avril couldn't change diapers. She'd come to him in tears, he'd been seven, and explained, and apologized. She just couldn't
handle diapers. She just couldn't deal with them. She'd sob
't mean she didn't love him to death or find him repellent.
'Can you be sensitive to something sad even though the person isn't not himself?’
She especial
'You explained it very well. It he
n they were before? If it's not that he's blan
ens and you st
One thing that's happened as she got over fifty is she gets a little red sideways line in the skin between her eyes when she
doesn't follow you. Ms. Poutrincourt gets
h himself?’
'I think I wanted to ask you that.’
'Are we discussing your Uncle Charles?’
'Hey Moms?’
She pretends to knock her forehead at being obtuse. 'Mario Love-o, are you sad? Are you trying to determine whether I've
been sensing that you yourself are
Mario's gaze keeps going from Avril to the window behind her. He can activate the Bolex's foot-treadle with his hands, if
necessary. The Center Courts' towering lights cast an odd pall up and out into the night. The sky has a wind in it, and dark thin
high clouds whose movement's pattern has a kind of writhing weave. All this is visible out past the faint reflections of the lit room,
and up, the tennis lights' odd small lumes like criss-crossing spots.
'Though of course the sun would leave my sky if I couldn't assume you'd simply come and tell me you were sad. There would
be no need for intuition about it.’
And plus then to the east, past all the courts, you can see some lights in houses in the
nd that Co
pital. Out th
cted in the v
he Storro
ding, b
The dark had a distanceless shape
'Skkkkk.’
'Booboo?’
'Skk-kkk.’
'Mario.’
'Hal!’
'Were you asleep there, Boo?’
'I don't think I was.’
'Cause I don't w
'Is it dark or is it me
'The sun won't be up for a while, I don't think.’
veral times.’
erous times.’
l the way across. You can feel the snores' vibrations in your midsection.’
pt right through it. I didn't hear you even come in.’
 surprise to come in and see the good old many-pillowed Mario-shape in his rack again.’
ments all over the place, and there was a long scene where I was pricing dentures.’
T and the urine
doct
me-retardant chair, and I keep
rece
rry about or check up on.’
for somebody else's teeth, not my teeth, and I can't seem to get the mail
carr
tever information you told me, he was so concerned.’
re little that the Moms wouldn't go anywhere without S.
John imself had the
acci vo. The seat was from the Fisher-Price Company. We went to Himself's opening of Kinds of Light at the
Hay
ay around his chest with the square bar on the leash thing and the Moms wore those sunglasses and looked up and to the
righ
ce C.T. called us all in. When you think about Orin what do you think,
Boo
member when she had to fly and wouldn't put him in a cagey box and they wouldn't even let a blind dog on
the , so she'd leave S. Johnson and leave him out tied to the Volvo and she'd make Orin put a phone out there with its
ante nson was tied to the Volvo and she'd call on the phone and let it ring next to S.
John
as concerned, I remember. She bought some kind of esoteric food for it. Remember how
ofte bathed it?
nd rang and Orin picked it up and barked into it like a
dog
own both arms if we didn't pretend how we didn't know what she was talking about
if an
were supposed to shrug and look at her like she was minus cards from her deck, or else?’
'So it's dark then.’
'Booboo, I just had a wicked awful dream.’
'You were saying "Thank you Sir may I have another" se
'Sorry Boo.’
'Num
'Sorry.’
'I think I slept right through it.’
'Jesus, you can hear Schacht snoring al
'I sle
'Quite a nice
'...’
'I hope you didn't move the bag back here just because it sounded like I might have been asking you. To.’
'I found somebody with tapes of old Psychosis, for until the return. I need you to show me how to ask somebody I don't know
to borrow tapes, if we're both devoted.’
'...’
'Hey Hal?’
'Booboo, I dreamed I was losing my teeth. I dreamed that my teeth dry-rotted somehow into shale and splintered when I ate or
spoke, and I was jettisoning frag
'All night last night people were coming up going where is Hal, have you seen Hal, what happened with C
or and Hal's urine. Moms asked me where's Hal, and I was surprised at that because of how she makes it a big point never to
check up.’
'Then, without any sort of dream-segue, I'm sitting in a cold room, naked as a jaybird, in a fla
iving bills in the mail for teeth. A mail carrier keeps knocking on the door and coming in without being invited and presenting
me with various bills for teeth.’
'She wants you to know she trusts you at all times and you're too trustworthy to wo
'Only not for any teeth of mine, Boo. The bills are
ier to acknowledge this, that they're not for my teeth.’
'I promised LaMont Chu I'd tell him wha
'The bills are in little envelopes with plasticized windows that show the addressee part of the bills. I put them in my lap until
the stack gets so big they start to slip off the top and fall to the floor.’
'LaMont and me had a whole dialogue about his concerns. I like LaMont a lot.’
'Booboo, do you happen to remember S. Johnson?’
'S. Johnson used to be the Moms's dog. That passed away.’
'And you remember how he died, then.’
'Hey Hal, you remember a period in time back in Weston when we we
son? She took him with her to work, and had that unique car seat for him when she had the Volvo, before H
dent in the Vol
den320310 that wouldn't let in cigarettes or dogs and the Moms brought S. Johnson in a blind dog's harness-collar that went
all the w
t the whole time so it looked like she was legally blind so they'd let S.J. into the Hayden with us, because he had to be there.
And how Himself just thought it was a good one on the Hayden, he said.’
'I keep thinking about Orin and how he stood there and lied to her about S. Johnson's map getting eliminated.’
'She was sad.’
'I've been thinking compulsively about Orin ever sin
?’
'The best was re
plane
nna up during the day out by where S. Joh
son because she said how S. Johnson knew her unique personal ring on the phone and would hear the ring and know that he
was thought about and cared about from afar, she said?’
'She was unbent where that dog w
n she
'...’
'What was it with her and that dog, Boo?’
'And the day we were out rolling balls in the driveway and Orin and Marlon were there and S. Johnson was there lying there
on the driveway tied to the bumper with the phone right there and it rang a
 and hung it up and turned it off?’
'...’
'So she'd think it was S. Johnson? The joke that Orin thought was such a good one?’
'Jesus, Boo, I don't remember any of that.’
'And he said we'd get Indian Rub-Burns d
d when she asked us about the bark on the phone when she got home?
'The Indian Rub-Burns I remember far too well.’
'We
'Orin lied with a really pathological intensity, growing up, is what I've been remembering.’ 
'He made us laugh really hard a lot of times, though. I miss him.’
'I don't know whether I miss him or not.’
'I miss Family Trivia. Do you remember four times he let us sit in on when they played Family Trivia?’
emory for this stuff, Boo.’
o the administrative loo and was going to watch personally
whi nally.’
t actually extract urine samples from us. We got to hold on to our urine, as
the M doubt knows quite well, don't kid yourself, from C.T.’
thout self-abasement or concession of anything compromising, got the guy to give us thirty days — the
Fun
 hear Schacht, you're right. Also the fans.’
sOK, over and over.
From
howed some serious brass under pressure, standing there
over He played the O.N.A.N.T.A. man like a fine instrument. I found myself feeling almost proud for him.’
as so important to extract thirty days
from
ay, Hal.’
ean it.’
n your elbow. You're on your side, facing my way. I can see your shadow.’
ard to understand when you're up on your side on your elbow like this.’
be it just doesn't occur to you. Even the possibility. Maybe it's never once struck you that something's being fabricated,
misr
 maybe that's the key. Maybe then whatever's said to you is so completely believed by you that, what, it becomes sort of
true
able to do, is assemble a kind of field guide to the different kinds of ways.’
ey lie, they become very still and centered and their gaze very concentrated
and comes fluttery and
insu
 telling the truth even when he didn't think he was.’
.’
ikaze-style liars. These'll tell you a surreal and fundamentally incredible lie, and
then
hen the type who sort of overelaborates on the lie, buttresses it with rococo formations of detail and amendment, and
that' ance over the urinal.’
omehow bored, like what he's saying is too obviously true to waste time on.’
 sound like you can always tell.’
machless. He projected a kind of weary pragmatism the urologist found impossible to discount.
'You've got a phenomenal m
'...’
'You probably think I'm wondering why you don't ask me about the thing with C.T. and Pemulis and the impromptu urine,
after the Eschaton debacle, where the urologist took us right down t
le we filled his cups, like watch it go in, the urine, to make sure it came from us perso
'I think I especially have a phenomenal memory for things I remember that I liked.’
'You can ask, if you like.’
'Hey Hal?’
'The key datum is that the O.N.A.N.T.A. guy didn'
oms no
'I have a phenomenal memory for things that make me laugh is what I think it is.’
'That Pemulis, wi
draiser, the What-aBurger, Thanksgiving Break, then Pemulis, Axford and I pee like racehorses into whatever-sized
receptacles he wants, is the arrangement we made.’
'I can
'Boo?’
T like the fans' sound at night. Do you? It's like somebody big far away goes like: it'sOKit'sOKit'sOKit'
 very far away.’
'Pemulis — the alleged weak-stomached clutch-artist — Pemulis s
 that urinal.
'...’
'You might think I'm wondering why you aren't asking me why thirty days, why it w
 the blue-blazered guy before a G.C./M.S. scan. As in what is there to be afraid of, you might ask.’
'Hal, pretty much all I do is love you and be glad I have an excellent brother in every w
'Jesus, it's just like talking to the Moms with you sometimes, Boo.’
'Hey Hal?’
'Except with you I can feel you m
'You're up o
'How does somebody with your kind of Panglossian constitution determine whether you're ever being lied to, I sometimes
wonder, Booboo. Like what criteria brought to bear. Intuition, induction, reductio, what?’
'You always get h
'May
epresented, skewed. Hidden.’
'Hey Hal?’
'And
 in transit. Flies through the air toward you and reverses its spin and hits you true, however mendaciously it comes off the
other person's stick.’
'...’
'You know, for me, Boo, people seem to lie in different but definite ways, I've found. Maybe I can't change the spin the way
you can, and this is all I've been
'...’
'Some people, from what I've seen, Boo, when th
intense. They try to dominate the person they lie to. The person to whom they're lying. Another type be
bstantial and punctuates his lie with little self-deprecating motions and sounds, as if credulity were the same as pity. Some
bury the lie in so many digressions and asides that they like try to slip the lie in there through all the extraneous data like a tiny
bug through a win-dowscreen.’
'Except Orin used to end up
'Would that that were a trait family-wide, Boo.’
'Maybe if we call him he'll come to the WhataBurger. You can see him if you want to if you ask, maybe
'Then there are what I might call your Kam
 pretend a crisis of conscience and retract the original lie, and then offer you the lie they really want you to buy instead, so the
real lie'll appear as some kind of concession, a settlement with truth. That type's mercifully easy to see through.’
'The merciful type of lie.’
'Or t
s how you can always tell. Pemulis was like that, I always thought, til his perform
'Rococo's a pretty word.’
'So now I've established a subtype of the over-elaborator type. This is the liar who used to be an over-elaborator and but has
somehow snapped to the fact that rococo elaborations give him away every time, so he changes and now lies tersely, sparely,
seeming s
'...’
'I've established that as a sort of subtype.' 'You
'Pemulis could have sold that urologist land in there, Boo. It was an incredibly high-pressure moment. I never thought he had
it in him. He was nerveless and sto
His e believed he had that kind of performance in
him
ad an Eve Arden beauty brochure all the time where Eve Arden says: "The importance
of a
dy can always tell, Boo. Some types are just too good, too complex and idiosyncratic; their lies are too close
to th
d?’
.’
nfants or vampires or whatever. I think at seventeen
now e type of liar where there's simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing
awa
?’
me.’
efer it or do not prefer, it is no distance. Difference. You are in the chair even if you do
not to prefer, no?’
nd he would not leave me alone. I didn't even have any money. I came in here to vomit.’
l that time doing one-hitters when this is really
wha
place?’
 is Ryle's Inman Square Club of Jazz. My wife is dying at home in my native province.’
ten to!’
 hours of no jazz they enjoy low voices, coming in for quiet.’
But the insanity is after all this time in hospitals and losing his business and his wife because of drinking he
sudd
 head.’
m by sitting down, rolling over, whatever. Sor-ry. When he says
can
f my wife.’
ro, even, what do they call it Feeling No Pain.’
ds, and I come here and telephone to betray them and I see this bruised person who strongly resembles
my
tting high and not. Dr. Garton never mentioned this. He talked plenty about shock but he never even freaking
men
face was a brass mask. It was almost frightening. I told him I never would hav
.’
'Psychosis live on the radio used to re
 mask is to increase your circulation," quote.’
'The truth is nobo
e truth's heart for you to tell.’
'I can't ever tell. You wanted to know. You're right. It never crosses my mind.’
'...’
'I'm the type that'd buy land, I think.’
'You remember my hideous phobic thing about monsters, as a ki
'Boy do I ever
'Boo, I think I no longer believe in monsters as faces in the floor or feral i
 I believe the only real monsters might be th
y.’
'But then how do you know they're monsters, then
'That's the monstrosity right there, Boo, I'm starting to think.’
'Golly Ned.’
'That they walk among us. Teach our children. Inscrutable. Brass-faced.’
'Can I ask you how it is being in that thing?’
Thing?’
'You know. Don't play dumb and embarrass
'A wheelchair is a thing which: you pr
prefer it. So it is better
'I can't believe I'm drinking. There's all these people in the House they're always worried they're going to drink. I'm in there
for drugs. I've never had more than a beer ever in my life. I only came in here to throw up from getting mugged. Some street guy
was offering to be a witness a
'I know what it is you are meaning.’
'What's your name one more time?’
'I call myself Rémy.’
'This is a beautiful thing as Hester would say. I don't feel horrid anymore. Ramy I feel better than I feel, felt in ever so I don't
know how long. This is like novocaine of the soul. I'm like: why was I spending al
t / call feeling better.’
'Us, I do not take any drugs. I drink infrequently.’
'Well you're making up for lost time I have to say.’
'When I drink I have many drinks. This is how it is for my people.’
'My mom won't even have it in the house. She said it's what made her father drive into concrete and wipe out his entire
family. Which like I'm so tired of hearing it. I came in here — what is this
'This, it
'There's this thing in the Big Book they make us every Sunday we have to drag ourselves out of bed at the absolute crack of
dawn and sit in a circle and read out of it and half the people can barely even read and it's excruciating to lis
'You should make your voice lower, for in the
'And there's a thing about a car salesman trying to quit drinking, it's about the they call it the insanity of the first one, drink —
he comes in a bar for a sandwich and a glass of milk — are you hungry?’
'Non.’
'What am I saying I don't have any money. I don't even have my purse. This stuff makes you stupid but it makes you feel
quite a bit improved. He wasn't thinking of a drink and then all of a sudden he thinks of a drink. This guy-’
'Out of a blue place, in one flashing instant.’
'Exactly.
enly gets it into his head that one drink won't hurt him if he puts it in a glass of milk.'1
'Crazy in his
'So when this absolutely reptilian character you saved me fro
he buy me a drink the book flashes in my mind and for sort of as it felt like a joke I ordered Kahlua and milk.’
'Me, I come in for nights I am tired, after the music has packed away, for the quiet. I use the telephone here as well,
sometimes.’
'I mean even before the mugging I was walking along soberly deciding how to kill myself, so it seems a little silly to worry
about drinking.’
'You have a certain expression of resemblance o
'Your wife is dying. Jesus I'm sitting here laughing and your wife is dying. I think it's that I haven't felt decent in so freaking
long, do you know what I'm saying? I'm not talking like good, I'm not talking like pleasure, I wouldn't want to go overboard with
this thing, but at least at like ze
'I know of this meaning. I am spending a day to find someone I think my friends will kill, all the time I am awaiting the
chance to betray my frien
wife. I think: Rémy, it is time for many drinks.’
'Well / think you're nice. I think you just about saved my life. I've spent like nine weeks feeling so bad I wanted to just about
kill myself, both ge
tioned Kahlua and milk.’ 
'Katherine, I will tell you a story about feeling so bad and saving a life. I do not know you but we are drunk together now, and
will
is it?’
f women. I am, shall we say, Swiss. My legs, they were lost in the teenage years being
struc
. Many of my friends also: without legs.’
d us and moved to Portland, which is in Oregon, with his therapist.’
ighbors, and unfairness.’
y mom found a picture of his therapist in his wallet and goes "What's that doing in here?" ‘
nd much beautiful territory, which the stronger nations at the time of losing my legs committed paper atrocities
to m
ted to pretend the invasion is alliance; we
very nt admit that there is an invasion. I am weak
and,
long to nothing; I am alone. I think of death. I do nothing but frequently drink, roll
arou
ers who will fight the truth. I am not alive,
Kath , locked inside my pain in the heart.
I wi
ything outside my pain.’
r invaders, bearing down upon her at high
spee
ke one of those Swiss metal helmets? Is she scrambling crazily to get out of the way?’
uck me, just great, another horrible thing I'm going to have stand here and witness and then go feel pain
over
ease my brake and I am careening down the downhill, almost wipe-outing numerous
plac
into the chair and roll across the Provincial Auto-route into the embanking ahead just ahead of the nose of the truck,
whi
 you hear this story?’
'It's not about Hitting Bottom ingesting any sort of Substance and trying to Surrender,
'My people, we do not hit the bottoms o
k by a train.’
'That must have smarted.’
'I would have temptation to say you have no idea. But I am sensing you have an idea of hurting.’
'You have no idea.’
'I am in early twenty years, without the legs
'Must have been an awful train crash.’
'Also my own father: dead when his Kenbeck pacemaker came within range of a misdialed number of a cellular phone far
away in Trois Rivieres, in a freakish occurrence of tragedy.’
'My dad emotionally abandone
'Also in this time, my Swiss nation, we are a strong people but not strong as a nation, surrounded by strong nations. There is
much hatred of our ne
'It all started when m
'It is, for me, who I am weak, so painful to be without legs in the early twenty years. One feels grotesque to people; one's
freedom is restricted. I have no chances now for jobs in the mines of Switzerland.’
'The Swiss have gold mines.’
'As you say. A
y nation's land.’
Trucking bastards.’
'It is a long story to the side of this story, but my part of the Swiss nation is in my time of no legs invaded and despoiled by
stronger and evil hated and neighboring nations, who claim as in the Anschluss of Hitler that they are friends and are not invading
the Swiss but conferring on us gifts of alliance.’
'Total dicks.’
'It is to the side, but for my Swiss friends and myself without legs it is a dark period of injustice and dishonor, and of terrible
pain. Some of my friends roll themselves off to fight against the invasion of paper, but me, I am too painful to care enough to
fight. To me, the fight seems without point: our own Swiss leaders have been subver
 few legless young cannot repel an invasion; we cannot even make our governme
 in pain, see all is pointless: I do not see the meaning of choosing to fight.’
'You're depressed is what you are.’
'I see no point and do no work and be
nd the despoiled countryside, sometimes dodging falling projectiles of invasion, thinking of death, bemoaning the depredation
of the Swiss land, in great pain. But it is myself I bemoan. I have pain. I have no legs.’
'I'm Identifying every step of the way with you, Ramy. Oh God, what did I say?’
'And us, our Swiss countryside is very hilly. The fauteuil, it is hard to push up many hills, then one is braking with all the
might to keep from flying out of control on the downhill.’
'Sometimes it's like that walking, too.’
'Katherine, I am, in English, moribund. I have no legs, no Swiss honor, no lead
erine. I roll from skiing lodge to tavern, frequently drinking, alone, wishing for my death
sh for my death but have not the courage to make actions to cause death. I twice try to roll over the side of a tall Swiss hill but
cannot bring myself. I curse myself for cowardice and inutile. I roll about, hoping to be hit by a vehicle of someone else, but at the
last minute rolling out of the path of vehicles on Autoroutes, for I am unable to will my death. The more pain in my self, the more
I am inside the self and cannot will my death, I think. I feel I am chained in a cage of the self, from the pain. Unable to care or
choose anything outside it. Unable to see anything or feel an
'The billowing shaped black sailing wing. I am so totally Identifying it's not even funny.’
'My story it was one day at the top of a hill I had drunkenly labored for many minutes to roll to the crest, and looking out over
the downhill slope I see a small hunched woman in what I am thinking is a metal hat far below at the bottom, attempting the
crossing of the Swiss Provincial Autoroute at the bottom, in the middle of the Provincial Autoroute, this woman, standing and
staring in the terror at one of the hated long and shiny many-wheeled trucks of our pape
ds in the hurry to come despoil part of the Swiss land.’
'Li
'She is standing transfixed with horror of the truck — identically as I had been motionless and transfixed by horror inside me,
unable to move, like one of the many moose of Switzerland transfixed by the headlights of one of the many logging-trucks of
Switzerland. The sunlight is reflecting madly on her metal hat as she is shaking her head in terror and she is clutching her —
pardon me, but her female bosom, as if the heart of her would explode from the terror.’
'And you think, Oh f
.’
'But the great gift of this time today at the hilltop above the Provincial Autoroute is I do not think of me. I do not know this
woman or love her, but without thinking I rel
es on the bumps and rocks of the hill's slope, and as we say in Switzerland I schüssch at enough speed to reach my wife and
sweep her up
ch had not slowed.’
'Hang me upside-down and fuck me in both ears. You pulled yourself out of a clinical depression by being a freaking hero.’
'We rolled and tumbled down the embanking on the Autoroute's distant side, causing my chair to tip and injuring a stump of 
me, and knocking away her thick metal hat.’
'You saved somebody's freaking life, Ramy. I'd give my left nut for a chance to pull myself out of the shadow of the wing that
way, Ramy.’
'You are not seeing this. It was this frozen with the terror woman, she saved my life. For this saved my life. This moment
broke my moribund chains, Katherine. In one instant and without thought I was allowed to choose something as more important
than
y's invasion on paper. Without the confinement of
the m istended
from
ven see them and chose you right back — result: passionate love.’
rmities of grave nature. It was there I learned of the other troubles.’
here were progressive decays of circulation and
vess lf restenosis. There were the more than standard accepted amounts of eyes and cavities in many different
stag of the body. There were the fugue states and rages and frequency of coma. She had
wan
inal drool and ended the seizures and there were certain
hats
ing this is a feel-better story at all.’
ions of the fauteuil when the old despair of before choosing this no-skull creature rose up once again inside me. Within
seve
u're saying this is love? This isn't love. I'll know when it's love because of the way it'll feel. It won't be about spinal fluid
and
 the clinical
depr he clinical depression was a shotgun nudging you down the wedding aisle. Was there a wedding
aisle
oose this woman. There was a long time of silence. My
who k of my wife.’
ince the wedding night her death was coming. Her restenosis of the heart, it is irreversible. Now my
Gert
ith it they say
my
m betraying it.’
 my thinking of my life. Her, she allowed this will without thinking. She with one blow broke the chains of the cage of pain at
my half a body and nation. When I had crawled back to my fauteuil and placed my tipped fauteuil aright and I was again seated I
realized the pain of inside no longer pained me. I became, then, adult. I was permitted leaving the pain of my own loss and pain at
the top of Switzerland's Mont Papineau.’
'Because suddenly you gazed at the girl without her metal hat and felt a rush of passion and fell madly in love enough to get
married and roll together off into the s—’
'She had no skull, this woman. Later I am learning she had been among the first Swiss children of southwestern Switzerland
to become born without a skull, from the toxicities in association of our enem
etal hat the head hung from the shoulders like the half-filled balloon or empty bag, the eyes and oral cavity greatly d
 this hanging, and sounds exiting this cavity which were difficult to listen.’
'But still, something about her moved you to fall madly in love. Her gratitude and humility and acceptance and that kind of
quiet dignity really horribly handic— birth-defected people usually have.’
'It was not mad. I had already chosen. The unclamping of the brakes of the fauteuil and schüssching to the Autoroute — this
was the love. I had chosen loving her above my lost legs and this half a self.’
'And she looked at your missing limbs and didn't e
'There was for this woman in the embanking no possible choosing. Without the containing helmet all energies in her were
committed to the shaping of the oral cavity in a shape that allowed breathing, which was a task of great enormity, for her head it
had also neither muscles nor nerves. The special hat had found itself dented in upon one side, and I had not the ability to shape my
wife's head into a shape that I could stuff the sac of her head into the hat, and I chose to carry her over my shoulders in a highspeed rolling to the nearest Swiss hôpital specializing in defo
'I think I'd like a couple more Kahlua and milks.’
'There was the trouble of the digestive tracking. There were seizures also. T
el, which calls itse
es of development upon different parts
dered away from a public institution of Swiss charitable care. Worst for choosing to love was the cerebro-and-spinal fluids
which dribbled at all times from her distending oral cavity.’
'And but your passionate love for each other dried up her cerebro-sp
 she looked so good in it just about drove you mad with love? Is that it?’
'Garçon!’
'Is the madly-in-love part coming up?’
'Katherine, I had too believed there was no love without passion. Pleasure. This was part of the pain of the no legs, this fear
that for me there would be no passion. The fear of the pain is many times worse than the pain of the pain, n'est ce —?’
'Ramy I don't think I'm like think
'I tried to leave the soft-head and cerebro-spinally incontinent woman, m'épouse au future, behind at the hôpital of grave
nature and to wheel off into my new life of uncaged acceptance and choice. I would roll into the fraying of battle for my despoiled
nation, for now I saw the point not of winning but of choosing merely to fight. But I had travelled no more than several
revolut
ral revolutions there was no point again and no legs, and only fear of the pain that made me not choose. Pain rolled me
backwards to this woman, my wife.’
'Yo
despair believe you me, Bucko. It'll be about your eyes meet across someplace and both your knees give out and from that
second forward you know you're not going to be alone and in hell. You're not half the guy I started to think you might have been,
Ray.’
'I had to face: I had chosen. My choice, this was love. I had chosen I think the way out of the chains of the cage. I needed this
woman. Without her to choose over myself, there was only pain and not choosing, rolling drunkenly and making fantasies of
death.’
'This is love? It's like you were chained to her. It's like if you tried to get on with your own life the pain of
ession came back. It's like t
? Could she even get down a wedding aisle?’
'My wife's wedding helmet was of the finest nickel mined and molded by friends in the nickel mines of southwest
Switzerland. Each of us, we were rolled down the aisle in special conveyings. Hers with special pans and drains, for the fluids. It
was the happiest day ever for me, since the train. The cleric asked did I ch
le very being came to a knifelike point in that instant, Katharine, my hand holding tenderly the hoo
'Hook? As in hand-hook?’
'I have been knowing s
raude, she has been in a comatose and vegetating state for almost one year. This coma has no exit, it is said. The advanced
Jaarvik IX Exterior Artificial Heart is said by the public-aid cardiologists of Switzerland to be her chance for life. W
wife can live for many more years in a comatose and vegetated state.’
'So you're down here like pressing your case to the Jaarvik IX people at Harvard or wherever.’
'It is for her I betray my friends and cell, the cause of my nation, which now that victory and independence of the neighbors is
possible I a
'You're spying and betraying Switzerland to try and keep alive somebody with a hook and spinal fluid and no skull in an
irrev
m not telling for disturbing you, poor Katherine. I am telling of pain and saving a life, and love.’
’
ow what I'm saying
here
 tell. To ask any person to see. It is no choice. It is not choosing Gertraude over the A.F.R., my
com
the
his choice, Katherine: I made it. It chains me, but the chains are of my choice. The other chains: no. The others were
the c
usea often accompanies this. Do not be alarmed if
ther
preciate the drinks and all, but I don't think I'm going to like memorize a lecture on love from somebody who marries
som
 right away or try to wait before you throw up, Mr. Drinking Expert?’
r: you would reply to me what?’
hat one before, asshole, and from . .. from guys with a little more to them south of the
wais
t I'd reply is I'm a shitty lay. As in sex-partner. I've only ever been sexual twice, and both times it was awful, and Brad
And nderson you know what he said? He said I was a lousy lay and
my snatch was sure awful big for somebody with such a little flat ass, Brad Anderson said.’
. You are not understanding.’
 would say No Thank You, you are saying, but this is because you would not believe my claim.’
 was true, you would say yes, Katherine, no?’
 Hope in secret by myself down in the Pump Room off the secondary maintenance tunnel. I use
Visi
le to miss. The kid was a devout Mormon. The dose was impossible to miss. Sales of Visine bottles
of p t urine during quarterly tests have been noted, it turns out, and classed as a Pemulis production.’
 just to establish a context of objectivity for Pemulis's urine.
It's want. I'm almost positive they're going to give Pemulis the Shoe by the end of the term. I don't know whether
Pem
ersible coma? And I thought / was disturbed. You're making me totally reorient my idea of disturbed, mister.’
'I a
'Well, Ray, far be it from far for me, but that's not love: that's low self-esteem and self-abuse and Settling For Less, choosing
a coma over your comrades. Assuming you're even not totally lying to get me into the hay or some fucked-up disturbed sicko shit
like that.’
This —
'Which I've got to tell you, saying I remind you of her isn't exactly the way to sweep my feet off, you kn
?’
'This is what is hard to
panions. Over the causes. Choosing Gertraude to love as my wife was necessary for the others, these other choices. Without
choice of her life there are no other choices. I tried leaving at the commencement. I got only very few revolutions of the
fauteuil.’
'Sounds more like a gun to your head than a choice. If you can't choose the other way, there's no choice.’
'No, but t
hains of not choosing.’
'Do you have a twin that just came in and sat down just to the left of you but is also like about one-third overlapping on you?’
'You are merely drunk. This will happened quickly if unused to alcohol. Na
e is visual doubling, losing balance, and nausea of the stomach.’
'The price of a like complete normal human digestive tract. I used to throw up every morning without drinking. Rain and
shine both.’
'You think there is no love without the pleasure, the no-choice compelling of passion.’
'I ap
ebody with cerebro-fluid spewing out of their mouth, no offense intended.’
'As you say. My opinions are only that the love you of this country speak of yields none of the pleasure you seek in love. This
whole idea of the pleasure and good feelings being what to choose. To give yourself away to. That all choice for you leads there
— this pleasure of not choosing.’
'Don't grudge me a little feeling good, of all people, Ray, asshole, shit-puddle, Swisshead.’
'...’
'Is it better to throw up
'I am thinking: what if I were to claim we might leave and I could lead you only three streets from here and show you
something with this promise: you would feel more good feeling and pleasure than ever before for you: you would never again feel
sorrow or pity or the pain of the chains and cage of never choosing. I am thinking of this offe
'I voot make ze hreply zat I've heard t
t, if you follow.’
'I do not understand.’
'Wha
erson when I called and said why didn't you call again Brad A
'No. No
'That's just what I said.’
'You
'...’
'If my claim, it
'...’
'Yes?’
'Now you're not on your side anymore, Hal, I can see. When you're on your back you don't have a shadow.’
'...’
'Hey Hal?’
'Yes, Mario.’
'I'm sorry if you're sad, Hal. You seem sad.’
'I smoke high-resin Bob
ne and mint toothpaste and shower with Irish Spring to hide it from almost everyone. Only Pemulis knows the true extent.’
'...’
'I'm not the one C.T. and the Moms want gone. I'm not the one they suspect. Pemulis publicly dosed his opponent at Port
Washington. It was impossib
re-adolescen
'Selling Visine bottles?’
'I'd be immune to expulsion anyway, obviously, as the Moms's relative. But I'm suspected of nothing other than ill-considered
moral paralysis out there on I. Day. My urine and Axhandle's urine are
Pemulis they
ulis knows this or not.’
'Hey Hal?’
'Normally they're after steroids, endocrine synthetics, mild 'drines, when they test. The O.N.A.N.T.A. guy gave indications
this one'll be a full-spectrum scan. Gas chromatography followed by electron-bombardment, with spectrometer readings on the
resultant mass-fragments. The real McCoy. The kind the Show uses.’ 
'Hey Hal?’
'Mike stands there and says what if hypothetically somebody was downwind from substances and got exposed and so on.
Clai
y needed hardly any prodding to give us time to clean out the
syst ybody, really. Good clean fun and so on and so forth.’
easant
cath o hear about. He's checked it. And Tenuates are apparently the Indy-type car of 'drines,
he s
at I do in secret, Boo, Mike says no more than thirty days to get it all out for sure. Cranberry juice, Calli tea, vinegar in
wate , Boo, it's fat-soluble. It stays in there, in the body's fat.’
.’
.T.A., what could C.T. do? It's not just that I'd lose my
even r in 18's. He'd have to give me the Shoe if he'd brought O.N.A.N.T.A. into it. And what about Himself's memory? I'm
dire
ys she all she wants to do is soften Orin's profile.’
hat I hid it
from e'll feel I had to hide it from her.’
le will happen if she finds out I hid it from her.’
'Thirty days is one calendar month of Calli tea and juice, you're saying.’
nces whatsoever. Of abrupt and total withdrawal while I try to justify my
seed aBurger and maybe get offered up to Wayne at the Fundraiser. And then your birthday in two weeks.’
 December, I'll have to finish prepping for the Boards and then take the Boards while still in
abru
 to hear.’
 you're hurt, Boo, that I've tried to hide all of it from you.’
wn in the weight room with a forehead Lyle didn't even want to get near. You sitting there letting me say I was
just
ou're the only one who knows when it's right to tell. I can't know for you, so why should I be hurt.’
id it from you and let you worry and be hurt that I was
tryin
can get hurt and mad at people, Boo. News-flash at almost fucking nineteen, kid. It's called being a person. You can get
mad put on a Moms-act of total trust and forgiveness. One
liar'
lendar month.’
mily-faced guy. Are you in there?’
ou can see it.’
Hope and already I'm bats inside and I can't sleep without more of the horror-show
drea
's only concern is is this DMZ he got for the WhataBurger detectable. He
goes and pores. He's fully alert and functional.321311 It seems different with me, Boo. I feel a hole. It's going to be a
hug
med vague memories of a poppy-seed bagel. Not at all Pemulis's normal rococo type of lie. This one had a kind of weary
earnestness. The guy in the blazer said he'd go ahead and give us thirty days before a full-spectrum scan. Mike had pointed out
that there was an enormous lady from Moment due to arrive and snuffle around, making it a really unfortunate time for any
outside-chance inadvertent scandals for anybody. It was like the gu
em. O.N.A.N.T.A. doesn't want to catch an
'...’
'The ingenious layer to the lie was that the guy thought the thirty days' grace was for Pemulis. That it was what Pemulis
needed. Pemulis could pass a urine test hanging upside down in a high wind. Guy watching or not. He has a whole unpl
eterization technique you don't want t
ays; his own urine can be all innocent and pale with two days’
warning, as long as he stays off the Bob.’
'...’
'Booboo, the thirty days was actually for me, and Mike let me stand there with my Unit out and not say anything while he
sold the urologist land and magazine subscriptions and Ginsu knives. He did it for me, and I'm not even the one they want.’
'You can tell me whatever you said.’
'Wh
r. Plus or minus a couple days. The Bob Hope I smoke and hide
'Mrs. Clarke told Bridget the human brain is high in fat, Bridget said
'Mario, if I get caught. If I come up dirty-urined in front of O.N.A.N
 yea
ctly related to Himself. Not to mention Orin. And meanwhile here's this Moment lady lumbering around looking for family
linen.’
'Troeltsch sa
'The hideous thing is how brightly it'd come out, if I flunk a urine.
E.T.A.'ll be publicly hurt. Hence Himself's memory, hence Himself.’
'...’
'And it'd kill the Moms, Mario. It'd be a terrible kertwang on the Moms. Not so much the Hope. The secrecy of it. T
 her. That sh
'Hey Hal?’
'Something terrib
'Of tea and vinegar and total abstinence. Of no substa
 at the What
'Hey Hal?’
'Jesus and then the SAT's in
pt withdrawal.’
'You'll get a perfect score. Everybody's betting you get a perfect score. I've heard them.’
'Marvelous. That's just exactly what I need
'Hey Hal?’
'And of course
'I'm zero percent hurt, Hal.’
'And of course you're wondering why I didn't just tell you when of course you knew anyway, knew something, the times
hanging upside-do
really really tired and nightmare-ridden.’
'I feel like you always tell me the truth. You tell me when it's right to.’
'Marvelous.’
'I feel like y
'Be a fucking human being for once, Boo. I room with you and I h
g to hide it.’
'I wasn't hurt. I don't want you to be sad.’
'You
 at somebody and it doesn't mean they'll go away. You don't have to
s enough.’
'You're scared your pee might still flunk after one ca
'Jesus it's like talking to a big poster of some s
'And you can't use a Visine bottle of pee because the man will be right there looking at your penis, and Trevor and Pemulis's
penises.’
'The sun's thinking about coming up in the window. Y
'It's been like forty hours without Bob
ms. I feel like I'm stuck halfway down a chimney.’
'You beat Ortho, and your toothache's gone.’
Temulis and Axhandle say a month'll be tit. Pemulis
 to the library
e hole, in a month. A way more than Hal-sized hole.’ 
'So what do you think you should do?’
'And the hole's going to get a little bigger every day until I fly apart in different directions. I'll fly apart in midair. I'll fly apart
in th , or at Tucson at 200 degrees in front of all these people who knew Himself and think I'm different. Whom I've lied to,
and
.’
 do?’
uld do.' 'Me tell you?’
 two big aprick ears right here, Boo. Listening. Because I do not know what to do.’
ill you get mad and tell me be a fucking?’
 trust you. You're smart, Boo.’
hen Hal?’
n Dream Duty and was in the front office
just
swer any knocks at the door themselves.
t something to do, the exact
sam
w and Xerox and promptly return by either e-or fax or First-Class mail, whichever they
mig
e Lung
liked it. It'll all come out anyway, clean pee or no.’
'Hey Hal?’
'And it'll kill her. I know it will. It will kill her dead, Booboo, I'm afraid
'Hey Hal? What are you going to
'...’
'Hal?’
'Booboo, I'm up on my elbow again. Tell me what you think I sho
'I'm just
'Hal, if I tell you the truth, w
'I
T
'Tell me what I should do.’
'I think you just did it. What you should do. I think you just did.’
'...’
'Do you see what I mean?’
17 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
In Don Gately's medical absence, Johnette F. had worked five straight night shifts o
after 0830 writing up the previous night in the Log, trying to think of synonyms for boredom and periodically dipping a finger
in her scalding coffee to stay awake, plus listening to distant toilets flush and showers hiss and residents clunking sleepily around
in the kitchen and dining room and everything like that, when somebody all of a sudden starts knocking at the House's front door,
which meant that the person was like a newcomer or stranger, since people in the Ennet House recovery community know that the
front door's unlocked at 0800 and always completely open to all but the Law as of 0801.
The residents these days all know not to an
So Johnette F. at first thought it might be some more of those kind of police322312 that wore suits and ties, come to depose
more residents as witnesses on the Lenz-and-Gately-and-Canadian fuck-up and everything like that; and Johnette got out the
clipboard with the names of all the residents with unresolved legal issues who needed to be put upstairs out of sight before any
police were let on the premises. A couple of the residents on the list were in the dining room in full view, eating cereal and
smoking. Johnette carried the clipboard as a kind of emblem of authority as she went to the window by the front door to check out
the knocking party and everything like that.
And but the kid at the door there was no way he was police or court-personnel, and Johnette opened the unlocked door and let
him in, not bothering to explain that nobody had to knock. It was an upscale kid about Johnette's own age or slightly less,
coughing against the foyer's pall of A.M. smoke, saying he wanted to speak in comparative private to someone in whatever passed
here for authority, he said. This kid he had the sort of cool aluminum sheen of an upscale kid, a kid with either a weird tan or a
weird windburn on top of a tan, and just the whitest Nike hightops Johnette had ever seen, and ironed jeans, as in with like a
crease down the front, and a weird woolly-white jacket with A.T.E. in red up one sleeve and in gray up the other, and slicked-back
dark hair that was wet, as in showered and not oil, and had half frozen, the hair, in the early outside cold and was standing up
straight and frozen in front, making his dark face look small. His ears looked inflamed from the cold. Johnette appraised him
coolly, digging at her ear with a pinkie. She watched the boy's face as David Krone came scuttling over like a crab and blinked at
the boy upside-down a few times and scuttled around and up the stairs, his forehead clunking against each stair. It was pretty
obvious the boy wasn't any resident's like homey or boyfriend come to give somebody a ride to work or like that. The way the boy
looked and stood and talked and everything like that radiated high-maintenance upkeep and privilege and schools where nobody
carried weapons, pretty much a whole planet of privilege away from the planet of Johnette Marie Foltz of South Chelsea and then
the Right Honorable Edmund F. Heany Facility for Demonstrably Incorrigible Girls down in Brockton; and in Pat's office, with
the door only half shut, Johnette gave her face the blandly hostile expression she wore around upscale boys with no tatts and all
their teeth that outside of NA wouldn't have interest in her or might view her lack of front teeth and nose-pin as evidence of they
were like better than her and like that, somehow. It emerged this kid didn't seem like he had enough emotional juice to be
interested in judging anybody or even noticing them, however. His talking had a burbly, oversalivated quality Johnette knew all
too wicked well, the quality of somebody who'd just lately put down the pipe and/or bong. The kid's hair was starting to melt in
the heat of Pat's office and drip and settle on his head like a slashed tire, causing that his face got bigger. He looked a little like
what the fourth Mrs. Foltz had called green around the gills. The boy stood there very straight with his hands behind his back and
said he lived nearby and had for some time been interested in sort of an idle, largely speculative way in considering maybe
dropping in on some sort of Substance Anonymous meeting and everything like that, basically as jus
e roundabout Denial shit as persons without teeth, and said but he didn't know where any were, any Meetings, or when, and
but knew The Ennet House323313 was nearby, that dealt directly with Anonymous organizations of this sort, and was wondering
whether he maybe could have — or borro
ht prefer — some sort of relevant meeting schedule. He apologized for intruding and said but he didn't know whom else to
call. The sort of guy like Ewell and Day and snotty look-right-through-you-if-you-weren't-a-fucking-covergirl Ken E. that knew
how to long-divide and say whom but didn't even know how to look up shit in the Yellow Pages.314
Much later, in subsequent events' light, Johnette F. would clearly recall the sight of the boy's frozen hair slowly settling, and
how the boy had said whom, and the sight of clear upscale odor-free saliva almost running out over his lower lip as he fought to
pronounce the word without swallowing. 
Technical interviewers under Chief of Unspecified Services R. ('the G.') Tine 325315 really do do this, bring a portable highwat
ake too much sense to her either, when she heard it, was
the
d you can always tell if a woman's ever
carri
dapters —
that
es of the word, which from a critical perspective would introduce into the film a kind of
syne
t on
Mol
nly veiled cries of a man at the very terminus
of h
ot exactly the psychic sea's steadiest keel had been in many respects
an a
 tether, and would in all probability have destroyed the
Mas
eet youth might suggest, since from everything Molly Notkin's
hear
t lamp and plug it in and adjust its neck so the light shines down directly on the face of the interview's subject, whose homburg
and shade-affording eyebrows had been removed by polite but emphatic request. And it was this, the harsh light on her fully
exposed post-Marxist face, more than any kind of tough noir-informed grilling from R. Tine Jr. and the other technical
interviewer, that prompted M.I.T. A.B.D.-Ph.D. Molly Notkin, fresh off the N.N.Y.C. high-speed rail, seated in the Sidney
Peterson-shaped directorial chair amid dropped luggage in her co-op's darkened and lock-dickied living room, to spill her guts,
roll over, eat cheese, sing like a canary, tell everything she believed she knew:326316
— Molly Notkin tells the U.S.O.U.S. operatives that her understanding of the après-garde Auteur J. O. Incandenza's lethally
entertaining Infinite Jest (V or VI) is that it features Madame Psychosis as some kind of maternal instantiation of the archetypal
figure Death, sitting naked, corporeally gorgeous, ravishing, hugely pregnant, her hideously deformed face either veiled or
blanked out by undulating computer-generated squares of color or ana-morphosized into unrecognizability as any kind of face by
the camera's apparently very strange and novel lens, sitting there nude, explaining in very simple childlike language to whomever
the film's camera represents that Death is always female, and that the female is always maternal. I.e. that the woman who kills you
is always your next life's mother. This, which Molly Notkin said didn't m
alleged substance of the Death-cosmology Madame Psychosis was supposed to deliver in a lalating monologue to the viewer,
mediated by the very special lens. She may or may not have been holding a knife during this monologue, and the film's big
technical hook (the Auteur's films always involved some sort of technical hook) involved some very unusual kind of single lens on
the Bolex H32's turret,327317 and it was unquestionably an f/x that Madame Psychosis looked pregnant, because the real Madame
Psychosis had never been visibly pregnant, Molly Notkin had seen her naked,328318 an
ed anything past the first trimester if you look at her naked.329319
— Molly Notkin tells them that Madame Psychosis's own mother had killed herself in a truly ghastly way with an ordinary
kitchen garbage disposal on the evening of Thanksgiving Day in the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, four-odd months before
the film's Auteur himself had killed himself, also with a kitchen appliance, also ghastlyly, which she says though any LincolnKennedy-type connections between the two suicides will have to be ferreted out by the interviewers on their own, since as far as
Molly Notkin knew the two different parents didn't even know of each other's existence.
— That the lethal cartridge's digital Bolex H32 camera — already a Rube-Goldbergesque amalgam of various improvements
and digital adaptations to the already modification-heavy classic Bolex HI6 Rex 5 — a Canadian line, by the way, favored
throughout his whole career by the Auteur because its turret could accept three different C-mount lenses and a
 Infinite Jest (V) or (V/)'s had been fitted with an extremely strange and extrusive kind of lens, and lay during filming on either
the floor or like a cot or bed, the camera, with Madame Psychosis as the Death- Mother figure inclined over it, parturient and
nude, talking down to it — in both sens
sthetic double-entendre involving both the aural and visual perspectives of the subjective camera — explaining to the camera
as audience-synecdoche that this was why mothers were so obsessively, con-sumingly, drivenly, and yet somehow narcissistically
loving of you, their kid: the mothers are trying frantically to make amends for a murder neither of you quite remember.
— Molly Notkin tells them she could be far more helpful and forth-comingly detailed if only they'd switch that beastly lamp
off or train it someplace else, which is a brass-faced falsehood and dismissed as such by R. Tine Jr., and so the light stays righ
ly Notkin's glabrous unhappy face.
— That Madame Psychosis and the film's Auteur had not been sexually enmeshed, and for reasons beyond the fact that the
Auteur's belief in a finite world-total of available erections rendered him always either impotent or guilt-ridden. That in fact
Madame Psychosis had loved and been sexually enmeshed only with the Auteur's son, who, though Molly Notkin never
encountered him personally and Madame Psychosis had taken care never to speak ill of him, was clearly as thoroughgoing a little
rotter as one would find down through the whole white male canon of venery, moral cowardice, emotional chicanery, and rot.
— That Madame Psychosis had been present neither at the Auteur's suicide nor at his funeral. That she'd missed the funeral
because her passport had expired. That nor had Madame Psychosis been present at the reading of the late Auteur's will, despite the
fact that she was one of the beneficiaries. That Madame Psychosis had never mentioned the fate or present disposition of the
unreleased cartridge entitled either Infinite Jest (V) or Infinite Jest (VI), and had described it only from the perspective of the
experience of performing in it, nude, and had never seen it, but had a hard time believing it was even entertaining, let alone
lethally entertaining, and tended to believe it had represented little more than the thi
is existential tether — the Auteur having apparently been extremely close to his own mother, in childhood — and had no
doubt been recognized as such by the Auteur — who though n
cute reader and critic of film, and would have been able to distinguish the real filmic McCoy from pathetic cries veiled as film
no matter how wildly his nautical compass was spinning around, on its
ter Print of the failed piece of art, the same way he'd reportedly destroyed the first four or five failed attempts at the same
piece, which pieces had admittedly featured actresses of lesser mystique and allure.
— That the Auteur's funeral had purportedly taken place in the L'Islet Province of Nouveau Quebec, the birth-province of the
Auteur's widow, featuring an interrment and not a cremation.
— That far be it from her to tell the U.S. Office of Unspecified Services its business, but why not simply go to J.O.I.'s widow
and verify directly the existence and location of the purported cartridge?
— That it seemed pretty unlikely to her, Molly Notkin, that the Auteur's widow had any connections to any anti-American
groups, cells, or movements, no matter what the files on her indiscr
d the woman didn't have much interest in any agendas larger than her own individually neurotic agendas, even though she
came on to Madame Psychosis all sweet and solicitous. That Madame Psychosis had confessed to Molly Notkin that the widow
struck her as very possibly Death incarnate — her constant smile the rictal smile of some kind of thanatoptic figure — and that it
had struck Madame Psychosis as bizarre that it was she, Madame Psychosis, whom the Auteur kept casting as various feminine
instantiations of Death when he had the real thing right under his nose, and eminently photogenic to boot, the widow-to-be, apparently a real restaurant-silencer-type beauty even in her late forties. 
— That the Auteur had stopped ingesting distilled spirits as Madame Psy-chosis's personal condition for consenting to appear
in what she knew to be her but did not know to be the J.O.I.'s final film-cartridge, and that the Auteur had, apparently,
incr
sychosis's guilt over the Auteur's felo de self had nothing to do with the purportedly lethal Infinite Jest
(V)
-be — who may well have been enraged by the fact that the Auteur had never been
will
tory combination of anamorphic fragmentation and antiPica
bt — there was little question in
A.B
he United States where poor nutrition and
indi
edibly,330320 kept his side of the bargain — possibly because he'd been so deeply moved at M.P.'s consent to appear before
the camera again even after her terrible accident and deformation and the little rotter of a son's despicable abandonment of the
relationship under the excuse of accusing Madame Psychosis of being sexually enmeshed with their — here Molly Notkin said
that she of course had meant to say his — father, the Auteur. And that the Auteur had apparently remained alcohol-free for the
whole next three-and-a-half months, from Xmas of the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad to 1 April of the Year of the Trial-Size
Dove Bar, the date of his suicide.
— That the completely secret and hidden substance-abuse problem, the one that had now landed Madame Psychosis in an
elite private dependency-treatment facility so elite that not even M.P.'s closest friends knew where it was beyond knowing only
that it was someplace far, very far away, that the abuse-problem could have been nothing but a consequence of the terrible guilt
Madame Psychosis felt over the Auteur's suicide, and constituted a clear unconscious compulsion to punish herself with the same
sort of substance-abuse activity she had coerced the Auteur into stopping, merely substituting narcotics for Wild Turkey, which
Molly Notkin could attest was some very gnarly-tasting liquor indeed.
— No, that Madame P
or (VI), which as far as Madame Psychosis had determined from the filming itself was little more than an olla podrida of
depressive conceits strung together with flashy lensmanship and perspectival novelty. That, no, rather the consuming guilt had
been over the condition that the Auteur suspend the ingestion of spirits, which it turned out, M.P. had claimed in deluded
hindsight, had been all that was keeping the man's tether ravelled, the ingestion, such that without it he was unable to withstand
the psychic pressures that pushed him over the edge into what Madame Psychosis said she and the Auteur had sometimes referred
to as quote 'self-erasure.’
— That it did not strike her, Molly Notkin, as improbable that the special limited-edition turkey-shaped gift bottle of Wild
Turkey Blended Whiskey-brand distilled spirits with the cerise velveteen gift-ribbon around its neck with the bow tucked under its
wattles on the kitchen counter next to the microwave oven before which the Auteur's body had been found so ghastlyly inclined
had been placed there by the spouse's widow-to
ing to give up spirits quote 'for her' but had apparently been willing to give them up quote 'for' Madame Psychosis and her
nude appearance in his final opus.
— That the by all reports exceptionally attractive Madame Psychosis had suffered an irreparable facial trauma on the same
Thanksgiving Day that her mother had killed herself with a kitchen-appliance, leaving her (Madame Psychosis) hideously and
improbably deformed, and that her membership in the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed's 13-Step self-help
organization was no kind of metaphor or ruse.
— That the intolerable stresses leading to the Auteur's self-erasure had probably way less to do with film or digital art — this
Auteur's anti-confluential approach to the medium having always struck Molly Notkin as being rather aloof and cerebrally
technical, to say nothing of naively post-Marxist in its self-congratula
resque331321 narrative stasis — or with having allegedly spawned some angelic monster of audience-gratification — anyone
with a nervous system who watched much of his oeuvre could see that fun or entertainment was pretty low on the late filmmaker's
list of priorities — but rather much more likely to do with the fact that his widow-to-be was engaging in sexual enmeshments with
just about everything with a Y-chromo-some, and had been for what sounded like many years, including possibly with the
Auteur's son and Madame's craven lover, as a child, seeing as it sounded like the little rotter had enough malcathected issues with
his mother to keep all of Vienna humming briskly for quite some time.
— That thus — with the Promethean-guilt angle on the Auteur's suicide cast into serious dou
.D.-Dr. Notkin's mind that the entire perfect-entertainment-as-Lzež>esíoíí myth surrounding the purportedly lethal final
cartridge was nothing more than a classic illustration of the antinomically schizoid function of the post-industrial capitalist
mechanism, whose logic presented commodity as the escape-from-anxieties-of-mortality-which-escape-is-itself-psychologicallyfatal, as detailed in perspicuous detail in M. Gilles Deleuze's posthumous Incest and the Life of Death in Capitalist Entertainment,
which she'd be happy to lend the figures standing up somewhere above the lamp's white fire, one of them tapping something
irritatingly against the lamp's conic metal shade, if they'd promise to return it and not mark it up.
— That — in response to respectful but pointed requests to keep the responses on some sort of factual track and spare them
all the eggheaded abstractions — Madame Psychosis's deforming trauma, in its combination of coincidence and malefic intention,
had been like something right out of the Auteur's most ghastly and unresolvable proto-incestuous disaster films, e.g. The Night
Wears a Sombrero, Dial C for Concupiscence, and The Unfortunate Case of Me. That Madame Psychosis, an only child, had been
extremely and heart-warmingly close to her father, a low-pH chemist for a Kentucky reagent outfit, who'd apparently had an
extremely close only-child and watching-movies-together-based relationship with his own mother and seemed to reenact the
closeness with Madame Psychosis, taking her to movies on a near-daily basis, in Kentucky, and driving her all over the mid-South
for various junior baton-twirling competitions while his wife, Madame Psychosis's mother, a devoutly religious but wounded and
neurasthenic woman with a fear of public spaces, stayed home on the family farm, canning preserves and seeing to the
administration of the farm, etc. But that things had gotten first strange and then creepy as Madame Psychosis entered puberty,
apparently; specifically the low-pH father had gotten creepy, seeming to behave as if Madame Psychosis were getting younger
instead of older: taking her to increasingly child-rated films at the local Cineplex, refusing to acknowledge issues of menses or
breasts, strongly discouraging dating, etc. Apparently issues were complicated by the fact that Madame Psychosis emerged from
puberty as an almost freakishly beautiful young woman, especially in a part of t
fference to dentition and hygiene made physical beauty an extremely rare and sort of discomfiting condition, one in no way
shared by Madame Psychosis's toothless and fireplug-shaped mother, who said not a word as Madame Psychosis's father
interdicted everything from brassieres to Pap smears, addressing the nubile Madame Psychosis in progressively puerile baby-talk
and continuing to use her childhood diminutive like Pookie or Putti as he attempted to dissuade her from accepting a scholarship
to a Boston University whose Film and Film-Cartridge Studies Program was, he apparently maintained, full of quote Nasty 
Pootem Wooky Barn-Bams, unquote, whatever family-code pejorative this signified.
— That — to cut to a chase which the interviewers' hands-on-hip attitudes and replacement of the lamp's bulb with a much
higher wattage signified they'd very much like to see cut to — as is often the case, it wasn't until Madame Psychosis got to college
and gradually acquired some psychic distance and matter for emotional comparison that she even began to see how creepy her
reagent-Daddy's regression had been, and not until a certain major-sport-star son's autograph on a punctured football inspired
more e-mailed suspicion and sarcasm than gratitude from home in KY that she began even to suspect that her lack of social life
throughout puberty might have had as much to do with her Daddy's intrusive discouragement as with her actaeonizing pubescent
charms. That — pausing briefly to spell actaeonizing — the shit had hit the intergenerational psychic fan when Madame Psychosis
brought the Auteur's little rotter of a son home to the KY spread for the third time, for Thanksgiving in the Year of the Tucks
Medicated Pad, and witnessing her Daddy's infantilizing conduct of her and her mother's wordless compulsive canning and
cooking, not to mention the terrific tension that resulted when Madame Psychosis attempted to move some of the stuffed animals
out of her room to make room for the Auteur's son, in short experiencing her home and Daddy through the comparative filter of
enmeshment with the Auteur's son brought Madame Psychosis to the crisis that precipitates Speaking the Unspeakable; and that it
had been at Thanksgiving Dinner, at midday on 24 November Y.T.M.P., when the low-pH Daddy began not only cutting up
Madame Psychosis's plate's turkey for her but mashing it into puree between the tines of his fork, all under the raised comparative
eyebrows of the Auteur's son, that Madame Psychosis finally aired the unspoken question of why, with her now of legal age and
living with a male and retired from childhood's twirling and carving out an adult career on one and potentially two sides of the
film-camera, did her own personal Daddy seem to feel she needed help to chew? Molly Notkin's secondhand take on the
emotional eruptions that ensued is not detailed, but she feels she can state w/ confidence that it's plausibly a case of any kind of
system that's been under enormous silent pressure for some time, that when the system finally blows the accreted pressure's such
that it's almost always a full-scale eruption. The low-pH Daddy's enormous stress had apparently erupted, right there at the table,
with his grown daughter's white meat between his tines, in the confession that he'd been secretly, silently in love with Madame
Psychosis from way, way back; that the love had been the real thing, pure, unspoken, genuflectory, timeless, impossible; that he
never touched her, wouldn't, nor ogle, less out of a horror of being the sort of mid-South father who touched and ogled than out of
the purity of his doomed love for the little girl he'd escorted to the movies as proudly as any beau, daily; that the repression and
disguisability of his pure love hadn't been all that hard when Madame Psychosis had been juvenile and sexless, but that at the
onset of puberty and nubility the pressure'd become so great that he could compensate only by regressing the child mentally to an
age of incontinence and pre-mashed meat, and that his awareness of how creepy his denial of her maturation must have seemed —
even though neither the daughter nor mother, even now wordlessly chewing a candied yam, had remarked on it, the denial and
creepiness, although the man's beloved pointers were given to whimper and scratch at the door when the denial had gotten
especially creepy (animals being way more sensitive than humans to emotional anomalies, in Molly Notkin's experience) — had
raised his internal limbic system's pressure to near intolerable foot-kilo levels, and that he'd been hanging on for dear life for the
past nigh on now a decade, but that now that he'd had to actually stand witness to the removal of Pooky and Urgle-Bear et al. from
her
e table that she and the Daddy had not once known each other as man and wife since
Mad
ure in the bell-jar of her own denial, because, she admits — admits is probably
less
 through childhood, ogled and touched and worse, and that this had been why she'd married at just
sixt
d mate and wants his daughter.
re herself with acid.
low
ballerina-wallpapered room to make space for a nonrelated mature male whose physical vigor through the peephole the
Daddy'd exerted every gram of trembling will he'd possessed trying not to drill the hole in the bathroom wall just above the mirror
over the sink whose pipes made the wall behind the headboard of Madame Psychosis's room's bed sing and clunk, and through
which, late at night — claiming to Mother a case of skitters from all the holiday nibbles — hunched atop the sink, every night
since Madame Psychosis and the Auteur's son had first arrived to sleep together in the unstuffed-animaled bed of a childhood
through which he'd been all but tortured by the purity of his impossible love for the —
— That it had been at this point that Madame Psychosis's mother's fork and then whole plate had clattered to the floor, and
that amid the sounds of the pointers under the table fighting over that plate the mother's own denial-system's pressure blew, and
she freaked, announcing publicly at th
ame Psychosis had first menstruated, that she'd known something incredibly creepy was going on but had denied it, evacuated
her suspicions and placed them under great press
 accurate than something like keens or shrieks or jabbers — that her own father — an itinerant camp-meeting preacher — had
molested her and her sister all
een, to escape, and that now it was clear to her that she'd married the exact same kind of monster, the kind who spurns his
ordaine
— That she'd said maybe it was her, she, the mother, who was the monster, which if so she was tired of hiding it and
appearing falsely before God and man.
— That whereupon she'd reeled from her place and hurdled three pointers and run down to the Daddy's acid-lab in the cellar,
to disfigu
— That the Daddy'd kept a world-class collection of various acids in Pyrex-brand flasks on wooden shelves down in the
cellar.
— That the Daddy, the rotter of a son, and finally a shock-slowed Madame Psychosis had all run down the stairs after the
mother and hit the cellar just as the mother had removed the stopper of a Pyrex flask with an enormous half-eaten-away skull on
the side, which along with the flaming scarlet piece of litmus paper afloat inside signified an incredibly low-pH and corrosive type
of acid.
— That Madame Psychosis's name was in reality Lucille Duquette, and the Daddy's name either Earl or Al Duquette of
extreme southeast KY, way down near TN and VA.
— That, despite the little rotter's professions of self-recrimination for allowing the deformity to take place and claim that the
swirling systems of guilt and horror and denial-informed forgiveness made a committed relationship with Madame Psychosis
increasingly untenable, it didn't take an expert in character-disorders and weaknesses to figure out why the fellow'd given Madame
Psychosis the boot within months of the traumatic deformity, now did it.
— That, right on the hysterical cusp where internalized rage can so easily shift to externalized rage, the mother had hurled the
-pH flask at the Daddy, who'd reflexively ducked; and that the rotter, one Orin, right behind, a former tennis champion with
superb upper-body reflexes, had instinctively ducked also, leaving Madame Psychosis — dazed and bradykinetic from the
sudden venting of so many high-pressure repressive family systems — open for a direct facial hit, resulting in the traumatic deformity. And that it had been everyone's failure to press any charges that had liberated the mother from Southeast-KY custody and
allowed her access once again to her home's kitchen, where, apparently despondent, she committed suicide by putting her
extremities down the garbage disposal — first one arm and then, kind of miraculously if you think about it, the other arm.332322
The most distant and obscure Tuesday P.M. Meeting listed in the little white Metro-Boston Recovery Options333323 booklet
the incisorless nostril-pierced girl down at The Ennet House had given him looked to be a males-only thing at 1730h. out in
Natick, almost in Framingham, at something with a location on Route 27 that the M.B.R.O. booklet listed only as 'Q.R.S.-32A.'
Hal, who had no last class period, rushed through p.m.'s, dispatching Shaw 1 and 3 by the time the regular P.M.'s were even
warming up, then skipping left-leg circuits in the weight room, and was also forgoing tonight's lemon chicken with potato rolls, all
to blast out to Natick in time to check this anti-Substance-fellowship-Meeting business out. He wasn't sure why, since it didn't
seem
K
To
m. Ave. to
the
n St. he turned right and struck out west. Once it cleared West Newton, Boylston St. became shunpike Rte. 9, the major
wes
e Olde
Eng
n his mnemonic screen the developmental history since B.S. '35 of the initial Substance
grou de
data
7 goes through blasted hills of rock, the very fringes of the Berkshires'
pen
 seems ghostly and circumspect. Hal's tires crunch cones in the road. Some sort of bird shits on his
win
had publicly repudiated this kind of
win
ing with a shuddering fart. It's dead quiet except for the hiss of light traffic down on
27 p in exurban Natick. It's either way colder out here or
else
hat sort of pressurized way of institutional doors. The savanna-colored lobby is broad and still and has a vague
med
 to be any kind of slobbering inability to abstain that was the problem — he hadn't had so much as a mg. of a Substance of
any kind since the 30-day urological condonation of last week. The issue's the horrific way his head's felt, increasingly, since he
abruptly Abandoned All Hope.334324 It wasn't just nightmares and saliva. It was as if his head perched on the bedpost all night
now and in the terribly early A.M. when Hal's eyes snapped open immediately said Glad You're UP I've Been Wanting To TAL
You and then didn't let up all day, having at him like a well-revved chain-saw all day until he could finally try to fall
unconscious, crawling into the rack wretched to await more bad dreams. 24/7's of feeling wretched and bereft.
Dusk was coming earlier. Hal signed out at the portcullis and blasted down the hill and took the tow truck up Com
C.C. Reservoir and then south on Hammond, the same deadening route as the E.T.A. conditioning run, except when he hit
Boylsto
t-suburb-commuter alternative to the suicidal 1-90, and 9 suburb-hopped serpentine all the way west to Natick and Rte. 27.
Hal crawled through traffic on a major-flow road that had once been a cowpath. By the time he was in Wellesley Hills, the
sky's combustionish orange had deepened to the hellish crimson of a fire's last embers. Darkness fell with a clunk shortly after,
and Hal's spirits with it. He felt pathetic and absurd even going to check this Narcotics Anonymous Meeting thing out.
Everybody always flashed his or her brights at the tow truck because the headlamps were set so senselessly high on the truck's
grille.
The little portable disk player had been detached by either Pemulis or Axford and not returned. WYYY was a ghostly thread
of jazz against a sea of static. AM had only corporate rock and reports that the Gentle administration had scheduled and then
cancelled a special Spontaneous-Disseminated address to the nation on subjects unknown. NPR had a kind of roundtable on
potential subjects — George Will's laryngectomy-prosthesis sounded hideous. Hal preferred silence and traffic-sounds. He ate two
of three $4.00 bran muffins he'd whipped in for at a Cleveland Circle gourmet bakery, grimacing as he swallowed because he'd
forgotten a tonic to wash them down, then put in a mammoth plug of Kodiak and spat periodically into his special NASA glass,
which fit neatly in the cup-holder down by the transmission, and passed the last fifteen minutes of the dull drive considering the
probable etymological career of the word Anonymous, all the way he supposed from the Æolic övuya through Thynne's B.S.
1580s reference to 'anonymall Chronicals'; and whether it was joined way back somewhere at the Saxonic taproot to th
lish on-áne, which supposedly meant All as One or As One Body and became Cynewulf's eventual standard inversion to the
classic anon, maybe. Then called up o
p AA, on which there'd been such a lengthy entry in the Discursive O.E.D. that Hal hadn't had to hit any sort of outsi
base to feel more or less factually prepared to drop into its spin-off NA and at least give the thing an appraising once-over.
Hal can summon a kind of mental Xerox of anything he'd ever read and basically read it all over again, at will, which talent the
Abandonment of Hope hasn't (so far) compromised, the withdrawal's effects being more like emotional/salivo-digestive.
The rock faces on either side of the truck when 2
umbra, are either granite or gneiss.
Hal for a while also practices saying 'My name's Mike.' 'Mike. Hi.' 'Hey there, name's Mike,' etc., into the truck's rearview.
By 15 minutes east of Natick it becomes obvious that the little booklet's terse Q.R.S. designates a facility called Quabbin
Recovery Systems, which is easy to find, roadside ad-signs starting to announce the place several clicks away, each sign a little
different and designed to form a little like narrative of which actual arrival at Q.R.S. would be the climax. Even Hal's late father
was too young really to remember Burma-Shave signs.
Quabbin Recovery Systems is set far back from Rte. 27 on a winding groomed-gravel road flanked all the way up by classy
old-time standing lanterns whose glass shades are pebbled and faceted like candy dishes and seem more for mood than
illumination. Then the actual building's driveway's an even more winding little road that's barely more than a tunnel through
meditative pines and poor-postured Lombardy poplars. Once off the highway the whole nighttime scene out here in exurbia —
Boston's true boonies —
dshield. The driveway broadens gradually into a like delta and then a parking lot of mint-white gravel, and the physical Q.R.S.
is right there, cubular and brooding. The building's one of these late-model undeformed cubes of rough panel-brick and granite
quoins. Illuminated moodily from below by more classy lanterns, it looks like a building-block from some child-titan's toy-chest.
Its windows are the smoky brown kind that in daylight become dark mirrors. Hal's late father
dow-glass in an interview in Lens & Pane when the stuff first came out. Right now, lit from inside, the windows have a sort of
bloody, polluted aspect.
A good two-thirds of the lot's parking places say RESERVED FOR STAFF, which strikes Hal as odd. The tow truck tends to
diesel and chuff after deignition, finally subsid
ast all the trees. Only TP-link workers and marathon-type commuters live
 a front's been coming in while Hal drove. The lot's piney air has the ethyl sting of winter.
Q.R.S.'s big doors and lintel are more of that reflector-shade glass. There's no obvious bell, but the doors are unlocked. They
open in t
ical/dental smell. Its carpet's a dense low tan Dacronyl weave that evacuates sound. There's a circular high-countered nurse's 
station or reception desk, but nobody's there.
The whole place is so quiet Hal can hear the squeak of blood in his head.
The 32A that follows Q.R.S. in the girl's little white booklet is presumably a room number. Hal has on a non-E.T.A. jacket
and carries the NASA glass he spits in. He'd have to spit even if he didn't have chew in; the Ko-diak's almost like a cover or
excuse.
There is no map or You-Are-Here-type directory on view in the lobby. The lobby's heat is intense and close but kind of
porous; it's in a sort of uneasy struggle with the radiant chill of all the smoked glass of the entrance. The lamps out in the lot and
off along the driveway are blobs of sepia light through the glass. Inside, cove-lighting at the seams of walls and ceiling produce an
indirect light that's shadowless and seems to rise from the room's objects themselves. It's the same lighting and lion-colored
carp
ntrances to stairways. He empties the NASA glass
rath
nother $100 in eagle-, leaf-, and broom-emblemized O.N.A.N. scrip, having had no idea what sort of introduct o-School
Geo
isted in the book as starting at 1730, and it was only around 1720, and Hal thought the voices might signify some
sort
heir feet under their knees, and they all wear socks, with no footwear or winter jackets anywhere in sight. Hal
ease
air is positioned
und the man holds a Magic Marker
in o
's got the blond eyebrows and creepy blond
eyel
fant expressing his grief and loss.’
, but it turns out
afte
eting in the first long hall Hal tries. The room numbers go up to 17 and then after Hal turns a sharp corner start at 34A. The
room doors are false blond wood but look thick and private, flush in their frames. There's also the smell of stale coffee. The walls'
color scheme is somewhere between puce and mature eggplant-skin, kind of nauseous against the sandy tan of the carpet. All
buildings with any kind of health-theme to them have this thin sick sweet dental sub-odor to them. Q.R.S. also seems to have
some sort of balsamy air-freshener going in the ventilation system, too, but it doesn't quite cover the sweet medical stink or the
bland sour smell of institutional food.
Hal hasn't heard one human sound since he came in. The place's silence has that glittery sound of total silence. His footfalls
make no sound on the Dacronyl. He feels furtive and burglarish and holds the NASA glass down at his side and the NA booklet
higher up and cover-out as a sort of explanatory I.D. There are computer-enhanced landscapes on the walls, little low tables with
glossy pamphlets, a framed print of Picasso's 'Seated Harlequin,' and nothing else that wasn't just institutional bullshit, visual
Muzak. Without any sound to his footfalls it's like the gauntlets of doors just glide by. The quiet has a kind of menace. The whole
cubular building seems to Hal to hold the tensed menace of a living thing that's chosen to hold itself still. If you asked Hal to
describe his feelings as he looked for room 32A the best he could do would be to say he wished he were somewhere else and
feeling some way besides how he felt. His mouth pours spit. The glass's one-third full and heavy in his hand and not much fun to
look at. He's missed the glass a couple of times and marred the tan carpet with dark spit. After two 90° turns it's clear the hallway's
run is a perfect square around the cube's ground level. He's seen no stairs or e
er gooily into a potted rubber tree's dirt. Q.R.S.'s building may be one of those infamous Rubikular cubes that looks
topologically undeformed but is actually impossible to negotiate on the inside. But the numbers after the third corner start at 18,
and now Hal can hear either very distant or very muffled voices. He carries the NA booklet in front of him like a crucifix. He has
about $50 U.S. and a
ory costs might be involved. Q.R.S. didn't purchase prime Natick acreage and the cutting-edge services of a São-Paul
metric-Minimalist architect with just altruistic goodwill, that was for sure.
Room 32A's wood-grain door was just as emphatically shut as all the others, but the muffled voices were behind this one. The
Meeting was l
 of pre-Meeting orientation for people who've come for the first time, sort of tentatively, just to scout the whole enterprise out,
so he doesn't knock.
He still has this intractable habit of making a move like he's straightening a bow tie before he enters a strange room.
And except for the thin rubber sheaths, the doorknobs on the Quabbin Recovery Systems doors are the same as at E.T.A. —
flat bars of brass toggle-bolted to the latch mechanism, so you have to push the bar down instead of turning anything to open the
door.
But the Meeting is under way, apparently. It isn't near big enough to create a mood of anonymity or casual spectation. Nine or
ten adult middle-class males are in the warm room on orange plastic chairs with legs of molded steel tubing. Every one of the men
has a beard, and each wears chinos and a sweater, and they all sit the same way, that Indian cross-legged style with their hands on
their knees and t
s the door shut and sort of slinks along the wall to an empty chair, all the time conspicuously brandishing the Meeting booklet.
The chairs are placed in no discernible order, and their orange clashes nastily with the room's own colors, walls and ceiling the
color of Thousand Island dressing — a color-scheme with unplaceable but uneasy associations for Hal — and more of the lionskin
Dacronyl carpet. And the warm air in 32A is stuffy with CO2 and unpleasantly scented with the aroma of soft male middle-aged
bodies not wearing footwear, a stale meaty cheesy smell, more nauseous even than the E.T.A. locker room after a Mrs. Clarke
Tex-Mex fiesta.
The only guy in the Meeting to acknowledge Hal's entrance is at the front of the room, a man Hal would have to call almost
morbidly round, his body nearly Leith-sized and globularly round and the smaller but still large globe of a head atop it, his socks
plaid and his legs not all the way crossable so it looks like he might pitch disastrously backward in his chair any minute, smiling
warmly at Hal's winter coat and NASA glass as Hal slinks and sits and slumps down low. The round man's ch
er a small white Magic Marker blackboard, and all the other chairs approximately face it, and
ne hand and holds what looks quite a bit like a teddy bear to his chest with the other, and wears chinos and a cable-knit
Norwegian sweater the color of toast. His hair is that waxy sort of blond, and he
ashes and violently flushed face of a true Norwegian blond, and his little beard is an imperial so sharply waxed it looks like a
truncated star. The morbidly round blond man's pretty clearly the leader of the Meeting, possibly a high-ranking official of
Narcotics Anonymous, whom Hal could casually approach about tracts and texts to buy and study, afterward.
Another middle-aged guy up near the front is crying, and he too holds what looks like a bear.
The blond brows hike up and down as the leader says 'I'd like to suggest we men all hold our bears tight and let our Inner
Infant nonjudgmentally listen to Kevin's Inner In
They're all at subtly different angles to Hal, who's slumped low over by the wall in the second-to-last row
r some subtle casual neck-craning that, sure enough, all these middle-class guys in at least their thirties are sitting there
clutching teddy bears to their sweatered chests — and identical teddy bears, plump and brown and splay-limbed and with a little
red corduroy tongue protruding from the mouths, so the bears all look oddly throttled. The room is menacingly quiet now except 
for the sibilance of the heating vents and the sobbing guy Kevin, and the plip of Hal's saliva hitting the bottom of the empty glass
rather more loudly than he might have wished.
The back of the crying guy's neck is turning redder and redder as he clutches his bear and rocks on his hams.
Hal sits with his leg crossed good-ankle-on-knee and joggles his white hightop and looks at his callused thumb and listens to
the Kevin guy sob and snuffle. The guy wipes his nose with the heel of his hand just like the littler Buddies at E.T.A. Hal figures
the tears and bears have something to do with giving up drugs, and that the Meeting is probably on the verge of coming around to
talking explicitly about drugs and how to give up drugs for a certain period without feeling indescribably wretched and bereft, or
may
he blond eyebrows, looking more than anything like some sort of Buddha-asCali
g.
He l on the bear and keeps subtly changing the shape of the cage. The guy Kevin,
who ly beet-red but shiny with embarrassed sweat between his shirt-collar and hair's hem, sobs even harder at
the t. The round leader's high hoarse voice had the same blandly kind didactic quality as Rusk's, as
if al .
eep breathing the leader looks up and around and nods at nothing and says 'Maybe we could
all n much we're caring for him and his Inner Infant right now, in his pain.’
 guys speak up:
tance-deprivation has been mentioned so far. And none of these guys looks like they've
ever
d by his chair and produces a cheap plastic portable CD laser-scanner and sets it on top of the toy-box, where it
begi with sporadic harps and chimes. The stuff
spre
lem on his NASA glass.
by the hand he hides behind. 'I'm feeling my Inner Infant's abandonment and deep-deprivation issues,
Har
d crying for his Mommy and Daddy to come hold him and
nurt little stuffing start
to c
ed bear's head. 'And nobody's coming!' he sobs. 'Nobody's coming. I feel alone with my bear and plastic airplanemob
er Infant by naming and sharing his needs
out
ght now.’
be at least some data on how long one might expect the wretchedness of giving up drugs to continue before the old nervous
system and salivary glands returned to normal. Even though Inner Infant sounds uncomfortably close to Dr. Doloros Rusk's
dreaded Inner Child, Hal'd be willing to bet that here it's some sort of shorthand Narcotics Anonymous sobriquet for like 'limbic
component of the CNS' or 'the part of our cortex that's not utterly wretched and bereft without the drugs that up to now have been
pulling us through the day, secretly' or some affirming, encouraging thing like that. Hal wills himself to stay objective and not
form any judgments before he has serious data, hoping desperately for some sort of hopeful feeling to emerge.
The diglobular leader has made a cage of his hands and rested his hands on his teddy bear's head and is breathing slowly and
evenly, watching Kevin kindly from under t
fornia-surfer-dude. The leader inhales gently and says 'The energies I'm feeling in the group are energies of unconditional love
and acceptance for Kevin's Inner Infant.' Nobody else says anything, and the leader doesn't seem to need anybody to say anythin
ooks down at the cage his hands have made
se neck is now not on
affirmation of love and suppor
ways speaking to a not-too-bright child
After some more cage-play and d
ame our feelings right now for Kevin and share how
Various bearded cross-legged
'I love you, Kevin.’
'I'm not judging you, Kevin.’
'Know just how you and the I.I. feel.’
'I'm feeling really close to you.’
'I'm feeling a lot of love for you right now, Kevin.’
'You're crying for two, guy.’
'Kevin Kevin Kevin Kevin Kevin.’
'I'm not feeling like your crying is one bit unmanly or pathetic, fella.’
It's at this point that Hal begins truly to lose his willed objectivity and open-mindedness and to get a bad personal feeling
about this Narcotics Anonymous ('NA') Meeting, which seems already deeply under way and isn't one bit like he's imagined an
even remotely hopeful antidrug Meeting would be like. It seems more like some kind of cosmetic-psychology encounter thing.
Not one Substance or symptom of Subs
 been engaged with anything more substantial than an occasional wine cooler, if he had to guess.
Hal's grim mood deepens as the round man up front now leans precariously over and down and opens a sort of toy-box under
the blackboar
ns to issue a kind of low treacly ambient shopping-mall music, mostly cello,
ads through the hot little room like melted butter, and Hal sinks lower in his orange chair and looks hard at the space-andspacecraft emb
'Kevin?' the leader says over the music. 'Kevin?' The sobbing man's hand lies over his face like a spider, and he doesn't even
start to look up until the leader has said several times very blandly and kindly 'Kevin, do you feel okay about looking at the rest of
the group?’
Kevin's red neck wrinkles as he looks up at the blond leader through his fingers.
The leader's made the cage again on his poor bear's squashed head. 'Can you share what you're feeling, Kevin?' he says. 'Can
you name it?’
Kevin's voice is muffled
v,' he says, drawing shuddering breaths. His mauve sweater's shoulders tremble. 'I'm feeling my Inner Infant standing holding
the bars of his crib and looking out of the bars . . . bars of his crib an
ure him.' Kevin sobs twice in an apneated way. One arm holds his lap's bear so tight Hal thinks he can see a
ome out of its mouth around its tongue, and a stalactite of that clear thin weepy-type mucus hangs from Kevin's nose just mm.
over the throttl
ile and teething ring.’
Everybody's nodding in an affirming and pained way. No two beards are exactly the same fullness and design. A couple other
sobs break out across the room. Everyone's bear stares blankly ahead.
The leader's nod is slow and meditative. 'And can you share your needs with the group right now, Kevin?’
'Please share, Kevin,' says a slim guy over by a black filing cabinet who sits like he's a veteran at sitting Indian-style in hard
plastic chairs.
The music's still going, going absolutely nowhere, like Philip Glass on Quaaludes.
'The work we're here to do,' the leader says over the music, one hand now pressed pensively to the side of his big face, 'is to
work on our dysfunctional passivity and tendency to wait silently for our Inner Infant's needs to be magically met. The energy I
feel in the group now is that the group is supportively asking Kevin to nurture his Inn
loud with the group. And I'm feeling how aware we all are how risky and vulnerable need-naming-out-loud must feel for
Kevin ri
Everybody looks deadly serious. A couple guys are rubbing their bears' bellies pregnantly. The only really Infantile thing Hal
can feel inside him is the inguinal gurgle of two heavy bran muffins swallowed at high speeds w/o liquid. The string of mucus
from Kevin's nose trembles and swings. The slender guy who'd asked Kevin please to share is now waggling the arms of his teddy
bear in an infantile way. Hal feels a wave of nausea flood his mouth with fresh saliva.
'We're asking you to name what your Inner Infant wants right now more than anything in the world,' the leader's saying to
Kevin.
'To be loved and held!' Kevin keens, sobbing harder. His lachrymucus is now a thin silver string joining his nose and the
fuzzy top of his bear's head. The bear's expression is seeming creepier to Hal by the second. Hal wonders what the etiquette is in
NA
ad gotten his M.B.A. at Wharton and cleaned up with a string of Simulated Reality arcades all up and down the South
Sho
6326 had been putting extra marshmallows
in hi
e no windows
at al
g and
plum
 of the old Inner Infant. Tears and other fluids flow
and
spik
dandled and told at high volume that he was
love er Infant that getting held and told you were loved didn't automatically
seem
soun
eet his needs.
at he's
driv
about getting up and leaving right in the middle of somebody's Infantile revelation of need. Meanwhile Kevin is saying that
his Inner Infant inside him had always hoped that some day his Mom and Dad would be there for him, to hold him and love him.
He says but right from the start they'd never been there for him, leaving him and his brother with Hispanic nannies while they
devoted themselves to their jobs and various types of psychotherapy and support groups. This takes a while to say, given all the
snuffles and wracked spasms. Then Kevin says but then by the time he was eight they were gone altogether, dead, smooshed by a
dysfunc-tionally falling radio traffic helicopter on the Jamaica Way on the way to Couples Counselling.
At this Hal's slumped head jerks up, his mouth oval with horror. He's all of a sudden realized that this guy who's seated at
such an angle that Hal's been able to see only the obliquest portion of his profile is in fact Kevin Bain, his brother Orin's old
E.T.A. doubles and chemical-mischief partner Marlon Bain's older brother, Kevin Bain, of Dedham MA, who the last Hal had
heard h
re, back during the pre-Subsidized-Time Simulated Reality craze, before InterLace viewers and digital cartridges let you do
your own customized Simulating right at home and the novelty wore off.335325 The Kevin Bain whose childhood hobby was
memorizing IRS capital-depreciation schedules and whose adult idea of a wild time33
s nightly cocoa, and who wouldn't have known a recreational drug if it walked up and poked him in the eye. Hal begins to
scan for possible exits. The only door was the one he'd come in, which is in full view of most of the room. There ar
l.
Hal's chilled by multiple realizations. This is no NA or anti-Substance Meeting. This is one of those men's-issues-Men'sMovement-type Meetings K. D. Coyle's stepdad went to and Coyle liked to mimic and parody during drills, making his stick's grip
poke out between his legs and yelling 'Nurture this! Honor getting in touch with this!’
Kevin Bain is wiping his nose with his poor teddy bear's head and saying it didn't look like his Inner Infant would ever get its
wish. The gooey music's cello sounds like some sort of cow mooing in distress, maybe at what it's in the middle of.
Sure enough, the round man, whose hand's left a print on his soft cheek, asks poor old Kevin Bain to honor and name his I.I.'s
wounded wish anyway, to say 'Please, Mommy and Daddy, come love and hold me,' out loud, several times, which Kevin Bain
goes ahead and does, rocking a little in his chair, his voice now with an edge of good old adult mortified embarrassment to it,
along with the racking sobs. A couple of the other men in the room are wiping at their bright-white drug-free eyes with the arms
of their teddy bears. Hal is painfully reminded of the rare Ziplocs of Humboldt County hydroponic marijuana that Pemulis
occasionally scored via FedEx from his mercantile counterpart at the Rolling Hills Academy, the curved tawny buds so bi
p with high-Delta-9 resin the Ziplocs had looked like bags of little teddy-bear arms. The moist sounds right behind him turn
out to be a mild-faced older man eating yogurt out of a plastic cup. Hal keeps rechecking the Meeting data in the little M.B.R.O.
booklet the girl had given him. He notes that the booklet has broad chocolate thumb-prints on several of the pages, and that two
pages are stuck firmly together with what Hal fears is an ancient dried booger, and now that the booklet's cover is dated January in
the Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland, i.e. nearly two years past, and that it's not impossible that the blandly
hostile toothless girl at The Ennet facility had kertwanged him by giving him a dated and useless M.B.R.O. guide.
Kevin Bain keeps repeating 'Please, Mommy and Daddy, come love me and hold me' in a kind of monotone of pathos. The
gradually intensifying lisp in Please is apparently a performative invocation
roll. The warm round leader Harv's own eyes are a moist glassy blue. The CD scanner's cello is now into some sort of semijazzy pizzicato stuff that seems oxymoronic against the room's mood. Hal keeps catching whiffs of a hot sick-sweet civety smell
that signifies somebody nearby has some athlete's-foot issues to confront, under his socks. Plus it's mystifying that 32A has no
windows, given all the smoky-brown fenestra-tion Hal'd seen from outside the Q.R.S. cube. The man eating yogurt's beard is one
of those small rectangular ones that's easy to keep clear of the cup's rim. The back and side of Kevin Bain's hair has separated into
y sweat-soaked strands, from the room's heat and the Infant's emotions.
All through his own infancy and toddlerhood, Hal had continually been held and
d, and he feels like he could have told K. Bain's Inn
 like it rendered you emotionally whole or Substance-free. Hal finds he rather envies a man who feels he has something to
explain his being fucked up, parents to blame it on. Not even Pemulis blamed his late father Mr. Pemulis, who hadn't exactly
ded like the Fred MacMurray of U.S. fathers. But then Pemulis didn't consider himself fucked up or unfree w/r/t Substances.
The blond and Buddhic cable-knit Harv, dandling his bear on his knee now, calmly asks Kevin Bain if it feels to his Inner
Infant like Mommy and Daddy were ever going to appear cribside to m
'No,' Kevin says very quietly. 'No, it doesn't, Harv.’
The leader is idly arranging his bear's splayed arms in different positions, so it looks like the bear's either waving or
surrendering. 'Do you suppose you would be able to ask someone in the group here tonight to love and hold you instead, Kevin?’
The back of Kevin Bain's head doesn't move. Hal's whole digestive tract spasms at the prospect of watching two bearded
adult males in sweaters and socks engage in surrogate Infant-hugging. He begins asking himself why he doesn't just fake a
hideous coughing fit and flee Q.R.S.-32A with his fist over his face.
Harv's now waggling the bear's arms back and forth and making his voice high and cartoon-characterish and pretending to
have his bear ask Kevin Bain's bear if it would maybe point to the man in the group Kevin Bain would most like to have hold and
nurture and love him in loco parentis. Hal's spitting quietly down the side of his glass and brooding wretchedly at the fact th
en fifty supperless clicks to listen to a globular man in plaid socks pretend his teddy bear's speaking Latin when he looks up 
from the glass and is chilled to see that Kevin Bain has wiggled his Indian-style way around in his chair and is holding his bear
way up by its underarms, just the way a father holds a toddler up for a public spect-op or parade, turning the throttled-looking bear
this way and that, scanning the room — as Hal covers part of his face with a hand, pretending to scratch an eyebrow, praying not
to be recognized — and finally manipulating the bear's arm so the plump brown fuzzy fingerless hand of the bear's pointing right
in Hal's direction. Hal doubles over in a coughing spasm only half-faked, running decision-trees on various ruses for flight.
Just like his younger brother Marlon Bain, Kevin Bain is a short thick person with a dark swart face. He looks sort of like an
overdeveloped troll. And he has the same capacity for constant incredible sweating that always made Marlon Bain look to Hal,
both on-court and off-, like a toad hunched moist and unblinking in humid shade. Except Kevin Bain's little glittery Bain eyes are
also red and swollen with public weeping, and he's balding back from the temples in a way that gives him a widow's peak like
nobody's business, and doesn't seem to recognize a post-pubescent Hal, and is pointing his bear's blunt hand Hal realizes finally
after almost swallowing his plug of Kodiak not at Hal but at the mild-faced square-bearded older guy behind him, who's holding a
spoon of vividly pink yogurt in front of his bear's open mouth, just touching its protruding tongue's red corduroy, pretending to be
feed
 orange chair no matter what; and then, as Kevin
Bain nd-signal into a motion like he's smoothing
his ader breathes deeply a couple of times. The music's settled back
into
 cabinet.
Bain's tears are actually exiting his eyes and projecting outward
seve
s upper
lip,
er.
d moving a
little
hat
sittin
eeds. Somebody shouted out 'Honor that Infant!' Somebody
else
eter as 'Hold That Line!' or 'Block That Kick!’
n he's chosen to meet those needs won't come.
ands over his belly and sat back, by this time, smiling, cross-legged, holding his tongue. His bear
sits
 all like the cool, sheep-scented breezes of Ascension Island in the
Sou
assively trying to get Jim to come to me,' says Kevin Bain, whose tears have largely stopped, and
who
ing the bear. Hal very casually puts the NASA glass between his legs and gets both hands under his chair-seat and hops the
chair bit by bit over and out of the lines of sight and transit between Kevin Bain and the yogurt man. Harv, up front, is making a
complex hand-signal to the yogurt man not to speak or move from his back-row
 wriggles cross-legged back around to face front again, Harv smoothly turns the ha
hair. The motion then becomes sincere and ruminative as the le
 its original nodding narcosis.
'Kevin,' Harv says, 'since this is a group exercise in passivity and Inner-Infant needs, and since you've selected Jim as the
member of the group you need something from, we need you to ask Jim out loud to meet your needs. Ask him to come up and
hold you and love you, since your parents aren't ever coming. Not ever, Kevin.’
Kevin Bain makes a mortified sound and reclamps a hand over his big swart face.
'Go for it, Kev,' somebody over near the Bly poster calls out.
'We affirm and support you,' says the guy by the filing
Hal now starts scrolling through an alphabetical list of the faraway places he'd rather be right now. He's not even up to Addis
Ababa when Kevin Bain acquiesces and begins very softly and hesitantly asking the mild-faced Jim, who's put aside his yogurt
but not the bear, to please come up and love him and hold him. By the time Hal's envisioned himself tumbling over American
Falls at the Concavity's southwest rim in a rusty old noxious-waste-displacement drum, Kevin Bain has asked Jim eleven progressively louder times to come nurture and hold him, to no avail. The older guy just sits there, clutching his yogurt-tongued bear,
his expression somewhere between mild and blank.
Hal has never actually seen projectile-weeping before.
ral cm. before starting to fall. His facial expression is the scrunched spread one of a small child's total woe, his neck-cords
standing out and face darkening so that it looks like some sort of huge catcher's mitt. A bright cape of mucus hangs from hi
and his lower lip seems to be having some kind of epileptic fit. Hal finds the tantrum's expression on an adult face sort of
compelling. At a certain point hysterical grief becomes facially indistinguishable from hysterical mirth, it appears. Hal imagines
watching Bain weep on a white beach through binoculars from the balcony of a cool dim Aruban hotel room.
'He's not coming!' Kevin Bain finally keens to the lead
Harv the leader nods, scratching an eyebrow, and confirms that that seems to be the case. He pretends to stroke his imperial in
puzzlement and asks rhetorically what might be the problem, why mild-faced Jim isn't automatically coming when called.
Kevin Bain's just about vivisecting his poor bear out of mortified frustration. He seems deeply into his Infant persona now,
and Hal rather hopes these guys have procedures for getting Bain at least back to sixteen before he has to try to drive home. At
some point a timpani has gotten involved in the CD's music, and a rather saucy cornet, and the music's finally starte
, toward what's either a climax or the end of the disk.
By now various men in the group have started crying out to Kevin Bain that his Inner Infant wasn't getting its needs met, t
g there passively asking for nurture to get up and come to him wasn't getting the needs met, that Kevin owed it to his Inner
Infant to come up with some sort of active way to meet the Infant's n
 called 'Meet those needs!' Hal is mentally strolling down the Appian Way in bright Eurosunlight, eating a cannoli, twirling his
Dunlop racquets by the throats like six-shooters, enjoying the sunshine and cranial silence and a normal salivary flow.
Pretty soon the men's supportive exhortations have distilled into everybody in the room except Harv, Jim and Hal chanting
'Meet Those Needs! Meet Those Needs!' in the same male-crowd-exhortative m
Kevin Bain wipes his nose on his sleeve and asks humongous Harv the leader what he's supposed to do to get his Infant's
needs met if the perso
The leader has folded his h
atop the protrusion of belly with its little blunt legs straight out, the way you'll see a bear sitting on a shelf. It seems to Hal that
the O2 in 32A is now getting used up at a ferocious clip. Not at
th Atlantic. The men in the room are still chanting 'Meet Those Needs!’
'What you're saying is I need to actively go over to Jim myself and ask him to hold me,' Kevin Bain says, grinding at his eyes
with his knuckles.
The leader smiles blandly.
'Instead of you're saying p
se sweat has taken on the clammy shine of true fear-sweat.
Harv emerges as one of these people who can heft one eyebrow and not the other. 'It would take real courage and love and
commitment to your Inner Infant to take the risk and go actively over to somebody that might give you what your Infant needs,' he
says quietly. The CD player has at some point shifted into an all-cello instrumental of 'I Don't Know (How to Love Him)' from an
old opera Lyle sometimes borrowed people's players and listened to at night in the weight room. Lyle and Marlon Bain had been
particularly tight, Hal recalls. 
The trimeter of the men's chant has reduced to a one-foot low-volume 'Needs, Needs, Needs, Needs, Needs' as Kevin Bain
slow
wly toward them with the tortured steps of a mime miming walking against a tornadic gale. Hal's
pict l plume. He's
lean ng the brown suspension in the bottom
of h in is the first really desperate and sincere prayer Hal can
rem as with feet in them.
oftly from the front of the room. 'Is it you moving actively toward Jim, or should it be the Infant inside
you
et your Infant do the walking, Kev.’
o Hal's most vivid full-color memory of the non-anti-Substance Meeting he drove fifty oversalivated clicks to by mistake
will
d hung around and
then
n length of time. It was Gately's first full night in St. Elizabeth's Hospital's Trauma Wing. He didn't know what night of
the w
 sick throb in what he assumed was a toe. He wondered dimly about going to the bathroom, if and
whe
ly across the hall's tile floor just outside the room, as if a stolid figure were seated just outside the door, against the wall, in
a ha
ly and hesitantly uncrosses his legs and rises from his orange chair, turning to face Hal and the motionless guy behind him,
this Jim. Bain begins to move slo
uring himself doing a lazy backstroke in the Azores, spouting glassy water up out of his mouth in a cytologica
ing almost out of his chair, as far as possible out of Kevin Bain's line of transit, studyi
is glass. His prayer not to be recognized by a regressive Kevin Ba
ember offering since he'd stopped wearing pajam
'Kevin?' Harv calls s
, the one with the needs?’
'Needs, Needs, Needs,' the bearded men are chanting, some rhythmically raising their manicured fists in the air.
Bain's looking back and forth between Harv and Jim, chewing his finger indecisively.
'Is this how an Infant moves towards its needs, Kevin?' Harv says.
'Go for it, Kevin!' a full-bearded man calls out.
'Let the Infant out!’
'L
S
 become that of his older brother's doubles partner's older brother down on all fours on a Dacronyl rug, crawling, hampered
because one arm was holding his bear to his chest, so he sort of dipped and rose as he crawled on three limbs toward Hal and the
needs-meeter behind him, Bain's knees leaving twin pale tracks in the carpet and his head up on a wobbly neck and looking up and
past Hal, his face unspeakable.
The ceiling was breathing. It bulged and receded. It swelled and settled. The room was in St. Elizabeth's Hospital's Trauma
Wing. Whenever he looked at it, the ceiling bulged and then deflated, shiny as a lung. When Don was a massive toddler his
mother had put them in a little beach house just back of the dunes off a public beach in Beverly. The place was affordable because
it had a big ragged hole in the roof. Origin of hole unknown. Gately's outsized crib had been in the beach house's little living
room, right under the hole. The guy that owned the little cottages off the dunes had stapled thick clear polyurethane sheeting
across the room's ceiling. It was an attempt to deal with the hole. The polyurethane bulged and settled in the North Shore wind and
seemed like some monstrous vacuole inhaling and exhaling directly over little Gately, lying there, wide-eyed. The breathing
polyurethane vacuole had seemed like it developed a character and personality as winter deepened and the winds grew worse.
Gately, age like four, had regarded the vacuole as a living thing, and had named it Herman, and had been afraid of it. He couldn't
feel the right side of his upper body. He couldn't move in any real sense of the word. The hospital room had that misty quality
rooms in fevers have. Gately lay on his back. Ghostish figures materialized at the peripheries of his vision an
 de-materialized. The ceiling bulged and receded. Gately's own breath hurt his throat. His throat felt somehow raped. The
blurred figure in the next bed sat up very still in bed in a sitting position and seemed to have a box on its head. Gately kept having
a terrible repetitious ethnocentric dream that he was robbing the house of an Oriental and had the guy tied to a chair and was
trying to blindfold him with quality mailing twine from the drawer under the Oriental's kitchen phone. The Oriental kept being
able to see around the twine and kept looking steadily at Gately and blinking inscrutably. Plus the Oriental had no nose or mouth,
just a smooth expanse of lower-facial skin, and wore a silk robe and scary sandals, and had no hair on its legs.
What Gately perceived as light-cycles and events all out of normal sequence was really Gately going in and out of
consciousness. Gately did not perceive this. It seemed to him more like he kept coming up for air and then being pushed below the
surface of something. Once when Gately came up for air he found that resident Tiny Ewell was seated in a chair right up next to
the bed. Tiny's little slim hand was on the bed's crib-type railing, and his chin rested on the hand, so his face was right up close.
The ceiling bulged and receded. The room's only light was what spilled in from the nighttime hall. Nurses glided down the hall
and past the door in subsonic footwear. A tall and slumped ghostish figure appeared to Gately's left, off past the blurred seated
square-head boy's bed, slumped and fluttering, appearing to rest its tailbone on the sill of the dark window. The ceiling rounded on
down and then settled back flat. Gately rolled his eyes up at Ewell. Ewell had shaved off his blunt white goatee. His hair was so
completely clean and white it took a faint pink cast from the pink of his scalp below. Ewell had been discoursing to him for an
unknow
eek it was. His circadian rhythm was the least of the personal rhythms that had been scrambled. His right side felt encased in
a kind of hot cement. Also a
n. Ewell was right in the middle of speaking. Gately couldn't tell if Ewell was whispering. Nurses glided across the doorway's
light. Their sneakers were so noiseless the nurses seemed to be on wheels. A stolid shadow of somebody in a hat was cast
oblique
t.
'My wife's personal term for soul is personality. As in "There's something incorrigibly dark in your personality, Eldred Ewell,
and Dewars brings it out." ‘
The hall floor was pretty definitely white tile, with a cloudy overwaxed shine in the bright fluorescence out there. Some kind
of red or pink stripe ran down the center of the hall. Gately couldn't tell if Tiny Ewell thought he was awake or unconscious or
what.
'It was in the fall term of third grade as a child that I found myself fallen in with the bad element. They were a group of tough
blue-collar Irish lads bussed in from the East Watertown projects. Runny noses, home-cut hair, frayed cuffs, quick with their fists,
sports-mad, fond of sneaker-hockey on asphalt,' Ewell said, 'and yet, strangely, I, unable to do even one pull-up in the President's
Physical Fitness Test, quickly became the leader of the pack we all fell into. The blue-collar lads all seemed to admire me for
attributes that were not clear. We formed a sort of club. Our uniform was a gray skallycap. Our clubhouse was the dugout of a
Little League diamond that had fallen into disuse. Our club was called the Money-Stealers' Club. At my suggestion we went with 
a descriptive name as opposed to euphemistic. The name was mine. The Irish lads acquiesced. They viewed me as the brains of
the
eering disadvantaged lads on to victory against far better-equipped teams. I
disc
ow the club, in the dugout. I got more
loqu
operation. I held them in a kind of thrall. This was due in large part to my capacity for rhetoric. Even the toughest and most
brutish Irish lad respects a gilded tongue. Our club was formed for the express purpose of undertaking a bunko operation. We
went around to people's homes after school, ringing the doorbell and soliciting donations for Project Hope Youth Hockey. There
was no such organization. Our donation-receptacle was a Chock Full O' Nuts can with PROJECT HOPE YOUTH HOCKEY
written on a strip of masking tape wrapped around the can. The lad who made the receptacle had spelled PROJECT with a G in
the first draft. I ridiculed him for the error, and the whole club pointed at him and laughed.
Brutally.' Ewell kept staring at the crude blue jailhouse square and canted cross on Gately's forearms. 'Our only visible
credentials were kneepads and sticks we'd purloined from the P.E. stockroom. By my order, all were held carefully to conceal the
PPTY W. WTTN ELEM SCH emblazoned down the side of every stick. One lad had a goalie mask on under his skallycap, the
rest kneepads and carefully held sticks. The kneepads were turned inside-out for the same reason. I couldn't even skate, and my
mother absolutely forbade rough play on asphalt. I wore a necktie and combed my hair carefully after each solicitation. I was the
spokesperson. The mouthpiece, the bad lads called me. They were Irish Catholics all. Watertown from east to west is Catholic,
Armenian, and Mixed. The Eastside boys all but genuflected to my gift for bullshit. I was exceptionally smooth with adults. I rang
doorbells and the lads arrayed themselves behind me on the porch. I spoke of disadvantaged youth and team spirit and fresh air
and the meaning of competition and alternatives to the after-school streets' bad element. I spoke of mothers in support-hose and
war-injured older brothers with elaborate prostheses ch
overed that I had a gift for it, the emotional appeal of adult rhetoric. It was the first time I felt personal power. I was
unrehearsed and creative and moving. Hard-case homeowners who came to the door in sleeveless Ts holding tallboys of beer with
stubble and expressions of minimal charity were often weeping openly by the time we left their porch. I was called a fine lad and a
good kid and a credit to me Mum and Da. My hair was tousled so often I had to carry a mirror and comb. The coffee can became
hard to carry back to the dugout, where we hid it behind a cin-derblock bench-support. We'd netted over a hundred dollars by
Halloween. This was a serious amount in those days.’
Tiny Ewell and the ceiling kept receding and then looming in, bulging roundly. Figures Gately didn't know from Adam kept
popping in and out of fluttery view in different corners of the room. The space between his bed and the other bed seemed to
distend and then contract with a slow sort of boinging motion. Gately's eyes kept rolling up in his head, his upper lip mustached
with sweat. 'And I was revelling in the fraud of it, the discovery of the gift,' Ewell was saying. 'I was flushed with adrenaline. I
had tasted power, the verbal manipulation of human hearts. The lads called me the gilded blarneyman. Soon the first-order fraud
wasn't enough. I began secretly filching receipts from the club's Chock Full O' Nuts can. Embezzling. I persuaded the lads it was
too risky to keep the can in the open-air dugout and took personal charge of the can. I kept the can in my bedroom and persuaded
my mother that it contained Christmas-connected gifts and must under no circumstances be inspected. To my underlings in the
club I claimed to be rolling the coins and depositing them in a high-interest savings account I'd opened for us in the name Franklin
W. Dixon. In fact I was buying myself Fez and Milky Ways and Mad magazines and a Creeple Peeple-brand Deluxe Oven-andMold Set with six different colors of goo. This was in the early 1970s. At first I was discreet. Grandiose but discreet. At first the
embezzlement was controlled. But the power had roused something dark in my personality, and the adrenaline drove it forward.
Self-will run riot. Soon the club's coffee can was empty by each weekend's end. Each week's haul went toward some uncontrolled
Saturday binge of puerile consumption. I doctored up flamboyant bank statements to sh
acious and imperious with them. None of the lads thought to question me, or the purple Magic Marker the bank statements
were done in. I was not dealing with intellectual titans here, I knew. They were nothing but malice and muscle, the worst of the
school's bad element. And I ruled them. Thrall. They trusted me completely, and the rhetorical gift. In retrospect they probably
could not conceive of any sane third-grader with glasses and a necktie trying to defraud them, given the inevitably brutal
consequences. Any sane third-grader. But I was no longer a sane third-grader. I lived only to feed the dark thing in my personality,
which told me any consequences could be forestalled by my gift and grand personal aura.
'But then of course eventually Christmas hove into view.' Gately tries to stop Ewell and say 'hove?' and finds to his horror that
he can't make any sounds come out, 'The meaty Catholic Eastside bad-element lads now wanted to tap their nonexistent Franklin
W. Dixon account to buy support-hose and sleeveless Ts for their swarthy blue-collar families. I held them off as long as I could
with pedantic blather on interest penalties and fiscal years. Irish Catholic Christmas is no laughing matter, though, and for the first
time their swarthy eyes began to narrow at me. Things at school grew increasingly tense. One afternoon, the largest and swarthiest
of them assumed control of the can in an ugly dugout coup. It was a blow from which my authority never recovered. I began to
feel a gnawing fear: my denial broke: I realized I'd gradually embezzled far more than I could ever make good. At home, I began
talking up the merits of private-school curricula at the dinner table. The can's weekly take fell off sharply as holiday expenses
drained homeowners of change and patience. This bear-market in giving was attributed by some of the club's swarthier lads to my
deficiencies. The whole club began muttering in the dugout. I began to learn that one could perspire heavily even in a bitterly cold
open-air dugout. Then, on the first day of Advent, the lad now in charge of the can produced childish-looking figures and
announced the whole club wanted their share of the accrued booty in the Dixon account. I bought time with vague allusions to cosignatures and a misplaced passbook. I arrived home with chattering teeth and bloodless lips and was forced by my mother to
swallow fish-oil. I was consumed with puerile fear. I felt small and weak and evil and consumed by dread of my embezzlement's
exposure. Not to mention the brutal consequences. I claimed intestinal distress and stayed home from school. The telephone began
ringing in the middle of the night. I could hear my father saying "Hello? Hello?" I did not sleep. My personality's dark part had
grown leathery wings and a beak and turned on me. There were still several days until Christmas vacation. I'd lie in bed panicked
during school hours amid piles of ill-gotten Mad magazines and Creeple Peeple figures and listen to the lonely handheld bells of
the Salvation Army Santas on the street below and think of synonyms for dread and doom. I began to know shame, and to know it
as grandiosity's aide-de-camp. My unspecific digestive illness wore on, and teachers sent cards and concerned notes. On some
days the door-buzzer would buzz after school hours and my mother would come upstairs and say "How sweet, Eldred," that there
were swarthy and cuff-frayed but clearly good-hearted boys in gray skallycaps on the stoop asking after me and declaring that
they were keenly awaiting my return to school. I began to gnaw on the bathroom's soap in the morning to make a convincing case 
for staying home. My mother was alarmed at the masses of bubbles I vomited and threatened to consult a specialist. I felt myself
mov
der cases took up
afte
er was required to see myself as good, remade. I never knowingly committed anothe
 that trembled with sunlight and a different Dr. was speculating to either Pat M. or Calvin T. that the invasive foreign
bod
I co
usly protects my mother from all
unpl meone has to do it. My mother believes right this minute I'm at a nine-month Banquede-G oesn't fit, from the rest home.
 to a woman who looks at me as if I were a dark
stain
hat to do,' Ewell said.
eard Ewell whisper as the ceiling
ing closer and closer to some cliff-edge at which everything would come out. I longed to be able to lean into my mother's
arms and weep and confess all. I could not. For the shame. Three or four of the Money-Stealers' Club's har
rnoon positions by the nativity scene in the churchyard across from our house and stared stonily up at my bedroom window,
pounding their fists in their palms. I began to understand what a Belfast Protestant must feel. But even more prospectively
dreadful than pummell-ings from Irish Catholics was the prospect of my parents' finding out my personality had a dark thing that
had driven me to grandiose wickedness and left me there.’
Gately has no idea how Ewell feels about him making no responses, whether Ewell doesn't like it or even notices it or what.
He can breathe OK, but something in his raped throat won't let whatever's supposed to vibrate to speak vibrate.
'Finally, on the day before my gastroenterologist appointment, when my mother was down the street at a speculum party, I
crept downstairs from my sick bed and stole over a hundred dollars from a shoebox marked I.B.E.W. LOCAL 517 PETTY
SLUSH in the back of my father's den's closet. I'd never dreamed of resorting to the shoebox before. Stealing from my own
parents. To remit funds I'd stolen from dull-witted boys with whom I'd stolen them from adults I'd lied to. My feelings of fear and
despicability only increased. I now felt ill for real. I lived and moved in the shadow of something dark that hovered just overhead.
I vomited without aid of emetic, now, but secretly, so I could return to school; I couldn't face the prospect of a whole Christmas
vacation of swarthy sentries pounding their palms outside the house. I converted my father's union's bills to small change and paid
off the Money-Stealers' Club and got pummelled anyway. Apparently on general bad-element principles. I discovered the latent
rage in followers, the fate of the leader who falls from the mob's esteem. I was pummelled and given a savage wedgie and hung
from a hook in my school locker, where I remained for several hours, swollen and mortified. And going home was worse; home
was no refuge. For home was the scene of the third-order crime. Of theft cubed. I couldn't sleep. I tossed and turned. There were
night terrors. I was unable to eat, no matter how long after supper I had to stay at the table. The more worried about me my parents
became, the greater my shame. I felt a shame and personal despicability no third-grader should have to feel. The holidays were not
jolly. I looked back over the autumn and failed to recognize anyone named Eldred K. Ewell Jr. It no longer seemed a question of
insanity or dark parts of me. I had stolen from neighbors, slum-children, and family, and bought myself sweets and toys. Under
any tenable definition of bad, I was bad. I resolved to toe the virtuous line from then on. The shame and horror was too awful: I
had to remake myself. I resolved to do whatev
r felony. The whole shameful interval of the Money-Stealers' Club was moved to mental storage and buried there. Don, I'd
forgotten it ever happened. Until the other night. Don, the other night, after the fracas and your display of reluctant se
offendendo,337327 after your injury and the whole aftermath ... Don, I dreamed the whole mad repressed third-grade interval of
grandiose perfidy all over again. Vividly and completely. When I awoke, I was somehow minus my goatee and my hair was
center-parted in a fashion I haven't favored for forty years. The bed was soaked, and there was a gnawed-looking cake of
McDade's special anti-acne soap in my hand.’
Gately starts to short-term recall that he was offered I.V.-Demerol for the pain of his gunshot wound immediately on
admission to the E.R. and has been offered Demerol twice by shift-Drs. who haven't bothered to read the HISTORY OF
NARCOTICS DEPENDENCY NO SCHEDULE C-IV+ MEDIC. that Gately'd made Pat Montesian swear she'd make them put in
italics on his file or chart or whatever, first thing. Last night's emergency surgery was remedial, not extractive, because the big
pistol's ordnance had apparently fragmented on impacting and passed through the meters of muscle that surrounded Gately's
Humorous ball and Scalpula socket, passing through and missing bone but doing great and various damage to soft tissues. The
E.R.'s Trauma Specialist had prescribed Toradol-IM338328 but had warned that the pain after the surgery's general anesthetic
wore off was going to be unlike anything Gately had ever imagined. The next thing Gately knew he was upstairs in a Trauma
Wing room
y had been treated with something unclean, beforehand, possibly, because Gately's developed a massive infection, and they're
monitoring him for something he heard as Noxzema but is really toxemia. Gately also wanted to protest that his body was 100%
American, but he seemed temporarily unable to vocalize aloud. Later it was nighttime and Ewell was there, intoning. It was totally
unclear what Ewell wanted from Gately or why he was choosing this particular time to share. Gately's right shoulder was almost
the same size as his head, and he had to roll his eyes up and over like a cow to see Ewell's hand on the railing and his face floating
above it.
'And how will I administer the Ninth Step when it comes time to make amends? How can I start to make reparations? Even if
uld remember the homes of the citizens we defrauded, how many could still be there, living? The club lads have doubtless
scattered into various low-rent districts and dead-end careers. My father lost the I.B.E.W.339329 account under the Weld
administration and has been dead since 1993. And the revelations would kill my mother. My mother is very frail. She uses a
walker, and arthritis has twisted her head nearly all the way around on her neck. My wife jealo
easant facts regarding me. She says so
enève-sponsored tax-law symposium in the Alsace. She keeps sending me knitted skiwear that d
'Don, this buried interval and the impost I've carried ever since may have informed my whole life. Why I was drawn to tax
law, helping wealthy suburbanites two-step around their fair share. My marriage
 at the back of her child's trousers. My whole descent into somewhat-heavier-than-normal drinking may have been some
instinctive attempt to bury third-grade feelings of despicability, submerge them in an amber sea.
'I don't know w
Gately was on enough Toradol-IM to make his ears ring, plus a saline drip with Doryx.340330
'I don't want to remember despicabilities I can do nothing about. If this is a sample of the "More Will Be Revealed," I hereby
lodge a complaint. Some things seem better left submerged. No?’
And everything on his right side was on fire. The pain was getting to be emergency-type pain, like scream-and-yank-yourcharred-hand-off-the-stove-type pain. Parts of him kept sending up emergency flares to other parts of him, and he could neither
move nor call out.
'I'm scared,' from what seemed somewhere overhead and rising, was the last thing Gately h
bulg
up the funnel's
cone
nds were up, and the room was so bright-white in the sunlight everything looked
blea
sticking to his resolution about nothing
stro
t341331 or maybe even
Dem
g there in a gunmetal wheelchair, face
cont
ed down toward them. Gately wanted to tell Tiny Ewell that he could totally fucking I.D. with Ewell's feelings, and that if he,
Tiny, could just hang in and tote that bale and put one little well-shined shoe in front of the other everything would end up all
right, that the God of Ewell's Understanding would find some way for Ewell to make things right, and then he could let the
despicable feelings go instead of keeping them down with Dewars, but Gately couldn't connect the impulse to speak with actual
speech, still. He settled for trying to reach his left hand across and pat Ewell's hand on the railing. But his own breadth was too far
to reach across. And then the white ceiling came all the way down and made everything white.
He seemed to sort of sleep. He fever-dreamed of dark writhing storm clouds writhing darkly and screaming on down the
beach at Beverly MA, the winds increasing over his head until Herman the polyurethane vacuole burst from the force, leaving a
ragged inhaling maw that tugged at Gately's XXL Dr. Dentons. A blue stuffed brontosaurus was sucked upward out of the crib
and disappeared into the maw, spinning. His mother was getting the shit beaten out of her by a man with a shepherd's crook in the
kitchen and couldn't hear Gately's frantic cries for help. He broke through the crib's bars with his head and went to the front door
and ran outside. The black clouds up the beach lowered and roiled, funnelling sand, and as Gately watched he saw a tornado's
snout emerge from the clouds and slowly lower. It looked as if the clouds were either giving birth or taking a shit. Gately ran
across the beach to the water to escape the tornado. He ran through the crazed breakers to deep warm water and submerged
himself and stayed under until he ran out of breath. It was now no longer clear if he was little Bimmy or the grown man Don. He
kept coming up briefly for a great sucking breath and then going back under where it was warm and still. The tornado stayed in
one place on the beach, bulging and receding, screaming like a jet, its opening a breathing maw, lightning coming off the funnelcloud like hair. He could hear the tiny tattered sounds of his mother calling his name. The tornado was right by the beach house
and the whole house trembled. His mother came out the front door, wild-haired and holding a bloody Ginsu knife, calling his
name. Gately tried to call for her to come into the deep water with him, but even he couldn't hear his calls against the scream of
the storm. She dropped the knife and held her head as the funnel pointed its pointy maw her way. The beach house exploded and
his mother flew through the air toward the funnel's intake, arms and legs threshing, as if swimming in wind. She vanished into the
maw and was pulled spinning up into the tornado's vortex. Shingles and boards followed her. No sign of the shepherd's crook of
the man who'd hurt her. Gately's right lung burned horribly. He saw his mother for the last time when lightning lit
. She was whirling around and around like something in a drain, rising, seeming to swim, bluely backlit. The burst of
lightning was the white of the sunlit room when he came up for air and opened his eyes. His mother's tiny rotating imago faded
against the ceiling. What seemed like heavy breathing was him trying to scream. The skinny bed's sheets were soaked and he
needed a piss something bad. It was daytime and his right side was in no way numb, and he was immediately nostalgic for the
warm-cement feeling of when it was numb. Tiny Ewell was gone. His every pulse was an assault on his right side. He didn't think
he could stand it for even another second. He didn't know what would happen, but he didn't think he could stand it.
Later somebody who was either Joelle van D. or a St. E's nurse in a U.H.I.D. veil was running a cold washcloth over his face.
His face was so big it took some time to cover it all. It seemed too tender a touch on the cloth for a nurse, but then Gately heard
the clink of I.V. bottles being changed or R.N.ishly messed with somewhere overhead behind him. He was unable to ask about
changing the sheets or going to the bathroom. Some time after the veiled lady left, he just gave up and let the piss go, and instead
of feeling wet heat he heard the rising metallic sound of something filling up somewhere near the bed. He couldn't move to lift the
covers and see what he was hooked up to. The bli
ched and boiled. The guy with either the square head or the box on his head had been taken off someplace, his bed unmade
and one crib-railing down. There were no ghostish figures or figures in mist. The hallway was no brighter than the room, and
Gately couldn't see any shadows of anybody in a hat. He didn't even know if last night had been real. The pain kept making his
lids flutter. He hadn't cried over pain since he was four. His last thought before letting his lids stay shut against the brutal white of
the room was that he'd maybe been castrated, which was how he'd always heard the term catheterized. He could smell rubbing
alcohol and a kind of vitamin stink, and himself.
At some point a probably real Pat Montesian came in and got her hair in his eye when she kissed his cheek and told him if he
could just hang in and concentrate on getting well everything would be fine, that everything at the House was back to normal,
more or less, and essentially fine, that she was so sorry he'd had to handle a situation like that alone, without support or counsel,
and that she realized full well Lenz and the Canadian thugs hadn't given him enough time to call anybody, that he'd done the very
best he could with what he'd had to work with and had nothing to feel horrid about, to let it go, that the violence hadn't been
relapse-type thrill-seeking violence but simply doing the best he could at that moment and trying to stand up for himself and for a
resident of the House. Pat Montesian was dressed as usual entirely in black, but formally, as in for taking somebody to court, and
her formalwear looked like a Mexican widow's. She really had said the words thug and horrid. She said not to worry, the House
was a community and it took care of its own. She kept asking if he was sleepy. Her hair's red was a different and less radiant red
than the red of Joelle van D.'s hair. The left side of her face was very kind. Gately had very little understanding of what she was
talking about. He was kind of surprised the Finest hadn't come calling already. Pat didn't know about the remorseless A.D.A. or
the suffocated Nuck: Gately'd tried hard to share openly about the wreckage of his past, but some issues still seemed suicidal to
share about. Pat said that Gately was showing tremendous humility and willingness
nger than non-narcotic painkillers, but that she hoped he'd remember that he wasn't in charge of anything except putting
himself in his Higher Power's hands and following the dictates of his heart. That codeine or maybe Percose
erol wouldn't be a relapse unless his heart of hearts that knew his motives thought it would be. Her red hair was down and
looked uncombed and mashed in on the side; she looked frazzled. Gately wanted very much to ask Pat about the legal fallout of
the other night's thug-fracas. He realized she kept asking if he was sleepy because his attempts to speak looked like yawns. His
inability to still speak was like speechlessness in bad dreams, airless and hellish, horrid.
What made the whole interface with Pat M. possibly unreal was that right at the end for no reason Pat M. burst into tears, and
for no reason Gately got so embarrassed he pretended to pass out, and slept again, and probably dreamed.
Almost certainly dreamed and unreal was the interval when Gately came up with a start and saw Mrs. Lopate, the objay dart
from the Shed that they come and install next to the Ennet House viewer some days, sittin
orted, head cocked, hair stringy, looking not at him but more like seemingly at whatever array of I.V. bottles and signifying 
monitors hung above and behind his big crib, so not speaking or even looking at him but still in some sense being there with him,
somehow. Even though there was no way she could have really been there, it was the first time Gately realized that the catatonic
Mrs. L. had been the same lady he'd seen touching the tree in #5's front lawn late at night, some nights, when he'd first come on
Staff. That they were the same person. And that this realization was real even though the lady's presence in the room was not, the
com
ably looking at him, probably thinking
he w
plexities of which made his eyes roll up in his head again as he passed back out again.
Then at some later point Joelle van Dyne was sitting in a chair just outside the railing of the bed, veiled, wearing sweatpants
and a sweater that was starting to unravel, in a pink-bordered veil, not saying anything, prob
as unconscious with his eyes open, or delirious with Noxzema. The whole right side of himself hurt so bad each breath was
like a hard decision. He wanted to cry like a small child. The girl's silence and the blankness of her veil frightened him after a
while, and he wished he could ask her to come back later.
Nobody'd offered him anything to eat, but he wasn't hungry. There were I.V. tubes going into the backs of both hands and the
crook of his left elbow. Other tubing exited him lower down. He didn't want to know. He kept trying to ask his heart if just
codeine would be a relapse, according to the heart, but his heart was declining to comment.
Then at some point Ennet House alum and senior counselor Calvin Thrust came roaring in and pulled up a chair and straddled
it backwards like a slow-tease stripper, slumping and draping his arms over the back of the chair, gesturing with an unlit rodney as
he spoke. He told Gately that man he looked like shit something heavy had fell on. But he told Gately he should get a gander of
the other guys, the Nucks in Polynesian-wear. Thrust and the House Manager had got there before E.M.P.H.H. Security could
drag the Finest away from issuing midnight street-side citations down on Comm. Ave., he told Gately. Lenz and Green and
Alfonso Parias-Carbo had dragged/carried the passed-out Gately inside and laid him on the black vinyl couch in Pat's office,
where Gately had come to and told them ixnay on the ambulanceay and to please wake him up in five more minutes, and then
passed out for serious real. Parias-Carbo seemed like he'd suffered a mild intestinal hernia from dragging/carrying Gately, but he
was being a man about it and had refused codeine downstairs at the E.R. and was expressing gratitude for the growth experience,
and the thoraxic lump was receding nicely. Calvin Thrust's breath smelled of smoke and old scrambled eggs. Gately had once seen
a cheap bootleg cartridge of a young Calvin Thrust having sex with a lady with only one arm on what looked like a crude
homemade trapeze. The cartridge's lighting and production values had been real low-quality, and Gately had been in and out of a
Demerol-nod, but he was 98% sure it had been the young Calvin Thrust. Calvin Thrust said how right there over Gately's
unconscious form in the office Randy Lenz had begun womaning right off how of course he, Randy Lenz, was going to somehow
get blamed for Gately and the Nucks getting fucked up and why didn't they just get it over with and give him the administrative
Shoe right now without going through the sham motions of deliberating. Bruce Green had rammed Lenz up against Pat's cabinets
and shaken him like a marga-rita, but refused to rat out Lenz or say why irate Canadians might think a specimen as dickless as
Lenz might have demapped their friend. The matter was under investigation, but Thrust confessed to a certain admiration for
Green's refusal to eat cheese. Brucie G. had suffered a broken nose in the beef and now had a terrific set of twin shiners. Calvin
Thrust said both he, Calvin Thrust, and the House Manager had immediately on arrival pegged Lenz as either coked up or 'drined
to the gills on some 'drine, and Thrust said he summoned every Oreida of self-control sobriety'd blessed him with and had quietly
taken Lenz out of the office into the special Disabled Bedroom next door and over the sound of Burt F. Smith coughing up little
pieces of lung in his sleep he said he'd real controlledly given Lenz the choice of voluntarily resigning his Ennet residency on the
spot or submitting to a spot-urine and a room-search and everything like that, plus to questioning by the Finest, who were pretty
doubtless even now on route with the fleet of ambulances for the Nucks. Meanwhile, Thrust said — gesturing with the gasper and
occasionally leaning forward to see whether Gately was still conscious and to tell him he looked like shit, meanwhile — Gately
had been lying there passed out, wedged with two full filing cabinets to keep him from rolling off the couch he was wider than,
and was bleeding in a very big way, and nobody knew how to, like, affix a turnipcut to a shoulder, and the good-bodied new girl
with the cloth mask was bending over the arm of the couch applying pressure to towels on Gately's bleeding, and her partly-open
robe was yielding a view that even brought Alfonso P.-C. around from his herniated fetal posture on the floor, and Thrust and the
House Manager were taking turns Asking for Help to intuitively know what they ought to do with Gately, because it was well
known that he was on Probie against a real serious bit, and with all due trust and respect to Don it wasn't clear at that point from
the scattered damaged Canadian forms still in different prone positions out in the street who'd done what to who in defense of
whatever or not, and the Finest tend to take a keen interest in huge guys who come into E.R.'s with spectacular gunshot wounds,
and but then when Pat M. pulled up in the Aventura laying rubber a couple minutes later she'd screamed rather unserenely at
Thrust for not having already rikky-ticked Don Gately over to St. E.'s on his own already. Thrust said he'd let go of Pat's
screaming like water off a duck, revealing that Pat M. had been under felony-weight domestic stress at home, he knew. He said
and but so Gately was too heavy to carry unconscious for more than a few meters, even with the masked girl filling in for PariasCarbo, and they'd just barely got Gately outside still in his wet bowling shirt and laid him briefly on the sidewalk and covered him
with Pat's black suede car-coat while Thrust maneuvered his beloved Corvette up as close to Gately as possible. The sounds of
sirens on the way up Comm. Ave. mixed with the sounds of severely fucked-up Canadians returning to whatever passed with
Nucks for consciousness and calling for what they called medecins, and with the crazed-squirrel sound of Lenz trying to start his
rusted-out brown Duster, which had a bad solenoid. They'd heaved Gately's dead weight in the 'Vette and Pat M. drove interference like a madwoman in her turbocharged Aventura. Pat let the masked girl ride shotgun with her because the masked girl
wouldn't quit asking her to let her come too. The House Manager stayed behind to represent Ennet House to E.M.P.H.H. Security
and the somewhat less bullshittable BPD-Finest. The sirens got steadily closer, which added to the confusion because senile and
mobile-vegetable residents of both Unit #4 and the Shed had been drawn out on the frozen lawns by the freakas, and the mix of
several kinds of sirens didn't do them a bit of good, and they started flapping and shrieking and running around and adding to the
medical confusion of the whole scene, which by the time him and Pat pulled out of there was a fucking millhouse and everything
like that. Thrust asks rhetorically how much does Don fucking weigh, anyway, because moving the front buckets way up to where
like dwarfs put them and putting Gately's carcass across the back seat of the 'Vette had required all available hands and even Burt
F.S.'s stumps, had been like trying to get something humongous through a door that's way smaller than the humongous thing was
and everything like that. Thrust occasionally tapped his gasper like he thought it was lit. The first squad cars had come fishtailing 
around the Warren-Comm. corner just as they all came out of the E.M. driveway onto Warren. Pat in her car up ahead had made
an arm-motion that could have been either waving coolly at the passing Finest or uncoolly clutching her head. Thrust said had he
mentioned Gately's blood? Gately'd bled all over Pat M.'s vinyl couch and filing cabinets and carpet, the little E.M. streetlet, the
sidewalk, Pat M.'s black suede car-coat, pretty much everybody's winter coats, and the beloved upholstery of Thrust's beloved
Corvette, which upholstery Thrust might add had been new, and dear. But he said not to worry about it, Thrust said: the fucking
blood was the least of the problems. Gately didn't like the sound of that at all, and started trying to blink at him in a kind of crude
code, to get his attention, but Thrust either didn't notice it or thought it was like a postoperative tic. Thrust's hair was always
combed straight back like a mobster. Thrust said at the St. E.'s E.R. how the E.R. crew had been quick and ingenious about getting
Gately out of the 'Vette and onto a double-width gur-ney, though they did have some trouble lifting the gurney so they could get
the legs with wheels set up under it so the guys in white could roll him in with more guys in white walking briskly alongside of
him and leaning over him and applying pressure and barking little orders in terse code like they always do in E.R.s and everything
like that, in emergencies. Thrust says he couldn't tell if they could tell right away it was a spectacular gunshot wound, nobody
used the G-word or anything like that. Thrust had babbled something about a chain-saw while Pat nodded furiously. The chief two
things Gately kept blinking rhythmically to try to find out were: did anybody end up getting killed, meaning the Nucks; and has
this one certain A.D.A.-type figure that always wore a hat come in from Essex County or given any sign of getting wind of
Gately's whereabouts or involvement; and — so really three things — and will any of the Ennet House residents that were right
there on the scene from start to finish look respectable enough on paper to have creditibility as like legal witnesses. Plus he
wouldn't mind knowing what the fuck Thrust was thinking of, scaring Lenz off and letting him screw off into the urban night
leaving Gately maybe holding the statutory bag. Most of Calvin Thrust's legality-experience was filmic and petty-vice. Thrust
eventually describes that one of the House Manager's key coups of quick thinking was doing a quick TP-scan and finding out
which of the residents out there milling around with the catatonics on the street had up-in-the-air legal issues such that they
needed to be se-cloistered in the protected area of the House out of legal sight by the time the BPD's Finest hit the scene. He says
in his view it was lucky for Gately that he (Gately) was such a massive son of a bitch and had so much blood, because even so
Gately'd lost huge volumes of blood all over people's upholstery and was in shock and everything like that by the time they got
him on the double-width gurney, his face cheese-colored and his lips blue and muttering all this shock-type stuff, but even so here
he (Gately) was, not exactly ready for a GQ cover but still sucking air. Thrust said in the waiting room at the E.R., where they
wouldn't let a working man smoke down there either, he said then the arrogant new girl resident in the white veil had up and tried
to take Thrust's inventory for letting Randy L. resign and decamp before his part in Gately's legal embryoglio could be nailed
down, and Pat M. had been pretty unconditionally loving about it but it was obvious she wasn't thrilled with Thrust's tactics either
and everything like that. Gately blinked furiously to signify his agreement with Joelle's position. Calvin Thrust gestured stoically
with his cigarette and said he'd told Pat M. the truth: he always told the truth, no matter how unpleasant for himself, today: he said
he'd said he'd encouraged Lenz to rikky-tick out of there because otherwise he was afraid that he (Thrust) was going to eliminate
Lenz's map on the spot, out of rage. Lenz's solenoid appeared to have been on the permanent dicky, because the rusty Duster was
seen by new resident Amy J. real early the next A.M. getting towed from its wrong-side-of-the-street spot in front of #3 when
Amy J. slunk back to the House all jonesy and hung-over to get her Hefty bag full of evicted personal shit, Lenz apparently having
abandoned his wheels and fleen off by foot during all the Finest's confusion and static with the ambulance drivers that who could
blame them didn't want to take Canadians because of horrible paperwork for Health Card reimbursement for Nucks. The House
Manager had gone so far as planting herself out in front of the House's locked front door with her not-all-that-small arms and legs
spread out, blocking the door, assertively stating at whatever Finest tried to enter that Ennet House was court-mandated Protected
by t
onth when the present Assistant Director left to go get certified
in je
he Commonwealth of MA and could only be entered with a Court Order and three working days' mandated time for the House
to file an injunction and wait for a ruling, and the Finest and even the booger-eating morons from E.M.P.H.H. Security were
successfully held in bay and kept out, therefore, by her, alone, and Pat M. was considering rewarding the House Manager's
coolness under fire by promoting her to Assistant Director next m
t-engine maintenance at East Coast Aerotech on a Mass Rehab grant. Gately's eyes keep rolling up in his head, only partly
from pain.
Unless he actually had a lit gasper going, Calvin Thrust always has this way of being only technically wherever he was. There
was always this air of imminent departure about him, like a man whose beeper was about to sound. It's like a lit gasper was
psychic ballast for him or something. Everything he said to Gately seemed like it was going to be the last thing he said right
before he looked at his watch and slapped his forehead and left.
Thrust said whatever that Nuck that the residents allege shot him shot him with was serious ordnance, because there'd been
bits of Gately's shoulder and bowling shirt all over the complex's little street. Thrust pointed at the huge bandage and asked
whether they'd talked to Gately yet about was he going to get to keep what was left of the mutilated shoulder and arm. Gately
found that the only audible sound he could make sounded like a run-over kitten. Thrust mentioned that Danielle S.'d been over to
Mass Rehab with Burt F.S. and had reported how they were doing miraculous things with prosfeces these days. Gately's eyes were
rolling around in his head and he was making pathetic little scared aspirated sounds as he pictured himself with a hook and parrot
and patch making piratical 'Arr Matey' sounds from the AA podium. He felt a terrible certainty that the whole nerve-assembly
network that connected the human voice-box to the human mind and let somebody ask for crucial legal and medical feedback
must run through the right human shoulder. All kinds of fucking shunts and crazy interconnections with nerves, he knew. He
imagined himself with one of those solar-cell electric shaver voice-box prosfeces he has to hold up to his throat (maybe with his
hook), trying to Carry the Message with it from the podium, sounding like an automatic teller or ROM-audio interface. Gately
wanted to know what day the next day was and whether any of Lenz's Nucks had been demapped, and what the official capacity
of the guy was in the hat who'd been sitting just outside the door to the room either last night or the night before, his hat's shadow
cast in a kind of parallelogram across the open doorway, and if the guy was still there, assuming the sight of the guy's hatted
shadow had been valid and not phantasmic, and he wondered how they went about cuffing you if one of your arms' shoulders was
mutilated and the size of your head. If Gately took anything deeper than a half-breath, a mind-bending sheet of pain goes down his
right side. He even breathed like a sick kitten, more like throbbing than breathing. Thrust said Hester Thrale had apparently 
disappeared sometime during the freakas and never came back. Gately could remember her running screaming off into the urban
night. Thrust said her Alfa Romeo got towed the next a.m. right along with Lenz's bum Duster, and her stuff's been duly bagged
and is on the porch and everything familiar like that. Thrust said they found this mysteriously huge stash of high-quality Irish
Luggage during the Staff's search of Lenz's room, and the House looks to be fixed for trash- and eviction-bags for the next fiscal
year. Discharged residents' bagged possessions stay on the porch for three days, and Gately's trying to calculate the present date
from this fact. Thrust says Emil Minty got a Full House Restriction for getting observed removing one of Hester Thrale's
undergarments from her bag on the porch, for reasons nobody much wants to speculate about. Kate Gom-pert and Ruth van Cleve
supposedly went to hit an NA meeting in Inman Square and got supposedly mugged and separated, and then only Ruth van Cleve
showed up back at the House, and Pat's sworn out a P.C. warrant for Gompert because of the girl's other psych and suicide issues.
Gately discovers he doesn't even all that much care whether anybody thought to call Stavros L. at the Shattuck about Gately's day
job. Thrust smoothed his hair back and said what else let's see. Johnette Foltz is so far covering Gately's shifts and said to say he's
in her prayers. Chandler Foss finished out his nine months and graduated but came back the next morning and hung around for
Morning Meditation, which has to be a good sign sobriety-wise for the old Chandulator. Jennifer Belbin did get indicted on the
bad-check issue up in Wellfleet Circuit Court, but they're going to let her finish out her residency at the House before anything
goes to trial, which her P.D. said graduating the House is guaranteed to get her bit cut in at least half. The Asst. Director had gone
up to court with Belbin on her own time. Doony Glynn's still laid up with the diveritis thing, and can be neither coaxed nor threatened out of his fetal position in bed, and the House Manager's trying to breastwork through the red tape at Health to get them to
OK him admission to St. E.'s even though he's got insurance fraud on his yellow sheet, part of his own past-wreckage. A guy that
had gone through the House back when Thrust did and had stayed sober in AA for four solid years had suddenly out of nowhere
slipped up and took The First Drink the same day as the Lenz freakas, and predictably ended getting totally shitfaced, and went
and fell off the end of the Fort Point pier — like literally took a long walk on a short pier, apparently — and sank like a rock, and
the memorial service is today, which is why Thrust is going to have to take off in a second here, he says. The new kid Tingley's
coming out of the linen closet for up to an hour at a time and is taking solid food and Johnette's quit lobbying to have the kid sent
over to Met State. The even newer new guy now that's come in to take Chandler Foss's spot's name is Dave K. and is one grim
stor
is whole
hum
ility and sex before they can be put out for the residents, and the residents are all
bitch
y to behold, Thrust assures him, a junior executive guy at ATHSCME Air Displacement, an upscale guy with a picket house
and kids and a worried wife with tall hair, who this Dave K.'s bottom was he drank half a liter of Cuerva at some ATHSCME
Interdependence Day office party and everything like that and got in some insane drunken limbo-dance challenge with a rival
executive and tried to like limbo under a desk or a chair or something insanely low, and got his spine all fucked up in a limbolock, maybe permanently: so the newest new guy scuttles around the Ennet House living room like a crab, his scalp brushing the
floor and his knees trembling with effort. Danielle S.
thinks Burt F.S. might have batorial ammonia or some kind of chronic lung thing, and Geoff D.'s trying to get the other
residents to sign a petition to get Burt barred from the kitchen and dining room because Burt can't cover his mouth when he
coughs, understandably. Thrust says Clenette H. and Yolanda W. are taking meals in their room and are under orders not to come
down or go near any windows, because of what happened to the map of the Nuck they allegedly stomped and everything like that.
Gately mews and blinks like mad. Thrust says everybody's being real supportive of Jenny B. and encouraging her to turn the
Wellfleet indictment over to her Higher Power. The Shed staff are still rolling the catatonic lady's wheelchair over from the Shed
to the House on scheduled a.m.'s, and Thrust says Johnette had to write up Minty and Diehl for putting one of those gag-arrows
that are curved in the middle and look like there's an arrow through your head over the catatonic lady's paralyzed head yesterday
and leaving her slumped by the TP like that all day. Plus Thrale's panties; so suddenly in twelve hours Minty's just one more
offense away from getting the Shoe, which Thrust is already personally shining the tip of his very sharpest shoe, in hopes. The
biggest issue at the House Bitch and Complaint meeting was that earlier this week it turns out Clenette H. had brung in th
ongous shitload of cartridges she said they were getting ready to throw in the dumpster up at the swank tennis school up the
hill she works at, and she promoted them and hauled them down to the House, and the residents all have a wild hair because Pat
says Staff has to preview the cartridges for suitab
ing that this'll take forever and it's just the fucking Staff hoarding the new entertainment when the House's TP's just about on
its hands and knees in the entertainment desert starving for new entertainment. McDade bitched at the meeting that if he had to
watch Nightmare on Elm Street XXII: The Senescence one more time he was going to take a brody off the House's roof.
Plus Thrust says Bruce Green hasn't shared word one to Staff about his feelings about anything to do with Lenz or Gately's
embryoglio; that he just sits around waiting for somebody to read his mind; that his roommates have complained that he thrashes
and shouts about nuts and cigars in his sleep.
Calvin Thrust, four years sober, straddling the backwards chair, keeps inclining himself ever more forward in the posture of a
man who's at any moment going to push up off out of the chair and leave. He reports how something deep in the previously
hopelessly arrogant-seeming 'Tiny' Ewell seems like it's broken and melted, spiritually speaking: the guy shaved off his Kentucky
Chicken beard, was heard weeping in the 5-Man head, and was observed by Johnette taking out the kitchen trash in secret even
though his Chore this week was Office Windows. Thrust had discovered fine dining in sobriety, and has the beginning of chins.
His hair is slicked back with odorless stuff at all times, and he has a more or less permanent sore on his upper lip. Gately for some
reason keeps imagining Joelle van Dyne dressed as Madame Psychosis sitting in a plain chair in the 3-Woman room eating a
peach and looking out the open window at the crucifix atop St. Elizabeth's Hospital's prolix roof. The crucifix isn't big, but it's up
so high it's visible from most anywhere in Enfield-Brighton. Sees Joelle delicately pulling the veil out to get the peach up under it.
Thrust says Charlotte Treat's T-cell count is down. She's needlepointing Gately some kind of GET BETTER A DAY AT A TIME
ASSUMING THAT'S GOD'S WILL doily, but it's been slow going, because Treat's developed some kind of goopy Virus-related
eye infection that's got her bumping into walls, and her counselor Maureen N. at the Staff Meeting wanted Pat to consider having
her transferred to an HIV halfway house up in Everett that's got some recovering addicts in there. Morris Hanley, speaking of Tcells, has baked some cream-cheese brownies for Gately as a nurturing gesture, but then the twats at the Trauma Wing's nurses'
station, like, impounded them from Thrust when he came up, but he'd had a couple on the way over in the bloodstained 'Vette and
he could assure Don that Hanley's brownies were worth killing a loved one for and everything like that. Gately feels a sudden rush 
of anxiety over the issue of who's cooking the House supper in his absence, like will they know to put corn flakes in the meat loaf,
for texture. He finds Thrust insufferable and wishes he'd just fucking go already, but has to admit he's less conscious of the
horrific pain when somebody's there, but that that's mostly because the drowned panic of not being able to ask questions or have
any input into what somebody's saying is so awful it sort of dwarfs the pain. Thrust puts his unlit gasper behind his ear where
Gately predicts hair-tonic will render it unsmokable, looks conspiratorially around back over each shoulder, leans in so his face is
visible between two bars of the bed's side-railing, and bathes Gately's face in old eggs and smoke as he leans in and quietly says
that Gately'll be psyched to hear that all the residents that were at the embryoglio — except Lenz and Thrale and the ones that
aren't in a legal position to step forward and like that, he says — he says they've most of them all come forward and filed
depositions, that the BPD's Finest, plus some rather weirder Federal guys with goofy-looking archaic crew cuts, probably involved
because of the like inter-O.N.A.N. element of the Nucks — here Gately's big heart skips and sinks — have come around and been
voluntarily admitted inside, on Pat's written OK, and they took depositions, which is like testifying on paper, and the depositions
look to be basically 110% behind Don Gately and support a justifiable señorio of either self-defense or Lenz-defense. Several
testimonies indicate the Nucks gave the impression of being under the influence of aggressive-type Substances. The single biggest
problem right now, Thrust says Pat says, is the missing alleged Item. As in the .44 Item Gately was plugged with's whereabouts
are missing, Thrust says. The last resident to depose to seeing it was Green, who says he took it away from the Nuck the nigger
girls stomped, whereupon he, Green, says he dropped it on the lawn. Whereupon it liked vanished from legal view. Thrust says
that in his legal view the Item's the thing that makes the difference between a señorio of ironshod self-defense and one of just
maybe a huge fucking beef in which Gately got mysteriously plugged at some indefinite point while rearranging a couple
Canadian maps with his huge bare hands. Gately's heart is now somewhere around his bare hairy shins, at the mention of Federal
crewcuts. His attempted plea for Thrust to come out and say did he actually kill anybody did he sounds like that crushed kitten
again. The pain of the terror is past standing, and it helps him surrender and quit trying, and he relaxes his legs and decides Thrust
gets to not say whatever he wants, that the reality right this second is that he's mute and powerless over Thrust. Thrust leans in and
hugs the back of the chair and says Clenette Henderson and Yolanda Willis are on Full House Restriction in their room to keep
them from coming down and maybe fucking themselves over legally in a deposition. Because the Nuck with the plaid hat with the
ear-flaps and the missing alleged Item had expired on the spot from a spike heel through the right eye, as he was getting the shit
stomped out of him as only female niggers can stomp, and everything like that, and Yolanda Willis had very shrewdly left the
shoe and spike heel right there protruding from the guy's map with her toe-prints all over its insides — meaning presumably the
shoe's — so producing the Item was going to be in her strong legal interests too, as well, as Thrust analyzes the legal landscape.
Thrust says Pat's limped around and appealed to every single resident personally, and everybody's submitted more or less voluntaril
aw when he talks like
cuto
y to a room- and property-search and everything like that, and still no large-caliber Item has turned up, though Nell Gunther's
hidden Oriental-knife collection sure made an impression. Thrust predicts it'll be strongly in Gately's lego-judicial interest and
everything like that to ransack his brain and mind for where and with who he last saw the alleged gun. The sun was starting to go
down over the West Newton hills through the double-sealed windows, now, trembling slightly, and the windowlight against the
far wall was ruddled and bloody. The heater vents kept making a sound like a distant parent gently shushing. When it starts to get
dark out is when the ceiling breathes. And everything like that.
Sometime later, at night, backlit by the light of the hall, is the figure of resident Geoffrey Day, sitting where Thrust had sat
but with the chair turned around the right way and with his legs primly crossed, eating a cream-cheese brownie he reports they're
passing out free to people down at the nurses' station. Day says Johnette F. is certainly no Don Gately in the culinary arena. She
seems to enjoy some sort of collusive kickback-type relationship with the manufacturers of Spam, Day says, is his theory. It might
be a whole different night. The nighttime ceiling no longer bulges convexly with Gately's own shallow breaths, and the improved
sounds he can now make have evolved from feline to more like bovine. But his right side hurts so bad he can barely hear. It's gone
from a fiery pain to cold dead deep tight pain with a queer flavor of emotional loss to it. From deep inside he can hear the pain
laughing at the 90 mg. of Toradol-IM they've got in the I.V. drip. As with Ewell, when Gately comes up out of sleep there's no
way to tell how long Day's been there, or quite why. Day is plowing through a long story it seems about his relationship growing
up with his younger brother. Gately has a hard time imagining Day being blood-related to anybody. Day says his brother was
developmentally challenged in some way. He had enormous red wet loose lips and wore eyeglasses so thick his eyes had looked
like an ant's eyes, growing up. Part of his challenge was that Day's brother had had a crippling phobic fear of leaves, apparently.
As in ordinary leaves, from trees. Day's been sucker-punched by an emergent sober memory of how he used to emotionally abuse
his little brother simply by threatening to touch him with a leaf. Day has this way of holding his cheek and j
ut photos of the late J. Benny. It's not at all evident why Day's choosing to share this stuff with a mute and feverishly
semiconscious Gately. It seems like Don G.'s gotten way more popular as somebody to talk to since he's become effectively
paralyzed and mute. The ceiling's behaving itself, but in the room's gray Gately could still make out a tallly insubstantial ghostish
figure appearing and disappearing in the mist of his vision's periphery. There was some creepy relationship between the figure's
postures and the passing nurses' noiseless glide. This figure pretty definitely seemed to prefer night to day, though by this point
Gately could well have been asleep again, as Day began to describe different species of hand-held leaves.
A recurring bad dream Gately's had ever since he gave up and Came In and got straight consists simply of a tiny acne-scarred
Oriental woman looking down at him. Nothing else happens; she's just looking down at Gately. Her acne scars aren't even all that
bad. The thing is that she's tiny. She's one of those tiny little anonymous Oriental women you see all over metro Boston, always
seeming to be carrying multiple shopping bags. But in the recurring dream she's looking down at him, from his perspective he's
looking up and she's looking down, which means Gately in the dream is either (a) lying down on his back looking vulnerably up at
her or (b) is himself even more incredibly tiny than the woman. Involved in the dream also in a menacing way somehow is a dog
standing rigidly in the distance past the Oriental woman, motionless and rigid, in profile, standing there still and straight as a toy.
The Oriental woman has no particular expression and never says anything, though her face's scars have a certain elusive pattern to
them that seems like it wants to mean something. When Gately opens his eyes again Geoffrey Day's gone, and his hospital bed
with its railings and I.V. bottles on stands has been moved way over so that it's right up next to the bed of whoever the person in
the room's other bed is, so it's like Gately and this unknown patient are a sexless old couple sleeping together but in separate beds, 
and Gately's mouth goes oval and his eyes bug out with horror, and his effort at yelling hurts enough to wake him up, and his
eyelids shoot up and rattle like old windowshades, and his hospital bed's back where it's always been, and a nurse is giving the
anonymous guy in the other bed some sort of late-night-type shot you could tell was narcotic, and the patient, who has a very deep
voice, is crying. Then somewhere later in the couple of hours before midnight's parking-switch symphony on Washington St.
outside is an unpleasantly detailed dream where the ghostish figure that's been flickering in and out of sight around the room
finally stays in one spot long enough for Gately to really check him out. In the dream it's the figure of a very tall sunken-chested
man in black-frame glasses and a sweatshirt with old stained chinos, leaning back sort of casually or else morosely slumped,
resting its tailbone against the window sill's ventilator's whispering grille, with its long arms hanging at its sides and its ankles
casually crossed so that Gately can even see the detail that the ghostly chinos aren't long enough for its height, they're the kind
kids used to call 'Highwa-ters' in Gately's childhood — a couple of Bimmy Gately's savager pals would corner some pencilnecked kid in those-type too-short trousers on the playground and go like 'Yo little brother where's the fucking flood?' and then lay
the kid out with a head-slap or chest-shove so the inevitable violin went skittering ass-over-teakettle across the blacktop, in its
case. The creepy ghostish figure's arm sometimes, like, vanishes and then reappears at the bridge of its nose, pushing the glasses
up in a weary unconscious morose gesture, just like those kids in the High water pants on the playground always did in a weak
morose way that always somehow made Gately himself want to shove them savagely in the chest. Gately in the dream
experienced a painful adrenal flash of remorse and entertained the possibility that the figure represented one of the North Shore
violin-playing kids he'd never kept his savage pals from abusing, now come in an adult state when Gately was vulnerable and
mute, to exact some kind of payback. The ghostly figure shrugged its thin shoulders and said But no, it was nothing of the sort, it
was just a plain old wraith, one without any sort of grudge or agenda, just a generic garden-variety wraith. Gately sarcastically in
the dream thought that Oh well then if it was just a garden-variety wraith, is all, geez what a fucking relief. The wraith-figure
smiled apologetically and shrugged, shifting its tailbone on the whispering grille a bit. There was an odd quality to its movements
in the dream: they were of regulation speed, the movements, but they seemed oddly segmented and deliberate, as if more effort
than necessary were going into them somehow. Then Gately considered that who knew what was necessary or normal for a selfproclaimed generic wraith in a pain-and-fever dream. Then he considered that this was the only dream he could recall where even
in the dream he knew that it was a dream, much less lay there considering the fact that he was considering the up-front dream
quality of the dream he was dreaming. It quickly got so multilevelled and confusing that his eyes rolled back in his head. The
wraith made a weary morose gesture as if not wanting to bother to get into any sort of confusing dream-v.-real controversies. The
wraith said Gately might as well stop trying to figure it out and just capitalize on its presence, the wraith's presence in the room or
dream, whatever, because Gately, if he'd bothered to notice and appreciate it, at least didn't have to speak out loud to be able to
interface with the wraith-figure; and also the wraith-figure said it was by the way requiring incredible patience and fortitude for
him (the wraith) to stay in one position long enough for Gately to really see him and interface with him, and the wraith was
making no promises about how many more months he (the wraith) could keep it up, since fortitude had never seemed to have been
his long suit. The city's aggregate nighttime lights lightened the sky through the room's window to the same dark rose shade you
see when you close your eyes, adding to the dream-of-dream-type ambiguity. Gately in the dream tried the test of pretending to
lose consciousness so the wraith would go away, and then somewhere during the pretense lost consciousness and really did sleep,
for a bit, in the dream, because the tiny pocked Oriental woman was back and looking wordlessly down at him, plus the creepy
rigid dog. And then the sedated patient in the next bed woke Gately back up, in the original dream, with some kind of narcotized
gurgle or snore, and the so-called wraith-figure was still there and visible, only now it was standing on top of the railing at the side
of Gately's bed, looking down at him now from a towering railing-plus-original-tallness height, having to exaggerate his
shoulders' natural slump in order to clear the ceiling. Gately got a clear view of an impressive thatch of nostril-hair, looking up
into the wraith's nostrils, and also a clear lateral look at the wraith's skinny ankles' like ankle-bones bulging in brown socks below
the cuffs of the Highwater chinos. As much as his shoulder, calf, toe, and whole right side were hurting, it occurred to Gately that
you don't normally think of wraiths or ghost -ish phantasms as being tall or short, or having bad posture, or wearing certaincolored socks. Much less having anything as specific as extrusive nostril-hair. There was a degree of, what, specificness about this
figure in this dream that Gately found troubling. Much less having the unpleasant old-Oriental-woman dream inside this dream
right here. He began to wish again that he could call out for assistance or to wake himself up. But now not even moos or mews
would come, all he could seem to do was pant real hard, as if the air was like totally missing his vocal box, or like his vocal box
was totally demapped from nerve-damage in his shoulder and now just sort of hung there all withered and dry like an old hornet
nest while air rushed out Gately's throat all around it. His throat still didn't feel right. It was exactly the suffocated speechlessness
in dreams, nightmares, Gately realized. This was both terrifying and reassuring, somehow. Evidence for the dream-element and so
on and so forth. The wraith was looking down at him and nodding sympathetically. The wraith could empathize totally, it said.
The wraith said Even a garden-variety wraith could move at the speed of quanta and be anywhere anytime and hear in symphonic
toto the thoughts of animate men, but it couldn't ordinarily affect anybody or anything solid, and it could never speak right to
anybody, a wraith had no out-loud voice of its own, and had to use somebody's like internal brain-voice if it wanted to try to
communicate something, which was why thoughts and insights that were coming from some wraith always just sound like your
own thoughts, from inside your own head, if a wraith's trying to interface with you. The wraith says By way of illustration
consider phenomena like intuition or inspiration or hunches, or when someone for instance says 'a little voice inside' was telling
them such-and-such on an intuitive basis. Gately can now take no more than a third of a normal breath without wanting to throw
up from the pain. The wraith was pushing his glasses up and saying Besides, it took incredible discipline and fortitude and patient
effort to stay stock-still in one place for long enough for an animate man actually to see and be in any way affected by a wraith,
and very few wraiths had anything important enough to interface about to be willing to stand still for this kind of time, preferring
ordinarily to whiz around at the invisible speed of quanta. The wraith says It doesn't really matter whether Gately knows what the
term quanta means. He says Wraiths by and large exist (putting his arms out slowly and making little quotation-mark fingerwiggles as he said exist) in a totally different Heisenbergian dimension of rate-change and time-passage. As an example, he goes
on, normal animate men's actions and motions look, to a wraith, to be occurring at about the rate a clock's hour-hand moves, and
are just about as interesting to look at. Gately was thinking for fuck's sake what was this, now even in unpleasant fever-dreams 
now somebody else is going to tell him their troubles now that Gately can't get away or dialogue back with anything about his
own experience. He normally couldn't ever get Ewell or Day to sit down for any kind of real or honest mutual sharing, and now
that he's totally mute and inert and passive all of a sudden everybody seems to view him as a sympathetic ear, or not even a
sympathetic real ear, more like a wooden carving or statue of an ear. An empty confessional booth. Don G. as huge empty
confessional booth. The wraith disappears and instantly reappears in a far corner of the room, waving Hi at him. It was slightly
reminiscent of 'Bewitched' reruns from Gately's toddlerhood. The wraith disappears again and again just as instantly reappears,
now holding one of Gately's Ennet House basement flea-baggy Staff bedroom's cut-out-and-Scotch-taped celebrity photos, this
one an old one of U.S. Head of State Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner, on stage, wearing velour, twirling a mike, from back in the
days before he went to a copper-colored toupee, when he used a strigil instead of a UV flash-booth and was just a Vegas crooner.
Again the wraith disappears and instantly reappears holding a can of Coke, with good old Coke's distinctive interwoven red and
white French curls on it but alien unfamiliar Oriental-type writing on it instead of the good old words Coca-Cola and Coke. The
unfamiliar script on the Coke can is maybe the whole dream's worst moment. The wraith walks jerkily and overdeliberately across
the floor and then up a wall, occasionally disappearing and then reappearing, sort of fluttering mistily, and ends up standing
upside-down on the hospital room's drop ceiling, directly over Gately, and holds one knee to its sunken chest and starts doing
what Gately would know were pirouettes if he'd ever once been exposed to ballet, pirouetting faster and faster and then so fast the
wraith's nothing but a long stalk of sweatshirt-and-Coke-can-colored light that seems to extrude from the ceiling; and then, in a
moment that rivals the Coke-can moment for unpleasantness, into Gately's personal mind, in Gately's own brain-voice but with
roaring and unwilled force, comes the term PIROUETTE, in caps, which term Gately knows for a fact he doesn't have any idea
what it means and no reason to be thinking it with roaring force, so the sensation is not only creepy but somehow violating, a sort
of lexical rape. Gately begins to consider this hopefully nonrecurring dream even more unpleasant than the tiny-pocked-Orientalwoman dream, overall. Other terms and words Gately knows he doesn't know from a divot in the sod now come crashing through
his head with the same ghastly intrusive force, e.g. ACCIAC-CATURA and ALEMBIC, LATRODECTUS MACTANS and
NEUTRAL DENSITY POINT, CHIAROSCURO and PROPRIOCEPTION and TESTUDO and ANNULATE and BRICOLAGE
and CATALEPT and GERRYMANDER and SCOPOPHILIA and LAERTES — and all of a sudden it occurs to Gately the
aforethought EXTRUDING, STRIGIL and LEXICAL themselves — and LORDOSIS and IMPOST and SINISTRAL and
MENISCUS and CHRONAXY and POOR YORICK and LUCULUS and CERISE MONTCLAIR and then D£ SICA NEOREAL CRANE DOLLY and CIRCUMAMBIENTFOUNDDRAMALEVIRATEMAR-RIAGE and then more lexical terms and
words speeding up to chipmunkish and then HELIATED and then all the way up to a sound like a mosquito on speed, and Gately
tries to clutch both his temples with one hand and scream, but nothing comes out. When the wraith reappears, it's seated way up
behind him where Gately has to let his eyes roll way back in his head to see him, and it turns out Gately's heart is being medically
monitored and the wraith is seated up on the heart monitor in a strange cross-legged posture with his pantcuffs pulled up so high
Gately could see the actual skinny hairless above-the-sock skin of the wraith's ankles, glowing a bit in the spilled light of the
Trauma Wing hall. The Oriental can of Coke now rests on Gately's broad flat forehead. It's cold and smells a little funny, like low
tide, the can. Now footsteps and the sound of bubblegum in the hall. An orderly shines a flashlight in and plays it over Gately and
the narcotized roommate and environs, and makes marks on a clipboard while blowing a small orange bubble. It's not like the light
passes through the wraith or anything dramatic — the wraith simply disappears the instant the light hits the heart monitor and
reappears the instant it moves away. Gately's unpleasant dreams definitely don't normally include specific gum-color and intense
physical discomfort and invasions of lexical terms he doesn't know from shinola. Gately begins to conclude it's not impossible that
the garden-variety wraith on the heart monitor, though not conventionally real, could be a sort of epiphanyish visitation from
Gately's personally confused understanding of God, a Higher Power or something, maybe sort of like the legendary Pulsing Blue
Light that AA founder Bill W. historically saw during his last detox, that turned out to be God telling him how to stay sober via
starting AA and Carrying The Message. The wraith smiles sadly and says something like Don't we both wish, young sir. Gately's
forehead wrinkling as his eyes keep rolling up makes the foreign can wobble coldly: of course there's also the possibility that the
tall slumped extremely fast wraith might represent the Sergeant at Arms, the Disease, exploiting the loose security of Gately's
fever-addled mind, getting ready to fuck with his motives and persuade him to accept Demerol just once, just one last time, for the
totally legitimate medical pain. Gately lets himself wonder what it would be like, able to quantum off anyplace instantly and stand
on ceilings and probably burgle like no burglar'd ever dreamed of, but not able to really affect anything or interface with anybody,
having nobody know you're there, having people's normal rushed daily lives look like the movements of planets and suns, having
to sit patiently very still in one place for a long time even to have some poor addled son of a bitch even be willing to entertain
your maybe being there. It'd be real free-seeming, but incredibly lonely, he imagines. Gately knows a thing or two about
loneliness, he feels. Does wraith mean like a ghost, as in dead? Is this a message from a Higher Power about sobriety and death?
What would it be like to try and talk and have the person think it was just their own mind talking? Gately could maybe Identify, to
an extent, he decides. This is the only time he's ever been struck dumb except for a brief but nasty bout of pleuritic laryngitis he'd
had when he was twenty-four and sleeping on the cold beach up in Gloucester, and he doesn't like it a bit, the being struck dumb.
It's like some combination of invisibility and being buried alive, in terms of the feeling. It's like being strangled somewhere deeper
inside you than your neck. Gately imagines himself with a piratical hook, unable to speak on Commitments because he can only
gurgle and pant, doomed to an AA life of ashtrays and urns. the wraith reaches down and removes the can of un-American tonic
from Gately's forehead and assures Gately he can more than Identify with an animate man's feelings of communicative impotence
and mute strangulation. Gately's thoughts become agitated as he tries to yell mentally that he never said a fucking thing about
impotence. He's got a way clearer and more direct view of the wraith's extreme nostril-hair situation than he'd prefer to. The
wraith hefts the can absently and says age twenty-eight seems old enough for Gately to remember U.S. broadcast television's old
network situation comedies of the B.S. '80s and '90s, probably. Gately has to smile at the wraith's cluelessness: Gately's after all a
fucking drug addict, and a drug addict's second most meaningful relationship is always with his domestic entertainment unit,
TV/VCR or HDTP. A drug addict's maybe the only human species whose own personal vision has a Vertical Hold, for Christ's
sake, he thinks. And Gately, even in recovery, can still summon great verbatim chunks not only of drug-addicted adolescence's
'Seinfeld' and 'Ren and Stimpy' and 'Oo Is 'E When 'E's at 'Ome' and 'Exposed Northerners' but also the syndicated 'Bewitched' and 
'Hazel' and ubiquitous 'M*A*S*H' he grew to monstrous childhood size in front of, and especially the hometown ensemble-casted
'Cheers!,' both the late-network version with the stacked brunette and the syndicated older ones with the titless blond, which
Gately even after the switch over to InterLace and HDTP dissemination felt like he had a special personal relationship with
'Cheers!,' not only because everybody on the show always had a cold foamer in hand, just like in real life, but because Gately's big
childhood claim to recognition had been his eerie resemblance to the huge neckless simian-browed accountant Nom who more or
less seemed to live at the bar, and was unkind but not cruel, and drank foamer after foamer without once hitting anybody's Mom
or pitching over sideways and passing out in vomit somebody else had to clean up, and who'd looked — right down to the massive
square head and Neanderthal brow and paddle-sized thumbs — eerily like the child D. W. ('Bim') Gately, hulking and neckless
and shy, riding his broom handle, Sir Osis of Thuliver. And the wraith on the heart monitor looks pensively down at Gately from
upside-down and asks does Gately remember the myriad thespian extras on for example his beloved 'Cheers!,' not the center-stage
Sam and Carla and Nom, but the nameless patrons always at tables, filling out the bar's crowd, concessions to realism, always
relegated to back- and foreground; and always having utterly silent conversations: their faces would animate and mouths move
realistically, but without sound; only the name-stars at the bar itself could audibilize. The wraith says these fractional actors,
human scenery, could be seen (but not heard) in most pieces of filmed entertainment. And Gately remembers them, the extras in
all public scenes, especially like bar and restaurant scenes, or rather remembers how he doesn't quite remember them, how it never
struck his addled mind as in fact surreal that their mouths moved but nothing emerged, and what a miserable fucking bottom-rung
job that must be for an actor, to be sort of human furniture, figurants the wraith says they're called, these surreally mute
background presences whose presence really revealed that the camera, like any eye, has a perceptual corner, a triage of who's
important enough to be seen and heard v. just seen. A term from ballet, originally, figurant, the wraith explains. The wraith pushes
his glasses up in the vaguely snivelling way of a kid that's just got slapped around on the playground and says he personally spent
the vast bulk of his own former animate life as pretty much a figurant, furniture at the periphery of the very eyes closest to him, it
turned out, and that it's one heck of a crummy way to try to live. Gately, whose increasing self-pity leaves little room or patience
for anybody else's self-pity, tries to lift his left hand and wiggle his pinkie to indicate the world's smallest viola playing the theme
from The Sorrow and the Pity, but even moving his left arm makes him almost faint. And either the wraith is saying or Gately is
realizing that you can't appreciate the dramatic pathos of a figurant until you realize how completely trapped and encaged he is in
his mute peripheral status, because like say for example if one of 'Cheers!' 's bar's figurants suddenly decided he couldn't take it
any more and stood up and started shouting and gesturing around wildly in a bid for attention and nonperipheral status on the
show, Gately realizes, all that would happen is that one of the audibilizing 'name' stars of the show would bolt over from stagecenter and apply restraints or the Heineken Maneuver or CPR, figuring the silent gesturing figurant was choking on a beer-nut or
something, and that then the whole rest of that episode of 'Cheers!' would be about jokes about the name star's life-saving heroics,
or else his fuck-up in applying the Heineken Maneuver to somebody who wasn't choking on a nut. No way for a figurant to win.
No possible voice or focus for the encaged figurant. Gately speculates briefly about the suicide statistics for bottom-rung actors.
The wraith disappears and then reappears in the chair by the bed's railing, leaning forward with its chin on its hands on the railing
in what Gately's coming to regard as the classic tell-your-troubles-to-the-trauma-patient-that-can't-interrupt-or-get-away position.
The wraith says that he himself, the wraith, when animate, had dabbled in filmed entertainments, as in making them, cartridges,
for Gately's info to either believe or not, and but in the entertainments the wraith himself made, he says he goddamn bloody well
made sure that either the whole entertainment was silent or else if it wasn't silent that you could bloody well hear every single
performer's voice, no matter how far out on the cinematographic or narrative periphery they were; and that it wasn't just the selfconscious overlapping dialogue of a poseur like Schwulst or Altman, i.e. it wasn't just the crafted imitation of aural chaos: it was
real life's real egalitarian babble of figurantless crowds, of the animate world's real agora, the babble342332 of crowds every
member of which was the central and articulate protagonist of his own entertainment. It occurs to Gately he's never had any sort of
dream where somebody says anything like vast bulk, much less agora, which Gately interprets as a kind of expensive sweater.
Which was why, the wraith is continuing, the complete unfiguranted egalitarian aural realism was why party-line entertainmentcritics always complained that the wraith's entertainments' public-area scenes were always incredibly dull and self-conscious and
irritating, that they could never hear the really meaningful central narrative conversations for all the unaltered babble of the
peripheral crowd, which they assumed the babble(7babel) was some self-conscious viewer-hostile heavy-art directorial pose,
instead of radical realism. The wraith's grim smile almost disappears before it appears. Gately's slight tight smile back is the way
you can always tell he's not really listening. He's remembering that he used to pretend to himself that the unviolent and sarcastic
accountant Nom on 'Cheers!' was Gately's own organic father, straining to hold young Bímmy on his lap and letting him draw
finger-pictures in the condensation-rings on the bartop, and when he was pissed off at Gately's mother being sarcastic and witty
instead of getting her down and administering horribly careful U.S.-Navy-brig-type beatings that hurt like hell but would never
bruise or show. The can of foreign Coke has left a ring on his forehead that's colder than the feverish skin around it, and Gately
tries to concentrate on the cold of the ring instead of the dead cold total ache on his whole right side — DEXTRAL — or the sober
memory of his mother Mrs. Gately's ex-significant other, the little-eyed former M.P. in khaki skivvies hunched drunk over his
notebook's record of his Heinekens for the day, his tongue in the corner of his mouth and his eyes scrunched as he tries to see a
unitary enough notebook to write in, Gately's mother on the floor trying to crawl off toward the lockable bathroom quietly enough
so the M.P. wouldn't notice her again. The wraith says Just to give Gately an idea, he, the wraith, in order to appear as visible and
interface with him, Gately, he, the wraith, has been sitting, still as a root, in the chair by Gately's bedside for the wraith-equivalent
of three weeks, which Gately can't even imagine. It occurs to Gately that none of the people that've dropped by to tell him their
troubles has bothered to say how many days he's even been in the Trauma Wing now, or what day it's going to be when the sun
comes up, and so Gately has no idea how long he's gone now without an AA meeting. Gately wishes his sponsor Ferocious
Francis G. would hobble by instead of Ennet Staff that want to talk about prosfeces and residents who come just to share remembered wreckage with somebody they don't even think can even hear them, sort of the way a little kid confides to a dog. He doesn't
let himself even contemplate why no Finest or federally crew-cut guys have visited yet, if he's been in here a while, if they've been
all over the House like hamsters on wheat already, as Thrust had said. The seated shadow of somebody in a hat is still there out
there in the hall, though if the whole interlude was a dream it isn't and has never been there, Gately realizes, squinting a little to try 
to make sure the shadow is the shadow of a hat and not a fire-extinguisher box on the hall wall or something. The wraith excuses
himself and disappears but then reappears two slow blinks later, back in the same position. 'That was worth an Excuse Me?'
Gately thinks at the wraith dryly, almost laughing. The sheet of pain from the near-laugh send his eyes way up back up in his
head. The chassis of the heart monitor doesn't look broad enough to support even a wraith's ass. The heart monitor's the silent
kind. It's got the moving white line with big speed bumps moving across it for Gately's pulse, but it doesn't make the sterile
beeping that old hospital-drama monitors did. Patients in hospital-dramas were frequently unconscious figurants, Gately reflects.
The wraith says he'd just paid a small quantumish call to the old spotless Brighton two-decker of one Ferocious Francis Gehaney,
and from the way the old Crocodile's shaving and putting on a clean white T-shirt, the wraith says, he predicts F.F. will be visiting
the Trauma Wing soon to offer Gately unconditional empathy and fellowship and acerbic Crocodilian counsel. Unless this was
just Gately himself thinking this up to keep a stiff upper attitude, Gately thinks. The wraith pushes his glasses up sadly. You never
think of a wraith looking sad or unsad, but this dream-wraith displays the whole affective range. Gately can hear the horns and
raised voices and U-turn squeals way down below on Wash, that indicate it's around OOOOh., the switching hour. He wonders
what something as brief as a car-horn-honk sounds like to a figurant that has to sit still for three weeks to be seen. Wraith, not
figurant, Gately meant, he corrects himself. He's lying here correcting his thoughts like he was talking. He wonders if his brainvoice talks fast enough for the wraith not to have to like tap its foot and look at its watch between words. Are they words if they're
only in your head, though? The wraith blows its nose in a hankie that's visibly seen better epochs and says he, the wraith, when
alive in the world of animate men, had seen his own personal youngest offspring, a son, the one most like him, the one most
marvelous and frightening to him, becoming a figurant, toward the end. His end, not the son's end, the wraith clarifies. Gately
wonders if it offends the wraith when he sometimes refers to it mentally as it. The wraith opens and examines the used hankie just
like an alive person can never help but do and says No horror on earth or elsewhere could equal watching your own offspring open
his m
r family had believed he
(the
oward the end, he'd begun privately to fear that his son was experimenting with Substances.
The
nduce him to open his mouth and come out
— e
 alive in the boy,
to m
-me attitude he's betraying, in the dream.
ess evangelical rabidity about it that had kept his attendance at meetings spotty.
And
outh and have nothing come out. The wraith says it mars the memory of the end of his animate life, this son's retreat to the
periphery of life's frame. The wraith confesses that he had, at one time, blamed the boy's mother for his silence. But what good
does that kind of thing do, he said, making a blurred motion that might have been shrugging. Gately remembers the former Navy
M.P. telling Gately's mother why it was her fault he lost his job at the chowder plant. 'Resentment Is The #l Offender' is another
Boston AA cliche Gately'd started to believe. That blame's a shell-game. Not that he wouldn't mind a private couple of minutes
alone in a doorless room with Randy Lenz, once he was up and capable again, though.
The wraith reappears slumped back in the chair with his weight on his tailbone and his legs crossed in that Erdedyish upscale
way. He says Just imagine the horror of spending your whole itinerant lonely Southwest and West Coast boyhood trying
unsuccessfully to convince your father that you even existed, to do something well enough to be heard and seen but not so well
that you became just a screen for his own (the Dad's) projections of his own failure and self-loathing, failing ever to be really seen,
gesturing wildly through the distilled haze, so that in adulthood you still carried the moist flabby weight of your failure ever to
make him hear you really speak, carried it on through the animate years on your increasingly slumped shoulders — only to find,
near the end, that your very own child had himself become blank, inbent, silent, frightening, mute. I.e. that his son had become
what he (the wraith) had feared as a child he (the wraith) was. Gately's eyes roll up in his head. The boy, who did everything well
and with a natural unslumped grace the wraith himself had always lacked, and whom the wraith had been so terribly eager to see
and hear and let him (the son) know he was seen and heard, the son had become a steadily more and more bidden boy, toward the
wraith's life's end; and no one else in the wraith and boy's nuclear family would see or acknowledge this, the fact that the graceful
and marvelous boy was disappearing right before their eyes. They looked but did not see his invisibility. And they listened but did
not hear the wraith's warning. Gately has that slight tight absent smile again. The wraith says the nuclea
wraith) was unstable and was confusing the boy with his own (the wraith's) boyhood self, or with the wraith's father's father,
the blank wooden man who according to family mythology had 'driven' the wraith's father to 'the bottle' and unrealized potential
and an early cerebral hemorrhage. T
 wraith keeps having to push its glasses up. The wraith says almost bitterly that when he'd stand up and wave his arms for
them all to attend to the fact that his youngest and most promising son was disappearing, they'd thought all his agitation meant
was that he had gone bats from Wild Turkey-intake and needed to try to get sober, again, one more time.
This gets Gately's attention. Here at last could be some sort of point to the unpleasantness and confusion of the dream. 'You
tried to get sober?' he thinks, rolling his eyes over to the wraith. 'More than once, you tried? Was it White-Knuckle?343333 Did
you ever Surrender and Come In?’
The wraith feels along his long jaw and says he spent the whole sober last ninety days of his animate life working tirelessly to
contrive a medium via which he and the muted son could simply converse. To concoct something the gifted boy couldn't simply
master and move on from to a new plateau. Something the boy would love enough to i
ven if it was only to ask for more. Games hadn't done it, professionals hadn't done it, impersonation of professionals hadn't
done it. His last resort: entertainment. Make something so bloody compelling it would reverse thrust on a young self's fall into the
womb of solipsism, an-hedonia, death in life. A magically entertaining toy to dangle at the infant still somewhere
ake its eyes light and toothless mouth open unconsciously, to laugh. To bring him 'out of himself,' as they say. The womb
could be used both ways. A way to say I AM SO VERY, VERY SORRY and have it heard. A life-long dream. The scholars and
Foundations and disseminators never saw that his most serious wish was: to entertain.
Gately's not too agonized and feverish not to recognize gross self-pity when he hears it, wraith or no. As in the slogan 'Poor
Me, Poor Me, Pour Me A Drink.' With all due respect, pretty hard to believe this wraith could stay sober, if he needed to get
sober, with the combination of abstraction and tragically-misunderstood
He'd been sober as a Mennonite quilter for 89 days, at the very tail-end of his life, the wraith avers, now back up on the silent
heart monitor, though Boston AA had a humorl
 he never could stand the vapid cliches and disdain for abstraction. Not to mention the cigarette smoke. The atmosphere of the
meeting rooms had been like a poker game in hell, had been his impression. The wraith stops and says he bets Gately's struggling
to hide his curiosity about whether the wraith succeeded in coming up with a figurant-less entertainment so thoroughly engaging
it'd make even an in-bent figurant of a boy laugh and cry out for more. 
Father-figure-wise, Gately's tried his best these last few sober months to fend off uninvited memories of his own grim
conversations and interchanges with the M.P.
The wraith on the monitor now bends sharply at the waist, way over forward so his face is upside-down only cm. from
Gately's face — the wraith's face is only about half the size of Gately's face, and has no odor — and responds vehemently that No!
No! Any conversation or interchange is better than none at all, to trust him on this, that the worst kind of gut-wrenching
intergenerational interface is better than withdrawal or hidden-ness on either side. The wraith apparently can't tell the difference
between Gately just thinking to himself and Gately using his brain-voice to sort of think at the wraith. His shoulder suddenly
sends up a flare of pain so sickening Gately's afraid he might shit the bed. The wraith gasps and almost falls off the monitor as if
he can totally empathize with the dextral flare. Gately wonders if the wraith has to endure the same pain as Gately in order to hear
his brain-voice and have a conversation with him. Even in a dream, that'd be a higher price than anybody's ever paid to interface
with D. W. Gately. Maybe the pain's supposed to lend credibility to some Diseased argument for Demerol the wraith's going to
make. Gately feels somehow too self-conscious or stupid to ask the wraith if it's here on behalf of the Higher Power or maybe the
Disease, so instead of thinking at the wraith he simply concentrates on pretending to wonder to himself why the wraith is spending
probably months of aggregate wraith-time flitting around a hospital room and making pirouetted demonstrations with croonerphotos and foreign tonic-cans on the ceiling of some drug addict he doesn't know from a rock instead of just quantuming over to
wherever this alleged youngest son is and holding very still for wraith-months and trying to have an interface with the fucking
son. Though maybe thinking he was seeing his late organic dad as a ghost or wraith would drive the youngest son bats, though,
might be the thing. The son didn't exactly sound like the steadiest hand on the old mental joystick as it was, from what the wraith's
shared. Of course this was assuming the mute figurant son even existed, this was assuming this wasn't all some roundabout way of
the Disease starting to talk Gately into succumbing to a shot of Demerol. He tries to concentrate on all this instead of
remembering what Demerol's warm rush of utter well-being felt like, remembering the comfortable sound of the clunk of his chin
against his chest. Or instead of remembering any of his own interchanges with his mother's live-in retired M.P. One of the highest
prices of sobriety was not being able to keep from remembering things you didn't want to remember, see for instance Ewell and
the fraudulent-grandiosity thing from his wie-nieish childhood. The ex-M.P. had referred to small children and toddlers as 'rugrats.' It was not a term of gruff affection. The M.P. had made the toddler Don Gately return empty Heineken bottles to the
neighborhood packy and then haul-ass on back with the bottle-deposits, timing him with a U.S.N.-issue chronometer. He never
laid a hand on Gately personally, that Don could recall. But he'd still been afraid of the M.P. The M.P.'d beaten his mother up on
an almost daily basis. The most hazardous time for Gately's mother was between eight Heinekens and ten Heinekens. When the
M.P. threw her on the floor and knelt down very intently over her, picking his spots and hitting her very intently, he'd looked like
a lobsterman pulling at his outboard's rope. The M.P. was slightly shorter than Mrs. Gately but was broad and very muscular, and
proud of his muscles, going shirtless whenever possible. Or in like sleeveless khaki military T's. He had bars and weights and
benches, and had taught the child Don Gately the fundamentals of free-weight training, with special emphasis on control and form
as opposed to just sloppily lifting as much weight as possible. The weights were old and greasy and their poundage pre-metric.
The M.P. was very precise and controlled in his approach to things, in a way Gately has somehow come to associate with all
blond-haired men. When Gately, at age ten, began to be able to bench-press more weight than the M.P., the M.P. had not taken it
in a good spirit and began refusing to spot him on his sets. The M.P. entered his own weights and repetitions carefully in a little
notebook, pausing to do this after each set. He always licked the point of the pencil before he wrote, a habit Gately still finds
repellent. In a different little notebook, the M.P. noted the date and time of each Heineken he consumed. He was the sort of person
who equated incredibly careful record-keeping with control. In other words he was by nature a turd-counter. Gately had realized
this at a very young age, and that it was bullshit and maybe crazy. The M.P. was very possibly crazy. The circumstances of his
leaving the Navy were like: shadowy. When Gately involuntarily remembers the M.P. now he also remembers — and wonders
why, and feels bad — that he never once asked his mother about the M.P. and why the fuck was he even there and did she actually
love him, and why did she love him when he flang her down and beat her up on a more or less daily basis for fucking years on
end. The intensifying rose-colors behind Gately's closed lids are from the hospital room lightening as the light outside the window
gets licoricey and predawn. Gately lies below the unoccupied heart-monitor snoring so hard the railings on either side of his bed
shiver and rattle. When the M.P. was sleeping or out of the house, Don Gately and Mrs. Gately never once talked about him. His
memory is clear on this. It wasn't just that they never discussed him, or the notebooks or weights or chronometer or his beating up
Mrs. Gately. The M.P.'s name was never even mentioned. The M.P. worked nights a lot — driving a cheese-and-egg delivery
truck for Cheese King Inc. until he was terminated for embezzling wheels of Stilton and fencing them, then for a time on a mostly
automated canning line, pulling a lever that sent New England chowder out of hundreds of spigots into hundreds of lidless cans
with an indescribable plopping sound — and the Gately home was like a different world when the M.P. was working or out: it was
like the very idea of the M.P. walked out the door with him, leaving Don and his mother not just behind but alone, together, at
night, she on the couch and he on the floor, both gradually losing consciousness in front of broadcast TV's final seasons. Gately
tries especially hard now not to explore why it never occurred to him to step in and pull the M.P. off his mother, even after he
could bench-press more than the M.P. The precise daily beatings had always seemed in some strangely emphatic way not his
business. He rarely even felt anything, he remembers, watching him hit her. The M.P. was totally unshy about hitting her in front
of Gately. It was like everybody unspokenly agreed the whole thing was none of Bimmy's beeswax. When he was a toddler he'd
flee the room and cry about it, he seems to recall. By a certain age, though, all he'd do is raise the volume on the television, not
even bothering to look over at the beating, watching 'Cheers!' Sometimes he'd leave the room and go into the garage and lift
weights, but when he left the room it was never like he was fleeing the room. When he'd been small he'd sometimes hear the
springs and sounds from their bedroom sometimes in the A.M. and worry that the M.P. was beating her up on their bed, but at a
certain point without anybody taking him aside and explaining anything to him he realized that the sounds then didn't mean she
was getting hurt. The similarity of her hurt sounds in the kitchen and living room and her sex-sounds through the asbestos
fiberboard bedroom wall troubles Gately, though, when he remembers now, and is one reason why he fends off remembering,
when awake.
Shirtless in the summer — and pale, with a blond man's dislike for the sun — the M.P. would sit in the little kitchen, at the 
kitchen table, feet flat on the wood-grain tiling, with a patriotic-themed bandanna wrapped around his head, recording Heinekens
in his little notebook. A previous tenant had thrown something heavy through the kitchen window once, and the window's screen
was fucked up and not quite flush, and houseflies came and went more or less at will. Gately, when small, would be in there in the
kitchen with the M.P. sometimes; the tile was better for his little cars' suspensions than nubbly carpet. What Gately remembers, in
pain, bubbling just under the lid of sleep, is the special and precise way the M.P. would handle the flies that came into the kitchen.
He used no swatter or rolled cone of Herald. He had fast hands, the M.P., thick and white and fast. He'd whack them as they lit on
the kitchen table. The flies. But in a controlled way. Not hard enough to kill them. He was very controlled and intent about it. He'd
whack them just hard enough to disable them. Then he'd pick them up real precisely and remove either a wing or like a leg,
something important to the fly. He'd take the wing or leg over to the beige kitchen waste-basket and very deliberately hike the lid
with the foot-pedal and deposit the tiny wing or leg in the wastebasket, bending at the waist. The memory is unbidden and very
clear. The M.P.'d wash his hands at the kitchen sink, using green generic dishwashing liquid. The maimed fly itself he'd ignore
and allow to scuttle in crazed circles on the table until it got stuck in a sticky spot or fell off the edge onto the kitchen floor. The
conversation with the M.P. that Gately reexperiences in minutely dreamed detail was the M.P., at about five Heinekens,
explaining that maiming a fly was way more effective than killing a fly, for flies. A fly was stuck in a sticky spot of dried
Heineken and agitating its wing as the M.P. explained that a well-maimed fly produced tiny little fly-screams of pain and fear.
Human beings couldn't hear a maimed fly's screams, but you could bet your fat little rug-rat ass other flies could, and the screams
of their maimed colleagues helped keep them away. By the time the M.P. would put his head on his big pale arms and grab a little
shut-eye among the Heineken bottles on the sun-heated table there'd often be several flies trapped in goo or scuttling in circles on
the table, sometimes giving odd little hops, trying to fly with one wing or no wings. Possibly in Denial, these flies, as to their like
condition. The ones that fell to the floor Gately would hunch directly over on hands and knees, getting one big red ear down just
as close to the fly as possible, listening, his big pink forehead wrinkled. What makes Gately most uncomfortable now as he starts
to try to wake up in the lemonlight of true hospital morning is that he can't remember putting the maimed flies out of their misery,
ever, after the M.P. passed out, can't mentally see himself stepping on them or wrapping them in paper towels and flushing them
down the toilet or something, but he feels like he must have; it seems somehow real vital to be able to remember his doing
something more than just hunkering blankly down amid his Transformer-cars and trying to see if he could hear tiny agonized
scre
ainst the ceiling, until after some time there
was
osture stolid, his old man's saggy little tits
risin blue tubes and an unlit cigar between his teeth and saying 'Well kid at
leas mething to be said for that there. And are you as yet sober, then?'
the
ected with that well, but
are ay to work, to show empathy and support, Bud O. and Glenn K. and Jack J. Glenn K. in
day
e broke her nose and
bent
heek — Bud O.'d tagged her with a left cross —
unti tually nurtured and supported Mrs. O. into eventually telling Bud O. to take a
flyin ing him for a male Al-Anon in Birkenstock sandals.
Gat all-too-clear memories of a certain remorseless Revere A.D.A.'s brown
shoe
 of his face one bit, something that's always
ams, listening very intently. But he can't for the life of him remember doing more than trying to hear, and the sheer cerebral
stress of trying to force a more noble memory should have awakened him, on top of the dextral hurt; but he doesn't come all the
way awake in the big crib until the memory's realistic dream bleeds into a nasty fictional dream where he's wearing Lenz's worsted
topcoat and leaning very precisely and carefully over the prone figure of the Hawaiian-dressed Nuck whose head he's whacked
repeatedly against the hood's windshield, he's supporting his inclined weight on his good left hand against the warm throbbing
hood, bent in real close to the maimed head, his ear to the bleeding face, listening very intently. The head opens its red mouth.
The wet start Gately finally wakes with jars his shoulder and side and sends a yellow sheet of pain over him that makes him
almost scream into the window's light. For about a year once at age twenty in Maiden he'd slept most nights in a home-built loft in
the dorm of a certain graduate R.N.-nursing program in Maiden, with a ragingly addicted R.N.-nursing student, in the loft, which
you needed a five-rung ladder to get up into this loft and the thing was only a couple of feet under the ceiling, and every A.M.
Gately'd awake out of some bad dream and sit up with a jolt and thwack his head ag
 a permanent concavity in the ceiling and a flattish spot in the curve of the top of his forehead he can still feel, lying here
blinking and holding his head with his good left hand. For a second, blinking and red with A.M. fever, he thinks he sees Ferocious
Francis G. in the bedside chair, chin freshly shaved and dotted with bits of Kleenex, p
g slowly under a clean white T-, smiling grimly around
t you're still on this side of the fuckin' sod, I guess there's so
Crocodile says coolly, disappearing and then not reappearing after several blinks.
The forms and sound in the room is really only three White Flaggers Gately's never known or conn
apparently here stopping in on their w
time wears the gray jumpsuit and complex utility-belt of a refrigeration technician.
'And who's the fellow in the hat outside?' he's asking.
Gately grunts in a frantic way that suggests the phoneme ü.
'Tall, well-dressed, grumpy, cocky-looking, piggy-eyed, wearing a hat. Civil-Service-looking. Black socks and brown shoes,'
Glenn K. says, pointing out toward the door where there's sometimes been the ominous shadow of a hat.
Gately's teeth taste long-unbrushed.
'Looking settled in for a stay, surrounded with sports pages and the takeout foods of many cultures, Laddie,' says Bud O., who
the story from before Gately's time goes once hit his wife so hard in the blackout that made him Come In h
 it over flat against her face, which he asked her never to have repaired, as a daily visual reminder of the depths drink sunk
him to, so Mrs. O. had gone around with her nose bent over flat against her left c
l U.H.I.D. referred her to Al-Anon, which even
g fuck to the moon and getting her nose realigned back out front and leav
ely's bowels have gone watery with dread: he has
s, piggy eyes, Stetson w/ feather, and penchant for Third World takeout. He keeps grunting pathetically.
Unsure how to be supportive, for a while the Flaggers try to cheer Gately up by telling him CPR jokes. 'CPR' is their term for
Al-Anon, which is known to Boston AAs as the 'Church of Perpetual Revenge.’
'What's an Al-Anon Relapse?' asks Glenn K.
'It is a twinge of compassion,' says Jack J., who has a kind of a facial tic.
'But what is an Al-Anon Salute?' Jack J. asks back.
The three all pause, and then Jack J. puts the back of his hand to his brow and flutters his lashes martyrishly at the dropceiling. They all three of them laugh. They have no clue that if Gately actually laughs he'll tear his shoulder's sutures. One side of
Jack J.'s face goes in and out of a tortured grimace that doesn't affect the other side
give Gately the fantods. Bud O. is waggling his finger disapprovingly at Glenn K., to signify an Al-Anon Handshake. Glenn K.
gives a lengthy impression of an Al-Anon mom watching her alcoholic kid marching in some parade and getting more and more
outr nd moves his chest up and down a few times in a
dum
ubjects — this was a mis-dressed and severely
wea
eir country to
appe
taple in its navel, a body like
som
n
aged at how everybody's out of step except her kid. Gately closes his eyes a
bshow of polite laughter, so they'll think they've cheered him up and screw. The little thoracic movements make his dextral
regions make him want to bite the side of his hand in pain. It's like a big wooden spoon keeps pushing him just under the surface
of sleep and then spooning him up for something huge to taste him, again and again.
19 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
After Rémy Marathe and Ossowiecke, and Balbalis also, they all reported back negatively for all signs of this veiled
performer, M. Fortier and Marathe threw into an effect this finally most drastic of the operations for the locating of the Master
Entertainment. This was to acquire members of the immediate family of the auteur, perhaps in public.
Marathe was charged with this operation's details, for M. Broullîme was now thrust into technical trouble-killing on the
furthering field-tests of viewer willingness; for one of the newly acquired test-subjects — this was an eccentrically dressed and
extremely irritating without-home man of the streets in a white wig appropriated with large bags filled of foreign cook-ware and
extremely small-in-size ladies' undergarments — was discovered to have been being severing and pushing beneath the room of
storage's closed door the severed digits of the second of the newly acquired test-s
kened or addicted man dressed in the clothing of a gauche woman, carrying multiple purses of suspicious nature — rather than
his own digits, marring the statistics of Broullîme's field-experiment to such the extent that M. Fortier was forced to consider
whether to allow Broullîme to conduct a lethal technical interview of the wigged substituter of digits for reasons of anger only.
Substantially, a technical interview of more importance was to be conducted in the city Phoenix far across the U.S. to the south, a
city's name Fortier had amusement from, and departed before incoming weather to attend Mile. Luria P------in this conducting,
leaving the trusted Rémy Marathe to charge details of the preliminary acquisition.
Marathe, who had made his decision and call, did what he could. A direct assault upon the Academy of Tennis itself was
impossible. A.F.R.s fear nothing in this hemisphere except tall and steep hillsides. Their attack must not be direct. Thus the
preliminary was to acquire and replace the tennis children of Quebec, known by the A.F.R. to be even then en route to U.S.A. soil
for gala competition with the tennis children of this Academy. Marathe selected young Balbalis, the one still with both the legs —
albeit paralyzed and stickishly withered, them — to lead the A.F.R. field-detail which must intercept the provincial players.
Marathe, he stayed at the Cambridge shop of the Antitois, withdrawing frequently to the jazz nights nearby of Ryle's restaurant.
Balbalis drove the modified van of Dodge north into the increasingly heavy snowstorm. They bypassed the Pongo checkpoint at
Methuen MA. They would place a large mirror in the deserted road and delude the tennis bus that it must leave the road to avoid
impact; its own headlights would delude it. An old F.L.Q. trick. Two teams in the van's back assembled the mirror's components.
Balbalis would not allow to stop for this assembly; the snowfall was worse in the Convexity because of the fans to the south. What
used to be Montpelier in Vermont lay between E.W.D. grids but took bad fallout from the region of Champlain and was
unoccupied and ghostly white with snow. Balbalis permitted at Montpelier a brief stop for final assembly and for those who were
incontinent to change their bags. Balbalis pressed hard to the former place of St. Johnsbury, where the mirror was installed across
the southbound lanes of the U.S. Interstate #91. Balbalis did not complain that there were no tracks in the snow of the road to be
followed. He never complained. They arrived well early just south of the checkpoint at which Provincial Autoroute #55 became
the Interstate #91. There was a brief period of the tension when it appeared that the night-vision attachment for the binoculars had
been misplaced. Balbalis remained cool and it was located. The plan was to intercept the travelling team of players and allow
A.F.R.s to arrive at the place in their stead. Marathe promised to conceive an excellent ruse to explain the wheelchairs and adult
beards of the false players. There was no smoking in the van while they waited for the children tennis players of th
ar at the checkpoint. The bus was forced to remain at the checkpoint for several minutes. The bus was large and chartered and
appeared warm within. Above its windshield its lit rectangle of destination displayed the English word for charter. If the bus
survived the swerve from the highway's mirror and was operational after the crash of swerving, Balbalis would drive this bus.
There was one brief argument over who would be required to drive the van, for Balbalis refused to leave the van behind them even
if the bus was operational. If the bus was not operational, no more than six junior children as survivors could be accommodated in
the van. The rest would be allowed to die for leur rai pays. Balbalis, he showed no preference one or the other way.
Gately dreamed he was with Ennet House resident Joelle van Dyne in a Southern motel whose restaurant's authoritarian sign
said simply EAT, in the U.S. South, in high summer, brutally hot, the foliage outside the room's broken windowscreen a parched
khaki, the air glassy with heat, the ceiling fan rotating at a second-hand's rate, the room's bed a lavish four-poster, tall and squishy,
the bedspread nubbly, Gately supine with his side on fire while newcomer Joelle v.D. raises her veil slightly to lick the sweat off
his lids and temples, whispering so the veil flutters around and fans him, promising him a p.m. of near-terminal pleasures,
undressing at the foot of the old tall bed, slowly, her loose light clothes moist with sweat and falling easily to the bare floor, and
an incredible female body, an inhuman body, the sort of body Gately's only ever seen with a s
ething you'd win in a raffle; and a fifth post forms on the four-poster, so to speak, which erect post's long-dormant height
obscures the nude newcomer's figure; and then when she moves around out of the pulsing shadow to lean in close and press her
inhuman body's face right up intimately close to his, she removes the veil, and on top of this body to die for is the unveiled
historical likeness of fucking Winston Churchill, complete with cigar and jowls and bulldog scowl, and the ghastliness of the
shock makes the rest of Gately's body go rigid, the pain of which wakes him with a jolted attempt to sit up that itself causes such a
blast of pain that he half passes back out again and lies there with rolling eyes and a round mouth.
Gately's also powerless over memories of the older-type lady that had been their neighbor when he and his mother shared bed
and board with the M.P. A Mrs. Waite. There was no Mr. Waite. The smeared window of the little empty garage the M.P. kept his
weights in was right next to the spiny neglected garden Mrs. Waite kept in the narrow strip between the two houses. Mrs. Waite's
house had been shall we say indifferently maintained. Mrs. Waite's house had made the Gately house look like the Taj. There was
something wrong about Mrs. Waite. None of the parents said what it was, but none of the kids were allowed to play in her yard or 
ring her bell on Halloween. Gately never got clear on what was supposed to be wrong about her, but the little poor neighborhood's
psyche throbbed with something dire about Mrs. Waite. Older kids drove across her lawn and shouted shit that Gately never quite
made out, at night. The littler kids thought they had it: they were pretty sure Mrs. Waite was a witch. Yes, she did look a little
witchy, but who over like fifty didn't? But the big thing was she kept jars of stuff she'd jarred herself in her little garage, browngreen viscous nameless vegetoid stuff in mayonnaise jars stacked on steel shelves and rusty-lidded and bearded with dust. The
littler kids snuck in and broke some of the jars and stole one and ran away in mortal terror to break it elsewhere and then run
again. They dared each other to ride their bikes in tiny diagonals across the edge of her lawn. They told each other stories of
seeing Mrs. Waite in a pointy hat roasting missing kids whose pictures were on milk-cartons and pouring the juice into jars. Some
of the bigger littler kids even tried that inevitable gag of putting a paper bag full of dog shit on her stoop and lighting it. It was
somehow a further indictment of Mrs. Waite that she never complained. She rarely left her house. Mrs. Gately would never say
what was wrong about Mrs. Waite but absolutely forbade Don to fuck with her in any way. Like Mrs. Gately was in any position
to enforce any, like, íbr-biddings. Gately never fucked with Mrs. Waite's stored jars or rode across her lawn, and never much
joined in on the witch-stories, which who needed witches to fear and despise when you had the good old M.P. right there at the
kitchen table. But he was still scared of her. When he'd once seen her gnarly-eyed face up against the smeared garage window one
P.M. when he had left the M.P. to beating Mrs. Gately and gone out to lift weights he screamed and almost dropped the benchpress bar on his Adam's apple. But over the long haul of a low-stimulation North Shore childhood, he'd gradually developed a
slight relationship with Mrs. Waite. He'd never all that much liked her; it wasn't like she was this lovable but misunderstood old
lady; it's not like he ran to her dilapitated house to confide in her, or bond. But he went over once or twice, maybe, under
circumstances he'd forgot, and had sat in her kitchen, interfaced a little. She was lucid, Mrs. Waite, and apparently continent, and
there was no pointy hat anywhere in sight, but her house smelled bad, and Mrs. Waite herself had swollen veiny ankles and little
white bits of that dried paste at the corners of her mouth and about a million newspapers stacked and mildewing all over the
kitchen, and the old lady basically radiated whatever mixture of unpleasantness and vulnerability it was that made you want to be
cruel to people. Gately was never cruel to her, but it's not like he loved her or anything. When Gately went over there the couple
times it was mostly when the M.P. was canning chowder and his mother had passed out in vomit she expected somebody else to
clean up, and he probably wanted to act out his kid's anger by doing something Mrs. G.'d pathetically tried to forbid. He didn't eat
much of whatever Mrs. Waite offered. She never offered him viscous material from a jar. His memories of whatever they
discussed are unspecific. She hung herself, eventually, Mrs. Waite — as in eliminated her own map — and because it was fall and
cool she wasn't found for maybe weeks after. It wasn't Gately who found her. A meter-reader guy found her several weeks after
Gately's eighth or ninth birthday. Gately's birthday was the same week as several other kids's in the neighborhood, by some
chance. Usually Gately'd have his party over with some of the other kids that were having their birthdays with a party. Hats and
Twister, X-Men videos, cake on Chinette plates, etc. Mrs. Gately was together enough to come a couple times. In retrospect, the
other kids' parents let Gately have birthdays with them because they'd felt sorry for him, he's involuntarily realized. But at some
sober neighbors' party, part of which was for his own eighth or ninth birthday, he remembers how Mrs. Waite had left her house
and come rung the sober neighbor's bell and had brought a birthday cake. For the birthday. A neighborly gesture. Gately'd spilled
the beans on the annual mass party at a kitchen-table interface with her. The cake was uneven and slightly tilted to one side, but it
was dark chocolate and decorated with four cursive names and had clearly been made with care. Mrs. Waite had spared Gately the
humiliation of putting just his name on the cake as if the cake was especially for him. But it was. Mrs. Waite had saved up for a
long time to afford to make the cake, Gately knew. He knew she smoked like a chimney and had given up cigarettes for weeks to
save up for something; she wouldn't tell him what; she'd tried to make her scary eyes twinkle when she wouldn't tell; but he'd seen
the mayonnaise jar full of quarters on a pile of papers and had wrestled with himself over promoting it, and won. But there were
only like nine candles on the cake when the party's Mom brought it in, and a couple of the kids having birthdays were like twelve,
was the private tip-off on who the cake was really for. The party's Mom had taken the cake at the door and said Thank You but
had neglected to invite Mrs. Waite in. Gately was in a position during Twister in the garage to see Mrs. Waite walking back home
across the street, slowly but very straightly and dignified and upright. A lot of the kids went to the garage door to look: Mrs. Waite
had rarely been seen outside her house before, and never off her property. The sober Mom brought the cake in the garage and said
it was a Touching Gesture from Mrs. Waite across the street; but she wouldn't let anybody eat the cake or even come close enough
to it to blow out the nine candles. The candles didn't all match. The candles burned down far enough so that there was a smell of
burnt frosting before they went out. The cake sat tilted by itself in a corner of the clean garage. Gately didn't defy the sober Mom
or any of the kids and eat a piece of the cake; he didn't even go near it. He didn't join in the delicious whispery arguments about
what kind of medical waste or roasted-kid renderings were in the cake, but he didn't stand up and argue with the other kids about
the fact of the poisoning, either. Before the party climaxed and the other kids that had got presents opened their presents, the sober
Mom had taken the cake into the kitchen when she thought nobody was watching and threw it out in the wastebasket. Gately
remembers the cake must have landed upside-down, because the unfrosted side was facing up in the waste-basket when he snuck
in and had a look at the cake. Mrs. Waite had disappeared back inside her house way before the Mom threw the cake away.
There's no way she could have seen the Mom take the uneaten cake back inside the house. A couple days later Gately had
promoted a couple packs of Benson & Hedges 100s from a Store 24 and put them in Mrs. Waite's mailbox, where junk mail and
utility bills were already piling up. He sometimes rang the bell but never saw her. Her bell had been a buzzer instead of a bell, he
remembers. She got found by a frustrated meter-reader some indefinite number of weeks after that. The circumstances of her death
and discovery became more dark myth for the littler kids. Gately wasn't so into self-torture as to think the cake getting not eaten
and getting thrown out was in any way connected with Mrs. Waite hanging herself. Everybody had their own private troubles,
Mrs. Gately had explained to him, and even at that age he could see her point. It's not like he'd like mourned Mrs. Waite, or
missed her, or even thought about her even once for many years after that. Which is what makes it somehow worse that his next,
even more unpleasant Joelle van Dyne pain-and-fever dream takes place in what is, unmistakably and unavoidably, Mrs. Waite's
kitchen, in great detail, right down to the ceiling's light-fixture full of dried bugs, the brimming ashtrays, the bar-graph of stacked
Globes, the maddening arrhythmic drip of the kitchen sink and the bad smell — a mixture of mildew and putrid fruit. Gately is in
the ladder-back kitchen chair he used to sit in, the one with one rung broken, and Mrs. Waite is in her chair opposite, seated on the 
thing he thought then was a weird pink doughnut instead of a hemorrhoid pillow, except in the dream Gately's feet reach all the
way to rest on the floor's dank tile, and Mrs. Waite is played by veiled U.H.I.D. House resident Joelle van D., except without her
veil, and what's more without any clothes, as in starkers, gorgeous, with that same incredible body as in the other one except here
this time with the face not of a jowly British P.M. but of a total female angel, not sexy so much as angelic, like all the world's light
had gotten together and arranged itself into the shape of a face. Or something. It looks like somebody, Joelle's face, but Gately
can't for the life of him place who, and it's not just the distraction of the inhumanly gorgeous naked bod below, because the dream
is not like a sex-dream. Because in this dream, Mrs. Waite, who is Joelle, is Death. As in the figure of Death, Death incarnate.
Nobody comes right out and says so; it's just understood: Gately's sitting here in this depressing kitchen interfacing with Death.
Death is explaining that Death happens over and over, you have many lives, and at the end of each one (meaning life) is a woman
who kills you and releases you into the next life. Gately can't quite make out if it's like a monologue or if he's asking questions and
she's responding in a Q/A deal. Death says that this certain woman that kills you is always your next life's mother. This is how it
works: didn't he know? In the dream everybody in the world seems to know this except Gately, like he'd missed that day in school
when they covered it, and so Death's having to sit here naked and angelic and explain it to him, very patiently, more or less like
Remedial Reading at Beverly H.S. Death says the woman who either knowingly or involuntarily kills you is always someone you
love, and she's always your next life's mother. This is why Moms are so obsessively loving, why they try so hard no matter what
private troubles or issues or addictions they have of their own, why they seem to value your welfare above their own, and why
there's always a slight, like, twinge of selfishness about their obssessive mother-love: they're trying to make amends for a murder
neit of you quite remember, except maybe in dreams. As Death's explanation of Death goes on Gately understands really
important vague stuff more and more, but the more he understands the sadder he gets, and the sadder he gets the more unfocused
and it's as if he's seeing her
thro
 were no animals or cages, but it was still a zoo. It was close to a nightmare and it woke me before
O5O
d felt
for a
w had
beg
 balance on one foot worked muscles and ligaments in the ankle that were
ther rk with nothing to do.
on my left foot for maybe five minutes tops. The Boards and A.P.s344334 were three weeks from tomorrow at 0800 in the
C.B
e Xmas diorama and shakeable snow. The grounds' trees, fences and
buil
s would translate spatially into the algebraic formula for an ellipse, I could see. Pemulis had poured a terrific
volu
her
wobbly becomes his vision of the Death's Joelle sitting nude on the pink plastic ring, until near the end
ugh a kind of cloud of light, a milky filter that's the same as the wobbly blur through which a baby sees a parental face
bending over its crib, and he begins to cry in a way that hurts his chest, and asks Death to set him free and be his mother, and
Joelle either shakes or nods her lovely unfocused head and says: Wait.
20 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT GAUDEAMUS IGITUR
I was in a zoo. There
Oh. Mario was still asleep, gently lit by the window's view of tiny lights down the hill. He lay very still and soundless as
always, his poor hands folded on his chest, as if awaiting a lily. I put in a plug of Kodiak. His four pillows brought Mario's chin to
his chest when he slept. I was still producing excess saliva, and my one pillow was moist in a way I didn't want to turn on a light
and investigate. I didn't feel good at all. A sort of nausea of the head. The feeling seemed worst first thing in the morning. I'
lmost a week as if I needed to cry for some reason but the tears were somehow stopping just millimeters behind my eyes and
staying there. And so on.
I got up and went past the foot of Mario's bed to the window to stand on one foot. Sometime during the night heavy sno
un to fall. I had been ordered by deLint and Barry Loach to stand on the left foot for fifteen minutes a day as therapy for the
ankle. The countless little adjustments necessary to
apeutically unreachable any other way. I always felt sort of dickish, standing on one foot in the da
The snow on the ground had a purple cast to it, but the falling and whirling snow was virgin white. Yachting-cap white. I
stood
.S.345335 auditorium at B.U. I could hear a night-custodial crew rolling a mop-bucket somewhere on another floor.
This was to be the first A.M. without dawn drills since Interdependence Day, and everybody was invited to sleep in until
breakfast. There were to be no classes all weekend.
I'd awakened too early yesterday, too. I'd kept seeing Kevin Bain crawling my way in my sleep.
I straightened up my bed and put the pillow's wet side down and put on clean sweatpants and some socks that didn't smell
foul.
The closest Mario comes to snoring is a thin sound he makes at the back of his throat. The sound is as if he's drawing out the
word key over and over. It's not an unpleasant sound. I estimated a good 50 cm. of snow on the ground, and it was really coming
down. In the purple half-light the West Courts' nets were half-buried. Their top halves shuddered in a terrible wind. All over the
subdormitory I could hear doors rattling slightly in their frames, as they did only in a bad wind. The wind gave the snowfall a
swirling diagonal aspect. Snow was hitting the exterior of the window with a sandy sound. The basic view outside the window
was that of a briskly shaken paperweight — the kind with th
dings looked toylike and miniaturized somehow. In fact it was hard to distinguish new snow falling from extant snow simply
whirling around in the wind. It only then occurred to me to wonder whether and where we would play today's exhibition meet.
The Lung wasn't yet up, but the sixteen courts under the Lung wouldn't have accommodated more than an A-only meet anyway. A
kind of cold hope flared in me because I realized this could be cancellation-weather. The backlash of this hope was an even worse
feeling than before: I couldn't remember ever actively hoping not to have to play before. I couldn't remember feeling strongly one
way or the other about playing for quite a long time, in fact.
Mario and I had begun to make a practice of keeping the phone console's power on at night but turning off the ringer. The
console's digital recorder had a light that pulsed once for each incoming message. The double flash of the recorder's light set up an
interesting interference pattern with the red battery-light on the ceiling's smoke detector, the two lights flashing in synch on every
seventh phone-flash and then moving slowly apart in a visual Doppler. A formula for the temporal relation between two
unsyncopated flashe
me of practical pre-Boards math into my head for two weeks, taking his own time and not asking for anything in return, being
almost suspiciously generous about it. Then, since the Wayne debacle, the little tutorials had ceased and Pemulis himself had been
very scarce, twice missing meals and several times taking the truck for long periods without checking with any of the rest of us
about our truck-needs. I didn't even try to factor in the rapid single flash of the phone's power-unit display on the side of the TP; 
this would make it some sort calculus thing, and even Pemulis had conceded that I was not hardwired for anything past algebra
and conic sections.
Every November, between I. Day and the WhataBurger Invitational in Tucson AZ, the Academy holds a semipublic
exhibition meet for the 'benefit' of E.T.A.'s patrons and alumni and friends in the Boston area. The exhibition is followed by a
semiformal cocktail party and dance in the dining hall, where players are required to appear showered and semiformal and
available for social intercourse with patrons. Some of them all but check our teeth. Last year Heath Pearson had appeared for the
gala
one
batt is juggernauts among
the
ario said 'key' and sometimes 'ski,' drawing them
out.
ring a digital recording of me rather than me.
This observation owed a debt to Pemulis, who for years and with several different roommates has retained the same recursive
message — This is Mike Pemulis's answering machine's answering machine; Mike Pemulis's answering machine regrets being
unavailable to take a first-order message for Mike Pemulis, but if you'll leave a second-order message at the sound of the clapping
hand, Mike Pemulis's answering machine will...,' and so on, which has worn so thin that very few of Pemulis's friends or
customers can abide waiting through the tired thing to leave a message, which Pemulis finds congenial, since no really relevant
caller would be fool enough to leave his name on any machine of Pemulis's anyway.
Plus it was also creepy that, when the face's effulgence becomes the boiled white of the Trauma Wing ceiling as he comes up
with a start up for air, the apparently real nondream Joelle van D. is leaning over the bed's crib-railing, wetting Gately's big
forehead and horror-rounded lips with a cool cloth, wearing sweatpants and a sort of loose brocaded hulpil whose lavender almost
matches the selvage on her clean veil. The hulpil's neckline is too high for there to be much cleavage-action as she leans over him,
which Gately regards as probably kind of a mercy. The two brownies Joelle's got in her other hand (and her nails are bitten down
to the ragged quick, just like Gately's) she says she liberated from the nurses' station and brought down for him, since Morris H.
meant them for him and they're by all just rights his. But she can see he's in no shape to swallow, she says. She smells like peaches
and cotton, and there's a sweet evil whiff of the discount Canadian gaspers so many of the residents smoke, and underneath those
smells Gately can detect that she's got on a bit of perfume.347337
To amuse him she says 'And Lo' several times. Gately makes his chest go up and down rapidly to signify amusement. He
declines either to moo or mew at her, out of embarrassment. Her veil this morning has a springy light-purple around the border,
and the hair framing the veil seems a darker red, duskier, than when she'd first come into the House and refused meat. Gately
hadn't been much into WYYY or Madame Psychosis, but he'd sometimes run into people who were — Organics men, mostly,
opium and brown heroin, terrible mulled wine — and he feels on top of the febrile pain and the creepiness of the amphetaminicwraith- and Winston-Churchill-face-Joelle-and angelic-maternal-Death-Joelle-drearns an odd vividness in himself at being
swabbed and maybe even generally admired by someone who's an underground local intellectual-dash-art-type celebrity. He
doesn't know how to explain it, like as if the fact that she's a public personage makes him feel somehow physically actuated, like
more there-feeling, conscious of the way he's holding his face, hesitant to make his barnyard sounds, even breathing through his
nose so she won't smell his unbrushed teeth. He feels self-conscious with her, Joelle can tell, but what's admirable is he has no
idea how heroic or even romantic he looks, unshaven and intubated, huge and helpless, wounded in service to somebody who did
not deserve service, half out of his tree from pain and refusing narcotics. The last and pretty much only man Joelle ever let herself
 in a red vest and bellboy's cap and furry tail, carrying a little organ and inviting patrons to grind the organ while he capered
around chattering. C.T. was unamused. The whole Fundraiser is a Charles Tavis innovation. C.T. is far better at public relations
and pump-priming than was Himself. The exhibition and gala are possibly the climax of C.T.'s whole administrative year. He'd
determined that mid-November was the best time for a fundraiser, with the weather not yet bad and the tax-year drawing to a close
but the U.S. holiday season, with its own draining system of demands on goodwill, not yet under way. For the past three fiscal
years, the Fundraiser's proceeds have all but paid for the spring's Southeast tour and the European terre-batu-fest of June-July.
The exhibition meet involved both genders' A and B teams and was always against some foreign junior squad, to give the
whole Fundraising affair a patriotic kicker. The gentle fiction was that the meet was just one stop for the foreign squad on a whole
vague general U.S. tour, but in truth C.T. usually flew the foreigners in special, and at some expense. We had in the past d
le with teams from Wales, Belize, the Sudan, and Mozambique. Cynics might point to an absence of tenn
opponents. Last year's Mozambique thing was a particular turkey-shoot, 70-2, and there'd been an ugly xeno-racist mood
among some of the spectators and patrons, a couple of whom cheerily compared the meet to Mussolini's tanks rolling over
Ethiopian spearchuckers. Y.D.A.U.'s opponents were to be the Quebec Jr. Davis and Jr. Wightman Cup teams, and their arrival
from M.I.A.-D'Orval346336 was keenly anticipated by Struck and Freer, who claimed that the Québecois Jr. Wightman girls were
normally sequestered and saw very few coed venues and would be available for broadening intercultural relations of all kinds.
It was improbable that anything was going to be landing on time at Logan in this kind of snow, though.
The wind also produced a desolate moaning in all the ventilation ducts. M
It occurred to me that without some one-hitters to be able to look forward to smoking alone in the tunnel I was waking up
every day feeling as though there was nothing in the day to anticipate or lend anything any meaning. I stood on one foot for a
couple more minutes, spitting into a coffee can I'd left on the floor near the phone from the night before. The implied question,
then, would be whether the Bob Hope had somehow become not just the high-point of the day but its actual meaning. That would
be pretty appalling. The Penn 4 that was my hand-strengthening ball for November was on the sill against the window. I'd neither
carried nor squeezed my ball for several days. No one seemed to have noticed.
Mario cedes me full control over the phone's ringer and answering machine, since he has trouble holding the receiver and the
only messages he ever gets are In-House ones from the Moms. I enjoyed leaving different outgoing messages on the machine. But
I refused ever to back the messages with music or digitally altered bits of entertainment. None of the E.T.A. phones was videocapable — another C.T. decision. Under C.T. the Academy's manual of honor codes, rules, and procedures had almost tripled in
length. Probably our room's best message ever was Ortho Stice doing his deadly C.T.-impression, taking 80 seconds to list
possible reasons why Mario and I couldn't answer the phone and outlining our probable reactions to all possible caller-emotions
provoked my our unavailability. But at 80 seconds the thing wore thin after a while. Our outgoing this week was something like
'This is the disembodied voice of Hal Incandenza, whose body is not now able . . .,' and so on, and then the standard invitation to
leave a message. It was honesty and abstinence week, after all, and this seemed a more truthful message to leave than the
pedestrian 'This is Hal Incandenza . . .,' since the caller would pretty obviously be hea
admire in a romantic way had left and wouldn't even face up to why, instead erecting for himself a pathetic jealous fantasy about
Joelle and his own poor father, whose only interest in Joelle had been first aesthetic and then anti-aesthetic.
Joelle doesn't know that newly sober people are awfully vulnerable to the delusion that people with more sober time than
them are romantic and heroic, instead of clueless and terrified and just muddling through day-by-day like everybody else in AA is
(except maybe the fucking Crocodiles).
Joelle says she can't stay long this time: all nonworking residents have to report for the House's a.m. daily-meditation
meeting, as Gately knows only too well. He isn't sure what she means by 'this time.' She describes the newest male resident's
weird limbo-injury posture, and the way Johnette Foltz has to cut up this Dave guy's supper and drop it into his open mouth bit by
bit like a bird with a chick. Lifting her face to the ceiling makes the linen veil conform to the features of the face below, mouth
open wide in imitation of a chick. The crewneckish hulpil makes her hair's loose curls look dark and her wrists and hands look
pale. Her hands's skin is taut and freckled and treed with veins. His bed's metal bars keep Gately's rolling eyes from seeing
anything much south of her thorax until Joelle finishes with the washcloth and retreats to the edge of the other bed, which at some
point has become empty and the crying guy's chart removed, and its crib-railings folded down, and she sits on the edge of the bed
and crosses her legs, supporting one huarache's heel on the railing's joint, revealing she's got on white socks under flesh-colored
huaraches and ancient baggy old birch-colored sweatpants with B.U.M. down one leg, which Gately's pretty sure he's seen at the
Sunday A.M. Big Book meeting on Ken Erdedy, and belong to Erdedy, and he feels a flash of something unpleasant that she'd be
wearing the upscale kid's pants. The A.M. light outside has gone from sunny yellow-white to now a kind of old-dime gray, with
what looks like serious wind.
Joelle eats the cream-cheese brownies Gately can't eat and works at pulling a kind of big notebookish thing out of her broad
cloth purse. She talks about last night's St. Columbkill's348338 Meeting, where they'd all gone unsupervised because Johnette F.
had to stay and keep an eye on Glynn who was sick and on Henderson and Willis, who were under legal quarantine upstairs.
Gately racks his RAM for which fucking night St. Columbkill's is. Joelle says how last night's was St. Collie's once-a-month
format where instead of a Commitment they had that round-robin discussion where somebody in the hall spoke for five minutes
and then picked the next speaker out of the hall's crowd. There'd been a Kentuckian there, which Gately might recall she was from
Kentucky? A Kentucky newcomer there, Wayne something, a real damaged-looking boy who hailed from the good old Blue Grass
State but of late resided in a disconnected drainage pipe off a watershed facility down in the Allston Spur, he'd said. This guy, she
said, said he was nineteen or thereabout, looked 40-some+, had clothes that looked to be decomposing on him even as he stood at
the podium, had a ripe odor of drainage about him that produced hankies as far back as the fourth row, which he explained the
odor by admitting his residential drainage pipe was in fact 'mostly' disconnected, like as in little-used. Joelle's voice is nothing like
the hollow resonant radio-voice and she uses her hands a lot to talk, trying to recreate the whole thing for Gately. Trying to give
him a little bit of a meeting, Gately realizes, with a slight tight smile of disbelief that he can't dredge up a mental meeting schedule
so he'll know what day this is.
Some of the St. Columbkillers were saying it was the longest single blackout they'd ever heard of. This Wayne fellow'd said
he had no idea when, why or how he'd ended up so far up north as metro Boston ten years after his last memory. Most compelling,
visually, Wayne had had a deep diagonal furrow in his face, extending from right eyebrow to left lip-corner — Joelle traces the
length and angle with a ragged-nailed finger across her veil — splaying his nose and upper lip and rendering him so violently
cross-eyed he seemed to address both corners of the front row at the same time. This old Wayne boy'd sketched how the facial
dent — what Wayne had called 'the Flaw,' pointing at it like people might need help seeing what he was talking about — derived
from his very own personal hard-drinking alcoholic & chicken-farmer Daddy, in the grip of the post-binge Horrors and seeing
subjective pests in a big way, one day, up and hitting Wayne at age nine smack in the face with a hatchet one time when Wayne
couldn't tell him where a certain Ball jar of distilled spirits had been hidden the day before, against the possibility of the Horrors.
It had been just him and his Daddy and his Maw — '"that was feeble"' — and 7.7 acres of chicken farm, Wayne had said. Wayne
said the Flaw had just about healed up fine with fresh air and plenty of exercise when his Daddy, trying one Monday P.M. to get
outside a late lunch of mush and syrup, up and clutched his skull, turned red and then blue and then purple, and died. Little Wayne
had reportedly wiped the face clean of mush, dragged the dead body under the farmhouse porch, wrapped it in Purina ChickenChow sacks, and told his feeble Maw his Daddy had gone off to lay up drunk. The diagonal-dented kid had apparently then gone
off to school as usual, done some discreet w.o.m. advertising, and had brought home with him a different set of boys each day for
almost a week, charging them a fiveski a head to crawl under the porch and eyeball a bona fried dead man. Late Friday p.m., he
recollected, he'd set off with hard currency to the billiard establishment where the niggers349339 that sold distilled Ball jars to his
late Daddy was at, getting set to ' "lay up drunk as a cock on jimson." ' The next thing this Wayne boy says he knows, he wakes up
in the partially disconnected NNE pipe, one millennial decade older and with some ' "right nasty" ' medical issues the timer's bell
prevents him from sharing in detail.
And this old Wayne boy had up and pointed to Joelle to come speak next. 'Almost as if he knew. As if he gut-intuited some
sort of kinship, affinity of origin.’
Gately grunted softly to himself. He figured guys with ten-year blackouts who live in pipes probably didn't have to much to
go on besides your gut-type intuitions. He knew he needed to be reminded that this strange girl was only about three weeks clean
and still leaching Substances out of her tissues and still utterly clueless, but he felt like he resented it whenever he got reminded.
Joelle had the big flat book in her lap and was looking down at her thumb and flexing it, watching it flex. What was disconcerting
was that when her head was down the veil hung loose at the same vertical angle as when her head was up, only now it was
perfectly smooth and untextured, a smooth white screen with nothing behind it. A loudspeaker down the hall gave those
xylophone dings that meant God knows what all the time.
When Joelle's head came back up, the reassuring little hills and valleys of veiled features reappeared behind the screen. 'I'm
going to have to take off here in a second,' she said. 'I could come on back after, if you want. I can bring anything you think you'd
like.’
Gately hiked an eyebrow at her, to get her to smile.
'Hopefully since your fever went down they said they'll decide you're out of the woods and take that out, finally,' Joelle said, 
looking at Gately's mouth. 'It's got to hurt, and Pat said you'll feel better when you can start quote sharing what you're feeling.’
Gately hiked both eyebrows.
'And you can tell me what you'd like brought. Who you'd want to have come. Whom.’
Moving his left arm north along his chest and throat to get the left hand up to feel at his mouth made the whole right side sing
with pain. A skin-warmed plastic tube led in from the right side and was taped to his right cheek and went into his mouth and went
down his throat past where his fingers could feel at the back of his mouth. He hadn't been able to feel it in his mouth or going
down the back of his throat to he didn't want to know where, or even the tape on his cheek. He'd had like this like tube in his
throat the whole time and hadn't even known it. It had been in there so long by the time he came up for air he'd gotten like
unconsciously used to it and hadn't even known it was there. Maybe it was a feeding tube. The tube was probably why he could
only mew and grunt. He probably didn't have permanent voice damage. Thank God. He made his thoughts capitalized and
Thanked God several times. He pictured himself at a lavish Commitment podium, like at an AA convention, off-handedly saying
something that got an enormous laugh.
Either Joelle had some sort of problem with her thumb or she'd just got really interested in watching the thumb flex and
twiddle. She was saying 'It's strange, not knowing it's coming, then standing up there to speak. Folks you don't know. Things I
don't realize I think til I say them. On the show I was used to knowing quite well what I thought before I spoke. This isn't like
that.' She seemed to be addressing herself to the thumb. 'I took a page from your manual and shared my complaint about the "But
For the Grace of God," and you were right, they just laughed. But I also ... I hadn't realized til I found myself telling them that I'd
stopped seeing the "One Day at a Time" and "Keep It in the Day" as trite cliches. Patronizing.' Gately noticed she still talks about
Recovery-issues in a stiff proper intellectualish way she doesn't talk about other stuff with. Her way of still keeping it all at arm's
length a little. A mental thumb to pretend to look at while she talks. It was all right; Gately's own way of keeping it at arm's length
at the start had involved an actual arm. He pictured her laughing as he tells her that, the veil billowing mightily in and out. He
smiled around the tube, which Joelle saw as encouragement. She said 'And why Pat in counselling keeps telling me just to build a
wall around each individual 24-hour period and not look over or back. And not to count days. Even when you get a chip for 14
days or 30 days, not to add them up. In counselling I'd just smile and nod. Being polite. But standing up there last night, I didn't
even share it aloud, but I realized suddenly that this was why I'd never been able to stay off the stuff for more than a couple weeks.
I'd always break down, go back. Freebase.' She looks up at him. 'I 'based, you know. You knew that. You all see the Intake forms.’
Gately smiles.
She said 'This was why I couldn't get off and stay off. Just as the cliche warns. I literally wasn't keeping it in the day. I was
adding the clean days up in my head.' She cocked her head at him. 'Did you ever hear of this fellow Evel Knievel? This
motorcycle-jumper?’
Gately nods slightly, being careful of a tube he now feels. This is why his throat had had that raped feeling in it. The tube. He
actually has an old cutout action picture of the historical Evel Knievel, from an old Life magazine, in a white leather Elvisish suit,
in the air, aloft, haloed in spotlights, upright on a bike, a row of well-waxed trucks below.
'At St. Collie only the Crocodiles'd heard of him. My own Daddy'd followed him, cut out pictures, as a boy.' Gately can tell
she's smiling under there. 'But what I used to do, I'd throw away the pipe and shake my fist at the sky and say As God is my
fucking witness NEVER AGAIN, as of this minute right here I QUIT FOR ALL TIME.' She also has this habit of absently patting
the top of her head when she talks, where little barrettes and spongy clamps hold the veil in place. 'And I'd bunker up all whiteknuckled and stay straight. And count the days. I was proud of each day I stayed off. Each day seemed evidence of something, and
I counted them. I'd add them up. Line them up end to end. You know?' Gately knows very well but doesn't nod, lets her do this on
just her own steam. She says 'And soon it would get. .. improbable. As if each day was a car Knievel had to clear. One car, two
cars. By the time I'd get up to say like maybe about 14 cars, it would begin to seem like this staggering number. Jumping over 14
cars. And the rest of the year, looking ahead, hundreds and hundreds of cars, me in the air trying to clear them.' She left her head
alone and cocked it. 'Who could do it? How did I ever think anyone could do it that way?’
Gately remembered some evil fucking personal detoxes. Broke in Maiden. Bent with pleurisy in Salem. MCI/Billerica during
a four-day lockdown that caught him short. He remembered Kicking the Bird for weeks on the floor of a Revere Holding cell,
courtesy of the good old Revere A.D.A. Locked down tight, a bucket for a toilet, the Holding cell hot but a terrible icy draft down
near the floor. Cold Turkey. Abrupt Withdrawal. The Bird. Being incapable of doing it and yet having to do it, locked in. A
Revere Holding cage for 92 days. Feeling the edge of every second that went by. Taking it a second at a time. Drawing the time in
around him real tight. Withdrawing. Any one second: he remembered: the thought of feeling like he'd be feeling this second for 60
more of these seconds — he couldn't deal. He could not fucking deal. He had to build a wall around each second just to take it.
The whole first two weeks of it are telescoped in his memory down into like one second — less: the space between two heartbeats.
A breath and a second, the pause and gather between each cramp. An endless Now stretching its gull-wings out on either side of
his heartbeat. And he'd never before or since felt so excruciatingly alive. Living in the Present between pulses. What the White
Flaggers talk about: living completely In The Moment. A whole day at a crack seemed like tit, when he Came In. For he had
Abided With The Bird.
But this inter-beat Present, this sense of endless Now — it had vanished in Revere Holding along with the heaves and chills.
He'd returned to himself, moved to sit on the bunk's edge, and ceased to Abide because he no longer had to.
His right side is past standing, but the hurt is nothing like the Bird's hurt was. He wonders, sometimes, if that's what Ferocious
Francis and the rest want him to walk toward: Abiding again between heartbeats; tries to imagine what kind of impossible leap it
would take to live that way all the time, by choice, straight: in the second, the Now, walled and contained between slow
heartbeats. Ferocious Francis's own sponsor, the nearly dead guy they wheel to White Flag and call Sarge, says it all the time: It's
a gift, the Now: it's AA's real gift: it's no accident they call it The Present.
'And yet it wasn't til that poor new pipe-fellow from home pointed at me and hauled me up there and I said it that I realized,'
Joelle said. 'I don't have to do it that way. I get to choose how to do it, and they'll help me stick to the choice. I don't think I'd
realized before that I could — I can really do this. I can do this for one endless day. I can. Don.’
The look he was giving her was meant to like validate her breakthrough and say yes yes she could, she could as long as she 
continued to choose to. She was looking right at him, Gately could tell. But he'd also gotten a personal prickly chill all over from
his own thinking. He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a
second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead,
glittering. And the projected future fear of the A.D.A., whoever was out there in a hat eating Third World fast food; the fear of
getting convicted of Nuckslaugh-ter, of V.I.P.-suffocation; of a lifetime on the edge of his bunk in M.C.I. Walpole, remembering.
It's too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it's as of now real. What's real is the tube and Noxzema and pain. And
this could be done just like the Old Cold Bird. He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each
heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What's unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What
his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like
G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise. He hadn't quite gotten this before now, how it wasn't just the matter of riding out the cravings
for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing
a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed. If Gately got out of this, he decided, he was going
to take the Knievel picture off his wall and mount it and give it to Joelle, and they'd laugh, and she'd call him Don or The Bimster,
etc.
Gately rolls his eyes way over to the right to see Joelle again, who she's using both pale hands to get the big book open on her
sweatpants' lap. Gray windowlight shines on clear plastic sheets like little laminates inside the thing.
'. .. idea to haul this out last night and was looking at it. I wanted to "show you my own personal Daddy,' she says. She's
holding the photo album out at him, wide open, like a kindergarten teacher at storytime. Gately makes a production of squinting.
Joelle comes over and rests the big album on the top of Gately's crib-railing, peering down over the top and pointing at a snapshot
in its little square sleeve.
'Right there's my Daddy.' In front of a low white porch-railing, a generic lean old guy with lines around his nose from
squinting into sunlight and the composed smile of somebody that's been told to smile. A skinny dog at his side, half in profile.
Gately's more interested in how the shadow of whoever took the photo is canted into the shot's foreground, darkening half the dog.
'And that's one of the dogs, a pointer that got hit right after that by a UPS truck out to 104,' she says. 'Where no animal with a
lick of sense would think it had business being. My Daddy never names dogs. That one's just called the one that got hit by the
UPS truck.' Her voice is different again.
Gately tries to Abide in seeing what she's pointing at. Most of the rest of the page's pictures are of farm-type animals behind
wooden fences, looking the way things look that can't smile, that don't know a camera's looking. Joelle said her personal Daddy
was a low-pH chemist, but her late mother's own Daddy had left them a farm, and Joelle's Daddy moved them out there and jickjacked around with farming, mostly as an excuse to keep lots of pets and stick experimental low-pH stuff in the soil.
At some point in here an all-business nurse comes in and fucks with the I.V. bottles, then hunkers down and changes the
catheter-receptacle under the bed, and for a second Gately likes to die of embarrassment. Joelle seems not even to be pretending
not to notice.
'And this right here's a bull we used to call Mr. Man.' Her slim thumb moves from shot to shot. The sunlight in Kentucky
looks bright-yellower than NNE's. The trees are a meaner green and have got weird mossy shit hanging from them. 'And this right
here's a mule called Chet that could jump the fence and used to get at everybody's flowers out along Route 45 til Daddy had to put
him down. This is a cow. This right here's Chet's mama. It's a mare. I don't recollect any kind of name except "Chet's Mama."
Daddy'd let her out to neighbors that really did farm, to sort of make up for folks' flowers.’
Gately nods studiously at each photo, trying to Abide. He hasn't thought about the wraith or the wraith-dream once since he
woke up from the dream where Joelle was Mrs. Waite as a maternal Death-figure. Next life's Chet's Mama. He opens his eyes
wide to clear his head. Joelle's head is down, looking down at the open album from overhead. Her veil hangs loose and blank
again, so close he could reach his left hand up and lift it if he wanted. The open book she's moving her hand around in gives
Gately an idea he can't believe he's only having now. Except he worries because he isn't left-handed. Which is to say SINISTRAL.
Joelle's got her thumb by a weird old sepia shot of the ass and hunched back of some guy scrabbling up the slope of a roof. 'Uncle
Lum,' she says, 'Mr. Riney, Lum Riney, my Daddy's partner over to the shop, that breathed some kind of fume at the shop when I
was little, and got strange, and now he'll always try and climb up on top of shit, if you let him.’
He winces at the pain of moving his left arm to put a hand on her wrist to get her attention. Her wrist is thin across the top but
oddly deep, thick-seeming. Gately gets her to look at him and takes the hand off her wrist and uses it to mime writing awkwardly
in the air, his eyes rolling a bit from the pain of it. This is his idea. He points at her and then out the window and circles his hand
back to her. He refuses to grunt or moo to emphasize anything. His forefinger is twice the size of her thumb as he again mimes
holding an implement and writing on the air. He makes such a big slow obvious show of it because he can't see her eyes to be sure
she gets what he's after.
If a halfway-attractive female so much as smiles at Don Gately as they pass on the crowded street, Don Gately, like pretty
much all heterosexual drug addicts, has within a couple blocks mentally wooed, shacked up with, married and had kids by that
female, all in the future, all in his head, mentally dandling a young Gately on his mutton-joint knee while this mental Mrs. G.
bustles in an apron she sometimes at night provocatively wears with nothing underneath. By the time he gets where he's going, the
drug addict has either mentally divorced the female and is in a bitter custody battle for the kids or is mentally happily still hooked
up with her in his sunset years, sitting together amid big-headed grandkids on a special porch swing modified for Gately's mass,
her legs in support-hose and orthopedic shoes still damn fine, barely having to speak to converse, calling each other 'Mother' and
'Papa,' knowing they'll kick within weeks of each other because neither could possibly live without the other, is how bonded
they've got through the years.
The projective mental union of Gately and Joelle ('M.P.') van Dyne keeps foundering on the vision of Gately knee-dandling a
kid in a huge blue- or pink-bordered veil, however. Or tenderly removing the spongy clamps of Joelle's veil in moonlight on their
honeymoon in Atlantic City and discovering just like one eye in the middle of her forehead or a horrific Churchill-face or
something.350340 So the addictive mental long-range fantasy gets shaky, but he still can't help envisioning the old X, with Joelle
well-veiled and crying out And Lo! in that empty compelling way at the moment of orchasm — the closest Gately'd ever come to 
Xing a celebrity was the ragingly addicted nursing-student with the head-banging loft, who'd borne an incredible resemblance to
the young Dean Martin. Having Joelle share personal historical snapshots with Gately leads his mind right over the second's wall
to envision Joelle, hopelessly smitten with the heroic Don G., volunteering to bonk the guy in the hat outside the room over the
head and sneak Gately and his tube and catheter out of St. E.'s in a laundry cart or whatever, saving him from the BPD Finest or
Federal crew cuts or whatever direr legal retribution the guy in the hat might represent, or else selflessly offering to give him her
veil and a big dress and let him hold the catheter under the muumuu and sashay right out while she huddles under the covers in
impersonation of Gately, romantically endangering her recovery and radio career and legal freedom, all out of a Liebestod-type
consuming love for Gately.
This last fantasy makes him ashamed, it's so cowardly. And even contemplating a romantic thing with a clueless newcomer is
shameful. In Boston AA, newcomer-seducing is called I3th-Stepping351341 and is regarded as the province of true bottomfeeders. It's predation. Newcomers come in so whacked out, clueless and scared, their nervous systems still on the outside of their
bodies and throbbing from detox, and so desperate to escape their own interior, to lay responsibility for themselves at the feet of
something as seductive and consuming as their former friend the Substance. To avoid the mirror AA hauls out in front of them. To
avoid acknowledging their old dear friend the Substance's betrayal, and grieving it. Plus let's not even mention the mirror-andvulnerability issues of a newcomer that has to wear a U.H.I.D veil. One of Boston AA's stronger suggestions is that newcomers
avoid all romantic relationships for at least a year. So somebody with some sober time predating and trying to seduce a newcomer
is almost tantamount to rape, is the Boston consensus. Not that it isn't done. But the ones that do it never have the kind of sobriety
anybody else respects or wants for themselves. A I3th-Stepper is still running from the mirror himself.
Not to mention that a Staffer seducing a new resident he's supposed to be there to help would be dicking over Pat Montesian
and Ennet House on a grand scale.
Gately sees it's probably no accident that his vividest Joelle-fantasies are coincident with flight-from-Finest-and-legalresponsibility fantasies. That his head's real fantasy is this newcomer helping him avoid, escape, and run, joining him later in like
Kentucky on a modified porch swing. He's still pretty new himself: wanting somebody else to take care of his mess, somebody
else to keep him out of his various cages. It's the same delusion as the basic addictive-Substance-delusion, basically. His eyes roll
up in his head at disgust with himself, and stay there.
I went down the hall to take out the tobacco and brush my teeth and rinse out the Spiru-Tein can, which had gotten an
unpleasant crust along the sides. The subdorm halls were curved and had no corners as such, but you can see at most three doors
and the jamb of the fourth from any point in the hall before the curve extrudes into your line of sight. I wondered briefly whether
it was true that small children believed their parents could see them even around corners and curves.
The high wind's moan and doors' rattle were worse in the uncarpeted hall. I could hear faint sounds of early-morning weeping
in certain rooms beyond my line of sight. Lots of the top players start the A.M. with a quick fit of crying, then are basically hale
and well-wrapped for the rest of the day.
The walls of the subdorms' hallways are dinner-mint blue. The walls of the rooms themselves are cream. All the woodwork is
dark and varnished, as is the guilloche that runs below all E.T.A. ceilings; and the dominant odor in the hallways is always a
mixture of varnish and tincture of benzoin.
Someone had left a window open by the sinks in the boys' room, and a hump of snow lay on the sill, and on the floor beneath
the window by the sink on the end, whose hot-water pipe shrieks, was a parabolic dusting of snow, already melting at the apex. I
turned on the lights and the exhaust fan kicked on with them; for some reason I could barely stand its sound. When I put my head
out the window the wind came from nowhere and everywhere, the snow swirling in funnels and eddies, and there were little grains
of ice in the snow. It was brutally cold. Across the East Courts, the paths were obscured, and the pine's branches were near
horizontal under their snow's weight. Schtitt's transom and observation tower looked menacing; it was still dark and snow-free on
the lee side facing Comm.-Ad. The sight of distant ATHSCME fans displacing great volumes of snowy air northward is one of the
better winter views from our hilltop, but visibility was now too poor to make out the fans, and the liquid hiss of the snow was too
total to make out whether the fans were even on. The Headmaster's House wasn't much more than a humped shape off by the north
tree-line, but I could picture poor C.T. at the living room window in leather slippers and Scotch-plaid robe, seeming to pace even
when standing still, raising and lowering the antenna of the phone in his hand, with several calls out already to Logan, M.I.A.-
Dorval, WeatherNet-9OOO's recorded update, heavy-browed figures in Quebec's O.N.A.N.T.A. office, C.T.'s forehead a washboard and lips moving soundless as he brainstormed his way toward a state of Total Worry.
I brought my head back in when I could no longer feel my face. I made my little ablutions. I hadn't had to go to the bathroom
in a serious way in three days.
The digital display up next to the ceiling's intercom read 11-18-ESTO456.
When the whap-whap of the bathroom door subsided I heard a quiet voice with an odd tone farther up around the curve of the
hallway. It turned out that good old Ortho Stice was sitting in a bedroom-chair in front of a hall window. He was facing the
window. The window was closed, and he had his forehead up against the glass, either talking or chanting to himself very quietly.
The whole lower part of the window was fogged with his breath. I came up behind him, listening. The back of his head was that
shark-belly gray-white of crew cuts so short the scalp shows through. I was more or less right behind his chair. I couldn't tell
whether he was talking to himself or chanting something. He didn't turn around even when I rattled my toothbrush in the NASA
glass. He had on his classic Darknesswear: black sweatshirt, black sweatpants on which he'd had a red and gray E.T.A.
silkscreened down both legs. His feet were bare on the cold floor. I was standing right beside the chair, and he still didn't look up.
'Who's that now?' he said, staring straight ahead through the window.
'Hi Orth.’
'Hal. You're up kind of early.’
I rattled my toothbrush a little to indicate a shrug. 'You know. Up and about.’
'What's the matter?’
'What do you mean?' I asked.
'Your voice. Shoot, are you crying? What's the matter?’ 
My voice had been neutral and a bit puzzled. 'I'm not crying, Orth.’
'Well then.' Stice breathed onto the window. He reached up without moving his head and scratched the back of his crew cut.
'Up and around. We going to play some furriners out there today or what?’
For the past ten days I'd always felt worst in the early a.m., before dawn. There's something elementally horrific about waking
before dawn. The window was unobscured above The Darkness's breath-line. The snow wasn't swirling or pummelling the
window as much on the building's east side, but the lee side's absence of wind showed just how hard new snow was coming down.
It was like a white curtain endlessly descending. The sky was lightening here on the east side, a paler gray-white, not unlike
Stice's crew-cut. I realized that from his position he could see only condensed breath on the window, no reflections. I made a few
grotesque, distended, pop-eyed faces at him behind his back. They made me feel worse.
I rattled the brush. 'Well, if we do, it's not going to be out there. It's drifting about up to the tape on the west nets. They'll have
to try to get us indoors somewhere.’
Stice breathed. 'There's no indoor place's got thirty-six courts, Inc. Winchester Club's got twelve is maybe the most. Fucking
Mount Auburn's only got eight.’
'They'll have to move us around to different sites. It's a pain in the ass, but Schtitt's done it before. I think the real variable'11
be whether the Quebec kids got into Logan last night before whenever it was this hit.’
'Logan'll be shut down you're saying.’
'But I think we'd have heard if they got in last night. Freer and Struck were keeping tabs on an F.A.A. link ever since supper,
Mario said.’
'Boys are looking to get X'd by some slow-witted hairy-legged foreign girls or what?’
'My guess is they're stuck up at Dorval. I'll bet C.T. is on the case even now. Get some sort of announcement at breakfast,
probably.’
This was a clear opening for The Darkness to do a quick C.T. impression, wondering aloud over the phone to the Québecois
coach whether he, C.T., should press for them to charter ground transport from Montreal or else rather urge them not to risk travel
through the Concavity in a storm in such a generous but disappointed gesture the Québecois would think busing the 400 clicks to
Boston in a blizzard was his own generous idea, C.T. wholly open, opening all different psych-strategies to the coach's inspection,
with the frantic ruffling sound of the coach's French-English dictionary loud in the phone's background. But Stice just sat there
with his forehead against the glass. His bare feet were tapping some sort of rhythm on the floor. The hallway was freezing, and his
toes had a faint blue tinge. He blew air out of his lips in a tight sigh, making his fat cheeks flap a little; we called this his horsesound.
'Were you talking to yourself out here, or chanting, or what?’
A silence ensued.
'Heard this one joke,' Stice said finally.
'Let's hear it.’
'You want to hear it?’
'I could use a quality laugh right now, Dark,' I said.
'You too?’
Another silence ensued. Two different people were weeping at different pitches behind closed doors. A toilet flushed on the
second floor. One of the weepers was nearly skirling, an inhuman keening sound. There was no way to tell which E.T.A. male it
was, which door back down past the walls' curve.
The Darkness scratched the back of his head again without moving his head. His hands looked almost luminous against the
black sleeves.
'There's these three statisticians gone duck hunting,' he said. He paused. 'They're like statisticians by trade.’
'I'm with you so far.’
'And they gone off hunting duck, and they're hunkered down in the muck of a duck blind, for hunting, in waders and hats and
all, your top-of-the-line Winchester double-aughts, so on. And they're quacking into one of them kazoos duck hunters always
quack into.’
'Duck-calls,' I said.
'There you go.' Stice tried to nod against the window. 'Well and here comes this one duck come flying on by overhead.’
'Their quarry. The object of their being out there.’
'Damn straight, their raisin-debt and what have you, and they're getting set to blast the son of a whore into feathers and goo,'
Stice said. 'And the first statistician, he brings up his Winnie and lets go, and the recoil goes and knocks him back on his ass
kersplat in the muck, and but he's missed the duck, just low, they saw. And so the second statistician he up and fires then, and
back he goes too on his ass too, these Winnies got a fucker of a recoil on them, and back on his ass the second one goes, from
firing, and they see his shot goes just high.’
'Misses the duck as well.’
'Misses her just high. At which and then the third statistician commences to whooping and jumping up and down to beat the
band, hollering "We got him, boys, we done got him!'‘
Someone was crying out in a bad dream and someone else was yelling for quiet. I wasn't even pretending to laugh. Stice
didn't seem to expect me to. He shrugged without moving his head. His forehead had not once left the cold glass.
I stood next to him in silence and held my NASA glass with the toothbrush and looked out over the top of Stice's head
through the window's upper half. The snowfall was intense and looked silky. The East Courts' pavilion's green canvas roof bowed
ominously down, its white GATOR-ADE logo obscured. A figure was out there, not under the shelter of the pavilion but sitting in
the bleachers behind the east Show Courts, leaning back with his elbows on one level and bottom on the next and feet stretched
out below, not moving, wearing what seemed to be puffy and bright enough to be a coat, but getting buried by snow, just sitting
there. It was impossible to tell the person's age or sex. Church spires off in Brookline were darkening as the sky lightened behind
them. The beginning of dawn looked like moonlight through the snow. Several people were at their vehicles' windshields with 
scrapers down along Commonwealth Avenue. Their images were tiny and dark and fluttered; the Avenue's line of buried parked
cars looked like igloo after igloo, some sort of Eskimo tract-housing thing. It had never before snowed like this in mid-November.
A snow-covered B train labored uphill like a white slug. It seemed clear that the T would be suspending routes before long. The
snow and cold sunrise gave everything a confected quality. The portcullis between the driveway and the parking lot was half up,
probably to keep it from being frozen closed. I couldn't see who was in the portcullis's security booth. The attendants always came
and went, most of them from the Ennet House place, trying to 'recover.' The flagpole's two flags were frozen and stuck right out
straight, turning stiffly from side to side in the wind, like someone in a neck-brace, instead of flapping. The E.T.A. physical-post
mailbox just inside the portcullis had a mo-hawk of snow. The whole scene had an indescribable pathos to it. Slice's fogged breath
kept me from seeing anything closer than the mailbox and East Courts. The light was starting to diffract into colors at the
perimeter of Slice's breath-fog on the window.
'Schacht heard that joke down at the Cranial place from some B.U. fellow with just terrible facial pain, he said,' Stice said.
Tm going to go ahead and ask the question, D-man.’
'It's a statistics joke. You got to know your medials means and modes.’
'I get the joke, Orth. The question is how come you've got your forehead all up against the window like that when your
breath's keeping you from seeing anything. What are you trying to look at? And isn't your forehead getting kind of cold?’
Stice didn't nod. He made his horse-sound again. He had always had the face of a fat man on a fit man's lean body. I hadn't
noticed before that he had an odd little teardrop of extra flesh low down on his right jowl, like a bit of skin with mole-aspirations.
He said 'The forehead stopped feeling cold a couple hours back, when I lost all my feeling in it.’
'You've been sitting here with bare feet and your forehead against the glass for a couple hours?’
'More like four, I think.’
I could hear a night-custodial crew laughing and clanking a bucket right below us. Only one was laughing. It was Kenkle and
Brandt.
'My next question's pretty obvious, then, Orth.’
He gave another awkward shrug that didn't involve his head. 'Well. It's sort of embarrassing, here, Inc,' he said. He paused.
'It's stuck is what it is.’
'Your forehead's stuck to the window?’
'Best as I can recollect I wake up, it's just after 0100, fuckin Coyle's having them discharges again and there's no sleeping
through that, boy.’
'I shudder to think, Orth.’
'And Coyle 'course just doesn't even hit the light just hauls out a fresh sheet from the stack under his bunk and goes right back
to sawing logs. And I'm wide awake by this point in time, though, and then I couldn't get back under.’
'Couldn't get back to sleep.’
'Something's real wrong, I can tell,' The Darkness said. 'Pre-Fundraiser nerves? The WhataBurger coming up? You feel
yourself starting to climb plateaux, starting to play the way you came here hoping one day to play, and part of you doesn't believe
it, it feels wrong. I went through this. Believe me, I can und—’
Stice automatically tried to shake his head and then gave a small cry of pain. 'Not that. None of that. Long fucking story. I'm
not even sure I'd want anybody to believe it. Forget that part. The point's I'm up there — I'm lying there real sweaty and hot and
jittered. I jump on down and got a chair and brang it out here to set where it's cool.’
'And where you don't have to lie there and contemplate Coyle's sheet slowly ripening under his bunk,' I said, shuddering a
little.
'And it's just starting to snow, then, out. It's about maybe like 0100. I thought how I'd just set and watch the snow a little and
settle on down and then go grab some sack down in the V.R.' He scratched at the reddening back of his scalp again.
'And as you watched, you rested your head pensively against the glass for just a second.’
'And that was all she wrote. Forgot the forehead was sweated up. Whammo. Kertwanged my own self. Just like remember
when Rader and them got Ingersoll to touch his tongue on that net-post last New Year's? Stuck here fucking tight as that tongue,
Hal. Hell of a lot more total stuck area, too, than Ingersoll. He only did lose that smidgeon off the tip. Inc, I tried to pull her off her
about 0230, and there was this fucking . . . sound. This sound and a feeling like the skin'll give before the bind will, sure. Frozen
stuck. And this here's more skin than I care to say goodbye to, buddy-ruff.' He was speaking just above a whisper.
'Jesus, and you've just been sitting here all this time.’
'Well shit I was embarrassed. And it never got quite bad enough to yell out. I kept thinking if it gets a little worse I'll go on
and yell out. And then along about 03 I quit feeling the forehead altogether.’
'You've just been sitting here waiting for someone to happen along. Chanting quietly to keep up your courage.’
'I was just praying like hell it wouldn't be Pemulis. God only knows what that son of a whore'd've thunk of to do to me here
all helpless and immobi-lated. And Troeltsch is sawing logs just inside that door there, with his fucking mike and cable and
ambitions. I've been praying he don't wake up. And let's don't even mention that son of a bitch Freer.’
I looked at the door. 'But that's Axhandle's single. What would Troeltsch be doing sleeping in Axhandle's room?’
Ortho shrugged. 'Trust that I've had plenty of time to listen and identify different folks' snores, Inc.’
I looked from Stice to Axford's door and back. 'So you've just been sitting here listening to sleep-noises and watching your
breath expand and freeze on the window?' I said. Imagining it seemed somehow unendurable: me just sitting there, stuck, well
before sunrise, alone, too embarrassed to call out, my own exhalations fouling the window and denying me even a view to divert
attention from the horror. I stood there horrified, admiring The Darkness's ballsy calm.
'There was a kind of real bad half-hour when my upper lip up and got stuck too, in the breath, when the breath froze. But I
breathed the sucker loose. I breathed real hot and fast. Goddamn near hyper-v'd. I was scared if I passed out I'd slump on forward
and the whole face'd get stuck. Goddamn forehead's bad enough.’
I put my toothbrush and NASA glass down on the cantilevered vent-module. Rooms' vents were recessed, hallway-vents
protrusive. E.T.A.'s annular heating system produced a lubricated hum I had stopped really hearing years ago. The Headmaster's 
House still had oil heat; it always sounded like a maniac was hammering at the pipes far below.
'Dark, prepare yourself mentally,' I said. 'I'm going to help pull you loose.’
Stice didn't seem to hear this. He seemed oddly preoccupied for a man occlusively sealed to a frozen window. He was feeling
at the back of his head with real vigor, which is what he did when he was preoccupied. 'You believe in shit, Hal?’
'Shit?’
'I don't know. Little-kid shit. Telekiniption. Ghosts. Parabnormal shit.’
'Just going to get around behind you and yank and we'll pop you right off,' I said.
'Somebody did come by before,' he said. 'There was somebody standing back there about maybe an hour back. But he just
stood there. Then he went away. Or ... it.' A full-body shiver.
'It'll be like that last little bit of ankle-tape. We'll pull you back so hard and fast you won't feel a thing.’
'I'm getting these real unpleasant memories of that piece of IngersolPs tongue on Nine's net-post that stayed there til spring.’
'This is no saliva-and-subzero-metal situation, Dark. This is some freakish occlusive seal. Glass doesn't conduct heat like
metal conducts heat.’
'There ain't too fucking much heat involved in this window right here, buddy-ruff.’
'And I'm not sure what you mean, paranormal. I believed in vampires when I was small. Himself allegedly used to see his
father's ghost on stairways sometimes, but then again toward the end he used to see black-widow spiders in his hair, too, and
claimed I wasn't speaking sometimes when I was sitting right there speaking to him. So we kind of wrote it all off. Orth, I guess I
don't know what to think about paranormal shit.’
Then plus I think something bit me. On the back of the head here, some bug that knew I was helpless and couldn't see.' Stice
dug again at the red area behind his ear. There was a kind of weltish bump there. It wasn't in a vampire-related area of the neck.
'And good old Mario says he's seen paranormal figures, and he's not kidding, and Mario doesn't lie,' I said. 'So belief-wise I
don't know what to think. Subhadronic particles behave ghostishly. I think I withhold all pre-judgment on the whole thing.’
'Well all right then. It was good it was you come by then.’
'The big thing's going to be to stiffen the old neck, Dark, to avoid whiplash. We'll pull you off there like a cork from a bottle
of Moët.’
'Pull my sorry ass off here, Inc, and I'll take and show you some parab-normal shit that'll shake your personal tree but good,'
Stice said, bracing, "n't said nothing to nobody but Lyle about it, and I'm sick of the secretness of it. You won't pre-formulize any
judgments, Inc, I know.’
'You're going to be fine,' I said. I got right behind Stice and bent slightly and got an arm around his chest. His wooden chair
creaked as I braced my knee against it. Stice began breathing fast and hard. His parotitic jowls flapped a little as he breathed. Our
cheeks were almost pressed together. I told him I was going to pull on the count of Three. I actually pulled on Two, so he couldn't
brace himself. I pulled back as hard as I could, and after a stutter of resistance Stice pulled back with me.
There was a horrible sound. The skin of his forehead distended as we yanked his head back. It stretched and distended until a
sort of shelf of stretched forehead-flesh half a meter long extended from his head to the window. The sound was like some sort of
elastic from hell. The dermis of Slice's forehead was still stuck fast, but the abundant loose flesh of Stice's bulldog face had risen
and gathered to stretch and connect his head to the window. And for a second I saw what might be considered Stice's real face, his
features as they would be if not encased in loose jowly prairie flesh: as every mm. of spare flesh was pulled up to his forehead and
stretched, I got a glimpse of Stice as he would appear after a radical face-lift: a narrow, fine-featured, and slightly rodential face,
aflame with some sort of revelation, looked out at the window from beneath the pink visor of stretched spare skin.
All this took place in less than second. For just an instant we both stayed there, straining backward, listening to the little RiceKrispie sound of his skin's collagen-bundles stretching and popping. His chair was leaning way back on its two rear legs. Then
Stice shrieked in pain: 'Jesus God put it back!' The little second face's blue eyes protruded like cartoon eyes. The fine little thinlipped second mouth was a round coin of pain and fear.
'Put it back put it back put it back!' Stice yelled.
I couldn't just let go, though, for fear that the elastic stretch would snap Stice forward into the window and send his face
through the glass. I eased him forward, watching the chair's front legs descend slowly to the floor; and the tension of the
forehead's skin decreased, and Slice's full fleshy round face reappeared over the small second face, and covered it, and we eased
him forward until nothing but a few centimeters of decollagenated forehead-skin hanging and sagging at about eyelash-level
remained as evidence of the horrific stretch.
'Jesus God,' Stice panted.
'You are really and truly stuck, Orth.’
'Fuck me skating did that ever hurt.’
I tried to rotate a kink out of my shoulder. 'We're going to have to thaw it off, Dark.’
'You're not getting close to this forehead with a saw, bud. I'll set right-cheer till spring first, see if I don't.’
Then Jim Troeltsch's towering A.M.-cowlick and then face and fist emerged through Axford's doorway just over Stice's
hunched shoulder. Stice had been right. Being in somebody else's room even after Lights Out was an infraction; staying there
overnight was too far out even to mention in the regulations. 'Reports of screaming have reached us here in the Eyewitness NewsCenter,' Troeltsch said into his fist.
'The fuck out of here, Troeltsch,' Stice said.
'Thaw, Ortho. Warm water. Heat the window. Hot water. Dissolve the adhesion. Heating pad. Hot pack from Loach's office or
something.’
'Loach's door can't be dickied,' Stice said. 'Don't wake him up on Fundraiser day yet.’
Troeltsch extended the fist. 'Reports of high-pitched screams have led this reporter to an unfolding scene of dramatic crisis,
and we're going to attempt to get a word with the youngster at the center of all the commotion.’
'Tell him to pipe down and get back with that hand or so help me Jesus, Hal.’
'The Darkness accidentally put his forehead against the window here when it was wet and it froze and he's been out here stuck 
all night,' I told Troeltsch, ignoring the big fist he held to my face. I squeezed Stice's shoulder. 'I'll go get Brandt to rig something
warm.’
It was as if some tacit agreement had been reached not even to bring up Troeltsch's being in Axford's room or where Axford
was. It was hard to know which would be more disturbing, Axford's not being in his room all night or Axford being in there
behind the ajar door, meaning Troeltsch and Axford had both spent the night in one small single with exactly one bed. The
universe seemed to have aligned itself so that even acknowledging it would violate some tacit law. Troeltsch seemed oblivious to
any appearance of impropriety or unthinkable possibilities. It was hard to imagine he'd be this obnoxious if he felt he had
something to be discreet about. He was standing on tiptoe to see over the window's breath-line, one hand cupped over his ear as if
to hold a headset. He whistled softly. 'Plus in addition now reports of mind-boggling snowfall are coming in to the News-Center.’
I grabbed my toothbrush and NASA glass from the vent's protrusion; since the Betel Caper,352342 only the worst kind of naïf
leaves his toothbrush unattended around E.T.A. 'Keep an eye on Stice and my NASA glass right there, Jim, if you would.’
'Any comment on the mixture of pain, cold, embarrassment, and weather-related feelings you must be feeling, Mr. Stice is it?’
'Don't leave me immobilated with Troeltsch, man, Hal. He's going to make me talk to his hand.’
'A weather-related drama unfolding around the original plight of an embarrassed man trapped by his own forehead,' Troeltsch
was saying into his fist, facing his own reflection in the window, trying with the other big hand to quash the cowlick, as I trotted
and slid to a stop in my socks just past the door to the stairwell.
Kenkle and Brandt were ageless in the special desiccated way janitors are ageless, somewhere between thirty-five and sixty.
They were inseparable and essentially unemployable. Boredom had years ago led us to Lateral Alice Moore's minimally cryptoprotected employee files, and Brandt's file had listed his S.-B. I.Q. as Submoronic-to-Moronic. He was bald and somehow at once
overweight and wiry. Both right and left temples carried red jagged surgical scars of unknown origin. His affective range
consisted of different intensities of grin. He lived with Kenkle in an attic apartment in Roxbury Crossing overlooking Madison
Park High School's locked and cordoned playground, famed site of unsolved ritual mutilations in the Year of the Perdue
Wonderchicken. His major attraction for Kenkle seemed to consist in the fact that he neither walked away nor interrupted when
Kenkle was speaking. Even in the stairwell I could hear Kenkle discoursing on their Thanksgiving plans and directing Brandt's
mop-work. Kenkle was technically black, as in Negroid, though he was more the burnt-sienna color of a spoiled pumpkin. But his
hair was a black person's hair, and he wore it in thick dreadlocks that looked like a crown of wet cigars. An academic diamond in
the very rough Roxbury Crossing, he'd received his doctorate in low-temperature physics from U.Mass. at twenty-one and taken a
prestigious sinecure at the U.S. Office of Naval Research, then at twenty-three had been court-martialed out of the O.N.R. for
offenses that changed each time you asked him. Some event between twenty-one and twenty-three seemed to have broken him at
several strategic points, and he'd retreated from Bethesda back to the front stoop of his old Roxbury Crossing apartment building,
where he read Ba'hai texts whose jackets he covered with intricately folded newspaper, and spat spectacular parabolas of
quivering phlegm into New Dudley Street. He was dark-freckled and carbuncular and afflicted with excess phlegm. He was an
incredible spitter, and alleged his missing incisors had been removed 'for facilitating the expec-toratory process.' We all suspected
he was either hypomanic or 'drine-addicted or both. His expression was very serious at all times. He discoursed nonstop to poor
Brandt, using spit as a sort of conjunction between clauses. He spoke loudly because they both wore earplugs of expanding foam
— people's nightmare-cries gave them the fantods. Their custodial technique consisted of Kenkle spitting with pinpoint accuracy
onto whatever surface Brandt was to clean next and Brandt trotting like a fine hunting dog from glob to glob, listening and
grinning, laughing when appropriate. They were moving away from me down the hall toward the second floor's east window,
Brandt making great shining arcs with his doh"s-head mop, Kenkle pulling the gunmetal bucket and lobbing signifying phlegm
over Brandt's bent back.
'And then the Yuletide season, Brandt my friend Brandt — Christmas — Christmas morning — What is the essence of
Christmas morning but the childish co-eval of venereal interface, for a child? — A present, Brandt — Something you have not
earned and which formerly was out of your possession is now in your po-ssession — Can you sit there and try to say there is no
symbolic rela-tion between unwrapping a Christmas present and undressing a young lady?’
Brandt bobbed and mopped, uncertain whether to laugh.
Himself had met Kenkle and Brandt on the T (Kenkle and Brandt apparently rode the T at night, recreationally), trying
somehow to make it up to Enfield from the Back Bay via the Orange Line,353343 and somewhat the worse for wear. Kenkle and
Brandt not only got Himself onto the right color train and kept him propped up between them all the way up the eternity of
Comm. Ave., they'd seen him safely down the T-stop's steep iron stairs and across traffic and up the hill's serpentine driveway to
the portcullis, and had been invited in at 0200 by Himself to continue whatever low-temperature discussion he and Kenkle had
been having as Brandt carried Himself up the hill in a fireman's carry (Kenkle recalls that night's discussion being about the
human nose as an erectile organ, but the only really sure bet is that it was one-sided); and the duo had ended up being cast as
black-veiled Noh-style attendants in Himself's Zero-Gravity Tea Ceremony, and had been menially employed at E.T.A. ever
since, though always on the graveyard shift, since Mr. Harde loathed Kenkle with a passion.
Kenkle hawked and hit a small strip of dust at the crease of baseboard and floor that the mop's arc had missed. 'For I am a
missionary man, Brandt, is what I am — Brandt — as in give me the straight-forward venereal in-terface of missionary congress
or give me nihil and zilch — You know what I am saying? — Give me your best thoughts on alter-native positions, Brandt —
Brandt — For me, for my part at least, I say nix and nihil on the rear-entry or you might hear it termed Dog- or Canine-Style
interface so favored in huts, blue car-tridges, Tan-tric etchings — Brandt, it's animal-istic — Why? — Why you say? — Brandt, it
is an ess-entially hunched way to have interface — She hunches, you hunch over her — In-ordinately too much hunching, to my
own way of—’
It was Brandt who heard me as I came up behind them in socks, trying to keep to the drier patches. I almost slipped twice. It
was still coming down hard outside the east window.
'Otto Brandt here!' Brandt called to me, extending a hand, though I was still several meters away.
Kenkle's dreadlocks protruded from under a plaid hat. He turned with Brandt and raised his hand Indianishly in greeting.
'Good prince Hal. Up and dressed in dawn's ear-a-ly.’ 
'Let me introduce myself,' Brandt said. I shook his hand.
'In his socks and toothbrush. E.T.A.'s athe-ling, Brandt, whom I will wager rar-e-ly hunches.’
'The Darkness needs you guys upstairs ASAP,' I said, trying to dry a sock against a pant-leg. 'Dark's face is stuck to the
window and he's in terrible pain and we couldn't pull it off and it's going to take hot water, but not too hot.' I indicated the bucket
at Kenkle's feet. I noticed Kenkle's shoes didn't match.
'What may we ask is so amusing, then?' Kenkle asked.
'Name's Brandt and pleased to meet you,' Brandt said, out with the hand again. He dropped the mop where Kenkle pointed.
'Troeltsch is with him now, but he's in a bad way,' I said, shaking Brandt's hand.
'We are in route,' Kenkle said, 'but why the hilarity?’
'What hilarity?’
Kenkle looked from me to Brandt to me. 'What hilarity he says. Your face is a hilarity-face. It's working hilariously. At first it
merely looked a-mused. Now it is open-ly cach-inated. You are almost doubled over. You can barely get your words out. You're
all but slapping your knee. That hilarity, good Prince atheling Hal. I thought all you players were compadre-mundos in civilian
life.’
Brandt beamed as he backed down the hall. Kenkle pushed his plaid cap back to scratch at some sort of eruption at the
hairline. I drew myself up to full height and consciously composed my face into something deadly-somber. 'How about now?’
Brandt had the custodial closet unlocked. There was the sound of a metal bucket being filled at the closet's industrial tap.
Kenkle brought his cap back forward and narrowed his eyes at me. He came up close. His eyelashes were clotted with small
crisp yellow flakes. There were Struck-like facial cysts in various stages of development. Kenkle's breath always smelled vaguely
of egg salad. He felt at his mouth speculatively for a moment and said 'Somewheres now between amused and cach-inated. Mirthful, perhaps. The crinkled eyes. The dimples of mirth. The exposed gums. We can bounce this off Brandt's best thinking as well,
if—’
From directly overhead came a ceiling-rattling 'GYAAAAAAA' from Stice. I was feeling at my face. Some doors opened
along the hall, heads protruding. Brandt had a full metal bucket and was trying to run to the stairwell, the weight of the bucket
canting his shoulder and steaming water sloshing onto the clean floor. He stopped with his hand on the stairwell door and looked
back over his shoulder at us, reluctant to proceed without Kenkle.
'I elect to go with mirthful,' Kenkle said, giving my shoulder a little squeeze as he stepped past. I heard him saying different
things to the heads in the doorways all the way down the hall.
'Jesus,' I said. Socks or no, I went forward into the really wet mopped area and tried to make out my face's expression in the
east window. It was now too light, though, outside, off all the snow. I looked sketchy and faint to myself, tentative and ghostly
against all that blazing white.
PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF WEATHER-DELAYED MEETING
BETWEEN:
(1) MR. RODNEY TINE SR., CHIEF OF UNSPECIFIED SERVICES & WHITE HOUSE ADVISER
ON INTERDEPENDENT RELATIONS; (2) MS.
MAUREEN HOOLEY, VICE-PRESIDENT FOR CHILDREN'S
ENTERTAINMENT, INTERLACE TELENTERTAINMENT, INC.; (3) MR. CARL E. ('BUSTER') YEE, DIRECTOR OF
MARKETING AND PRODUCT-PERCEPTION, GLAD FLACCID RECEPTACLE
CORPORATION; (4) MR. R. TINE JR., DEPUTY REGIONAL COORDINATOR, U.S. OFFICE OF UNSPECIFIED
SERVICES; AND (5) MR. P. TOM VEALS, VINEY AND VEALS ADVERTISING, UNLTD.
8TH FLOOR STATE HOUSE ANNEX BOSTON MA, U.S.A
20 NOVEMBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT
UNDERGARMENT
mr. tine sr.: Tom. Buster. Mo.
mr. veals: R. the G.
mr. yee: Rod.
mr. tine sr.: Guys.
mr. tine jr.: Afternoon, Chief!
mr. tine sr.: Mmmph.
Ms. HooLEY: Glad you could finally get in, Rod. May I say we're all extremely excited, on our end.
mr. tine sr.: Never seen snow like this. Any of you ever seen snow remotely approaching anything like this?
mr. veals: [Sneezes.] Fucking town.
mr. yee: Like an extra dimension out there. Less an element than its own dimension.
someone: [Shoe makes a squelching noise under the table.]
mr. yee: With its own rules, laws. Awe-inspiring. Fearsome.
MR. veals: Cold. Wet. Deep. Slippery. More like.
mr. tine jr.: [Tapping the edge of a ruler against the tabletop.] Their limo in from Logan did a 180 on Storrow. Mr. Yee was
just telling —
mr. tine sr.: [Tapping a telescoping weatherman's pointer against the edge of the tabletop.] So what's the poop. The skinny.
What are we talking.
Ms. hooley: Spot ready for previewing. We need your go. I'm in from Phoenix via New New York.
mr. YEE: I'm in from Ohio. Choppered up from NNY with Mo here.
Ms. hooley: Spot's master's in the post-production lab down at V&V. All ready except for some final bugs with the matteing.
mr. veals: Maureen says we need you and Buster's green light to disseminate.
Ms. hooley: You and the titular sponsor here green-light it, we can have disseminatable product by the end of the weekend.
mr. veals: [Sneezes.] Assuming this fucking snow doesn't shut down our power. 
mr. tine sr.: [Motioning with weatherman's pointer to U.S.O. stenographer to transcribe verbatim.] Seen it yet, Buster?
mr. yee: Negative, Rod. Just in with these folks here. Kennedy completely socked in. Mo had to charter a chopper. I'm sitting
here cherry.
mr. tine jr.: [Tapping edge of ruler on tabletop.] How'd you fare getting up here, Sir, if I may?
mr. tine sr.: Mountain comes to Mohammed, eh Tom?
mr. veals: How come I only came two clicks down here and I'm the one with a fucking cold?
mr. tine jr.: I've been here in Boston as well.
mr. veals: [Checking connections on Infernatron 210-Y Digital Player and Viewer System.] So shall we?
mr. tine sr.: OK, for the record. Mo. Demographic target?
Ms. HOOLEY: Ages six to ten, with marginally reduced efficacy four to six and ten to thirteen. Let's say target's four to
twelve, white, native English-speaking, median income and above, capacity on Kruger Abstraction Scale three or above. [Refers
to notes.] Advertable attention-span of sixteen seconds with a geometric fall-off commencing at thirteen seconds.
mr. tine sr.: Spot-length?
Ms. hooley: Thirty seconds with a traumatic graphic at fourteen seconds.
mr. veals: [Hawks phlegm.]
mr. yee: Proposed insertion-vehicle, Mo?
Ms. hooley: The 'Mr. Bouncety-Bounce Show,' spontaneous dissemination at 1600 M to F. 1500 Central and Mountain.
Cream of the crop. 82 Share on spontaneous receptions for the slot.
mr. yee: Any data on what percentage of total viewing in the slot is Spontaneous versus Recorded cartridge?
Ms. HOOLEY: We had 47% plus or minus two as of Year of the Yushityu 2007. That's the last year the data's firmed up for.
mr. tine sr.: So say 40% of total viewing for the spot.
mr. yee: Give or take. Impressive.
mr. tine sr.: So check, check, check. We got rough costs?
mr. YEE: Production just over half a meg. Post-production —
mr. veals: Bupkus. 150K before matteing.
mr. yee: I might add that Tom's pro-bonoing his part of the production.
mr. veals: So you all ready to eyeball this or what?
Ms. hooley: Since 'Mr. B-B' 's contracted as a no-public-service-spot vehicle, dissemination charge'11 come out around 18
OK per slot.
mr. YEE: Which we're still of the position this seems a bit steep.
mr. tine jr.: The upcoming year's Glad's year, Buster. You wanted the year. You want the Year of Glad to be the year half the
nation stopped doing anything but staring bug-eyed at some sinister cartridge while little whorls went around in their eyes until
they died of starvation in the middle of their own exc—?
mr. tine sr.: Shut up, Rodney. And quit with the ruler-tapping. Buster I'm sure knows the incredible good will that's even now
accruing from their proud sponsorship of probably the most important public-service spots ever conceived, given the potential
threat here.
mr. veals: [Sneezes twice in abrupt succession.] [Comment unintelligible.]
mr. tine sr.: [Taps telescoping weatherman's pointer on edge of table-top.] Righto then. The spot itself, then. The spokesfigure
icon thing. Still the singing Kleenex?
mr. yee: The what-was-it, Frankie the No-Thankee Hankie, warning kids to say No Thankee to unlabelled or suspicious
cartridges?
Ms. HOOLEY: [Clears throat.] Tom?
mr. tine jr.: [Taps ruler on edge of tabletop.]
mr. veals: [Hawks.] No. Had to shit-can the dancing Kleenex after the response groups' test data were analyzed. Various
problems. The phrase 'No Thankee' itself perceived as archaic. Uncool. Crotchety-adult. Too New England or something.
Summoned images of a leathery-faced old guy in overalls. Took attention away from what they're supposed to say No Thanks to.
Plus phrase-recognition data was way under minimum slogan-parameters.
Ms. hooley: Problems with the icon itself.
mr. veals: [Blowing nose one nostril at a time.] Kids hated Frankie the Hankie. We're talking levels past ambivalence.
Associated the hankie with snot, basically. The word booger kept coming up. The singing didn't help.
Ms. hooley: Which is why in this case thank God for response-group testing.
mr. yee: This business'll make you old.
mr. veals: Had to go back and completely reboot at square one.
mr. yee: Does anyone else smell a peculiar citrusy floral odor?
Ms. hooley: Tom's boys've been at it twenty-four/seven. We're extremely excited at the result.
mr. veals: It's previewable but rough. Not really quite there yet. The first Phil's digitals had a bug.
mr. tine jr.: Phil?
mr. veals: A small bug, but nasty. Dregs of a turbovirus in the graphic encoder. Phil's head kept detaching and floating off to
the upper right. Not a good effect at all, given the message we want to send.
mr. yee: Like orange blossoms, but with a kind of sick sweetness.
Ms. HOOLEY: Oh dear.
mr. veals: [Sneezes.] And debugging put us behind on some of the fonts, so you're going to have to use some imagination
here. Has this 210 unit been downloaded for schematic matteing?
mr. tine jr.: Excuse me. Phil?
mr. veals: Introducing Fully Functional Phil, the prancing ass.
Ms. hooley: More like a mule, a burro. A burro. 
mr. tine jr.: [Tapping like mad.] An ass?
Ms. hooley: Horse-characters were copyrighted by ChildSearch. Their 'Patch the Pony Who Says Nay to Strangers' spots.
mr. tine jr.: A prancing ass?
Ms. hooley: The perception of naïveté and clumsiness about a mule-icon provoked a kind of empathy in the response groups.
Phil's not coming off as an authority-figure-joy-killer type. More like a peer. So the cartridge he warns against gets none of the
forbidden-fruit-type boost of being warned against by an authority figure.
mr. veals: Plus the kid market's a frigging horror show. Near every species was copyrighted. Garfield. McGruff the freaking
crime dog. Toucan Sam. The O.N.A.N. bird of prey. Let's not even get into the bears or bunnies. It was basically either an ass or a
cockroach. Never again the kid's market as God is my witness. [Sneezes.]
Ms. hooley: Once we went with the burro, Tom opted to accentuate the clumsy-incompetence factor. To almost ironize the
icon. Buck teeth, crossed eyes —
mr. veals: Extravagantly crossed. Like he's just been whacked with a sock full of nickels. Eye-response was through the roof.
Ms. hooley: Ears that won't stay upright. Legs keep getting all rubbery and tangled when he tries to prance.
mr. veals: But prance he does.
mr. yee: But surely it doesn't present itself as an ass. Surely it doesn't prance out and say, 'Take it from me, an ass.’
mr. veals: A fully functional ass.
Ms. hooley: Tom's rather ingeniously played up the functionality angle. The energy and verve versus passivity angle. He's
never just Phil. He's Fully Functional Phil. He's a blur of kid-type activity — school, playing, teleputer-interfacing, prancing.
Tom's got him storyboarded for a number of thirty-second activity-packed little adventures. He's a goof, an iconic child, but he's
active. He stands for the attraction of capacity, agency, choice. As versus the spot's animated adult who we see in a recliner
ostensibly watching the Canadian cartridge, little spirals going around and around in his eyes as his body sort of melts and his
head starts growing and distending until the passive watching adult's image is just a huge five-o'clock-shadowed head in the
recliner, his eyeballs huge and whirling.
mr. tine jr.: [Taps his ruler against the edge of the tabletop.j
mr. veals: Let's just roll the thing for them, Mo.
mr. tine sr.: I've got to say I foresee trouble selling a certain Commander in Chief on a prancing ass as an improvement over a
singing Kleenex.
Ms. hooley: Phil's message is that not every entertainment cartridge out there is necessarily a good old safe pre-approved
InterLace TelEnter-tainment product. He says word's reached him during his fun-filled fully functional daily activities of a certain
very wicked and sneaky cartridge that even has a little smiling face on the case and when you first start watching it looks like it
promises to be more fun to watch than anything you've ever wished on a star or blown out a birthday-cake candle for. In a
thought-bubble that becomes visible when Phil's ears flop down again —
mr. veals: [Sneezes.] Not yet matted in all the way —
mr. tine sr.: You know how he is about Kleenex.
Ms. hooley: — will be an image of an iconic cartridge case with a friendly smile and pudgy little harmless Pillsbury
Doughboy arms and legs.
mr. yee: [Loosening his collar.] Not the actual copyrighted Pillsbury iconic-limb animation-codes, though.
mr. veals: Relax. More like a reference. An allusion to plumpness, cute-ness. Pudgy and harmless-looking limbs, is the thing.
mr. tine jr.: [Tapping edge of tabletop with ruler.]
mr. tine sr.: [Pointing at tapping ruler with weatherman's pointer.] You're close to losing that hand, bucko.
Ms. hooley: [Referring to notes.] Then Phil looks up and pops the thought-bubble with a needle and says But it's a liar, this
smiling cartridge is, a wicked thing, lying, like the stranger who leans out of his car and offers you a ride home to your Mommy
and Daddy but really wants to grab you and put his sweaty hand over your mouth and lock you in the car and take you far away
with him to where you'll never see your Mommy, Daddy, or Mr. Bouncety-Bounce ever again.
mr. veals: Which and here's the traumatic graphic at fourteen, a dark-bordered new thought-bubble over Phil in which now
the cartridge's limbs are like a dockworker's, it's a swart leering cartridge with yellow fangs and long nails in a plaid cap and
overalls driving off with an animated kid splayed all screaming and horrified against the car's rear window, spirals starting to roll
in the kid's eyes. Wait'll you see it.
Ms. hooley: It's so scary it's positively riveting.
mr. veals: [Sneezes twice.] Stuff of fucking nightmares.
mr. yee: Urgle. Urgle urgle. Splarg. Kaa. [Falls from chair.]
mr. tine jr.: Holy mackerel.
mr. tine sr.: Buster? Buster?
Ms. hooley: Mr. Yee's epileptic. Severe. Untreatable. Happened twice on the chopper in. Stress or embarrassment brings it on.
He'll be back up in a minute. Just act natural when he comes back up.
mr. yee: [Heels drumming on terrazzo State House Annex floor tile.] Ack. Kaa.
mr. tine sr.: Jesus.
mr. tine jr.: [Tapping ruler on tabletop's edge.] Jesus W. Christ.
mr. tine sr.: [Rising, indicating tapping ruler with extended weatherman's pointer.] All right, God damn it. Give me that thing.
Give it here.
mr. tine jr.: But Chiefmr. tine sr.: You heard me God damn it. You know it drives me bats. You'll get it back when we're done. Drives me up the
wall. Always has. What is it with you and that ruler.
Ms. hooley: Be up and back in the game in a jiff. He won't remember the fit. Just don't mention it. The embarrassment of
mentioning it'll set it off again. That's why twice on the chopper. I learned the hard way.
mr. yee: Splar. Kak. 
mr. veals: [Hawking.] For Christ's sake.
Ms. hooley: [Referring to notes.] As the cartridge in the car in the thought-bubble drives the splayed kid away, Phil prances a
bit and warns that we don't even know for sure what the cartridge to watch out for is even about. He warns that the police only
know that it's something that looks like you'd really want to watch it. He says all we know is it looks really entertaining. But that it
really just wants to take away your functionality. He says we know it's . .. Canadian.
mr. veals: That's why the plaid cap in the traumatic graphic. Response data indicates a plaid cap with earflaps signifies the
Big C to over 70% of the spot's target. The overalls drive the association home.
Ms. hooley: At nineteen seconds, Fully Functional Phil then dances his Warning Dance, a Native-American-cumBreakdance-type dance we're hoping will catch on among younger dancers. His rhetorical thrust is to play it functional and safe
and make sure and check with Mommy and/ or Daddy before watching any entertainment you haven't seen before. I.e. to accept
no Spontaneous Dissemination and play no post-delivered entertainment without checking with an authority figure.
mr. tine jr.: But as a peer. More like, 'I'm thinking this is what / better do, if I want to stay fully functional.’
mr. yee: [Back upright in chair.] Somebody's mentioned the floppy-ear and plastic-buck-teeth product tie-ins.
mr. tine jr.: Jesus Mr. Yee, are you sure you're OK?
Ms. hooley: Ixnay on the entionmay.
mr. yee: [Sweat-soaked, looking around.] What did he mean? He didn't mean . . . ?
mr. tine sr.: God damn it, Rodney.
mr. yee: Urg. Splarg. [Falls from chair.]
Ms. hooley: [Clears throat.] And finally, direly — can I say direly?
mr. veals: This is at 25.35 seconds.
Ms. hooley: Emphatically warns that if Mommy and/or Daddy have been observed sitting in one position in front of the
home's viewer for an unusually long period of time —
mr. veals: — Without speaking. Without responding to stimuli.
Ms. hooley: — or acting in any way unusual or distracted or creepy or spooky with respect to an entertainment on the viewer
—
mr. veals: We cut spooky on the last pass.
mr. yee: Sklah. Nnngg.
Ms. hooley: — that the fully functional kid'll never attempt to rouse them himself, and Fully Functional Phil leans way in in a
kind of fish-eye-lens close-up and says 'No-ho-ho-ho way' would he ever be so dumb as to even for a second plunk himself
passively down and have a look at what it is his parents are so silently, creepily engrossed by, but to vacate the premises and
prance as fast as he can to get a policeman, who'll know just how to cut the premises' power and help Mum and Dad.
mr. veals: His trademark expression is 'No-ho-ho-ho way.' He works it in whenever possible.
mr. tine jr.: His equivalent to the Kleenex's 'No-Thankee.’
mr. tine SR.: We're ready to view, I think.
mr. yee: [Back in seat, necktie now wrapped all the way around neck like aviator's scarf.] Still hashing out the tie-ins with
Hasbro et al.
mr. veals: We're all cued and ready.
mr. tine sr.: Let's have a look at the sucker.
Ms. hooley: Since Tom's too modest to say so, I should say that Tom's already storyboarded an extremely exciting adolescenttargeted version of Fully Functional Phil, for music-video and soft-core disseminations, where Phil engages in a great deal more
ironic self-parody, and in this version his trademark expression becomes 'It's your ass, ace.’
mr. tine jr.: So let's have a look at the bastard.
mr. tine sr.: Kid, your job here from here on out is to pipe down, now do you —?
mr. YEE: I've been asked to say for transcription how pleased the Glad Flaccid Receptacle Corporation is, during this
potentially grave interval, to be a proud —
mr. veals: [At the Infernatron 210 Viewer.] Hit those lights over behind you, kid.
mr. tine jr.: This'll make it difficult for the transcriber to transcribe, can I say.
MR. YEE: This spot doesn't happen to in any way optically pulse or strobe, does it?
mr. veals: Are we all set?
mr. tine sr.: So lights already.
Gately's memories of 'Cheers!' 's Nom now are clearer and vivider than any memory of the wraith-dream or the whirling
wraith who said death was just everything outside you getting really slow. The implication that there might at any given time in
any room be whole swarms of wraiths flitting around the hospital on errands that couldn't affect anybody living, all way too fast to
see and dropping by to watch Gately's chest rise and fall at the rate of the sun, none of this has sunk in enough to give him the
howlers, not in the wake of Joelle's visit and the fantasies of romance and rescue, and the consequent shame. There's now a sandy
sound of gritty sleetish stuff wind-driven against the room's window, the hiss of the heater, sounds of gunfire and brass bands
from cartridge viewers on in other rooms. The room's other bed's still empty and tightly made. The intercom gives that triple ding
every few minutes; he wonders if they just do it to bug people. The fact that he couldn't even finish Ethan From in 10th-grade
English and hasn't got clue one about where ghostwords like SINISTRAL or LIEBESTOD mean or come from, much less
OMMATOPHORIC, is just starting to percolate up to awareness when there's a cold hand on his good shoulder and he opens his
eyes. Not to mention ghostwords, which is a real and esoteric word. He's been floating just under sleep's lid again. Joelle van D.'s
gone. The hand is the nurse that had changed the catheter-bag. She looks hassled and unserene, and one cheekbone sticks out
farther than the other, and her little slot of a mouth's got little vertical wrinkles all around it from being held tight all the time, not
unlike the basically-late Mrs. G.'s tight little mouth.
'The visitor said you'd requested this, because of the tube.' It's a little stenographic notebook and Bic. 'Are you left-handed?'
The nurse means sinistral. She's penguin-shaped and smells of cheap soap. The notebook is STENOGRAPHIC because its pages 
turn over at the top instead of to the side. Gately shakes his head gingerly and opens his left hand for the stuff. It makes him feel
good all over again that Joelle had understood what he'd meant. She hadn't just come to tell her troubles to somebody that couldn't
make human judgment-noises. Shaking his head slowly lets him see past the nurse's white hip. Ferocious Francis is sitting in the
chair that the wraith and Ewell and Calvin Thrust had all sat in, his skinny legs uncrossed, gnarled and crew-cutted and clear-eyed
behind his glasses and totally relaxed, holding his portable O2-tank, his chest rising and falling at about the rate a phone rings,
watching the nurse waddle tensely out. Gately can see a clean white T- under the open buttons of Ferocious Francis's flannel shirt.
Coughing is F.F.'s way of saying hello.
'Still sucking air I see,' Ferocious Francis says when the fit's passed, making sure the little blue tubes are still taped under his
nose.
Gately struggles with one hand to flip the notebook open and write' YO!' in block caps. Except there's nothing to really hold
the notebook up against and write; he has to sort of balance it flat on one thigh, so he can't see what he's writing, and writing with
his left hand makes him feel like a stroke-victim must feel, and what he holds up at his sponsor looks more like
'Figured God needed a little help the other night did you?' Francis says, leaning way out to the side to get a red bandanna
hankie out of a back pocket. 'What I heard.’
Gately tries to shrug, can't, smiles weakly. His right shoulder is so thickly bandaged it looks like a turbanned head. The old
man probes a nostril and then examines the hankie with interest, just like the dream-wraith did. His fingers are swollen and
misshapen and his nails are long and square and the color of old turtleshell.
'Poor sick bastard going around cutting up people's pets, cut up the wrong people's pets. This is the way I heard it.’
Gately wants to tell Ferocious Francis how he's discovered how no one second of even unnarcotized post-trauma-infectionpain is unendurable. That he can Abide if he must. He wants to share his experience with his Crocodile sponsor. And plus, now
that somebody he trusts himself to need is here, Gately wants to weep about the pain and tell how bad the pain of it is, how he
doesn't think he can stand it one more second.
'You saw yourself as in charge. Thought you'd step in. Protect your fel-lowman from his consequences. Which poor sick
green Ennet House fuck was it?’
Gately struggles to try and get his knee up so he can see to write 'LENZ. WHITE WIG. ALWAYS NORTH. ALWAYS ON
PHONE.' Again it looks cuneiform though, illegible. Ferocious Francis blows out a nostril and replaces the little tube. The tank in
his lap makes no sound. It has a little valve but no dial or needles.
'You stepped in against six armed Hawaiians, I hear. Marshall Plan. Captain Courageous. God's personal Shane.' F.F. likes to
send air through his nose's tubes in a mirthless burst, a kind of anti-laugh. His nose is large and cucumber-shaped and wide-pored,
and pretty much its whole circulatory system is visible. 'Glenny Kubitz calls me and describes the thing blow by blowjob. Says I
should see the other guys. Says about breaking a Hawaiian's nose, shoving the bits up into the brain. The old chop-and-stiff-arm
he says. Big Don G.'s a Satanically tough motherfuck: this was his assessment. Said the way he heard it you could fight like you
was born in a barfight. I tell Glenny I say I'm sure you'll be proud to hear him say it.’
Gately was trying with maddening sinistral care to write out 'HURT? DEAD ANY? FINIST? WHO HAT IN HALL?,' more
like drawing than writing, when without warning one of the day-shift Trauma M.D.s sweeps in, radiating brisk health and painless
cheer. Gately remembers dealing with this one M.D. some days ago in a kind of gray post-surgical fog. This M.D. is Indian or
Pakistani and is glossily dark but with a sort of weirdly classically white-type face you could easily imagine profiling on a coin,
plus teeth you could read by the gleam of. Gately hates him.
'So I am here with you again in this room!' The M.D. sings, kind of, when he talks. The name in gold piping on his white coat
has a D and a K and a shitload of vowels. Gately almost had to reach up and swat this M.D. after surgery to keep him from
hooking up a Demerol drip. That was between let's say four and eight days ago. It's probably But for the Grace that his
Crocodilian sponsor Ferocious Francis G.'s sitting here watching blandly when the Pakistani M.D. sweeps in this time.
Plus they all have this flourishy M.D. way of sweeping Gately's chart up off their hip and holding it up to read it. The
Pakistani purses his lips and puffs them out absently and sucks off his pen a little.
'Grade-two toxemia. Synovial inflammation. The pain of the trauma is very much worse today, yes?' the M.D. says to the
chart. He looks up, the teeth emerge. 'Synovial inflammation: nasty nasty. The pain of synovial inflammation is compared in the
medical literature to renal calculus and ec-topic labor.' Partly it's the darkness of the classic face around them that makes the teeth
seem so high-watt. The smile widens steadily without seeming to run out of new teeth to expose. 'And so you are now ready to let
us provide the level of analgesia the trauma warrants instead of Toradol, simple headache ibuprofen, which these medications are
boys doing a large man's duty here, yes? There has been reconsidering in light of the level? Yes?’
Gately is inscribing an enormous vowel in the notebook with incredible care.
'I make you aware of synthetic anipyretic analgesics which are no higher than Category C-III354344 for dependence.' Gately
imagines the M.D. smiling incandescently as he wields a shepherd's crook. The guy has that odd clipped singsong way of talking
of skinny guys in loincloths on mountains in films. Gately superimposes a big skull and crossbones over the glossy face, mentally.
He holds up a palsied page-high A and brandishes it at the M.D. and then brings the notebook back down and swiftly up again,
spells it out, figuring Ferocious Francis will step in and set this ad-man for the Disease straight once and for all, so Gately'll never
have to face this kind of Pakistani temptation again with maybe nobody supportive here next time. C-III his ass. Fucking Talwin's
C-III, too.
'Oramorph SR for an instance. Very safe, very much relief. Fast relief.’
This is just morphine sulfate with a fancy corporate name, Gately knows. This raghead doesn't know who he's dealing with, or
what he's.
'Now I must tell tell, I would make the personal first choice of titrated hydromorphone hydrochloride, in this case —’
Christ, this is Dilaudid. Blues. Fackelmann's Mount Doom. Kite's steep-angled decline, as well. Death on a Ritz. The Blue
Bayou. Gene Fackelmann's killer, by and large. And also Gately pictures good old Nooch, tall skinny Vinnie Nucci, from the
beach at Salem, who favored Dilaudid and spent over a year without ever taking the belt off his wing, dropping through Osco
skylights at night on a rope with the belt all tight and ready just over his elbow already, Nucci never eating and getting skinnier
and skinnier until he seemed to be just two cheekbones raised to a great silent height, even the whites of his eyes finally turning
the blue of the bayou; and Fackelmann's eliminated map after the insane scam on Sorkin and a disastrous two nights of Dilaudid,
when Sorkin'd —
'— though I say yes, this in truth is a C-II medication, and I wish to respect all wishes and concerns,' the M.D. half-sings,
inclined at the waist now by Gately's railings, looking closely at the shoulder's dressing but not seeming at all disposed to even
touch it, his hands behind his back. His ass is more or less right in Ferocious Francis's face, who's just sitting there. The M.D.
doesn't even seem to be aware 34-year-sober Ferocious Francis is there. And Francis isn't making a peep.
It also occurs to Gately that esoteric is another ghostword he's got no rights to throw around, mentally.
'For I am Moslem, and abstain also, by religious law, from all abusive compounds as well,' the M.D. says. 'Yet if I have
suffered trauma, or the dentist of my teeth proposes to perform a painful process, I submit as a Moslem to the imperative of my
pain and will accept relief, knowing no established religion's God wills needless suffering for His children.’
Gately has made two shaky smaller A's together on the next sheet and is stabbing emphatically at the sheet with his Bic. He
wishes if the M.D. wouldn't shut up he'd at least move, so Gately could shoot a desperate Please-Jump-In-Here look at Ferocious
Francis. The drug-question has nothing to do with established Gods.
The M.D.'s bobbing a little as he leans, his face coming in and then receding. 'This is a Grade-II trauma we are looking at in
this room. Allow me to explain that the discomfort of right now will only intensify as the synovial nerves begin to reanimate. The
laws of trauma dictate that the pain will intensify as healing begins to commence. I am a professional at my job, sir, as well as a
Moslem. Hydrocodone bitartrate355345 — C-III. Levorphanol tartrate356346 — C-III. Oxymorphone hydrochloride357347 —
admittedly, yes, C-II, but more than indicated in this degree of needless suffering.’
Gately can hear Ferocious Francis blowing his nose again behind the M.D. Gately's mouth floods with spittle at the memory
of the sick-sweet antiseptic taste of hydrochloride that rises to the tongue with an injection of Demerol, the taste Kite and the
lesbian burglars and even Equus ('I'll Stick Anything in Any Part of My Body') Reese all gagged at but that poor old Nooch and
Gene Fackelmann and Gately himself had loved, came to love like a mother's warm hand. Gately's eyes wobble and his tongue
protrudes from a shiny mouth-corner as he draws a crude syringe and arm and belt and then tries to draw a skull-and-bones over
the whole shaky ensemble, but the skull looks more like a plain old smiley-face. He holds it out to the foreigner anyway. The
dextral pain's so bad he wants to throw up, throat-tube or no.
The M.D. studies the palsied drawing, nodding the exact way Gately used to nod at Alfonso Parias-Carbo the totally
ununderstandable Cuban. 'Oxycodone-nalaxone compound,358348 with a short half-life but only a C-III grading of abuse.' There's
no way the guy could be like intentionally making his voice this wheedly-sounding; it's got to be Gately's own Disease. The
Spider. Gately envisions his brain struggling in a silk cocoon. He keeps summoning to mind the little detox-story Ferocious
Francis tells from the Commitment podium, how they gave him Librium359349 to help with the discomfort of Withdrawal, and
how Francis says he just threw the Librium hard over his left shoulder, for luck, and has had very good luck ever since.
'Likewise as well the time-tested pentazocine lactate, which I can offer with assurances as a Moslem trauma-professional
standing here in this room in person with you at your bed's side.’
Pentazocine lactate is Talwin, Gately's #2 trusted standard when he was Out There, which 120 mg. on an empty gut was like
floating in oil the exact same temperature as your body, just like Percocet360350 except without the maddening back-of-theeyeball itch that always wrecked a Percocet high for him.
'Surrender your courageous fear of dependence and let us do our profession, young sir,' the Pakistani sums up, standing right
up next to the bed, the left side, his professional lab-coat hiding F.F., hands behind his back, the dull glint of the metal corner of
Gately's chart just visible between his legs, immaculate of posture, smiling cheerily down, the whites of his eyes as ungodly white
as his teeth. The memory of Talwin makes parts of his body Gately didn't know could drool drool. He knows what's coming next,
Gately does. And if the Pakistani goes ahead and offers Demerol again Gately won't resist. And who the fuck'll be able to blame
him, after all. Why should he have to resist? He'd received a bona fide Grade-Whatever dextral synovial trauma. Shot with a
professionally modified .44 Item. He's post-trauma, in terrible pain, and everyone heard the guy say it: it was going to get worse,
the pain. This was a trauma-pro in a white coat here making reassurances of legitimate fucking use. Gehaney heard him; what the
fuck did the Flaggers want from him? This wasn't hardly like slipping over to Unit #7 with a syringe and a bottle of Visine. This
was a stop-term measure, a short-gap-type measure, the probable intervention of a compassionate unjudging God. A quick Rxsquirt of Demerol — probably at the outside two, three days of a Demerol drip, maybe even one where they'd hook the drip to a
rubber bulb he could hold and self-administer the Demerol only As Needed. Maybe it was the Disease itself telling him to be
scared a medically necessary squirt would pull all his old triggers again, put him back in the cage. Gately pictures himself trying
to shunt through a magnetic-contact burglar alarm with a hand and a hook. But surely if Ferocious Francis thought a medically
advised short-term squirt suspect, at all, the old reptilian bastard would say something, do his fucking job as a Crocodile and
sponsor, instead of just sitting there playing with his nostril's little noninvasive tube.
'Look kid, I'm gonna screw and let you settle this bullshit and come back up later,' comes Francis's voice, subdued and
neutral, signifying nothing, and then the rasp of the chair's legs and the system of grunts that always accompanies F.F.'s getting up
from a chair. His white crew cut rises like a slow moon over the Pakistani's shoulder, which the M.D.'s only sign of
acknowledgment of Francis is to sort of tuck his chin down into his shoulder like a violinist, addressing Gately's sponsor for the
first time:
'Then perhaps you would please, Mr. Gately Senior, if you please help us help your concerned and brave boy here but a boy I
believe whose cavalier attitude underestimates the level of coming discomfort which is sadly unnecessary altogether if he will let
us help him, sir,' the Pakistani sings over his shoulder to Ferocious Francis, as if they were the room's only adults. He's assuming
Ferocious Francis is Gately's organic Dad.
Gately knows a Crocodile never bothers to correct anybody's misimpres-sion. He's halfway to the door, moving with
maddening slow care like always, as if walking on ice, twisted and seeming to limp off both legs and heartbreakingly assless in
the baggy seat-shiny wide-waled old man's corduroys he always wears, the back of his red neck complexly creased as he moves
off away, lifting one hand in a gesture of acknowledgment and dismissal of the M.D.'s request: 
'Not my business to say one way or the other. Kid's gonna do what he decides he needs to do for himself. He's the one that's
feeling it. He's the only one can decide.' He either pauses or slows down even further at the open door, looking back at Gately but
not meeting his wide eyes. 'You keep your pecker up, kid, and I'll bring some of the son of a bitches by to look in again later.' He
slips in 'Might want to Ask For Some Help, deciding.' The last of this comes from the white hall as the Pakistani's glossy head
comes back in close with now a tight strained-patience smile, and Gately can hear him inhaling to get ready to say that of course
in Grade-II traumas of this severe type the treatment of preferred indication is the admittedly C-II and highly abusable but
unsurpassed for effectiveness and tightly controlled administration of one 50-mg. tab in a diluting saline drip q. 3-4 hours of
mep—
Gately's good left hand skins a knuckle shooting out between the bars of the bedside crib-railing and plunging under the
M.D.'s lab-coat and fastening onto the guy's balls and bearing down. The Pakistani pharmacologist screams like a woman. It isn't
rage or the will to harm so much as just no other ideas for keeping the bastard from offering something Gately knows that he's
powerless at this moment to refuse. The sudden exertion sends a blue-green sheet of pain over Gately that makes his eyes roll up
as he bears down on the balls, but not enough to crush. The Pakistani curtsies deeply and bends forward, crumpling around
Gately's hand, showing all 112 teeth as he screams higher and higher until he hits a jagged high note like a big opera lady in a
Viking helmet so shattering it makes the crib-railings and windowglass shiver and woke Don Gately up with a start, his left arm
through the railing and twisted with the force of his attempt to sit up so that the pain now made him hit almost the same high note
as the dream's foreign M.D. The sky outside the window was gorgeous, Dilaudid-colored; the room was full of serious A.M. light;
no sleet on the window. The ceiling throbbed a little but did not breathe. The one visitor-chair was back over by the wall. He
looked down. Either the stenographer's notebook and pen had got knocked off his bed or the dream had made up that part, too.
The next bed was still empty and made up tight. It came to him all of a sudden why they called them hospital corners. But the
railing Joelle van D. had folded down to sit on the bunk in the fucking Erdedy kid's sweats was still folded down, and the other
railing was still up. So there was some like evidence of the one part, that she'd been really there, showing him the pictures. Gately
brought his skinned hand gingerly back inside the railing and felt to make sure there really was a big invasive tube going into his
mouth, and there was. He could roll his eyes way up and see his heart monitor going silently nuts. Sweat was coming off every
part of him, and for the first time in the Trauma Wing he felt like he needed to take a shit, and he had no idea what arrangements
there were for taking a shit but suspected they weren't going to be appetizing at all. Second. Second. He tried to Abide. No single
second was past enduring. The intercom was giving triple dings. There really were sounds of other rooms' TPs, and of a meal cart
being rolled down the hall, and the metally smell of food for the edible patients. He couldn't see anything like a hat-shadow in the
hall, but it could have been all the sunlight.
The dream's vividness had been either fever or Disease, but either way it had fucking seriously rattled his cage. He heard the
singsong voice promising about increasing discomfort. His shoulder beat like a big heart, and the pain was sickeninger than ever.
No single second was past standing. Memories of good old Demerol rose up, clamoring to be Entertained. The thing in Boston AA
is they try to teach you to accept occasional cravings, the sudden thoughts of the Substance; they tell you that sudden Substancecravings will rise unbidden in a true addict's mind like bubbles in a toddler's bath. It's a lifelong Disease: you can't keep the
thoughts from popping in there. The thing they try to teach you is just to Let Them Go, the thoughts. Let them come as they will,
but do not Entertain them. No need to invite a Substance-thought or -memory in, offer it a tonic and your favorite chair, and chat
with it about old times. The thing about Demerol wasn't just the womb-warm buzz of a serious narcotic. It was more like the,
what, the aesthetics of the buzz. Gately'd always found Demerol with a slight Talwin kicker such a smooth and orderly buzz. A
somehow deliciously symmetrical buzz: the mind floats easy in the exact center of a brain that floats cushioned in a warm skull
that itself sits perfectly centered on a cushion of soft air some neckless distance above the shoulders, and inside all is a somnolent
hum. Chest rises and falls on its own, far away. The easy squeak of your head's blood is like bedsprings in the friendly distance.
The sun itself seems to be smiling. And when you nod off, you sleep like a man of wax, and awaken in the same last position you
remember falling asleep in.
And pain of all sorts becomes a theory, a news-item in the distant colder climes way below the warm air you hum on, and
what you feel is mostly gratitude at your abstract distance from anything that doesn't sit inside concentric circles and love what's
happening.
Gately takes advantage of the fact that he's already facing ceilingward to seriously Ask For Help with the obsession. He
thinks hard about anything else at all. Heading out w/ old Gary Carty in the pre-dawn reek of low tide off Beverly to bring up
lobster traps. The M.P. and the flies. His mother sleeping slack-mouthed on a chintz divan. Cleaning the very grossest corner of
the Shattuck Shelter. The billow of the veiled girl's veil. The traps' little cages of cross-hatched bars, the lobsters' eyes' stalks
always poking through the squares so the eyes looked out at open sea. Or the bumper stickers on the M.P.'s old Ford —SEEEEE
YAAAAAAAü and DON'T TAILGATE ME OR I'LL FLICK A BOOGER ON YOUR WINDSHIELD! and MIA:
 and I HAVEN'T HAD SEX IN SO LONG I FORGET WHO GETS TIED UP! The fish asking about what's
water. The sharp-nosed round-cheeked dead-eyed nurse with a weird Germanish accent that would sell Gately little sampler
bottles of Sanofi-Winthrop Demerol syrup, 80 mg./bottle, vilely banana-flavored, then would lie back slack and dead-eyed while
Gately X'd her, barely breathing, in an airless Ipswich apartment whose weird brown windowshades filled the place with light the
color of weak tea. Named Egede or Egette, she eventually started telling Gately she couldn't come close to coming unless he
burned her with a cigarette, which marked the first time Gately seriously tried to quit smoking.
Now a black outside-linebacker of a St. E.'s nurse rumbles in and checks his drips and writes on his chart and points the
artillery of her tits down at him to ask how he's doing, and calls him 'Baby,' which nobody minds from enormous black nurses.
Gately points at his lower abdomen in the area of his colon and tries to make a broad explosive gesture with just one arm, slightly
less mortified than if it had been a human-size white nurse, at least.
Gately happened onto Demerol at age twenty-three when intra-ocular itching finally forced him to abandon Percocets and
explore new vistas. Demerol was more expensive mg. for mg. than most synthetic narcs, but it was also easier to get, being the
treatment of medical choice for mind-bending post-operative pain. Gately can't for the life of him remember who or just where in
Salem he was first introduced to what the boys on the North Shore called Pebbles and Barns-Bams, 50 and 100 mg. Demerol
tablets, respectively very tiny and tiny, chalky white scored discs with on one,side and Sanofi-Winthrop Co.'s very-soonbeloved trademark, a kind of on the other, that rakish just puncturing the square envelope of itchy-eyed North-Shore life.
And remembering even the feels like Entertaining the obsession. He knows it was not long after Nooch's funeral, because
he'd been alone and crewless at whatever moment whoever handed him two 50 mg. tablets way too tiny for his big-fingered
hands, in lieu of whatever else it was he'd wanted, laughing when Gately said What the fuck and They look like Bufferin for ants
or some shit, saying: Trust Me.
It must have been his twenty-third summer Out There, because he remembers being shirtless and driving down 93 when he
ran out of everything else and pulled off into the JFK Library lot to take them, so small and tasteless he had to check his open
mouth in the rearview to make sure he'd gotten them down. And he remembers not wearing a shirt because he'd gotten to study his
big bare hairless chest for a long time. And from that somnolent p.m. in the JFK lot on he'd been a faithful attendant at the goddess
De-merol's temple, right to the very finish.
Gately remembers crewing — for good bits of both the Percocet and De-merol eras — with two other North Shore narcotics
addicts, who Gately'd grown up with one and had broke digits for Whitey Sorkin the migrainous bookie with the other. They
weren't burglars, either of them, these guys: Fackelmann and Kite. Fackelmann had a background in creative-type checks, plus
access to equipment for manufacturing I.D., and Kite's background was he'd been a computer-wienie at Salem State before he got
the Shoe for hacking the phone bills of certain guys deep in trouble over 900 sex-lines into the S.S. Administration's WATS
account, and they became naturals at crewing together, F. and K., and had their own unambitious but elegant scam going that
Gately was ever only marginally in on. What Fackelmann and Kite'd do, they'd rig up an identity and credit record sufficient to
rent them a luxury furnished apt., then they'd rent a lot of upscale-type appliances from like Rent-A-Center or Rent 2 Own down
in Boston, then they'd sell the luxury appliances and furnishings off to one of a couple dependable fences, then they'd bring in
their own air mattresses and sleeping bags and canvas chairs and little legit-bought TP and viewer and speakers and camp out in
the empty luxury apartment, getting very high on the rented goods' net proceeds, until they got their second Overdue Notice on the
rent; then they'd rig up another identity and move on and do it all over. Gately took his turn being the one to bathe and shave and
answer a luxury-apt.-rental ad in borrowed Yuppiewear and meet the property management people and sweep them off their
Banfis with his I.D. and credit rating, and forge some name on the lease; and he usually crashed and got high in the apts. with
Fackelmann and Kite, though he, Gately, had had his own digit-breaking and then later burglary career, and his own fences, and
tended more and more to cop his own scrips and his own Percocets and then later Demerol.
Lying there, working on Abiding and not-Entertaining, Gately remembers how good old doomed Gene Fackelmann — that
for a narcotics addict had had a truly raging libido — used to like to bring different girls home to whatever apt. they were
scamming at the time, and how Fax'd open the door and look around in pretend-astonishment at the empty and carpetless luxury
apt. and shout 'We been fuckin robbed!’
For Fackelmann and Kite, the rap on Gately was that he was a great and (for a narcotics addict, which places limits on
rational trusting) stand-up guy, and a ferociously good friend and crewmate, but they just didn't for their lives see why Gately
chose to be a narcotics man, why these were his Substances of his choice, because he was a great and cheerful stand-up jolly-type
guy off the nod, but when he was Pebbled or narculated in any way he'd become this totally taciturn withdrawn dead-like person,
they always said, like a totally different Gately, sitting for hours real low in his canvas chair, practically lying in this chair whose
canvas bulged and legs bowed out, speaking barely at all, and then only the necessariest word or two, and then without ever
seeming to open his mouth. He made whoever he got high with feel lonely. He got real, like, interior. Pamela Hoffman-Jeep's term
was 'Other-Directed.' And it was worse when he shot anything up. You'd have to almost pry his chin off his chest. Kite used to say
it was like Gately shot cement instead of narcotics.
McDade and Diehl come in around 1100h. from visiting Doony Glynn down somewheres in the Gastroenterology Dept. and
try to give Gately's left hand archaic old unhip high fives as a goof and say the Bowel guys've got Glynn on a megadrip of a
Levsin361351-codeine diverticulitis compound, and the Doon seemed to have undergone a kind of spiritual experience vis-a-vis
this compound, and was giving them ebubblient high fives and saying the Bowel M.D.s were saying that there was a chance the
condition might be inoperable and chronic and that D.G.'d have to be on the compound for life, with a rubber bulb for SelfAdministration, and the formerly fetal Doon was sitting up in a lotus position and seemed to be a very happy camper indeed.
Gately makes pathetic sounds around his oral tube as McDade and Diehl start to interrupt each other apologizing for how it's
looking like they might not be able to stand up and legally depose for Gately like they'd be ready to do in a fucking hatbeat if it
weren't for various legal issues they're still under the clouds of that their P.D. and P.O. respectively say that walking voluntarily
into Norfolk District Court in Enfield would be tittymount to like judicio-penal suicide, they're told.
Diehl looks at McDade and then says there's also disparaging news about the .44 Item, that by everybody's reconstruction of
events it's more than likely Lenz might have promoted the Item up off the lawn when he legged it off the E.M.P.H.H. complex just
ahead of the Finest. Because it's fucking vanished, and nobody'd have rat-holed it and not given it up knowing what's at stake for
the good old G-Man in the deal. Gately makes a whole new kind of noise.
McDade says the more upbeat news is that Lenz has been possibly spotted, that Ken E. and Burt F. Smith had seen what
looked like either R. Lenz or C. Romero after a wasting illness on their way back from wheeling Burt F.S. to a meeting in
Kenmore Square, mostly from the side of the back they'd seen him, wearing a back-split tux and sombrero w/ balls, and apparently
officially relapsed, back Out There, drunk as a maroon, so totally legless when they saw him he was doing a drunk's old hurricanewalk, fighting his way from parking meter to parking meter and clinging to each parking meter. Wade McDade here thinks to
insert that the confirmed scuttlebutt is that E.M.P.H.H. is getting ready to rent out Unit #3 to a long-term mental-health agency
caring for people with incapacitating agoraphobia, and that everybody at the House is speculating on what a constantly crowded
and cabin-feverish place that's going to be, what with the terribleness of the predicted winter coming up. Diehl says his nasal sinus
can always tell when it's going to snow, and his sinus is starting to predict at least flurries for maybe as early as tonight. They
never think to tell Gately what day it is. That Gately can't communicate even this most basic of requests makes him want to
scream. McDade, in what's either an intimate aside or a knife-twist at a Staffer who's in no position to enforce anything, confides 
that he and Emil Minty are arranging with Parias-Carbo — who works for an Ennet House alum at All-Bright Printing down near
the Jackson-Mann School — for engraved-looking formal invitations for the agoraphobic folks in Unit #3 to all just come on out
and over to Ennet House for a crowded noisy outdoor Welcome-to-the-E.M.P.H.H.-Neighborhood bash. And now Gately knows
for sure it was McDade and Minty that put the HELP WANTED sign up under the window of the lady in Unit #4 that shouts for
Help. The general level of tension in the room increases. Gavin Diehl clears his throat and says everybody says to say Gately's like
wicked missed back at the House and everybody said to say ' 's up?' and that they hope the G-Man's up and back kicking
residential ass very soon; and McDade produces an unsigned Get Well card from his pocket and puts it carefully through the
railing's bars, where it lies next to Gately's arm and begins to open up from being folded and shoved in a pocket. It's clear the thing
was shoplifted.
It's probably the pathetic unsigned folded hot card, but Gately's suddenly stricken by the heat of the waves of self-pity and
resentment he feels about not only the card but about the prospect of these booger-chewing clowns not standing up to eyewitness
for his se offendendo after he just tried to do his sober job on one of their behalf and is now lying here in a level of increasing
dextral discomfort these limp punks couldn't imagine if they tried, getting ready to have to say no to grinning Pakistanis about his
Disease's drug of choice with an invasive tube down his mouth and no notebook after he asked for one, and needing to shit and to
know the day and no big black nurse in view, and unable to move — it suddenly seems awful starry-eyed to be willing to look on
the course of events as evidence of the protection and care of a Higher Power — it's a bit hard to see why a quote Loving God
would have him go through the sausage-grinder of getting straight just to lie here in total discomfort and have to say no to
medically advised Substances and get ready to go to jail just because Pat M. doesn't have the brass to make these selfish bottomfeeding dipshits stand up and do the right thing for once. The resentment and fear make cords stand out on Gately's purple neck,
and he looks ferocious but not at all jolly. — Because what if God is really the cruel and vengeful figurant Boston AA swears up
and down He isn't, and He gets you straight just so you can feel all the more keenly every bevel and edge of the special
punishments He's got lined up for you? — Because why the fuck say no to a whole rubber bulbful of Demerol's somnolent hum, if
these are the quote rewards of sobriety and rabidly-active work in AA? The resentment, fear and self-pity are almost narcotizing.
Way beyond anything he'd felt when hapless Canadians punched or shot him. This was a sudden total bitter impotent Job-type
rage that always sends any sober addict falling back and up inside himself, like vapor up a chimney. Diehl and McDade were
backing away from him. As well they fucking might. Gately's big head felt hot and cold, and his pulse-line on the overhead
monitor started to look like the Rockies.
The residents, between Gately and the door, wide-eyed, now suddenly parted to let someone pass. At first all Gately could see
between them was the kidney-shaped plastic bedpan and a cylindrical syringe-snouted ketchup-bottlish thing with FLEET down
the side in cheery green. It took this equipment a second to signify. Then he saw the nurse that came forward bearing the stuff, and
his raging heart fell out of him with a thud. Diehl and McDade made hearty-farewell noises and melted out the door with the
vague alacrity of seasoned drug-addicts. The nurse was no slot-mouthed penguin or booming mammy. This nurse looked like
something out of a racy-nursewear catalogue, like somebody that had to detour blocks out of her way to avoid construction sites at
lunchtime. Gately's projected image of his and this gorgeous nurse's union unfolded and became instantly grotesque: him prone
and ass-up on the porch swing, she white-haired and angelic and bearing something away in a kidney-shaped pan to the towering
pile behind the retirement-cottage. Everything angry in him evaporated as he got ready to just fucking die of mortification. The
nurse stood there and twirled the bedpan on one finger and flexed the long Fleet cylinder a couple times and made an arc of clear
fluid come out the tip and hang in the win-dowlight, like a gunslinger twirling his six-shooter around to casually show off, smiling
in a way that simply snapped Gately's spine. He began to mentally recite the Serenity Prayer. When he moved he could smell his
own sour smell. Not to mention the time and pain involved in rolling onto his left side and exposing his ass and pulling his knees
to his chest with one arm — 'Hug those knees like they were your Sweetie, is what we say,' she said, putting a terribly soft cool
hand on Gately's ass — without jostling the catheter or I.V.s, or the thick taped tube that went down his mouth to God knows
where.
I was going to go back up to see about Stice's defenestration, to check on Mario and change my socks and examine my
expression in the mirror for unintentional hilarity, to listen to Orin's phone-messages and then the protracted-death aria from
Tosca once or twice. There is no music for free-floating misery like Tosca.
I was moving down the damp hall when it hit. I don't know where it came from. It was some variant of the telescopically selfconscious panic that can be so devastating during a match. I'd never felt quite this way off-court before. It wasn't wholly
unpleasant. Unexplained panic sharpens the senses almost past enduring. Lyle had taught us this. You perceive things very
intensely. Lyle's counsel had been to turn the perception and attention on the fear itself, but he'd shown us how to do this only oncourt, in play. Everything came at too many frames per second. Everything had too many aspects. But it wasn't disorienting. The
intensity wasn't unmanageable. It was just intense and vivid. It wasn't like being high, but it was still very: lucid. The world
seemed suddenly almost edible, there for the ingesting. The thin skin of light over the baseboards' varnish. The cream of the
ceiling's acoustic tile. The deerskin-brown longitudinal grain in the rooms' doors' darker wood. The dull brass gleam of the knobs.
It was without the abstract, cognitive quality of Bob or Star. The turn-signal red of the stairwell's lit EXIT sign. Sleepy T. P.
Peterson came out of the bathroom in a dazzling plaid robe, his face and feet salmon-colored from the showers' heat, and vanished
across the hall into his room without seeing me wobbling, leaning against the cool mint wall of the hallway.
But the panic was there too, endocrinal, paralyzing, and with an overcog-nitive, bad-trip-like element that I didn't recognize
from the very visceral on-court attacks of fear. Something like a shadow flanked the vividness and lucidity of the world. The
concentration of attention did something to it. What didn't seem fresh and unfamiliar seemed suddenly old as stone. It all
happened in the space of a few seconds. The familiarity of Academy routine took on a crushing cumulative aspect. The total
number of times I'd schlepped up the rough cement steps of the stairwell, seen my faint red reflection in the paint of the fire door,
walked the 56 steps down the hall to our room, opened the door and eased it gently back flush in the jamb to keep from waking
Mario. I reexperienced the years' total number of steps, movements, the breaths and pulses involved. Then the number of times I
would have to repeat the same processes, day after day, in all kinds of light, until I graduated and moved away and then began the
same exhausting process of exit and return in some dormitory at some tennis-power university somewhere. Maybe the worst part 
of the cognitions involved the incredible volume of food I was going to have to consume over the rest of my life. Meal after meal,
plus snacks. Day after day after day. Experiencing this food in toto. Just the thought of the meat alone. One megagram? Two
megagrams? I experienced, vividly, the image of a broad cool well-lit room piled floor to ceiling with nothing but the lightly
breaded chicken fillets I was going to consume over the next sixty years. The number of fowl vivisected for a lifetime's meat. The
amount of hydrochloric acid and bilirubin and glucose and glycogen and gloconol produced and absorbed and produced in my
body. And another, dimmer room, filled with the rising mass of the excrement I'd produce, the room's double-locked steel door
gradually bowing outward with the mounting pressure.... I had to put my hand out against the wall and stand there hunched until
the worst of it passed. I watched the floor dry. Its dull shine brightened behind me in the snowlight from the east window. The
wall's baby blue was complexly filigreed with bumps and clots of paint. An unmopped glob of Kenkle's spit sat by the corner of
V.R.5's door's jamb, quivering slightly as the door rattled in its frame. There were scuffles and thumps from upstairs. It was still
snowing like hell.
I lay on my back on the carpet of Viewing Room 5, still on the second floor, fighting the sense that I'd either never been here
before or had spent lifetimes just here. The entire room was panelled in a cool yellow shimmering material called Kevlon. The
viewer took up half the south wall and was dead and gray-green. The carpet's green was close to this color, too. The instructional
and motivational cartridges were in a large glass bookcase whose central shelves were long and whose top and bottom shelving
tapered down to almost nothing. Ovoid would convey the case's shape. I had the NASA glass with my toothbrush in it balanced on
my chest. It rose whenever I inhaled. I'd had the NASA glass since I was a little boy, and its decal of white-helmeted figures
waving authoritatively through the windows of a prototype shuttle was faded and incomplete.
After a time, Sleepy T.P. Peterson put his wet-combed head in the door and said LaMont Chu wanted to know whether what
was happening outside qualified as a blizzard. It took over a minute of my not saying anything for him to go away. The ceiling
panels were grotesquely detailed. They seemed to come after you like some invasive E.T.A. patron backing you up against the
wall at a party. The ankle throbbed dully in the snowstorm's low pressure. I relaxed my throat and simply let the excess saliva run
post-nasally back and down. The Moms's mother had been ethnic Québecois, her father Anglo-Canadian. The term used in the
Yale Journal of Alcohol Studies for this man was binge-drinker. All my grandparents were deceased. Himself's middle name had
been Orin, his father's own father's name. The V.R.'s entertainment cartridges were arrayed on wall-length shelves of translucent
polyethylene. Their individual cases were all either clear plastic or glossy black plastic. My full name is Harold James Incandenza,
and I am 183.6 cm. tall in stocking feet. Himself designed the Academy's indirect lighting, which is ingenious and close to fullspectrum. V.R.5 contained a large couch, four reclining chairs, a midsized recumbency, six green corduroy spectation-pillows
stacked in a corner, three end tables, and a coffee table of mylar with inlaid coasters. The overhead lighting in every E.T.A. room
came from a small carbon-graphite spotlight directed upward at a complexly alloyed reflecting plate above it. No rheostat was
required; a small joystick controlled the brightness by altering the little spot's angle of incidence to the plate. Himself's films were
arranged on the third shelf of the entertainment-case. The Moms's full name is Avril Mondragon Tavis Incandenza, Ed.D., Ph.D.
She is 197 cm. tall in flats and still came up only to Himself's ear when he straightened and stood erect. For almost a month in the
weight room, Lyle had been saying that the most advanced level of Vaipassana or 'Insight' meditation consisted in sitting in fully
awakened contemplation of one's own death. I had held Big Buddy sessions in V.R.5 throughout the month of September. The
Moms had grown up without a middle name. The etymology of the term blizzard is essentially unknown. The full-spectrum
lighting system had been a labor of love from Himself to the Moms, who'd agreed to leave Brandeis and head up the Academy's
academics and had an ethnic Canadian's horror of fluorescent light; but by the time the system had been installed and de-bugged,
the gestalt of the Moms's lumiphobia had extended to all overhead lighting, and she never used her office's spot-and-plate system.
Petropolis Kahn put his large shaggy head in and asked what was all this brooha upstairs, the thumps and cryings-out. He
asked whether I was going to breakfast. The scuttlebutt on breakfast was sausage-analog and OJ with palpable pulp, he said. I
closed my eyes and recalled that I'd known Petropolis Kahn for three years and three months. Kahn went away. I could feel his
head's withdrawal from the doorway: a very slight suction in the room's air. I needed to fart but had not so far farted. The atomic
weight of carbon is 12.01 and change. A small and carefully monitored game of Eschaton slated for the mid-A.M., with
(according to rumor) Pemulis himself as game-master, was certain to be snowed out. It had begun to occur to me, driving back
from Natick on Tuesday, that if it came down to a choice between continuing to play competitive tennis and continuing to be able
to get high, it would be a nearly impossible choice to make. The distant way in which this fact appalled me itself appalled me. The
founder of the sub-14's’
Tunnel Club had been Heath Pearson as a very little boy. The rumor that Pemulis himself would don the beanie for the next
Eschaton came from Kent Blott; Pemulis had been avoiding me ever since I returned from Natick on Tuesday — as if he sensed
something. The woman behind the register at the Shell station last night had recoiled as I approached to present my card before
pumping, as if she too had seen something in my expression I hadn't known was there. The North American Collegiate Dictionary
claimed that any 'very heavy' snowstorm with 'high winds' qualified as a blizzard. Himself, for two years before his death, had had
this delusion of silence when I spoke: I believed I was speaking and he believed I was not speaking. Mario averred that Himself
had never accused him of not speaking. I tried to recall whether I had ever brought the subject up with the Moms. The Moms was
at pains to be completely approachable on all subjects except Himself and what had been going on between her and Himself as
Himself withdrew more and more. She never forbade questions about it; she just got so pained and blurry-faced that you felt cruel
asking her anything. I considered whether Pemulis's cessation of the math-tutorials was perhaps an oblique affirmation, a kind of
You Are Ready. Pemulis often communicated in a kind of esoteric code. It was true that I had kept mostly to myself in the room
since Tuesday. The condensed O.E.D., in a rare bit of florid imprecision, defined blizzard as 'A furious blast of frost-wind and
blinding snow in which man and beast frequently perish,' claiming the word was either a neologism or a corruption of the French
blesser, coined in English by a reporter for Iowa's Northern Vindicator in B.S. 1864. Orin alleged in Y.T.M.P. that when he took
the Moms's car in the morning he sometimes observed the smeared prints of nude human feet on the inside of the windshield.
V.R.5's heating duct's grille gave off a sterile hiss. All up and down the hall were sounds of the Academy coming to life, making
competitive ablutions, venting anxiety and complaints at the possible blizzard outside — wanting to play. There was heavy foottraffic in the third-floor hall above me. Orin was going through a period where he was attracted only to young mothers of small
children. A hunched way: she hunches; you hunch. John Wayne had had a violent allergic reaction to a decongestant and had commandeered the WETA microphone and publicly embarrassed himself on Troeltsch's Tuesday broadcast, apparently, and had been
taken to St. Elizabeth's overnight for observation, but had recovered quickly enough to come home and then finish ahead even of
Stice in Wednesday's conditioning run. I missed the entire thing and was filled in by Mario on my return from Natick — Wayne
had apparently said unkind things about various E.T.A. staff and administration, none of which anyone who knew Wayne and all
he stood for had taken seriously. Relief that he was OK had dominated everyone's accounts of the whole incident; the Moms
herself had apparently stayed by Wayne's side late into the night at St. E.'s, which Booboo felt was estimable and just like the
Moms. Simply imagining the total number of times my chest will rise and fall and rise. If you want prescriptive specificity you go
to a hard-ass: Sitney and Schneewind's Dictionary of Environmental Sciences required 12 cm./hour of continuous snowfall,
minimum winds of 60 kph., and visibility of less than 500 meters; and only if these conditions obtained for more than three hours
was it a blizzard; less than three hours was 'C-IV Squall.' The dedication and sustained energy that go into true perspicacity and
expertise were exhausting even to think about.
It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or
pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the
same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or
philately — the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person.
Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms blandly filled
with excrement and meat? To what purpose? This was why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age
when the questions why and to what grow real beaks and claws. It was kind, in a way. Modern German is better equipped for
combining gerundives and prepositions than is its mongrel cousin. The original sense of addiction involved being bound over,
dedicated, either legally or spiritually. To devote one's life, plunge in. I had researched this. Stice had asked whether I believed in
ghosts. It's always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the
reality of the ghost. Never questions whether his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned. Stice had promised something
boggling to look at. That is, whether Hamlet might be only feigning feigning. I kept thinking of the Film and Cartridge Studies
professor's final soliloquy in Himself's unfinished Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms that Utilize Every Centimeter of
Available Space with Mind-Boggling Efficiency, the sour parody of academia that the Moms had taken as an odd personal slap. I
kept thinking I really should go up and check on The Darkness. There seemed to be so many implications even to thinking about
sitting up and standing up and exiting V.R.5 and taking a certain variable-according-to-stride-length number of steps to the
stairwell door, on and on, that just the thought of getting up made me glad I was lying on the floor.
I was on the floor. I felt the Nile-green carpet with the back of each hand. I was completely horizontal. I was comfortable
lying perfectly still and staring at the ceiling. I was enjoying being one horizontal object in a room filled with horizontality.
Charles Tavis is probably not related to the Moms by actual blood. Her extremely tall French-Canadian mother died when the
Moms was eight. Her father left their potato farm on 'business' a few months later and was gone for several weeks. He did this sort
of thing with some frequency. A binge-drinker. Eventually there would be a telephone call from some distant province or U.S.
state, and one of the hired men would go off to bail him out. From this disappearance, though, he returned with a new bride the
Moms had known nothing about, an American widow named Elizabeth Tavis, who in the stilted Vermont wedding photo seems
almost certainly to have been a dwarf — the huge square head, the relative length of the trunk compared to the legs, the sunken
nasal bridge and protruding eyes, the stunted phocomelic arms around squire Mondragon's right thigh, one khaki-colored cheek
pressed affectionately against his belt-buckle. C.T. was the infant son she'd brought to the new union, his father a ne'er-do-well
killed in a freak accident playing competitive darts in a Brattleboro tavern just as they were trying to adjust the obstetric stirrups
for the achondroplas-tic Mrs. Tavis's labor and delivery. Her smile in the wedding photo is homo-dontic. According to Orin,
though, C.T. and the Moms claim Mrs. T. was not a true homodont the way — for instance — Mario is a true homodont. Every
single one of Mario's teeth is a second bicuspid. So it was all rather up in the air. The account of the disappearance, darts-accident,
and dental incongruity comes from Orin, who claimed to have decocted it all out of an extended one-sided conversation he had
with a distraught C.T. in the waiting room of Brigham and Women's OB/GYN while the Moms was prematurely delivering Mario.
Orin had been seven years old; Himself had been in the delivery room, where apparently Mario's birth was quite a touch-and-go
thing. The fact that Orin was our one and only source for data shrouded the whole thing in further ambiguity, as far as I was
concerned. Pinpoint accuracy had never been Orin's forte. The wedding photo was available for inspection, of course, and
confirmed Mrs. Tavis as huge-headed and wildly short. Neither Mario nor I had ever approached the Moms on the issue, possibly
out of fear of reopening psychic wounds from a childhood that had always sounded unhappy. All I knew for sure was that I had
never approached her about it.
For their part, the Moms and C.T. have never represented themselves as anything other than unrelated but extremely close.
The attack of panic and prophylactic focus's last spasm now suddenly almost overwhelmed me with the intense horizontality
that was all around me in the Viewing Room — the ceiling, floor, carpet, table-tops, the chairs' seats and the shelves at their backs'
tops. And much more — the shimmering horizontal lines in the Kevlon wall-fabric, the very long top of the viewer, the top and
bottom borders of the door, the spectation pillows, the viewer's bottom, the squat black cartridge-drive's top and bottom and the
little push-down controls that protruded like stunted tongues. The seemingly endless horizontality of the couch's and chairs' and
recumbency's seats, the wall of shelves' every line, the varied horizontal shelving of the ovoid case, two of every cartridge-case's
four sides, on and on. I lay in my tight little sarcophagus of space. The horizontality piled up all around me. I was the meat in the
room's sandwich. I felt awakened to a basic dimension I'd neglected during years of upright movement, of standing and running
and stopping and jumping, of walking endlessly upright from one side of the court to the other. I had understood myself for years
as basically vertical, an odd forked stalk of stuff and blood. I felt denser now; I felt more solidly composed, now that I was
horizontal. I was impossible to knock down.
Gately's cognomen growing up and moving through public grades had been Bim or Bimmy, or The Simulator, etc., from the
acronymic B.I.M., 'Big Indestructible Moron.' This was on Boston's North Shore, mostly Beverly and Salem. His head had been
huge, even as a kid. By the time he hit puberty at twelve the head seemed a yard wide. A regulation football helmet was like a 
beanie on him. His coaches had to order special helmets. Gately was worth the cost. Every coach past 6th grade told him he was a
lock for a Division 1 college team if he bore down and kept his eye on the prize. Memories of half a dozen different neckless,
buzz-cut, and pre-infarcted coaches all condense around a raspy emphasis on bearing down and predictions of a limitless future
for Don G., Bimmy G., right up until he dropped out in high school's junior year.
Gately went both ways — fullback on offense, outside linebacker on D. He was big enough for the line, but his speed would
have been wasted there. Already carrying 230 pounds and bench-pressing well over that, Gately clocked a 4.4 40 in 7th grade, and
the legend is that the Beverly Middle School coach ran even faster than that into the locker room to jack off over the stopwatch.
And his biggest asset was his outsized head. Gately's. The head was indestructible. When they needed yards, they'd shift to isolate
Gately on one defender and get him the ball and he'd lower his head and charge, eyes on the turf. The top of his special helmet
was like a train's cowcatcher coming at you. Defenders, pads, helmets, and cleats bounced off the head, often in different
directions. And the head was fearless. It was like it had no nerve endings or pain receptors or whatever. Gately amused teammates
by letting them open and close elevator doors on the head. He let people break things over the head — lunchboxes, cafeteria trays,
bespectacled wienies' violin cases, lacrosse sticks. By age thirteen he never had to buy beers: he'd bet some kid a six he could take
a shot with this or that object to the head. His left ear is permanently kind of gnarled from elevator-door impacts, and Gately
favors a kind of long-sided Prince Valiantish bowl-cut to help cover the misshapen ear. One cheekbone still has a dented violet
cast from 10th grade when a North Reading kid at a party bet him a twelve-pack on a shot with a sock full of nickels and then
clocked him under the eye with it instead of the skull. It took Beverly's whole offensive line to pull Gately off what was left of the
kid. The juvenile line on Gately was that he was totally jolly and laid-back and easygoing up to a certain point but that if you
crossed that point with him you better be able to beat a 4.4 40.
He was always kind of a boys' boy. He had a jolly ferocity about him that scared girls. And he had no idea how to deal with
girls except to try and impress them by letting them watch somebody do something to his head. He was never what you'd call a
ladies' man. At parties he was always at the center of the crowd that drank instead of dancing.
It was surprising, maybe, given Gately's size and domestic situation, that he wasn't a bully. He wasn't kindly or heroic or a
defender of the weak; it's not like he stepped kindly in to protect wienies and misfits from the preda-tions of those kids that were
bullies. He just had no interest in brutalizing the weak. It's still not clear to him if this was to his credit or not. Things might have
been different if the M.P. had ever knocked Gately around instead of focusing all his attention on the progressively weaker Mrs.
G.
He smoked his first duBois at age nine, a hard little needle-thin joint bought off jr.-high niggers and smoked with three other
grade-school football players in a vacant summer cottage one had the key to, watching broadcast-televised niggers run amok in a
flaming L.A. CA after some Finest got home-movied crewing on a nigger in the worst way. Then his first real drunk a few months
later, after he and the players'd hooked up with an Orkin man that liked to get kids all blunt on screwdrivers and that wore
brownshirts and jackboots in his off-hours and lectured them about Zog and The Turner Diaries while they'd drink the OJ and
vodka he'd bought them and look at him blandly and roll their eyes at each other. Soon none of the football players Gately hung
with were interested in much of anything except trying to get high and holding air-guitar and pissing contests and talking
theoretically about Xing big-haired North Shore girls, and trying to think up things to break over Gately's head. They all had like
domestic situations too. Gately was the only one of them truly dedicated to football, and that was probably just because he'd been
told over and over that he had real talent and limitless futures. He was classified Attention-Deficit and Special-Ed, from grade
school on, with particular Deficits in 'Language Arts,' but that was at least partly because Mrs. G. could barely read and Gately
wasn't interested in making her feel worse. And but there was no Deficit in his attention to ball, or to cold foamers or screwdrivers
or high-resin desBois, or especially to applied pharmacology, not once he'd done his first Quaalude362352 at age thirteen.
Just as Gately's whole recall of his screwdriver-and-sinsemilla beginnings tends to telescope into one memory of pissing
orange juice into the Atlantic (he and the blunt cruel Beverly players and bullies he partied with drinking whole quarts of throatwarming OJ at a shot and standing ankle-deep in grit on a North Shore shore, facing east and sending long arcs of legal-padyellow piss into onrushing breakers that came in and creamed around their feet, the foam warm and yellow-shot with their piss —
like spitting into the wind — Gately at the podium had started saying it turns out he was pissing on himself right from the start,
with alcohol), in just the same way, the whole couple years before he discovered oral narcotics, the whole period 13-15 when he
was a devotee of Quaaludes and Hefenreffer-brand beer collapses and gathers itself under what he still recalls as 'The Attack of
the Killer Sidewalks.' Quaaludes and Hefenreffer also marked Gately's entree into a whole new rather more sinister and less
athletic social set at B.M.S., one member of which was Trent Kite,363353 a dyed-in-wool laptop-carrying wienie, chinless and
with a nose like a tapir, and pretty much the last fanatical Grateful Dead fan under age forty on the U.S. East Coast, whose place
of honor in the sinister Beverly Middle School drug-set was due entirely to his gift for transforming the kitchen of any vacationing
parents' house into a rudimentary pharmaceutical laboratory, using like BBQ-sauce bottles as Erlenmeyer Flasks and microwave
ovens to cyclize OH and carbon into three-ring compounds, synthesizing methylenedioxy psychedelics364354 from nutmeg and
sassafras oil, ether from charcoal-starter, designer meth from Tryptophan and L-Histidine, sometimes using only a gas-top range
and parental Farberware, able even to decoct usable concentrations of tetra-hydrofruan from PVC Pipe Cleaner — which at that
time best of British luck ordering tetrahydrofruan from any chemical company in the 48 con tigs/6 provinces without getting paid
an immediate visit by D.E.A. guys in three-piece suits and reflecting shades — and then using the tetrahydrofruan and ethanol and
any protein-binding catalyst to turn plain old Sominex into something just one H3C molecule away from good old biphasic methaqualone, a.k.a. the intrepid Quaalude. Kite had called his Quaalude-isotopes 'QuoVadis,' and they were a great favorite for 13-15-
year-old Bimmy G. and the slouched sharp-haired sinister set he dropped Ludes and QuoVadises with, washing them down with
Hefenreffers, resulting in a kind of mnemonic brown-out where the entire two-year interval — the same interval during which the
ex-M.P. found somebody else, a Newburyport divorcee who apparently put up a more sporting fight than Mrs. G., and decamped
in his sticker-covered Ford with his seaman's bag and pea-coat — the whole period's become in Gately's sober memory just the
vague era of The Attack of the Killer Sidewalks. Quaaludes and 16-oz. Hefenreffers awakened Gately and his new droogs to the
usually-dormant-but-apparently-ever-lurking ill will of innocent-seeming public sidewalks everywhere. You didn't have to be
brainy Trent Kite to figure out the equation (Quaaludes) + (not even that many beers) = getting whapped by the nearest sidewalk
— as in you're walking innocently along down a sidewalk and out of nowhere the sidewalk comes rushing up to meet you:
WHAP. Happened time after fucking time. It made the whole crew resent having to walk anywhere on QuoVadises because of not
having driver's licenses yet, which gives you some idea of the sum-total I.Q. brought to bear on the problem of the Attacks. A tiny
permanent cast in his left eye and what looks like a chin-dimple are Gately's legacy from the period before moving up to
Percocets, which one advantage of the move deeper into oral narcs was that Percocets + Hefenreffers didn't allow you even
enough upright mobility to make you vulnerable Co sidewalks' ever-lurking ill will.
It was amazing that none of this stuff seemed much to hurt Gately's performance playing ball, but then he was as devoted to
football as he was to oral CNS-depressants. At least for a while. He had disciplined personal rules back then. He absorbed
Substances only at night, after practice. Not so much as a fractional foamer between 0900h. and 1800h. during the seasons of
practice and play, and he settled for just a single duBois on Thursday evenings before actual games. During football season he
ruled himself with an iron hand until the sun set, then threw himself on the mercy of sidewalks and the somnolent hum. He used
class to catch up on REM-sleep. By freshman year he was starting on the Beverly-Salem H.S. Minutemen Varsity and was on
academic probation. Most of the sinister set he'd hung with were expelled for truancy or trafficking or worse by sophomore year.
Gately kept hanging in and on til seventeen.
But Quaaludes and QuoVadis and Percocets are lethal in terms of homework, especially washed down with Hefenreffer, and
extra-especially if you're academically ambivalent and A.D.D.-classified and already using every particle of your self-discipline
protecting football from the Substances. And — unhappily — high school is totally unlike higher education in terms of majorsport coaches' influence over instructors, athletes-and-grades-wise. Kite got Gately through math and Special Ed. science, and the
French teacher was getting her strabysmic eyeballs fucked out by the Minutemen's tanned lounge-lizard of an Offensive
Coordinator on the behalf of Gately and a semi-retarded tight end. But English just fucking killed him, Gately. All four of the
English teachers the Athletic Dept. tried Gately on had this sieg-heil idea that it was somehow cruel to pass a kid that couldn't do
the work. And the Athletic Dept. pointing out to them that Gately had an especially challenging domestic situation and that
flunking Gately and rendering him ineligible for ball would eliminate his one reason even to stay on in school — these were to no,
like, aveil. English was his sink-or-swim situation, what he then termed his 'Water Lou.' Term papers he could more or less swing;
the football coach had wienies on retainer. But the in-class themes and tests killed Gately, who simply didn't have enough will left
over after sunset to choose like the crushingly dull Ethan From over QuoVadis and Hefenreffer. Plus by this time three different
schools' authorities had him convinced he was basically dumb, anyway. But mostly it was the Substances. This one particular B.-
S.H.S.-Athletic-Dept.-hired wienie of an English tutor spent a sophomore-year March's worth of evenings in Gately's company,
and by Easter the kid weighed 95 pounds and had a nose-ring and hand-tremors and was placed by his frantic, functional parents
in a juvenile-intervention rehab, where the wienie's whole first week of Withdrawal was spent in a corner reciting Howl in highvolume Chaucerian English. Gately flunked Sophomore Comp. in May and lost the fall's eligibility and withdrew from school for
a year to preserve his junior season. And but then, without the only other thing he'd been devoted to, the psychic emergency-brake
was off, and Gately's sixteenth year is still mostly a gray blank, except for his mother's new red chintz TV-watching couch, and
also the acquaintance of an accommodating Rite-Aid pharmacist's assistant with disfiguring eczema and serious gambling debts.
Plus memories of terrible rear-ocular itching and of a basic diet of convenience-store crud, plus the vegetables from his mother's
vodka glass, while she slept. When he finally returned for his sophomore year of class and junior year of ball at seventeen and 284
lbs., Gately was enervated, flabby, apparently narcoleptic, and on a need-schedule so inflexible that he needed 15 mg. of good old
oxycodone hydro-chloride out of his pocket's Tylenol bottle every three hours to keep the shakes off. He was like a huge confused
kitten out on the field — the coach made him go in for P.E.T. Scans, fearing M.S. or Lou Gehrig's — and even the Classic Comics
version of Ethan From was now beyond his abilities; and good old Kite was gone by that last September of Unsubsidized Time,
admitted early on a full ride in Comp. Science by Salem State U., meaning Gately was now on his own in remedial math and
chem. On offense, Gately lost his starting spot in the third game to a big clear-eyed freshman the coach said showed nearly
limitless potential. Then Mrs. Gately suffered her cirrhotic hemorrhage and cerebral-blood thing in late October, just before the
midterms Gately was getting ready to fail. Bored-eyed guys in white cotton blew blue bubbles and loaded her in the back of a
leisurely sirenless ambulance and took her first to the hospital and then to a Medicaid L.T.I.365355 out across the Yirrell Beach
span in Pt. Shirley. The backs of Gately's eyes were too itchy for him to even be able to stand out on the red pocked stoop's steps
and see to wave adios. The first gasper he ever smoked was that day, a 100 out of a half-finished pack of his mother's generics,
that she left. He didn't even ever go back to B.-S.H.S. to clean out his lockers. He never played organized ball again.
I may have been dozing. Some more heads came and awaited response and left. I may have dozed. It occurred to me that I
didn't have to eat if I was not hungry. This presented itself as almost a revelation. I hadn't been hungry in over a week. I could
remember when I was always hungry, constantly hungry.
Then at some point Pemulis's head appeared in the doorway, his strange twin-towered A.M. cowlick bobbing as he looked
back over each shoulder out into the hall. His right eye was either twitchy or swollen from sleep; something was wrong with it.
'Mmyellow,' he said.
I pretended to shade my eyes. 'Howdy there stranger.’
It is not Pemulis's way to apologize or explain or worry that you might think ill of him. In this he reminded me of Mario. This
almost regal lack of insecurity is hard to put together with his crippling neurasthenia on-court.
"s up?' he said, not moving from the doorway.
I could see my asking him where he'd been all week leading to so many different possible responses and further questions that
the prospect was almost overwhelming, so enervating I could barely get out that I'd just been lying here on the floor.
'Lying here is all,' I told him.
'So I just got told,' he said. 'The Petropulator mentioned hysterics.’
It was almost impossible to shrug lying supine on thick shag. 'See for yourself,' I said.
Pemulis came all the way in. He became the only thing in the room that understood itself as basically vertical. He didn't look
very good; his color wasn't good. He had not shaved, and a dozen little black bristles jutted from the ball of his chin. He gave the
impression of chewing gum even though he was not chewing gum. 
He said 'Thinking?’
'The opposite. Thought-prophylaxis.’
'Feeling a little punk?’
'Can't complain.' I rolled my eyes up at him.
He made a sharp glottal stop. He moved toward the periphery of my vision and fit himself into the seam of two walls behind
me; I heard him sliding down to assume the back-supported squat he sometimes liked.
The Petropulator was Petropolis Kahn. I was thinking of the final film-lecture in Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms
... and then of C.T.'s misadventure at Himself's funeral. The Moms had had Himself interred in her family's traditional plot in
L'Islet Province. I heard a whoop and two crashes directly overhead. My rib cage contracted and expanded.
'Incster?' Pemulis said after a time.
A noteworthy thing turned out to be that the mound of earth on a freshly-filled grave seems airy and risen and plump, like
dough.
'Hal?' Pemulis said.
'Javol.’
'We've got some really important interfacing to do, brother.’
I didn't say anything. There were too many potential responses, both witty ones and earnest ones. I could hear Pemulis's
cowlicks brush each wall as he looked to either side, and the slight sound of a small zipper being played with.
'I'm thinking we could go someplace discreet and really interface.’
'I'm a highly tuned horizontal antenna tuned in to you lying right here.’
'I was meaning could we go somewheres.’
'So this urgency all of a sudden?' I was trying to make my intonation Jewish-motherish, that melodic dip-rise-dip. 'All week:
not a call, not a card. Now I should hear this about urgency?’
'Seen your Mums around lately?’
'Haven't seen her all week. Doubtless she's over helping C.T. arrange a weather-venue.' I paused. 'I haven't seen him all week
either, come to think,' I said.
'The Eschaton's a no-go,' Pemulis said. 'The map's a mess out there.’
'We're going to get an announcement about the Quebec kids very soon, I can feel it,' I said. Tm that highly tuned in this
position.’
'What say let's skip the sausage-analog and whip down to Steak 'N Sundae and eat.’
There was an extended pause as I ran a response-tree. Pemulis was zipping and unzipping something with a short zipper. I
couldn't decide. I finally had to choose almost at random. 'I'm trying to cut down on patronizing places with '"N" in their name.’
'Listen.' I heard his knees creak as he leaned in toward the top of my head. 'About the tu-savez-quoi —’
'The Eeday Emmay Eezay. The synthetic bacchanal. That's definitely off, Mike. Talk about the map being a mess.’
'That's part of what we need to interface about, if you'd get off your literally your ass here.’
I spent a minute watching the NASA glass fall and rise. 'Don't even start, M.M.’
'What start?’
'We're on hiatus, remember? We're living like Shi'ite Moslems for the thirty days you miraculously blarneyed the guy into
giving us.’
'Blarney wasn't why we got it, Inc, is the thing.’
'And now, what, twenty days to go. We're going to produce urine like a mullah's babe, we agreed.’
'This isn't—' Pemulis started.
I farted, but it didn't produce a noise. I was bored. I couldn't remember a time when Pemulis had bored me. 'And I do not need
you launching temptation-rhetoric my way,' I said.
Keith Freer appeared in the doorway, leaning against the jamb with his bare arms crossed. He was still wearing the weird
unitard he slept in, which made him look like someone who tore phone books in half at a sideshow.
'Does somebody have an explanation why there's human flesh on the hall window upstairs?' he said.
'We're conversing here,' Pemulís told him.
I half sat up. 'Flesh?’
Freer looked down at me. 'This is nothing to laugh at I don't think Hal. There's I swear to fucking God a human strip of
forehead-flesh upstairs on the hall window, and what looks like two eyebrows, and bits of nose. And now Tall Paul says down in
the lobby Stice was seen coming out of the infirmary wearing something out of Zorro.’
Pemulis was completely vertical, standing again; I could hear his knees as he rose. 'It's like a tête-à-tête in here, brother. We're
in here bunkered, mano a—’
'Stice got stuck to the window,' I explained, lying all the way back down. 'Kenkle and Brandt were going to detach him with
warm water from a janitorial bucket.’
Pemulis said 'How do you get stuck to a window?’
'Well from the looks it looks like they detached half his face from his head,' Freer said, feeling at his own forehead and
shuddering a little.
Kieran McKenna's little porcine snout appeared in a gap under Freer's arm. He still wore his stupid full-head gauze wrap for
his supposed bruised skull. 'Did you guys get to see The Darkness? Gopnik said he looks like a piece of cheese pizza where
somebody tore the cheese off. Gopnik said Troeltsch is charging two bucks a look.' He ran off toward the stairwell without
waiting for a reply, his pocket jingling madly. Freer looked at Pemulis and opened his mouth, then apparently reconsidered and
followed off down the hall. We could hear a couple of sarcastic whistles at Freer's unitard.
Pemulis reappeared at the top of my vision; his right eye was definitely twitching. 'This is what I meant about going
someplace discreet. When have I ever urgently asked you to dialogue before, Inc?’
'Certainly not within the last few days, Mike, that's for sure.’ 
There was an extended pause. I raised my hands over my face and looked at their shapes against the indirect lights.
Pemulis finally said 'Well, I'm going to go make sure I eat before I have to see Stice without a fucking forehead.’
'Have an analog for me,' I said. 'Let me know if there's word on the meet. I'll eat if I'm going to have to play.’
Pemulis licked his palm and tried to get his cowlicks to behave. From my vantage he was high overhead and upside-down. 'So
are you going to get up and go up and get dressed and stand on one foot with that opera thing on at some point? Because I could
eat and then come up. We can tell Mario we need to mano-à-tête.’
Now I was making a cage of my hands and watching the light through its shape as I rotated it. 'Will you do me a favor? Get
Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms That Utilize Every Centimeter of Available Space with Mind-Boggling Efficiency out
for me. It's about a dozen cartridges in from the right on the third shelf down in the entertainment-case. Cue it up to about 2300,
2350 maybe? The last five minutes or so.’
'The third shelf down,' I said as he scanned, tapping a foot. 'They've got all Himself's stuff together on the third shelf.’
He scanned. 'Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators? Fun with Teeth? Annular Fusion Is Our Fiend? I haven't even heard of half
your Dad's shit that's here.’
'It's Friend, not Fiend. Either it's mislabeled or the label's peeling. And they're supposed to be alphabetized. It ought to be
right next to Flux in a Box:
'And me using the poor guy's lab,' Pemulis said. He loaded the player and turned on the viewer, his knees popping again as he
squatted to set the cue to 2350. The huge screen hummed in a low pitch that ascended as it began to warm up, the screen taking on
a milky blue aspect like the eye of a dead bird. Pemulis's feet were bare and I looked at the calluses on his heels. He tossed the
cartridge's case carelessly on a couch or chair behind me and looked down. 'What the fuck's Fun with Teeth supposed to be
about?’
I tried to shrug against the friction of the carpet. 'Pretty much what it says it's about.' The funeral had been held on 5 or 6
April in St. Adalbert, a small town built around spud-storage facilities fewer than five clicks west of the Great Concavity. We'd all
had to fly up by way of Newfoundland because of the volume of waste-displacement launches that spring. And commercial
airlines hadn't yet had data on high-altitude Dioxin levels over the Concavity. Cloud-cover prevented our seeing much of the New
Brunswick coast, which I'm told was a mercy. What happened at the funeral service itself was simply that a circling gull scored a
direct white hit on the shoulder of C.T.'s blue blazer, and that when he opened his mouth in shock at the direct hit, a large bluebodied fly flew right into his mouth and was hard to extract. Several persons laughed. It was no huge or dramatic thing. The
Moms probably laughed hardest of anyone.
The TP's tracker chugged and clicked, and the viewer bloomed. Pemulis had been wearing parachute pants and a tam-o'-
shanter and lensless spectacles, but no shoes. The cartridge started close to what I'd wanted to review, the protagonist's climactic
lecture. Paul Anthony Heaven, all 50 kilos of him, gripping the lectern with both hands so you could see that he was missing his
thumbs, the sad dyed strands combed over his bald spot visible because he had his head down, reading the lecture in the deadening
academic monotone that Himself so loved. The monotone was the reason why Himself used Paul Anthony Heaven, a
nonprofessional, by trade a data-entry drone for Ocean Spray, in anything that required a deadening institutional presence — Paul
Anthony Heaven had also played the threatening supervisor in Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat, the Massachusetts State
Commissioner for Beach and Water Safety in Safe Boating Is No Accident, and a Parkinsonian corporate auditor in LowTemperature Civics.
'Thus the Flood's real consequence is revealed to be desiccation, generations of hydrophobia on a pandemic scale,' the
protagonist was reading aloud. Peterson's The Cage was running on a large screen behind the lectern. A number of shots of
undergraduates with their heads on their desks, reading their mail, making origami animals, picking at their faces with blank
intensity, established that the climactic lecture wasn't coming off as all that climactic to the audience within the film. 'We thus
become, in the absence of death as ideologic end, ourselves desiccated, deprived of some essential fluid, aridly cerebral, abstract,
conceptual, little more than hallucinations of God,' the academic read in a deadly drone, his eyes never leaving his lectern's text.
The art-cartridge critics and scholars who point to the frequent presence of audiences inside Himself's films, and argue that the
fact that the audiences are always either dumb and unappreciative or the victims of some grisly entertainment-mishap betrays
more than a little hostility on the part of an 'auteuf pegged as technically gifted but narratively dull and plotless and static and not
entertaining enough — these academics' arguments seem sound as far as they go, but they do not explain the incredible pathos of
Paul Anthony Heaven reading his lecture to a crowd of dead-eyed kids picking at themselves and drawing vacant airplane- and
genitalia-doodles on their college-rule note-pads, reading stupefyingly turgid-sounding shit366356 — 'For while clinamen and
tessera strive to revive or revise the dead ancestor, and while kenosis and daemonization act to repress consciousness and memory
of the dead ancestor, it is, finally, artistic askesis which represents the contest proper, the battle-to-the-death with the loved dead'
— in a monotone as narcotizing as a voice from the grave — and yet all the time weeping, Paul Anthony Heaven, as an upward
hall full of kids all scan their mail, the film-teacher not sobbing or wiping his nose on his tweed sleeve but silently weeping, very
steadily, so that tears run down Heaven's gaunt face and gather on his underslung chin and fall from view, glistening slightly,
below the lectern's frame of sight. Then this too began to seem familiar.
He hadn't in the beginning burgled, Gately, as a full-time drug addict, though he did sometimes promote small valuables from
the apartments of the strung-out nurses he X'd and copped samples from. After the bailout from school, Gately worked full-time
for a time for a North Shore bookmaker, a guy that also owned several titty clubs down Rte. 1 in Saugus, Whitey Sorkin, that had
sort of casually befriended him when Gately was still playing high-profile ball. His professional association with Whitey Sor-kin
continued part-time even after Gately discovered his real B&E vocation, though he tended more and more toward less taxing
nonviolent crime.
But from age like eighteen to twenty-three, Gately and the prenominate Gene Fackelmann — a towering, slope-shouldered,
wide-hipped, prematurely potbellied, oddly priapistic, and congenitally high-strung Dilaudid addict with a walrusy mustache that
seemed to have a nervous life of its own — these two served as like Whitey Sorkin's operatives in the field, taking bets and
phoning them in to Saugus, delivering winnings, and collecting debts. It was never clear to Gately why Whitey Sorkin was called
Whitey, because he spent a huge amount of time under ultraviolet lamps as part of an esoteric cluster-headache-treatment regimen 
and so was the constant shiny color of a sort of like dark soap, with almost the same color and coin-of-the-realm classic profile as
the cheery young Pakistani M.D. who'd told Gately at Our Lady of Solace Hospital in Beverly how Teddibly Soddy he was that
Mrs. G.'s cirrhosis and cirrhotic stroke had left her at roughly the neurologic level of a Brussels sprout and then given him publictransportation directions to the Point Shirley L.T.I.
Eugene ('Fax') Fackelmann, who'd dropped out of the Lynn MA educational system at like ten, had met Whitey Sorkin
through the same eczema-tic, gamble-happy pharmacist's assistant Gately had first met Sorkin through. Gately was now no longer
called Bimmy or Doshka. He was Don now, nicknameless. Sometimes Donny. Sorkin referred to Gately and Fackelmann as his
Twin Towers. They were more or less Sorkin's paid muscle. Except not in any sort of way important crime figures' paid muscle is
portrayed in popular entertainment. They didn't stand impassively flanking Sorkin at crime-figure meetings or light his cigar or
call him 'Boss' or anything. They weren't his bodyguards. In fact they weren't physically around him that much; they usually dealt
with Sorkin and his Saugus office and secretary via beepers and cellular phones.367357
And while they did collect debts for Sorkin, including bad debts (especially Gately), it's not like Gately went around breaking
debtors' kneecaps. Even the threat of coercive violence was pretty rare. Partly, Gately and Fackelmann's sheer size was enough to
keep delinquencies from getting out of hand. And partly it was that everybody involved usually knew each other — Sorkin, his
bettors and debtors, Gately and Fackelmann, other drug addicts (who sometimes bet, or more often dealt with Gately and Fackelmann for guys that did), even the North Shore Finest's Vice guys, many of whom also sometimes bet with Sorkin because he
gave the Finest special civil-servant reductions on vigorish. It was all like this community. Usually Gately's job on bad debts or
delinquent vig was to go around to the debtor at whatever bar the guy watched satellite sports at and just inform him that the debt
was threatening to get out of hand — making the debt itself seem like the delinquent party — and that Whitey was concerned
about it, and work out some arrangement or payment-plan with the guy. Then the young Gately'd go into the bar's head and cellphone Sorkin and get his OK on whatever arrangement they'd worked out. Gately was laid-back and affable and never had a hard
word for anybody, hardly. Nor did Whitey Sorkin: a lot of his bettors were old and steady customers, and lines of credit went with
the territory. Most of the rare debt-trouble that called for size and coercion involved guys with a gambling problem, kind of
pathetic furtive guys addicted to the rush of the bet, who got themselves in a hole and then tried suicidally to bet their way out of
the hole, and who'd bet with several bookies at once, and who'd lie and agree to payment-arrangements they had no intention of
sticking to, suicidally betting they could keep all their debts in the air until they could square themselves with the major long-shot
score they were always sure was around the corner. These types were painful, because usually Gately knew the debtors and they'd
exploit his knowing them and beg and weep and tug at both Gately's and Whitey Sorkin's heartstrings with tales of loved ones and
wasting illnesses. They'd sit there and look into Gately's eyes and lie and believe their own lies, and Gately would have to call in
the debtors' lies and sob-stories and get Sorkin's explicit decision on if to believe them and what to do. These types were Gately's
first exposure to the concept of real addiction and what it can turn someone into; he hadn't yet connected the concept to drugs
really, except coke-heads and hardcore needle-jockeys, who at that point all seemed to him just as furtive and pathetic as the
gambling-addicts, in their own way. These sob-story-, one-more-chance-types were also the types that put Whitey Sorkin through
hell in terms of emotionally, causing Whitey cluster headaches and terrible cranio-facial neuralgia, and at a certain point Sorkin
used to start adding (to the delinquent skeet, the vig, and the interest) extra charges for his own required intake of Cafergot368358
spansules and UV light and visits to Enfield MA's National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation. The use of Gately and Fack-elmann's
rump-roast-sized fists in actual hands-on coercion got called for only when a compulsive debtor's lies and hole got serious enough
that Sorkin became willing to forgo the guy's patronage in the future. At this sort of point, Whitey Sorkin's business-objective
became to somehow induce the addicted debtor to cover his debts to Sorkin before the debtor covered his debts to any of the other
books he was into, which meant for Sorkin that he had to vividly demonstrate to the debtor that Sorkin's was the least pleasant
hole to be in and the most important one to get out of. Enter the Twin Towers. The violence was to be tightly controlled and
gradually progressive in like stages. The first round of incentivizing hose-work — a light beating, maybe a broken digit or two —
usually fell to Gene Fackelmann, not only because he was the naturally crueler of the Twin Towers and rather liked putting a digit
in a car door, but also because he had a controlled restraint Gately lacked: Sorkin found that once Gately got started in physically
on somebody it was like something ferocious and uncontrolled on a slope inside the big kid got dislodged and started to roll on its
own, and sometimes Gately wouldn't be able to stop himself before the debtor was reduced to a condition where he wasn't even
going to be able to raise his head, much less funds, at which point not only did Sorkin have to write off the debt but the big kid
Donny'd get so guilty and remorseful he'd triple his drug-intake and be no use to fucking nobody for a week. Sorkin learned how
to use his Towers to maximize their strengths. Fackelmann got the first-round light work for coercive collections, but Gately was
better than Fax at negotiating arrangements with guys so it never had to come to violence. And there were certain harder cases,
cases that laid Sorkin out in bed with cranio-facial stress for days at a time because they were hard-case addicts that were either so
far gone or so deep in so many holes that Fackelmann's light cruelty didn't resolve the situation. At an extreme point with some of
these cases Sorkin got to a point where he was willing to forgo not only the debtor's future patronage but also the remittance due;
at a certain point the goal was to minimize future other hard cases by making it clear that W. Sorkin was one book you couldn't
just flagrantly stay in the hole with and lie to for month after month without having your map seriously fucking reconfigured. Here
again, in this-type case Gately's internal out-of-control slope of ferocity was superior to Fackelmann's easy but ultimately shallow
sadism.369359
W. Sorkin, like most psychosomatic-level neurotics, was spiteful to his enemies and overgenerous to his friends. Gately and
Fackelmann each received 5% vig on the 10% vigorish Sorkin took on every bet, and Sorkin made over $200,000 worth of book
all over the North Shore on a week's pro ball alone, which for most diplomaless young Americans 1,000+ per pre-millennial week
would have been a very handsome living, but for the Twin Towers' rigid physical scheduling of narcotics needs was not even 60%
enough, weekly. Gately and Fackelmann moonlighted, and for a while separately — Fackelmann's sideline with I.D.s and creative
personal checking, Gately working freelance Security for large card games and small drug-deliveries — but even before they were
a real crew they copped as a unit, as in together, plus once in a moon with poor old V. Nuccí, for whom Gately also occasionally
held the rope on late-night Osco-and-Rite-Aid-skylight missions, his entree to formal burglary proper. The fact that Gately was
devoted to Percocets and Barn-Bams and Fackelmann to Dilaudid allowed them a high level of trust with each other's stashes. 
Gately would do Blues, which had to be injected, only when no oral narcs were to be got and he was face to face with early
Withdrawal. Gately feared and despised needles and was terrified of the Virus, which in those days was laying out needle-jockeys
left and right. Fackelmann would cook up for Gately and tie him off and let Gately watch closely as he took the plastic wrap off a
mint-new syringe and needle-cartridge Fackelmann could get with a fake Medicaid Iletin370360 I.D. for diabetes mellitus. The
worst thing about Dilaudid for Gately was that the hydromorphone's transit across the blood-brain barrier created a terrible fivesecond mnemonic hallucination where he was a gargantuan toddler in an XXL Fisher-Price crib in a sandy field under a stormcloudy sky that bulged and receded like a big gray lung. Fackelmann would loosen the belt and stand back and watch Gately's
eyes roll up as he broke a malarial sweat and stared up at the delusion's respiritic sky while his huge hands throttled the air in front
him just like a toddler shakes at the bars of his crib. Then after five or so seconds the Dilaudid would cross over and kick, and the
sky stopped breathing and turned blue. A Dilaudid nod made Gately mute and sodden for three hours.
Besides the maddening itch behind the eyes, Fackelmann didn't like oral narcotics because he said they gave him terrible
sugar-cravings that his huge soft slumped weight wouldn't tolerate indulging. Not exactly the swiftest ship in Her Majesty's fleet
in terms of like upstairs, Fackelmann was resistant to Gately's pointing out that Dilaudid also gave the Faxman terrible sugarcravings, as did actually just about everything. The plain truth was that Fackelmann just really liked Dilaudid.
Then good old Trent Kite got the administrative Shoe from Salem State, who informed him he'd never study in the industry
again, and Gately brought Kite into the crew, and Kite threw together some old-time Quo-Vadis for a small crew-warming party,
and Fackelmann introduced Kite to pharmaceutical-grade Dilaudid, and Kite found a new friend for life, he said; and Kite and
Fackelmann swiftly fell into the I.D.-, credit-history-and-furnished-luxury-apartment-scam, in which by this time Gately involved
himself pretty much only as a hobby, preferring bold nighttime merchandise-promotion to fraud, which fraud tended to involve
meeting the people you stole from, which Gately found slimy and kind of awkward.
Gately lay in the Trauma Ward in terrific infected pain, trying to Abide between cravings for relief by remembering a
blinding white afternoon just after Xmas, when Fackelmann and Kite were off disposing of some of a furnished apartment's
furnishings and Gately was killing time in the apartment laminating some false MA drivers licenses rush-ordered by rich Philips
Andover Academy371361 kids for what turned out to be the last New Year's Eve of Unsubsidized Time. He'd been standing at an
ironing board in the by now pretty much unfurnished apartment, ironing laminates onto the fake licenses, watching good old
Boston U. play Clemson in the Ken-L-Ration-Magnavox-Kemper-Insurance Forsythia Bowl on a cumbersome first-generation
Inter-Lace HDV hanging on the bare wall, the high-def viewer always now the last luxury furnishing to be fenced. The winter
daylight through the penthouse windows was dazzling and fell across the viewer's big flat screen and made the players look
bleached and ghostly. Through the windows off in the distance was the Atlantic O., gray and dull with salt. The B.U. punter was a
hometown Boston kid the announcers kept inserting was a walk-on and an inspirational story that had never played a major sport
until college and now was already one of the finest punt-specialists in N.C.A.A. history, and had the potential to be a lock for a
pretty much limitless pro ball career if he bore down and kept his eye on the carrot. The B.U. punter was two years younger than
Don Gately. Gately's big digits could barely fit around the iron's EZ-grip handle, and stooping over the ironing board made the
small of his back ache, and he hadn't eaten anything except deep-fried stuff out of shiny plastic packaging for like a week, and the
stink of the plastic laminates under the iron stunk wicked bad, and his big square face sagged lower and lower as he stared at the
punter's ghostly digital image until he found himself starting to cry like a babe. It came out of emotional nowheres all of a sudden,
and he found himself blubbering at the loss of organized ball, his one gift and other love, his own stupidity and lack of discipline,
that blasted cocksucking Ethan From, his Mom's Sir Osis and vegetabilization and his failure after four years ever yet to visit,
feeling suddenly lower than bottom-feeder-shit, standing over hot laminates and Polaroid squares and little stick-on D.M.V. letters
for rich blond male boys, in the blazing winter light, blubbering amid fraudulent stink and tear-steam. It was two days later he got
pinched for assaulting one bouncer with the unconscious body of another bouncer, in Danvers MA, and three months after that
that he went to Billerica Minimum.
Entrepot-bound, twitchy-eyed and checking both sides behind him as he comes, rounding the curve of Subdormitory B's hall
with his stick and little solid frustum-shaped stool, Michael Pemulis sees at least eight panels of the drop-ceiling have somehow
fallen out of their aluminum struts and are on the floor — some broken in that incomplete, hingey way stuff with fabric-content
gets broken — including the relevant panel. No old sneaker is in evidence on the floor as he clears the panels to plant the stool, his
incredibly potent Bentley-Phelps penlight in his teeth, looking up into the darkness of the struts' lattice.
Given the Faxter's historical proclavity for fraudulent scams, it was amazing to Gately that he didn't ever know how
Fackelmann had been fraudulently getting over on Whitey Sorkin in all kinds of little ways almost from the start, and didn't even
find it out until the not at all small scam with Eighties Bill and Sixties Bob, which took place during the three months Gately was
out on bail Sorkin had generously put up. By this time Gately had fallen in with two lesbian pharmaceutical-cocaine addicts he'd
met at the gym doing upside-down sit-ups from the chin-up bar (the lesbians, not Gately, who was strictly from bench, curl, and
squat). These vigorous girls ran a rather intriguing house-cleaning-and-key-copyíng-and-burglary operation in Peabody and
Wakefield, and Gately had begun working heavy-merchandise-lifting and 4x4-vehicle-promotion for them, serious full-time
burglary, as his taste for even the threat of violence diminished on account of remorse at the bouncer-damage he'd inflicted in that
Danvers bar after just seven Hefenreffers and an innocent comment about the B.-S.H.S.'s Min-utemen's inferiority to the Danvers
H.S. Roughriders; and Gately left more and more of Sorkin's transfer-and-collection work to Fackelmann, who by this time had
gotten back into oral narcotics out of Virus-fears and stopped resisting the sugar-cravings he associated with oral narcs and gotten
so fat and soft his shirtfront looked like an accordion when he sat down to eat Peanut M&M's and nod, and now also to a badnews new guy Sorkin had lately befriended and put to work, a fuchsia-haired Harvard Square punk-type kid with a build like a
stump and round black unblinking eyes, an old-fashioned street-junk needle-jockey that went by the moniker Bobby C or just 'C,'
and liked to hurt people, the only I.V.-heroin addict Gately'd come across that actually preferred violence, with no lips at all and
purple hair in three great towering spikes and little bare patches in the hair on his forearms — from constantly testing the edge on
his boot-knife — and a leather jacket with way more zippers than anybody could ever need, and a pre-electric earring that hung
way down and was a roaring skull in gold-plate flames.
Gene Fackelmann had, it turns out, for years been getting fraudulently over on Whitey Sorkin's bookmaking operation in all 
sorts of little ways that Gately and Kite (according to Kite) hadn't known about. Usually it was something like Fax taking longshot action from marginal bettors not well known to Sorkin and not phoning the action in to Sorkin's secretary, and then, when the
long-shot lost, collecting the skeet plus vig372362 from the bettor and rat-holing it all for himself. It had seemed to Gately after he
found out about it a suicidal-type risk, since if any of these long-shots ever actually won Fackelmann would be responsible for
giving the bettor his winnings from 'Whitey' — meaning it would be Sorkin that would hear the complaint if Fackelmann didn't
come up with the $ on his own and get it to the bettor — and the whole crew's pharmacological expenses meant they always
existed on the absolutest margins of liquidity, at least that's what Gately and Kite (according to Kite) had always thought. It wasn't
until Fackelmann's map had been presumably eliminated for keeps and Kite had returned from his long highatus and Gately and
Kite were getting the late Fackelmann's stuff together to divvy up valuables and dump the rest and Gately found, taped to the
underside of Fackelmann's porn-cartridge storage case, over $22,000 in mint-crisp O.N.A.N. currency, not until then that Gately
realized that Fack-elmann had through iron will kept unspent an emergency reserve skeet-payment stake for just such a worst-case
possibility. Gately split this found Fackelmann-$ with Trent Kite, then but went and turned his half of it in to Sorkin, claiming it
was all they'd found. It wasn't that he forked his half over to Sorkin out of any kind of fear — Sorkin would have regretfully had
the C kid and his Nuck/fag crew demap him, Gately, too, along with Fack-elmann, if he'd thought Gately had been part of Fax's
scam — but out of guilt over having been clueless about his own fellow Twin Tower screwing Sorkin after Sorkin had been so
neurasthenically over-generous to them both, and because Fackelmann's betrayal had ended up so hurting Sorkin and causing him
so much psychosomatic grief that he'd spent a whole week in bed in Saugus in the dark with Lone Ranger-type sleep shades on,
drinking VO and Cafergot and clutching his traumatized cranium and face, feeling betrayed and abandoned, he'd said, his whole
faith in the human creature shaken, he'd wept to Gately over the cellular phone, after it all came out. Ultimately, Gately gave
Sorkin his half of Fackelmann's secret $ mostly to try and cheer Sorkin up. Let him know somebody cared. He also did it for
Fackelmann's memory, which he was mourning Fax's gruesome death even at the same time he cursed him for a liar and rat-punk.
It was a time of moral confusion for Don G., and his half of the post-mortem $ seemed like the best he could do in terms of like a
gesture. He didn't rat out that Kite had a whole other half, which Kite spent his half of the $ on Grateful Dead bootlegs and a
portable semiconductor-refrigeration unit for his D.E.C. 2100's motherboard that upped his processing capacity to 32 mb2 of
RAM, roughly the same as an InterLace Disseminator-substation or an NNE Bell cellular SWITCHnet; though it wasn't two
months before he'd pawned the D.E.C. and put it in his arm, and had become such a steeply-downhill-type Dilaudid-addict that
when he signed on as Gately's new trusted associate for B&Es after Gately got out of Billerica the once-mighty Kite wasn't even
able to dicky an alarm or shunt a meter, and Gately found himself the brains of the team, which it was a mark of his own highangle decline that this fact didn't make him more nervous.
The R.N. that'd flushed his colon while Gately wept with shame is now back in the room with an M.D. Gately hasn't seen
before. He lies there pinwheel-eyed from pain and efforts to Abide via memory. One eye has some sort of blurry sleep-goop film
in it that won't blink or rub away. The room is filled with mournful gunmetal winter-P.M. light. The M.D. and gorgeous R.N. are
doing something to the room's other bed, attaching something metally complex from out of a big case not unlike a good-tablesilverware case, with molded purple velvet insides for metal rods and two half-circles of steel. The intercom dings. The M.D.'s got
a beeper at his belt, an object with still more unhealthy associations. Gately hasn't exactly been asleep. The heat of his post-op
fever makes his face feel tight, like standing too close to a fire. His right side's settled down to a sick ache like a kicked groin.
Fackelmann's favorite phrase had been 'That's a goddamned lie!' He'd used it in response to just about everything. His mustache
always looked like it was getting ready to crawl off his lip. Gately's always despised facial hair. The former naval M.P. had had a
great big yellow-gray mustache he waxed into two sharp protruding steer-horns. The M.P. was vain about his mustache and spent
giant amounts of time clipping and grooming and waxing it. When the M.P. passed out, Gately used to come quietly up and gently
push the stiff waxed sides of the mustache into crazy canted angles. Sorkin's new third field-operative C'd claimed to collect ears
and to have a collection of ears. Bobby C with his lightless eyes and flat lipless head, like a reptile. The M.D. was one of those
apprentice Residential M.D.s that looked about twelve, scrubbed and groomed to a dull pink shine. He radiated the bustling cheer
they teach M.D.s how to radiate at you. He had a child's haircut, complete with spit-curl, and his thin neck swam in the collar of
his white M.D.-coat, and his coat's pens' pocket-protector and the owlish glasses he kept pushing up, together with the little neck,
gave Gately the sudden insight that most M.D.s and A.D.A.s and P.D./P.O.s and shrinks, the fearsomest authority figures in a drug
addict's life, that these guys came from the pencil-necked ranks of the same weak-chinned wienie kids that drug addicts used to
despise and revile and bully, as kids. The R.N. was so attractive in the gray light and goop-blur it was almost grotesque. Her tits
were such that she had a little cleft of cleavage showing even over her R.N.'s uniform, which was not like a low-neckline thing.
The milky cleavage that suggests tits like two smooth scoops of vanilla ice cream that your healthy-type girls all have probably
got. Gately's forced to confront the fact that he's never once been with a really healthy girl, and not with even so much as a girl of
any kind in sobriety. And then when she reaches way up to unscrew a bolt in some kind of steelish plate on the wall over the
empty bed the like hemline of her uniform retreats up north so that the white stockings' rich violinish curves at the top of the
insides of her legs in the white LISLE are visible in backlit silhouette, and an EMBRASURE of sad windowlight shines through
her legs. The raw healthy sexuality of the whole thing just about makes Gately sick with longing and self-pity, and he wants to
avert his head. The young M.D. is also staring at the lissome stretch and retreating hem, not even pretending to help with the bolt,
missing as he goes to push up the glasses so that he stabs himself in the forehead. The M.D. and R.N. exchange several pieces of
real technical medical language. The M.D. drops his clipboard twice. The R.N. either doesn't notice any of the sexual tension in
the room because she's spent her whole life as the eye of a storm of sexual tension, or else she just pretends not to notice. Gately's
almost positive the M.D.'s jacked off before to the thought of this R.N., and he feels sick that he totally empathizes with the M.D.
It'd be CIRCUMAMBIENT sexual tension, would be the ghostword. Gately'd never even let an unhealthy strung-out-type female
go into the head for at least an hour after he'd taken a dump in there, out of embarrassment, and now this sickening circumambient
creature had with her own Fleet syringe and soft hands summoned a loose pathetic dump from the anus of Bimmy Gately, which
anus she had thus seen close up, producing a dump.
It doesn't even register on Gately that it's spitting a little goopy sleet outside until he's made himself avert his head from the
window and R.N. The ceiling's throbbing a little, like a dog when it's hot. The R.N. had told him, from behind, her name was 
Cathy or Kathy, but Gately wants to think of her as just the R.N. He can smell himself, a smell like sandwich-meat left in the sun,
and feel greasy sweat purling all over his scalp, and his unshaved chin against his throat, and the tube taped into his mouth is tacky
with the scum of sleep. The thin pillow is hot and he has no way to flip it over to the cool side of the pillow. It's like his shoulder's
grown its own testicles and every time his heart beats some very small guy kicked him in them, the testicles. The M.D. sees
Gately's open eyes and tells the nurse the gunshot patient is semiconscious again and is he Q'd for any kind of P.M. med. The
sleetfall is slight; it sounds like somebody's throwing little fistfuls of sand at the window from real far away. The deadly R.N.,
helping the M.D. clamp some kind of weird steel back-braceish thing with what looks like a metal halo they'd put together from
parts out of the big case, clamping the thing to the head of the bed and to little steel plates under the bed's heart monitor — it looks
sort of like the upper part of an electric chair, he thinks — the R.N. looks down in mid-stretch and says Hi Mr. Gately and says
Mr. Gately is allergic and doesn't get any meds except antipyretics and Toradol in a drip Dr. Pressburger do you Mr. Gately you
poor brave allergic thing. Her voice is like you can just imagine what she'd sound like getting X'd and really liking it. Gately's
repelled at himself for having taken a dump in front of this kind of R.N. The M.D.'s name had sounded just like 'Pressburger' or
'Priss-burger,' and Gately's now sure the poor yutz'd taken daily ass-kickings from sinister future drug addicts, as a kid. The M.D.'s
perspiring in the ambient sexuality of the R.N. He says (the M.D. does) So what's he intu-bated for if he's conscious and selfventilating and on a drip. This is while the M.D.'s trying to screw the metal halo itself to the top of the back-braceish thing with
bolt-head screws, one knee up on the bed and stretching so part of the red soft upper part of his ass is showing over his belt, not
being able to get the thing screwed on, shaking the metal halo like it's its stubborn fault, and even lying there Gately can tell the
guy's turning the bolt-head screws the wrong way. The R.N. comes over and puts a cool soft hand on Gately's forehead in a way
that makes the forehead want to die with shame. What Gately can get from what she says to Dr. Pressburger is that there'd been
concern that Gately might have got a fragment of whatever projectile he got invaded with in, through, or near his lower-something
Trachea, since there'd been trauma to his Something-with-six-syllables-that-started-with-Sterno, she said the radiology results
were indefinite but suspicious, and somebody called Pendleton had wanted a 16 mm. siphuncular nebulizer dispensing 4 ml. of
20% Mucomyst373363 q. 2 h. on the off-chance of hemorrhage or mucoidal flux, like just in case. The parts of this Gately can
follow he doesn't care for one bit. He doesn't want to know his body even fucking has something with six syllables in it. The
horrifying R.N. wipes Gately's face off as best she can with her hand and says she'll try to fit him in for a sponge bath before she
goes off-shift at 1600h., at which Gately goes rigid with dread. The R.N.'s hand smells of Kiss My Face-brand Organic Hand and
Body Lotion, which Pat Montesian also uses. She tells the poor M.D. to let her have a try at the cranial brace, those things are
always a bear to screw in. Her shoes are those subaudible nurses' shoes that make no sound, so it seems like she glides away from
Gately's bed instead of walks away. Her legs aren't visible until she gets a certain ways away. The M.D.'s own shoes have a wet
squeak to the left one. The M.D. looks like he hasn't slept well in about a year. There's a faint vibe of prescription 'drines about the
guy, on Gately's view. He paces squeakily at the foot of the bed watching the R.N. turn the screws the right way and pushes his
owlish glasses up and says that Clifford Pendleton, scratch golfer or no, is a post-traumatic maroon, that nebulized Mucomyst is
for (and here his voice makes it clear he's reciting from memory, like to show off) abnormal, viscid, or inspissated post-traumatic
mucus, not potential hemorrhaging or edema, and that 16 mm. siphuncular intubation itself had been specifically discreditated as
an intratracheal-edema prophylaxis in the second-to-latest issue of Morbid Trauma Quarterly as so diametrically invasive that it
was more apt to exacerbate than to alleviate hemoptysis, according to somebody he calls 'Laird' or 'Layered.' Gately's listening in
with the uncomprehending close attention of like a child whose parents are discussing something adultly complex about child-care
in its presence. The condescension with which Prissburger inserts that hemoptysis means something called 'pertussive
hemorrhage,' like Kathy the R.N. wasn't enough of a pro not to have to insert little technical explanations for, makes Gately sad
for the guy — it's obvious the guy pathetically thinks this kind of limp condescending shit will impress her. Gately's got to admit
he would have tried to impress her, too, though, if she hadn't met him by holding a kidney-shaped pan under his working anus.
The R.N.'s finishing packing up the parts of the brace thing the M.D. couldn't seem to attach, meanwhile. She was saying the M.D.
seemed awful well-up on methodology for something called a 2R, as they left, and Gately could tell the M.D. couldn't tell she was
being a little sarcastic. The M.D. was struggling to try to carry the thing's case, which Gately judges weighs at most 30 kg. It
occurs to him head-on for the first time that the real reason Stavros L. hired shelter-cleaning guys out of halfway houses was that
he could get away with paying them like bupkis, and that he (Don G.) must surely on some level have known this all along but
been in some kind of Denial about confronting it head-on that he was getting fucked over by Stavros the shoe-freak, and that the
word embrasure had been surely another invasive-wraith ghostword, and then now also that nobody seems to exactly be falling all
over themself to bring the paper and pen it had sure seemed like Joelle van D. had understood Gately's mimed request for, and that
thus maybe Joelle's visit and show-and-tell with the snapshots had been just as much a febrile hallucination as the figuranted
wraith, and that it has stopped spitting sleet but the clouds out there still look like they mean serious business out there over
Brighton-Allston, and that if Joelle v.D.'s intimate visit with the photo album was a hallucination that at least meant it was also a
hallucination she was wearing fucking college-kid Ken Erdedy's sweatpants, and that the low-angled sadness of the cloudy P.M.
light meant it had to be pretty near 1600h. EST so that maybe There By The Grace he could avoid maybe getting an uncontrolled
woodie getting sponged naked by the horrifyingly attractive K/Cathy and but still could get sponged by her linebacker of a
replacement, because the sour meaty smell of himself was grim, only maybe miss the woodie-hazard and get sponged by the big
hairy-moled 1600-2400h. nurse in support-hose to who Gately's anus was a stranger. Plus that 1600h. EST was SpontaneousDissemination time for Mr. Bouncety-Bounce, the mentally ill kiddy-show host Gately's always loved and used to try his best with
Kite and poor old Fackelmann to be home and largely alert for, and that nobody's once offered to click on the HD viewer that
hangs next to a myopic fake-Turner fog-and-boat print on the wall opposite Gately's and the former kid's beds, and that he had no
remote with which to either activate the TP at 1600 or ask somebody else to activate it. That without some kind of notebook and
pencil he couldn't communicate even the basícest question or like concept to anybody — it was like he was a vegetated
hemorrhagic-stroke-victim. Without a pencil and notebook he couldn't even seem to get across a request for a notebook and
pencil; it was like he was trapped inside his huge chattering head. Unless, his head then points out, Joelle van Dyne's visit had
been real and her understanding of the pen-and-notebook gesture had been real, and but somebody out there in the hallway with a
hat or at the Hospital President's office or at the nurses' station with his innerdicted M.-Hanley-brownies had also innerdicted the 
request for writing supplies, at the Finest's request, so he couldn't get his story straight with anybody before they came for him,
that it was like a pre-interrogation softening-up thing, they were leaving him trapped in himself, a figurant, mute and unmoving
and blank like the House's catatonic lady slumped moist and pale in her chair or the Advanced Basics Group's adopted girl's
vegetable-kingdom sister, or the whole catatonic gang over at E.M.P.H.H.'s #5 Shed, silent and dead-faced even when touching a
tree or propped up amid exploding front-lawn firecrackers. Or the wraith's nonexistent kid. It's got to be past 1600h., light-wise,
unless it's the lowering clouds. There's roughly 0% or less visibility now outside the sleet-crusted window. The room's
windowlight is darkening to that Kaopec-tate shade that has always marked the just-pre-sunset time of day that Gately (like most
drug addicts) has always most dreaded, and had always either lowered his helmet and charged extra-murderous at somebody to
block it out (the late-day dread) or else dropped QuoVadis or oral narcotics or turned on Mr. Bouncety-Bounce extra loud or
busied himself in his silly chef's hat in the Ennet House kitchen or made sure he was at a Meeting sitting way up close in nosepore range, to block it out (the late-day dread), the gray-light late-afternoon dread, always worse in winter, the dread, in winter's
watered-down light — just like the secret dread he's always felt whenever everybody happened to ever leave the room and left
him alone in a room, a terrible stomach-sinking dread that probably dates all the way back to being alone in his XXL Dentons and
crib below Herman the Ceiling That Breathed.
It occurs to Gately that right now's just like when he was a toddler and his Mom and her companion were both passed out or
worse: no matter how frightened or scared he might become he now again cannot get anybody to come or to hear or even know
about it; the discredited tube to prevent vicious or inspired bleeding in his suspicious Trachea has left him completely Alone,
worse off than a toddler that could at least bellow and yowl, rattling the bars of its playpen in terror that nobody tall was in any
shape to hear him. Plus this dreadful time of weak gray late-day light is the time, was the time when the sad and nerdily dressed
wraith appeared yesterday. Assuming that was yesterday. Assuming it was a real wraith. But the wraith, with its chinky Coke and
theories of post-mortem speed, had been able to interface with Gately without aid of speech or gesture or Bic, was why even out
of his mind Gately had had to admit to himself it must have been a delusion, a fever-dream. But he has to admit he'd kind of liked
it. The dialogue. The give-and-take. The way the wraith could seem to get inside him. The way he said Gately's best thoughts were
really communiques from the patient and Abiding dead. Gately wonders if his organic father the ironworker is not now maybe
dead and dropping in and standing very still from time to time for a communique. He felt slightly better. The room's ceiling was
not breathing. It lay flat as a stucco sheet, rippling only slightly with the petroleum-fumes of fever and Gately's own smell. Then
bubbling up out of nowhere again he suddenly confronts deep-focus memories of Gene Fackelmann's final demise and Gately and
Pamela Hoffman-Jeep's involvement in Fackelmann's demise.
Gately, for several months before he did his State assault-bit, was disastrously involved with one Pamela Hoffman-Jeep, his
first girl ever with a hyphen, a sort of upscale but directionless and not very healthy and pale and incredibly passive Danvers girl
that worked in Purchasing for a hospital-supply co. in Swampscott and was pretty definitely an alcoholic and drank bright drinks
with umbrellas in Rte. 1 clubs in the late P.M. until she swooned and passed out with a loud clunk. That's what she called it —
'swooned.' The swooning and passing out with a loud clunk as her head hit the table was more or less a nightly thing, and Pamela
Hoffman-Jeep fell automatically in love with any man she termed 'chivalrous'374364 enough to carry her out to the parking lot
and drive her home without raping her, which rape of an unconscious head-lolling girl she termed 'Taking Advantage. ' Gately got
introduced to her by Fackelmann, who one time as he came up through a sports bar called the Pourhouse's parking lot to dialogue
with a Sorkin-debtor Gately saw Fackelmann staggering along carrying this unconscious girl to his ride, one big hand quite a bit
farther up her prom-looking taffeta gown than it really needed to be to carry her, and Fackelmann told Gately if Don'd give this
gash a ride home he'd stay and do the collection, which Gately's heart wasn't in collections anymore and he jumped at the trade, as
long as Fackelmann could promise him she could hold her various fluids in the 4x4 he was driving. So it was Fackelmann who
told him, as he put the tiny and limp but still continent body in his arms in the parking lot of the Pourhouse, to watch his personal
six, Gately, and be sure and violate her a little, because this gash here was like one of those South Sea-culture gashes in that if
Gately took her home and she woke up nonviolated she'd be Gately's for life. But Gately obviously had no intention of raping an
unconscious person, much less even putting his hand up the gown of a girl that might lose her fluids any second, and this locked
him into the involvement. Pamela Hoffman-Jeep called Gately her 'Night-Errand' and fell passively in love with his refusal to
Take Advantage. Gene Fackelmann, she confided, was not the gentleman Gately was.
What helped make the involvement disastrous was that Pamela Hoffman-Jeep was always either so leglessly drunk or so
passively hungover all the time that any sort of sex any time at all with her would have classified as Taking Advantage.
This girl was the single passivest person Gately ever met. He never once saw P.H.-J. actually get from one spot to another
under her own power. She needed somebody chivalrous to pick her up and carry her and lay her back down 24/7/365, it seemed
like. She was a sort of sexual papoose. She spent most of her life passed out and sleeping. She was a beautiful sleeper, kittenish
and serene, never drooling. She made passivity and unconsciousness look kind of beautiful. Fackelmann called her Death's PosterChild. Even at work, at the hospital supply co., Gately imagined her horizontal, curled fetal on something soft, with all the hot
slack facial intensity of a sleeping baby. He imagined her bosses and coworkers all tiptoeing around Purchasing whispering to
each other to not wake her up. She never once rode in the actual front seat of any vehicle he drove her home in. But she also never
threw up or pissed herself or even complained, just smiled and yawned an infant's little milky yawn and snuggled deeper into
whatever Gately had swaddled her in. Gately started doing that thing about yelling they'd been robbed when he carried her into
whatever stripped luxury apt. they were crewing in. P.H.-J. wasn't what you'd call great-looking, but she was incredibly sexy,
Gately felt, because she always managed to look like you'd just X'd her into a state of total unmuscled swoon, lying there
unconscious. Trent Kite told Fackelmann he thought Gately was out of his fucking mind. Fax observed that Kite himself was not
exactly a W. T. Sherman with the ladies, even with coke-whores and strung-out nursing students and dipsoid lounge-hags whose
painted faces swung loose from their heads. Fackelmann claimed to have started a Log just to keep track of Kite's attempted
pickup lines — surefire lines like e.g. 'You're the second most beautiful woman I've ever seen, the first most beautiful woman I've
ever seen being former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher,' and 'If you came home with me I'm unusually confident that I
could achieve an erection,' and said that if Kite wasn't still cherry at twenty-three and a half it was proof of some kind of divinetype grace. 
Sometimes Gately would come out of a Demerol-nod and look at pale passive Pamela lying there sleeping beautifully and
undergo a time-lapse clairvoyant thing where he could almost visibly watch her losing her looks through her twenties and her face
starting to slide over off her skull onto the pillow she held like a stuffed toy, becoming a lounge-hag right before his eyes. The
vision aroused more compassion than horror, which Gately never even considered might qualify him as a decent person.
Gately's two favorite things about Pamela Hoffman-Jeep were: the way she would come out of her stupor and hold her cheek
and laugh hysterically each time Gately carried her across the threshold of some stripped apartment and bellow that they'd been
ripped off; and the way she always wore the long white linen gloves and bare-shoulder taffeta that made her seem like some
upscale North Shore debutante who's had like one too many dippers of country-club punch and is just begging to be Taken
Advantage of by some low-rent guy with a tattoo — she'd make a sort of languid very-slow-motion bullwhip-gesture with her
hand in the long white glove as she lay wherever Gately had deposited her and simper out with an upscale inflection 'Don Honey,
bring Mommy a highball' (she called a drink a highball), which it turned out was a deadly impression of her own Mom, who it
turned out this lady made Gately's own Mom look like Carry Nation by comparison, lush-wise: the only four times Gately ever
met Mrs. H.-J. were all at E.R.s and sanitaria.
Gately lies there pop-eyed with guilt and anxiety in the hiss and click of resumed sleet, in the twilit St. E.'s room, next to the
glittering back-brace-and-skull-halo thing clamped exoskeletally to the empty next bed and gleaming dully at selected welds,
Gately trying to Abide, remembering. It had been Pamela Hoffman-Jeep that finally clued Gately in on the little ways Gene
Fackelmann had been historically getting over on Whitey Sorkin, and alerted him to the suicidal creek Fackelmann had got
himself into with a certain mistaken-bet scam that had blown up right in his map. Even Gately had been able to tell something was
the matter: for the last two weeks Fackelmann had been squatting sweatily in a corner of the stripped living room, right outside the
little luxury bedroom Gately and Pamela were lying in, out there squatting over his Sterno cooker and incredible twin hills of skyblue Dilaudid and many-hued M&M's, not much speaking or responding or moving or even seeming to cop a nod, just sitting
there hunched and plump and glistening like some sort of cornered toad, his mustache flailing around on his lip. Things would
have had to be bad indeed for Gately ever to try to get coherent data out of P.H.-J. Apparently the deal was that one of the bettors
that bet with Sorkin through Fackelmann was a guy Gately and Fackelmann know only as Eighties Bill, an impeccably groomed
guy that wore red suspenders under snazzy Zegna-brand menswear and tortoiseshell specs and Docksiders, an old-fashioned
corporate take-overer and asset-plunderer, maybe fifty, with an Exchange Place office and a souvenir FREE MILKEN bumper
sticker on his Beamer — it was a night of many highballs and much papoosing, and Gately had to keep flicking the top of P.H.-J.'s
skull to keep her conscious long enough to free-associate her way through the details — who was on his fourth marriage to his
third aerobics instructor, and who liked to bet only on Ivy League college hoops, but who when he did so — bet — bet amounts so
huge that Fackelmann always had to get Sorkin's pre-approval on the bet and then call Eighties Bill back, and so on.
But so — according to Pamela Hoffman-Jeep — this Eighties Bill, who's a Yale alum and usually unabashedly sentimental
about what Pamela H.-J. laughingly says Fackelmann called his 'almometer' — well, on this particular time it seems like a little
impeccably groomed birdie has whispered in Eighties Bill's hairy ear, because this one time Eighties Bill wants to put $125K
down on Brown U. against Yale U., i.e. betting against his almome-ter, only he wants (-2) points instead of the even spread Sorkin
and the rest of the Boston books are taking off the Atlantic City line for a spread. And Fackelmann has to cell-phone down to
Saugus to bounce this off Sorkin, except Sorkin's down in the city in Enfield at the National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation office
getting his weekly UV-bombardment and Cafergot refill from Dr. Robert ('Sixties Bob') Monroe — the septuagenarian pinksunglasses-and-Nehru-jacket-wearing N.C.-F.P.F. ergotic-vascular-headache-treatment specialized, a guy who in yore-days
interned at Sandoz and was one of T. Leary's original circle of mayonnaise-jar acid-droppers at T. Leary's now-legendary house in
West Newton MA, and is now (60s B.) an intimate acquaintance of Kite, because Sixties Bob is an even bigger Grateful Dead
fanatic maybe even than Kite, and sometimes got together with Kite and several other Dead devotees (most of who now had canes
and O2 tanks) and traded historical-souvenir-type tiger's eyes and paisley doublets and tie-dyes and lava lamps and bandannas and
plasma spheres and variegated black-light posters of involuted geometric designs, and argued about which Dead shows and
bootlegs of Dead shows were the greatest of all time in different regards, and just basically had a hell of a time. 60s B., an
inveterate collector and haggling trader of shit, sometimes took Kite along on little expeditions of eclectic and seedy shops for
Dead-related paraphernalia, sometimes even informally fencing stuff for Kite (and so indirectly Gately), covering Kite with $
when Kite's rigid need-schedule didn't permit a more formal and time-consuming fence, Sixties Bob then trading the merchandise
around various seedy locales for 60s-related shit nobody else'd even usually want. A couple times Gately had to actually finger an
ice cube out of a highball and slip it under the shoulderless neckline of P.H.-J.'s prom gown to try and keep her on some kind of
track. Like most incredibly passive people, the girl had a terrible time ever separating details from what was really important to a
story, is why she rarely ever got asked anything. But so the point is that the person that took Fackelmann's call about Eighties
Bill's mammoth Yale-Brown bet wasn't in fact Sorkin but rather Sorkin's secretary, one Gwendine O'Shay, the howitzer-breasted
old Green-Cardless former I.R.A.-moll who'd gotten hit on the head with a truncheon by a godless Belfast Bobbie once too often
back on the Old Sod, and whose skull now was (in Fackelmann's own terminology) soft as puppy-shit in the rain, but who had just
the seedy sort of distracted-grandmotherly air that makes her perfect for clapping her red-knuckled old hands to her cheeks and
squealing as she claimed Mass Lottery lottery winnings whenever Whitey Sorkin and his MA-Statehouse bagmen-cronies arrange
to have a Sorkinite buy a mysteriously winning Mass Lottery ticket from one of the countless convenience stores Sorkin & cronies
own through dummy corporations all up and down the North Shore, and who, because she could not only give what Sorkin
claimed was the only adequate cervical massage west of the Berne Hot Alp Springs Center but also could both word-process a
shocking 110 wpm and wield a shillelagh like nobody's business — plus had been W. Sorkin's dear late I.R.A.-moll Mum's
Scrabble-pal back in Belfast, on the Old Sod — served as Whitey's chief administrative aide, manning the cellular phones when
Sorkin was out or indisposed.
And so but P.H.-J.'s point, which Gately has to just about crack her scalp open flicking out of her: Gwendine O'Shay, familiar
with Eighties Bill and his Y.U. Bulldog sentimentality, plus cranially soft as a fucking grape, O'Shay took Fackelmann's call
wrong, thought Fackelmann said Eighties Bill wanted 125K with (-2) points on Yale instead of (-2) on Brown, put Fackelmann on
Hold and made him listen to Irish Muzak while she put in a call to a Yale Athletic Dept. mole out of Sorkin's Read-Protected 
database's MOLE file and learned that the Yale U. Bulldogs' star power forward had been diagnosed with an extremely rare
neurologic disorder called Post-Coital Vestibulitis375365 in which for several hours after intercourse the power forward tended to
suffer such a terrible vertiginous loss of proprioception that he literally couldn't tell his ass from his elbow, much less make an
authoritative move to the bucket. Plus then O'Shay's second call, to Sorkin's Brown U. athletic mole (a locker-room attendant
everybody thinks is deaf), reveals that several of Brown U.'s most sirenish and school-spirited hetero coeds had been recruited,
auditioned, briefed, rehearsed (i.e. 'debriefed,' giggles Pamela Hoffman-Jeep, whose giggles involve the sort of ticklish shoulderwrithing undulations of a much younger girl getting tickled by an authority figure and pretending not to like it), and stationed at
strategic points —1-95 rest-stops, in the spare-tire compartment at the rear of the Bulldogs' chartered bus, in the evergreen
shrubbery outside the teams' special entrance to the Pizzitola Athl. Center in Providence, in concave recesses along the Pizzitola
tunnels between special entrance and Visitors' locker room, even in a specially enlarged and sensually-appointed locker next to the
power forward's locker in the VLR, all prepared — like the Brown cheerleaders and Pep Squad, who've been induced to do the
game pantyless, electrolysized and splits-prone to help lend a pyrotechnic glandular atmosphere to the power forward's whole
playing-environment — prepared to make the penultimate sacrifice for squad, school, and influential members of the Brown
Alumni Bruins Boosters Assoc. So that Gwendine O'Shay then switches back to Fackelmann and OKs the mammoth bet and
point-spread, as like who wouldn't, with that kind of mole-reported fix in the works. Except of course she's taken the wager
backwards, i.e. O'Shay thinks Eighties Bill's now got 125K on Yale coming within two points, while Eighties Bill — who it turns
out's cast himself as White Knight in bidding for majority control of Providence's Federated Funnel and Cone Corp., O.N.A.N.'s
leading manufacturer of conoid receptacles, with F.F.&C. CEO'd by a prominent Brown alumnus so rabid a Bruins-booster he
actually wears a snarling hollow bear-head to conference games, whose ass Eighties Bill is going about kissing like nobody's
beeswax, P.H.-J. inserts, hinting it was Eighties Bill who'd tipped the Bruins staff off about the power forward's Achilles' vas
deferens — E.B. quite reasonably believes he's now got Brown within a deuce for 125 el grande's.
The wrench in the ointment that nobody in Providence has counted on is the picket-and-knuckleduster-wielding appearance of
Brown University's entire Dworkinite Female Objectification Prevention And Protest Phalanx outside the Pizzitola Athl. Center's
main gates right at game-time, two FOPPPs per motorcycle, who blow through the filigreed gates like they were so much wet
Kleenex and storm the arena, plus a division of Brown's pluckier undergraduate N.O.W.s who execute a pincer-movement down
from the cheap seats up top during the first time-out, at the precise moment the Brown cheerleaders' first pyramid-maneuver ends
in a mid-air split that causes the Pizzitola's Scoreboard's scorekeeper to reel backward against his controls and blow out both
HOME's and VISITORS' zeroes, on the board, just as the FOPPPs' unmuffled Hawgs come blatting malevolently down through
the ground-level tunnels and out onto the playing floor; and in the ensuing melee not only are cheerleaders, Pep Squad, and
comely Brown U. sirens all either laid out with picket-signs wielded like shillelaghs or thrown kicking and shrieking over the
burly shoulders of militant FOPPPs and carried off on roaring Hawgs, leaving the Yale power forward's delicate nervous system
intact if overheated; but two Brown U. Bruin starters, a center and a shooting guard — both too wrung-out and dazed by a
grueling week of comely-siren-auditioning and -rehearsing to have sense enough to run like hell once the melee spills out onto the
Pizzitola hardwood — are felled, by a FOPPP knuckleduster and a disoriented referee with a martial-arts background,
respectively; and so when the floor is finally cleared and stretchers borne off and the game resumes, Yale U. cleans Brown U.'s
clock by upwards of 20.
Then so Fackelmann calls up Eighties Bill and arranges to pick up the skeet, which is $137,500 with the vig, which E.B. gives
him in large-denomination pre-O.N.A.N. scrip in a GO BROWN BRUINS gym-bag he'd brought to the game to sit next to the
ursine-headed CEO with and now has less than no use for, but so Fackelmann receives the skeet downtown and blasts up cheesy
Route 1 to Saugus to deliver the skeet and pick up his vig on the vig ($625 U.S.) right away, needing to cop Blues in what's
starting to be the worst way, etc. Plus Fackelmann's figuring on maybe a small bonus or at least some emotional validation from
Sorkin for bringing in such a mammoth and promptly-remitted wager. But, when he gets to the Rte. 1 titty bar at the rear of which
Sorkin has his administrative offices behind an unmarked fire door and all wallpapered in stuff that looks like ersatz wood
panelling, Gwendine O'Shay wordlessly points behind her station at Sorkin's personal office door with a terse gesture Fackelmann
doesn't think fits with the up-beatness of the occasion at all. The door's got a big poster of R. Limbaugh on it, from before the
assassination. Sorkin's in there working spreadsheets with his special monitor-screen-light-filtering goggles on. The goggles'
lenses on their long protruding barrels look like lobsters’
eyes on stalks. Gately and Fackelmann and Bobby C never spoke to Sorkin until spoken to, not out of henchmanish obsequity
but because they could never tell what Sorkin's cranio-facial vascular condition was or if he could tolerate sound until they
verifiably heard him tolerating his own. (Sound.) So G. Fackelmann waits wordlessly to hand over Eighties Bill's skeet, standing
there tall and soft and palely sweating, the overall shape and color of a peeled boiled egg. When Sorkin hikes an eyebrow at the
GO BRUINS bag and says the knee-slapping hilarity of the joke escapes him, Fack-elmann's mustache positively takes off all over
his upper lip, and he prepares to say what he always says when he's flummoxed, that whatever's being said is with all due respect a
goddamn lie. Sorkin saves his data and pushes his desk chair back so he can reach all the way down to the fireproof drawer. The
goggles are often used in data-processing sweatshops and list for a deuce. Sorkin grunts as he hauls out a huge old Mass Lottery
box for Quik-Pick cards and heaves it onto the desk, where it bulges obscenely, filled with 112.5K U.S. — there's 112.5 fucking K
in there, all in ones, 125K minus vig, what Sorkin via O'Shay believes to be Eighties Bill's winnings, all in small bills, because
Sorkin's pissed off and can't resist making a little like gesture. Fackelmann doesn't say anything. His mustache goes limp as his
mental machinery starts revving. Sorkin, massaging his temples, staring up at Fackelmann with his goggles like a crab in a tank,
says he supposes he can't blame Fax or O'Shay, that he'd have OK'd the bet himself, what with the neurologic tip on the Yale
forward they had. Who could have foreseen thuggish Femínazis screwing up the ointment. He utters a bit of Gaelic that
Fackelmann doesn't know but assumes to be fatalistical. He peels six C-notes and an O.N.A.N.ite 25-spot off a wad the size of an
artillery shell and pushes them across the metal desk at Fackelmann, his vig on the vig. He says What the fuck (Sorkin does), this
Eighties Bill kid's irrational sentimentalism for Yale will sooner or later catch up with him. Veteran books tend to be statistically
philosophical and patient. Fackelmann doesn't even bother to wonder why Sorkin refers to Eighties Bill as 'kid' when they're both
about the same age. But a high-watt bulb is slowly beginning to incandesce over Fackelmann's moist head. As in the Faxter starts 
to conceptualize the overall concept of what must of happened. He still hasn't said anything, Pamela Hoffman-Jeep emphasizes.
Sorkin looks Fackelmann over and asks if he's gained some asymmetrical-type weight, there. Fackelmann's left tit does look
noticeably bigger than his right, under his sport-coat, because of the legal envelope with 137 1000s and one 500 in it, the skeet
from an Eighties Bill who thought he'd lost. Just like Sorkin thought E.B.'d won. The slight high whine in the room that Sorkin
thinks is his ínfernatron disk-drive is really the whine of Fackelmann's high-speed mentation. His mustache roils like a cracked
whip as he works his own internal mental spreadsheet. 25OK in one lumpy sum represented like 375 sky-blue grams of
hydromorphone hydrochloride376366 or like 37,500 10-mg. soluble tablets of the shit, available from a certain rapacious but
discreet Chinatown opiate-dealer who'd only deal synthetic narcs in 100-gram weights — which all translated, assuming Kite
could be persuaded to pack up his D.E.C. 2100 and move far far away with Fackelmann to help him set up a street-distribution
matrix in some urban market far far away, into close to like let's see carry the one like 1.9 million in street-value, which sum
meant that Fackelmann and to a lesser jr.-partner extent Kite could have their chins on their chests for the rest of their days
without ever having to strip another apt., forge another passport, break another thumb. All if Fackelmann just kept his map shut
about O'Shay's confabulation of Yale/ Brown//Brown/Yale, mumbled something about an I.V.-adulterant causing a sudden and
temporary gigantism in one tit, and blasted out of there straight down Rte. 1 to this one Dr. Wo and Associates, Hung Toy's Cold
Tea Emporium, Chinatown.
By this time Pamela Hoffman-Jeep had succumbed to the highballs and her own swaddled warmth and was irreversibly
swooned, ice or fillip or no, twitching synaptically and murmuring to somebody named Monty that he was certainly no kind of
gentleman in her book. But Gately could chart the rest of Fackelmann's shit-creek's course for himself. When approached by
Fackelmann with a GO BROWN gym-bag of Dr. Wo's finest wholesale Dilaudid and invited to decamp with him and set up a
distrib-matrix for their own drug-empire far far away, Kite would have staggered back in horror at Fackelmann's obviously not
knowing that the bettor Eighties Bill was in fact none other than the son of Sixties Bob, viz. Whitey Sorkin's personal
migrainologist, who Sorkin trusted and confided in as only a massive I.V.-dose of Cafergot can make you trust and confide, and
whom Sorkin would undoubtedly tell all about the guy's own son's huge win on Yale, and who wasn't like Ward-and-Wally close
with his son, Sixties Bob wasn't, but naturally kept distant paternal tabs on him, and would certainly have known that E.B.'d in
fact bet Brown in an attempt to cozy up to the conic CEO, and so would know that there'd been some kind of mix-up; and also that
(Kite'd still be staggering back in horror as all this added up) plus, even if Sorkin somehow didn't get told of Eighties Bill's loss
and Fackelmann's scam from Sixties Bill, the fact was that Sorkin's newest savagest U.S. muscle, Bobby ('C') C, old-fashioned
smack-addict, copped regular old organic Burmese heroin from this Dr. Wo on a regular basis, and was sure to hear about 300+
grams of wholesale Dilaudid bought by a Fackelmann known to be C's co-employee off Sorkin . . . and thus that Fackelmann, who
when he came to Kite with the proposition was already in possession of a Brown-Booster bag full of 37,500 10-mg. Dilaudids and
minus Sorkin's 25OK — plus with as Gately later knew only 22K in suicidal-scam-backfire-insurance capital — was already
dead: Fackelmann was a Dead Man, Kite would have said, staggering back with horror at Fax's idiocy; Kite'd have said he could
smell FackeJmann already biodegrading from here. Dead as a fucking post, he'd have told Fackelmann, already worrying about
being seen sitting there with him in whatever titty bar they were in when Fax hit Kite with the proposal. And Gately, watching
P.H.-J. sleep, could not only imagine but Identify fully with how Fackelmann, on hearing Kite say he could smell him dead and
why, with how Fackelmann, instead of taking his bagful of Blues and gluing on a goatee and immediately fleeing to climes that'd
never even fucking heard of metro Boston's North Shore — that the Fax-ter'd done what any drug addict in possession of his
Substance would do when faced with fatal news and attendant terror: Facklemann'd made a fucking beeline for their luxurystripped home and familiar safe-feeling hearth and had plopped down and immediately fired up the Sterno cooker and cooked up
and tied off and shot up and nailed his chin to his chest and kept it there with staggering quantities of Dilaudid, trying to mentally
blot out the reality of the fact that he was going to get demapped if he didn't take some kind of decisive remedial action at once.
Because, Gately realized even then, this was your drug addict's basic way of dealing with problems, was using the good old
Substance to blot out the problem. Also probably medicating his terror by stuffing himself with Peanut M&M's, which would explain all the wrappers littering the floor of the corner he hadn't moved from. That thus this is why Fackelmann has been squatting
moist and silent in a corner of the living room right outside this very bedroom here for days; this was why the apparent
contradiction of the staggering amount of Substance Fackelmann had in the gym-bag next to him together with the cornered-toad
look of a man in the great fear one associates with Withdrawal. Charting and thinking, drumming his fingers absently on P.H.-J.'s
unconscious skull, Gately realized he could more than empathize with Fackelmann's flight into Dilaudid and M&M's, but he now
realizes that that was the first time it really ever dawned on him in force that a drug addict was at root a craven and pathetic
creature: a thing that basically hides.
The most sexual thing Gately ever did with Pamela Hoffman-Jeep was he liked to unwrap her cocoon of blankets and climb
in with her and spoon in real tight, fitting his bulk up close against all her soft concave places, and then go to sleep with his face in
her nape. It bothered Gately that he could empathize with Fackelmann's desire to hide and blot out, but in the retrospect of
memory now it bothers him more that he didn't lie there up next to the comatose girl being bothered for more than a few minutes
before he felt the familiar desire that blots out all bother, and that that night he had unwrapped the cocoon of bedding and arisen so
automatically in service of this desire. And feels the worst of all that he'd lumbered out of the bedroom in just jeans and belt out to
the gloaming living room where Fackelmann was hunched moist and smeary-mouthed in the corner next to a mountain of 10 mg.
Dilaudids and his mixing bowl of distilled water and works-kit and Sterno unit, that Gately had lumbered so automatically out to
Fackelmann under the pretense — to himself, too, the pretense, was the worst thing — the pretense that he was just going to check
on poor old Fackelmann, to maybe try and convince him to take some kind of action, go penitent to Sorkin or flee the clime
instead of just hiding there in the corner with his mind in neutral and his chin on his chest and a stalactite of chocolated drool from
his lower lip lengthening. Because he knew that the first thing Fackelmann would do when Gately left P.H.-J. and lumbered out to
the defur-nished living room would be to fumble in his GoreTex works-kit for a new factory-wrapped syringe and invite Gately to
hunker on down and get right with the planet. I.e. ingest some of this mountain of Dilaudid, to keep Fackelmann company. Which
to Gately's shame he did, had done, and no part of the reality of Fackelmann's creek and the need for action had even been brought
up, so intent were they on the Blues' somnolent hum, blotting everything out, while Pamela Hoffman-Jeep lay wrapped tight in the 
other room dreaming of damsels and towers — Gately did, he remembers vividly, he let Fackelmann fix them both up but good,
and told himself he was doing it to keep Fackelmann company, like sitting up with a sick friend, and (maybe worst) believed it
was true.
Little entr'actes of feverish dreams punctuate memories and being conscious, like. He dreams he's riding due north on a bus
the same color as its own exhaust, passing again and again the same gutted cottages and expanse of heaving sea, weeping. The
dream goes on and on, without any kind of resolution or arrival, and he weeps and sweats as he lies there, stuck in it. Gately
comes sharply around when he feels the little rough tongue on his forehead — not unlike Nimitz the M.P.'s little pet kitten's
hesitant tongue, when the M.P. had still had the kitten, before the mysterious period when the kitten disappeared and the garbage
disposal wouldn't run right for days and the M.P. sat hungover with his notebook at the kitchen table with his blond head in his
hands, just sat there for several days, and Gately's Mom went around pale as hell and wouldn't go near the kitchen sink for days,
and rushed to the bathroom when Gately finally asked what was the deal with the garbage disposal and where was Nimitz. When
Gately gets his eyelids unstuck, though, the tongue is not even close to being Nimitz's. The wraith is back, right by the bed,
dressed like before and blurred at the edges in the hat-shadowed spill of hallway-light, and except now with him is another,
younger, way more physically fit wraith in kind of faggy biking shorts and a U.S. tank top who's leaning way over Gately's railing
and ... fucking licking Gately's forehead with a rough little tongue, and as Gately reflexively strikes out at the guy's map — no
man put his tongue on D. W. Gately and lived — he has just enough time to realize the wraith's breath has no warmth to it, or
smell, before both wraiths vanish and a blue forked bolt of pain from his sudden striking-out sends him back against his hot pillow
with an arched spine and a tube-impeded scream, his eyes rolling back into the dove-colored light of whatever isn't quite sleep.
His fever is way worse, and his little snatches of dreams have a dismantled cubist aspect he associates in memory with
childhood flu. He dreams he looks in a mirror and sees nothing and keeps trying to clean the mirror with his sleeve. One dream
consists only of the color blue, too vivid, like the blue of a pool. An unpleasant smell keeps coming up his throat. He's both in a
bag and holding a bag. Visitors flit in and out, but never Ferocious Francis or Joelle van D. He dreams there's people in his room
but he's not one of them. He dreams he's with a very sad kid and they're in a graveyard digging some dead guy's head up and it's
really important, like Continental-Emergency important, and Gately's the best digger but he's wicked hungry, like irresistibly
hungry, and he's eating with both hands out of huge economy-size bags of corporate snacks so he can't really dig, while it gets
later and later and the sad kid is trying to scream at Gately that the important thing was buried in the guy's head and to divert the
Continental Emergency to start digging the guy's head up before it's too late, but the kid moves his mouth but nothing comes out,
and Joelle van D. appears with wings and no underwear and asks if they knew him, the dead guy with the head, and Gately starts
talking about knowing him even though deep down he feels panic because he's got no idea who they're talking about, while the
sad kid holds something terrible up by the hair and makes the face of somebody shouting in panic: Too Late.
She'd come out of the St. E.'s doors and turned right for the quick walk back up to Ennet and a grotesquely huge woman
whose hose bulged with stubble and whose face and head were four times larger than the largest woman Joelle had ever seen had
grabbed her arm at the elbow and said she was sorry to be the one to tell her but that unbeknownst to her she was in almost mindboggling danger.
It took rather a while for Joelle to look her up and down. 'This is supposed to be news?’
So and but that night's next A.M.'d found Gately and Fackelmann still there in Fackelmann's little corner, belts around their
arms, arms and noses red from scratching, still at it, the ingestion, on a hell of a tear, cooking up and getting off and eating
M&M's when they could find their mouths with their hands, moving like men deep under water, heads wobbling on strengthless
necks, the empty room's ceiling sky-blue and bulging and under it hanging on the wall overhead to their right the apartment's
upscale TP's viewer on a recursive slo-mo loop of some creepy thing Fackelmann liked that was just serial shots of flames from
brass lighters, kitchen-matches, pilot lights, birthday candles, votive candles, pillar candles, birch shavings, Bunsen burners, etc.,
that Fackelmann had got from Kite, who just before dawn had come out dressed and declined to get high with them and coughed
nervously and announced he had to leave for a few days or more for a 'totally key' and unmissable software trade-show in a
different area code, not knowing Gately now knew he knew Fackelmann already to be dead, w/ Kite then trying to leave discreetly
with every piece of hardware he owned in his arms, including the nonportable D.E.C., trailing cables. Then a bit later, as the A.M.
light intensified yellowly and made both Gately and Fackelmann curse the fact that the curtains had been stripped and pawned, as
they continued to hunch and cook and shoot, at maybe O83Oh. Pamela Hoffman-Jeep was up and vomiting briskly and applying
mousse against the workaday day, calling Gately Honey and her Night Errand and asking if she'd done anything last night she'd
have to explain to anybody today — kind of an a.m. routine in their relationship — applying blush and drinking her standard antihangover breakfast377367 and watching Gately and Fackel-mann's chins fall and rise at slightly different underwater rates. The
smell of her perfume and high-retsin mints hung in the bare room long after she'd bid them both Ciao Bello. As the A.M. sun got
higher and intolerable, instead of taking action and nailing a blanket or something over the window they opted instead to obliterate
the reality of the eye-scalding light and began truly bingeing on Blues, flirting with an O. D. They scaled Fackelmann's Mt.
Dilaudid at a terrible clip. Fackelmann was by nature a binger. Gately was typically more like a maintenance user. He rarely went
on a classic-type binge, which meant plunking down in one place with an enormous stash and getting loaded over and over again
for long periods without moving. But when he did start a binge he might as well have been strapped to the snout of a missile for
all the control he had over length or momentum. Fackelmann was having at the mountain of 10-mg. Blues like there was no
tomorrow. Every time Gately even started to bring up the issue of how Faxter had come by such a huge blue haul of the Substance
— trying maybe to invite Fackelmann to confront the reality of his trouble by describing it, like — Fackelmann would cut him off
with a soft 'That's a goddamn lie.' This was pretty much all Fackelmann would ever say, when loaded, even in response to things
like questions. You have to picture all the binge's verbal exchanges as occurring like very slowly, oddly distended, as if the time
were honey:
'Serious fucking stash you managed to come by somehow right here, Fa—’
'That's a goddamn lie.’
'Man. Man. I just hope Gwendine or C's got the phone today out there, man. Instead of Whitey. No business getting done out
of here today I don't thi—’ 
"s a goddamn he.’
'That's for sure, Fax.’
"s a goddamn lie.’
'Fax. The Faxter. Count Faxula.’
'Goddamn lie.’
After a while in all the distension it got to be like a joke. Gately would haul his big head upright and try to allege the
roundness of the planet, the three-dimensionality of the phenomenal world, the blackness of all black dogs —
"s a goddamn lie.’
They found it increasingly funny. After every exchange like this they laughed and laughed. Each exhalation of laughter
seemed to take several minutes. The ceiling and the window's light receded. Fackelmann wet his pants; this was even funnier.
They watched the pool of urine spread out against the hardwood floor, changing shape, growing curved arms, exploring the fine
oak floor. The rises and valleys and little seams. It might of gotten later and then early A.M. again. The entertainment cartridge's
myriad small flames were reflected in the spreading puddle, so that soon Gately could watch without taking his chin off his chest.
When the phone rang it was just a fact. The ringing was like an environment, not a signal. The fact of its ringing got more and
more abstract. Whatever a ringing phone might signify was like totally overwhelmed by the overwhelming fact of its ringing.
Gately pointed this out to Fackelmann. Fackelmann vehemently denied it.
At some point Gately tried to stand and was rudely assaulted by the floor, and wet his own pants.
The phone rang and rang.
At another point they got interested in rolling different colors of Peanut M&M's into the puddles of urine and watching the
colored dye corrode and leave a vampire-white football of M&M in a nimbus of bright dye.
The intercom's buzzer to the luxury apartment complex's glass doors downstairs sounded, overwhelming both of them with
the fact of its sound. It buzzed and buzzed. They discussed wishing it would stop the way you discuss wishing it would stop
raining.
It became the ICBM of binges. The Substance seemed inexhaustible; Mt. Dilaudid changed shapes but never really much
shrank that they could see. It was the first and only time ever that Gately I.V.'d narcotics so many times in one arm that he ran out
of arm-vein and had to switch to the other arm. Fackelmann was no longer coordinated enough to help him tie off and boot.
Fackelmann kept making a string of chocolaty drool appear and distend almost down to the floor. The acidity of their urine was
corroding the apt.'s hardwood floor's finish in an observable way. The puddle had grown many arms like a Hindu god. Gately
couldn't quite tell if the urine had explored its way almost back to their feet or if they were already sitting in urine. Fackel-mann
would see how close to the surface of the pond of their mixed piss he could get the tip of the string of spit before he sucked it back
up and in. The little game had an intoxicating aura of danger to it. The insight that most people like play-danger but don't like reallife danger hit Gately like an epiphany. It took him gallons of viscous time to try and articulate the insight to Fackelmann so that
Fackelmann could give it the imprimatur of a denial.
Eventually the buzzer stopped.
The phrase 'More tattoos than teeth' also kept going through Gately's head as it bobbed (the head), even though he had no idea
where the phrase came from or who it was supposed to refer to. He hadn't been to Billerica Minimum yet; he was on bail that
Whitey Sorkin had bonded.
The taste of the M&M's couldn't cut the weirdly sweet medical taste of hydromorphone in Gately's mouth. He watched an old
stovetop-burner's crown of blue flame shimmer in the shine of the urine.
During a ruddled sunset-light period Fackelmann had had a small convulsion and a bowel movement in his pants and Gately
hadn't had the coordination to go to Fackelmann's side during the seizure, to help and just be there. He had the nightmarish feeling
that there was something crucial he had to do but had forgot what it was. 10-mg. injections of the Blue Bayou kept the feeling at
bay for shorter and shorter periods. He'd never heard of somebody having a convulsion from an O.D., and Fackelmann had indeed
seemed to bounce to his version of back.
The sun outside the big windows seemed to go up and down like a yo-yo.
They ran out of the distilled water Fackelmann had in the mixing bowl, and Fackelmann took a cotton and sopped up candydyed urine off the floor and cooked up with urine. Gately appeared to himself to be repulsed by this. But there was no question of
trying to get to the stripped kitchen for the distilled-water bottle. Gately was tying off his right arm with his teeth, now, his left
was so useless.
Fackelmann smelled very bad.
Gately nodded out into a dream where he was on a Beverly-Needham bus whose sides said PARAGON BUS LINES: THE
GRAY LINE. In his stu-porous recall over four years later in St. E.'s he realizes that this bus is the bus from the dream that
wouldn't end and wouldn't go anywhere, but has the sickening realization that the connection between the two buses is itself a
dream, or is in a dream, and it's now that his fever returns to new heights and his line on the heart monitor gets a funny little hitch
like a serration at the 1st and 3rd nodes, which makes an amber light flash at the nurse's station down the hall.
When the buzzer sounded again they were watching the flames-film late at night. Now poor old Pamela Hoffman-Jeep's voice
came to them through the intercom. The intercom and apt.-complex-front-doors-unlocker button were all the way across the living
room by the apartment door. The ceiling bulged and receded. Fackelmann had made his hand into the shape of a claw and was
studying the claw in the light of the TP's flames. Mt. Dilaudid was badly caved in on one side; a disastrous avalanche into Lake
Urine was a possibility. P.H.-J. sounded drunk as a Nuck. She said to let her in. She said she knew they were in there. She used
party as a verb several times. Fackelmann was whispering that it was a lie. Gately remembers he actually had to prod himself in
the bladder to feel if he had to go to the bathroom. His Unit felt small and icy cold against his leg in the wet jeans. The ammoniac
smell of urine and the breathing ceiling and drunk distant female voice ... Gately reached in the dark for the bars of his playpen,
grasped them with pudgy fists, hauled himself to his feet. His rising was more like the floor lowering. He wobbled like a toddler.
The apt. floor below him feinted right, left, circling for an opening to attack. The luxury windows hung with starlight. Fackelmann
had made his claw come alive into a spider and was letting the spider climb slowly down his chest-area. The starlight was smeary; 
there were no distinct stars. Everything out of the line of fire of the cartridge-viewer was dark as a pocket. The buzzer sounded
angry and the voice pathetic. Gately put his foot out in the direction of the buzzer. He heard Fackelmann telling his hand's claw's
spider it was witnessing the birth of an empire. Then when Gately put his foot down there was nothing there. The floor dodged his
foot and rushed up at him. He caught a glimpse of bulged ceiling and then the floor caught him in the temple. His ears belled. The
impact of the floor against him shook the whole room. A box of laminates teetered and fell and fanned clear laminates all over the
wet floor. The viewer fell off the wall and cast ruddled flames on the ceiling. The floor jammed itself against Gately, pressing in
tight, and he grayed out with his scrunched face toward Fackelmann and the windows beyond, with Fackelmann holding the
spider out in mid-air at him for his inspection.
'Oh for Christ's sake then.
'I was in two scenes. What else is in there I do not know. In the first scene I'm going through a revolving door. You know,
around in this glass revolving door, and going around out as I go in is somebody I know but apparently haven't seen for a long
time, because the recognition calls for a shocked look, and the person sees me and gives an equally shocked look — we're
supposedly formerly very close and now haven't seen each other in the longest time, and the meeting is random chance. And
instead of going in I keep going around in the door to follow the person out, which person is also still revolving in the door to
follow me in, and we whirl in the door like that for several whirls.’
'Q.’
'The actor was male. He wasn't one of Jim's regulars. But the character I recognize in the door is epicene.’
'Q.’
'Hermaphroditic. Androgynous. It wasn't obvious that the character was supposed to be a male character. I assume you can
Identify.
'The other had the camera bolted down inside a stroller or bassinet. I wore an incredible white floor-length gown of some sort
of flowing material and leaned in over the camera in the crib and simply apologized.’
'Q.’
'Apologized. As in my lines were various apologies. "I'm so sorry. I'm so terribly sorry. I am so, so sorry. Please know how
very, very, very sorry I am." For a real long time. I doubt he used it all, I strongly doubt he used it all, but there were at least
twenty minutes of permutations of "I'm sorry."
'Q.’
'Not exactly. Not exactly veiled.’
'Q.’
'The point of view was from the crib, yes. A crib's-eye view. But that's not what I mean by driving the scene. The camera was
fitted with a lens with something Jim called I think an auto-wobble. Ocular wobble, something like that. A ball-and-socket joint
behind the mount that made the lens wobble a little bit. It made a weird little tiny whirring noise, I recollect.’
'Q.’
'The mount's the barrel. The mount's what the elements of the lens are arranged in. This crib-lens's mount projected out way
farther than a conventional lens, but it wasn't near as big around as a catadioptric lens. It looked more like an eye-stalk or a nightvision scope than a lens. Long and skinny and projecting, with this slight wobble. I don't know much about lenses beyond basic
concepts like length and speed. Lenses were Jim's forte. This can't be much of a surprise. He always had a whole case full. He paid
more attention to the lenses and lights than to the camera. His other son carried them in a special case. Leith was cameras, the son
was lenses. Lenses Jim said were what he had to bring to the whole enterprise. Of filmmaking. Of himself. He made all his own.’
'Q.’
'Well I've never been around them. But I know there's something wobbled and weird about their vision, supposedly. I think
the newer-born they are, the more the wobble. Plus I think a milky blur. Neonatal nystagmus. I don't know where I heard that
term. I don't remember. It could have been Jim. It could have been the son. What I know about infants personally you couJd — it
may have been an astigmatic lens. I don't think there's much doubt the lens was supposed to reproduce an infantile visual field.
That's what you could feel was driving the scene. My face wasn't important. You never got the sense it was meant to be captured
realistically by this lens.’
•Q.’
'I never saw it. I've got no idea.’
'Q.’
'They were buried with him. The Masters of everything unreleased. At least that was in his will.’
'Q.’
'It had nothing to do with killing himself. Less than nothing to do with it.’
'Q.’
'No I never saw his fucking will. He told me. He told me things.
'He'd stopped being drunk all the time. That killed him. He couldn't take it but he'd made a promise.’
'Q.’
'I don't know that he ever even got a finished Master. That's your story. There wasn't anything unendurable or enslaving in
either of my scenes. Nothing like these actual-perfection rumors. These are academic rumors. He talked about making something
quote too perfect. But as a joke. He had a thing about entertainment, being criticized about entertainment v. nonen-tertainment and
stasis. He used to refer to the Work itself as "entertainments." He always meant it ironically. Even in jokes he never talked about
an anti-version or antidote for God's sake. He'd never carry it that far. A joke.’
'...’
'When he talked about this thing as a quote perfect entertainment, terminally compelling — it was always ironic — he was
having a sly little jab at me. I used to go around saying the veil was to disguise lethal perfection, that I was too lethally beautiful
for people to stand. It was a kind of joke I'd gotten from one of his entertainments, the Medusa-Odalisk thing. That even in
U.H.I.D. I hid by hiddenness, in denial about the deformity itself. So Jim took a failed piece and told me it was too perfect to 
release — it'd paralyze people. It was entirely clear that it was an ironic joke. To me.’
'Q.’
'Jim's humor was a dry humor.’
'Q.’
'If it got made and nobody's seen it, the Master, it's in there with him. Buried. That's just a guess. But I bet you.’
'...’
'Call it an educated bet.' 'Q.’
'...’
'Q, Q, Q.’
'That's the part of the joke he didn't know. Where he's buried is itself buried, now. It's in your annulation-zone. It's not even
your territory. And now if you want the thing — he'd enjoy the joke very much, I think. Oh shit yes very much.’
By a rather creepy coincidence, it turned out that, up in our room, Kyle Dempsy Coyle and Mario were also watching one of
Himself's old efforts. Mario had gotten his pants on and was using his special tool to zip and button. Coyle looked oddly
traumatized. He was sitting on the edge of my bed, his eyes wide and his whole body with the slight tremble of something hanging
from the tip of a pipette. Mario greeted me by name. Snow continued to whirl and eddy outside the window. The position of the
sun was impossible to gauge. The net-posts were now buried almost up to their scorecard attachments. The wind was piling snow
up in drifts against all Academy right angles and then pummelling the drifts into unusual shapes. The window's whole view had
the gray grainy quality of a poor photo. The sky looked diseased. Mario worked his tool with great patience. It often took him
several tries to catch and engage the tool's jaws on the tongue of his zipper. Coyle, still wearing his apnea-mouthguard, stared at
our room's little viewer. The cartridge was Himself's Accomplice!, a short melodrama with Cosgrove Watt and a boy no one had
ever seen before or since.
'You woke up early,' Mario said, smiling up from his fly. His bed was made up drum-tight.
I smiled. 'Turns out I wasn't the only one.’
'You look sad.’
I raised my hand with the NASA glass at Coyle. 'An unexpected pleasure, K.D.C.’
'Thtithe fickn meth,' Coyle said.
I put the glass and toothbrush on my dresser and straightened its doily. I picked some clothing up and began separating it by
smell into wearable and unwearable.
'Kyle says Jim Troeltsch tore some of Ortho's face off trying to pull him off a window his face got glued to,' Mario said. 'And
then Jim Troeltsch and Mr. Kenkle tried to put toilet tissue on the ripped parts, the way Tall Paul sometimes puts little bits of
Kleenex on a shaving cut, but Ortho's face was a lot worse than a shaving cut, and they used a whole roll, and now Ortho's face is
covered with toilet tissue, and the tissue's stuck now, and Ortho can't get it off, and at breakfast Mr. deLint was yelling at Ortho
for letting them put toilet tissue on it, and Ortho ran to his and Kyle's room and locked the door, and Kyle doesn't have his key
since the accident with the whirlpool.’
I helped Mario on with his police lock's vest and affixed the Velcro nice and tight. Mario's chest is so fragile-feeling that I
could feel his heartbeat's tremble through the vest and sweatshirt.
Coyle removed the apnea-guard. Strings of white nighttime oral material appeared between his mouth and the guard as he
extracted it. He looked to Mario. 'Tell him the worst part.’
I was watching Coyle very closely to see what he planned to do with the sickening mouthpiece he held.
'Hey Hal, your phone has messages, and Mike Pemulis came by and asked if you were up and about.’
'You haven't told him the worst part of it,' Coyle said.
'Don't even think about putting that thing down anywhere my bed, Kyle, please.’
Tm holding it away from everything, don't worry.’
Mario used his tool to zip up the long curved zipper of his backpack. 'Kyle said there was a problem with a discharge again —
’
'So I heard,' I said.
'— and Kyle says he woke up and Ortho was missing, and Ortho's bed was missing as well, so he turned on the light —’
Coyle gestured with the appliance: 'And lo and fucking-capital-B behold.’
'—yes and lo,' Mario said, 'Ortho's bed is up near the ceiling of their room. The frame has some way got lifted up and bolted
to the ceiling sometime during the night without Kyle hearing it or waking up.’
'Until the discharge, that is,' I said.
This is it,' said Coyle. The tin cans and accusations I'm moving his stuff around are one thing. I'm going to Lateral Alice for a
switch like Troeltsch did. This is the straw.’
Mario said 'And his bed's up on the ceiling now, still, and if it falls it's going to go right through the floor and fall in Graham
and Petropolis's room.’
'He's in there right now all mummified in toilet paper, sulking, with his bed hanging overhead, with the door locked, so I can't
even get my apnea-guard-cleaning supplies,' Coyle said.
I'd heard nothing about Troeltsch apparently switching room-assignments with Trevor Axford. A gigantic wedge of snow slid
down a steep part of the roof over our window and fell past the window and hit the ground below with a huge whump. For some
reason the fact that something as major as a midterm room-switch could have taken place without my knowing anything about it
filled me with dread. There were a few glitters of a possible incipient panic-attack again.
Mario's bedside table had a tube of salve for his pelvis's burn, unevenly squeezed. Mario was looking at my face. 'Is it you're
sad about not getting to play if the Quebec players are canceled?’
'And then to crown off the whole night he ends up with his face glued to a window,' Coyle said disgustedly.
'Frozen,' I corrected him.
'Except but now listen to Stice's explanation.’ 
'Let me guess,' I said.
'For the bed hovering.’
Mario looked at Coyle. 'You said bolted.’
'I said presumably bolted is what I said. I said the only rationale that's possible is bolts.’
'Let me guess,' I said.
'Let him guess,' Mario told Coyle.
'The Darkness thinks ghosts.' Coyle stood and came toward us. His two eyes were not set quite level in his face. 'Slice's
explanation that he swore me to discretion but that was before the bed on the ceiling was he thinks he's been somehow selected or
chosen to get haunted or possessed by some kind of beneficiary or guardian ghost that resides in and/or manifests in ordinary
physical objects, that wants to teach The Darkness how to not underestimate ordinary objects and raise his game to like a
supernatural level, to help his game.' One eye was subtly lower than the other, and set at a different angle.
'Or hurt somebody else's,' I said.
'Stice is mentally buckling,' Coyle said, still moving in. I was careful to stay just out of morning-breath range. 'He keeps
staring at things with his temple-veins flexing, trying to exert will on them. He bet me 20 beans he could stand on his desk chair
and lift it up at the same time, and then he wouldn't let me cancel the bet when I got embarrassed for him after half an hour,
standing up there flexing his temples.’
I was also keeping a careful eye on the oral appliance. 'Did you guys hear sausage-analog and fresh-squeezed for breakfast?’
Mario asked again if I were sad.
Coyle said 'I was down there. Stice's map was taking the edge off appetites all over the room. Then deLint started in yelling at
him.' He was looking at me oddly. 'I don't see what's so funny about it, man.’
Mario fell backward onto his bed and wriggled into his backpack's straps with practiced ease.
Coyle said 'I don't know if I should go to Schtitt, or Rusk, or what. Or Lateral Alice. What if they haul him off somewhere,
and it's my fault?’
'There's no denying The Dark's raised his game this fall though.’
'There are machine messages on the machine, Hal, too,' Mario said as I held his hands carefully and pulled him upright.
'What if it's the mental buckling that's raised his game?' Coyle said. 'Does it still count as buckling?’
Cosgrove Watt had been one of the very few professional actors Himself ever used. Himself often liked to use rank amateurs;
he wanted them simply to read their lines with an amateur's wooden self-consciousness off cue cards Mario or Disney Leith would
hold up well to the side of wherever the character was supposed to be looking. Up until the last phase of his career, Himself had
apparently thought the stilted, wooden quality of nonprofes-sionals helped to strip away the pernicious illusion of realism and to
remind the audience that they were in reality watching actors acting and not people behaving. Like the Parisian-French Bresson he
so admired, Himself had no interest in suckering the audience with illusory realism, he said. The apparent irony of the fact that it
required nonactors to achieve this stilted artificial I'm-only-acting-here quality was one of very few things about Himself's early
projects that truly interested academic critics. But the real truth was that the early Himself hadn't wanted skilled or believable
acting to get in the way of the abstract ideas and technical innovations in the cartridges, and this had always seemed to me more
like Brecht than like Bresson. Conceptual and technical ingenuity didn't much interest entertainment-film audiences, though, and
one way of looking at Himself's abandonment of anticonfluentialism is that in his last several projects he'd been so desperate to
make something that ordinary U.S. audiences might find entertaining and diverting and conducive to self-forgetting378368 that he
had had professionals and amateurs alike emoting wildly all over the place. Getting emotion out of either actors or audiences had
never struck me as one of Himself's strengths, though I could remember arguments during which Mario had claimed I didn't see a
lot of what was right there.
Cosgrove Watt was a pro, but he wasn't very good, and before Himself discovered him, Watt's career consisted mostly of
regional-market commercials on broadcast television. His widest commercial exposure was as the Dancing Gland in a series of
spots for a chain of East Coast endocrinology clinics. He'd worn a bulbous white costume, white toupee, and either a ball-andchain or white tap-shoes, depending on whether he was portraying the Before-Gland or the After-Gland. Himself during one of
these commercials had shouted Eureka at our HD Sony and travelled personally all the way to Glen Riddle, Pennsylvania, where
Watt lived with his mother and her cats, to recruit him. He used Cosgrove Watt in almost every project for eighteen months. Watt
for a time was to Himself as DeNiro was to Scorsese, McLachlin to Lynch, Allen to Allen. And up until Watt's temporal-lobe
problem made his social presence unbearable, Himself had actually put Watt, mother, and cats up in a contiguous suite of what
later became prorectors' rooms off the main E.T.A. tunnel, the Moms acquiescing in this but instructing Orin, Mario, and me never
ever to remain in a room alone with Watt.
Accomplice! was one of Watt's later roles. It is a sad and simple cartridge, and so short that the TP retracked to the film's
beginning in almost no time. Himself's film opens as a beautifully sad young bus-station male prostitute, fragile and epicene and
so blond even his eyebrows and lashes are blond, is approached in the Greyhound coffee shop by a flabby, dissipated-looking old
specimen with gray teeth and circumflex eyebrows and obvious temporal-lobe difficulties. Cosgrove Watt plays the depraved
older man, who takes the boy home to his lush but somehow scuzzy co-op apartment, in fact the place Himself had rented for O.
and the P.G.O.A.T. and had decorated in various gradations of scuz for the interiors of almost all his late projects.
The sad and beautiful Aryan-looking boy agrees to seduction by the dissipated old specimen, but only on the condition that
the man wear protection. The boy, who is inarticulate, nevertheless makes this stipulation extremely clear. Safe Sex or No Sex, he
stipulates, holding up a familiar foil packet. The hideous old specimen — now in a smoking jacket and ascot of apricot-colored
silk, and smoking through a long white FDR-style filter — is offended, thinks the young male prostitute has sized him up as such
a depraved and dissipated old specimen that he might well have It, the Human Immuno Virus, he thinks. His thoughts are rendered
via animated thought-bubbles, which Himself at that late-middle stage hoped the audience would find at once self-consciously
nonillusory and wildly entertaining. Watt's old specimen is grinning grayly in what he thinks is a pleasant way as he obligingly
takes the foil packet and removes his ascot with what he believes to be a sensual flourish ... but inside his thought-bubble he's
having temporal-lobe spasms of sadistic rage at the sad blond boy for appearing to size him up as a health risk. The obvious health 
risk here is referred to, both orally and in the thought-bubble, merely as It. For example: 'Little bastard thinks I'm so dissipatedlooking that I've been at this sort of thing so long that I'm likely to have It, does he,' the old specimen thinks, his thought-bubble
going all jagged with rage.
So the flabby old specimen's now, at only six minutes into the cartridge, Track 510, he's now taking the sad beautiful boy, in
the standard (extravagantly hunched) homosexual way, on the canopied bed of his tacky boudoir: the young male prostitute's
dutifully assumed the hunched, homo-submissive position because the old ponce has showed him he's wearing the condom. The
young prostitute, who's shown (hunched) only from the left side during the act itself, seems beautiful in a fragile, skinny-flanked,
visible-ribs way, while the old specimen has the slack ass and pointy little breasts of a man made grotesque by years of
dissipation. The intercourse scene is done under bright lamps, without any sort of soft focus or light-jazz background score to
lighten the atmosphere of clinical detachment.
What the sad blond submissive boy doesn't know is that the dissipated old specimen had secretly palmed an old-fashioned
one-sharp-sided razor blade when he'd gone into his burgundy-tiled bathroom to gargle with cinnamon mouthwash and dab Calvin
Klein-brand Pheromonic Musk on his flabby pulse-points, and as he hunches animalistically over the boy, he's holding the
business end of the blade right up next to the sad boy's anus as he takes his pleasure, so that the blade's sharp side slices into both
condom and erect phallus on each outthrust, the hideous old specimen unmindful of the blood and whatever pain's involved in the
phallic slicing as, still hunched and thrusting, he peels the slit condom off like the skin of a sausage. The young male prostitute,
hunched submissively, feels the condom-peel and then the blood and starts struggling like a condemned man, trying to get the
condomless bleeding flabby old specimen out and off of him. But the boy's thin and delicate, and the old man has no trouble
holding him down with his soft slack flabby weight until he's grimaced and grunted and taken his pleasure to its end. It's
apparently an explicit-homosexual-sex-scene convention that whoever takes the submissive hunched position keeps his face
turned away from the camera while the dominant partner's phallus is inside him, and Himself honors this convention, though a
self-conscious footnote subtitled along the bottom of the screen rather irritatingly points out that the scene is honoring a
convention. The prostitute turns his agonized face around to the camera only after the depraved older homosexual has removed his
bloody and deflating post-pleasure phallus, brings his blond-browed face around to his left to face the audience in a mute howl as
he collapses onto his delicate chest with his arms out on the satin sheets and his violated bum hiked high in the air, revealing now
at the crease of his bum and upper hamstring a vivid purple splotch, more vivid than any bruise and with eight spidery tentacles
radiating from it that are, the older man's horrified thought-bubble reveals, the unmistakable eight-legged-vivid-contusion-blotch
sign of Kaposi's Sarcoma, that most universal symptom of It, and the boy is sobbing that the depraved old homosexual has made
him — the prostitute — a murderer, the boy's racking sobs making the hiked bum waggle in front of the old specimen's horrified
face as the boy sobs into the chartreuse satin and shrieks 'Murderer! Murderer!' over and over, so that almost a third oí
Accomplice!'s total length is devoted to the racked repetition of this word — way, way longer than is needed for the audience to
absorb the twist and all its possible implications and meanings. This was just the sort of issue Mario and I argued about. As I see
it, even though the cartridge's end has both characters emoting out of every pore, Accomplice!'$ essential project remains abstract
and self-reflexive; we end up feeling and thinking not about the characters but about the cartridge itself. By the time the final
repetitive image darkens to a silhouette and the credits roll against it and the old man's face stops spasming in horror and the boy
shuts up, the cartridge's real tension becomes the question: Did Himself subject us to 500 seconds of the repeated cry 'Murderer!’
for some reason, i.e. is the puzzlement and then boredom and then impatience and then excruciation and then near-rage
aroused in the film's audience by the static repetitive final 1/3 of the film aroused for some theoretical-aesthetic end, or is Himself
simply an amazingly shitty editor of his own stuff?
It was only after Himself's death that critics and theorists started to treat this question as potentially important. A woman at U.
Cal-Irvine had earned tenure with an essay arguing that the reason-versus-no-reason debate about what was unentertaining in
Himself's work illuminated the central conundra of millennial après-garde film, most of which, in the teleputer age of home-only
entertainment, involved the question why so much aesthetically ambitious film was so boring and why so much shitty reductive
commercial entertainment was so much fun. The essay was turgid to the point of being unreadable, besides using reference as a
verb and pluralizing conundrum as conundra.379369
From my horizontal position on the bedroom floor I could use the TP's remote to do everything but actually remove and insert
cartridges into the drive's dock. The room's window was now a translucent clot of snow and steam. InterLace's Spontaneous
Disseminations for New New England were all about weather. With our subscription system, E.T.A. got numerous large-market
Spontaneous tracks. Each track took a slightly different angle on the weather. Each track had a slightly different focus. Remote
reports from Boston's North and South shores, Providence, New Haven, and Hartford-Springfield served to establish a consensus
that a terrific amount of snow had fallen and was continuing to fall and blow around and pile up. Cars were shown abandoned at
hasty angles, and we got to see the universal white VW-Bug-shape of snow-buried cars. Black-helmeted gangs of adolescents on
snowmobiles were shown prowling New Haven's streets, clearly up to no good. Pedestrians were shown bent over and
floundering; remote-report journalists were shown trying to flounder over to them to get their thoughts and reflections. One
floundering reporter in Quincy on the South Shore abruptly disappeared from view except for a hand with a microphone
protruding bravely from some sort of sinkhole of snow; the bent backs of technicians were then shown floundering away from the
remote camera to his aid. People with snow blowers stood in their own little blizzards. A pedestrian was filmed doing a
spectacular pratfall. Cars at all angles in streets were shown with their tires spinning, shuddering in stasis. One track kept cutting
back to a man endlessly trying to brush off a windshield that immediately whitened again behind each brushstroke. A bus sat with
its snout in a monster-sized drift. ATHSCME fans atop the wall north of Ti-conderoga NNY were shown making horizontal
cyclones of snow in the air. Rouged somber women in InterLace studios concurred that this was the worst blizzard to hit the
region since B.S. 1998 and the second-worst since B.S. 1993. A man in a wheelchair was shown staring stonily at a two-meter
drift across the ramp outside the State House. Satellite maps of east-central O.N.A.N. showed a white formation that was spiralled
and shaggy and seemed to have what looked like claws. It was not a Nor'easter. A hot moist ridge from the Gulf of Mexico and an
Arctic cold front had collided over the Concavity. The storm's satellite photo was superimposed on schemata of the '98 ass-kicker
and shown to be just about identical. An unwelcome old acquaintance was back, a striking woman with black bangs and vivid 
lipstick said, smiling somberly. Another track iterated: this was not a Nor'easter. It might have been better to say 'smiling
mirthlessly.' The flat glazed eyes of the man brushing impotently at his windshield seemed to represent an important visual image;
different tracks kept returning to his face. He refused to acknowledge journalists or requests for thoughts. His was the creepy
businesslike face of someone carefully picking up glass in the road after an accident in which his decapitated wife's been impaled
on the steering wheel. Another track's anchor was a beautiful black woman with purple lipstick and what looked like a very tall
crew cut. Reports of snow came in from all directions. After a while I stopped keeping track of the number of times the word
snow was repeated. All synonyms for snowstorm were rapidly exhausted. Helmetless thrill-seekers on snowmobiles were doing
doughnuts in Copley Square downtown. Homeless men hunched nearly drift-covered in doorways, readying snorkels of rolled-up
newspaper. Jim Troeltsch, now apparently a resident of B-204, had liked to do a pretty funny impression of an InterLace
anchorwoman having an orgasm. One of the thrill-seekers' snowmobiles spun out of control and plunged into a drift, and the
remote camera stayed on the drift for several moments, but nothing emerged. Connecticut's National Guard Reserve had been
ordered to assemble but had not assembled because travel in Connecticut was impossible. Three men in uniforms and gray
helmets chased two men in white helmets, all on snowmobiles, for reasons an on-site journalist described as not yet emergent.
Remote-site journalists used such words as emergent, individual, alleged, utilize, and developing. But all this impersonal diction
was preceded by the anchorperson's first name, as if the report were part of an intimate conversation. An InterLace delivery-boy
was shown delivering recorded cartridges on a snowmobile and was described as plucky. Otis P. Lord had undergone a procedure
for the removal of the Hitachi monitor on Thursday, LaMont Chu had said. I had never once ridden a snowmobile, skied, or
skated: E.T.A. discouraged them. DeLint described winter sports as practically getting down on one knee and begging for an
injury. The snowmobiles on the viewer all made sounds like little chain-saws that were extra pugnacious to compensate for being
so little. There was a poignant shot of a stuck plow in Northampton. 'Individuals who are not with emergency reasons to travel'
(sic) were being officially discouraged from travelling by a state trooper in a hat with a chinstrap. A Brockton man in a Lands' End
parka took a fall too burlesque to have been unstaged.
I could barely recall the '98 blizzard. The Academy had been open for only a few months. I remember the edges of the shaved
hilltop were still square and steep and striped in sedimentary layers, final construction delayed by some nasty piece of litigation
from the VA hospital below. The storm came barrelling in southeast from Canada in March. Dwight Flechette and Orin and the
other players had had to be led to the Lung roped together, single file, Schtitt in the lead carrying a highway flare. A couple photos
hung in C.T.'s waiting room. The last boy along the rope disappeared into a forlorn gray whirl. The Lung's new bubble had had to
be taken down and fixed when snow-weight stove it in on one side. The T stopped running. I remember some of the younger
players had cried and sworn up and down that the blizzard wasn't their fault. For days snow churned steadily out of a graphite sky.
Himself had sat in a spindle-backed chair, at the same living-room window C.T. now uses for advanced worry, and aimed a series
of nondigital cameras at the mounting snow. After years in which his consuming obsession was the establishment of E.T.A., Orin
said, Himself had started in with the film-obsession almost immediately after the Academy was up and running. Orin has said the
Moms had assumed the film thing was a passing obsession. Himself had seemed interested mostly in the lenses and rasters380370
at first, and in the consequences of their modification. He sat in that chair throughout the whole storm, sipping brandy from a onehanded snifter, his long legs not quite covered by a plaid blanket. His legs had seemed to me almost endlessly long back then. He
always seemed to be right on the edge of coming down with something. His record up until then indicated that he remained
obsessed with something until he became successful at it, then transferred his obsession to something else. From military optics to
annular optics to entrepreneurial optics to tennis-pedagogy to film. In the chair during the blizzard he'd had beside him several
different types of camera and a large leather case. The inside of the case was striated with lenses down both sides. He used to let
Mario and me put different lenses in our eyes and squint to hold them, imitating Schtitt.
One way of looking at the film-obsession's endurance is that Himself was never really successful or accomplished at
filmmaking. This was something else on which Mario and I had agreed to disagree.
It took almost a year to complete the move from Weston to E.T.A. The Moms had attachments in Weston and she drew things
out. I was pretty small. I lay flat on my back on our room's carpet and tried to recall details of our home in Weston, twidgeling the
TP's remote with my thumb. I do not have Mario's head for remembered detail. One dissemination-track simply panned the metroBoston sky and horizons from atop the Hancock tower. On the FM band, WYYY was apparently doing its weather-report via
mimesis, broadcasting raw static while the student staff doubtless did bongs in celebration of the storm and then went up sliding
around the Union's cerebral rooftop. The Hancock camera's pan included the sinciput of the M.I.T. Union, its roof's convolutions
filling with snow ahead of the rest of it, creepy filigrees of white against the roof's deep gray.
Our subdorm room's only carpet was an oversized corruption of the carpet page from the Lindisfarne Gospels in which you
had to look very closely to make out the tiny pornographic scenes in the Byzantine weave surrounding the cross. I'd acquired the
carpet years ago during a period of intense interest in Byzantine pornography inspired by what I'd seen as a titillating reference in
the O.E.D. I too had moved serially between obsessions, as a child. I adjusted my angle on the carpet. I was trying to align myself
along some sort of grain in the world I could barely feel, since Pemulis and I stopped. Meaning the grain, not the world. I realized
I could not distinguish my own visual memories of the Weston house from my memories of hearing Mario's detailed reports of his
memories. I remember a late-Victorian three-level on a low quiet street of elms, hyperfertilized lawns, tall homes with oval
windows and screen porches. One of the street's homes had a pineapple finial. Only the street itself was low; the lots were humped
up high and the houses so tall the broad street seemed nevertheless constricted, a sort of affluence-flanked defile. It seemed always
to be summer or spring. I could remember the Moms's voice high overhead at a screen-porch door, calling us in as dusk drifted
down and leaded fanlights began to light up at homes' doors in some sort of linear sync. Either our driveway or another driveway
flanked with whitewashed stones the shapes of beads or drops. The Moms's intricate garden in a backyard enclosed by a
fencework of trees. Himself on the screen porch, stirring a gin and tonic with his finger. The Moms's dog S. Johnson, not yet
neutered, confined by psychosis in a sort of large fenced pen abutting the garage, running around and around the pen when
thunder sounded. The smell of Noxzema: Himself behind Orin in the upstairs bathroom, towering over and down, teaching Orin to
shave against the grain, upward. I remember S. Johnson leaping up on his hind legs and sort of playing the fence with his paws as
Mario approached the pen: the rattling chain-link's pitch. The circle of earth worn bare by S.J.'s orbit in the pen when thunder 
sounded or planes crossed overhead. Himself sat low in chairs and could cross his legs and still have both feet flat on the floor.
He'd hold his chin in his hand while he looked at you. My memories of Weston seemed like tableaux. They seemed more like
snapshots than films. A weird isolated memory of summertime gnats knitting the air above the shaggy animal-head of a neighbor's
topiary hedge. Our own round shrubs trimmed flat as tabletops by the Moms. More horizontals. The chatter of hedge-clippers,
their power-cords bright orange. I had to swallow spit with almost every breath. I remembered climbing with a dawdler's heavy
tread the cement steps up from the street to a gambrel-roofed late-Victorian whose narrow height from the steps gave it the
distended look of thick liquid hanging: gingerbread eaves, undulate shingles of weathered red, zinc gutters the Moms's graduate
students came and kept clean. A blue star in the front window and the words BLOCK MOTHER, which had always suggested
either a rectangular woman or some type of football-crowd cheer. The inside cool and dim and a smell of Lemon Pledge. I had no
visual memories of my mother without white hair; all that varied was the length. A touch-tone phone, with a cord running into the
wall, on a horizontal surface in a recessed alcove near the front door. Cork floors and pre-mounted shelving of woody-smelling
wood. The chilling framed print of Lang directing Metropolis in 1924.381371 A hulking black chest with strap-hinges of brass. A
few of Himself's old heavy tennis trophies as bookends on the mounted shelving. An étagère filled with old-fashioned magnetic
videos in bright adverting boxes, a cluster of blue-and-white delfts on the étagère's top shelf that had dwindled as one figurine
after another got knocked off by Mario, stumbling or shoved. The blue-white chairs with the protective plastic that made your legs
sweat. A divan done in some sort of burlapesque Iranian wool dyed to the color of sand mixed with ash — this may have been a
neighbor's divan. Some cigarette burns in the fabric of the divan's arms. Books, videotapes, kitchen's cans — all alphabetized.
Everything painfully clean. Several spindle-backed captain's chairs in contrasting fruit-woods. A surreal memory of a steamed
lavatory mirror with a knife sticking out of the pane. A massive stereo television console of whose gray-green eye I was afraid
when the television was off. Some of the memories have to be confabulated or dreamed — the Moms would never have had a
divan with burns in it.
A picture window east, the direction of Boston, with claret-colored figures and a blue sun all suspended in a web of lead. The
candy-colored summer sunrise through that window as I watched television in the A.M.
The tall thin quiet man, Himself, with his razor-burn and bent glasses and chinos too short, whose neck was slender and
shoulders sloped, who slumped in candied east-window sunlight with his tailbone supported by windowsills, meekly stirring a
glass of something with his finger while the Moms stood there telling him she'd long-since abandoned any reasonable hope that he
could hear what she was telling him — this silent figure, of whom I still remember mostly endless legs and the smell of Noxzema
shave-cream, seems, still, impossible to reconcile with the sensibility of something like Accomplice! It was impossible to imagine
Himself conceiving of sodomy and razors, no matter how theoretically. I lay there and could almost remember Orin telling me
something almost moving that Himself had once told him. Something to do with Accomplice! The memory hung somewhere just
out of conscious reach, and its tip-of-the-tongue inaccessibility felt too much like the preface to another attack. I accepted it: I
could not remember.
Off down the Weston street a church with an announcement-board in the grass out front — white plastic letters on a slotted
black surface — and at least once Mario and I stood watching a goatish man change the letters and thus the announcement. One of
the first occasions where I remember reading something involved the announcement-board announcing:
LIFE IS LIKE TENNIS THOSE WHO SERVE BEST USUALLY WIN
with the letters all spaced far out like that. A big fresh-cement-colored church, liberal with glass, denomination not recalled,
but built in what was, in the B.S. 8O's probably, modern — a parabolic poured-concrete shape billowed and peaked like a cresting
wave. A suggestion in it of some paranormal wind somewhere that could make concrete billow and pop like a tucking sail.
Our own subdorm room now has three of those old Weston captain's chairs whose backs dent your spine if you don't fit it
carefully between two spindles. We have an unused wicker basket for laundry on which are stacked some corduroy spectationpillows. Floor plans for Hagia Sophia and S. Simeon at Qal'at Si'man on the wall over my bed, the really prurient part of
Consummation of the Levirates over the chairs, also from the old interest in Byzantinalia. Something about the stiff and
dismantled quality of maniera greca porn: people broken into pieces and trying to join, etc. At the foot of Mario's bed a surplusstore trunk for his own film equipment and a canvas director's chair where he's always laid out his police lock, lead weights, and
vest for the night. A fiberboard stand for the compact TP and viewer, and a stenographer's chair for using the TP to type. Five total
chairs in a room where no one ever sits in a chair. As in all the subdorm rooms and hallways, a guilloche ran around our walls half
a meter from the ceiling. New E.T.A.s always drove themselves bats counting their room's guilloche's interwoven circles. Our
room had 811 and truncated bits of -12 and -13, two left halves stuck like open parentheses up in the southwest corner. Between
the ages of eleven and thirteen I'd had a plaster knock-off of a lewd Constantine frieze, the emperor with a hyperemic organ and
an impure expression, hung by two hooks from the guilloche's lower border. Now I couldn't for the life of me recall what I'd done
with the frieze, or which Byzantine seraglio the original had decorated. There had been a time when data like these were instantly
available.
The Weston living room had had an early version of Himself's full-spectrum cove lighting and at one end an elevated
fieldstone fireplace with a big copper hood that made a wonderful ear-splitting drum-head for wooden spoons, with memories of
some foreign adult I didn't recognize grinding at her temples and pleading Do Stop. The Moms's jungle of Green Babies had
spread out into the room from another corner, the plants' pots on stands of various heights, hanging in nests of twine suspended
from clamps, arrayed at eye-height from projecting trellises of white-painted iron, all in the otherworldly glow of a white-hooded
tube of ultraviolet light hung with thin chains from the ceiling. Mario can recall violet-lit laces of ferns and the wet meaty gloss of
rubber-tree leaves.
And a coffee table of green-shot black marble, too heavy to move, on whose corner Mario knocked out a tooth after what
Orin swore up and down was an accidental shove.
Mrs. Clarke's varicotic calves at the stove. The way her mouth overhead would disappear when the Moms reorganized
something in the kitchen. My eating mold and the Moms's being very upset that I'd eaten it — this memory was of Orin's telling
the story; I had no childhood memory of eating fungus.
My trusty NASA glass still rested on my chest, rising when my rib cage rose. When I looked down my own length, the glass's 
round mouth was a narrow slot. This was because of my optical perspective. There was a concise term for optical perspective that
I again could not quite make resolve.
What made it hard really to recall our old house's living room was that so many of its appointments were now in the living
room of the Headmaster's House, the same and yet altered, and by more than rearrangement. The onyx coffee table Mario had
fallen against (specular is what refers to optical perspective; it came to me after I stopped trying to recall it) now supported
compact disks and tennis magazines and a cello-shaped vase of dried eucalyptus, and the red-steel stand for the family Xmas tree,
when in season. The table had been a wedding gift from Himself's mother, who died of emphysema shortly before Mario's
surprise birth. Orin reports she'd looked like an embalmed poodle, all neck-tendons and tight white curls and eyes that were all
pupil. The Moms's birth-mother had died in Quebec of an infarction when she — the Moms — was eight, her father during her
sophomore year at McGill under circumstances none of us knew. The hydrant-sized Mrs. Tavis was still alive and somewhere in
Alberta, the original L'Islet potato farm now part of the Great Concavity and forever lost.
Orin and Bain et al. at Family Trivia during that terrible first year's blizzard, Orin imitating the Moms's high breathy 'My son
ate this! God, please!,' never tiring of it.
Orin had liked also to recreate for us the spooky kyphotic hunch of Himself's mother, in her wheelchair, beckoning him closer
with a claw, the way she seemed always caved in over and around her chest as if she'd been speared there. An air of deep
dehydration had hung about her, he said, as if she osmosized moisture from whoever came near. She spent her last few years
living in the Marlboro St. brownstone they'd had before Mario and I were born, tended by a gerontologic nurse Orin said always
wore the expression of every post-office mug shot you've ever seen. When the nurse was off, a small silver bell was apparently
hung from an arm of the old lady's wheelchair, to be rung when she could not breathe. A cheery silver tinkle announcing
asphyxiation upstairs. Mrs. Clarke would still pale whenever Mario asked about her.
It's become easier to see the climacteric changes in the Moms's own body since she began confining herself more and more to
the Headmaster's House. This occurred after Himself's funeral, but in stages — the gradual withdrawal and reluctance to leave the
grounds, and the signs of aging. It is hard to notice what you see every day. None of the physical changes has been dramatic —
her nerved-up dancer's legs becoming hard, stringy, a shrinking of the hips and a girdly thickening at the waist. Her face settles a
little lower on her skull than it did four years ago, with a slight bunching under the chin and an emerging potential for something
pruny happening around her mouth, in time, I thought I could see.
The word that best connoted why the glass's mouth looked slotty was probably foreshortened.
The Q.R.S. Infantilist would no doubt join the old grief-therapist in asking how watching one's Moms begin to age makes you
feel inside. Questions like these become almost koans: you have to lie when the truth is Nothing At All, since this appears as a
textbook lie under the therapeutic model. The brutal questions are the ones that force you to lie.
Either our old kitchen or a neighbor's kitchen panelled with walnut and hung with copper pâté-molds and herbal sprigs. An
unidentified woman — not Avril or Mrs. Clarke — standing in that kitchen in snug cherry slacks, loafers over bare feet, waggling
a mixing spoon, laughing at something, a long-tailed comet of flour on her cheek.
It occurred to me then with some force that I didn't want to play this afternoon, even if some sort of indoor exhibition-meet
came off. Not even neutral, I realized. I would on the whole have preferred not to play. What Schtitt might have to say to that, v.
what Lyle would say. I was unable to stay with the thought long enough to imagine Himself's response to my refusal to play, if
any.
But this was the man who made Accomplice!, whose sensibility informed the hetero-hardcore Möbius Strips and the sadoperiodontal Fun with Teeth and several other projects that were just thoroughgoingly nasty and sick.
Then it occurred to me that I could walk outside and contrive to take a spill, or squeeze out the window on the rear staircase
of HmH and fall several meters to the steep embankment below, being sure to land on the bad ankle and hurt it, so I'd not have to
play. That I could carefully plan out a fall from the courts' observation transom or the spectators' gallery of whatever club C.T. and
the Moms sent us to to help raise funds, and fall so carefully badly I'd take out all the ankle's ligaments and never play again.
Never have to, never get to. I could be the faultless victim of a freak accident and be knocked from the game while still on the
ascendant. Becoming the object of compassionate sorrow rather than disappointed sorrow.
I couldn't stay with this fantastic line of thought long enough to parse out whose disappointment I was willing to cripple
myself to avoid (or forgo).
And then out of nowhere it returned to me, the moving thing Himself had said to Orin. This was concerning 'adult' films,
which from what I've seen are too downright sad to be truly nasty, or even really entertainment, though the adjective adult is kind
of a misnomer.
Orin had told me that once he and Smothergill, Flechette, and I think Penn's older brother had gotten hold of a magnetic video
of some old hardcore X-film — The Green Door or Deep Throat, one of those old chestnuts of cellulite and jism. There were
excited plans to convene in V.R.3 and watch the thing in secret after Lights Out. The Viewing Rooms at that point had broadcast
televisions and magnetic VCR-devices, instructional mag-vids from Galloway and Braden, etc. Orin and co. were all around
fifteen at the time, bombed by their own glands — they were pop-eyed at the prospect of genuine porn. There were rules about
videos' suitability for viewing in the Honor Code, but Himself was not noted for his discipline, and Schtitt didn't yet have deLint
— the first generation of E.T.A.s did pretty much as they pleased off-court, as long as they were discreet.
Nevertheless, word about this 'adult' film got around, and somebody — probably Mary Esther Thode's sister Ruth, then a
senior and insufferable — ratted the boys' viewing-plans out to Schtitt, who took the matter to Himself. Orin said he was the only
one Himself called into the Headmaster's office, which in that era had only one door, which Himself asked Orin to close. Orin
recalled seeing none of the unease that always accompanied Himself's attempts at stern discipline. Instead Himself invited Orin to
sit and gave him a lemon soda and stood facing him, leaning back slightly so that the front edge of his desk supported him at the
tailbone. Himself took his glasses off and massaged his closed eyes delicately — almost trea-suringly, his old eyeballs — in the
way Orin knew signified that Himself was ruminative and sad. One or two soft interrogatives brought the whole affair out in the
open. You could never lie to Himself; somehow you just never had the heart. Whereas Orin made almost an Olympic sport of
lying to the Moms. Anyway, Orin quickly confessed to everything. 
What Himself said then moved him, Orin told me. Himself told Orin he wasn't going to forbid them to watch the thing if they
really wanted to. But just please to keep it discreet, just Bain and Smothergill and Orin's immediate circle, nobody younger, and
nobody whose parents might hear about it, and for God's sake don't let your mother get wind. But that Orin was old enough to
make his own entertainment-decisions, and if he decided he wanted to watch the thing.. . . And so on.
But Himself said that if Orin wanted his personal, fatherly as opposed to headmasterly, take on it, then he, Orin's father —
though he wouldn't forbid it — would rather Orin didn't watch a hard-porn film yet. He said this with such reticent earnestness
there was no way Orin couldn't ask him how come. Himself felt his jaw and pushed his glasses up several times and shrugged and
finally said he supposed he was afraid of the film giving Orin the wrong idea about having sex. He said he'd personally prefer that
Orin wait until he'd found someone he loved enough to want to have sex with and had had sex with this person, that he'd wait until
he'd experienced for himself what a profound and really quite moving thing sex could be, before he watched a film where sex was
presented as nothing more than organs going in and out of other organs, emotionless, terribly lonely. He said he supposed he was
afraid that something like The Green Door would give Orin an impoverished, lonely idea of sexuality.
What poor old O. claimed to have found so moving was Himself's assumption that O. was still cherry. What moved me to feel
sorry for Orin was that it seemed pretty obvious that that had nothing to do with what Himself was trying to talk about. It was the
most open I'd ever heard of Himself being with anybody, and it seemed terribly sad to me, somehow, that he'd wasted it on Orin.
I'd never once had a conversation nearly that open or intimate with Himself. My most intimate memory of Himself was the
scratchiness of his jaw and the smell of his neck when I fell asleep at supper and he carried me upstairs to bed. His neck was thin
but had a good meaty warm smell; I now for some reason associate it with the odor of Coach Schtitt's pipe.
I tried briefly to picture Ortho Stice hoisting his bunk up and bolting it to the ceiling without waking Coyle. Our room's door
remained ajar from Mario's exit with Coyle to find someone with a master key. Yardguard and Wagenknecht's heads popped in
briefly and urged me to come have a look at The Darkness's ruined map and withdrew when they got no response. The second
floor was pretty quiet; most of them were still dawdling at breakfast, awaiting some announcement on the weather and Québecois
squads. Snow hit the windows with a gritty sound. The angle of the wind had made a kind of whistle out of one corner of the
subdorm building, and the whistling came and went.
Then I heard John Wayne's stride in the hall outside, light and even and easy on floors, the stride of a guy with stellar calfdevelopment. I heard his low sigh. Then, though the door was too far behind me to see, for a moment or two I could somehow tell
for sure that John Wayne's head was inside the open door. I could feel it clearly, almost painfully. He was looking down at me
lying there on the Lindisfarne carpet. There was none of the gathering tension of a person deciding whether or not to speak. I
could feel my throat's equipment move when I swallowed. John Wayne and I never had much to say to one another. There wasn't
even hostility between us. He ate dinner with us at HmH every so often because he and the Moms were tight. The Moms made
little attempt to disguise her attachment to Wayne. Now his breathing behind me was light and very even. No waste, complete
utilization of each breath.382372
Of us three, it was Mario who had spent the most time with Himself, sometimes travelling with him for location-work. I had
no idea what they spoke about together, or how openly. None of us had ever pressed Mario to say much about it. It occurred to me
to wonder why this was so.
I decided to get up but then did not in fact get up. Orin was convinced that Himself was a virgin when he met the Moms in his
late thirties. I find this pretty hard to believe. Orin will also grant that there's no doubt Himself was faithful to the Moms right up
to the end, that his attachment to Orin's fiancee was not sexual. I had a sudden and lucid vision of the Moms and John Wayne
locked in a sexual embrace of some kind. John Wayne had been involved with the Moms sexually since roughly the second month
after his arrival. They were both expatriates. I hadn't yet been able to identify a strong feeling one way or the other about the
liaison, nor about Wayne himself, except for admiring his talent and total focus. I did not know whether Mario knew of the
liaison, to say nothing of poor C.T.
It was impossible for me to imagine Himself and the Moms being explicitly sexual together. I bet most children have this
difficulty where their parents are concerned. Sex between the Moms and C.T. I imagined as both frenetic and weary, with a kind
of doomed timeless Faulknerian feel to it. I imagined the Moms's eyes open and staring blankly at the ceiling the whole time. I
imagined C.T. never once shutting up, talking around and around whatever was taking place between them. My coccyx had gone
numb from the pressure of the floor through the thin carpet. Bain, graduate students, grammatical colleagues, Japanese fightchoreographers, the hairy-shouldered Ken N. Johnson, the Islamic M.D. Himself had found so especially torturing — these
encounters were imaginable but somehow generic, mostly a matter of athleticism and flexibility, different configurations of limbs,
the mood one more of cooperation than complicity or passion. I tended to imagine the Moms staring expressionlessly at ceilings
throughout. The complicit passion would have come after, probably, with her need to be sure the encounter was hidden. Petersonallusions notwithstanding, I wondered about some hazy connection between this passion for hiddenness and the fact that Himself
had made so many films titled Cage, and that the amateur player he became so attached to was the veiled girl, Orin's love. I
wondered whether it was possible to lie supine and throw up without aspirating vomit or choking. The plumed spout of a whale.
The tableau of John Wayne and my mother in my imagination was not very erotic. The image was complete and sharply focused
but seemed stilted, as if composed. She reclines against four pillows, at an angle between seated and supine, staring upward,
motionless and pale. Wayne, slim and brown-limbed, smoothly muscled, also completely motionless, lies over her, his untanned
bottom in the air, his blank narrow face between her breasts, his eyes unblinking and his thin tongue outthrust like a stunned
lizard's. They stay just like that.
She wasn't dumb — she figured it was likely that they'd let her loose just to see where she'd go.
She went home. She went to the House. She got one of the last trains before they closed the T, probably. It took forever to get
from Comm. Ave. down to Enfield Marine in her clogs and skirt in the snow, and melt soaked the veil and made it adhere to the
features below. She'd been close to removing the veil to get away from the outside-linebacker of a federal lady anyway. She
looked now just like a linen-pale version of what she really looked like. But there was no one about in the snow. She figured if she
could speak with Pat M. Pat M. might be prevailed upon to put her in quarantine with Clenette and Yolanda, not let in no law. She
could tell Pat about the wheelchairs, try to convince her to dismantle the ramp. The visibility was so bad she didn't see it til she 
cleared the Shed, the Middlesex County Sheriff's car, fiercely snow-tired, lights going bluely, parked idling in the roadlet outside
the ramp, wipers on Occasional, a uniform at the wheel absently feeling his face.
He says 'I'm Mikey, alcoholic and addict and a sick fuck, you know what I'm saying?’
And they laugh and shout out 'You definitely are' as he stands there rocking the podium slightly, blurred a bit through the
linen, smearing one side of his face with a laborer's hand as he tries to think what to say. It's another of these round-robin-speaker
deals, each speaker picking the next from the smoky lunchtime crowd, jogging up to the fiberboard podium trying to think what to
say, and how, for the five minutes each is allotted. The chairperson at the table up by the podium has a clock and a novelty-shop
gong.
'Well,' he says, "well so I seen some of the old Mikey come back out yesterday, you know what I'm saying? Fucking scared
me to see it. What it was, I was going to take my kid down to the lanes and bowl a couple. With my kid. Who he just got the cast
off. So I'm all happy and whatnot, got the day off, see the kid. Quality sober time with the kid. So on and so forth. So I'm all on
the happy wagon and like that, about seeing the kid, you know what I'm saying? So, what, so I call up my cunt of a sister. He's
living back with them, with Ma and my sister, so I'm calling up my sister to see can I come get the kid at such-and-such time and
whatnot. Because you know how the judge said I got to get one of them's fucking consent to even see my kid. You know what I'm
saying? Because of the restraining order on the old Mikey, from before. I got to get their permission. And I, what, accept that, I
say OK, so I'm calling up all accepting and on the happy wagon for my sister to consent, and she out of the goodness of her heart
she makes me wait while she says she's got to check it with Ma. And they consent, finally. And I, what, accept that, you know
what I'm saying? And I say I was going to be there at such-and-such time and whatnot, and my sister says ain't I even going to say
thank you? Like with the attitude, you know what I'm saying? And I say 't the fuck, what, you want a fucking medal for letting me
see my own kid? And the cunt hangs up on me. Oh. Fucking oh. Ever since the judge with the order, it's with the attitude over
there, the cunt and Ma both. So after she just hangs up on me a little of the old Mikey I think starts to come out and I go over there
and yes all right I got to be honest I do I park on the grass of their fucking lawn, and I go up and go up and I see her and I'm like
Fuck you you cunt, and Ma's in the hall behind her in the door, I go Fucking hang up on me why don't you, you should go for
some fucking counselling you know what I'm saying? And they don't neither one of them like that verbal comment too much,
right? The cunt almost starts laughing and goes, like, I'm telling her to go for counseling?’
Crowd-laughter.
'I mean I ain't exactly coming over there with long-term sobriety, right? And I accept that. But the cunt's got the hook on the
door and she's going Who the fuck are you to be telling me to go for fucking counselling after the sick fucking little like stunt you
and that bimbo pulled on that kid who only just now even got the cast off? Oh, and no sign of the fucking kid anywhere. Just her
and Ma through the screen door, all over the place with the attitude. And now they tell me to get the fuck off their porch, No they
tell me, as in like Permission Denied, consent to see my own kid fucking refused. And the cunt still in her fucking bathrobe after
noon, and Ma behind her half in the bag already and hanging on to the fucking wall. You know what I'm saying? My serenity's
like: See yaa! And I say up boat-ayouse's asses, I'm here for my goddamn kid. And now my sister says she's going for the phone,
and Ma's saying The fuck, get the fuck out, Mikey. And plus did I mention no sign of the kid, and I ain't to even like touch the
screen door, not without consent. And I'm wanting to fucking kill somebody here, you know what I'm saying? And my sister's
getting the antenna out on the phone, and so I go OK I'm fucking leaving, but I like grab my balls at the both of them and go Eat
me the boatayouse, you know what I'm saying? Cause now it's the old Mikey back, and now / got with the attitude now, also. I'm
wanting to light my cunt of a sister up so bad I can't hardly see to get the truck off the lawn and leave. But and so and but so I'm
driving back home, and I'm so mad I all of a sudden try and pray. And I try and pray, driving along and whatnot, and it comes to
me I see irregarding of their fucked-up attitude I still need to go back and apologize irregardless, for grabbing my balls at them,
cause that's old fucking behavior. I see for my own sobriety's sake I need to go back and try and say I'm sorry. The thought of it
just about makes me puke, you know what I'm — but I go back and pull the truck up out front on the street and pray and go back
up on the porch, and I fucking apologize, and I go to my sister Please can I at least see the kid to see the cast off, and the cunt goes
Fuck you, get the fuck out, we don't accept your fucking apology. And no sign of Ma, and the fucking kid there's no sign of him,
so I got to accept her word and don't even know for sure if the cast is even off. But why I needed to share I think is it scared me. I
scared me, you know what I'm saying? I was at the counsellor's after and I told him I go I got to get some kind of hold on this
fucking temper or I'm going to end up right back in front of the fucking judge for lighting somebody up again, you know what I'm
saying? And God fucking forbid it should be somebody that's in my family, because I been that route once too many times
already. And I go like Am I nuts, Dr., or what? Do I got a like death-wish or what? You know what I'm saying? The cast just only
now finally comes off and I'm wanting to light up the fucking cunt that's got to consent I should get closer than a hundred m.'s to
the kid? Is it like I'm trying to set myself up for a drink or what exactly is it with this spring-loaded temper, if I'm sober? The
temper and judge is why I fucking got sober in the first place. So what the fuck is this? Well fuck me. I'm just grateful I got some
of that out. It's been up in my head, renting space, you know what I'm saying? I see Vinnie's getting ready to fucking gong me. I
want to hear from Tommy E. back there against the wall. Yo Tommy! What are you, spanking the hog back there or what? But
I'm just glad to be here. I just wanted to get some of that shit out.’
The man's pants' crease was gone at the knee and his Cardin topcoat looked slept in.
'It was good of you to grant me an easement.’
Pat M. tried to recross her legs and shrugged. 'You said you weren't here professionally.’
'Good of you to believe me.' The Assistant District Attorney for Suffolk County's 4th Circuit up on the near North Shore's hat
was a good dress Stetson with a feather in the band. He held it up in his lap by the brim and slowly rotated it by moving his
fingers along the brim. He'd re-crossed his legs twice. 'We met you and Mars at the Marblehead Regatta for the McDonald's
House thing for children, not this summer but either the sum—’
'I know who you are.' Pat's husband wasn't a celebrity but knew a lot of local celebrities, from the mint-reconditioned-sportscar upscale network around Boston.
'Well it's good of you. I'm here about one of your residents.’
'But not professionally,' Pat said. It wasn't a question or verification. She was cool steel when it came to protecting the 
residents and House. Then back home in her own home she was a shattered husk of a wreck.
'Frankly I'm not sure why I am here. You're just down the hill from the hospital. I've been up at Saint Elizabeth's off and on
for three days. Perhaps 1 need to simply air this. The 5th District boys — the P.D.s — speak well of the place. Your House here.
Perhaps I need simply to share this, to work up the nerve. My sponsor's no help. He's simply said do it if you want to have any
hope of things getting better.’
Anything less than a combination thoroughgoing professional and AA-longtimer would have at least hiked an eyebrow at one
of the most powerful and remorseless constables in three counties saying sponsor.
'It's Phob-Comp-Anon,' the A.D.A. said. 'I went through Choices383373 last winter and have been working a program of
recovery in Phob-Comp-Anon a day at a time to the best of my ability ever since then.’
'I see.’
'It's Tooty,' the A.D.A. said. He did a pause with his eyes closed and then smiled, still with his eyes closed. 'It is, rather, me,
and my enmeshment-issues with Tooty's . . . condition.’
Phob-Comp-Anon was a decade-old 12-Step splinter from Al-Anon, for codependency-issues surrounding loved ones who
were cripplingly phobic or compulsive, or both.
'It's a long story and not a particularly interesting one, I'm sure,' the A.D.A. said. 'Suffice to say that Tooty's been in torment
over some oral-dental-hygienic-violation issues that have their roots we're discovering in some issues from a childhood whose
dysfunctionality we — well, which she'd been in denial about for quite some time. It doesn't matter what. My program's my own.
The hiding the car keys, the cutting off her credit with different dentists, the checking the wastebaskets for new brush-wrappers
five times an hour — my unmanageability's my own, and I'm doing what I can, day by day, to let go and detach with love.’
'I think I understand.’
'I'm working Nine, now.’
Pat said 'The Ninth Step.’
The A.D.A. reversed the hat's rotation by moving his fingers in the opposite direction along the brim.
'I'm trying to make direct amends to whosoever my Fourth- and Eighth-Step work's revealed I've harmed, except in cases
where to do so would injure them or others.’
A tiny spiritual slip from Pat in the form of a patronizing smile. 'I have a nodding acquaintance with Nine myself.’
The A.D.A. was barely there, his eyes fixed and dilated. The remorselessly ingathered eyebrow-angle Pat had always seen in
his photos was completely reversed. The brows now formed a little peaked roof of pathos.
'One of your residents,' he said. 'A Mr. Gately, Court-Remanded out of the 5th Circuit, Peabody I believe. Or Staff counselor,
alumni, some status.’
Pat made a kind of exaggerated innocent trying-to-place-the-name-type face.
The A.D.A. said 'It doesn't matter. I'm aware of your constraints. I want nothing from you on him. It's him I've been up at
Saint Elizabeth's to see.’
Pat allowed herself one slightly flared nostril at this news.
The A.D.A. leaned forward, hat rotating between his calves, elbows on knees in the odd defecatory posture men used to try to
communicate earnestness in their sharing. 'I'm told — I owe the — Mr. Gately — an amend. I need to make an amend to Mr.
Gately.' He looked up. 'You too — this remains within these walls, as if it were my anonymity. All right?’
'Yes.’
'It doesn't matter what for. I blamed the — I've harbored a resentment, against this Gately, concerning an incident I'd
considered responsible for making Tooty's phobia reflare. It doesn't matter. The specifics, or his culpability or exposure to
prosecution in the incident — I've come to believe these don't matter. I've harbored this resentment. The kid's picture's been up on
my Priority-board with the pictures of far more objectively important threats to the public weal. I've been biding my time, waiting
to get him. This latest incident — no, don't say it, you needn't say a thing — seemed like just the opening. My last chance went
federal and then fizzled.’
Pat allowed herself a very slightly puzzled forehead.
The man waved the hat. 'It doesn't matter. I've hated, hated this man. You know that Enfield's Suffolk County. This incident
with the Canadian assault, the alleged firearm, the witnesses who can't depose because of their own exposure. . . . My sponsor, my
entire Group — they say if I act on the resentment I'm doomed. I'll get no relief. It won't help Tooty. Tooty's lips will still be white
pulp from the peroxide, her enamel in tatters from the constant irrational brushing and brushing and brushing and —' he clamped
his fine clean hand over his mouth and produced a high-pitched noise that frankly gave Pat the howlers, his right eyelid twitching.
He took several breaths. 'I need to let it go. I've come to believe that. Not just the prosecution — that's the easy part. I've
already tossed the file, though whatever civil liability the — Mr. Gately might face is another matter, not my concern. It's so
damnably ironic. The man's going to two-step out of at the very least a probation-violation and prosecution on all his old highly
convictable charges because I have to pitch the case, for the sake of my own recovery, I, who wanted nothing so much as to see
this man locked down in a cell with some psychopathic cellmate for the rest of his natural life, who shook my fist at the ceiling
and vowed —' and again the noise, this time muffled by the fine hat and so less well-muffled, his shoes pounding a little on the
carpet in rage so that Pat's dogs raised their heads and looked quizzically at him, and the epileptic one had a very small loud-noise
seizure.
'I hear you saying this is very hard but you've decided what you need to do.’
'Worse,' the A.D.A. said, blotting his brow with an unfolded handkerchief. 'I have to make an amend, my sponsor's said. If I
want the growth that promises real relief. I have to make direct amends, put out my hand and say that I'm sorry and ask the man's
forgiveness for my own failure to forgive. This is the only way I'll be able to forgive him. And I can't detach with love from
Tooty's phobic compulsion until I've forgiven the b— the man I've blamed in my heart.’
Pat looked him in the eye.
'Of course I can't say I've tossed the Canadian case's file, I needn't go that far they say. That would expose me to conflict of
interest — the irony — and could hurt Tooty, if my position's threatened. I've been told I can simply let him simmer on that until 
time passes and nothing moves forward.' He raised his own eyes. 'Which means you cannot tell anyone either. Declining to
prosecute for personal spiritual reasons — the office — it would be hard for others to understand. This is why I've come to you in
explicit confidence.’
'I hear your request and I'll honor it.’
'But listen. I can't do it. Cannot. I've sat outside that hospital room saying the Serenity Prayer over and over and praying for
willingness and thinking of my own spiritual interests and believing this amend is my Higher Power's will for my own growth and
I haven't been able to go in. I go and sit paralyzed outside the room for several hours and drive home and pry Tooty away from the
sink. It can't go on. I have to look that rotten — no, evil, I'm convinced in my heart, that son of a bitch is evil and deserves to be
removed from the community. I have to walk in there and extend my hand and tell him I've wished him ill and blamed him and
ask for forgiveness — him — if you knew what sick, twisted, sadistically evil and sick thing he did to us, to her — and ask him
for forgiveness. Whether he forgives or not is not the issue. It's my own side of the street I need to clean.’
'It sounds very, very hard,' Pat said.
The fine hat was almost spinning between the man's calves, the pantcuffs of which had been pulled up in the defecatory
forward lean to reveal socks that weren't, it seemed, both quite the same texture of wool. The mismatched socks spoke to Pat's
heart more than anything else.
'I don't even know why I came here,' he said. 'I couldn't simply leave again and drive home. Yesterday she'd been at her
tongue with one of those old NoCoat LinguaScraper appliances until it bled. I can't go home and look on that again without having
cleaned house.’
'I hear you.’
'And you were just down the hill.’
'I understand.’
'I don't expect help or counsel. I already believe I have to do it. I've accepted the injunction to do it. I believe I have no choice.
But I can't do it. I haven't been able to do it.’
'Willing, maybe.’
'Haven't yet been willing. Yet. I wish to emphasize yet.’
20 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
IMMEDIATELY PRE-FUNDRAISER-EXHIBITION-FÊTE
GAUDEAMUS IGITUR
Usually, part of the experience of having the place you live in throw a gala is watching different people arrive for the
festivities — the Warshavers, the Cartons and Peltasons and Prines, the Chins, the Middlebrooks and Gelbs, an incidental Lowell,
the Buckmans in their claret-colored Volvo driven by their silent grown son who you never see except when he's driving Kirk and
Binnie Buckman someplace. Dr. Hickle and his creepy niece. The Chawafs and Heavens. The Reehagens. The palsied and mega
wealthy Mrs. Warshaver with her pair of designer canes. The Donagan brothers from Svelte Nail. But usually we never get to see
them arriving, the friends and patrons of E.T.A., for the Fundraising exhibition and gala. Usually while they're arriving and getting
greeted by Tavis we're all down in the lockers, dressing and stretching, getting ready to exhibit. Getting shaved and taped by
Loach, etc.
It must usually be an unusual occasion for the guests, too, because for the first few hours they're there to watch us play —
they're all audience — then at some point with the last couple matches winding down the guys in white jackets with trays start
appearing in Comm.-Ad., and the gala starts, and then it's the guests who become the participants and performers.
Dressing and stretching, wrapping grips with Gauze-Tex or filling a pouch with fuller's earth (Coyle, Freer, Slice, Traub) or
sawdust (Wagen-knecht, Chu), getting taped, those in puberty getting shaved and taped. A ritual. Even the conversation, usually,
such as it is, has a timeless ceremonial aspect. John Wayne hunched as always on the bench before his locker with his towel like a
hood over his head, running a coin back and forth over the backs of his fingers. Shaw pinching the flesh between his thumb and
first finger, acupressure for a headache. Everyone had gone into their like autopilot ritual. Possalthwaite's sneakers were pigeontoed under a stall door. Kahn was trying to spin a tennis ball on his finger like a basketball. At the sink, Eliot Kornspan was
blowing out his sinuses with hot water; no one else was anywhere near the sink. A certain number of hysterical pre-competition
rumors about the Quebec Jr. Team and the severity of the weather circulated and were refuted and shifted antigens and returned.
You could hear the high-register end of the wind even down here. The Csikszentmihalyi kid was doing a kind of piaffer in place,
his knees hitting his chest, stretching his hip-flexors out. Troeltsch sat up against his locker near Wayne, wearing a disconnected
headset and broadcasting his own match in advance. There were fart-accusations and -denials. Rader snapped a towel at
Wagenknecht, who liked to stand for long periods of time bent at the waist with his head against his knees. Arslanian sat very still
in a corner, blindfolded in what was either an ascot or a very fey necktie, his head cocked in the attitude of the blind. It was
unclear whether B squads would even get to play; no one was sure how many courts the M.I.T. Union had inside. Rumors flew
this way and that. Michael Pemulis was nowhere to be seen since early this A.M., at which time Anton Doucette said he'd seen
Pemulis quote 'lurking' out by the West House dumpsters looking quote 'anxiously depressed.’
Then a small but univocal cheer went up from some of the players when Otis P. Lord appeared at the door, his cadaverous
dad escorting him, O.P.L. out of post-op and pale but looking his old self, with just a thin little choker-width bandage of gauze
around his neck from the monitor's removal and an odd ellipse of dry red skin around his mouth and nostrils. He came in and
shook a few hands and used the stall next to Postal Weight and left; he wasn't playing today.
J. L. Struck was applying an astringent to areas of his jaw.
An hysterical rumor that the Quebec players had been spotted coming down a ramp out of a charter-bus in the main lot and
were by all appearances not the Quebec J.D.C. and -W.C. squads but some sort of Special-Olympicish Quebec adult wheelchairtennis contingent — this rumor flew wildly around the locker room and then died out when a couple of the sub-14's who burned
nervous energy by scampering around checking rumors scampered out and up the stairs to check the rumor and failed to return. 
Across the wall on the Female side we could easily hear Thode and Donni Stott invoking Camilla, goddess of speed and light
step. Thode had had an hysterical tantrum after breakfast because Poutrincourt hadn't showed for the Females' pre-match Staff
thing and looked to be AWOL. Loach et al. had outfitted Ted Schacht with a complex knee-brace with jointed aluminum struts
down both sides and a coin-sized hole in the elastic over the kneecap for dermal ventilation, and Schacht was lumbering around
between the stalls and the locker with his arms straight out and his weight on his heels pretending to walk like Frankenstein.
Several people talked to themselves at their lockers. Barry Loach was down on one knee shaving Hal's left ankle for tape. A
couple of us remarked how Hal wasn't eating the usual customary Snickers bar or AminoPal. Hal had his hands on Loach's shoulders as the tape went on. A match-wrap is two horizontal layers just above the malleolus knob-thing, then straight down and four
times around the tarsus just in front of the joint, so there's a big gap for flexion of the joint, but a compacting and supportive wrap.
Then Loach puts a liner-sock and a wick-sock over the tape, then slides on the little inflatable AirCast deal and pumps it to the
right pressure, checking with a little gauge, and Velcros it just tight enough for support plus max-flexion. Hal was on the bench
with his hands on Loach's shoulders through the whole little routine. Everybody's had his hands on Loach's shoulders at one time
or another. Hal's shave and wrap take four minutes. Schacht's knee and Fran Unwin's hamstring thing each take over ten. Wayne's
quarter looked like it was dancing on his knuckles. Because of the towel over his head all you could see was a very thin oval
section of his face, like an almond on its end. Wayne got to have a small disk-player in his locker, and Joni Mitchell was playing,
which nobody ever minded because he kept it very low. Stice was blowing a purple bubble. Freer was trying to touch his toes.
Traub and Whale, also on the wrap-bench, later said Hal was being weird. Like they said asking Loach if the pre-match locker
room ever gave him a weird feeling, occluded, electric, as if all this had been done and said so many times before it made you feel
it was recorded, they all in here existed basically as Fourier Transforms of postures and little routines, locked down and stored and
call-uppable for rebroadcast at specified times. What Traub heard as Fourier Transforms Whale heard as Furrier Transforms. But
also, as a consequence, erasable, Hal had said. By whom? Hal before a match usually had a wide-eyed ingen-uish anxiety of
someone who'd never been in a situation even remotely like this before. His face today had assumed various expressions ranging
from distended hilarity to scrunched grimace, expressions that seemed unconnected to anything that was going on. The word was
that Tavis and Schtitt had chartered three buses to take the squads to an indoor venue Mrs. Inc had had alumnus Corbett Th-Thorp
call in mammoth favors to arrange — several mostly unused courts somewhere in the deep-brain tissue of the M.I.T. Student
Union — and that the whole gala would be moved over to the Student Union, and that the Quebec team and most of the guests
were being contacted by cellular about the cancellation of the previous cancellation and the change in venue, and that those guests
who didn't hear about the change would ride in the buses with the players and staff, some of them in formal- and evening-wear,
probably, the guests. Traub also says he also heard Hal use the word moribund, but Whale couldn't confirm. Schacht entered a
stall and drove the latch home with a certain purposeful sound that produced that momentary gunslinger-enters-saloon-type hush
throughout the locker room. Nobody in the vicinity could say they heard Barry Loach respond one way or another to any of the
strange moody things Hal was saying as Loach locked down the ankle for high-level play. Wa-genknecht apparently really did
fart.
The consensus among E.T.A.s is that Head Trainer Barry Loach resembles a wingless fly—blunt and scuttly, etc. One E.T.A.
tradition consists of Big Buddies recounting to new or very young Little Buddies the saga of Loach and how he ended up as an
elite Head Trainer even though he doesn't have an official degree in Training or whatever from Boston College, which is where
he'd gone to school. In outline form, the saga goes that Loach grew up as the youngest child of an enormous Catholic family, the
parents of which were staunch Catholics of the old school of extremely staunch Catholicism, and that Mrs. Loach (as in the
mom)'s life's most fervent wish was that one of her countless children would enter the R.C. clergy, but that the eldest Loach boy
had done a two-year U.S.N. bit and had gotten de-mapped early on in the Brazilian O.N.A.N./U.N. joint action of Y.T.M.P.; and
that within weeks of the wake the next oldest Loach boy had died of ciquatoxic food-poisoning eating tainted blackfin grouper;
and the next oldest Loach, Therese, through a series of adolescent misadventures had ended up in Atlantic City NJ as one of the
women in sequined leotards and high heels who carries a large posterboard card with the Round # on it around the ring between
rounds of professional fights, so that hopes for Therese becoming a Carmelite dimmed considerably; and on down the line, one
Loach falling helplessly in love and marrying right out of high school, another burning only to play the cymbals with a first-rate
philharmonic (now crashing away with the Houston P.O.). And so on, until there was just one other Loach child and then Barry
Loach, who was the youngest and also totally under Mrs. L.'s thumb, emotionally; and that young Barry had breathed a huge sigh
of relief when his older brother — always a pious and contemplative and big-hearted kid, brimming over with abstract love and an
innate faith in the indwelling goodness of all men's souls — began to show evidence of a true spiritual calling to a life of service
in the R.C. clergy, and ultimately entered Jesuit seminary, removing an enormous weight from his younger brother's psyche
because young Barry — ever since he first slapped a Band-Aid on an X-Men figure — felt his true calling was not to the
priesthood but to the liniment-and-adhesive ministry of professional athletic training. Who, finally, can say the whys and whences
of each man's true vocation? And then so Barry was a Training major or whatever at B.C., and by all accounts proceeding
satisfactorily toward a degree, when his older brother, quite far along toward getting ordained or frocked or whatever as a licensed
Jesuit, suffered at age twenty-five a sudden and dire spiritual decline in which his basic faith in the innate indwelling goodness of
men like spontaneously combusted and disappeared — and for no apparent or dramatic reason; it just seemed as if the brother had
suddenly contracted a black misanthropic spiritual outlook the way some twenty-five-year-old men contract Sanger-Brown's
ataxia or M.S., a kind of degenerative Lou Gehrig's Disease of the spirit — and his interest in serving man and God-in-man and
nurturing the indwelling Christ in people through Jesuitical pursuits underwent an understandable nosedive, and he began to do
nothing but sit in his dormitory room at St. John's Seminary — right near Enfield Tennis Academy, coincidentally, on Foster
Street in Brighton off Comm. Ave., right by the Archdiocese H.Q. or whatever — sitting there trying to pitch playing-cards into a
wastebasket in the middle of the floor, not going to classes or vespers or reading his Hours, and talking frankly about giving up
the vocation altogether, which all had Mrs. Loach just about prostrate with disappointment, and had young Barry suddenly reweighted with dread and anxiety, because if his brother bailed out of the clergy it would be nearly irresistibly incumbent on Barry,
the very last Loach, to give up his true vocation of splints and flexion and enter seminary himself, to keep his staunch and beloved
Mom from dying of disappointment. And so a series of personal interviews with the spiritually necrotic brother took place, Barry 
having to station himself on the other side of the playing-cards' wastebasket so as even to get the older brother's attention, trying to
talk the brother down from the misanthropic spiritual ledge he was on. The spiritually ill brother was fairly cynical about Barry
Loach's reasons for trying to talk him down, seeing as how both men knew that Barry's own career-dreams were on the line here
as well; though the brother smiled sardonically and said he'd come to expect little better than self-interested #l-looking-out from
human beings anyway, since his prac-ticum work out among the human flocks in some of Boston's nastier downtown venues —
the impossibility of conditions-changing, the ingratitude of the low-life homeless addicted and mentally ill flocks he served, and
the utter lack of compassion and basic help from the citizenry at large in all Jesuitical endeavors — had killed whatever spark of
inspired faith he'd had in the higher possibilities and perfectibility of man; so he opined what should he expect but that his own
little brother, no less than the coldest commuter passing the outstretched hands of the homeless and needy at Park Street Station,
should be all-too-humanly concerned with nothing but the care and feeding of Numero Uno. Since a basic absence of empathy and
compassion and taking-the-risk-to-reach-out seemed to him now an ineluctable part of the human character. Barry Loach was
understandably way out his depth on the theological turf of like Apologia and the redeemability of man — though he was able to
relieve a slight hitch in the brother's toss that was stressing his card-throwing arm's flexor carpi ulnaris muscle and so to up the
brother's card-in-wastebasket percentage significantly — but he was not only desperate to preserve his mother's dream and his
own indirectly athletic ambitions at the same time, he was actually rather a spiritually upbeat guy who just didn't buy the brother's
sudden despair at the apparent absence of compassion and warmth in God's supposed self-mimetic and divine creation, and he
managed to engage the brother in some rather heated and high-level debates on spirituality and the soul's potential, not that much
unlike Alyosha and Ivan's conversations in the good old Brothers K., though probably not nearly as erudite and literary, and
nothing from the older brother even approaching the carcinogenic acerbity of Ivan's Grand Inquisitor scenario.
In outline, it eventually boiled down to this: a desperate Barry Loach — with Mrs. L. now on 25 mg. of daily Ativan384374
and just about camped out in front of the candle-lighting apse of the Loach's parish church — Loach challenges his brother to let
him prove somehow — risking his own time, Barry's, and maybe safety somehow — that the basic human character wasn't as
unempathetic and necrotic as the brother's present depressed condition was leading him to think. After a few suggestions and
rejections of bets too way-out even for Barry Loach's desperation, the brothers finally settle on a, like, experimental challenge.
The spiritually despondent brother basically challenges Barry Loach to not shower or change clothes for a while and make himself
look homeless and disreputable and louse-ridden and clearly in need of basic human charity, and to stand out in front of the Park
Street T-station on the edge of the Boston Common, right alongside the rest of the downtown community's lumpen dregs, who all
usually stood there outside the T-station stemming change, and for Barry Loach to hold out his unclean hand and instead of
stemming change simply ask passersby to touch him. Just to touch him. Viz. extend some basic human warmth and contact. And
this Barry does. And does. Days go by. His own spiritually upbeat constitution starts taking blows to the solar plexus. It's not clear
whether the verminousness of his appearance had that much to do with it; it just turned out that standing there outside the station
doors and holding out his hand and asking people to touch him ensured that just about the last thing any passerby in his right mind
would want to do was touch him. It's possible that the respectable citizenry with their bookbags and cellulars and dogs with little
red sweater-vests thought that sticking one's hand way out and crying 'Touch me, just touch me, please' was some kind of new
stem-type argot for 'Lay some change on me,' because Barry Loach found himself hauling in a rather impressive daily total of $ —
significantly more than he was earning at his work-study job wrapping ankles and sterilizing dental prostheses for Boston College
lacrosse players. Citizens found his pitch apparently just touching enough to give him $; but B. Loach's brother — who often
stood there in collar less mufti up against the plastic jamb of the T-sta-tion's exit, slouched and smirking and idly shuffling a deck
of cards in his hands — was always quick to point out the spastic delicacy with which the patrons dropped change or $ into Barry
Loach's hand, these kind of bullwhip-motions or jagged in-and-outs like they were trying to get something hot off a burner, never
touching him, and they rarely broke stride or even made eye-contact as they tossed alms B.L.'s way, much less ever getting their
hand anywhere close to contact with B.L.'s disreputable hand. The brother not unreasonably nixed the accidental contact of one
commuter who'd stumbled as he tried to toss a quarter and then let Barry break his fall, not to mention the bipolarly ill bag-lady
who got Barry Loach in a headlock and tried to bite his ear off near the end of the third week of the Challenge. Barry L. refused to
concede defeat and misanthropy, and the Challenge dragged on week after week, and the older brother got bored eventually and
stopped coming and went back to his room and waited for the St. John's Seminary administration to give him his walking papers,
and Barry Loach had to take Incompletes in the semester's Training courses, and got canned from his work-study job for not
showing up, and he went through weeks and then months of personal spiritual crisis as passerby after passerby interpreted his
appeal for contact as a request for cash and substituted abstract loose change for genuine fleshly contact; and some of the Tstation's other disreputable stem-artists became intrigued by Barry's pitch — to say nothing of his net receipts — and started
themselves to take up the cry of 'Touch me, please, please, someone!,' which of course further compromised Barry Loach's
chances of getting some citizen to interpret his request literally and lay hands on him in a compassionate and human way; and
Loach's own soul began to sprout little fungal patches of necrotic rot, and his upbeat view of the so-called normal and respectable
human race began to undergo dark revision; and when the other scuzzy and shunned stem-artists of the downtown district treated
him as a compadre and spoke to him in a colle-gial way and offered him warming drinks from brown-bagged bottles he felt too
disillusioned and coldly alone to be able to refuse, and thus started to fall in with the absolute silt at the very bottom of the metro
Boston socio-economic duck-pond. And then what happened with the spiritually infirm older brother and whither he fared and
what happened with his vocation never gets resolved in the E.T.A. Loach-story, because now the focus becomes all Loach and
how he was close to forgetting — after all these months of revulsion from citizens and his getting any kind of nurturing or
empathic treatment only from homeless and addicted stem-artists — what a shower or washing machine or a ligamental
manipulation even were, much less career-ambitions or a basically upbeat view of indwelling human goodness, and in fact Barry
Loach was dangerously close to disappearing forever into the fringes and dregs of metro Boston street life and spending his whole
adult life homeless and louse-ridden and stemming in the Boston Common and drinking out of brown paper bags, when along
toward the end of the ninth month of the Challenge, his appeal — and actually also the appeals of the other dozen or so cynical
stem-artists right alongside Loach, all begging for one touch of a human hand and holding their hands out — when all these
appeals were taken literally and responded to with a warm handshake — which only the more severely intoxicated stemmers 
didn't recoil from the profferer of, plus Loach — by E.T.A.'s own Mario Incan-denza, who'd been sent dashing out from the Back
Bay co-op where his father was filming something that involved actors dressed up as God and the Devil playing poker with Tarot
cards for the soul of Cosgrove Watt, using subway tokens as the ante, and Mario'd been sent dashing out to get another roll of
tokens from the nearest station, which because of a dumpster-fire near the entrance to the Arlington St. station turned out to be
Park Street, and Mario, being alone and only fourteen and largely clueless about anti-stem defensive strategies outside T-stations,
had had no one worldly or adult along with him there to explain to him why the request of men with outstretched hands for a
simple handshake or High Five shouldn't automatically be honored and granted, and Mario had extended his clawlike hand and
touched and heartily shaken Loach's own fuliginous hand, which led through a convoluted but kind of heartwarming and faithreaffirming series of circumstances to B. Loach, even w/o an official B.A., being given an Asst. Trainer's job at E.T.A., a job he
was promoted from just months later when the then-Head Trainer suffered the terrible accident that resulted in all locks being
taken off E.T.A. saunas' doors and the saunas' maximum temperature being hard-wired down to no more than 50°C.
The inverted glass was the size of a cage or small jail cell, but it was still recognizably a bathroom-type tumbler, as if for
gargling or post-brushing swishing, only huge and upside-down, on the floor, with him inside. The tumbler was like a prop or
display; it was the sort of thing that would have to be made special. Its glass was green and its bottom over his head was pebbled
and the light inside was the watery dancing green of extreme ocean depths.
There was a kind of louvered screen or vent high on one side of the glass, but no air was coming out. In. The air inside the
huge glass was pretty clearly limited, as well, because there was already CO2 steam on the sides. The glass was too thick to break
or to kick his way out, and it felt like he might have possibly broken the leg's foot already trying.
There were some green and distorted faces through the glass's side's steam. The face at eye-level belonged to the latest
Subject, the dexterous and adoring Swiss hand-model. She stood looking at him, her arms crossed, smoking, exhaling greenly
through her nose, then looked down to confer with another face, seeming to float at about waist-level, that belonged to the shy and
handicapped fan who O.'d realized had shared the Subject's Swiss accent.
The Subject behind the glass would meet Orin's eye steadily but did not acknowledge him or anything he shouted. When Orin
had tried to kick his way out was when he'd recognized that the Subject was looking at his eyes rather than into them as
previously. There were now smeared footprints on the glass.
Every few seconds Orin wiped the steam of his breath away from the thick glass to see what the faces were doing.
His foot really was hurt, and the remains of whatever had made him fall asleep so hard really were making him sick to his
stomach, and in sum this experience was pretty clearly not one of his bad dreams, but Orin, #71, was in deep denial about its not
being a dream. It was like the minute he'd come to and found himself inside a huge inverted tumbler he'd opted to figure: dream.
The stilted amplified voice that came periodically through the small screen or vent above him, demanding to know Where Is The
Master Buried, was surreal and bizarre and inexplicable enough to Orin to make him grateful: it was the sort of surreal
disorienting nightmarish incomprehensible but vehement demand that often gets made in really bad dreams. Plus the bizarre
anxiety of not being able to get the adoring Subject to acknowledge anything he said through the glass. When the speaker's screen
slid back, Orin looked away from the glass's faces and up, figuring that they were going to do something even more surreal and
vehement that would really nail down the undeniable dream-status of the whole experience.
Mile. Luria P---------, who disdained the subtler aspects of technical interviews and had lobbied simply to be given a pair of
rubber gloves and two or three minutes alone with the Subject's testicles (and who was not really Swiss), had predicted accurately
what the Subject's response would be when the speaker's screen was withdrawn and the sewer roaches began pouring blackly and
shinily through, and as the Subject splayed itself against the tumbler's glass and pressed its face so flat against the absurd glass's
side that the face changed from green to stark white, and, much muffled, shrieked at them 'Do it to her! Do it to her!,' Luria P------
---inclined her head and rolled her eyes at the A.F.R. leader, whom she had long regarded as something of a ham.
Human beings came and went. An R.N. felt his forehead and yanked her hand back with a yelp. Somebody down the hall was
jabbering and weeping. At one point Chandler F., the recently graduated nonstick-cookware salesman, seemed to be there in the
classic resident-confiteor position, his chin on his hands on the bedside crib-railing. The room's light was a glowing gray. The
Ennet House House Manager was there, fingering the place her missing eyebrow'd been, trying to explain something about how
Pat M. hadn't come because she and Mr. M.'d had to kick Pat's little girl out of the house for using something synthetic again, and
was in a too shaky place spiritually to even leave home. Gately felt physically hotter than he'd ever felt. It felt like a sun in his
head. The crib-type railings got tapered on top and writhed a little, like flames. He imagined himself on the House's aluminum
platter with an apple in his mouth, his skin glazed and crispy. The M.D. that looked age twelve appeared with others wreathed in
mist and said Up it to 30 q 2 and Let's Try Doris,385375 that the poor son of a bitch was burning down. He wasn't talking to
Gately. The M.D. was not addressing Don Gately. Gately's only conscious concern was Asking For Help to refuse Demerol. He
kept trying to say addict. He remembered being young on the playground and telling Maura Duffy to look down her shirt and spell
attic. Somebody else said Ice Bath. Gately felt something rough and cool on his face. A voice that sounded like his own brainvoice with an echo said to never try and pull a weight that exceeds you. Gately figured he might die. It wasn't calm and peaceful
like alleged. It was more like trying to pull something heavier than you. He heard the late Gene Fackelmann saying to get a load of
this. He was the object of much bedside industry. A brisk clink of I.V. bottles overhead. Slosh of bags. None of the overhead
voices talking to him. His input unrequired. Part of him hoped they were putting Demerol in his I.V without him knowing. He
gurgled and mooed, saying addict. Which was the truth, that he was, he knew. The Crocodile that liked to wear Hanes, Lenny, that
at the podium liked to say 'The truth will you set you free, but not until it's done with you.' The voice down the hall was weeping
like its heart would break. He imagined the A.D.A. with his hat off earnestly praying Gately would live so he could send him to
M.D.C.-Walpole. The harsh sound he heard up close was the tape around his unshaved mouth getting ripped off him so quick he
hardly felt it. He tried to avoid projecting how his shoulder would feel if they started pounding on his chest like they pound on
dying people's chests. The intercom calmly dinged. He heard conversing people in the hall passing the open door and stopping for
a second to look in, but still conversing. It occurred to him if he died everybody would still exist and go home and eat and X their
wife and go to sleep. A conversing voice at the door laughed and told somebody else it was getting harder these days to tell the
homosexuals from the people who beat up homosexuals. It was impossible to imagine a world without himself in it. He remem-
bered two of his Beverly High teammates beating up a so-called homosexual kid while Gately walked away, wanting no part of
either side. Disgusted by both sides of the conflict. He imagined having to become a homosexual in Walpole. He imagined going
to one meeting a week and having a shepherd's crook and parrot and playing cribbage for a cigarette a point and lying on his side
in his bunk in his cell facing the wall, jacking off to the memory of tits. He saw the A.D.A. with his head bowed and his hat
against his chest.
Somebody overhead asked somebody else if they were ready, and somebody commented on the size of Gately's head and
gripped Gately's head, and then he felt an upward movement deep inside that was so personal and horrible he woke up. Only one
of his eyes would open because the floor's impact had shut the other one up plump and tight as a sausage. His whole front side of
him was cold from lying on the wet floor. Fackelmann around somewhere behind him was mumbling something that consisted
totally of g's.
His open eye could see the luxury apt. window. It was dawn outside, a glowing gray, and birds had plenty to say out in the
bare trees; and at the big window was a face and a windmill of arms. Gately tried to adjust the vertical hold on his vision. Pamela
Hoffman-Jeep was at the window. Their apt. was on the second floor of the luxury complex. She was up in a tree right outside the
window, standing on a branch, looking in, either gesturing wildly or trying to keep her balance. Gately felt a rush of concern about
her falling out of the tree and was preparing to ask the floor to maybe please relax its hold a second and let him go when P.H.-J.'s
face suddenly fell and exited the bottom of the window and was replaced by the face of Bobby ('C') C. Bobby C raised a slow
two-finger salute to his temple in an impassively mocking Hello as he scanned the evidence of serious bingeing in the room,
through the window. Eyeballing Mt. Dilaudid with special attention, nodding down to somebody down under the tree. He edged
forward on the branch until he was right up flush with the window and pushed up on its frame with one hand, trying to open the
locked window. The rising sun behind him cast a shadow of his head against the wet floor. Gately called out to Fackelmann and
tried to roll and sit up. His bones felt full of busted glass. Bobby C held up a six-pack of Hefenreffer and waggled it suggestively,
like wanting in. Gately had just managed to sit partly up when C's fist in its fingerless glove came through the window, spraying
double-pane glass. The fallen TP screen continued to show shots of small flames, Gately could see. C's arm came through and
groped for the latch and raised the window. Fackelmann was bleating like a sheep but not moving; a syringe he hadn't bothered
with removing hung from the inside of his elbow. Gately saw Bobby C had glass in his purple hair and a vintage Taurus-PT 9 mm.
jammed into his spike-studded belt. Gately sat there dumbly as C clambered on in and kind of tiptoed through the various puddles
and rolled Fackelmann's head back to check his pupils. C clucked his tongue and let Fackelmann's head fall back against the wall,
Fax still softly bleating. He turned smartly on his boot's heel and started across toward the apartment door, and Gately sat there
looking at him. When he got to where Gately was sitting on the floor with his wet legs curved parenthesized out in front of him
like some sort of huge pre-verbal rug-rat C stopped as if to say something he'd just remembered, looking down at Gately, his smile
wide and warm, and Gately noticed he had a black front tooth just as C caught him over the ear with the Taurus-PT and put him
back down. The floor got the back of Gately's head worse than the gun-butt did. His ears belled. It wasn't stars he saw. Then
Bobby C kicked Gately in the balls, S.O.P. to keep your man down, and Gately drew his knees up and turned his head and was
sick out onto the floor. He heard the apartment door opening and the leisurely sound of C's boots going down the stairs to the
complex's door. Between spasms, Gately urged Fackelmann to go for the window as rickety-tick as he could. Fack-elmann was
slumped back against the wall; he was looking at his legs and saying he couldn't feel his legs, that he was numb from the scalp on
down and climbing.
C returned shortly, and at the head of a whole entourage-type group of people Gately didn't like the looks of at all. There were
DesMonts and Pointgravè, Canadian Harvard Square small-time thug-types Gately knew slightly, small-time freelancers, too
Canadianly dumb for anything but the brutalest work. Gately was unglad to see them. They wore overalls and nonmatching
flannel shirts. The poor eczematic pharmacist's-assistant guy was behind them, carrying a black Dr.-bag. Gately was on his back
pedalling his legs in the air, which is what anybody that's played organized ball knows is what you do for a brody to the groin. The
pharmacist's assistant stopped behind C and stood there looking at his own Weejuns. Three big unfamiliar girls entered in red
leather coats and badly laddered hose. Then poor old Pamela Hoffman-Jeep, her taffeta torn and stained and her face gray with
shock, got borne in through the door by two Oriental punks in shiny leather jackets. They had their hands under her ass and
carried her as if seated, one leg out and a white stick of bone protruding from her shin, which her shin was a serious mess. Gately
saw all this upside-down, pedalling his legs until he could get up. One of the big girls carried an old-type Graphix bong and a Glad
Cinch-Sak kitchen-can bag. Either Pointgravè or DesMonts — Gately could never remember which of them was who — carried a
case of bonded liquor. C asked generally if it was Party Time. The room brightened as the sun climbed. The room was filling up.
Another of the girls made negative comments about the urine on the floor. Fackelmann in the corner began saying it was all a
goddamned lie. C pretended to answer himself in a falsetto and said Yes indeedyweedy it was Party Time. Now a very bland
groomed collegeish guy in a Wembley tie entered with a TaTung Corp. box and put it down by where the pharmacist's assistant
was still standing, and the bland guy rehung the teleplayer on the wall and ejected the TP's small-flame cartridge, dropping it on
the wet floor. The two Oriental toughs carried Pamela Hoffman-Jeep over to a far corner of the living room, and she screamed
when they dropped her onto a box of counterfeit little Commonwealth of MA peel-off seals. They were small, the Orientals, and
they were looking down at him, but neither had bad skin. A small grim woman with a tight gray bun and sensible shoes entered
last and shut the apt. door behind her. Gately rolled slowly to his knees and stood up, still bent a bit at the waist, not moving, one
eye still swollen shut. He could hear Fackelmann trying to stand. P.H.-J. stopped shrieking and blacked out and slumped down
until her chin was on her chest and her ass half off the box. The room smelled like Dilaudid and urine and Gately's vomit and
Fackelmann's bowel movement and the red leather girls's fine leather coats. C came on over and reached up and put his arm
around Gately's shoulders and stood with him like that while two of the tough girls in their coats passed around bottles of bourbon
from the case. Gately could focus best when he squinted. The A.M. sun hung in the window, up and past the tree, yellowing. The
bottles were the black-labelled boxy bottles that signified Jack Daniels. A churchbell off in the Square struck seven or eight.
Gately had had a bad experience with Jack Daniels at age fourteen. The bland groomed corporate guy had inserted a different TP
cartridge and now was getting a portable CD player out of the TaTung box while the pharmacist's assistant watched him.
Fackelmann said whatever it was was a total goddamn lie. Pointgravè or DesMonts took the bottle C had taken from the tough 
girls and handed to Gately. The sunlight on the floor through the window was spidered with shadows of branches. Everybody in
the room's shadows were moving around on the west wall. C also held a bottle. Soon just about everybody had their own
individual bottle of Jack. Gately heard Fackelmann asking somebody to open his for him he was numb to the ceiling and climbing
and he couldn't feel his hands. The small grim librarianish woman went to Fackelmann, removing her purse from her shoulder.
Gately was figuring out what he was going to say on the Faxter's behalf when Whitey Sorkin arrived. Until then he figured it was
C's party and just not to unnecessarily rile C. It seemed to take a long time to formulate mental thoughts. Pamela Hoffman-Jeep's
shin looked like ground chuck. C lifted his square bottle and asked for general permission to like propose a toast. P.H.-J.'s lips
were blue with shock. Gately felt bad that he felt so little romantic concern now that she'd fallen out of the tree. He spent no time
wondering if she'd ratted them out, if she'd brought Bobby C to them or vice-versy. At least one of the girls in the red leather coats
had an awful big Adam's apple for a girl. C roughly turned Gately's shoulders toward Fackelmann in the corner and toasted to old
friends and new friends and what looked like a serious fucking-A score for Gene Gene the Fax Machine, given the size of this
Dilaudid-pile and all the evidence of some serious fucking partying they could see, and smell. Everyone drank from their bottle.
The grim-faced little woman had to help Fackelmann find his mouth with the mouth of his bottle. All three of the big women
displayed Adam's apples when they tilted way back to chug. The polite swallow of Jack almost made Gately heave. C's Item in his
belt pressed against Gately's thigh and so did some of the belt's spikes. DesMonts and Pointgravè both had S&W Items in
shoulder-holsters. The Oriental punks didn't display any arms but had a look about them like they didn't ever even shower
unarmed; safe bet they at least had little weird sharp chinky things you threw at people, Gately figured. Several of C's group
chugged their whole bottle. One of the big girls hurled her bottle at the west wall, but it didn't break. Why is it you feel it in your
gut and not your nuts per se, when you get brodied? Gately was turning and looking wherever C's arm was turning him. The
contorted face on the rehung viewer from the corporate guy's cartridge was Whitey Sorkin's, a portrait Sorkin had let some
neuralgic painter do of him having a cluster-headache out at the National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation in the city, for a series for
an ad for aspirin. The cartridge seemed like just a continuous still of the painting, so that it looked like Sorkin on the wall was sort
of presiding over the gathering in a mute pained way. The librarianish little woman was threading a sewing needle with thread, her
mouth real tight. The pharmacist's assistant was getting little skin-flakes all over the black bag as he hunkered down over the bag
removing several syringes from the bag and filling them out of a 2500-IU ampule and handing them up to be passed around. The
N.C.-F.P.F. painting had a red fist pulling a handful of brain out of the top of Sorkin's skull while Sorkin's face looked out of the
viewer with the classic migraine-sufferer's look of super-intense thought, almost more meditative than hurt-looking. One Oriental
kid was squatting chinkishly in the corner drinking Jack and the other was sweeping up spilled laminates off the floor, using a flap
from the TaTung box for a dustpan. Chinks could do some serious sweeping, Gately reflected. Another of the girls threw her
bottle at the wall. It was when C didn't even have Gately facing them that it dawned on Gately the girls in coats and slatternly hose
were fags dressed up as girls, like as in transvestals. Bobby C was beaming. The first bit of real personal-ass fear Gately felt was
when he realized these people looked like mostly members of Bobby C's personal set, that they weren't the people Sorkin would
dispatch if he was sending his own people and coming himself, soon, that Sorkin's painting on the wall was symbolic of Sorkin
wasn't coming, that Sorkin had given Bobby C free rain on this piece of painful business. The pharmacist's assistant removed two
pre-filled syringes from the bag, unwrapping their crinkly plastic. C told Gately quietly how Whitey said to say he knew Bonnie
wasn't part of Fackelmann's score to fuck Sorkin and Eighties Bill. That he didn't need to do anything except kick back and enjoy
the party and let Fackelmann face his own music and to not let any like 19th-century notions of defending the weak and pathetic
drag Gately into this. C said he was sorry about the bit of the beating, he had to make sure Gately didn't try and get Fackelmann
out the window while he was down unlocking the door. That he hoped Gately wouldn't hold it against him 'cause he wished him
no particular ill and wanted no beef, later. This was all said very quietly and intensively while the two fags in wigs that had tried
to break bottles were sitting on a box filling the Graphix's huge party-bowl with grass from the Glad bag, which contained grass.
DesMontes sat in a director's chair. Everybody else was drinking out of their square bottle, standing around the sunny room in the
awkward postures of way more people than seats. Their arms were pale and hairless. The two Oriental toughs were tying each
other off. The draft through the fist-hole in the window made Gately shiver. The other fag was making like comments about
Gately's physique. Gately asked C quietly if he and Fackelmann couldn't get cleaned up real quick and they could all go see
Sorkin together and Whitey and Gene could reason together and work out an accord. Fackelmann found his voice and asked
loudly if anybody wanted to hike on over here to Mt. Dilaudid and get fucking fucked up. Gately winced. Bobby C smiled at
Fackelmann and said it looked like Fax had had about enough. But at the same time the psoriatic assistant came to Fackelmann
and checked his pupils with a penlight and then shot him up with a pre-filled, using an artery in his neck. The back of
Fackelmann's head hit the wall several times, his face flushing violently in the standard clinical reaction to Narcan.386376 The
pharmacist then came C and Gately's way. The portable CD player started in with poor old Linda McCartney as C held Gately and
the asst. pharmacist tied him off with an M.D.'s rubber strap. Gately stood there slightly hunched. Fackelmann was making sounds
like a long-submerged man coming up for air. C told Gately to fasten his seatbelt. Urine had turned part of the apt.'s luxuryhardwood floor's finish soft and white, like soap-scum. The CD playing was one C'd played all the fucking time in the car when
Gately had been with him in a car: somebody had taken an old disk of McCartney and the Wings — as in the historical Beatles's
McCartney — taken and run it through a Kurtzweil remixer and removed every track on the songs except the tracks of poor old
Mrs. Linda McCartney singing backup and playing tambourine. When the fags called the grass 'Bob' it was confusing because
they also called C 'Bob.' Poor old Mrs. Linda McCartney just fucking could not sing, and having her shaky off-key little voice
flushed from the cover of the whole slick multitrack corporate sound and pumped up to solo was to Gately unspeakably
depressing — her voice sounding so lost, trying to hide and bury itself inside the pro backups' voices; Gately imagined Mrs. Linda
McCartney — in his Staff room's wall's picture a kind of craggy-faced blonde — imagined her standing there lost in the sea of her
husband's pro noise, feeling low esteem and whispering off-key, not knowing quite when to shake her tambourine: C's depressing
CD was past cruel, it was somehow sadistic-seeming, like drilling a peephole in the wall of a handicapped bathroom. Two of the
transvestals were doing the Swim to the awful tape in the swept center of the floor; the other had one of Fackelmann's arms while
the bland guy in the Wembley tie gripped Fack-elmann's other arm and was slapping Fackelmann lightly as the Dilaudid fought
the Narcan. They'd seated Fackelmann in his corner in Gately's special Demerol-chair. Gately's balls throbbed with his pulse. The 
pharmacist's assistant's face was right up in Gately's. His cheeks and chin were a mess of silvery scaly flakes, and an oily sweat on
his forehead caught the window's sunlight as he gave Gately a tight smile.
'I'm pretty much straight already, C-man, after that nut-shot,' Gately said, 'if you don't want to waste the Narcan.’
'Oh this isn't no Narcan,' C said softly, holding Gately's arm.
'Hadly,' said the assistant, uncapping the syringe.
C said 'Hold on to your hat.' He poked the assistant's shoulder. 'Tell him.’
'It's pharm-grade Sunshine,'387377 the assistant said, tapping for a good vein.
'Hold on to your heart,' C said, watching the needle go in. The pharmacist slid it in expertly, horizontal and flush to the skin.
Gately had never done Sunshine. Next to ungettable outside a Canadian hospital. He watched his own blood ruddle the serum as
the pharmacist extended his thumb to ease the plunger back. The pharmacist's assistant could really boot. C's tongue was in the
corner of his mouth as he watched. The corporate guy had Fackelmann's arms held tight and a transvestal who'd gotten in behind
the chair held his head by the chin and hair as the gray lady knelt before him with her threaded needle. Gately couldn't keep
himself from watching the stuff go in him. There was no pain. He wondered for a second if it was a hot shot: it seemed like a
whole lot of trouble to go to just to get him off. The pharmacist's thumbnail was ingrown. There were a couple eczema-flakes on
Gately's arm where the guy was inclined over it. You get to like the sight of your own blood after a while. The pharmacist had him
half booted when Fackelmann started screaming. The scream's pitch got higher as it drew out. When Gately could look away from
the stuff going in, he saw the librarian-type lady was sewing Fackelmann's eyelids open to the skin above his eyebrows. As in they
were sewing poor old Count Faxula's eyes open. A kid on the playground had used to turn his lids inside out at girls like they were
doing now to the poor old Faxter. Gately gave a reflexive jerk toward him, and C hugged him tight with one arm.
'Easy,' C said very softly.
The taste of the hydrochloride in the Sunshine was the same, delicious, the taste of the smell of every Dr.'s office everywhere.
He'd never done Talwin-PX. Impossible to get scrips for, the PX, a Canadian blend; U.S. Talwin's388378 got .5 mg. of naloxone
mixed in, to cut the buzz, is why Gately only did NX on top of Barn-Bams. He understood they'd given Fackelmann the anti-narc
so he'd feel the needle as they sewed his eyes open. Cruel is spelled with a u, he remembered. The two Orientals left the room at
C's direction. Linda McC. sounded borderline-psychotic. The little gray lady worked fast. The eye that was already sewed open
bulged obscenely. Everybody in the room except C and the corporate guy and grim lady started shooting dope. Two of the fags
had their eyes shut and their faces at the ceiling as if they couldn't take watching what they were doing to their arm. The
pharmacist was tying off the passed-out Pamela Hoffman-Jeep, which seemed like insult + injury. There was every different kind
of style and skill-level of injection and boot going on. Fackelmann's face was still a scream-face. The corporate-tool type was
dropping fluid from a pipette into Fackelmann's sewed-open eye while the lady rethreaded the needle. It was just seeming to
Gately he'd seen the fluid-in-eye thing in a cartridge or movie the M.P.'d liked when he was a Bim playing ball on the chintz in the
sea when the Sunshine crossed the barrier and came on.
You could see why the U.S. made them cut the buzz. The air in the room got overclear, a glycerine shine, colors brightening
terribly. If colors themselves could catch fire. The word on the C-II Talwin-PX was it was intense but short-acting, and pricey. No
word on its interaction with massive residual amounts of I.V.-Dilaudid. Gately tried to figure while he still could. If they were
going to eliminate his map with an O.D. they'd have used something cheap. And if the librarian was going to sew his eyes open.
Gately was trying to think. Too they wouldn't have got him. Him. Got him off.
The very air of the room bulged. It ballooned. Fackelmann's screams about lies rose and fell, hard to hear against the arterial
roar of the Sun. McC. was trying to muffle a cough. Gately couldn't feel his legs. He could feel C's arm around him taking more
and more of his weight. C's arms's muscles rising and hardening: he could feel this. His legs were, like: opting out. Attack of
floors and sidewalks. Kite used to sing a ditty called '32 Uses For Sterno Me Lad.' C was starting to let him down easy. Strong
squat hard kid. Most heroin-men you can knock down with a Boo. C: there was a gentleness about C, for a kid with the eyes of a
lizard. He was letting him down real easy. C was going to protect Bimmy Don from the bad floor's assault. The supported swoon
spun Gately around, C moving around him like a dancer to slow the fall. Gately got a rotary view of the whole room in almost
untakable focus. Pointgravè was vomiting chunkily. Two of the fags were sliding down the wall they had their backs to. Their red
coats were aflame. The passing window exploded with light. Or else it was DesMontes that was vomiting and Pointgravè was
taking the TP's viewer off the wall and stretching its fibroid wire over toward Fackelmann against the wall. One of Fax's eyes was
as open as his mouth, disclosing way more eye than you ever want to see on somebody. He was no longer struggling. He stared
piratically straight ahead. The librarian was starting on his other eye. The bland man had a rose in his Japel and he'd put on glasses
with metaJ lenses and was blind-high and missing Fax's eye with the dropper half the time, saying something to Pointgravè. A
transvestal had P.H.-J.'s torn hem hiked up and a spiderish hand on her flesh-colored thigh. P.H.-J.'s face was gray and blue. The
floor came up slowly. Bobby C's squat face looked almost pretty, tragic, half lit by the window, tucked up under Gately's spinning
shoulder. Gately felt less high than disembodied. It was obscenely pleasant. His head left his shoulders. Gene and Linda were both
screaming. The cartridge with the held-open eyes and dropper had been the one about ultra-violence and sadism. A favorite of
Kite. Gately thinks sadism is pronounced 'saddism.' The last rotating sight was the chinks coming back through the door, holding
big shiny squares of the room. As the floor wafted up and C's grip finally gave, the last thing Gately saw was an Oriental bearing
down with the held square and he looked into the square and saw clearly a reflection of his own big square pale head with its eyes
closing as the floor finally pounced. And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it
was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.
 1 1. Methamphetamine hydrochloride, a.k.a. crystal meth. 2 Orin's never once darkened the door of any sort of therapy-professional, by the way, so his takes on his dreams are always generally pretty
surface-level.
3 E.T.A. is laid out as a cardioid, with the four main inward-facing bldgs. convexly rounded at the back and sides to yield a cardioid's curve, with the
tennis courts and pavilions at the center and the staff and students' parking lots in back of Comm.-Ad. forming the little bashed-in dent that from
the air gives the whole facility the Valentine-heart aspect that still wouldn't have been truly cardioid if the buildings themselves didn't have their
convex bulges all derived from arcs of the same r, a staggering feat given the uneven ground and wildly different electrical-and-plumbing-conduit 

wallspace required by dormitories, administrative offices, and polyresinous Lung, pull-offable probably by on the whole East Coast one guy, E.T.A.'s
original architect, Avril's old and very dear friend, the topology world's closed-curve-mapping-Übermensch A.Y. ('Vector-Field') Rickey of Brandeis
U., now deceased, who used to wow Hal and Mario in Weston by taking off his vest without removing his suit jacket, which M. Pemulis years later
exposed as a cheap parlor-trick-exploitation of certain basic features of continuous functions, which revelation Hal mourned in a Santa's-not-real
type of secret way, and which Mario simply ignored, preferring to see the vest thing as plain magic.
4 Those younger staffers who double as academic and athletic instructors are, by convention at North American tennis academies, known as
'prorectors.’ 5 Known usually as 'drines — i.e. lightweight speed: Cylert, Tenuate,3
 Fastin, Preludin, even sometimes Ritalin. It's worth an N.B. that, unlike Jim
Troeltsch or the Preludin-happy Bridget Boone, Michael Pemulis (out of maybe some queer sort of blue-collar street-type honor) rarely ingests
any 'drines before a match, reserving them for recreation — some people are wired to find heart-pounding eye-wobbling 'drinestimulation recreational.
a. Tenuate's the trade name of diethylpropion hydrochloride, Marion Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, technically a prescription antiobesity agent,
favored by some athletes for its mildly euphoric and resources-rallying properties w/o the tooth-grinding and hideous post-blood-spike crash that
the hairier-chested 'drines like Fastin and Cylert inflict, though with a discomfitting tendency to cause post-spike ocular nystagmus. Nystagmus or
no nystagmus, Tenuate's a particular favorite of Michael Pemulis, who hoards for personal ingestion every 75-mg. white Tenuate capsule he can lay
hands on, and does not sell or trade them, except sometimes to roommate Jim Troeltsch, who nags Pemulis for them and also goes into Pemulis's
special entrepôt-yachting-cap and promotes still more of them on the sly, a couple at a time, feeling that they help his sports-color-commentary
loquacity, which secret promotions Pemulis knows about all too well, and is biding his time to retaliate, never you fear.
6 Lightweight tranqs: Valium-III and Valrelease, good old dependable Xanax, Dai-mane, Buspar, Serax, even Halcion (legally available in Canada,
unbelievably, still); with those kids inclined toward a heavier slide — reds, Meprospan, 'Happy Patch' transder-mals, Miltown, Stelazine, the odd
injury-'scrip Darvon) never lasting for more than a couple seasons for the obvious reason that serious tranqs can make even breathing seem like
too much trouble to go to, the cause of a meaty percentage of tranq-related deaths being attributed off the record by Emergency Room personnel
to 'P.S.' or 'Pulmonary Sloth.’
7 Top jr. players are for the most part pretty cautious with alcohol, mostly because the physical consequences of heavy intake — like nausea and
dehydration and poor hand-eye interface — make high-level performance almost impossible. Very few other standard substances have prohibitive
short-term hangovers, actually, though an evening of even synthetic cocaine will make the next day's Dawn Drills very unpleasant indeed, which is
why so few of E.T.A.'s hard core do cocaine, though there's also the issue of expense: though many E.T.A.s are the children of upscale parents, the
children themselves are rarely flush with $ from home, since the gratification of pretty much every physical need is either taken care of or
prohibited by E.T.A. itself. It's maybe worth noting that the same people hardwired to enjoy recreational 'drines also tend to gravitate toward
cocaine and methedrine and other engine-revvers, while another broad class of more naturally higher-strung types tend more toward the edgebevelling substances: tranqs, cannabis, barbiturates, and — yes — alcohol. 8 I.e.: psylocibin; Happy Patchesa
; MDMA/Xstasy (bad news, though, X); various low-tech manipulations of the benzene-ring in methoxy-class
psychedelics, usually home-makable; synthetic dickies like MMDA, DMA, DMMM, 2CB, para-DOT I-VI, etc. — though note this class doesn't and
shouldn't include CNS-rattlers like STP, DOM, the long-infamous West-U.S.-Coast 'Grievous Bodily Harm' (gamma hydroxybutyric acid), LSD-25 or -
32, or DMZ/M.P. Enthusiasm for this stuff seems independent of neurologic type.
a. Homemade transdermals, usually MDMA or Muscimole, with DDMS or the over-counter-available DMSO as the transdermal carrier. 9 A.k.a. LSD-25, often with a slight 'drine kicker added, called 'Black Star' because in metro Boston the available acid usually comes on chip-sized
squares of thin cardboard with a black stencilled star on them, all from a certain shadowy node of supply down in New Bedford. All acid and
Grievous Bodily Harm, like cocaine and heroin, come into Boston mostly from New Bedford MA, which in turn gets most of its supply from
Bridgeport CT, which is the true lower intestine of North America, Bridgeport, be advised, if you've never been through there. 10 Like most sports academies, E.T.A. maintains the gentle fiction that 100% of its students are enrolled at their own ambitious volition and not that
of, say for instance, their parents, some of whom (tennis-parents, like the stage-mothers of Hollywood legend) are bad news indeed. 11 An involved Arab women's game involving little shells and a quilted gameboard — rather like mah jongg without rules, by the diplomatic and
medical husbands' estimate. 12 Meperedine hydrochloride and pentazocine hydrochloride, Schedule C-II and C-IVa narcotic analgesics, respectively, both from the good folks
over at Sanofi Winthrop Pharm-Labs, Inc.
a. Following the Continental Controlled Substance Act of Y.T.M.P., O.N.A.N.D.E.A.'s hierarchy of analgesics/antipyretics/anxiolytics establishes drugclasses of Category-II through Category-VI, with C-II's (e.g. Dilaudid, Demerol) being judged the heaviest w/r/t dependence and possible abuse,
down to C-VTs that are about as potent as a kiss on the forehead from Mom. 13 Though masked in the evidentiary photo and never once given up or named by Gately to anyone, this can be presumed to have been one Trent
('Quo Vadis') Kite, Gately's old and once-gifted friend from his Beverly MA childhood.
14 This A.D.A.'s little personal trademark was that he always wore an anachronistic but quality Stetson-brand businessman's hat with a decorative
feather in the band, and frequently touched or played with the hat in tense situations.
15 The Bureau of Alcohol/Tobacco/Firearms, at that time under the temporary aegis of the United States Office of Unspecified Services. 16 Extremely unpleasant Québecois-insurgents-and-cartridge-related subsequent developments make it clear that this was (again) Trent ('Quo
Vadis') Kite.
17 The codeineless kind, though — almost the first physical datum Gately took in in the nasty flashbulb-flash shock of the occupied bedroom's light
coming on, to give you an idea of an oral-narcotics man's depth of psychic investment. 18 On top of the seascape safe's more negotiable contents, themselves on top of an unplugged and head-parked and absolutely top-hole genuine
InterLace state-of-the-art TP/viewer ensemble in a multishelved hardwood rollable like entertainment-system-console thing, with a cartridge-dock
and double-head drive in a compartment underneath with doors with classy little brass maple-leaf knob things and several shelves crammed tight
with upscale arty-looking film cartridges, which latter Don Gately's colleague just about drooled all over the parquet flooring at the potential
discriminating-type-fence-value of, potentially, if they were rare or celluloid-transferred or not available on the InterLace Dissemination Grid. 19 'Une Personne de I'Importance Terrible,' presumably. 20 Fluorescence has been banned in Quebec, as have computerized telephone solicitations, the little ad-cards that fall out of magazines and have to
be looked at to be picked up and thrown in the trash, and the mention of any religious holiday whatsoever to sell any sort of product or service, is
just one reason why his volunteering to come live down here was selfless. 21 Q.v. Note 211 sub. 22 Trade name of terfenadine, Marion Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, the tactical nuclear weapon of nondrowsy antihistamines and mucoidal
desiccators.
23 Office of Naval Research, U.S.D.D.
24 JAMES O. INCANDENZA: A FILMOGRAPHY3
The following listing is as complete as we are able to make it. Because the twelve years of Incandenza's directorial activity also coincided with
large shifts in film venue — from public art cinemas, to VCR-capable magnetic recordings, to InterLace TelEntertainment laser dissemination and
reviewable storage disk laser cartridges — and because Incandenza's output itself comprises industrial, documentary, conceptual, advertorial,
technical, parodic, dramatic noncommercial, nondramatic ('anti-confluential') noncommercial, nondramatic commercial, and dramatic commercial
works, this filmmaker's career presents substantive archival challenges. These challenges are also compounded by the facts that, first, for
conceptual reasons, Incandenza eschewed both L. of C. registration and formal dating until the advent of Subsidized Time, secondly, that his 

output increased steadily until during the last years of his life Incandenza often had several works in production at the same time, thirdly, that his
production company was privately owned and underwent at least four different changes of corporate name, and lastly that certain of his highconceptual projects' agendas required that they be titled and subjected to critique but never filmed, making their status as film subject to
controversy.
Accordingly, though the works are here listed in what is considered by archivists to be their
a. From Comstock, Posner, and Duquette, The Laughing Pathologists: Exemplary Works of the Anticonfluential Après Garde: Some Analyses of
the Movement Toward Stasis in North American Conceptual Film (w/ Beth B., Vivienne Dick, James O. Incandenza, Vigdis Simpson, E. and K.
Snow).' ONANite Film and Cartridge Studies Annual, vol. 8, nos. 1-3 (Year of D.P. from the A.H.), pp. 44-117.
probable order of completion, we wish to say that the list's order and completeness are, at this point in time, not definitive.
Each work's title is followed: by either its year of completion, or by 'B.S.,' designating undated completion before Subsidization; by the
production company; by the major players, if credited; by the storage medium's ('film' 's) gauge or gauges; by the length of the work to the
nearest minute; by an indication of whether the work is in black and white or color or both; by an indication of whether the film is silent or in sound
or both; by (if possible) a brief synopsis or critical overview; and by an indication of whether the work is mediated by celluloid film, magnetic video,
Interlace Spontaneous Dissemination, TP-compatible InterLace cartridge, or privately distributed by Incandenza's own company(ies). The
designation UNRELEASED is used for those works which never saw distribution and are now publicly unavailable or lost.
Cage.b Dated only 'Before Subsidization.' Meniscus Films, Ltd. Uncredited cast; 16 mm.; .5 minutes; black and white; sound. Soliloquized parody
of a broadcast-television advertisement for shampoo, utilizing four convex mirrors, two planar mirrors, and one actress. UNRELEASED
Kinds of Light. B.S. Meniscus Films, Ltd. No cast; 16 mm.; 3 minutes; color; silent. 4,444 individual frames, each of which photo depicts lights of
different source, wavelength, and candle power, each reflected off the same unpolished tin plate and rendered disorienting at normal projection
speeds by the hyperretinal speed at which they pass. CELLULOID, LIMITED METROPOLITAN BOSTON RELEASE, REQUIRES PROJECTION AT .25
NORMAL SPROCKET DRIVE
Dark Logics. B.S. Meniscus Films, Ltd. Players uncredited; 35 mm.; 21 minutes; color; silent w/ deafening Wagner/Sousa soundtrack. Griffith
tribute, limura parody. Child-sized but severely palsied hand turns pages of incunabular manuscripts in mathematics, alchemy, religion, and bogus
political autobiography, each page comprising some articulation or defense of intolerance and hatred. Film's dedication to D. W. Griffith and Taka
limura. UNRELEASED
Tennis, Everyone? B.S. Heliotrope Films, Ltd./U.S.T.A. Films. Documentary cast w/ narrator Judith Fukuoka-Hearn; 35 mm.; 26 minutes; color;
sound. Public relations/advertorial production for United States Tennis Association in conjunction with Wilson Sporting Goods, Inc. MAGNETIC
VIDEO
'There Are No Losers Here.' B.S. Heliotrope Films, Ltd./ U.S.T.A. Films. Documentary cast w/ narrator P. A. Heaven; 35 mm.; color; sound.
Documentary on B.S. 1997 U.S.T.A. National Junior Tennis Championships, Kalamazoo MI and Miami FL, in conjunction with United States Tennis
Association and Wilson Sporting Goods. MAGNETIC VIDEO
Flux in a Box. B.S. Heliotrope Films, Ltd./Wilson Inc. Documentary cast w/ narrator Judith Fukuoka-Hearn; 35 mm.; 52 minutes; black and
white/color; sound. Documentary history of box, platform, lawn, and court tennis from the 17th-century Court of the Dauphin to the present.
MAGNETIC VIDEO
Infinite Jest (I). B.S. Meniscus Films, Ltd. Judith Fukuoka-Hearn; 16/35 mm.; 90(?) minutes; black and white; silent. Incandenza's unfinished and
unseen first attempt at commercial entertainment. UNRELEASED
Annular Fusion Is Our Friend. B.S. Heliotrope Films, Ltd./Sunstrand Power & Light Co. Documentary cast w/ narrator C. N. Reilly; SignInterpreted for the Deaf; 78 mm.; 45 minutes; color; sound. Public relations/advertorial production for New England's Sunstrand Power and Light
utility, a nontechnical explanation of the processes of DT-cycle lithiumized annular fusion and its applications in domestic energy production.
CELLULOID, MAGNETIC VIDEO
Annular Amplified Light: Some Reflections. B.S. Heliotrope Films/Sunstrand Power & Light
b. With the possible exception of Cage III — Free Show, Incandenza's Cage series bears no discernible relation to Sidney Peterson's 1947 classic,
The Cage.
Co. Documentary cast w/ narrator C. N. Reilly; Sign-Interpreted for the Deaf; 78 mm.; 45 minutes; color; sound. Second infomercial for
Sunstrand Co., a nontechnical explanation of the applications of cooled-photon lasers in DT-cycle lithiumized annular fusion. CELLULOID,
MAGNETIC VIDEO
Union of Nurses in Berkeley. B.S. Meniscus Films, Ltd. Documentary cast; 35 mm.; 26 minutes; color; silent. Documentary and closed-caption
interviews with hearing-impaired RNs and LPNs during Bay Area health care reform riots of 1996. MAGNETIC VIDEO, PRIVATELY RELEASED BY
MENISCUS FILMS, LTD.
Union of Theoretical Grammarians in Cambridge. B.S. Meniscus Films, Ltd. Documentary cast; 35 mm.; 26 minutes; color; silent w/ heavy use of
computerized distortion in facial close-ups. Documentary and closed-caption interviews with participants in the public Steven Pinker-Avril M.
Incandenza debate on the political implications of prescriptive grammar during the infamous Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts convention
credited with helping incite the M.I.T. language riots of B.S. 1997. UNRELEASED DUE TO LITIGATION
Widower. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Cosgrove Watt, Ross Reat; 35 mm.; 34 minutes; black and white; sound. Shot on location in
Tucson AZ, parody of broadcast television domestic comedies, a cocaine-addicted father (Watt) leads his son (Reat) around their desert property
immolating poisonous spiders. CELLULOID; INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE RERELEASE #357-75-00 (Y.P.W.)
Cage II. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Cosgrove Watt, Disney Leith; 35 mm.; 120 minutes; black and white; sound. Sadistic penal
authorities place a blind convict (Watt) and a deaf-mute convict (Leith) together in 'solitary confinement,' and the two men attempt to devise ways
of communicating with each other. LIMITED CELLULOID RUN; RERELEASED ON MAGNETIC VIDEO
Death in Scarsdale. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Cosgrove Watt, Marlon R. Bain; 78 mm.; 39 minutes; color; silent w/ closed-caption
subtitles. Mann/Allen parody, a world-famous dermatological endocrinologist (Watt) becomes platonically obsessed with a boy (Bain) he is treating
for excessive perspiration, and begins himself to suffer from excessive perspiration. UNRELEASED
Fun with Teeth. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Herbert G. Birch, Billy Tolan, Pam Heath; 35 mm.; 73 minutes; black and white; silent w/
non-human screams and howls. Kosinski/Updike/Peckinpah parody, a dentist (Birch) performs sixteen unanesthetized root-canal procedures on an
academic (Tolan) he suspects of involvement with his wife (Heath). MAGNETIC VIDEO, PRIVATELY RELEASED BY LATRODECTUS MACTANS PROD.
Infinite Jest (II). B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Pam Heath; 35/78 mm.; 90(?) minutes; black and white; silent. Unfinished, unseen
attempt at remake of Infinite Jest (I). UNRELEASED
Immanent Domain. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Cosgrove Watt, Judith Fukuoka-Hearn, Pam Heath, Pamela-Sue Voorheis, Herbert G.
Birch; 35 mm.; 88 minutes; black and white w/ microphotography; sound. Three memory-neurons (Fukuoka-Hearn, Heath, Voorheis (w/
polyurethane costumes)) in the Inferior frontal gyrus of a man's (Watt's) brain fight heroically to prevent their displacement by new memoryneurons as the man undergoes intensive psychoanalysis. CELLULOID; INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE RERELEASE #340-03-70 (Y.P.W.)
Kinds of Pain. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Anonymous cast; 35/78 mm.; 6 minutes; color; silent. 2,222 still-frame close-ups of middleaged white males suffering from almost every conceivable type of pain, from an ingrown toenail to cranio-facial neuralgia to inoperable colo-rectal
neoplastis. CELLULOID, LIMITED METRO BOSTON RELEASE, REQUIRES PROJECTION AT .25 NORMAL SPROCKET-DRIVE
Various Small Flames. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Cosgrove Watt, Pam Heath, Ken N. Johnson; 16 mm.; 25 minutes w/ recursive loop
for automatic replay; color; silent w/ sounds of human coitus appropriated from and credited to Caballero Control Corp. adult videos. Parody of
neoconceptual structuralist films of Godbout and Vodriard, n-frame images of myriad varieties of small household flames, from lighters and birthday
candles to stovetop gas rings and grass clippings ignited by sunlight through a magnifying glass, alternated with anti-narrative sequences of a man 

(Watt) sitting in a dark bedroom drinking bourbon while his wife (Heath) and an Amway representative (Johnson) have acrobatic coitus in the
background's lit hallway. UNRELEASED DUE TO LITIGATION BY I96os US CONCEPTUAL DIRECTOR OF VARIOUS SMALL FIRES ED RUSCHA —
INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE RE-RELEASE #330-54-94 (Y.T.-S.D.B.)
Cage HI — Free Show. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions/Infernatron Animation Concepts, Canada. Cosgrove Watt, P. A. Heaven, Everard
Maynell, Pam Heath; partial animation; 35 mm.; 65 minutes; black and white; sound. The figure of Death (Heath) presides over the front entrance
of a carnival sideshow whose spectators watch performers undergo unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling that the spectators' eyes
become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow
tent the figure of Life (Heaven) uses a megaphone to invite fairgoers to an exhibition in which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable
degradations, they can witness ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs. INTERLACE TELENT FEATURE CARTRIDGE #357-65-65
'The Medusa v. the Odalisque* B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Uncredited cast; zone-plating laser holography by James O. Incandenza
and Urquhart Ogilvie, Jr.; holographic fight-choreography by Kenjiru Hirota courtesy of Sony Entertainment-Asia; 78 mm.; 29 minutes; black and
white; silent w/ audience-noises appropriated from network broadcast television. Mobile holograms of two visually lethal mythologic females duel
with reflective surfaces onstage while a live crowd of spectators turns to stone. LIMITED CELLULOID RUN; PRIVATELY RERELEASED ON MAGNETIC
VIDEO BY LATRODECTUS MACTANS PRODUCTIONS
The Machine in the Ghost: Annular Holography for Fun and Prophet. B.S. Heliotrope Films, Ltd./National Film Board of Canada. Narrator P. A.
Heaven; 78 mm.; 35 minutes; color; sound. Nontechnical introduction to theories of annular enhancement and zone-plating and their applications
in high-resolution laser holography. UNRELEASED DUE TO US/CANADIAN DIPLOMATIC TENSIONS
Homo Duplex. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Narrator P. A. Heaven; Super-8 mm.; 70 minutes; black and white; sound. Parody of
Woititz and Shulgin's 'poststructural antidocu-mentaries,' interviews with fourteen Americans who are named John Wayne but are not the legendary
20th-century film actor John Wayne. MAGNETIC VIDEO (LIMITED RELEASE)
Zero-Gravity Tea Ceremony. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Ken N. Johnson, Judith Fukuoka-Hearn, Otto Brandt, E. J. Kenkle; 35 mm.;
82 minutes; black and white/color; silent. The intricate Ocha-Kai is conducted 2.5 m. off the ground in the Johnson Space Center's zero-gravitysimulation chamber. CELLULOID; INTERLACE TELENT RERELEASE #357-40-01 (Y.P.W.)
Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions/ Infernatron Animation Concepts, Canada. Animated w/
uncredited voices; 35 mm.; 59 minutes; color; sound. God and Satan play poker with Tarot cards for the soul of an alcoholic sandwich-bag
salesman obsessed with Bernini's 'The Ecstasy of St. Teresa.' PRIVATELY RELEASED ON CELLULOID AND MAGNETIC VIDEO BY LATRODECTUS
MACTANS PRODUCTIONS
The Joke. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Audience as reflexive cast; 35 mm. X 2 cameras; variable length; black and white; silent.
Parody of Hollis Frampton's 'audience-specific events,' two Ikegami EC-35 video cameras in theater record the 'film' 's audience and project
the resultant raster onto screen — the theater audience watching itself watch itself get the obvious 'joke' and become increasingly self-conscious
and uncomfortable and hostile supposedly comprises the film's involuted 'antinarrative' flow. Incandenza's first truly controversial project, Film &
Kartridge Kultcher's Sperber credited it with 'unwittingly sounding the death-knell of post-poststructural film in terms of sheer annoyance.'
NONRECORDED MAGNETIC VIDEO SCREENABLE IN THEATER VENUE ONLY, NOW UNRELEASED
Various Lachrymose U.S. Corporate Middle-Management Figures. Unfinished. UNRELEASED
Every Inch of Disney Leith. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions/Medical Imagery of Alberta, Ltd. Disney Leith; computer-enlarged 35 mm./x 2
m.; 253 minutes; color; silent. Miniaturized, endoscopic, and microinvasive cameras traverse entire exterior and interior of one of Incandenza's
technical crew as he sits on a folded scrape in the Boston Common listening to a public forum on uniform North American metricization. PRIVATE
RELEASE ON MAGNETIC VIDEO BY LATRODECTUS MACTANS PRODUCTIONS; INTERLACE TELENT RERELEASE #357-56-34 (Y.P.W.)
Infinite Jest (HI). B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Uncredited cast; 16/35 mm.; color; sound. Unfinished, unseen remake of Infinite Jest
(I), (II). UNRELEASED
Found Drama I.
Found Drama II.
Found Drama HI. . . . conceptual, conceptually unfilmable. UNRELEASED
The Man Who Began to Suspect He Was Made of Glass. Year of the Whopper. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Cosgrove Watt, Gerhardt
Schtitt; 35 mm.; 21 minutes; black and white; sound. A man undergoing intensive psychotherapy discovers that he is brittle, hollow, and
transparent to others, and becomes either transcendentally enlightened or schizophrenic. INTERLACE TELENT FEATURE CARTRIDGE #357-59-00
Found Drama V.
Found Drama VI. . . . conceptual, conceptually unfilmable. UNRELEASED
The American Century as Seen Through a Brick. Year of the Whopper. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Documentary cast w/ narration by P. A.
Heaven; 35 mm.; 52 minutes; color w/ red filter and oscillophotography; silent w/ narration. As U.S. Boston's historical Back Bay streets are
stripped of brick and repaved with polymerized cement, the resultant career of one stripped brick is followed, from found-art temporary installation
to displacement by E.W.D. catapult to a waste-quarry in southern Quebec to its use in the F.L.Q.-incited anti-O.N.A.N. riots of January/Whopper, all
intercut with ambiguous shots of a human thumb's alterations in the interference pattern of a plucked string. PRIVATELY RELEASED ON MAGNETIC
VIDEO BY LATRODECTUS MACTANS PRODUCTIONS
The ONANtiad. Year of the Whopper. Latrodectus Mactans Productions/Claymation action sequences © Infernatron Animation Concepts, Canada.
Cosgrove Watt, P. A. Heaven, Pam Heath, Ken N. Johnson, Ibn-Said Chawaf, Squyre Frydell, Maria-Dean Chumm, Herbert G. Birch, Everard
Meynell; 35 mm.; 76 minutes; black and white/color; sound/silent. Oblique, obsessive, and not very funny claymation love triangle played out
against live-acted backdrop of the inception of North American Interdependence and Continental Reconfiguration. PRIVATELY RELEASED ON
MAGNETIC VIDEO BY LATRODECTUS MACTANS PRODUCTIONS
The Universe Lashes Out. Year of the Whopper. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Documentary cast w/ narrator Herbert G. Birch; 16 mm.; 28
minutes; color; silent w/ narration. Documentary on the evacuation of Atkinson NH/New Quebec at the inception of Continental Reconfiguration.
MAGNETIC VIDEO (LIMITED RELEASE)
Poultry in Motion. Year of the Whopper. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Documentary cast w/ narrator P. A. Heaven; 16 mm.; 56 minutes;
color; silent w/ narration. Documentary on renegade North Syracuse NNY turkey farmers' bid to prevent toxification of Thanksgiving crop by
commandeering long, shiny O.N.A.N. trucks to transplant over 200,000 pertussive fowl south to Ithaca. MAGNETIC VIDEO (LIMITED RELEASE)
Found Drama IX.
Found Drama X.
Found Drama XL . .. conceptual, conceptually unfilmable. UNRELEASED
Möbiu$ Strips. Year of the Whopper. Lactrodectus Mactans Productions. 'Hugh G. Rection,' Pam Heath, 'Bunny Day,' 'Taffy Appel'; 35 mm.; 109
minutes; black and white; sound. Pornography-parody, possible parodic homage to Fosse's All That Jazz, in which a theoretical physicist ('Rection'),
who can only achieve creative mathematical insight during coitus, conceives of Death as a lethally beautiful woman (Heath). INTERLACE TELENT
FEATURE CARTRIDGE #357-65-32 (Y.W.)
Wave Eye-Eye to the Bureaucrat. Year of the Whopper. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Everard Maynell, Phillip T. Smothergill, Paul Anthony
Heaven, Pamela-Sue Voorheis; 16 mm.; 19 minutes; black and white; sound. Possible parody/homage to B.S. public-service-announcement cycle of
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints,c
 a harried commuter is mistaken for Christ by a child he knocks over.
Blood Sister: One Tough Nun. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Telma Hurley, Pam Heath, Maria-Dean
Chumm, Diane Saltoone, Soma Richardson-Levy, Cosgrove Watt; 35 mm.; 90 minutes; color; sound. Parody of revenge/recidivism action genre, a
formerly delinquent nun's (Hurley's) failure to reform a juvenile delinquent (Chumm) leads to a rampage of recidivist revenge. INTERLACE TELENT 

PULSE-DISSEMINATION 21 JULY Y.T.M.P., CARTRIDGE #357-87-04
Infinite Jest (IV). Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Pam Heath (?), 'Madame Psychosis'(?); 78 mm.; 90
minutes(?); color; sound. Unfinished, unseen attempt at completion of Infinite Jest (HI). UNRELEASED
Let There Be Lite. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Documentary cast w/ narrator Ken N. Johnson;
16mm.; 50 minutes(?); black and white; silent w/ narration. Unfinished documentary on genesis of reduced-calorie bourbon industry. UNRELEASED
Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED
No Troy. Year of the Whopper. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. No cast; liquid-surface holography by Urquhart Ogilvie, Jr.; 35 mm.; 7 minutes;
enhanced color; silent. Scale-model holographic recreation of Troy NY's bombardment by miscalibrated Waste Displacement Vehicles, and its
subsequent elimination by O.N.A.N. cartographers. MAGNETIC VIDEO (PRIVATE RELEASE LIMITED TO NEW BRUNSWICK, ALBERTA, QUEBEC)
Note: Archivists in Canada and the U.S. West Coast do not list No Troy but do list titles The Violet City and The Violet Ex-City, respectively, leading
scholars to conclude that the same film was released under several different appellations.
Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED
Valuable Coupon Has Been Removed. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Enterc. See Romney and Sperber, 'Has James O. Incandenza Ever Even Once Produced One Genuinely Original or Unappropriated or Nonderivative
Thing?' Post-Millennium Film Cartridge Journal, nos. 7-9 (Fall/Winter, Y.P.W.), pp. 4-26.
tainment Unlimited. Cosgrove Watt, Phillip T. Smothergill, Diane Saltoone; 16 mm.; 52 minutes; color; silent. Possible Scandinavian-psychodrama
parody, a boy helps his alcoholic-delusional father and disassociated mother dismantle their bed to search for rodents, and later he intuits the
future feasibility of D.T.-cycle lithiumized annular fusion. CELLULOID (UNRE-LEASED)
Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Documentary or uncredited cast w/
narrator P. A. Heaven; 16 mm.; 45 minutes; black and white; sound. Children and adolescents play a nearly incomprehensible nuclear strategy
game with tennis equipment against the real or holographic(?) backdrop of sabotaged ATHSCME 1900 atmospheric displacement towers exploding
and toppling during the New New England Chemical Emergency of Y.W. CELLULOID (UNRELEASED)
Stand Behind the Men Behind the Wire. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Documentary cast w/ narrator
Soma Richardson-Levy; Super-8 mm.; 52 minutes; black and white/color; sound. Shot on location north of Lowell MA, documentary on Essex
County Sheriff's Dept. and Massachusetts Department of Social Services' expedition to track, verify, capture, or propitiate the outsized feral infant
alleged to have crushed, gummed, or picked up and dropped over a dozen residents of Lowell in January, Y.T.M.P. INTERLACE TELENT
CARTRIDGE #357-12-56
As of Yore. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Cosgrove Watt, Marlon Bain; 16/78 mm.; 181 minutes; black
and white/color; sound. A middle-aged tennis instructor, preparing to instruct his son in tennis, becomes intoxicated in the family's garage and
subjects his son to a rambling monologue while the son weeps and perspires. INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE # 357-16-09
The Clever Little Bastard. Unfinished, unseen. UNRELEASED
The Cold Majesty of the Numb. Unfinished, unseen. UNRELEASED
Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms That Utilize Every Centimeter of Available Space With Mind-Boggling Efficiency. Unfinished due to
hospitalization. UNRELEASED
Low-Temperature Civics. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Cosgrove Watt, Herbert G. Birch, Ken N.
Johnson, Soma Richardson-Levy, Everard Maynell, 'Madame Psychosis,' Phillip T. Smothergill, Paul Anthony Heaven; 35 mm.; 80 minutes; black and
white; sound. Wyler parody in which four sons (Birch, Johnson, Maynell, Smothergill) intrigue for control of a sandwich-bag conglomerate after
their CEO father (Watt) has an ecstatic encounter with Death ('Psychosis') and becomes irreversibly catatonic. NATIONAL DISSEMINATION IN
INTERLACE TELENT'S 'CAVALCADE OF EVIL' SERIES —JANUARY/YEAR OF TRIAL-SIZE DOVE BAR —AND INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE #357-
89-05
(At Least) Three Cheers for Cause and Effect. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Cosgrove Watt, Pam
Heath, 'Hugh G. Rection'; 78 mm.; 26 minutes; black and white; sound. The headmaster of a newly constructed high-altitude sports academy
(Watt) becomes neurotically obsessed with litigation over the construction's ancillary damage to a V.A. hospital far below, as a way of diverting
himself from his wife's (Heath's) poorly hidden affair with the academically renowned mathematical topologist who is acting as the project's
architect ('Rection'). CELLULOID (UNRELEASED)
(The) Desire to Desire. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Robert Lingley, 'Madame Psychosis,' Maria-Dean
Chumm; 35 mm.; 99 minutes(?); black and white; silent. A pathology resident (Lingley) falls in love with a beautiful cadaver ('Psychosis') and the
paralyzed sister (Chumm) she died rescuing from the attack of an oversized feral infant. Listed by some archivists as unfinished. UNRELEASED
Safe Boating Is No Accident. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad(?). Poor Yorick Entertainment
Unlimited/X-Ray and Infrared Photography by Shuco-Mist Medical Pressure Systems, Enfield MA. Ken N. Johnson, 'Madame Psychosis,' P. A.
Heaven. Kierkegaard/Lynch (?) parody, a claustrophobic water-ski instructor (Johnson), struggling with his romantic conscience after his fiancee's
('Psychosis"s) face is grotesquely mangled by an outboard propeller, becomes trapped in an overcrowded hospital elevator with a defrocked
Trappist monk, two overcombed mis-sionarjes for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, an enigmatic fitness guru, the Massachusetts
State Commissioner for Beach and Water Safety, and seven severely intoxicated opticians with silly hats and exploding cigars. Listed by some
archivists as completed the following year, Y.T.-S.D.B. UNRELEASED
Very Low Impact. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Maria-Dean Chumm, Pam Heath, Soma RichardsonLevy-O'Byrne; 35 mm.; 30 minutes; color; sound. A narcoleptic aerobics instructor (Chumm) struggles to hide her condition from students and
employers. POSTHUMOUS RELEASE Y.W.-Q.M.D.; INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE * 357-97-29
The Night Wears a Sombrero. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad (?). Ken N. Johnson, Phillip T. Smothergill, Dianne Saltoone, 'Madame Psychosis';
78 mm.; 105 minutes; color; silent/sound. Parody/homage to Lang's Rancho Notorious, a nearsighted apprentice cowpoke (Smothergill), swearing
vengeance for a gunslinger's (Johnson's) rape of what he (the cowpoke) mistakenly believes is the motherly brothel-owner (Saltoone) he (the
cowpoke) is secretly in love with, loses the trail of the gunslinger after misreading a road sign and is drawn to a sinister Mexican ranch where
Oedipally aggrieved gunslingers are ritually blinded by a mysterious veiled nun ('Psychosis'). Listed by some archivists as completed the preceding
year, Y.W. INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE #357-56-51
Accomplice! Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Cos-grove Watt, Stokely 'Dark Star' McNair; 16 mm.; 26
minutes; color; sound. An aging pederast mutilates himself out of love for a strangely tattooed street hustler. INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE #
357-10-10 withdrawn from dissemination after Cartridge Scene reviewers called Accomplice! '. .. the stupidest, nastiest, least subtle and worstedited product of a pretentious and wretchedly uneven career.' NOW UNRELEASED
Entitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED
Dial C for Concupiscence. Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Soma Richardson-Levy-O'Byrne, Maria-Dean
Chumm, Ibn-Said Chawaf, Yves Fran-coeur; 35 mm.; 122 minutes; black and white; silent w/ subtitles. Parodic noir-style tribute to Bresson's Les
Anges du Peché, a cellular phone operator (Richardson-Levy-O'Byrne), mistaken by a Québecois terrorist (Francoeur) for another cellular phone
operator (Chumm) the FLQ had mistakenly tried to assassinate, mistakes his mistaken attempts to apologize as attempts to assassinate her
(Richardson-Levy-O'Byrne) and flees to a bizarre Islamic religious community whose members communicate with each other by means of
semaphore flags, where she falls in love with an armless Near Eastern medical attache (Chawaf). RELEASED IN INTERLACE TELENT'S 'HOWLS
FROM THE MARGIN' UNDERGROUND FILM SERIES — MARCH/ Y.T.-S.D.B. — AND INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE #357-75-43
Insubstantial Country. Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Cosgrove Watt; 16 mm.; 30 minutes; black and
white; silent/sound. An unpopular après-garde filmmaker (Watt) either suffers a temporal lobe seizure and becomes mute or else is the victim of 

everyone else's delusion that his (Watt's) temporal lobe seizure has left him mute. PRIVATE CARTRIDGE RELEASE BY POOR YORICK
ENTERTAINMENT UNLIMITED
It Was a Great Marvel That He Was in the Father Without Knowing Him. Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited.
Cosgrove Watt, Phillip T. Smothergill;
16 mm.; 5 minutes; black and white; silent/ sound. A father (Watt), suffering from the delusion that his etymologically precocious son
(Smothergill) is pretending to be mute, poses as a 'professional conversationalist' in order to draw the boy out. RELEASED IN INTERLACE TELENT'S
'HOWLS FROM THE MARGIN' UNDERGROUND FILM SERIES — MARCH/ Y.T.-S.D.B —AND INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE #357-75-50
Cage IV— Web. Unfinished. UNRELEASED Cage V — Infinite Jim. Unfinished. UNRELEASED Death and the Single Girl. Unfinished. UNRELEASED.
The Film Adaptation of Peter Weiss's 'The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton
Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.'Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. James O. Incan-denza, Disney
Leith, Urquhart Ogilvie, Jr., Jane Ann Prickett, Herbert G. Birch, 'Madame Psychosis,' Maria-Dean Chumm, Marlon Bain, Pam Heath, Soma
Richardson-Levy-O'Byrne-Chawaf, Ken N. Johnson, Dianne Saltoone; Super-8 mm.; 88 minutes; black and white; silent/ sound. Fictional 'interactive
documentary' on Boston stage production of Weiss's 20th-century play within play, in which the documentary's chemically impaired director
(Incandenza) repeatedly interrupts the inmates' dumbshow-capering and Marat and Sade's dialogues to discourse incoherently on the implications
of Brando's Method Acting and Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty for North American filmed entertainment, irritating the actor who plays Marat (Leith) to
such an extent that he has a cerebral hemorrhage and collapses onstage well before Marat's scripted death, whereupon the play's nearsighted
director (Ogilvie), mistaking the actor who plays Sade (Johnson) for Incandenza, throws Sade into Marat's medicinal bath and throttles him to
death, whereupon the extra-dramatic figure of Death ('Psychosis') descends deus ex machina to bear Marat (Leith) and Sade (Johnson) away, while
Incandenza becomes ill all over the theater audience's first row. 8 MM. SYNC-PROJECTION CELLULOID. UNRELEASED DUE TO LITIGATION,
HOSPITALIZATION
Too Much Fun. Unfinished. UNRELEASED
The Unfortunate Case of Me. Unfinished. UNRELEASED
Sorry All Over the Place. Unfinished. UNRELEASED
Infinite Jest (Vï). Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. 'Madame Psychosis'; no other definitive data. Thorny
problem for archivists. Incandenza's last film, Incandenza's death occurring during its post-production. Most archival authorities list as unfinished,
unseen. Some list as completion of Infinite Jest (IV), for which Incandenza also used 'Psychosis,' thus list the film under Incandenza's output for
Y.T.M.P. Though no scholarly synopsis or report of viewing exists, two short essays in different issues of Cartridge Quarterly East refer to the film
as 'extraordinary'd
 and 'far and away [James O. Incandenza's] most entertaining and compelling work.'e
 West Coast archivists list the film's gauge
as '16 ... 78 ... n mm.,' basing the gauge on critical allusionsf
 to 'radical experiments in viewers' optical perspective and context' as IJ(Vì)'s
distinctive feature. Though Canadian archivist Tête-Bêche lists the film as completed and privately distributed by P.Y.E.U. through posthumous
provisions in the filmmaker's will, all other comprehensive filmographies have the film either unfinished or UNRELEASED, its Master cartridge either
destroyed or vaulted sui testator.
d. E. Duquette, 'Beholden to Vision: Optics and Desire in Four Après Garde Films,' Cartridge Quarterly East, vol. 4 no. 2, Y.W.-Q.M.D., pp. 35-39.
e. Anonymous, 'Seeing v. Believing,' Cartridge Quarterly East, vol. 4 no. 4, Y.W.-Q.M.D., pp. 93-95.
f. Ibid.
25 More like July-October, actually. 26 Synthetically enhanced enkephalin, an opiate-like pentapeptide or so-called endor-phin manufactured in the human spine, one of the compounds
prominently involved in the infamous 'CadaverGate' scandal that brought down so many funeral directors in the Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken. 27 Metro Boston subdialectical argot — origin unknown — for cannabis, pot, grass, du-Bois, dope, ganja, bhang, herb, hash, m. jane, kif, etc.; with
'Bing Crosby' designating cocaine and organic methoxies ('drines), and — inexplicably — 'Doris' standing for synthetic dickies, psychs, and phenyls. 28 Monoamine-oxidase inhibitors, a venerable class of antidepressants/anxiolytics, of which Parnate — SmithKline Beecham's product-name for
tranylcypromine sulfate — is a member. Zoloft is sertraline hydrochloride, a serotonin-reuptake-inhibitor (SRI) not all that dissimilar to Prozac,
manufactured by Pfizer-Roerig.
29 Electro-Convulsive Therapy. 30 A neutral boric acid eyewash, a kind of turbo-charged Visine, available over-counter from Wyeth Labs, with its own eye-cup of apothecary-blue
plastic that's downright gorgeous when held up to a window's light.
31 Schtitt's term for Mr. A. deLint, which means technically 'soulmate' or 'spouse' but isn't meant at all sexually w/r/t deLint, we can rest assured. 32 Roughly, 'They Can Kill You, But the Legalities of Eating You Are Quite a Bit Dicier.’ 33 I.e., 'Before Subsidization' or the beginning of the subsidized O.N.A.N.ite lunar calendar under President Gentle; see sub. 34 A.k.a. 'E.L.D.,' that still-green shoot off the pure branch of math that deals with systems and phenomena whose chaos is beyond even
Mandelbrotian math's Strange Equations and Random Attractants, a delimiting reaction against the Chaos Theories of fractal-happy meteorologists
and systems analysts, E.L.D., whose post-GÖdelian theorems and nonexistence proofs amount to extremely lucid and elegant admissions of defeat
in certain cases, hands thrown up w/ complete deductive justification. Incandenza, whose frustrated interest in grand-scale failure was unflagging
through four different careers, would have been all over Extra-Linear Dynamics like white on rice, had he survived.
35 I.e., presumably, 'of-Georg-Cantor,' Cantor being a !9OOs-era set-theorist (German also) and more or less founder of transfinite mathematics,
the man who proved some infinities were bigger than other infinities, and whose 1905-ish Diagonal Proof demonstrated that there can be an
infinity of things between any two things no matter how close together the two things are, which D. Proof deeply informed Dr. J. Incandenza's
sense of the transstatistical aesthetics of serious tennis.
36 Low-Bavarian for something like 'wandering alone in blasted disorienting territory beyond all charted limits and orienting markers,' supposedly. 37 Wheelchair. 38 Ghostly light- and monster-shadow phenomenon particular to certain mountains; e.g. q.v. Part I of Goethe's Faust, the Walpurgisnacht six-toed
danceathon on the Harz-Bröcken, in which there's described a classic 'Bröckengespenstphänom.' (Gespenst means specter or wraith.) 39 Marathe's superior in the A.F.R.,a
 the leader of the Wheelchair Assassins' U.S.A. cell, and the former boyhood friend of Rémy Marathe's late
older brothers, both struck and killed by trains.b
a. Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, a.k.a. Wheelchair Assassins, pretty much Quebec's most dreaded and rapacious anti-O.N.A.N. terrorist
cell.
b. See Note 304 sub. 40 In other words, M. Fortier and the A.F.R. (as far as Marathe knew) believed that Marathe was functioning as a kind of 'triple agent' or duplicitous
'double agent' — at Fortier's direction, Marathe had pretended to approach B.S.S. seeking to trade knowledge of the A.F.R.'s anti-O.N.A.N. activities
for protection and medical care for his hideously ill wife (Marathe's) — only (as far as Marathe can know) Marathe and very few B.S.S. operatives
know that Marathe is now only pretending to pretend to betray, that M. Steeply is fully aware that Marathe responds to B.S.S.'s summonses with
what M. Fortier believes is his (Fortier's) full knowledge, that M. Fortier is not (as far as Marathe and Steeply can reasonably posit) aware that
Steeply and B.S.S. are aware that Fortier is aware of Marathe's meetings with Steeply, and that Marathe's own violent death will be the smallest of
his (Marathe's) problems should his Mont-Tremblant countrymen come to suspect the even-numbered total of his final loyalties. 41 Intra-O.N.A.N. sobriquet for 'acting as a double agent'; similarly w/ 'tripling,' and so on. 42 The 'thing of important' seems to be that Marathe's A.F.R. superiors believe he only is pretending to betray them in order to secure advanced
U.S. cardiac-prosthetic technology for his wife; but that in fact he really is betraying them (the superiors, his country) — probably actually for that
medical tech — and is thus only pretending only to pretend.

43 Chronic inflammation of the terminal ileum and adjacent tissues, named in dubious honor of a Dr. Crohn in B.S. 1932. 44 Professional euphemism for involuntary interrogation, either w/ or w/o physical inducements. 45 See Note 304 sub. 46 Over-the-counter topical stuff for the corticatization of skin, tincture of benzoin facilitates the development of the kinds of callus that don't get
blood-blisters underneath. Way more common and universal among serious players than Lemon Pledge. Finding the smell of t. of b. nauseous,
some junior players prefer an applied layer of corn starch or baby powder, which makes the t. of b. easier to wash off later but also leaves weird
little white fingerprints over everything you touch.
47 Le Front de la Liberation de la Quebec, rather a younger and rowdier and less implacably businesslike cell than the A.F.R., and symbolically
adopting certain cultural customs, musics and motifs associated with Hawaii, supposedly an ironic nod to the idea that Quebec is now, too, a kind
of annex or territory of the U.S., a Canadian province only on paper, and separated from its real captor-nation by distances of space and culture
that are unbridgeable.
48 The progressive asymmetrical narrowing of one or more cardiac sinuses; can be either atherosclerotic or neoplastic; rare before continental
Interdependence; now the third-leading cause of death among adults of Quebec and New Brunswick and the seventh among adults of the
Northeastern U.S.A.; associated with chronic low-level exposure to 2,3,7,8 Tetrachlorodibenzo-P-Di- and -Trioxin compounds. 49 Redundancy sic. 50 Said galoots also known, in the old founder's AA circle, Enfield MA's White Flag Group, as 'The Crocodiles.’ 51 Syntax sic, which had helped drive Mrs. Avril Incandenza — her Op-Ed letters and formal complaints apparently ignored at every political level —
to help found the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts, ever since a bramble in the flank of advertisers, corporations, and all fast-and-looseplayers with the integrity of public discourse — see sub. 52 The Gas Chromatography/Mass Spectometry scan uses particle-bombardment and a positive-ion read by a spectrometer. It's the mid-range test
of choice for corporations and athletic bodies, way less expensive than chromosomatic breakdowns of hair samples, but — as long as
environmental controls on the hardware're strictly observed — more comprehensive and reliable than the older E.M.I.T. and AbuScreen/RIA urine
tests.
53 Eschaton is a real-participant and tennis-court-modified version of the EndStat® ROM-run nuclear-conflagration game. 54 Viz. Prescriptive Grammar (Grade 10), Descriptive Grammar (11), Grammar and Meaning (12). 55 Hal, who personally thinks the term that'd apply here would be suborned, not entrapped — unless the caller were himself a police officer —
keeps his own counsel on this point and basically goes along to get along.
56 or PMA, Grievous Bod., nutmeg's myristicin, or Hawaiian baby-woodrose seeds' ergine, or the African iboga's ibogaine, the yagé's harmaline ... or
the fly agaric fungus's well-known muscimole, which fitviavi's derived DMZ resembles chemically sort of the way an F-18 resembles a Piper Cub. . .
.
57 Ingesters' accounts of the temporal-perception consequences of DMZ in the literature are, as far as Pemulis is concerned, vague and inelegant
and more like mystical in the Tibetan-Dead-Book vein than rigorous or referentially clear; one account Pemulis doesn't completely get but can at
least get the neuro-titillating gist of is one monograph's toss-off quote from an Italian lithographer who'd ingested DMZ once and made a lithograph
comparing himself on DMZ to a piece of like Futurist sculpture, plowing at high knottage through time itself, kinetic even in stasis, plowing
temporally ahead, with time coming off him like water in sprays and wakes.
58 Certified (by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) Substance Abuse Counselor. 59 Oxycodone hydrochloride w/ acetaminophen, C-II Class, Du Pont Pharmaceuticals. 60 Replacing the old neo-Georgian J. A. Stratton Student Center, right off Mass. Ave. and gutted with C4 during the so-called M.I.T. Language Riots
of twelve years past.
61 An après-garde digital movement, a.k.a. 'Digital Parallelism' and 'Cinema of Chaotic Stasis,' characterized by a stubborn and possibly intentionally
irritating refusal of different narrative lines to merge into any kind of meaningful confluence, the school derived somewhat from both the narrative
bradykineticism of Antonioni and the disassociative formalism of Stan Brakhage and Hollis Frampton, comprising periods in the careers of the late
Beth B., the Snow brothers, Vigdis Simpson, and the late J. O. Incandenza (middle period).
62 At the zenith of the self-help-group movement in the B.S. mid-1990s, there were estimated to be over 600 wholly distinct Step-based fellowships
in the U.S.A., all modelled, however heretically or flakily, on the '12 Steps' of Alcoholics Anonymous. By Y.D.A.U., the number has dropped to about
one-third of that.
63 (the student engineer's analogy) 64 Not 100% clear on this, but the thrust is that the T and Q are the two basic courses of study leading historically to the like 18th-century
equivalent of a H.S. diploma and a B.A., or maybe M.A., respectively, at nodes of hoary classicality like Oxford and Cambridge U. during the time of
Samuel Johnson — more or less the original grammato-lexical-and-pedagogical hard-ass — and that the trivium makes you take grammar, logic,
and rhetoric, and then if you're still standing you get the quadrivium of math, geometry, astronomy, and music, and that none of the classes —
including the potentially lightweight astronomy and music — were in fact lightweight, which is one possible reason why the portraits of all these
classical and neo-classical B.A.s and D.Phil.s at Oxford and Cambridge look so pale and wasted and haunted and grim. Not to mention that the only
day E.T.A.s get off classes is Sunday, partly to make up for how much they're away from the classroom on trips; and back at E.T.A. classless
Sunday is a three-session day on the courts, all of which strikes people outside academies as almost fanatically brutal. For more general pedagogy
here see P. Beesley's somewhat frumpy and dated B.S.-era Revival of the Humanities in American Education, or better yet Dr. A. M. Incandenza's
updated version of same, with its prose updated and typos eradicated and argument rather more keenly honed, available on CD-ROM through
InterLace @cornup3.COM or in trade paperback from Cornell University Press, 3rd edition © Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. 65 E.T.A.s' moniker for the Headmaster's House. 66 Some M.I.T.s are compulsive about taping the shows and then listening to the musics again and trying to track them down in stores and college
archives, not unlike the way some of their parents had killed whole evenings trying to parse out the lyrics on R.E.M. and Pearl Jam tapes, etc. 67 A couple of the Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital Security officers know E.T.A.'s Hal Incandenza from having met his brother Mario when
James O. Incandenza had hired the officers as lineless figurant background-extra cops for both Dial C for Concupiscence and Three Cheers for
Cause and Effect. The E.M. officers are sometimes down in The Unexamined Life tavern on Blind Bouncer nights when Hal is in there with like
Axford, Hal hitting The Life quite a bit less frequently than Axford and Struck and Troeltsch, who rarely miss a Bring-Your-Braille-I.D. theme-night
at The Unexamined Life, and seem able to function during A.M. drills even after several parasolled Mudslides or the House-Specialty Blue Flame
cognac-based things you have to blow out before sipping from their huge blue-rimmed snifters. The E.M. cops are both young dim big good regular
blue(literally)-collar Boston guys, high-school tackles now going soft, their jowls razor-burned and purpling with gin, and they'll sometimes regale
the E.T.A.s w/r/t some of the more colorful E.M. specimens they're paid to keep secure. There's something a little compulsive about the cops'
particular interest in #5 chronic catatonics, especially. The E.M. cops call Unit #5 'The Shed,' they say, because its residents don't seem housed
there so much as more like stored there. The E.M. cops pronounce stored 'stew-wad.' The chronic catatonics themselves they refer to as 'objay
darts,' which is something else Don G. over in #6 has never understood. Over Mudslides, they'll often give little thumbnail anecdotes about various
of The Shed's objay darts, and one of the reasons why they regale the E.T.A.s only when Hal's down there at The Unexamined Life is that Hal is
the only E.T.A. who seems truly interested, which is the sort of thing your veteran off-duty cop can always sense. E.g. one of the objay darts
they're into is the lady who sits very still with her eyes closed. The cops explain that the lady is not catatonic in the strict sense of catatonic but
rather a 'D.P.,' which is mental-health-facility slang for Debilitatingly Phobic. Her deal is apparently that she's almost psychotically terrified of the
possibility that she might be either blind or paralyzed or both. So e.g. she keeps her eyes shut tight 24/7/365 out of the reasoning that as long as
she keeps her eyes shut tight she can find hope in the possibility that if she was to open them she'd be able to see, they say; but that if she were 

ever to actually open her eyes and actually not be able to see, she reasons, she's lost that precious like margin of hope that she's maybe not blind.
Then they run through her similar reasoning behind sitting absolutely motionless out of a phobia of being paralyzed. After each anecdote-tale like
(they've got like an anecdote-routine, the E.M. cops), the shorter E.M. Security officer always uses his tongue to manipulate the little green parasol
from one side of his mouth to the other as he holds his snifter tight in both hands and makes his jowls accordionize as he nods and posits that the
terrifying thing is that the common unifying symptom of most of The Shed's objay darts is a terror so terrifying it makes the object of the terror
come true, somehow, which observation always makes both of the big dim workingmen shiver an identical and kind of almost delicious-looking
shiver, pushing their hats back and shaking their heads at their glasses, as Hal blows out the fire of the second Blue Flame they've bought him,
making a wish before he blows.
68 Freer's 'The Viking' moniker is his own invention, and nobody else uses it, instead referring to him as just 'Freer,' and regarding it as a classic
pathetic Freer-type move that he goes around trying to get people to refer to him as The Viking.’
69 NA = Narcotics Anonymous; CA = Cocaine Anonymous. In some cities there are also Psychedelics Anonymous, Nicotine Anonymous (also,
confusingly, called NA), Designer Drugs Anonymous, Steroids Anonymous, even (especially in and around Manhattan) something called Prozac
Anonymous. In none of these Anonymous fellowships anywhere is it possible to avoid confronting the God stuff, eventually.
70 Not to mention, according to some hard-line schools of 12-Step thought, yoga, reading, politics, gum-chewing, crossword puzzles, solitaire,
romantic intrigue, charity work, political activism, N.R.A. membership, music, art, cleaning, plastic surgery, cartridge-viewing even at normal
distances, the loyalty of a fine dog, religious zeal, relentless helpfulness, relentless other-folks'-moral-inventory-taking, the development of hardline schools of 12-Step thought, ad darn near infinitum, including 12-Step fellowships themselves, such that quiet tales sometimes go around the
Boston AA community of certain incredibly advanced and hard-line recovering persons who have pared away potential escape after potential escape
until finally, as the stories go, they end up sitting in a bare chair, nude, in an unfurnished room, not moving but also not sleeping or meditating or
abstracting, too advanced to stomach the thought of the potential emotional escape of doing anything whatsoever, and just end up sitting there
completely motion- and escape-less until a long time later all that's found in the empty chair is a very fine dusting of off-white ashy stuff that you
can wipe away completely with like one damp paper towel.
71 The Boston AA slogan w/r/t this phenomenon is 'You Can't Unring a Bell.’ 72 About which Pakistani manager and his ancestry and ratty little mustache and officious management style McDade has a colorful thing or two to
say, boy.
73 One of the graduate prorectors' little tasks is supposedly to go around to different Subdorm floors and check the rooms for things like are the
beds made up drum-tight, with unpleasant little extra drills added to the regimens of bed-making and toothpaste-cap-replacing slackers, though
few of the prorectors have the combination anality and drive actually to go around to their assigned rooms with a checklist, the exceptions being
Aubrey deLint, Mary Esther Thode, and the hatchet-faced Kenyan Tony Nwangi, who's got the Pemulis/Troeltsch/Schacht suite under extremely
beady scrutiny at all times.
74 Davis Cup is male, Wightman female. 75 Hal's private dread is that Tavis will want him to offer up his personal competitive map and dignity to John ('N.R.') Wayne — who's never in
several matches lost more than three games in a set to Hal — for the titillation of the alumni and patrons at the November Fundraiser-gala's
exhibitions, though this is pretty unlikely right before the What-aBurger, when Hal'll be apt to face Wayne in the semis anyway, and Schtitt isn't apt
to want an utter demapping that fresh in Hal's mind right before a major event. 76 Hal Incandenza had been thought for a while as a toddler to have some sort of Attention Deficit Disorder — partly because he read so fast and
spent so little time on each level of various pre-CD-ROM video games, partly because just about any upscale kid even slightly to port or starboard
of the bell curve's acme was thought at that time to have A.D.D. — and for a while there'd been a certain amount of specialist-shuttling, and many
of the specialists were veterans of Mario and were preconditioned to see Hal as also damaged, but thanks to the diagnostic savvy of Brandeis's
Child Development Center the damage assessments were not only retracted but reversed way out to the other side of the Damaged-to-Gifted
continuum, and for much of the glabrous part of his childhood Hal'd been classified as somewhere between 'Borderline Gifted' and 'Gifted' —
though part of this high cerebral rank was because B.C.D.C.'s diagnostic tests weren't quite so keen when it came to distinguishing between raw
neural gifts and the young Hal's mono-maniacally obsessive interest and effort, as if Hal were trying as if his very life were in the balance to please
some person or persons, even though no one had ever even hinted that his life depended on seeming gifted or precocious or even exceptionally
pleasing — and when he'd committed to memory entire dictionaries and vocab-check software and syntax manuals and then had gotten some
chance to recite some small part of what he'd pounded into his RAM for a proudly nonchalant mother or even a by-this-time-as-far-as-he-wasconcerned-pretty-much-out-there father, at these times of public performance and pleasure — the Weston MA School District in the early B.S.
1990s had had interschool range-of-reading-and-recall spelling-beeish competitions called 'Battle of the Books,' which these were for Hal pretty
much of a public turkey-shoot and approval-fest — when he'd extracted what was desired from memory and faultlessly pronounced it before certain persons, he'd felt almost that same pale sweet aura that an LSD afterglow conferred, some milky corona, like almost a halo of approved grace,
made all the milkier by the faultless nonchalance of a Moms who made it clear that his value was not contingent on winning first or even second
prize, ever.
77 Granted, Pemulis, over the summer (he boards at E.T.A. during the summer but hasn't qualified for the European trip since Y.P.W.), had made
and distributed (at cost) a few copies of a highly amusing low-memory TP game whose graphics featured a picture of deLint and a mock-up of the
hell-panel from H. Bosch's tryptich The Garden of Earthly Delights, which TP game continues to enjoy a select late-night vogue among the sub-16's. 78 (Subject to O.N.A.N. Dept. of Weights and Measures Oversight Committee ratification of final contract between G.F.R. Co., Zanesville OH, and
the Bureau of Endorsement Revenue, United States Office of Unspecified Services, Vienna VA, 15 December Y.D.A.U.) 79 And, it goes w/o saying, w/o one of those video-recorded suicide notes or fond farewells from the terminally ill, which digital halloos from beyond
the grave were, after a brief and videophony-like vogue, by the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar used only by the tasteless and trailer-park tacky, w/
the very tackiest using Tableaux w/ famous dead Elvis-/Carson-grade celebrities to convey their farewells. 80 Orin Incandenza knew that Joelle van Dyne and Dr. James O. Incandenza weren't lovers; Mrs. Avril Incandenza did not know that they weren't
lovers, although by the time of Joelle's acquaintance with him Jim wasn't in a position to be lovers with anybody, neurologically speaking, though
it's not clear to Joelle whether Avril even knew this, since Jim and Avril hadn't been intimate with each other, i.e. conjugally, for quite some time,
though Jim hadn't known the precise reason why Avril was so sanguine about their not being intimate until the incident with the Volvo, where
apparently Avril had been with someone (Orin would not say who or whether he knew who) in the Volvo and had idly — and disastrously, whether
w/ unconscious intent or not — and presumably post-coitally idly written the person's first name in the steam of the steamed-up car window, which
name had disappeared with the steam but had reappeared the next time the window had steamed up, which had been when James had been
driving to this very brownstone, to shoot Joelle in the weird wobble-lensed maternal Tm-so-terribly-sorry' monologue-scene of the last thing he'd
done, and then never shown her, and had ordered the cartridge's burial in the brass casket w/ him in the same testament in which he'd willed
Joelle an absurd (and addiction-enabling) annuity, which Avril'd never have lowered herself to the level of contesting, but which could hardly be
expected not to have solidified the appearance that they'd been lovers, Joelle and Jim. 81 'Theory and Praxis in Peckinpah's Use of Red,' Classic Cartridge Studies vol. IX, nos. 2 & 3, YY2007MRCVMETIUFI/ITPSFH,O,OM(s). 82 Maybe in like psychic opposition to their Moms's compulsive cleaning thing, both Orin when he was at E.T.A. and now Hal are horrific slobs. In
Hal's case this is facilitated by the fact that the third floor of Subdorm C's prorector is the incredibly lax and laid-back Corbett Thorp, who may
stutter and go in for half-baked motivational experiments on the younger players but never comes around with a white glove and clipboard. Mario
makes his bed without fail, but you have to keep in mind that it's not like he's got all that much else to do. Hal's fitted sheet and sheet are BeanJames River flannels in matching green and black Night Watch plaid, and for a comforter he uses a green fiberfill winter-camp sleeping bag that's
of unknown origin and price because he got it for Xmas and it had all the tags removed.

83 Boston Police Department. 84 Available on ROM via InterLace @deltad3.COM or in (remaindered) paperback from Delta/Delacorte division of Bantam-Doubleday-Dell-Little,-
Brown, itself a division of Bell Atlantic/TCI.
85 = no academy affiliation. 86 The O.N.A.N.T.A. junior tour allows court-side oxygen ever since an unfortunate embolism in Raleigh NC, Y.W.Q.M.D. 87 Q.v. Note 24 supra. 88 Since claiming rampant and mysterious breakage and then one time having the Dun-lop rep passing through Allston on his way out of Boston
from E.T.A. see not one but three kids on three separate corners hawking shiny new Dunlop sticks in what amounted, Dunlop charged, almost to
Conspiracy to Defraud, in YY2OO7MRCVMETIUFI/ ITPSFH,O,OM(s). 89 The fact that it's not at all clear day-to-day what this it and caring mean, or how you can be expected both to care passionately and not care at
all, that huge amounts of internal psychic energy get expended on trying to come to some acceptable understanding of all this stuff, particularly
from 16 to like 18, is not accidental or a weakness in E.T.A. pedagogy, in Schacht's opinion, though a sizable contingent of E.T.A.s view Schtitt as
bats and essentially a figurehead and choose to steer more by head prorector deLint's clipboard and reductive statistics, which at least afford you a
firm idea of where you stand, comparatively, at all times. 90 E.g.:
SELECTED SNIPPET FROM THE INDIVIDUAL-RESIDENT-INFORMAL-INTERFACE HOURS OF D. W. GATELY, LIVE-IN STAFF, ENNET HOUSE DRUG
AND ALCOHOL RECOVERY HOUSE, ENFIELD MA, ON AND OFF FROM JUST AFTER THE BROOKLINE YOUNG PEOPLE'S AA MTNG UP to ABOUT
2329H., WEDNESDAY 11 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U.
'I fear I simply have to deny the insinuation that it's disloyal or ungrateful to find oneself troubled by certain quite glaring inconsistencies in this
master quote unquote Program you all seem to expect us simply to open up and blindly swallow whole and then walk around glazed with our arms
right out straight in front of us parroting, reciting.' 'Geoff— Geoffrey, man, I don't think anybody's trying to insinuate anything over on you, brother.
I know I ain't trying to.’
No, you simply sit there with your arms crossed nodding with that timeless patience that communicates condescension and judgment without
exposing you to responsibility for insinuating anything aloud.’
'Maybe when I look patient I'm really trying to be patient with myself, for not finishing school and etcetera and having a hard time keeping up
with you.’
This AA tactic of masking condescension behind humility....’
'I guess I'm just sorry for you you're feeling frustrated with the Program today. I know there's lots of days I'm frustrated with it. So I don't know
what to say helpful to you except what they said to me, to just hang in there.’
'One Day at a One Day at a One Day.’
'Brother, that's just all I know to tell you that's worked for me. I know for me it don't matter if there's days I fucking hate it. I just have to do it.
And it don't help me or anybody else if I go around negativing on newcomers and trying to take out my issues on trying to fuck them up with Godpuzzles.’
'Mr. Gately Sir, I found myself sitting tonight in yet another Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting the central Message of which was the importance of
going to still more Alcoholics Anonymous Meetings. This infuriating carrot-and-donkey aspect of trudging to Meetings only to be told to trudge to
still more Meetings.’
'I hear you.’
'As if, I mean, what's supposedly going to be communicated at these future meetings I'm exhorted to trudge to that cannot simply be
communicated now, at this meeting, instead of the glazed recitation of exhortations to attend these vague future revelatory meetings?’
'I'm doing my best to stay with you here Day man.’
'And tonight I'm just settling in in yet another uneven-legged chair, cultivating that glazed passive spectatorial state of mind that is clearly what
they're trying to inspire in the ephebe, settling in next to a positively redolent Emil M. and trying to hold my poor addled Denial-ridden mind open
with all available main, listening to this ravaged-looking Yalie in yellow slacks detail episodes of tremens whose gruesomeness interdicted any
possible Identification —’
'I'm remembering I heard Pat tell you that thinking people who are walking ahead of you are following you is a pretty bad kind of D.T.s, brother.’
'And I informed her that there's a well-known surveillance tactic known as the Box-surveillance, which involves certain members of the
surveillance team establishing themselves in front of the subject.’
'Except I don't ever remember you explaining why a sociology teacher weaving his way from his fourth bar to his fifth bar is important enough
for four guys from some you-never-mentioned-what kind of conspiracy to be pulling this real complex surveillance thing.’
'...’
'Except I was interrupting your point you were sharing, I know, and I'm sorry.’
'Your basic decency is why you're whom I bring my thoughts to, Don. You know that.’
'That makes me feel good Day man.’
'I mean to whom else might I speak? The girl who takes her eye out and fondles it? Poor Ewell with his obsessive tattoo charts? Lenz^
'It makes me feel good you think I'm decent to talk to. That's supposed to be why I'm here. I sure needed to talk, at the start. Can you
remember where you were headed before I broke i—interrupted?’
'Something this broken Ivy Leaguer said, some AA sally. He said that only one newcomer in a million actually trudges into an Alcoholics
Anonymous Closed Meeting and in fact doesn't belong there.’
'Meaning doesn't turn out to have the Disease you mean.’
'Yes. And that he said that quote if You — looking right at yours truly, seemingly, with that wearily amused patient expression you all must
practice in front of the mirror — he said that only one newcomer in a million doesn't belong here, and if quote You think You're that one-in-amillion, You definitely belong here. And everyone howled with mirth, stomped their feet and blew coffee through their noses and wiped their eyes
with the backs of their hands and elbowed each other. Howled with mirth.’
'But you were, like, unsmiling at it.’
'And everyone labels as Denial or ingratitude what's actually horror, Don. The horror of acknowledging that you do apparently have some sort of
problem with mild sedatives and fine Chianti, and wanting with all sincerity to give every fair chance to a treatment-modality which millions swear
up and down has helped them with their own problem.’
'You're talking about AA.’
'To want very much to believe in it, and to try, and then to your horror find the Program riddled with these obvious and idiotic fallacies and
reductia ad absurdum which —’
Tm going to need to ask you to try and say that again in words I can follow, Geoffrey, if you want me to be right there alongside with you. And
I'm sorry if that seems descending.’
'Don, I am sincere when I say I'm frightened when I find that there are things about this allegedly miraculous Program's doctrine that simply do
not follow. That do not cohere. That do not make anything resembling rational sense.’
'I'm with you on that one now, brother.’
'Tonight's example of the one-in-a-million, say. Don, let me ask you, Don. In all earnest. Why shouldn't every human being in the world be in
AA?’
'Now I'm not with you anymore again, Geoffrey.’ 

'Don, why doesn't every featherless biped on earth qualify for AA? By AA's reasoning, why isn't everyone everywhere an alcoholic?’
'Well Geoffrey man it's a totally private decision to admit the Disease, nobody can go tell another man he's —’
'But indulge me for a moment. By AA's own professed logic, everyone ought to be in AA. If you have some sort of Substance-problem, then you
belong in AA. But if you say you do not have a Substance-problem, in other words if you deny that you have a Substance-problem, why then you're
by definition in Denial, and thus you apparently need the Denial-busting Fellowship of AA even more than someone who can admit his problem.’
'Don't look at me like that. Show me the flaw in my reasoning. I beg you. Show me why not everyone should be in AA, given the way AA regards
those who don't believe they belong there.’
'And now you don't know what to say. There's no cockle-warming cliche that applies.' 'The slogan I've heard that might work here is the slogan
Analysis-Paralysis' 'Oh lovely. Oh very nice. By all means don't think about the validity of what they're claiming your life hinges on. Oh do not ask
what is it. Do not ask not whether it's not insane. Simply open wide for the spoon.’
'For me, the slogan means there's no set way to argue intellectual-type stuff about the Program. Surrender To Win, Give It Away To Keep It.
God As You Understand Him. You can't think about it like an intellectual thing. Trust me because I been there, man. You can analyze it til you're
breaking tables with your forehead and find a cause to walk away, back Out There, where the Disease is. Or you can stay and hang in and do the
best you can.’
'AA's response to a question about its axioms, then, is to invoke an axiom about the inadvisability of all such questions.’
'I ain't AA Day man. No one like individual can respond for AA.’
'Am I out of line in seeing something totalitarian about it? Something dare I say un-American? To interdict a fundamental doctrinal question by
invoking a doctrine against questioning? Wasn't this the very horror the Madisonians were horrified of in 1791? Amendments I and IX? My
Grievance is disallowed because my Petition for Redress is a priori interdicted by the inadvisability of all Petitioning?’
'I'm about to get fucking lapped here I'm so not-following. You honestly don't see what's a little whacked-out about what you're saying about
Denial?’
'I'm thinking your failure to engage me on the question itself means either I'm right, and AA's whole Belonging-versus-Denial matrix is
constructed on logical sand, in which case horror, or else it means you're stupefied with condescending pity for me for some reason I fail to grasp,
doubtless because of Denial, in which case the look on your face right now is the same weary patience that makes me want to scream in meetings.’
'So scream. They can't kick you out.’
'How comforting.’
'This is a thing I do know. They can't kick you out.’
91 Pillow-biter's a North Shore term, one Gately grew up with, and it and the f-term are the only terms for male homosexuals he knows, still. 92 Diane Prins, Perth Amboy NJ. 93 An anxiety-fest captured nicely by the banner-shaped posters deLint used to have D. Harde put up each fall over the senior-locker sections of
both locker rooms that had WINNERS NEVER HAVE TO QUIT until some of the other prorectors went to Schtitt and got him to make deLint take
them down.
94 It's surely been spelled out already that prorectors teach one marginal class per term and serve as on-court assistants to Schtitt's
Lebensgefährtin Aubrey deLint, and that their existence at E.T.A. is marginal and low-prestige and their spiritual state on the low continuum
between embittered and accepting, and for many of the more neurasthenic E.T.A. students the prorectors are kind of repellent the way hideously
old people are repellent, reminding the students of the kind of low-prestige purgatorial fate that awaits the marginal and low-ranked jr. player; and
while a couple of the prorectors are feared, none of them is all that much respected, and they're avoided, and stick together with one another and
keep to themselves and seem on the whole sad, with that grad-schoolish sense of arrested adolescence and reality-avoidance about them. 95 Pink being Microsoft Inc.'s first post-Windows DOS, quickly upgraded to Pink2 when InterLace took everything 100% interactive and digital; by
Y.D.A.U. it's kind of a dinosaur, but it's still the only DOS that'll run a MathpakVEndStat tree without having to stop and recompile every few
seconds.
96 A kind of prorectorishly sad post in Amateur Sports Administration at tiny Throp-pinghamshire Provincial College in Fredericton N.B., C.T.'s
undergrad alma mater.
97 It's both perverse and kind of understandable that getting some sort of college scholarship (or 'Ride'), while very few E.T.A.s (and certainly not
Orin Incandenza) have any real kind of financial need, that nevertheless a scholarship is enormously important self-esteem-wise, since opting for
the college-tennis route in the first place is kind of an admission of defeat and a surrender of dearly held dreams of the professional Show. 98 And to keep a distant but weirdly beady and obsessive eye on Mario, from whose lordotic presence in a room Tavis'd flee just as Avril was fleeing
from the temptation of overlobbying Orin on B.U., such that for a few days when both Orin and Mario entered a room there'd be the sound of a
tremendous collision in the hall outside as C.T. and Avril's flights' vectors met.
99 MA Dept. of Revenue. 100 The way a White Flagger formulates this, e.g., is that 99.9% of what goes on in one's life is actually none of one's business, with the .1% under
one's control consisting mostly of the option to accept or deny one's inevitable powerlessness over the other 99.9%, which just trying to parse this
out makes Don Gately's forehead turn purple.
101 Some of their earliest dates were watching big-budget commercial films, and Orin had one time completely unpremeditatedly told her it was a
strange feeling watching commercial films with a girl who was prettier than the women in the films, and she'd punched him hard in the arm in a
way that just about drove him wild.
102 International Brotherhood of Pier, Wharf, and Dock Workers. 103 A quote 'episode of excessive neuronal discharge manifested by motor, sensory and/or [psychic] dysfunction, with or without unconsciousness
and/or convulsive [movements],' plus eye-rolling and tongue-swallowing.
104 In order for O.N.A.N.T.A. academies to qualify as actual schools and not just like extended-term sports camps, all instructors and prorectors
except the Head have to be listed as more like academic instructors who prorect on the side. 105 A Dworkinite heavy-leather organization whose membership on the U.S. East Coast was in the five figures up until the ugly Pizzitola Riots of
Providence RI in Y.W.-Q.M.D. discredited the F.O.P.P.P.s, and fragmented them.
106 There's a Viewing Room on each subdorm floor, and room-size TP's w/ phone consoles and (if a kid wants) modems are standard issue, but only
E.T.A. juniors and seniors get to have actual cartridge-viewers in their subdorm rooms — a two-year-old administrative concession the credit for
which goes largely to Troeltsch, who made such a pest of himself with Charles Tavis over the issue that Tavis finally relented just to keep the kid
from lurking in his office's waiting room, speaking into his fist, pretending to report on 'the flames of controversy surrounding individual rights
raging here in quaint and peaceful Enfield' — and none of these viewers (likewise the Viewing Room's units) can have motherboard-cards for
Spontaneous InterLace Disseminations or for ROM-caliber games, which broadcasts and videoish games encourage a stuporous passivity that
E.T.A.'s philosophy now regards as venomous to the whole set of reasons the kids are enrolled there in the first place. 107 E.g. the WhataBurger Invitational will allegedly be recorded for fringe-market, order-only viewing, later this month. 108 Sometimes, especially in early fall and late spring, this can involve a lapse of several weeks; WETA doesn't broadcast when most of the kids are
away at some competitive thing, and Saturday classes are likewise often canceled — this is one reason why so many prorectors' classes are
relegated by Mrs. A.M.I, to Saturdays.
109 Apparently the Parti Q. is provincial, intra-Québecois; the Bloc's its federal counterpart, w/ members in Parliament, and so on and so forth. 110 Q.v. here later in the same day, 11/7, as Hal Incandenza sits on the edge of his unmade bed, undressed, with the good right leg curled under
him and the bad ankle soaking in a janitor-pail of dissolved Epsom salts, looking through one of Mario's old Hush Puppy shoeboxes of letters and 

snapshots. Saturdays involve classes and drills and P.M. matches but no conditioning run or weight circuits. Afternoon's odd mismatched challenge
matches held on staff-squeegeed Center Courts under a steady metal sunless sky. The air still damp after lunchtime's rain. Hal's own odd match
was truncated when C-squadder Hugh Pemberton took a ball in the eye up at net and began wandering the service box in wobbled circles. Hal
skipped a quick trip down to the Pump Room and got to shower nearly solo in the main locker room. Tomorrow's Interdependence Day communal
supper at E.T.A. is a big deal and includes each person's own specially selected hat, plus real dessert, and a post-prandial Mario-made film, and
sometimes a sing-along. Hal and Pemulis, Struck and Axford and Troeltsch and Schacht and sometimes Stice have their own special private daybefore-I.-Day-ritualistic-supper-out-and-trip-to-The-Unexamined-Life blowout-gala, since Sunday is a day of total mandatory R&R. The untruncated
matches are winding down out there, Hal can hear. The sun is coming out just in time to go down. The Comm.-Ad. pipes start to moan and sing
with crowded showering kids. Pale net-shadows are starting to elongate acutely across the sidelines of the courts' north sides. Mario is more or less
the Incandenza family archivist ex officio. Mario has been closeted with Disney Leith all day preparing things for Sunday's postprandial gala and
filmiest. The phone sits mute atop the answering-machine attachment on the telephone's power unit's console. Its antenna is retracted and it
simply sits there, exuding the vague contained menace of mute phones. The phone's ringer sort of twitters instead of ringing. The audio-only
comm.-system's power console is bolted to a receptacle on the side of Hal and Mario's TP, and its red power light blinks at the slow liquid rate of a
radio tower. The phone and answering machine are hand-me-downs from Orin's days at E.T.A., old models of transparent plastic, so you can see
everything's quad-colored pasta of wires and chips and tin disks. The only message when Hal got in was from Orin at I4l2h. Orin had said he'd just
called to ask whether by any chance Hal'd ever realized that all of Emily Dickinson — as in the Belle of Amherst Emily Dickinson, the canonical
agoraphobic poet — that every single one of Ms. Dickinson's canonical poems could by sung without loss or syllabic distortion to the tune of 'The
Yellow Rose (of Texas).' 'Because I could not stop for Death He kindly stopped for Me,' Orin had sung illustratively onto the recording. 'I hope the
Father in the skies Will lift his little Girl.' Actually more like sort of sung. There'd been professional-locker-room sounds in the background — locker
doors banging, bass voices on tile and steel, personal stereos, hisses of antiperspirant and styling-spritz. The odd enclosed echo of locker rooms
everywhere, junior or pro. 'On my volcano grows the Grass A meditative spot/ and so on. The fleshy pop of a professionally snapped towel on adult
skin. A black man's falsetto laughter. Orin's recorded voice said he'd just grabbed an odd free second to inquire what Hal's machine might make of
this fact.
Hal spits Kodiak tobacco juice into an old rocket-emblazoned NASA glass on the bedside table, idly and for no special reason riffling through
densely packed letters tri-folded and packed upright, a kind of Rolodex of different mementos and postal correspondence Mario's rescued from
wastebaskets and recycling bins and dumpsters and quietly saved in shoeboxes. Mario has no problem with Hal perusing his closet's stuff. Mario's
closet has a canvas strap instead of a knob. Ideally there would also be a bucket of very cold water, and Hal would move the bad ankle from one
bucket to the other and back again. A whistle sounds from down near the girls' West Courts. Someone little in the hall outside the closed door
shouts 'Guess again!' to someone else farther down the hall. None of the Hush Puppy box's snail-mail letters are to or from Mario. Mario's bed is
loosely, unanally made. Hal's bed is unmade. Hal and Mario's mother had done her undergraduate Honors work at McGill on the use of hyphens,
dashes, and colons in E. Dickinson. The Epsom-water whitens his calluses. Unlaundered bedding swims around him. The phone twitters. Ample
make this bed, or Ample make this bed. The phone twitters again.
A MOVING EXAMPLE OF THE SORTS OF PHYSICAL-POST MAIL MRS. AVRIL INCANDENZA HAS SENT HER ELDEST CHILD ORIN SINCE the FELO
DE SE OF DR. J. O. INCANDENZA, THE SORT OF CHIRPILY
QUOTIDIAN MAIL THAT —HERE'S THE MOVING PART —SEEMS to IMPLY A CONTEXT OF REGULAR INTER-PARTY COMMUNICATION, STILL
20 June Y.W.-Q.M.D.
Dear Filbert,3
It's been a quiet week here on Mount Gawdforsakenb
 — today is perishing hot, windless, quiet as a tomb, lush and pretty. Every floral unit on
the grounds has its pistil aprick and petals atremble in a truly shameless fashion, for the bees are about. The whole hill hums drowsily. Yesterday,
your Uncle Charles was accosted on the north path by a bumblebee that he alleges was so enormous it sounded like a tuba, and he dispatched Mr.
Harde and the grounds crew with skeet rifles and orders to ' . . .bring the Sikorski-sized bugger down.' I shall spare you details of the subsequent
misadventures of the grounds crew, two of whom are now recovering satisfactorily.
The paucity of decibels here is due in part to all six A-teams' departure yesterday for Milan, with Gerhardt, Aubrey, Carolyn, and Urquhart at the
pedagogical tiller. It seems not so many moons ago that we were seeing you, Marlon, Ross, and the rest off on the European clay junket. I recall
pressing the maternal beak to the terminal window's glass, trying to make my Filbert out somewhere behind the airplane's impossible little bullethole windows. I cried like a fool every time, as of course I did all over again yesterday, embarrassing everyone but Mario, who also cried.
As for me, I've swotted and wakked all morning, cranking up your Uncle Charles's videophone and trying to cajole the editors of various
supermarket trade publications to run M.G.M.'sc
 latest plea for amending Less to Fewer'm those !*#!*# Express Check-Out lanes. One old editorial
codger said that he'd dearly love to help me out but that his newsletter was devoted exclusively to issues of promotional display. When I suggested
that a little comic relief in the form of the L------>F bulletin might not be amiss, he chortled. Chortling is good. We like chortling. However, I did
manage to twist the arms (harder to do telephonically than one might think) of Produce Weekly, Star Market s Quarterly Register, and
PriceChopper's Shelf and Cart, so the wheels of adjectival justice continue, albeit creakily, to turn.
The very last gobbet of Academy news is that your Uncle Charles had his blood cholesterol tested late last week. Though the verdict rendered
was no worse than a rather unperspicuous "Normal to Upper-normal" (sic), the penultimate modifier has caused, as you might anticipate, much
pacing and high-decibel whingeing, as well as vows of eternal xerophagy from here on out. Your Uncle Charles has already, for some months now,
made a practice of swallowing three teaspoons of fish-liver oil just before he hurls the administrative skeleton bedward for the night. Your brothers
have taken to trekking over on slow nights to watch him swallow his oil, purely out of enthusiasm for the faces Charles makes as the stuff goes
gulletward. I e-ordered the poor man a low-lipid, artery-friendly cookbook as a sort of Whatthehell present the day the results came in, and your
Uncle Charles has already pored over the thing and marked several yummers. We're to have a swot at cabbage patties tonight, fast-laners that we
are. I do suppose the poor man will find a way to ladle rice brand
 into his toothpaste before this spasm of angst subsides. Bless his heart — as it
were!
My, this machine does let one maunder on. I'd best get back to harrying grocers. One of this fall's matriculates6
 is the son of a man who's
apparently become an immensely wealthy Telegrocerf in the Upper Midwest, so perhaps the Express Lane-Solecism issue will simply disappear in
these here parts as well.
It goes without saying that you are of course wearing your halo and mouth-guard at all appropriate times and eating at least one green, leafy
vegetable per day.
Oh — 'twas wonderful to hear about the arbitration and contract. Mr. deLint read a detailed account and told us all about it. Proud, as ever, to
know you.
Miss You and Love You Lots, and c.
AND AN EXAMPLE OF THE INVARIANT RESPONSE THESE PIECES OF MAIL ELICIT
Ms. Incandenza Dear__________________
Due to the large number of mail the New Orleans Saints® are so fortunate enough to receive from all across the 2nd InterLace Grid8
, we
regrettably say
ORTKTINCANDENZA #71__________can not answer your letter in person, however, on behalf of the New Orleans Saints"________________
______has asked me to say
Thank-You for your message of support, and best wishes.
Inclosed, please accept a special, color 20 X 25 centimeter personally autographed 

action photo of ORIN INCANDENZA_______________#71___________________} as
our way of saying Thank-You and how important you're letter has been to us. Cordjally, Jethro Bodine
Assistant Mailroom Technician
And c.
'Mmyellow.’
'Presenting Speedy Seduction Strategy Number 7.’
'Orin. Happy Inter-Day Eve. E Unibus Pluram and so on. Still dodging the disabled?’
'A proviso up-front, Hallie: Number 7 never misses.’
'And not every Dickinson poem is singable to 'Yellow Rose,' O. Sorry to disappoint you. For instance like "Ample make this bed — Make this bed
with awe" isn't even iambic, much less quatrameter/trimeter.’
'Just a theory. Just tossing it out for the machine's consideration.’
'A practice to be encouraged. This particular theory's unfortunately a dink. Plus I don't think you quite meant proviso.'‘
'Number 7 remains a no-miss proposal, though. Picture this. Obtain a ring. As in a wedding band. So you present yourself to the Subject as
visibly married.’
'You know I hate these Strategy calls.’
'Also of course works if you really do happen to be married. In which case you've got a ring already.’
Tm sitting here soaking my ankle, O.’
'The object being, to present yourself to the Subject as married, as in happily married, and you engage her in a conversation in which you make
a big deal of how head-over-heels in love you are with your wife, how wonderful she is, the wife, how blue and clean the pilot-light of passion still
burns in the central heating system of your love for her, your wife, even after all these several years you've been hitched.’
Tm sitting here looking through an old box of letters to kill just a very few minutes before a bunch of us climb in the tow truck for Pemulis's
annual I.-Day-Eve town-painting.’
'But as you're saying all this to the Subject, your manner is nevertheless indicating that you're attracted to her.’
'It's poignant somehow that you always use the word Subject when you mean the exact obverse.’
'But it's not like flirtatious or salivious, your manner. More like just strongly involuntarily attracted. Almost as if hypnotized against your will. Your
manner can indicate this just by following the Subject's conversational movements and changes of posture or facial expression in that sort of
vacant intense way a hungry person watches somebody eating. Following the movements of the fork as if memerized. With, of course now, the
occasional flicker of pain and conflict in your eyes, at the fact that here you are involuntarily memerized by somebody other than your serapic wife,
which the point —’
'Time. Yo. I think you mean seraphic. I also think you meant lascivious and mesmerized.’
'You know what your problem is, Hallie?’
'I have just one problem?’
'But hang on until you see that 7's worth not making me digress away from, though. Because the point being to get across how it's an incredible
tribute to the Subject's overwhelming female charms that you can even really even see her, the Subject, since you're so in love with your wife you
barely even see most women as even female anymore, much less be involuntarily attracted to the Subject, much less have maybe the thought of
infidelity skitter no matter how involuntarily across your devoted mind. And it's not like you'll have to volunteer any of this directly. The Subject'll
draw the observations on her own. That's the point of the conflicted flickers in your memerized eyes, or at the most an involuntary tortured groan,
a quick bite of the knuckle of the forefinger.’
'A heel of the hand to the forehead or something like that.’
'Get your manner down just conflicted-looking enough and the Subject herself'll actually start drawing you out on this fact, the involuntary
attraction that's so painful to you and so flattering and tributary to her.’
'So wait. This is like a conversation where you're affecting all this flickering and groaning? Like you mean a cocktail-party-small-talk
conversation? Or do you just brandish your fake ring at some girl at a bus stop and start a tortured tribute to your seraphic wife?’
'It takes place anywhere. Venue-adjustable. 7's portable and never-miss. The point is to maneuver the issue of your devoted attracted conflicted
pain to the point where you can appear to almost sort of break down and can ask the Subject in all tortured sincerity if she thinks your involuntarily
finding her so visibly female and attractive makes you a bad husband. Display vulnerability and ask her to evaluate the like integrity of your heart.
Seem desperate. Your whole married self-concept shaken. Practically beg the Subject to reassure you you're not a bad-hearted man. Plead with the
Subject to say what she thinks it might be about her charms that could drive your serapic wife even momentarily from your heart. You present the
attraction you feel for the Subject as this involuntary identity-threatening soul-searing-type crisis you just desperately need her help with, the
Subject's, person to person.’
'Sounds very moving.’
'And if it so happens you really are married, the additional advantage to 7's pitch is that you and the Subject both, however briefly, get to believe
it. The pitch. The involuntary passionate doomed knight-errant-type pitch.’
'And of course, O., the Subject just happens to be married herself, often with small children, putting her directly in your crosshairs.’
'A matter of what's the word personal preference and taste that doesn't impact 7's surefire no-miss quality one way or the other. It's the doomed
involuntary conflicted good-man's-downfall-type quality that no Subject can seemingly resist.’
'Ainsi, then.’
'Well O. the thing's sick. It's even sicker than 4. Was it 4? The one you said that Loach inspired, where you'd supposedly just that very day
dropped out of Jesuit seminary after umpteen years of disciplined celibacy because of carno-spiritual yearnings you hadn't even been quite in touch
with as carno-spiritual in nature until you just now this very moment laid eyes on the Subject? With the breviary and rented collar?’
'That was 4, yes. 4's pretty much of a gynecopia also, but within a kind of narrower demographic psychological range of potential Subjects.
Notice I never said 4 was no-miss.’
'Well you must be a very proud young man. This is even sicker. The fake ring and fictional spouse. It's like you're inventing somebody you love
just to seduce somebody else into helping you betray her. What's it like. It's like suborning somebody into helping you desecrate a tomb they don't
know is empty.’
'This is what I get for passing down priceless fruits of hard experience to somebody who still thinks it's exciting to shave.’
'I ought to go. I have a blackhead I have to see to.’
'You haven't asked why I called right back. Why I'm calling during high-toll hours.’
'Plus I feel some kind of toothache starting, and it's the weekend, and I want to see Schacht before Mrs. Clarke's confectionery day in the sun
tomorrow. Plus I'm naked.’
'I'm surprised you were even there. In person. I was expecting the Disembodied Voice and asking you to call back ASAP on this. What is it out
there, 1600? Why aren't you outside hard at play? Don't tell me Schtitt started cancelling P.M.'S for I.-Day Eve.’
'I tagged this kid Pemberton in the eye up at net. It was inadvertent. We were only four games in. He hit a big soft fluffy goose of an approach
and I was trying to handcuff him. I hit it at him only to handcuff him. He never even got his stick up. Right in the left socket. It made a sound like a
champagne cork. A prorector named Corbett Thorp said he thought Pemberton might have detached a retina. Something sure seemed detached.
He was walking around in diminishing circles like he'd been hit with a mallet.’
'You sound really, like, remorse-riddled.’
'Kitchens arid heat, O. I've taken my share of balls in various spots. And whence bizarre metric theories about Emily Dickinson all of a sudden, by 

the way? And what's up with the lurking figures with wheelchairs?’
'You're a Top-Ten junior stickman suddenly now this year, Hallie, what's Schtitt doing giving you a cloth mouse like Hugh Pemberton to bat
around anyway?’
'You remember him?’
'Who could forget a kid that looks like he's curtsying when he serves? With the white visor and the little amber glasses? That kid's been hanging
from the bottom of the ladder by his nails since he was nine.’
'It's been carnage all week. Schtitt's playing the C teams against the A's. It's for the C's development, Donni said. Also because today word's
down from the tower some of the staff thought some of the A's looked tentative against Port Wash.’
'They despise tentativity.’
'I think they want us just short of cocky for the Fundraiser and then the WhataBurger, where Wayne's got a chance to knock this Veach kid off
the pole.’
'Let's not forget you though either, H. I can get down for at least the WhataBurger semis if you get there, if you want incentive.’
'As in in person, O.?’
'Word is you're worth watching now.’
'Word?’
'I keep my ear to the cement, Hallie.’
'At least for very short Subjects, I'd imagine.’
'We take off for the Patriots that Friday, what is that like the 27th or -8th, but it's a Saturday afternoon game. I can be down there by midday
Sunday if you're still in the thick.’
'You'll probably need to wear some sort of sign around your neck so I know it's you.’
'So then you'll be up here just as we're down there, oddly, playing.’
'It goes without saying you'd give me the advance skinny if anybody I didn't want to see was by any chance flying down there with you guys.’
'The C versus A thing's been more like grotesque than confidence-building. Guys are taking out stress in kind of twisted ways. Struck beat
Gloeckner in 40 minutes and then made a show of revealing he'd had 3-kilo ankle-weights on under his socks. Wayne made van Slack cry right
there in front of everybody.’
'Word is Wayne has exactly one gear.’
'Then Thursday Coyle had his left wrist tied to his right ankle and was still beating this new kid Stockhausen until Schtitt sent Tex Watson down
to tell him to knock it off.’
'So but the reason I'm really calling, Hallie.’
'And you're being evasive about the dread about the disabled. The like rolling stalkers.’
'I haven't seen wheel one in days. I'm thinking possibly this was a kind of very shy sort of fan club of people without legs that look up to me —’
'Grotesque entendre, O.’
'— as, like, the ultimate leg. They use different ruses to follow me around and never come close or say anything because they're really shy
because they don't have legs. So now my mind's resting easier.’
'Now if the roach- and spiders-at-heights fears'd subside you could really hold the head high.’
'So the reason I'm calling.’
'I already said I'd let you know when and if. No sightings of any journalists. Your Moment profiler.’
'I'm actually glad I got you in person. I was going to ask you to call me ASAP.’
Tm pleased to call you a sap whenever you like, O.’
'That's below you. And I can hear you still chewing that grisly shit. That shit's going to make your lower jaw fall right off. I've seen it happen
down here, believe me. And you're wondering why the tooth problems all the time suddenly.’
'Snuff's saliva-stimulating. It's actually oral-hygiene-enhancing, when you factor in all the extra brushing. The caries are Himself's legacy. You
know that. The Himself whose root canals put Dr. Zegarelli's kids through Andover.’
'This basically nonsocial call, H., is because I need your feedback on some issues from these half-dozen or so very complex and far-ranging and
in-depth conversations I had with a certain Subject.’
'Not the mobile-home person, surely.’
'Whole different ballpark of Subject. The Dickinson theory I have to admit came from these conversations.’
'Sounds like one deep lady.’
'Whole levels and dimensions to this one. We've had a whole series of very intense verbal interchanges. Transcendentalist poetics was just one
of the in-depth issues ranged over. This subject keeps me on the cerebral toes.’
'Dickinson's about as Transcendentalist as Poe. Your Subject's 0 for 2.’
'This is all off to the side of the call. I told this Subject I'd consider certain issues very carefully before I really responded.’
'Which meant you'd consider what she wanted to hear and how to ladle it on until she begs you to have intercourse with her.’
'I hence need considered-sounding responses to two basic questions.’
'Why this sick thing of making me complicit in these Strategic pursuits when you know I think they're troubled and sick? It's like asking
somebody to help you culture anthrax or something.’
'Just two questions is all.’
'Now I'm beginning almost to be able to feel my pulse in the tooth, it feels like the infection's gathering force so fast.’
'Firstly, what does the following word I can't find in the dictionary mean: s-a-m-i-z-d-a-t.’
'Samizdat. Russian compound noun. Soviet twentieth-century idiom. Sam — stem: "self"; izdat — undeclined verb: "to publish." I think the literal
denotation's technically archaic: the sub-rosa dissemination of politically charged materials that were banned when the Eschaton-era Kremlin was
going around banning things. Connotatively, the generic meaning now is any sort of politically underground or beyond-the-pale press or the stuff
published thereby. There's no real samizdat in the U.S. per se, First Amendment-wise, I don't think. I suppose ultra-radical Québecois and Albertan
stuff could be considered O.N.A.N.ite samizdat.’
Tow.’
'Not just Séparatisteur pamphlets, now. It'd have to be more incendiary. Materials advocating violence, destruction of property, disruption of
Grids, anti-O.N.A.N. terrorism and so on. I don't think O.N.A.N.'s got technical bans per se, I don't think, but Poutrincourt said the R.C.M.P.s are
empowered to impound literature and even desktop-publishing and InterLink hardware et cetera without any sort of warrant.’
'R.C.M.P.’
'Mounties, O.’
'The Nelson Eddy guys in silly hats and equestrian jaspers.’
'Close enough. Next question.’
'So you'd have no idea why The Mad Stork's name would come up in connection with somebody saying samizdat.’
'This is the second question?’
'Call it l(a).’
'Not in any strict sense of the term. I guess I could see some Séparatisteurs trying to read The ONANtiad or Brick as anti-Reconfiguration films.
Maybe stuff like Poultry in Motion. A lot of Himself's stuff was self-distributed, too. And Immanent Domain's allegedly on one level an allegory about
the Concavity, though that overlooks that Gentle wasn't even President when the thing came out. But you can tell your Subject that Himself's work 

was all very self-consciously American. His interest in politics was subordinate to form. Always. And none of it's banned. Whatever's still on the
InterLace back-menus is inter-Grid: you can order The ONANtiad in Manitoba, Vera Cruz, anywhere.’
'Speaking of Quebec Separatism, interestingly.’
'Why do I get a sinking feeling this is going to be l(a)-point-one or something. Maybe I could call you back tomorrow and we could chat on and
on. I'm going to be here reading for Boards till the Eschaton at 1400. Holiday tolls are low.’
'It's my nickel, here.’
'Or maybe you could simply call the person who's really the person to chat with about all issues Canadian, O.’
'Droll.’
'Moving right along to question 2, then — my Epsom salts are getting cold.’
'The big one is what you'd have to say if some tough-minded and spectacular Subject asked you what you have to say about the way every Nuck
Séparatisteur up there, from the Bloc Québecois and Fils de Montcalm all the way out to the really bug-eyed radical fringe-type sects and terroristic
cells —’
'I'm going to have to object to the word Nuck, O.’
'Beg pardon. The issue being why the whole Québec-Séparatisteur collection up there dropped the original Quebec-independence objective like a
rock and switched seemingly overnight to putting everything into agitating against O.N.A.N. and the Reconfiguration and forcing the return of the
Concavity to our map.’
'O., this is O.N.A.N.ite politics. I'd look my Subject right in the big blue eye and tell her straight-out that the field of nanomicroscopy is not yet
advanced enough to measure my interest in the intricacies of O.N.A.N.ite politics. Poutrincourt's class is disquieting enough. The whole thing's
unpleasant and dry and repetitive and mostly dull. Thevet has a kind of compelling romanto-historical yarn to spin, though, about —’
Tm serious. You've had some background, at least. The only Nuck prorector we ever got taught ceramics.’
'But you're the one with the Pleiades and the 5 on the French Achievement boards and the ability to trill your R's.’
'That's Parisian. And now I don't even watch the sports summaries, much less the political stuff. Just try for just one second. This Subject raised
issues that were way out of my depth.’
'That's not even coherent enough to be a mixed metaphor, O. Are you honestly telling me you want your depth increased? Or are you just
looking for some Cliff-Note summary so you can incorporate the impression of depth into some new panty-removal campaign? Are you going to tell
her you studied O.N.A.N.ite politics under the Jesuits?’
'The whole thing was dicey. I had to tell the Subject that I had to think about it and ponder, that I always took time to ponder at depth before I
just dashed off an opinion.’
'And don't tell me: this is your Moment profiler? Your Boswell in an E cup? Is this why she's en route? Was the whole familio-historical profile
story last week a dodge? Am I really just supposed to sit down with her and paint you now as a political-minded ex-seminarian who's married to
someone only some sort of heroically proportioned goddess could tempt you to betray? Because I'll tell you right now that Schtitt's not going to let
any of us here talk to anybody from some glossy rag like Moment without him or deLint sitting right there with us. Gone are the days of Himself not
caring how many who's-the-next-Venus-Williams-hype journalists haunt the grounds, man. Schtitt's now calling the shots on who talks to whom.
DeLint has a whole scathing appendix to the Admissions Manual about junior development and toxic hype.’
'Helen'll be able to get in.’
'Schtitt's not going to let me hype your political acuity or pseudo-wife or anything else. He's got C.T. seeing this place as a sort of prophylactic
against commercial attention. He thinks junior commercial attention's deforming. The Manual now invites us to see ourselves as in utero and hype
as thalidomide. Schtitt'll let her in and stick her in with C.T. and let C.T. filibuster her till she throws herself out the window like that journalist from
Condé Nast last fall.’
'Forget the profile. Speak to her or don't. This is personal.’
'Meaning you've discovered she has small children and maybe a marriage you can deform.’
'I'm ignoring all this. Helen's a different sort of Subject. I've discovered levels and dimensions to Helen that have nothing to do with profiles.’
'Meaning she's a tough nut. Meaning you've set your crosshairs and she hasn't succumbed. And she knows you're not married and not a
tormented Jesuit. She's Strategy-resistant because she knows too much to fall for a persona.’
'Co-ponder with me a second, if you're through. Stop me at any time. Jump right in at any time. On both the ultra-left and -right, the brass ring
up there has always been independent secession for Quebec, historically, no? Am I off? The Fronte Liberation and so on? The Fils de Montcalm. Or
is it maybe du? Are they the ones in Spandex and pancake makeup? The giant pies dropped on Ottawa after the third Meech Lake Accord?’
'Parizeau et all and so on. Feel free to stop me or jump in. It all'd been about getting Quebec out of Canada, right? The Meech Lake and
Charlottetown revolts. The Crétien assassination. "Notre Rai Pays." Terrorists in plaid flannel. French Canada for the Fran-cophonic. Acadian
Zionism. "La Québecois Toujours." "On ne parle d'Anglais ici." ‘
'With all the terrorism especially directed at Ottawa, pressure on Ottawa and Canada. "Permettez Nous Partir, Permettez Nous Être." Or we blow
up the Frontenac. Or we irradiate Winnipeg. Or we put a railroad-spike through Crétien's eye. This is not exactly deep-depth, O.’
'Yes and then but suddenly everything changes when Ottawa, under duress or no, puts itself under the surgically sterile like thumb of O.N.A.N.,
with the advent of O.N.A.N., Gentle, quote unquote Experialism.’
'You don't sound like you need any input from me on all this, O.’
'But so but then in immediate unison all the various different Separatist groups drop secession and independence like rocks and all transfer their
insurgent resentment to O.N.A.N. and the U.S., and now insurge against O.N.A.N. on behalf of the same Canada they'd spent decades treating like
the enemy. Does this seem a little bit odd?’
t 5
'Doesn't this seem a little odd, Hallie?’
'I'm really the wrong blood-relative to ask about the intricacies of the Canadian radical mind, O. We have a blood-relative who's got dual
citizenship, if you recall. Who I'm sure'd be overjoyed to ponder Separatist ideological flux with you all you want and then some. I'm sure. Once her
jaw recovered from being unhinged by joy that you actually called.’
'I'm slapping not one but both knees at the dro—’
' 'd you know she's never once asked me whether Booboo and I hear from you? Not once. A sort of appalled pride. She's ashamed of even
hurting over it, some —’
'Kidding all off to the side, I'm serious about this. The oddness of it. You know I respect your frontal lobes, Hallie. I'm asking for depth, not any
kind of expertise.’
'You just ignored the meat of everything I just said. You're like an old person about this. With an old person's weird selective hearing.’
'I'm going to let this whole pot-insulting-the-kettle on selective awareness of things just slide right on by. As a gesture that this is a serious call.
Why they all seemingly with one mind switched objectives.’
'And acting on behalf of the whole of Canada, Quebec, suddenly, is what you want explained. Or do you simply want it confirmed as odd?’
'The Subject cited polls from when they were still bothering to take polls up there that said like upwards of four-fifths of all Canadians wanted
out of O.N.A.N. and hoped President Gentle had a ghastly accident in his UV-booth, et cetera.’
'So the second and final question concerns this shift from anti-Canadian Québecer nationalism to anti-O.N.A.N. Canadian nationalism.’
'What I was thinking is is this maybe a textbook case of Johnny-Gentle-type-find-an-enemy-for-a-divided-nation-to-come-together-by-blamingand-hating theory in action? Is this somehow Quebec like circling its wagons with Alberta and all the other provinces in the face of a common 

enemy?’
 '...’
'Hal?’
'You could always point out to the profiler that there's a nice little irony to Gentle's strategy ending up bringing Canada together at our expense,
when it was pretty obviously meant to bring us together at Canada's expense.’
'But you sound like you think the more deeply pondered response would be something else.’
'All I know is some very basic schoolboy history from Poutrincourt's class. And from the advantage of occasional contact with the Moms.’
'Hit me.’
'The historical record indicates pretty clearly that the one and only nationalism in the Québecois soul is Québecois nationalism. It's been "Nous v.
La Plupart Toujours," and the more so the farther out on the fringes you get. I can't see the Séparatisteurs considering Quebec a true part of
Canada any more than Lesotho saw itself as part of SOUTHAF. Poutrincourt keeps thumping the fact that there's no valid comparison between
Quebec and our own antebellum South. Why do you think Meech Lake IIIh
 failed? It's because at root they've never seen themselves as anything
other than hostages of Ottawa and the Anglophone provinces. Even moderate Séparatisteurs like Parizeau spoke of the final surrender on the Plains
of Abraham as a kind of forced property-transfer, the whole original war1
 as one in which French-Canadians weren't the losers so much as the
spoils. Booty.’
'This all checks with the Subject's take.’
'The impression I get is that Quebec's hatred of anglophone Canada transcends anything they could work up against O.N.A.N. Just mention 1759
and the Moms's lips disappear. Pemulis and Axford keep coming early and putting a big gothic 1759 on the blackboard before GÔcMJ just to watch
the Moms's lips disappear when she comes in and sees it.’
'My sense is the Subject concurs on the hatred-assessment. They want plain out, always have. Health-care and NAFTA be damned. That's why
they sabotaged all three Meech Lake Accords, she says. She seems to imply the anti-O.N.A.N. thing is some sort of anomalous dodge or
something.’
'I've got to confess a sort of curiosity now about this profiler you just last week were preparing to fend off about Himself. Not to mention
comparing her to defensive linemen. Rubensian was never your type, I didn't think.’
 '...’
'Plus any Subject you're bothering about even giving the impression of depth to. This is more work than your type of Subject tends to demand,
usually, isn't it?’
'...’
'This is something else that isn't you. You've never exactly been shy about discussing Subjects with me.’
'It's complex. She's grown on me.’
'It's this certain way she takes notes on your explanation of Coffin-Corner punts.’
'It's complicated. There's a lot I'm not saying. She's got levels. I've discovered levels and dimensions to her I didn't know were originally there.’
'Oh O., please don't let it just be you've just discovered she's married with little kids.
That's not it by any chance is it? Please let it be something other than little kids.’
'...’
'Let it be something other than the hordes of other Subjects I've sat and listened to excruciatingly detailed sadistic blow-by-blow Strategic
accounts of. Orin "Home-wrecker" Incandenza, this is what the team calls you, in like jest? You sick pup.’
'I'm a sick pup? I'm the sick one?’
'... Wants to blame her, won't admit it, needs to, won't admit it, sweepingly blames the whole affair of Himself on her, won't interface with her or
worse even acknowledge her, resents even the fact she forgives things like you and Marlon Bain killing her dog —’
'— a hit-and-run-and-back-up-and-hit-again driver, I told you rep—’
'— pretends he gets the most retardate PR staffer he can make hold the crayon to send grotesque solecistic pseudo-impersonal replies to her
pathetic letters. Jethro Bodine, O.? Jethro Bodine?
'A private chuckle. She'd never get it.’
'Disowns her — worse, sicker, tells himself he's convinced himself she doesn't even exist, as if she never existed, but by some coincidence has
this rapacious fetish for young married mothers he can strategize into betraying their spouses and maybe damaging their kids for all time, and has
this apparently even more rapacious compulsive need to call the blood-relative he hasn't even seen in four years and tell him all about every
Subject and Strategy, blow-by-blow, long distance, in nanomicroscopic detail. Let's stop and ponder this all for a moment, O., what say?’
'I'm letting all this be just water off a duck's back. I can tell it's the tooth talking. I can remember the stress of the place. All I can say is that
trust me here: this Moment Subject is like strickenly dissimilar from what you're indicting. The levels and circumstances aren't the ones you're so
anxious to call rapacious. Is all I can say at this juncture.’
'Why do I suspect it's simply that you tried to make the big X with her and she demurred and this simply piqued your interest? During my can'tmiss nail-interval you were saying how enormous interior linemen were making comments about her bottom being so huge and soft you could
whack it over and over with a car antenna and not hurt it.’
'Hallie I never said any such fucking thing. You pulled that out of the air. And I'm sick?’
'You said she was obese.’
'I said she was a girl and a half in all directions. Which all of a sudden there was something that seemed cross-cultural about it: I had this
sudden flash of understanding how cultures can regard largeness as erotic. More of someone to love. Not to mention queerly and oddly intense and
alive and vibrant.’
'And she declined a casual advance, and showed you pictures of her like enormous offspring, and you came to attention.’
'With a heartbreakingly lovely face, too, Hal, all peachy and lissome, like big pretty girls get.’
Tm going to have to keep her away from this kid Ortho Stice up here, because he really is a Rubensophile. After P.M.s when we sit around he'll
go on and on about enormous breasts and melon bellies and quivering laps until we're all grimacing and pinching our nose-bridges. And whatever
you meant was not lissome.’
'The reserve QB who's next to me in these godawful pre-game costumed swoop-and-glides said something I liked. Helen passed him in the
locker room and he — do you want to hear this?’
'She was in the locker room?’
'It's the law. The pros aren't a PR-gulag. He said she had a face that'd break your heart and then also break the heart of whoever like rushed
over to your aid as you pitched over sideways grabbing your chest.’
'That is a pretty good one, O.’
'But so far we concur on the basic oddness, it sounds like. If the radicals want Quebec loose from Canada still, and that's always been the
priceless pearl, why like dissipate themselves trying to wreak mayhem down here almost the precise moment Interdependence is declared? 'ce
pas?’
'I'd rather just agree it's a stumper and then go dry my ankle and find a clean shirt and grab Schacht and hit him up for some Anbesol before we
hit the truck.’
'Right? And do these different groups get along, amongst themselves, the different Separatist flanges?’
'Not according to Poutrincourt they don't.’
'So why then the united concerted switch from like Let Quebec Go or we stick knives in the eyes of Canadian VIPs and drop huge confections on 

Rue Sherbrooke during St. Jean-Baptiste Day to all of a sudden Let Canada Go or we blow up ATHSCME towers and stretch mirrors across U.S.
highways and hang fleur-de-lis banners from U.S. monuments and disrupt InterLace pulses and skywrite Nuck obscenities over Buffalo and dicky
with waste-vehicle launchers so it rains moose-guano on New Haven and shoot O.N.A.N.ite V.I.P.s on U.S. soil and only barely get foiled from
injecting anaerobic toxins into jars of Planters peanuts?’
'The New Haven Brown Rain thing was sort of a chortle, though, you have to admit.’
'Chortles are good. We like chortles. But what's the political motivation for the about-face? Account for this for me. All it has to do is sound
soberly considered.’
'Orin, I'm trying to reconcile your doubtless sincere seriousness about this with your choice of me as co-ponderer.’
'All—’
Tm a privileged white seventeen-year-old U.S. male. I'm a student at a tennis academy that sees itself as a prophylactic. I eat, sleep, evacuate,
highlight things with yellow markers, and hit balls. I lift things and swing things and run in huge outdoor circles. I am just about as apolitical as
someone can be. I am out of all loops but one, by design. I'm sitting here naked with my foot in a bucket. What exactly is it you hope to get from
me on this? I keep losing focus on whether you want a deep-sounding line of patter to facilitate Xing this fleshy Subject or have somehow been
seduced into believing it's really worth pondering the weedy thought-processes of fringe Canadians. Of fringe anybody. How consistent do the
Brazilian Nuevo Contras' objectives look? The Noie Störkraffs? Shining Path's? The Belgian CCCY? Pro-Life assault squads? The Ez-ed-Dean-elQassan? P.E.T.A. fur-farm arsonists' objectives? Jesus, Gentle and the poor C.U.S.P.s?'k
'Poor C.U.S.P.s?’
'Why not just soberly shrug and invoke the term wacko and leave it at that? Why not tell her you're a radically simple and somewhat sick young
man who kicks balls really high in the air for a living?’
'All I—’
'Why not just say who cares? This stuff isn't about you and me. The person this stuff is about is the person you say you've erased from all RAM.
Why not tell the damn truth for once?’
'Me tell the truth? Me lie?’
'What, this ascapartic bathroom-mag journalist is going to give you like an SAT entrance-test on Francophone extremism? Like a gyno-entrance
exam? You have to place above a certain percentile to get her to let you X her on the floor of the nursery right next to the bassinet? Whom are you
trying to kid? Whom do you think this is really about? Can you be that sick that you can't even admit it over the fucking phone?’
'Or what?’
'I'm sorry, O. I apologize.’
'Think nothing of it. I know you didn't mean it.’
'I hate losing the temper.’
'You don't sound good, Hallie. You sound ground down.’
Hal grinds at his eye with a finger. 'These tooth-episodes make me feel like that wobbled shrieking figure in that Munch lithograph.’
'That chew's going to eat right through your membranes. It's a vicious vice. I'm urging in all earnest. Ask that Schacht kid.’
Michael Pemulis cracks Hal's door slowly and slowly pokes his head and one shoulder in, saying nothing. He has showered but is still flushed, and
his right eye gets wobbly in this certain way when two or three Tenuates are wearing off. He has his yachting cap, gold epaulets of fake naval
braid, and in one ear a piratical gold hoop that lights up in sync with his pulse. With the door just cracked and his head poked in he brings his other
arm in over from behind like it's not his arm, his hand in the shape of a claw just over his head, and makes as if the claw from behind is pulling him
back out into the hall. W/ an eye-rolling look of fake terror.
Hal is hunched, examining his finger for eye-material. 'In all the excitement we've neglected the most obvious response, then, O. Your answer
for the exam, and then I can go dry the ankle.' He can hear PemuJis asking Petropolis Kahn and Stephan Wagenknecht something off down the
hall through the cracked door.
'I think I already tried the obvious response on her, but hit me.’
'Pemulis just made his first pass and left the door ajar. I'm sitting here nude in a draft through an open door neglecting the maybe deceptively
obvious fact that something like, what, three-quarters of the Concavity's northern border runs contiguous to Quebec.’
'Exactamundo.’
'So that so what if Ottawa didn't formally subjoin the Concavity to any particular province. Really big favor, I'm sure. Because the map speaks for
itself. Bits of western New Brunswick and a smidgeon of Ontario aside, the Concavity — the physical fact and fallout of the Concavity — it's
Quebec's problem. Something like 750 clicks of border along the Concavity, with attendant seepage, for Notre Rai Pays.’
'Yes plus the brunt of the airborne wastes from the high-altitude ATHSCMEs, plus being the province that gets splatted when the E.W.D. vehicles
overshoot the Concavity. This is what í tried right off the bat on her.’
'So what's the puzzle. Put yourself in Quebec's shoes. Once again they get the gooey end of the Canadian dipstick. It's mostly now western
Québecer kids the size of Volkswagens shlumpfing around with no skulls. It's Québecers with cloracne and tremors and olfactory hallucinations and
infants born with just one eye in the middle of their forehead. It's eastern Quebec that gets green sunsets and indigo rivers and grotesquely
asymmetrical snow-crystals and front lawns they have to beat back with a machete to get to their driveways. They get the feral-hamster incursions
and the Infant-depredations and the corrosive fogs.’
'Although people aren't exactly flocking to New Brunswick or Lake Ontario either. And the coastal ATHSCMEs send the coastal phenols out over
Fundy, and supposedly the lobsters out there are like monsters in old Japanese films, and supposedly Nova Scotia glows, at night, in satellite
photos.’
'Still and all, O., tell her proportionally speaking it's Quebec that's borne the brunt of what Canada had to take. The brunt again, to their way of
thinking, remember. Small wonder the fringe mentalities are violently anti-O.N.A.N. up there. There's got to be a real straw-and-camel feel to the
whole thing.’
The door swings all the way open and clunks against the wall behind it. Michael Pemulis has pretended to kick it in. 'Good Lard preserve us he's
nekkid,' he says, coming in and closing the door to check behind it. Hal holds up a hand for him to wait a second.
'Except here's the thing,' Orin says. Pemulis stands expectantly in an uncluttered patch of Hal's half of the floor and makes a show of looking at
his wrist as if there were a watch there. Hal nods at him and holds up one finger.
'Except here's the thing,' Orin is saying. 'The issue she raises is is there really any sort of realistic hope of Quebec getting Gentle to get O.N.A.N.
to reverse the Reconfiguration. Take back the Concavity, shut down the fans, make us acknowledge the waste as fundamentally American waste.’
'Well probably of course not.' Hal looks up at Pemulis and makes his own hand into a claw and makes clawing motions at the phone. Pemulis is
compulsively going around zipping and unzipping everything in the room with a zipper, a habit of his Hal loathes. 'But now she's got you falling
back into demanding realistic and consistent logic from fringe mentalities again.’
'But Hallie just hang on. Canada as a whole couldn't oppose O.N.A.N. Wouldn't. Ottawa's so far in now they wouldn't say shit if they had three
times the mouthful they already have. Of shit I mean.’
Pemulis is pointing vehemently out the west window at the parking lot where the tow truck is parked and making exaggerated Henry Vlll-like
rending and chewing motions. His eyes, under the waning influence of P.M. stimulants, do not get mirthful or glazed.
They just get tiny and lightless and even closer together in his narrow face, like a second set of nostrils. The right eye's little wobble is out of
sync with the pulse of his earring.
There's the sound of Orin switching phone-hands. 'So then I'll ask you what she seemed like she rhetorically asked: are the Separatists' and
fringe cells' pathetic little anti-O.N.A.N. campaigns and gestures down here basically just hopeless and pathetic?’ 

'Does fish-shit drift slowly bottomward, O.? How could she see it as anything but, if she's as savvy as you say?' Hal removes his pruned white
foot from the janitor-bucket and dries it on a woppsed-up sheet. He points at a pair of underwear near Pemulis's Dock-sider. Pemulis picks the
briefs up off the floor with two fingers and tosses them to Hal with a pretend-shudder.
'So simply largely symbolic at best, then?’
Hal's lying back trying to get his legs into the briefs with one hand. 'Tell her after much chin-stroking simply yes, O. O., Pemulis is standing here
already in his hat pretending to clang a dinner bell. He's got big glittery ropes of drool swinging from his lower lip.' Pemulis is actually making a
complex system of motions indicating both the procedures for rolling a duBois and the lateness of the hour. For the past two years, Hal and
Pemulis and Struck and Troeltsch and sometimes B. Boone have made a little ritual of nipping out to the little hidden clearing behind West House's
parking lot's dumpsters and sharing an obscene cigar-sized duBois before the I.-Day-Eve expedition and supper out, while Schacht and sometimes
Ortho Stice sit inside the tow truck, faces green in the green glow of the truck's instruments, warming it up. Hal sits up and makes a waggling goon-ahead-on-down motion to Pemulis.
'But you have the . .. Mr. Hope,' Pemulis stage-whispers.
'One moment please.' Hal clamps a hand hard over the phone and covers phone and hand with two pillows and some bedding, and stagewhispers 'Where's your part of the Mr. H. all of a sudden? Why do we have to roll a zeppelin out of my part of the Hope I bought retail from you
not three days ago?’
The nystagmus makes the eye-rolling lurider. 'Extenuations. We can get it all sorted out right later. Nobody's going to like exploit you.’
And then it's hard to extract the hand and phone. 'O., I'm going to have to book out of here in just about one second.’
'Just how about this. Ponder this in advance for me and try and stay upright til you can call me back. This was the Subject's crux-type proposal.
You can call collect if you want.’
'I don't have to respond,' Hal says.
'Correct.’
'I just listen and then break the connection.’
'Calling me like tonight or tomorrow before lunch, collect if I.-Day's full-toll.’
'I just sit here very briefly and then the conversation's over and we can go.' Hal's directing all this more at Pemulis, who's pacing and holding the
Constantine bust in his hands and examining it at close range, shaking his head.
'All set? This is it. Are you set?’
'So go already.’
'Her poser goes roughly like this. If the Separatists' big object has always been to independently secede, and if they've got about a snowball's
chance of ever really getting O.N.A.N. de-Reconfigured, and if pretty much all Canadians despise Gentle and the transfer of the Concavity and the
whole Experialist merde sandwich, but especially the Concavity, the cartographic fact of a Concavity in our map and a new Convexity in theirs, that
the maps now say it's Canadian soil, this toxified like area: grant that all this is obviously right; then why don't the Separatists in Quebec use the
fact of the odiousness of the Concavity to go put their parliamentary wigs on and go to Ottawa to parliament and say to the rest of Canada like:
Look, let us secede, and we'll take the Concavity with us when we secede, it'll be our problem not yours, it'll go on the maps as Québecois and not
Canadian, it'll be our blot and our bone of dissension with O.N.A.N., and Canadian honor will be desmirched, and Canada's pathetic standing in
O.N.A.N. and the like world community of standings will be rehabilitated because of the ingenious way Ottawa's parliament will have regerrymandered O.N.A.N.'s map without taking on the U.S. directly? Why not this? Why don't they go to Ottawa and say Cuibono all around and say
This way everybody wins? We get our own Notre Rai Pays, and you get the slap in the face of the Concavity off your map. The Subject posited why
the Nucks don't see the odiousness of the Concavity as maybe the best thing that ever happened to them in terms of Canada's persuadability into
letting Quebec go. She hit me with Why wouldn't your thinking militant Nucks use the Concavity as a bargaining chip for independence, why would
they want O.N.A.N. to take back the one thing odious enough to be a chip?’
'Who's this you're talking to you can't call back?' Pemulis says loudly, pacing back and forth with little toy-soldier about-faces, his hoop flickering
like mad.
Hal lowers the phone but doesn't cover it. 'It's Orin, wanting to know why Quebec and the F.L.Q. and so on haven't tried bargaining with the
Canadian administration, offering Quebec's cartographic adoption of the Concavity in exchange for Separation.' Hal cocks his head slightly. 'This
could be Poutrincourt's so-called Separation and return's real meaning, it occurs to me.’
'Orin as in your brother, with the leg?’
'He's all in a swivet about inter-O.N.A.N.ite politics.’
Pemulis makes a megaphone of his hands. 'Tell him who gives a bright flaming fart! Tell him to go read a book! Tell him to access any one of a
dozen D-bases off of the Net! Tell him you're pretty sure he can afford it!' Pemulis's hands are slender and red-knuckled and his fingers long and
sort of falcate. 'Tell him you can hear the truck getting impatiently revved as on one of the very few totally free nights we ever get our friends get
ready to leave without you. Remind him how we have to eat on schedule up here or we get the wobbles. Tell him we read books and tirelessly
access D-bases and run our asses off all day here and need to eat instead of we don't just stand there and swing one leg up and down over and
over for seven-plus figures.’
'Tell Penisless to go sit on something sharp,' Orin says.
'O., he's right, I can feel that feeling of my body starting to feed on itself. You said I could think and call you back. I'll use your pager if you like.’
Pemulis has used one foot to clear a path through laundry and diskettes and books and gear to the west window, where he's making broad
involved gestures with a person or persons outside down on the grounds whom the window's big sill keeps Hal from being able to see. Hal's
underwear is at a diagonal across his pelvis. Orin on the phone is saying:
'Picture this and see what you think. Imagine this. The F.L.Q. and other various Separatist cells all suddenly divert their terror's energies away
from Canada and suddenly start mounting an insurgent campaign of U.S. and Mexican harassment. But the thing is they make a big deal of
terroristically insurging against O.N.A.N. on the behalf of all of Canada. They even find a way to bring the Albertan ultra-rightists in on it, plus other
provincial fringes, so it looks to O.N.A.N. like maybe all of Canada as a whole is in on the insurging.’
'I don't have to picture it. It's what's going on. The C.P.C.P.1
 makes incursions against Montana like clockwork. There was that horrific jamming
of InterLace pulses and substitution of porn-films for children's programming around Duluth in June traced to that psycho quintet in southwest
Ontario. The Interstates north of Saratoga are still supposed to be undrivable after sunset.’
'Exactly.’
'So some point for me to ponder needs to emerge really fast, here, Orin.’
'The point is I was rhetorically invited by the Subject to entertain the picture of it all really being the Nucks. The pan-Canadian thing being a
dodge. The Separatists all somehow united and orchestrating the anti-O.N.A.N.ism. The rhetorical question becomes to imagine this and ask: Why
would they do this?’
'We're wearing a groove in the same track again, O. It's because the Concavity impacts mainly Quebec.’
'No, I mean she meant why would they make such a noise about insurging on behalf of all of Canada and go to such lengths to orchestrate the
appearance of pan-Canadian anti-O.N.A.N.ism.’
'And then judging by precedent the Subject gave a hypothetical answer to her own question. Have you gotten to get a word in edgewise
throughout this series of interviews, O.?’
'What if it's that the Nuck Separatists know totally well that if the O.N.A.N. administration sees Canada as a big enough roach in the ointment,
Gentle and Unspecified Services' boys in white can get together with Mexico's Vichified puppet-state and make things like really unpleasant indeed
for Ottawa. They could make Canada the sort of black scapegoat of all of O.N.A.N. There's little you can picture that might be worse than being the 

one country in a three-country continental Anschluss that the other two countries are ganging up on and making things unpleasant for.’
'Vichified Anschluss? This doesn't sound like any Orin I know. These are rabidly political catchwords. What kind of heartbreaking Rubensian
Moment-type fluff-journalist is this you're so determined to —?’
'The unpleasantness is pretty easy to imagine a picture of. The E.W.D. vectors could easily be recalibrated further north, Gentle could tell them.
Our waste-resources are extensive. At the mildest, he could say, good-sized chunks of Canada could be Concav-itized.’
'I have to go. Pemulis is slumped back against the wall with his hands over his stomach and is slumping all the way down the wall looking
wobbly and pale.’
'Ponder the picture of the parliament's nails bitten all the way down to the ragged pink pulpy stuff as the Nucks orchestrate the terrorism so it
looks more and more like Canada versus O.N.A.N.’
Hal's in slacks and one street-sock and one athletic sock and picking different shirts up off the floor, trying to smell a clean one. 'But this is all —’
'Kyaaaa!' Pemulis vaults a corner of Hal's bed and tries to claw at the transparent phone's antenna like he's going to break it off. Hal turns to
protect the phone with a shoulder, whipping at Pemulis with a sweatshirt.
Orin is saying 'What I'm asking is for you to ponder could it maybe end up that Quebec, after wreaking various mayhi down here and making it
look like it's all of Canada, the P.Q.s or somebody respectable gets wigged up and go to Ottawa and offers this deal: Parliament gets the P.M. and
the government to get the other provinces to let Quebec go, Separate, aller, partir — and in return Québec'll step up the anti-O.N.A.N. harassment
and insurgency while dropping the pretense of other provinces being involved and all of Canada insurging and make it publicly clear that it's
Quebec and Quebec alone that's O.N.A.N.'s real nemesis. They tell Ottawa they'll offer the contiguousness of the Concavity as their reason and
send absolutely everything they've got in terms of terrorism at O.N.A.N. and Gentle, taking full credit each time. Offering themselves as the culprit
and de-Reconfiguration as the objective.’
'So your multilevelled journalist's hypothesizing a kind of meta-extortion.' Hal can hear Pemulis's whistle-lipped breathing. 'Separation is still the
Québecer insurgents' real goal, and their anti-O.N.A.N. insurgency is not what it appears.' Hal's in the dark under the desk that the fold-out TP and
drives and phone console and modem are stacked on one corner of, surrounded by nests of wires, trying to find his other street-shoe. 'It's
supposedly just been a ruse to arouse O.N.A.N.'s ire at Canada so the Québecers can use the U.S. and Mexico as levers on Ottawa.’
'Trying to engineer it so that Canada'll be more than happy to disassociate from them,’
Orin says. 'And Fm saying I don't have the background or lobes to even know whether she might be putting me on, testing my depth.’
'You've always had a special dread of depth-testing.’
'How about why don't you just toss me the Bob and Axhandle and me'll go down and get things ready and wait for you,' Pemulis stage-whispers
to Hal's slacks' bottom, which is pretty much all that's visible from under the desk. Hal's hand comes up out of the leg-space under the desk and
raises one finger and shakes it a little for emphasis. Pemulis is standing next to the small TP viewer — which is propped up like a large photo with a
buttressy thing that folds out of its back — and the TP's disk- and cartridge-drive, which takes up less than a quarter of the desktop and has the
phone's console and power unit bolted into a receptacle on the drive's side.
Hal's voice is muffled and has the strained pitch of someone trying to clear nests of dust-bunnied wire to find something. 'Except Orin I don't see
a great deal of pondering required here. The total anti-U.S. insurgency so far's been too hapless and small-potato for her theory to work. The odd
pie- and guano-bombardment, stretching mirrors across lonely roads, even demapping officials and botulizing the occasional peanut jar. None of
this is exactly bringing anyone to his knees. None of this is making Canada or Quebec look like any kind of serious threat.’
Michael Pemulis, his jaunty cap pushed back and his lips pursed as if whistling, but not whistling, is very casually brushing his hand over the
drive and console's power unit, as if killing time by casually dusting. His other hand's jingling pocket-change. There's the sound of Hal clunking his
head on something under the desk. His bottom is bony and his belt has missed two loops. The power unit's toggle's next to a little red jewel of a
power-light that blinks at the same rate as a smoke alarm when the toggle's on ON.
Hal sneezes twice. Pemulis taps his fingers in a little anapestic gallop over the unit's top. Orin sounds like he's sitting up straight. 'Hallie kid now
you're right with me, this is where your pondering lobes come in, because that was just my response, that there was nothing sufficiently more than
just an annoying gnat-like annoyance about the insurgencies, which is where she moved beyond my depth back into l(a), if you remember, when
she raised this samizdat-word in connec—’
a. Don't ask.
b. Ibid.
c. I.e., the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts, a syntactic-integrity PAC Avril had put together with two or three very dear friends and
colleagues around metro Boston.
d. The Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster's anti-sclerotic miracle-food craze.
e. The then-skinny Eliot Kornspan, before Loach and Freer got hold of him.
f. At once high-tech and somehow atavistic, Telegrocery services let you order off your TP and then have the stuff brought right to your door by
college-studenty types, often within hours, saving one the stress and fluorescent hassle of public food-shopping. As of Y.D.A.U. it's still very big in
some areas and not all that big in others. The first Tele-grocery service didn't even launch in metro Boston until YY2007MRCVMETIUFI/
ITPSFH,O,OM(s), and it's still mostly in Boston a downscale and blue-collar thing, oddly.
g. Interlace serves just about all of habitable O.N.A.N.; each nation comprises (roughly speaking) an entertainment-dissemination 'Grid.’
h. After Meech Lake I, Charlottetown I and II, and Meech Lake II, this was Ottawa's fifth and final attempt to placate Quebec with a
constitutional amendment formalizing the Gallic province's right to 'preserve and promote' a 'distinct society and culture.’
i. The French and Indian War, known to Québecers as 'La Guerre des Britanniques et des Sauvages,' BS c. 1754-60, at the final battles of which,
at the Plains of Abraham in '59 and Montreal in '60, the English and Americans kicked ass and took names in a large way that's never quite been
forgotten by the Québecois, whose memory for insult is the stuff of legend. The wily Amherst was there, too, at Ticonderoga and Montreal, with his
trusty smallpox-blankets.
j. Grammar and Meaning.
k. The Clean U.S. Party of Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner.
1. The Calgarian pro-Canadian Phalanx.
111 Hal's term, actually an Incandenza-family term, actually not inappropriate here because like most Incandenza-family terms put into family usage
by Avril, who's an expatriate Québecer, whinge is some east-Canadian idiom for vigorous high-pitched complaining, almost like whining except
with a semantic tinge of legitimacy to the complaint.
112 The soon to be all-too-well-known and dread-inspiring Assassins des Fauteuils Roll-ents of the E.W.D.-receptacle-festooned Papineau region of
southwestern Quebec.
113 Which sinewy stuff is described by the OB-GYN specialist in his DictaChart as 'neural-gray.’ 114 © B.S. MCMLXII, The Glad Flaccid Receptacle Corporation, Zanesville OH, sponsor of the very last year of O.N.A.N.ite Subsidized Time (q.v.
Note 78). All Rights Reserved.
115 Volkmann's contracture's some kind of severe serpentine deformation of the arms following a fracture that hadn't been set right or splinted or
where the arm's been allowed to stay all woundedly bent in as it heals; bradyauxesis refers to some part(s) of the body not growing as fast as the
other parts of the body — Himself and the Moms got plenty familiar with these sorts of congenital-challenge terms and many more, re Mario,
particularly the variations on the medical root brady, from the Greek bradys meaning slow, such as bradylexia (w/r/t reading), bradyphenia
(practical-problem-solving-type thinking), nocturnal bradypnea (dangerously slow breathing during sleep sometimes, which is why Mario uses four 

pillows minimum), bradypedestrianism (obvious), and especially bradykinesia, an almost gerontologic lentissimo about most of Mario's movements,
an exaggerated slowness that both resembles and permits extremely close slow attention to whatever's being done. 116 Pretty much the BMW of 16mm. digital-cartridge recorders, brought out in limited numbers by Paillard Cinématique of Sherbrooke, Quebec,
CAN, just weeks before its manufacturing facilities were annularly hyperfloriated and the company went belly-up. 117 . overshot the place to mention that Mario's head — in perverse contradistinction to the arm-trouble — is hyperauxetic, and two to three times
the size of your more average elf-to-jockey-sized head and facies. 118 You'd somehow think that Mario would be thick as thieves with the blue-collar custodial and kitchen and physical plant/grounds staff, but it's
odd, he and they never have much to say to each other, and with rare exceptions none of the E.T.A.s including Mario has anything interpersonal to
do with the nine-month part-time halfway-house rehabilitating workers, who mostly mow and mop and empty trash and load dishes into the dining
hall's steamer, and who radiate a kind of slitty-eyed reserve that seems far more sullen and ungrateful than shy. 119 also overshot the spot to include that Mario's a homodont: all his teeth are bicuspids and identical, front and back, not unlike a porpoise; it's a
source of unending struggle for Ted Schacht, who tends to avoid Mario because whenever he's around him he has to fight the urge to have him
open up and submit to scrutiny, which Schacht can well imagine would hurt his feelings: nobody wants to be an object of clinical interest like that. 120 This basic phenomenon being what more abstraction-capable post-Hegelian adults call 'Historical Consciousness.’ 121 Eschaton's pre- and post-procedures are convolved enough so that an actual game gets gotten up every like month or so at most, almost
always on Sunday, but even then not all twelve of a year's kids can get the hours off to play, which is why the latitude and surplus in gamepersonnel.
W-520-500-268-6w-9w-9w- 122 O.N.A.N.ite Classroom Cartographic Series 14W4, © B.S. 1994, Rand McNally & Company. 123 Pemulis here, dictating to Inc, who can just sit there making a steeple out of his fingers and pressing it to his lip and not take notes and wait
and like inscribe [sic] it anytime in the next week and get it verbatim, the smug turd. Using the Mean-Value formula for dividing available
megatonnage among Combatants whose GNP/Military // Military/Nuke ratios vary from Eschaton to Eschaton keeps you from needing to crunch out
a new ratio for each Combatant each time, plus lets you multi-regress the results so Combatants get rewarded for past thermonuclear largesse
[occasional verbal flourishes Hal's — HJI]. The formula's also provable by the Extreme Value Theorem, which the EV Theorem itself has a proof
that's just about the biggest Unit-twisting bitch in the whole of applied differentiation, but I see Hal grimacing, so we'll keep it compact, even
though this whole thing is real interesting if you're interested and whatnot.
Say you've got a Combatant and a record of his past GNP/Military // Military/Nuke ratios. We want to give the Combatant the like exact average
of all the past megatonnages he's gotten in the past. The exact average is called the 'Mean Value,' which ought to give us a bit of a giggle, given
the hostility of the context here.
So then but let A stand for the Mean Value of a Combatant's constantly fluctuating ratio and so constantly fluctuating initial megatonnage. We
want to find A and give the Combatant exactly A megatons. How to do it's pretty elegant, and all you need for it is two pieces of data: the most his
ratio's ever been and the least it's ever been. These two datums [sic] are called the Extreme Values of the cn-n function for which A's the Mean
Value, by the way.
So then but so let / be a continuous non-negative function (meaning the ratio) on the interval [a, b] (meaning the difference between the least
the ratio's ever been and the most it's ever been and whatnot). Are these little explanations aggravating [sic]? Inc's looking at me like butter would
freeze. It's hard to know what to assume v. what to explain. I'm trying to be as clear as I can be [sic]. And now he's looking at me like I'm
digressing. Why don't you just pass that certain item back on over here, Inculator. But so we've got / and we've got [a, bj. And let r and R be the
smallest and biggest values of the function /(x) on the interval [a, b]. So now check out the rectangles of height r and height R over the interval [a,
b] in the diagram marked let's go ahead and mark it say PEEMSTER:
PEEMSTER
The Mean Value we're after, A, can now be expressed integrally as the Area of some intermediate-type rectangle whose height is taller [sic] than
r but shorter [sic] than R. From here on it's just tit. We need a constant. You always need a constant. Inc's nodding his head sarcastically like I
think I'm saying something sage. Let d be any constant, for computational reasons the closer to 1 the better, so like let d be the size of Hal's Unit.
Hal Incandenza's Addendum: In meters.
Michael Pemulis's Resumption: Very funny. So now, just looking at the wicked-illuminating PEEMSTER diagram above, you can see that this Area
we want:
is going to be bigger than the area of the rectangle with height r and but also smaller than the area of the rectangle with height R. Pure mental
reason [sic] compels, then, that [sic] somewhere in there between r and R there's an exact height, f(x'), such that (I have to say that every
demonstration of a stats theorem has Let and such that in them, mostly I think because they're so wicked much fun to say) such that the rectangle
of this height f(x') over the whole interval [a, b] has exactly the Area we want, the Mean Value of all the historic [sic] expenditure-ratios; in other
words in abstracted form:
where (b — a) is just the size of the interval. And so have a look at the revealing diagram labeled HALSADICK:
This fucking works. You don't have to crunch out a whole new ratio each time for each Combatant to dole out the ordnance. You just skim the
highest and lowest ratios off the Eschaton records the Beanie-man keeps on each time. This is wicked. This is fucking elegant. Note that (Note
that's another like compulsitory [sic] term) note that the Combatant's Mean-Value megatonnage will change, slightly, from Eschaton to Eschaton,
exactly the way a like hitter's season average will alter just a bit from at-bat to at-bat, depending integrally on what he delivered on his last trip to 

the plate and whatnot. Note also that you can use this Mean-Value time-saver with anything that varies within a (definable) set of boundaries and
whatnot — like any line, or a tennis court's boundaries, or like maybe say a certain drug's urine-level range between Clean and Royally Pinched. As
a like exercise, if you're interested, play three hours of high-level competitive jr. top-level [sic] tennis and then calculate the Mean Value of the
ratios of first serves to appearances at net and appearances at net to points won; for a serve-and-volleyer, this is how to tell how serve-dependent
his match-performance is. DeLint does this kind of exercise every morning sitting on the can. It's going to be interesting to see if [sic] Hal, who
thinks he's just too sly trying to outline Eschaton in the 3rd-person tense [sic] like some jowly old
Eschatologist with leather patches on his elbows [sic], if Inc can transpose [sic?] the math here without help from his Mumster. Later. P.S. Allston
Rules.
124 Both EndStat and Mathpak are registered trademarks of Aapps Inc., itself now a division of InterLace TelEntertainment.
125 Plastic-mesh laundry baskets take two hands to carry and keep you from being able to dribble up more balls with your stick's face; the castoff janitorial buckets are the size of like a middle-size wastebasket, but they have a sturdy steel pail-type handle, and their hard-polymer
composition makes for lasting wear. It was into just such a bucket that Pemulis threw up before his kind of suspicious V.D. down at Port
Washington.
(Various gear-companies sell various specially designed ball receptacles with names like 'Ball-Hopper' and 'Ball-Bank' — the general Academy
consensus is these are for dilettantes and pussies.)
126 It being well-nigh impossible to keep the present from infecting even a playful and childlike Historical Consciousness, Canadians often end up
playing picayune but villainous roles in Eschatonic TRIGSITs.
127 A lot of these little toss-ins and embellishments are Inc amusing himself, not Otis's TRIGSIT, which is 100% all biz.
P.S. Wolf-Spiders Ruleth the Land.
128 Most Valuable Lobber. 129 M. Pemulis is, in the best Allston MA tradition, a good friend and a bad-news enemy, and even E.T.A.s who don't like him are careful not to do
or even say anything that might call for score-settling, because Pemulis is a thoroughgoing chilled-revenge gourmet, and is not one bit above
dosing someone's water-jug or voltaging their doorknob or encoding something horrid in your E.T.A. med-files or dickying with the mirror over the
bureau in the little recessed part of your subdorm room so that when you look in the mirror in the A.M. to comb or tend to a blackhead or
something you see something staring back at you that you'll never entirely get over, which is what took over two years to finally happen to M. H.
Penn, who afterward wouldn't say what he'd seen but stopped shaving altogether and, it's agreed, has never been quite himself since. 130 Pemulis doesn't actually literally say 'breath and bread.’ 131 Before Boston Groups' regular speaker meetings there are often closed, half-hour Beginners' Discussion Meetings, where newcomers can share
their cluelessness, weakness, and despair in a warm supportive private atmosphere. 132 The word Group in AA Group is always capitalized because Boston AA places enormous emphasis on joining a Group and identifying yourself as
a member of this larger thing, the Group. Likewise caps in like Commitment, Giving It Away, and c.
_ Gately's little bedroom in the damp Ennet House basement is plastered all over every part of every wall that's dry enough to take tape with
cutout Scotch-taped photos of all sorts of variegated and esoteric celebrities past and present, which are varied as residents throw magazines into
the E.M.P.H.H. dumpsters and are frequently selected because the celebrities are somehow grotesque; it's a kind of compulsive habit held over
from Gately's fairly dysfunctional North Shore childhood, when he'd been a clipping and taping fiend.
_ And if you're brand-new, as in like your first three days, and so on mandatory nonpunitive House Restriction — like veiled Joelle van Dyne, who
entered the House just today, 11/8, Interdependence Day, after the E.R. physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital who last night had pumped
her full of Inderal3
 and nitro had looked upon her unveiled face and been deeply affected, and had taken a special interest, a consequence of which
after Joelle regained consciousness and speech had involved placing a call to Pat Montesian, whose paralyzying alcoholic stroke the physician had
treated in this very same E.R. almost seven years before, and in whose case he'd also taken a special interest and had followed, such that he was
now a personal friend of the sober Pat M.'s and sat honorarily on Ennet House's Board of Directors, so that his call to Pat's home on Saturday night
had gotten Joelle into the House on the spot, as of Interdependence Day A.M.'S discharge from B&W, leap-frogging literally dozens of waiting-list
people and putting Joelle into Ennet House's intensive program of residential treatment literally before she even knew what was happening, which
in retrospect might have been lucky — if you're this new you're actually not supposed ever to leave the Staffer's sight, though in practice this rule
gets suspended when you have to go to the ladies' room and the Staffer's male, or vice versa.
a. Propranolol hydrochloride, Wyeth-Ayerst, a beta-blocking antihypertensive.
_ A conviction common to all who Hang In with AA, after a while, and abstracted in the slogan 'My Best Thinking Got Me Here.’
_ Trade-name Fastin, ®SmithKline Beecham Inc., a low-level 'drine not unlike Tenu-ate, though w/ more associated tooth-grinding.
_ None of these are Don Gately's terms.
_ In e.g. Boston: join Group, get Active, get phone #s, get sponsor, audio-call sponsor daily, hit meetings daily, pray like fiend for release from
Disease, don't kid self that you can still buy rodneys in liquor stores or date your dealer's niece or think for a second you can still hang out in bars
playing darts and just drinking Millennial Fizzies or vanilla Yoo-Hoos, etc.
_ Volunteer Counselor Eugenio ('Gene') M. favors entomologic tropes and analogies, which is especially effective with brand-new residents fresh
from subjective safaris through the Kingdom of Bugs.
_ Don G.'s North Shore's vulgate signifier for trite/banal is: limp.
_ Likewise that his private term for blacks is niggers, which is unfortunately still all he knows.
_ The speaker doesn't actually use the terms thereon, most assuredly, or operant lim-bic system, though she really had, before, said chordate
phylum.
_ Sic.
134 E.g. see Ursula Emrich-Levine (University of California-Irvine), 'Watching Grass Grow While Being Hit Repeatedly Over the Head With a Blunt
Object: Fragmentation and Stasis in James O. Incandenza's Widower, Fun with Teeth, Zero-Gravity Tea Ceremony, and Pre-Nuptial Agreement of
Heaven and Hell,' Art Cartridge Quarterly, vol. Ill, nos. 1-3, Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken. 135 TRANSCRIPT-FRAGMENT FROM INTERVIEW SERIES FOR PUTATIVE
MOMENT MAGAZINE SOFT PROFILE ON PHOENIX CARDINAL
PROFESSIONAL PUNTER O. J. INCANDENZA, BY PUTATIVE MOMENT
MAGAZINE SOFT-PROFILE-WRITER HELEN STEEPLY, 3 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U. 'Q.’
'Well, there are odd sorts of consolations in having somebody go progressively bats in front of your eyes, such as for example sometimes The
Mad Stork would go off on things in sort of a funny way. We always thought he was funny a good bit of the time.
'You've got to remember he came at entertainment more from an interest in lenses and light. Most arty directors I think get more abstract as
they go on. With him it was the opposite. A lot of his funniest stuff was very abstract. Are those earrings real copper? Can you wear real copper?’
•Q.’
'You've got to remember that he came out of all these old artish directors that were really "ne pas a la mode" anymore by the time he broke in,
not just Lang and Bresson and Deren but the anti-New Wave abstracters like Frampton, wacko Nucks like Godbout, anticonfluential directors like
Dick and the Snows who not only really belonged in a quiet pink room somewhere but were also self-consciously behind the times, making all sorts 

of heavy art-gesture films about film and consciousness and isness and diffraction and stasis et cetera. Most extremely beautiful women Pve ever
met complain of getting a sort of itchy green crust when they wear real copper. So the tenure-jockeys and critics who were hailing this millennial
new Orthochromatic Neorealism thing as the real new avant-garde thing were getting tenure by blasting Dick and Godbout and the flying Snow
Brothers and The Stork for trying to be avant-garde, when really they were self-consciously trying to be more like après-garde. I never did get
straight on what Orthochromatic means, but it was very trendy. But The Mad Stork talked a lot about intentional atavism and retrogradism and
stasis. Plus the academics who hated him hated the artificial sets and the chiaroscuro lighting, which the Stork had a total fetish for weird lenses
and chiaroscuro.
'After the thing about the Medusa and the Odalisque came out, and The Joke, and the film-establishment theory-queers were holding their noses
and saying Incandenza's still mired in this late-century self-referencing unentertaining formalism and unrealistic abstraction, after a while Himself,
The Stork, in his own progressively bats way, decided to get revenge. He planned a lot of it out at McLean Hospital, which's out in Belmont, which
is where Himself had almost his own private reserved room, by then. He made up a genre that he considered the ultimate Neorealism and got
some film-journals to run some proc-lamatory edictish things he wrote about it, and he got Duquette at M.I.T. and a couple other younger tenurejockeys who were in on it to start referring and writing little articles in journals and quarterlies about it and talking at art openings and avant-garde
theater and film openings, feeding it into the grapevine, hailing some new movement they called Found Drama, this supposedly ultimate
Neorealism thing that they all declared was like the future of drama and cinematic art, etc.
'Because I'm thinking if you like copper stuff and little Aztec suns there's a small place down in Tempe where I know the owner and he has some
incredible little copper pieces we could parp down and have you look at. My own theory is it takes an incredible natural complexion to be able to
wear the baser metals, though it might just be an allergy-thing, the way some women react and some don't.’
'Q.’
'What Found Drama was — and you've got to keep in mind that Duquette and a Brandeis critic named like Posener who was in on the revenge
each got a mammoth grant for this, and The Mad Stork got two smaller ones somewhere, grants, to go cross-country to graduate film programs
giving turgid theoretical deadly-serious lectures on this Found Drama, and then they'd come back up home to Boston and The Stork and the couple
critics would lay up drunk and invent new Found-Drama theoretical lectures and chortle and laugh till there was evidence it was time for Himself to
go back to detox again.’
'Q.’
'Like a family nickname. Hal and I either called him Himself or The Sad Stork. The Moms was the first to say Himself, which I think is a Canadian
thing. Hal mostly said Himself. God knows what Mario used to call him. Who knows. I said Mad, The Mad Stork.’
'Q.’
'No see there weren't any real cartridges or pieces of Found Drama. This was the joke. All it was was you and a couple cronies like Leith or
Duquette got out a metro Boston phone book and tore a White Pages page out at random and thumbtacked it to the wall and then The Stork
would throw a dart at it from across the room. At the page. And the name it hit becomes the subject of the Found Drama. And whatever happens
to the protagonist with the name you hit with the dart for like the next hour and a half is the Drama. And when the hour and a half is up, you go
out and have drinks with critics who like chortlingly congratulate you on the ultimate in Neorealism.’
'Q.’
'You do whatever you want during the Drama. You're not there. Nobody knows what the name in the phone book's doing.’
'Q.’
'The joke's theory was there's no audience and no director and no stage or set because, The Mad Stork and his cronies argued, in Reality there
are none of these things. And the protagonist doesn't know he's the protagonist in a Found Drama because in Reality nobody thinks they're in any
sort of Drama.’
'Q.’
'Almost nobody. That's a very good point. Almost nobody. I'm going to take a chance and just tell you I'm a little bit intimidated here.’
'Q.’
'I'm worried this might sound sexist or offensive. I've been around very, very beautiful women before, but I'm not accustomed to them being
really acute and sharp and politically savvy and penetrating and multilevelled and intimidatingly intelligent. I'm sorry if that sounds sexist. It's
simply been my experience. I'll go ahead and simply tell you the truth and take the chance that you might think I'm some kind of stereotypical
Neanderthal athlete or sexist clown.’
'Q.’
'Absolutely no, no, nothing got recorded or filmed. Reality being camera-free, being the joke I'll again underline. Nobody even knew what the guy
in the phone book had been doing, nobody knew what the Drama had been. Although they liked to speculate when they'd go out after the time
was up to have drinks and pretend to review how the Drama went. Himself usually imagined the guy was sitting there watching cartridges, or
counting some pattern in his wallpaper, or looking out the window. It wasn't impossible maybe even the name you hit with the dart was somebody
dead in the last year and the phone book hadn't caught up, and here was this guy who was dead and just a random name in a phone book and the
subject of what people for a few months — until Himself couldn't keep a straight face anymore or had had enough revenge on the critics, because
the critics were hailing — not just the critics in on the joke, but actual tenure-jockeys who were getting tenure to assess and dismiss and hail —
they were hailing this as the ultimate in avant-garde Neorealism, and saying maybe The Stork deserved reappraisal, for a Drama with no audience
and oblivious actors who might have moved away or died. A certain Mad Stork got two grants out of it and later made a lot of enemies because he
refused to give them back after the hoax was like unveiled. The whole thing was kind of bats. He spread the grant money for Found Drama around
a couple of local improvisation companies. It's not like he kept the money. It's not like he needed it. I think he especially liked the idea that the star
of the show might have already moved away or recently died and there was no way to know.’ 136 See for example Incandenza's first narrative collaboration w/ Infernatron-Canada, the animated Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell,
made at the acknowledged height of his anticonfluential period — B.S. Private Release, L.M.P. 137 The festivity here being due largely to the fact that both he and Gerhardt Schtitt returned from putting on little E.T.A. presentations at various
tennis clubs too late to have been informed about the degenerative Eschaton free-for-all and serious Lord-, Ingersoll-, and Penn-injuries, both
trainer Barry Loach and prorector Rik Dunkel having told Avril, and Schtitt to be told by whichever of Nwangi and deLint first works up the pluck,
and the issue of telling Tavis being as would be S.O.P. left up to Avril, who will — because Tavis has already lost a certain amount of sleep
preparing emotionally and rhetorically for the impending arrival of putative Moment journalist 'Helen' Steeply, whom he's been convinced to let onto
the grounds by Avril's argument that the Moment office promises the profile's subject and inevitable hype involve only an E.T.A. alumnus (Avril
neglected to tell Tavis she was pretty sure it was Orin) and that a certain amount of soft-news-publicity for E.T.A.-qua-institution couldn't hurt in
either the fundraising- or the recruiting-goodwill department — who will almost certainly wait and tell Tavis (who's in far too festive a mood to
notice three or four younger kids ominously absent from the supper and gala) in the morning, if the poor man's to have a chance at any real sleep
at all (also giving Avril time to figure out how upperclass heads can roll, as of course they must, given chaos and season-ending injuries under the
direct gaze of designated Big Buddies, without those heads including that of Hal, who — unlike, thank God, John — was identified at the scene with
that Pemulis person). Hal can tell just by the dining hall's emotional gestalt that neither Schtitt nor Tavis knows about the Eschaton, but the Moms
is next to impossible to read, and Hal won't know whether she's been told of the debacle until he is able to pry Mario away from Anton (The
Boogerman') Doucette and get the Moms-skinny right from Booboo direct, after the film.
138 Troeltsch wears an InterLace Sports baseball cap, and Keith Freer a two-horned operatic Viking helmet along with his leather vest, and Fran
Unwin a fez, and fierce little Josh Gopnik the white beanie with the dirty cart-wheel-track across it from this afternoon's debacle. Tex Watson wears
a tan Stetson with a really high crown, and little Tina Echt an outlandishly large plaid beret that covers half her little head, the Vaught twins a 

freakish bowler with two domes and one brim, Stephan Wagenknecht a plastic sallet — this is just scanning at random; the headwear goes on and
on, a whole topography of hats — and Carol Spodek a painter's cap with the name of a paint company, and Ber-nadette Longley a calpac that
obstructs the view of people behind her. Duncan van Slack in a harquebus w/ buckle. Should probably also mention Avril's wearing a Fukoama
microfiltration mask, it being way too early in the day for supper for her anyway. Ortho Stice wears a calotte and the U.S.S. Millicent Kent a slanted
noir-style fedora and Tall Paul Shaw, way in back, a conquistadorial helmet and escudo, and Mary Esther Thode a plain piece of cardboard propped
on her head that says HAT. Idris Arslanian's spectacular bearskin shako is held in place with a chinstrap. 139 (I.e. silk-suited Vocalists snapping their fingers and telling their casino audiences they were beautiful human beings and but when it comes time
to actually start crooning the Vocalists' lips move but nothing Velvety emerges, all sound withheld, a Job Action, rendered even more chilling by the
skill with which the Frankies and Tonies lip-synch to utter silence — and the way the beautiful casino audiences, hit someplace they lived,
somehow, clearly, responded with near-psychotic feelings of deprivation and abandonment, became a mob, almost tore lounges down, upended
little round tables, threw free ice-intensive drinks, audiences in their well-heeled majority behaving like dysfunctional or inadequately nurtured
children.)
140 The years right around the millennium being a terrible U.S. time for waste, then, ozone-wise and landfill-wise and shoddily-disposed-of-dioxinswise, w/ DT-cycle annular fusion at the stage where they had the generating-massive-amounts-of-high-R-waste part down a lot more pat than the
consuming-the-waste-in-a-nuclear-process-whose-own-waste-was-the-fuel-for-the-first-waste-intensive-phase-of-the-circle-of-reactions part. 141 Actual term employed is downer-type. 142 A lightless and eye-averted late-night weight room being not exactly a last-name type of place. 143 Sometimes it's as straightforward as directing someone to give her fiance the roundhouse forehand slap she's been secretly aching to give him
ever since he'd once teased her about putting some Band-Aids on those insect bites on her chest. 144 = the anticoníluental Cage HI — Free Show; q.v. Note 24 supra. 145 The Medusa wears a kind of chain-mail backless evening gown and Hellenic sandals, the Odalisque a Merry Widow. 146 Mario's speculative puppet-show comes down maybe a little hard on the implication that former O.C.D.-support-group-sponsor and later Clean
U.S. Party campaign manager and now O.U.S. Chief Rodney P. Tine is the real dark force behind Reconfiguration and New England's de-mapping
and the transfer of the Great Concavity, that Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner was and remains a slightly unbent but basically genial and befuddled
figurehead, content mostly to twirl his mike and immolate his epidermis so long as his office is clean and his food's pre-tasted, and that it's actually
been Tine behind C.U.S.P.'s geopolitical anality and Experialism, and that Tine was essentially pulling Gentle's strings all through the Concavity
Cabinet and subsequent Reconfiguration and mass relocation. This is, in point of fact, simply one theory and direction for finger-pointing, and tends
to founder on the unexplained issue of just what would motivate Tine to undertake all this anyway, since his own O.C.D. has been documented to
be ruminative rather than hygienic, not to mention the fact that he's hopelessly smitten with the Québecer Luria P------. J. O. Incandenza's own
ONANtiad, being an adult production, was considerably more restrained and ambiguous on the whole Tine-as-dark-force issue. 147 An oblique little in-tribute from Mario to the Moms, at which line every year Avril at the Headmaster's Table takes off the witch's hat and holds it
by the brim and whips it around in an enthused circle three times over her head. 148 The umpires on the U.S. junior tour tend to be retired high-school principals whose only renumeration is the chance to exercise again some
slight authority over the young.
149 Clipperton eventually perfecting the toss-with-the-same-hand-you-serve-with maneuver pioneered by South African doubles specialist Colin van
der Hingle after a hideous turbo-prop-charter-aircraft-propeller accident took off his right arm, ear, and sideburn in only the second year of his
Show career, in Durban. 150 Certain other and doubtless really disturbing footage of Clipperton's suicide still exists, having — with perhaps half a dozen other emotionally
or professionally sensitive cartridge-Masters — been designated Unviewable by testatory codicil and, as far as either Hal or Orin knows, enclosed in
some sort of vault-apparatus that only Himself's attorneys and maybe Avril have access to. As far as can be determined, only those lawyers, Avril,
Disney Leith, and perhaps Mario know that the cartridges were, in fact, along with his case of special lenses, interred right there with J. O.
Incandenza's dead bodya
 — yickily enough — there having been room in the bronze casket only because Incandenza's extreme height dictated a
casket-size that his thin physique didn't nearly fill the width and depth of.
a. (in the Mondragon-family-plot area of Le Cimetière du St. Adalbert in the now over-lush potato-growing country off Provincial Autoroute 204 in
L'Islet Province, Quebec, just over the border from what is now the eastern Concavity, such that the funeral had to be delayed and then rushed to
be fit in between annulation-cycles)
151 The other having been that predictive call for the catatonic hero, also for Ogilvie's Entertainment 2-termer. 152 Every Nielsen respondent seemed to respond with especial neural repulsion to one or another particular portrait. There was one of a woman
with every carpenter's tool known to God exiting her face. One of a young male with a spear of scarlet light through the right temple and coming
clear out the other side. A woman with her crown between the incisors of some sort of shark so huge it passes from view past the frame. A grandmotherly type with roses, human hands, a pencil, and other lush-type flora all coming serpentine out of her open skull's top. A head coming out in
a long string from a throttled tube of paste; a Talmudic scholar bearded in needles; a Baconian pope with his hat on fire. Three or four dental ones
that sent people scrambling to the bathroom to floss themselves bloody. The painting that had particularly nailed nine-year-old Hal and had had
him popping Nunhagen compulsively until his ears started ringing and didn't stop for almost a week had been of a deeply parlor-tanned and
vaguely familiar upscale male, a disembodied fist yanking a handful of brains out of the guy's left ear while the guy's overhealthy face, like most of
the ad's faces, wears a queer look of intense unhappy concentration, one more of like brooding than conventionally expressive of pain. 153 NoCoat Inc. ended up occupying the #346 spot vacated by Hoechst's CBS, Hal noted with surprisingly little irony. 154 Granted that this stuff is all grossly simplified in Hal's ephebic account; Lace-Forché and Veals are in fact transcendent geniuses of a particularly
complex right-time-and-place sort, and their appeals to an American ideology committed to the appearance of freedom almost unanalyzably
compelling.
155 Granted, pace critics, this was partly to forestall A.C.D.C.'s apellate-court claims that InterLace was basically hopping up and down on the B.S.
1890 Sherman Act with spike heels.
156 'Reduced Instruct-Set Computers,' descendents of the IBM/Apple 'Power PCs,' with mainframe-caliber response-time and .25 terabytes of DRAM
and numerous expansion-slots for various killer apps.
157 A couple of Incandenza's more accessible early documentaries were bought by Inter-Lace on a distribution-factored contingency basis, but
except for a flat PBS-ish one on the lay priciples of DT-annulation they never brought Meniscus/Latrodectus more than a fraction of the interest on
the interest from Himself's rearview-mirror fortune. InterLace ended up optioning rights to only a couple of his higherbrow productions for its
'Howls from the Margin' low-volume-expectation product-line during Himself's lifetime; the bulk of his stuff didn't make any ILT menus until after
his untimely death.
158 It didn't do J. Gentle F.C.'s original grass-roots-intensive campaign a whole lot of good around ultra-liberal Enfield that one of his earliest signcarrying faithful had been E.T.A.'s own Gerhardt Schtitt, who politically listed so far to starboard that even people without watches looked at their
watches and referred vaguely to just-recalled appointments whenever Schtitt's eyes got a certain particular navy-blue cast and he uttered any one
of such terms as America, decadence, State, or Law; but Mario I. was pretty much the only one clued in to the fact that Schtitt's attraction to
Gentle had more to do with Schtitt's take on tennis than anything else: the Coach was swept away with the athleto-Wagnerian implications of
Gentle's proposals for waste, this business of sending from yourself what you hope will not return. 159 Triaminotetralin, a synthesized hallucinogen whose high transdermal bioavailability makes it a popular ingredient in the 'Happy Patches' so
prevalent in the American West and Southwest of Subsidized Time — Pharmochemical Quarterly 17, 18 (Spring, Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar)
provides a detailed account of the synthesis and transdermal physiochemistry of aminotetralins in general.

160 Québecois French: 'working up steam.’ 161 'Homestyle. Ready to Serve.’ 162 'Pursuit of happiness.’ 163 Q.v. Note 304 sub. 164 'Absolutely no bonking,' presumably. 165 The both-hands-full logistics of which are hard to envision, but realism wasn't really the point of the image for the bitter Brigade boys. 166 It's also where Mario's most derivative of Himself, whose own ONANtiad was more centrally concerned with doomed high-office claymation
romance than with political comment, though the love thing in Incandenza Sr.'s film had concerned not Tine and a Québecois fatale but an alleged
doomed and unconsummated affair between President J. Gentle and the equally hygiene-and-germ-obsessed wife of Canada's 'Minister of Environment and Resource-Development Enterprises,' the affair presented as doomed and unconsummated because the Minister hires a malevolent young
Canadian Candida albicans specialist to induce in his wife a severe and more or less permanent yeast infection, driving both wife and Gentle to
ardent-desire-v.-hygienic-neurosis breakdowns during which the wife throws herself across the tracks in front of a Québecois bullet-train and Gentle
decides to exact his revenge on a macrocartographic scale. The ONANtiad was not Him-self's strongest effort by a long shot, and pretty much
everybody around E.T.A. agrees that Mario's own Reconfiguration-explanation-parody is funnier and more accessible than Himself's, if also a bit
heavier-handed.
167 The officially spun term for making Canada take U.S. terrain and letting us dump pretty much everything we don't want onto it is Territorial
Reconfiguration. Great Concavity and Grand Convexité are more like U.S./Canadian street argot that got adopted and genericized by the media. 168 A more abstract but truer epigram that White Flaggers with a lot of sober time sometimes change this to goes something like: 'Don't worry
about getting in touch with your feelings, they'll get in touch with you.’
169 Presumably North Shore AA meetings, but Gately never recollects hearing the word AA; all he remembers from the time is just 'Meetings' and a
Diagnosis he'd construed as chivalric.
170 But Avril had gotten former M.I.T. #1 Men's Singles Corbett Thorp to drive Mario down to V.F. Rickey's cerebral Student Union thing, where
Thorp used his old student I.D. (thumb over expiration date) to get them past the Security lady at the Rectus Bulbi and down to the YYY studio's
freezing pink basement, where the only person who didn't talk like an angry cartoon character, a severely carbuncular man at the engineer's board,
would by way of comment point only at a tripartite onionskin screen that stood folded beneath a handless wall-clock, possibly signifying that no
hiatus could be all that long if the absent party hadn't taken her trusty screen. Mario hadn't had any idea M.P.'d used a screen, on-air. That's when
he'd gotten agitated.
171 Corbett Thorp's sobriquet among the less kind kids is 'Th-th-th-th.’ 172 Known also sometimes as 'Pukers.’ 173 The dull-metal Kenkle & Brandt kind, not the white plastic industrial-solvent buckets associated with Eschaton and yesterday's debacle. 174 Moving fast in one direction and having the ball hit someplace behind you and having to try to stop and reverse direction very quickly is known
also as a 'wrong-foot' or 'contre-pied,' and it results in a fair number of injuries to junior knees and ankles; ironically enough it's Hal, since the
explosion, who's known as the real E.T.A. master of placement and opponent-yanking-around and the old contre-pied. Also a quick insertion that
Dennis van der Meer, father of Side-to-Sides, was a Dutch immigrant low-level pro who became a major pro coach and tennis-education-theory
guru, on the same level with like a Harry Hopman or Vic Braden. 175 Stice's legendarily dysfunctional parents are in Kansas, but he's got two vaguely lesbianic maiden aunts or great-aunts or something up in
Chelsea who keep bringing him foods the staff won't let him eat.
176 Serious juniors never pick up tennis balls with their hands. Males tend to bend down and dribble the balls up with the face of their stick; there
are various little substyles of this. Females and some younger males less into bending stand and trap the ball between their shoe and racquet and
bring their foot up in a quick little twitch, the stick bringing the ball up with it. Males who do this trap the ball against the inside of the shoe, while
females trap the ball against the outside of the shoe, which looks a bit more feminine. Reverse-snobbism at E.T.A. has never reached the point of
people bending way down and picking balls up manually, which, like wearing a visor, is regarded as the true sign of the novice or hack. 177 N.b.: Europeans and Australians refer to overheads as 'overhands,' while South Africans sometimes also call them 'pointers.’ 178 The budget doesn't allow for communal suppers on weekends, and the weekly menu has below SATR and SUND the word forage, which with a
certain percentage of this fall's residents ends up being literal.
179 Expanding where appropriate on Note 12: Demerol is meperidine hydrochloride, a Schedule C-II synthetic narcotic, available from Sanofi
Winthrop Laboratories in banana-flavored syrup; 25, 50, 75, and 100 mg./ml. cartridge-needle units; and (most popular w/ D.W.G.) the 50 and 100
mg. tablets known up on the Shore as Pebbles and Barn-Bam, respectively. (DôcD of course means Drunk and Disorderly, and P.D. and P.O.
respectively mean Public Defender and Probation Officer or 'Probie,' by the way.)
180 If somebody dies during the commission of a felony, even from so much as a defective pacemaker or a lightning bolt, the felon's facing Murder2 and unbargainable time, at least in MA, a ghastly statutory provision as far as most active drug addicts are concerned, since even though they're
not violence-oriented, efficiency and safety-consciousness are not exactly hallmarks of addiction-motivated crimes, which tend to be impulsive and
fuzzily thought out at best.
181 Also known as a case being 'Blue-Filed,' meaning put in a kind of judicial limbo for a specified period, and reopenable ('Red-Filed') at any time
P.O.s and Boards decide the defendant isn't making 'satisfactory progress.’ 182 She didn't literally say shitstorm. 183 Gately didn't get any of this from Pat Montesian; it's mostly like Ennet House mythology, with some hard facts from Gene M. and Calvin Thrust,
both of whom think Pat M. just about hung the moon.
184 A totally different thing than Volkmann's contracture (cf. Note 115). 185 Which he had to make a fucking Financial Amend to have fixed, which luckily semi-Crocodile Sven R. was a refinisher and voluntarily fixed the
crack with some weird fake-wood-resin, so Gately only had to pay for the tube of fake-wood-resin instead of a whole new institutional table. 186 E.g. 'Kid, sobriety's like a hard-on: the minute you get it, you want to fuck with it'; they'd rattle this kind of stuff off; they had a million of them. 187 (Never yet having checked the side of a box of pasta for possible directions.) 188 Project MK-Ultra, U.S.-C.I.A. inception 4/3/B.S.53: 'The central activity of the MK-Ultra program was conducting and funding brainwashing
experimentation with dangerous drugs and other techniques [sic] performed on persons who were not volunteers by C.I.A. Technical Service
Division employees, agents, and contractors.' — Civil Action #80-3163, Orlikow et al. v. United States of America, B.S. 1980. 189 Alprazolam, Upjohn Inc.'s big hat-throw into the benzodiazepine ring, only Schedule C-IV but wickedly dependence-producing, w/ severe
unpleasant abrupt-withdrawal penalties.
190 Ennet House near-alumnus Chandler Foss's analysis, which you can bet was developed outside Gately's earshot. 191 Another vestige: Gately still always automatically notices bars and mesh, the foil and little magnetic contacts of residential alarms, plungerbuttons on the inside of hinges, etc.
192 Local argot for Storrow Drive, which runs along the Charles from the Back Bay out to Alewife, with multiple lanes and Escherian signs and Onand Off-ramps within car-lengths of each other and no speed limit and sudden forks and the overall driving experience so forehead-drenching it's in
the metro Police Union's contract they don't have to go anywhere near it.
193 Whether English misspelling or Québecois solecism, sic. 194 Jolly-Jolt® hand-buzzers, Whoopi-Daisy® (celebrity-endorsed) cushions, Blammo® cigars, Oh, Waiter® plastic-ice-cubes-w/-fly, I See
London!® X-ray specs, etc. usually just trucked over, along w/ the Saprogenic Greetings® treacly greeting and postcards, from the Waltham
facilities of Acme Inc., a.k.a. 'The Acme Family of Gags 'N Notions, Pre-Packaged Emotions, Jokes and Surprises and Wacky Disguises,' at a 

substantial and politically motivated discount, seeing that the company's owned by the Quebec-sympathetic shadowy Albertan mogul who'd been
such a force in the anti-broadcast A.C.D.C., and who over a decade back had exploited the then-U.S.-owned then-Acme's severe PR and cash-flow
problems right after the serial Blammo Cigar tragedies to move in and hostile t/o the firm for about 30% of its real worth.
195 Unknown to the hapless Antitois, this doesn't mean they're necessarily blank. Copy-Capable cartridges, a.k.a. Masters, require a 585-r.p.m.-drive
viewer or TP to run, and on a conventional 450-drive decline to give off so much as static, appearing rather empty and blank. Q.v. here Note 301
sub.
196 Being out of the sociolinguistic loop, L.A. has no way of knowing that 'To hear the squeak' is itself the very darkest of contemporary Canada's
euphemisms for sudden and violent de-mapping.
197 L.A. having a pretty good intuition that the lone communicable 'va chier, putain!' wouldn't be a good idea in this context. 198 From Ch. 16, 'The Awakening of My Interest in Annular Systems,' in The Chill of Inspiration: Spontaneous Reminiscences by Seventeen Pioneers
of DT-Cycle Lithiumized Annular Fusion, ed. Prof. Dr. Günther Sperber, Institut fur Neutronenphysik und Reak-tortechnik, Kernforschungszentrum
Karlsruhe, U.R.G., available in English in ferociously expensive hardcover only, © Y.T.M.P. from Springer-Verlag Wien NNY.
199 E.g.: Ted Schacht adjusting his wristbands and sash. Carol Spodek stretching for a volley at net, her whole body distended, face grim and full of
cords. An old one of Marlon Bain at the follow-through of a big forehand, a corona of sweat shimmering around him, his bigger arm crossed across
his throat. Ortho Stice doing a handstand. Yardguard gliding down through a low backhand. Wayne this summer sliding on Rome's fine clay, a red
cloud hiding everything below the knees. Pemulis and Stice standing cross-armed against desert light and a fence. Shaw without his silly wispy
pseudo-Newcombe mustache. The photos have been looked at so often they're pale. Hal at the height of his toss, knees more bent than he'd like.
Wayne holding up a silver plate. The European-contingent males three summers past all lined up outside a square van with its steering wheel on
the wrong side, somebody with either two or three fingers held up over Axford's head. Schtitt addressing kids you can only see the backs of. Todd
Possalthwaite shaking a small black kid's hand at net. Troeltsch pretending to interview Felicity Zweig. The Vaught twins sharing a foot-long frank
at a stand at the Bronx's U.S. Jr. Open. Todd Possalthwaite at the net with a P.W.T.A. kid. Every muscle in Amy Wingo's front leg ridged as she
gets a little ahead of herself on a backhand. On and on. They're not in a straight line; they're more like chaotically placed. Heath Pearson, former
tow-truck shareholder, now at Pepperdine, facing away from the camera, under Lung-light, running. The Palmer Academy courts looking cheesy in
the heat. A lot of the photos are stills from Mario. Peter Beak falling nastily after a stretch-volley, both feet off what looks like Longwood's synthetic
grass. The photos surrounded by locationless clouds and sky. Freer in the bleachers at Brisbane in thongs and a tank-top, giving the camera a
peace-sign. The Lung in mid-assembly with Pearson and Penn and Vandervoort and Mackey and the rest of that year's seniors out in the pavilion's
webbed chairs, feet up in the cold, kibbitzing Hal and Schacht and the other kids lugging parts. One of Mrs. Clarke's cooks in a hairnet mixing
something with an arm-sized pestle in a bowl she has to tilt to hold. None of Mario or Orin. A battalion of kids in sweats doing sprints up the hill in
deep snow, two or three well behind and ominously bent over. Some lighter-blue rectangles where pictures have been taken down and not yet
replaced. A shirtless Freer playing microtennis with Lori Clow. A close-up of bespectacled Gretchen Holt staring in disbelief at a linesman's call.
Wayne and a Manitoban in T-shirts with leaves on them, hands over their hearts, facing north. Kent Blott with a horrified boomerang mouth and his
nose a protrusion in the supporter fit over his ears and nose and Traub and Lord collapsing around him in either hilarity or horror. Hal and Wayne
at the net in doubles, both leaning way over left like the whole court's tilted.
200 Hal and Mario have long since had to accepta
 the fact that Avril, at 50+, is still endocrinologically compelling to males.
a. 'Accept' isn't the same as 'be crazy about,' of course. 201 As with the neuro-gastric thing, only Ted Schacht and Hal know that Pemulis's deepest dread is of academic or disciplinary expulsion and
ejection, of having to schlepp back down Comm. Ave. into blue-collar Allston diploma- and ticket-outless, and now in his final E.T.A. year the
dread's increased many-fold, and is one reason Pemulis takes such elaborate precautions in all extracurriculars — making a Substance-customer
explicitly suborn him, etc. — and is why Hal and Schacht presented him on his last birthday with the poster over Pemulis's room's console that has
a careworn large-crowned King sitting on his throne stroking his chin and brooding, with the caption: YES, I'M PARANOID — BUT AM I PARANOID
ENOUGH?
202 Though it's unmentioned, everyone in the waiting room except Ann Kittenplan is keenly aware that Lord and Postal Weight are Pemulis's
charges, Penn and Ingersoll Ax-handle's; plus that neither Struck nor Troeltsch seems to have been summoned for potential discipline. 203 Since tennis courts are laid side to side and played on by hard-hitting but fallible humans, errant shots are always going off sticks' frames and
net-posts and even fences and bouncing and rolling into other people's territory. In starting at usually the quarterfinal rounds of serious
tournaments there are ballboys to retrieve them. In early rounds and practice, though, the delicate etiquette is that you suspend play and get other
people's balls for them, if they come rolling across, and shoot them back over to the court of origin. The way to signal for this sort of help is to yell
'Sorry!' or 'A little help on Three?' or something. But both Hal and Axford seem constitutionally incapable of doing this, asking for help with errant
balls. They both have to hold everything and go and run all the way over to some other court, halting at each intervening court to wait for a point
to be finished, to get their own balls. It's a curious inability to request aid that no amount of negative reinforcement from Tex Watson or Aubrey
deLint can seem to correct.
204 Where it's a non-overhead run-back-to-the-baseline-after-an-offensive-lob-then-run-all - the - way - back - up - and - tap - the - netcord - with -
your - stick - j ust - as - Nwangi - or - Thode-hits-another-offensive-lob-over-your-head-you-have-to-run-back-and-get-successfully-back-or-theypile-extra-lobs-onto-your-regular-allotment pure pain-fest.
205 A Clipperton-level legend involves the now long-gone little E.T.A. who in Y.W.-Q.M.D. had called MA's Department of Social Services and
characterized disciplinary Pukers as child abuse, resulting in the appearance at the portcullis of two stitchy-mouthed and humorless D.S.S.-ladies
who hung creepily around all day and required Schtitt's actually confining Aubrey deLint to his room, so purply furious was deLint with the kid
who'd dropped the dime.
206 No clue. 207 Hal had missed out on the soft grass, clay, and Har-Tru surfaces of the Jr. Slams, because a singular disadvantage of attending a North
American academy is that O.N.A.N.T.A. rules for Jr. Slams permit just one entrant per academy in each age-division, and John Wayne got the nods. 208 The late J. O. Incandenza's Meniscus Optical Products Ltd.'s development of those weird wide-angle rear-view mirrors on the sides of
automobiles that so diminish the cars behind you that federal statute requires them to have printed right on the glass that Objects In Mirror Are
Closer Than They Appear, which little imprints Incandenza found so disconcerting that he was kind of shocked when U.S. automakers and
importers bought rights on the mirrors, way back, for Incandenza's first unsettling entrepreneurial payday — E.T.A.s like to postulate that the
mirrors had been inspired by the always-foreshortened Charles Tavis. 209 Extremely annoying host of InterLace Spontaneous-Dissemm. children's program. 210 ® CardioMed Fitness Products, a fourth-generation StairMasterish thing except set more to resemble a down-escalator somehow dickied to a
sadistically high number of r.p.m.s, so that the exerciser has to sort of run climbing for his life to avoid getting hurled backwards all the way across
the office by the machine, which is what accounts for the big square weight-room floor-mat attached to the cleared expanse of office wall opposite
the rear of the machine, which Tavis had moved up to from his StairMaster after a frightening cholesterol-count report, and had had kind of a tricky
time with at first, once requiring a back-brace.
211 The Satellite pro Hal'd gotten a set from, a barrel-chested Latvian who thought Hal's name was AIL 212 N.b. again that Marathe's native tongue is not good old contemporary idiomatic Parisio/European French but cont. id. Québecois French, which
is about on a par with Basque in terms of difficulty, being full of weird idioms and having both inflected and uninílected grammatical features, an
inbred and obstreperous dialect, and which in fact Steeply barely got an 'Acceptable' in, in U.S.O. technical-interview training in Vienna /
Falls Church VA, and which does not admit of easy coeval expression in English.
213 Viz. at the allusion to the supposed samizdateur's anticonfluential and meta-entertainmentish and hologram-intensive Medusa-v.-Odalisque 

thing, which in fact the play-within-film fight-scene part can be broken down into a series of what are called 'Fast Fourier Transforms,' though what
the hell 'ALGOL' is is anybody's guess, unless it's not an acronym but some actual Québecois term, 'I'algol,' which if so it isn't in any dictionaries or
on-line lexical sources anywhere in the 2nd or 3rd IL/IN Grid.
214 Q.v. William James on '. .. that latent process of unconscious preparation often preceding a sudden awakening to the fact that the mischief is
irretrievably done,' the line that actually snapped Lenz to what he was up to when he chanced to read it in a huge large-print edition he'd found
behind a bookshelf along the north wall of the Ennet living room of something called The Principles of Psychology with The Gifford Lectures on
Natural Religion, by William James (obviously), available in EZC large-font print from Microsoft/NAL-Random House-Ticknor, Fields, Little, Brown
and Co., © Y.T.M.P., a volume that's come to mean a great deal to Lenz. 215 ® The Mobil Chemical Co.'s Consumer Products Branch's Plastics Division, Pitts-ford NNY. 216 ® Ibid. 217 A.k.a. Haloperidol, McNeil Pharmaceutical, 5 mg./ml. pre-filled syringes: picture several cups of Celestial Seasonings' Cinnamon Soother tea
followed by a lead-filled sap across the back of the skull.
218 National Security Agency, absorbed w/ A.T.F. and D.E.A., C.I.A. and O.N.R. and Secret Service into the ambit of the Office of Unspecified
Services.
219 The A.A.O.A.A., Unspecified Services' most elite and least specific division, which on Hugh Steeply's latest field-assignment is paying his salary,
though his checks and alimony's garnishment are routed through something called the 'Foundation for Continental Freedom,' which one fervently
hopes is a shell/dummy.
220 Charlestown/Southie street term for meters. 221 Powdered vitamin B12, convincingly bitter and talc-textured, which Lenz has always preferred B12 to Manitol as a cut because Manitol gives him
this allergic thing where he got very tiny red bumps with weird pale caps on his fingertips. 222 Hydrolysis is the metabolic process by which organic cocaine's broken down into benzoylecgonine, methanol, ecgonine, and benzoic acid, and
one reason not everybody is wired to enjoy Crosbulation is that the process is essentially toxic and can yield unpleasant neurosomatic fallout in
certain systems: e.g. in Don Gately's neurosystem, spider angiomas and a tendency to pluck at the skin on the backs of his hands, due to which
tendency he's always loathed and hated coke and most cokeheads; in Bruce Green's system, binocular nystagmus and a walloping depression even
while the coke-high's still on that accounts for the tendency toward fits of weeping with his nystagmic face hidden in the crook of his big right arm;
in Ken Erdedy an unstoppable rhinorrhagia that sent him to the Emergency Room both times he ever did cocaine; in Kate Gompert blepharospecticity and now instant cerebral hemorrhage because she's on Parnate, an M. A.O.-inhibiting antidepressant; in Emil Minty a ballism so out-of-control
he snorted Bing only once. Hemispasms of the oral labia are a common effect of coke-hydrolysis, one mild enough so that people can get them and
still enjoy Bing very much; the spasming can range from a mild gnawing/writhing affect in Lenz, Thrale, Cortilyu, and Foss to an alternating series
of Edvard Munch-Jimmy Carter-Paliaccí-Mick Jagger-like expressive contortions so severe that everyone in a room except for them is embarrassed.
In former cokehead Calvin Thrust, hydrolysis had caused a priapism that led directly to his early choice of career. Randy Lenz also gets nystagmus,
but of the right eye only, as well as vascular constriction, diuresis extremus, phosphenism, compulsive tooth-grinding, megalomania, phobophobia,
euphoric recall, delusions of persecution and/or homicidal envy, sociosis, postnasal drip, a mild priapism that makes the diuresis a dicey and
gymnastic affair, occasional acne rosea and/or rhinophyma, and — especially if there's synergism from almost a whole pack of filterless Winstons
and four cups of nipple-hardeningly strong and alkaline B.Y.P. coffee — confabulation concurrent with a manic garrulousness sufficient to cause
lingual tendinitis, pulmonary phasece, and a complete inability to send from his presence anyone who seems at all willing to listen to him. 223 A.k.a. lignocaine, xylocaine-L, a diethylamino-oxylidide compound used as a dental and maxillofacial anesthetic, the world's best Bing-cut
because it numbs and produces a bitter drip just like the Bingster, and also even temporarily heightens the rush of LV. coke, though if it's 'based it
tastes nothing like oxidized coke, and it's also more expensive than Manitol or B12 and harder to get because it's prescription, meaning the
orthodontist was a very popular fellow with dealers indeed. 224 TRANSCRIPT-FRAGMENTS FROM INTERVIEW SERIES FOR PUTATIVE MOMENT MAGAZINE SOFT PROFILE ON PHOENIX
CARDINAL PROFESSIONAL PUNTER O. J. INCANDENZA, BY PUTATIVE MOMENT MAGAZINE SOFT-PROFILE WRITER
HELEN STEEPLY —NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U.
'I'm not going to talk about why I don't talk to the Moms anymore.' 'Q.' 'Or The Mad Stork's adventures in the mental-health community, either.’
'Q.’
'We're not off to a good start here, ma'am, no matter how lovely you're looking in that pantsuit.’
'Q.’
'Because the question doesn't mean anything is why. Insane is just like a catch-term, it doesn't describe anything, it isn't a reason for anything.
The Stork was a full-blown demented alcoholic for the last three years of his life, and he put his head in the microwave, and I think just in terms of
unpleasantness you'd have to be sort of insane to kill yourself in such a painful way. So but was he insane. In the last five years of his life he put
together a tennis academy and got together a national-caliber coaching staff and U.S.T.A. accreditation and sanction and multi-Grid funding and set
up the start of an endowment for E.T.A., and also came up with that new kind of window glass that doesn't fog or smudge from people touching it
or breathing on it and drawing little finger-oil faces on it, then sold it to Mitsubishi, and also managed the revenues from all his previous patents,
plus of course drank himself blind on a daily basis and then needed at least two hours to sit there naked under a scratchy blanket and shake, and
went around impersonating various kinds of health-care professionals during the periods he believed he was a health-care professional, from when
he had the delirium-tremen-type career delusions, and in his spare time made in-depth documentaries and a dozen art-films that people are still
writing doctoral theses on. So was he insane? It's true, the New Yorker guy, the film guy who replaced the guy who replaced Rafferty, what was
his name, it's true he kept saying the films were like the planet's most psychotic psyche working out its shit right there on the screen and asking
you to pay to watch him. But you have to remember that that guy got third-degree burned by the whole Found Drama scam. That guy was one of
the high-caliber critics who said in print that here Incandenza had put drama ahead three or four leaps in one visionary leap, and after The Stork
finally couldn't keep a straight face anymore and spilled the beans on NPR radio during a 'Fresh Air' dramaturgy-panel the New Yorker guy dropped
from critical sight for like a year and then when he came back he had it in for Himself in a very big way, which is understandable.’
'Q.’
'What I started to say is if quote unquote sources you cannot name say the reason I'm not in contact is I claim the Moms is insane, well, what is
insane supposed to mean. Do I trust her I do not. Do I want to be in association with her in any way — that is a neg. Do I think she's irretrievably
bats? One of her best friends is the E.T.A. counselor, Rusk, with doctorates in both Gender and Deviance. Does she think the Moms is bats?’
'Q.’
'The criteria I was analogizing to The Stork is does the Moms function. And the Moms functions and then some. The Moms careers through the
day turboed and in fifth gear. You've got the assorted Deaning at E.T.A. You've got the full teaching load there. You've got accreditation reports
and structuring both quadrivium and trivium three years ahead of time at the start of every year. You've got writing prescriptive linguistics books
that come out every thirty-six months so you could set your watch by them. You've got grammatical conferences and conventions, which she
doesn't leave the grounds ever anymore but she's there videophonically rain or shine for them all. You've got the Militant Grammarians of
Massachusetts, which she co-founded with a couple quote cherished academic friends, also bats, where the M.G.M.s for instance go around to
Mass, supermarkets and dun the manager if the Express Checkout sign says 10 ITEMS OR LESS instead of OR FEWER and so on. The year before
The Mad Stork's death the Orange Crush people had an ad on billboards and little magazine-fall-out cards that said CRUSH: WITH A TASTE THAT'S
ALL IT'S O WN, with like a possessive /T¾ and I swear the M.G.M. squad lost their minds; the Moms spent five weeks going back and forth to NNY
City, organized two different rallies on Madison Avenue that got very ugly, acted as her own attorney in the suit the Crush people brought, never
slept, never once slept, lived on cigarettes and salad, huge salads always consumed very late at night, the Moms has a thing about never eating 

until it's late.’
'Q-’
'Apparently it's the noise, she can't take urban noise, she says, is why Hallie says she hasn't set glass-slipper-one off the Grounds in — you'd
have to ask Hallie. The Volvo was already up on blocks when I was at college downtown. But I know she went to The Stork's funeral, which was off
the grounds. Now she's got a tri-modem and videophony out the bazoo, though she'd never use a Tableau, I know.’
'Q.’
'Well it's been pretty obvious since early on out in Weston the Moms has O.C.D. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. The only reason she's never
been diagnosed or treated for it is that in her the Disorder doesn't prevent her from functioning. It all seems to come back to functioning.
Traversion is character, according to Schtitt. One guy I was close to at E.T.A. for years developed the kind of impairing O.C.D. where you need
treatment — Bain wasted huge amounts of time on all these countless rituals of washing, cleaning, checking things, walking, had to have a Tsquare on the court to make sure all the strings on his stick were intersecting at 90°, could only go through a doorway if he'd felt all around the
frame of the doorway by hand, checking the frame for God knows what, and then was totally unable to trust his senses and always had to recheck
the doorway he'd just checked. We had to physically carry Bain out of the locker room, before tournaments. Actually we've been close all our lives,
notwithstanding that Marlon Bain is the single sweatiest human being you'd ever want to get within a click of. I think the O.C.D. might have started
as a result of the compulsive sweat, which the sweat itself started after his parents were killed in a grotesque freak accident, Bain's. Unless the
strain of the constant rituals and fussing itself exaculates the perspiring. The Stork used Marlon in Death in Scarsdale, if you want to see way more
than you want to know about perspiration. But the E.T.A. staff indulged Bain's pathology about doorways because Schtitt's own mentor had been
pathologically devoted to this idea that you are what you walk between. It's so nice to be able to end a sentence with a preposition when it's
easier. Jesus I'm thinking usage again. This is why I avoid the topic of the Moms. The whole topic starts to infect me. It takes me days to clean
myself out of it. Traversion being character according to Schtitt. It takes a certain type of woman to look that good in a pantsuit, I think. I've
always —’
'Q.’
'I think the point being that with actual clinical Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder I had to watch much of my ex-doubles partner's life grind to a
halt because it'd take him three hours to shower and then another two to get out through the shower door. He was in this sort of paralysis of
compulsive motions that didn't serve any kind of function. The Moms, on the other hand, can function with the compulsions because she's also
compulsively efficient and practical about her compulsions. Whether this makes her more insane than Marlon Bain or less insane than Marlon Bain,
who can like say. As an instance the Moms solved a lot of her threshold-problems by having no real doors or doorways built on the first floor of
HmH so the rooms are all split off by angles and partitions and plants. The Moms kept to a Prussian bathroom-schedule so she couldn't spend
hours in there washing her hands until the skin fell off the way Bain's did, he had to wear cotton gloves the whole summer right before he left
E.T.A. The Moms for a while had video cameras installed so she could obsessively check whether Mrs. Clarke'd left the oven on or check her plants'
arrangement or whether all the bathroom towels are lined up with their fringes flush without physically checking; she had a little wall of monitors in
her study at HmH; The Stork put up with the cameras but the sense I get is that Tavis isn't going to be keen on being photorecorded in the
bathroom or anyplace else, so maybe she's had to have other recourse.3
 You can check that yourself out there. What I'm trying to say is she's compulsively efficient even about her obsessions and compulsions. Of course there are doors upstairs, lockable doors, but that's in service of other
compulsions. The Moms's. You can go ahead and ask her what I mean. She's so compulsive she's got the compulsions themselves arranged so
efficiently that she can get everything done and still have plenty of time left over for her children. These are a constant drain on her batteries. She's
got to keep Hal's skull lashed tight to hers without being so overt about it that Hallie has any idea what's going on, to keep him from trying to pull
his skull away. The kid's still obsessed with her approval. He lives for applause from exactly two hands. He's still performing for her, syntax- and
vocabulary-wise, at seventeen, the same way he did when he was ten. The kid is so shut down talking to him is like throwing a stone in a pond.
The kid has no idea he even knows something's wrong. Plus the Moms has to obsess over Mario and Mario's various challenges and tribulations and
little patheticnesses and worship Mario and think Mario's some kind of secular martyr to the mess she'd made of her adult life, all the while having
to keep up a front of laissez-faire laid-back management where she pretends to let Mario go his own way and do his own thing.’
'Q-’
'I'm not going to talk about it.’
'Q.’
'No and don't insult my intelligence, I'm not going to talk about why I don't want to talk about it. If this is going to be a Moment article, Hallie's
going to read it, and then he'll read it to Booboo, and I'm not talking about The Stork's death or the Moms's stability in a thing where they'll read
about it and have to read some authoritative report on my take on it instead of coming to their own terms about it. With it, rather. Terms with,
terms about. No, terms with it.’
 '...’
'They both might have to wait until they get away from there before they can even realize what's going on, that the Moms is unredeemably
fucking bats. All these terms that became cliches — denial, schizogenic, pathogenic family like systems and so on and so forth. A former
acquaintance said The Mad Stork always used to say cliches earned their status as cliches because they were so obviously true.’
'...’
'I never once saw the two of them fight, not once in eighteen domestic and Academy years, is all I'll say.' 'Q.’
'The late Stork was the victim of the most monstrous practical joke ever played, in my opinion, is all I'll say.’
'All right, I'll relate one antidoteb
 that might be more revealing of the Moms's emotional weather than any adjective. Jesus, see, I start explicitly
referring to parts of speech just thinking about the whole thing. The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for
making the people around them think they themselves are crazy. In military science this is called Psy-Ops, for your info.’
 'Q.’
'I'm sorry? Right then, one illustrative thing. Which thing to pick. Embarrassment of riches. I'll pick one at random. I think I was maybe twelve. I
was in 12's, I know, on that summer's tour. Though I was playing 12's when I was still ten. It was ten to thirteen that I was regarded as gifted,
with a tennis future. I began to decline around what should have been puberty. Call me let's say twelve. People were talking about NAFTA and
something called the quote Information Turnpike and there was still broadcast TV, though we had a satellite dish. The Academy wasn't even a
twinkle in anybody's eye. The Stork would disappear periodically when money came in. I think he kept going back up to Lyle in Ontario. Call me
age ten. We still lived in Weston, known also as Volvoland. The Moms gardened like a fiend out there. This was something else she had to do. Had
a thing about. Hadn't gone to indoor plants yet. Called the garden's crops her Green Babies. Wouldn't let us eat the zucchini. Never picked it, it got
monstrous and dry and fell off and rotted. Big fun. But her real thing was preparing the garden every spring. She started making lists and pricing
supplies and drafting outlines in January. Did I mention her own father had been a potato farmer, at one time a millionaire potato-baron-type
farmer, in Quebec?
'But so it's early March. Are those earrings electric, or is it you? How come I've never seen those earrings up to now? I thought women who
could bring off copper earrings never wore anything but copper. You should see yourself in this light. Fluorescence isn't kind to most women. It
must take an exceptional kind —’
'Q.’
'In the Moms's family plot. St.-Quelquechose Quebec or something. Never been there. His will said only not anywhere near his own dad's plot.
Right near Maine. Heart of the Concavity. The Moms's home town's wiped off the map. Bad ecocycles, real machete-country. I'd have to try to
recall the town. But so but then so the Moms is out in the cold garden. It's March and it's co-wold. I've got this story down. I've related this
incident to several family-type professionals, and not one eyebrow stayed steady among them. This is the sort of antidote that makes pathogenic-

systems-pros' eyebrows go all the way up and over their skull and disappear down the back of their neck.’
'So then I'm let's say thirteen, which means Hallie's four. The Moms is in the backyard garden, tilling the infamously flinty New England soil with
a rented Rototiller. The situation is ambiguous between whether it's the Moms steering the Rototiller or vice versa. The old machine, full of gas I'd
slopped through a funnel — the Moms secretly believes petroleum products give you leukemia, her solution is to pretend to herself she doesn't
know what's wrong when the thing won't work and to stand there wringing her hands and let some eager-to-please thirteen-year-old puff out his
chest at being able to diagnose the problem, and then I pour the gas. The Rototiller is loud and hard to control. It roars and snorts and bucks and
my mother's stride behind it is like the stride of someone walking an untrained St. Bernard, she's leaving drunken staggery footprints behind her in
the tilled dirt, behind the thing. There's something about a very very tall woman trying to operate a Rototiller. The Moms is incredibly tall, way
taller than everybody except The Stork, who towered even over the Moms. Of course she'd be horrified if she ever brought herself to recognize
what she was doing, orchestrating a little kid into handling the gas that she thinks might be cancerous; she doesn't even know she's phobic about
gas. She's wearing two pairs of work-gloves and plastic surgery-type bags over her espadrilles, which were the only footwear she could garden in.
And a Fukoama microfiltration pollution mask, which you might remember those from that period. Her toes are blue in the dirty plastic bags. I'm a
few meters ahead of the Moms, in charge of preemptive rock- and clod-removal. That's her term. Preemptive rock- and clod-removal.
'Now work with me, see this with me. In the middle of this tilling here comes my little brother Hallie, maybe like four at the time and wearing
some kind of fuzzy red pajamas and a tiny little down coat, and slippers that had those awful Nice-Day yellow smile-faces on both toes. We've been
at it maybe an hour and half, and the garden's dirt is just about tilled when Hal conies out and down off the pressure-treated redwood deck and
comes walking very steadily and seriously toward the border of the garden the Moms had surveyed out with little sticks and string. He has his little
hand out, he's holding out something small and dark and he's coming toward the garden as the Rototiller snorts and rattles behind me, dragging
the Moms. As he gets closer the thing in his hand resolves into something that just doesn't look pleasant at all. Hal and I look at each other. His
expression is very serious even despite that his lower lip is having a sort of little epileptic fit, which means he's getting ready to bawl. That's with a
w. I remember the air was gray with dust and the Moms had her glasses on. He holds the thing out toward the Moms's figure. I squint. The thing
covering his palm and hanging over the sides of the palm is a rhombusoid patch of fungus. Big old patch of house-mold. Underline big and old. It
must have come from some hot furnace-hidden corner of the basement, some corner she must have missed with the flamethrower, after the
flooding we had every January thaw. I heft a clod or rock, I'm staring, every follicle I've got is bunched and straining. You could feel the tension, it
was like standing down at Sunstrand Plaza when they fired the transformers, every follicle bunches and strains. It was a sort of nasal green, blackspeckled, hairy like a peach is hairy. Also some orange speckles. A patch of very bad-news-type mold. Hal looks at me in the noise, his lower lip all
over the place. He looks to the Moms, the Moms is intent on a plumb-straight Rototilled line, weaving. The piece is that the mold looks, like,
strangely incomplete. As in it dawns on me right then chewed on, Helen. And yes as I squint some sickening hairy stuff is still there like impacted in
the kid's front teeth and hairily smeared around the mouth.
'Be there with me, Helen. Feel the sort of Wagnerish clouds gather. Hallie always said there was always this sense as a kid with the Moms that
the whole cosmos was just this side of fulminating into boiling clouds of elemental gas and was being held materially together only through heroic
exercise of will and ingenuity on the part of the Moms.
'Everything slows waaay down. She's coming around with the machine at the end of a row and sees Hallie wearing his happy-slippers outside in
the cold, which just in itself is enough to gut-shot the cosmos as far as she's concerned, usually. Now we're seeing the Rototiller get shut down as
she bends way down to where I'd showed her the choke. The machine diesels a little and farts some blue smoke. The machine sucks the nub of its
starter-rope into itself. I can feel the voltage like I'm still there. Post-racket tingling quiet descends. There's the tentative chirp of a bird. The Moms
comes toward Hal standing there in his little red coat. She's tucking a wisp of hair back under the special plastic cap's elastic. Her hair at that time
was dark brown, she's addressing him, she has an unbelievably humiliating little family pet name for the kid that I'll show him the mercy of never
telling anybody.
'But so she's coming over. Hal is standing there. Holds the horrific patch of fungus out. The Moms sees at first only her child holding something
out, and like all moms hardwired for motherhood she reaches to take whatever her baby holds out. The one sort of case where she wouldn't check
before reaching out toward something held out.’
'Q.’
'The Moms though now stops just inside the border of string and she squints, her glasses have dust, she starts to see and process just what it is
the kid's holding out to her. Her hand's outstretched in the air over the garden's string and she stops.
 'Hallie takes one step forward, arm up and out in a kind of like Nazi salute. He goes "I ate this."
'The Moms says she begs his pardon.
'Helen, you decide. But consider the fragility of the obsesso-compulsive's control. The terrible life-ruling phobias. Her four horsemen: enclosure,
communicational imprecision, and untidiness, which you can't get much untidier than basement-mold.’
'Q.’
'The fourth horseman stays hidden, of course, like in all quality eschatologies, the unturned card, under wraps till actual game-time.
' "I ate this" Hal goes, he's still holding the thing out, not crying, a kind of clinical grimness to him about it, like the mold's some audit it's his job
to show her. And do you want to know if she touched it?’
'Q.’
'It suddenly occurs to me that if you want stuff on the Moms and The Mad Stork you could contact Bain. He practically lived with us in Weston.
As like a secondary source. I'm sure he'd discuss the Moms's foibles all you want. The man still practically holds up a crucifix at any mention. His
little greeting-card company has just been bought up by a huge novelty concern, so I'm sure he's in his big room lying there having palm-fronds
waved and his forehead wiped, feeling flush and voluble. I guess I'd rather you didn't ask him about my foibles, but he's inexhaustible on the
subject of the Moms and O.C.D. He never leaves home, which home is one room, the converted Children's Reading Room of what used to be the
Waltham Public Library, which is the whole third floor. He learned from the Moms how to minimize doorways to traverse. I'm afraid he's not
InterNetted and has an O.C.D.-phobic thing about e-mail. His snail-mail address is Marlon K. Bain, Saprogenic Greetings Inc., BPL-Waltham Bldg.,
1214 Totten Pond Road, Waltham MA 021549872/4. It'd also be good if you could avoid mentioning the number 2 to him. He has problems with
the number 2. I don't know if his not leaving home is similar to the Moms's not leaving home. This is the most I've thought about the Moms in a
dog's age, to be honest with you. You have this way of getting stuff out of me. It's like you do nothing but sit there with that cigarette and you're
all I can see and all I want is to please you. It's like I can't help it. Is this just good journalism, Helen?’
'Or is there something more going on here, some kind of strange bond I feel between us that sort of like tears down all my normal personal-life
boundaries and makes me open totally to you? I guess I have to hope you won't take advantage. Does this all sound like some kind of line? Maybe
if it was a line it'd sound less lame. I guess I do wish I could come off more suave. I don't know what else to do except just tell what's going on
inside me, even if it sounds lame. I never have any clue what you're thinking about it.’
' "Help! My son ate this!" She screamed the same thing over and over, holding the mold-rhombus up like a torch, running around just inside the
string border while I and Hallie staggered back, literally like staggered back, gaping at our first taste of apocalypse, a corner of the universe
suddenly peeled back to reveal what seethed out there just beyond tidiness. What lay just north of order.
' "Help! My son ate this! My son has eaten this! Help!" she kept screaming, running in tight little right-faces just inside this perfect box of string,
and I'm seeing The Mad Stork's face at the glass door over the deck, palms out and thumbs together to make a frame, and Mario my other brother
next to him as usual down around his knee, with Mario's face all squished against the glass from supporting his weight, their breath on the window
spreading, Hal inside the string finally and trying to follow her, crying, and not impossibly I also crying a little, just from the infectious stress, and
those two through the back door's glass just watching, and fucking Booboo also trying to make that frame with his hands, so finally it was Mr.
Reehagen next door, who was so-called "friends" with her, who had to come out and over and finally had to hook up the hose/ 

a. This may be a lie — no one else at E.T.A. knows anything else about there having been any cameras in HmH's kitchen, bathroom, etc.
b. sic.
225 She'd arrayed the photos herself, from her purse, on the dresser; he hadn't had to ask her to; it added to the sense of synchronous mercy, a
cosmic kindness balancing out the Jacuzzi's dead bird and the frigidly invasive reporter.
226 E.T.A. shorthand: Vector/Angle/Pace/Spin. 227 The NW-to-NE angle at the former Monteplier VT isn't quite 90°, but it is very close. By the way, the Syracuse-Ticonderoga-Salem triangle is one
of those endless-based 25-130-25 triangles that looks so hideous when projected onto one of Corbett Thorp's distorting globes in the Trivium's
Cubular Trigonometry.
228 Quod vide here Ch. 7, 'It All Started with a Colorectal Neoplastis, an Openness to Communicative Manifestations of Divine Grace, and a SeedyLooking Fellow That Publicly Lifted a Chair He Was Standing On, That Was Clearly Just Such a Manifestation,' in The Chill of Inspiration:
Spontaneous Reminiscences by Seventeen Pioneers of DT-Cycle Lithiumized Annular Fusion, ed. Prof. Dr. Günther Sperber, Institut fur
Neutronenphysik und Reaktortechnik, Kernforschungszentrum Karlsruhe, U.R.G., available in English in ferociously expensive hardcover only, ©
Y.T.M.P. from Springer-Verlag Wien NNY. (N.b. that while the annular meta-disease treatment is highly effective on metastatic cancers, it proved a
disappointment on the HIV-spectrum viri, since AIDS is itself a meta-disease.)
229 Because he'd been sworn to secrecy, Green doesn't tell Lenz that Charlotte Treat had shared with Green that her adoptive father had been onetime Chair of the Northeast Regional Board of Dental Anesthesiologists, and had been pretty liberal with the use of the old N2O and thiopental
sodium around the Treats' Revere MA household, for personal and extremely unsavory reasons. 230 ® The Mauna Loa Macadamia Nut Corp., Hilo HI — 'A LOW SODIUM FOOD.’ 231 Popular corporate-hard-rock bands, though it shows where Bruce Green's psychic decline really started that, except for TBA5, these bands were
all truly big two or three years past, and are now slightly passe, with Choosy Mothers having split up entirely by now to explore individual creative
directions.
232 This is one reason why he consents to be hung way out into space from Schtitt's transom for filming all-court play, held only by some prorector
with a firm grip on the back of his lock's vest, which the players looking up at Mario's forward ski-jump posture off the crow's nest find incredibly
terrifying and audacious and ballsy, and Avril won't even leave HmH during all-court filmings. 233 This though Avril's never come right out and articulated her worry about his P.M. safety to Mario, not wanting to seem as though she's making a
special issue of his deficits and vulnerability or to seem inconsistent when she lets Hal go off nightly wherever he likes or just basically in any way
to inhibit Mario's sense of autonomy and freedom by causing him to worry about her worrying — which he does, rather a lot, worry about Avril's
worrying about him. If that makes sense.
234 Mario, like his maternal uncle Charles Tavis, has a dislike of fluorescent lighting.
235 'Is that supposed to mean something? What's that supposed to mean?’
'Nothing. Literally nothing.’
236 A depressing new Sober Club in Somerville's Davis Square where AAs and NAs — mostly new and young — get heartbreakingly dolled up and
dance stiffly and tremble with sober sexual anxiety and they stand around with Cokes and M.F.s telling each other how great it is to be in an
intensely social venue with all your self-conscious inhibitions unmedicated and screaming in your head. The smiles alone in these places are
excruciating to see.
237 A Restriction means just no Overnight that week and an extra Chore; a House Restriction means you have to be back an hour after work and
nightly meetings; Full House is no leaving the House except for work and meetings, and 15 minutes to get back, and no even leaving to buy
smokes or a paper, or even to go out in the lawn for oxygen, and one violation means a Discharge: F.H.R. is Ennet's version of the Hole, and it's
dreaded.
238 Ennet House takes its urines over to the methadone clinic, which has all manner of clients who have to submit weekly urines to courts and
programs, and the clinic lets Ennet put its urines gratis in the weekly batch the clinic sends out to an E.M.I.T.-mill clinic all the way out in Natick,
and in return every once in a while Pat gets a call from the trollish little social worker who runs #2 about some client down there who's decided he
wants off the methadone, as well, and Pat will shoot the client way up on the Interview list and give him an interview and usually let the client in —
Calvin T. and Danielle S. had both originally gotten into Ennet House this way, i.e. via #2.
239 It's maybe significant that Don Gately never once failed to clean up any vomit or incontinence his mother'd just drunkenly left there or passed
out in, no matter how pissed off or disgusted he was or how sick he himself was: not once.
240 (who owns a Lincoln, Henderson does, origins unknown and suspicious) 241 This is all for Insurance Reasons, the Staff sheet on which Gately doesn't understand all the language of, and fears. 242 It's against House rules to smoke upstairs in the bedrooms — more Insurance Reasons — and a week's Restriction is supposed to be mandatory,
and Pat's personally a fanatic about the rule, but Gately, much as he fears the grim boilerplate on the Insurance Sheet, always pretends he doesn't
see anything when he sees somebody smoking up here, since when he was a resident he actually used to sometimes smoke in his sleep he was so
tense, and every once in a while will wake up and find that he has again, i.e. lit a gasper and apparently smoked it and put it out all in his sleep,
down in bed in his Staff oubliette in the basement.
243 (the items from the House's donated-clothes baskets that fit Gately being few and far) 244 Gately's made it an iron point never again ever to run, once he got straight. 245 NNE street argot for any kind of handgun. 246 (Erdedy's hands still up, w/ keys) 247 (NNE Region, trying hard not to irritate Tine Sr. by fidgeting) 248 (Desert-SW Region, understated in a massive peasant skirt and sensible flats) 249 These, ® a number of fine companies, are like enormous versions of the little windshield-washer implements at service stations — an industrial
mop-handle w/ a canted rubber blade at the end, used for spreading puddle-water out so it dries faster, at some academies replaced with the EZDRI hinged-roller-of-dense-sponge-at-the-end court-dryer, which E.T.A. eschews because of how fast the rolling sponge at the end mildews and
smells bad.
250 Mrs. Incandenza always grades everything in blue ink. 251 A phenomenon not unknown, viz. menial employees and shift-workers mining E.T.A.'s collected waste for cast-off value, and permitted by the
administration and Mr. Harde, or rather just not actively discouraged, since 'One man's trash . ..' and so on, with the only requirement being a
certain visual discretion when carrying off E.T.A.'s offal, simply because the whole thing's kind of embarrassing for everybody. 252 I.e. the Women's Tennis Association, the distaff equivalent of the A.T.P. 253 Sic, presumably for Betamax (®Sony). 254 Sic, but it's pretty obvious what Marathe means here. 255 Reinforced Aluminum Spectation Unit. 256 The occasional upscale parent could be seen exiting Comm.-Ad. and crossing behind the West Courts' south fence to the asphalt lot and what
were unmistakably parental autos, all remarkable for their textbook tire-pressure and bristles of cellular antennae and the absence of any little
dust-smiles on their rear or side windows. Charles Tavis had spent the morning interfacing with parents of those E.T.A. kids injured in I.-Day's Eschaton free-for-all. Lateral Alice Moore, for a treat, had been listening to Tavis and parents on her headphones, while typing, instead of her
collection of aerobic favorites. Struck and Pemulis had cruised by before lunch and blarneyed her into putting the exchanges on her intercom's
speaker for a couple minutes. You should hear C.T. enclosed with parents sometime. It was only some of the parents — Todd Possalthwaite's dad 

was on honeymoon in the Azores, and Otis P. Lord's mother had some inner-ear thing and the Lords couldn't fly. But Pemulis and Struck concurred
that everyone with any kind of administration in his blood should hear E.T.A.'s Headmaster with parents and a placative mission, a master charmer
past all social gauge, a Houdini with the manacles of fact, the interfaces like fluidless seductions — Pemulis said the man's missed a genuine calling
in sales — everyone practically wanting to smoke a cigarette afterward, the parents leave weeping, pumping Tavis's hands — one parent per hand
— practically begging him to accept both their thanks and their apologies for daring to even possibly think, even for a moment. Then, supporting
each other, making their way over Lateral Alice's third rail and past the beaming extremely polite lads by her desk and out through the pressurized
glass lobby doors and down off the white-pillared neo-Georgian porch and past courts and bleachers and into their well-maintained autos and out
the portcullis and very slowly down the hill's brick drive before they even recall they'd forgotten to pop in on their injured kid, sign his cast, feel his
forehead, say Hey.
257 I.e. ace/double fault, rather like the ratio of strikeouts to walks for a pitcher. 258 It was like Steeply'd never seen so many left-handed people: both Hal Incandenza and the boy in black were left-handed, one of the two little
girls four courts down was left-handed, deLint was marking the chart with his left hand. Both A.F.R. turncoat Rémy Marathe and Québecer tripleoperative Luria P— - were southpaws, though Steeply realized that this could hardly be called significant. 259
Saprogenic Greetings*
WHEN YOU CARE ENOUGH TO LET A PROFESSIONAL SAY IT FOR YOU
*a proud member of the ACME Family of Gags 'N Notions, Pre-Packaged Emotions, Jokes and Surprises and Wacky Disguises
Ms. Helen Steepley And So On November Y.D.A.U.
... (1) Orin Incandenza and I played, practiced, and generally hung out through most of what seemed at the time to be our formative years. We
met because I kept encountering him across the net in the local tennis tournaments we played around metro Boston, Boys' 10's. We were the two
best 10-year-old males in Boston. We soon became practice partners, our mothers driving us every weekday afternoon to a junior development
program at the Auburndale Tennis Club in West Newton. After my own parents were horribly killed on the Jamaica Way commuter road one
morning in the freak crash of a radio traffic-report helicopter, I became a sort of hanger-on at the Incandenza house out in Weston. When J.O.I,
founded the Academy, I was one of the first matriculants. Orin and I were inseparable until around age 15, when I reached my own zenith in terms
of early puberty and athletic promise and began to be able to beat him. He took it hard. We were never inseparable again. We spent quantity time
together again briefly for a few months the next year, during a period when we both experimented heavily with recreational substances. We both
ended up losing enthusiasm for substances after only a couple years, Orin because he had finally entered puberty and had discovered the weaker
sex and found he needed all his faculties and guile, myself because a couple of really negative methoxy-psychedelic experiences left me with
certain Disabilities that to this day make normal life an exceptional challenge, and which I tend to blame on having done deadly-serious
hallucinogens at a sort of larval psychological stage during which no N. American adolescent should be allowed to do hallucinogens. These
Disabilities led to my departure from the Enfield Tennis Academy at 17, prior to graduation, and my withdrawal from competitive junior tennis and
contemporary life as we know it. Orin was largely burned out on tennis too by 17, though no one in his right mind could have foreseen a defection
to organized U.S. football in his future.
A grunting, crunching ballet of repressed homoeroticism, football, Ms. Steepley, on my view. The exaggerated breadth of the shoulders, the
masked eradication of facial personality, the emphasis on contact-vs.-avoidance-of-contact. The gains in terms of penetration and resistance. The
tight pants that accentuate the gluteals and hamstrings and what look for all the world like codpieces. The gradual slow shift of venue to "artificial
surface," "artificial turf." Don't the pants' fronts look fitted with codpieces? And have a look at these men whacking each other's asses after a play.
It is like Swinburne sat down on his soul's darkest night and designed an organized sport. And pay no attention to Orin's defense of football as a
ritualized substitute for armed conflict. Armed conflict is plenty ritualized on its own, and since we have real armed conflict (take a spin through
Boston's Roxbury and Mattapan districts some evening) there is no need or purpose for a substitute. Football is pure homophobically repressed
nancy-ism, and do not let O. tell you different.
. .. (3c) I cannot help you too much with the facts surrounding Dr. Incandenza's suicide. I know that he erased his own cartography in a grisly
way. I was told that in the year leading up to his death Dr. Incandenza was abusing ethyl alcohol on a daily basis and was working on a whole new
genre of film-cartridge that Orin at the time claimed was driving Dr. Inc insane.
. . . (3e) The supposed cause of their separation is that Dr. Incandenza began using her in his work more and more extensively and eventually
asked her to perform in the prenominate completely radical new type of filmed entertainment that supposedly was driving him to a breakdown.
They supposedly became close, James and Jo-Ellen, though Orin in my judgment is not a reliable source of information about their relationship.
The only other apposite fact I have — and I have this not from Orin but from an innocent female relative of mine who was (briefly) in a position
to interface with our punter in an intimate and unguarded way impossible between hetero males — is that some incident occurred in the
Incandenzas' Volvo involving one of the windows and a word — all I am given is that O. reports that in the days prior to Dr. Incandenza's felo de
se, a so-called "word" appeared on a "fogged" "window" of Mrs. Inc's pale yellow Volvo, and the word cast a conjugal pall in all sorts of directions.
This is it.
... (5) The "vailed warning" (typo?) you refer to in my postal response to you is simply that you have to take what Orin says in a fairly highsodium way. I am not sure I would stand and point at Orin as an example of a classic pathological liar, but you have only to watch him in certain
kinds of action to see that there can be such a thing as sincerity with a motive. I have no idea what your relationship with Orin is or what your
feelings are — and if Orin wishes it I am afraid I can predict your feelings for him will be strong — so I shall just tell you that for instance at E.T.A.
I saw Orin in bars or at post-tournament dances go up to a young lady he would like to pick up and use this fail-safe cross-sectional pick-up
Strategy that involved an opening like "Tell me what sort of man you prefer, and then I'll affect the demeanor of that man." Which in a way of
course is being almost pathologically open and sincere about the whole picking-up enterprise, but also has this quality of Look-At-Me-Being-SoTotally-Open-And-Sincere-I-Rise-Above-The-Whole-Disingenuous-Posing-Process-Of-Attracting-Someone-,-And -I-Transcend-The-CommonDisingenuity-In-A-Bar-Herd-In-A-Particularly-Hip-And-Witty-Self-Aware-Way-,-And-If-You-Will-Let-Me-Pick-You-Up-I-Will-Not-Only-Keep - Being -
This - Wittily, - Transcendently - Open -, - But - Will - Bring-You - Into - This -World-Of-Social-Falsehood-Transcendence, which of course he
cannot do because the whole openness-demeanor thing is itself a purposive social falsehood; it is a pose of poselessness; Orin Incandenza is the
least open man I know. Spend a little time with Orin's Uncle Charles a.k.a. "Gretel the Cross-Sectioned Dairy Cow" Tavis if you want to see real
openness in motion, and you will see that genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's syndrome.
It is not that Orin Incandenza is a liar, but that I think he has come to regard the truth as constructed instead of reported. He came by this idea
educationally, is all I will add. He studied for almost eighteen years at the feet of the most consummate mind-fucker I have ever met, and even
now he remains so flummoxed he thinks the way to escape that person's influence is through renunciation and hatred of that person. Defining
yourself in opposition to something is still being anaclitic on that thing, isn't it? I certainly think so. And men who believe they hate what they really
fear they need are of limited interest, I find.
. .. Again I will remind you that Orin and I are on the outs a bit at the moment, so some of my judgments may be temporarily short on charity.
One reason Orin is not a straight-out liar is that Orin is not a particularly skillful liar. The few times I saw him try consciously to lie were pathetic.
This is one reason why his juvenile recreational-chemical phase passed so quickly compared to some of our colleagues at E.T.A. If you are going to
do serious drugs while you are still a minor and under your parents' roof, you are going to have to -lie often and lie well. Orin was a strangely
stupid liar. I am recalling there was one afternoon on Mrs. Clarke's day off when Mrs. Inc had to go off and overfunction somewhere and Orin was
supposed to baby-sit Mario and Hal, who were at the kind of crazed-toddler age where they would hurt themselves if they were not closely
supervised, and I was over, and Orin and I decided to dart up to the loft over the Weston house's garage to smoke a bit of Bob Hope, which is to
say high-resin marijuana, and in the loft, high, wandered disastrously into the sort of pseudophilosophical mental labyrinth that Bob Hope-smokers 

are always wandering into and getting trapped in and wasting huge amounts of time3
 inside
a. This tendency to involuted abstraction is sometimes called "Marijuana Thinking"; and by the way, the so-called "Amotivational Syndrome"
consequent to massive Bob Hope-consumption is a misnomer, for it is not that Bob Hope-smokers lose interest in practical functioning, but rather
Marijuana-Think themselves into labyrinths of reflexive abstraction that seem to cast doubt on the very possibility of practical functioning, and the
mental labor of finding one's way out consumes all available attention and makes the Bob Hope-smoker look physically torpid and apathetic and
amoti-vated sitting there, when really he is trying to claw his way out of a labyrinth. Note that the overwhelming hunger (the so-called "munchies")
that accompanies cannabis intoxication may be a natural defense mechanism against this kind of loss of practical function, since there is no more
practical function anywhere than foraging for food.
an intellectual room they cannot negotiate their way out of, and by the time we hadn't resolved the abstract problem that had put us into the
labyrinth but just as always had gotten so hungry we abandoned it and stumbled out and down the loft's wooden ladder, the sun was all the way
on the other side of the sky over Wayland and Sudbury, and the whole afternoon had passed without Hal and Mario having received any protective
supervision; and Hal and Mario somehow survived the afternoon, but when Mrs. Incan-denza returned that night she asked Orin what we and the
supervised toddlers had done all afternoon and Orin lied that we had all been right here, respectively playing and supervising, and Mrs. Incandenza
expressed puzzlement to Orin because she said she had tried to call the house several times that afternoon but was unable to get through, and
Orin replied that while supervising he had herded the toddlers carefully into rooms with phone-jacks and made calls and had been on the phone
several times for Jong periods of time for this that or the other thing, was why she had been unable to get through, at which Mrs. Incandenza (who
is extremely tall) had blinked several times and looked very confused and said that but the phone had not been busy, it had just rung and rung and
rung. At a juncture like this, men and boys get separated in terms of prevarication, I submit. And all Orin could come up with was a steady gaze as
he said, as if from the Rose Garden: "I have no response to that." Which incredibly stupid response he and I found very funny for weeks afterward,
especially since Mrs. Incandenza never punished and refused to act as if she believed lying was even a possibility as far as her children were
concerned, and treated an exploded lie as an insoluble cosmic mystery instead of an exploded lie.
The worst instance of both Orin's mendacious idiocy and Mrs. Incandenza's unwillingness to countenance an idiotic lie came one grisly day soon
after Orin had finally gotten his vehicle operator's license. O. and I found ourselves with an idle weekday afternoon off in August after losing early
at a synthetic-grass tournament down at Long-wood, and Hal was still alive in what was then Boys' 10's and thus a good bit of the E.T.A. summer
community was still down at Longwood, including Mario and Mrs. Incandenza, who'd been driven down I remember by a sort of swarthily foreignlooking moniíial-internist medical resident Mrs. Inc had introduced as a so-called "dear and cherished friend" but hadn't explained how they'd met,
and Dr. Incandenza was indisposed and not in a position to bother anyone that day, I remember, and Orin and I had most of E.T.A. to ourselves,
even the gate's portcullis unmanned and up, and this being at the acme of our interest in such things we wasted little time in ingesting some sort
of recreational substance, I cannot recall what kind but I remember them as particularly impairing, and we decided however that we weren't yet
impaired enough, and decided to drive down the hill to one of the disreputable liquor stores along Commonwealth Avenue that accepted your word
of honor as proof of age, and we hopped into the Volvo and blasted down the hill and down Commonwealth Avenue, severely impaired, and
wondered in a speculative way why people on the sidewalks all along Commonwealth seemed to be waving at us and holding their heads and
pointing and jumping wildly up and down, and Orin waving cheerfully back and holding his own head in a sort of friendly imitation, but it was not
until we got all the way down to the Commonwealth-Brighton Ave. split that the horrible realization hit us: Mrs. Incandenza often during summer
days kept the Incandenzas' beloved dog S. Johnson leashed to the back of her Volvo within reach of his water and Science Diet bowls, and Orin
and I had peeled out in the car without even thinking to check for whether S. Johnson was attached to it. I will not try to describe what we found
when we pulled into a parking lot and slunk to the rear of the car. Let's call it a nubbin. Let's say what we found was a leash and collar, and a
nubbin. According to the couple of witnesses who were able to speak, S. Johnson had made a valiant go of trying to keep up back there for at least
a couple blocks down Commonwealth, but at some point he either lost his footing or got his canine affairs in order and figured it was his day to
shuffle off, and gave up, and hit the pavement, after which the scene the witnesses described was unspeakable. There was fur and let's call it
material down the middle of the inside east-bound lane for five or six blocks. What we had left to take slowly back up the Academy's hill was a
leash, a collar with tags describing medication-allergies and food-sensitivities, and a nubbin of let's call it attached material.
The point is that I defy you to imagine how it felt later that day to stand there with Orin in the HmH living room before the prone and piteously
weeping Mrs. Incandenza and listen to Orin try to construct a version of events in which he and I had sensed somehow that S. Johnson was dying
for a good brisk August walk and were walking him down Commonwealth,15 saying there we were walking good old S. Johnson demurely down the
sidewalk when a hit-and-run driver not only swerved up onto the sidewalk to run the dog down but then backed up and ran him over again and
backed up and ran him over again, and on and on, so more like a pulverize-and-run driver, while Orin and I had stood there too paralyzed with
horror and grief even to think of noticing the make and color of the car, much less the fiend's license plate. Mrs. Incan-denza on her knees (there's
something surreal about a very tall woman on her knees), weeping and pressing her hand to her collarbone but nodding in confirmation at every
syllable of Orin spinning this pathetic lie, O. holding up the leash and collar (and nubbin) like Exhibit A, with me next to him wiping my forehead
and wishing the immaculately polished and sterilized hardwood floor would swallow up the whole scene in toto.
... (7) Ms. Steeples, to my way of thinking, the word "abuse" is vacuous. Who can define "abuse"? The difficulty with really interesting cases of
abuse is that the ambiguity of the abuse becomes part of the abuse. Thanks over the decades to the energetic exercise of your own profession, Ms.
Steeley, we have all heard ACOAs and AlaTeens and ACONAs and ACOGs and WHINERS relate clear cases of different kinds of abuse: beatings,
diddlings, rapes, deprivations, domineerment, humiliation, captivity, torture, excessive criticism or even just utter disinterest. But at least the
victims of this sort of abuse can, when they have dredged it back up after childhood, confidently call it "abuse." There are, however, more
ambiguous cases. Harder to profile, one might say. What would you call a parent who is so neurasthenic and depressive that any opposition to his
parental will plunges him into the sort of psychotic depression where he does not leave his bed for days and just sits there in bed cleaning his
revolver, so that the child would be terrified of opposing his will and plunging him into a depression and maybe causing him to suicide? Would that
child qualify as "abused"? Or a father who is so engrossed by mathematics that he gets engrossed helping his child with his algebra homework and
ends up forgetting the child and doing it all himself so that the child gets an A in Fractions but never in fact learns fractions? Or even say a father
who is extremely handy around the house and can fix anything, and has the son help him, but gets so engrossed in his projects (the father) that he
never thinks to explain to the son how the projects actually get done, so that the son's "help" never advances past simply handing the father a
specified wrench or getting him lemonade or Phillips-head screws until the day the father is crushed into aspic in a freak accident on the Jamaica
Way and all opportunities for transgenerational instruction are forever lost, and the son never learns how to be a handy homeowner himself, and
when things malfunction around his own one-room home he has to hire contemptuous filthy-nailed men to come fix them, and feels terribly
inadequate (the son), not only because he is not handy but because this handiness seemed to him to have represented to his father everything
that was independent and manly and non-Disabled in an American male. Would you cry "Abuse!" if you were the unhandy son, looking back?
Worse, could you call it abuse without feeling that you were a pathetic self-indulgent piss-puddle, what with all the genuine cases of hair-raising
physical and emotional abuse diligently reported and analyzed daily by conscientious journalists (and profiled?)?
I am not sure whether you could call this abuse, but when I was (long ago) abroad in the world of dry men, I saw parents, usually upscale and
educated and talented and functional and white, patient and loving and supportive and concerned and involved in their children's lives, profligate
with compliments and diplomatic with constructive criticism, loquacious in their pronouncements of unconditional love for and approval of their
children, conforming to every last jot/tittle in any conceivable definition of a good parent, I saw parent after unimpeachable parent who raised kids
who were (a) emotionally retarded or (b) lethally self-indulgent or (c) chronically depressed or (d) bor- derline psychotic or (e) consumed with
narcissistic self-loathing or (f) neurotically driven/addicted or (g) variously psychosomatically Disabled or (h) some conjunctive permutation of (a) ...
(g) Now, Orin had never once walked S. Johnson. Orin was not even all that keen on S. Johnson, because the dog was always trying to mate with
his left leg. And anyway, S. Johnson was very much Mrs. Incandenza's dog, and was normally exercised only by Mrs. Incandenza, and at rigidly 

specific times of day.
.
Why is this. Why do many parents who seem relentlessly bent on producing children who feel they are good persons deserving of love produce
children who grow to feel they are hideous persons not deserving of love who just happen to have lucked into having parents so marvelous that
the parents love them even though they are hideous?
Is it a sign of abuse if a mother produces a child who believes not that he is innately beautiful and lovable and deserving of magnificent maternal
treatment but somehow that he is a hideous unlovable child who has somehow lucked in to having a really magnificent mother? Probably not.
But could such a mother then really be all that magnificent, if that's the child's view of himself?
I am not speaking about my own mother, who was decapitated by a plummeting rotorblade long before she could have much effect one way or
the other on my older brother and innocent younger sister and me.
I think, Mrs. Starkly, that I am speaking of Mrs. Avril M.-T. Incandenza, although the woman is so multileveled and indictment-proof that it is
difficult to feel comfortable with any sort of univocal accusation of anything. Something just was not right, is the only way to put it. Something
creepy, even on the culturally stellar surface. For instance, after Orin had pretty clearly killed her beloved dog S. Johnson in a truly awful if accidental way, and then had tried to evade responsibility for it with a lie that a parent far less intelligent than Avril could have seen right through, Mrs.
Inc's response was not only not conventionally abusive, but seemed almost too unconditionally loving and compassionate and selfless to possibly be
true. Her response to Orin's pathetic pulverize-and-run-driver lie was not to act credulous so much as to act as if the entire grotesque fiction had
never reached her ears. And her response to the dog's death itself was bizarrely furcated. On the one hand, she mourned S. Johnson's death very
deeply, took the leash and collar and canine nubbin tenderly and arranged lavish memorial and funeral arrangements, including a heartbreakingly
small cherrywood coffin, cried in audible private for weeks, etc. But the other half of her emotional energies went into being overly solicitous and
polite toward Orin, upping the daily compliment-and-reinforcement-dose, arranging for favorite foods at E.T.A. meals, having his favorite little
tennis appurtenances appear magically in his bed and locker with loving notes attached, basically making the thousands of little gestures by which
the technically stellar parent can make her child feel particularly valued0
 — all out of concern that Orin in no way think she resented him for S.
Johnson's death or blamed him or loved him less in any way because of the whole incident. Not only was there no punishment or even visible
pique, but the love-and-support-bombardment increased. And all this was coupled with elaborate machinations to keep the mourning and funeral
arrangements and moments of wistful dog-remembrance hidden from Orin, for fear that he might see that the Moms was hurt and so feel bad or
guilty, so that in his presence Mrs. Inc became even more cheerful and loquacious and witty and intimate and benign, even suggesting in oblique
ways that life was now somehow suddenly better without the dog, that some kind of unrecognized albatross had been somehow removed from her
neck, and so on and so forth.
What does a trained analyst of our cultural profile's soft contours like yourself make of this, Mrs. Starksaddle? Is it mind-bogglingly considerate
and loving and supportive, or is there something . . . creepy about it? Maybe a more perspicuous question: Was the almost pathological generosity
with which Mrs. Inc responded to her son taking her car in an intoxicated condition and dragging her beloved dog to its grotesque death and then
trying to lie his way out of it, was this generosity for Orin's sake, or for Avril's own? Was it Orin's "self-esteem" she was safeguarding, or her own
vision of herself as a more stellar Moms than any human son could ever hope to feel he merits?
When Orin does his impression of Avril — which I doubt you or anyone else can get him to do anymore, though it was a party-stopper back in
our days at the Academy — what he will do is assume an enormous warm and loving smile and move steadily toward you until he is in so close that
his face is spread up flat against your own face and c. Yes — all right — this may start to touch on it: not "valuable" but "valued."your breaths
mingle. If you can get to experience it — the impression — which will seem worse to you: the smothering proximity, or the unimpeachable warmth
and love with which it's effected?
For some reason now I am thinking of the sort of philanthropist who seems humanly repellent not in spite of his charity but because of it: on
some level you can tell that he views the recipients of his charity not as persons so much as pieces of exercise equipment on which he can develop
and demonstrate his own virtue. What's creepy and repellent is that this sort of philanthropist clearly needs privation and suffering to continue,
since it is his own virtue he prizes, instead of the ends to which the virtue is ostensibly directed.
Everything Orin's mother is about is always terribly well-ordered and multivalent. I suspect she was badly abused as a child. I have nothing
concrete to back this up.
But if, Ms. Bainbridge, you have yielded your own charms to Orin, and if Orin strikes you as a wonderfully gifted and giving lover — which by
various accounts he is — not just skilled and sensuous but magnificently generous, empathic, attentive, loving — if it seems to you that he does,
truly, derive his own best pleasure from giving you pleasure, you might wish to reflect soberly on this vision of Orin imitating his dear Moms as
philanthropist: a person closing in, arms open wide, smiling.
260 ® The Glad Flaccid Receptacle Corporation, Zanesville OH. 261 (including K. McKenna, who claims to have a bruised skull but does not in fact have a bruised skull) 262 This is why Ann Kittenplan, way more culpable for Eschaton-damage than any of the other kids, isn't down here on the punitive cleanup crew, is
that it's become a defacto Tunnel Club operation. LaMont Chu was nominated to tell her she could blow it off and they'd mark her down as present,
which was just fine with Ann Kittenplan, since even the butchest little girls don't seem to have this proto-masculine fetish for enclosure underneath
things.
263 = Stars, shooting stars, falling stars. 264 Poutrincourt uses the Nuck idiom réflechis instead of the more textbook reflexes, and does indeed sound like the real Canadian McCoy, though
her accent is without the long moany suffixes of Marathe, and but anyway it is for certain that a certain 'journalist' will be e-mailing Falls Church VA
on the U.S.O.'s Clipper-proof line for the unexpurgated files on one 'Poutrincourt, Thierry T.’
265 Using s'annuler instead of the more Québecois se détruire. 266 Using the vulgate Québecois transperçant, whose idiomatic connotation of doom Poutrincourt shouldn't have had any reason to think the
Parisian-speaking Steeply would know, which is the slip that indicates that Poutrincourt's figured out that Steeply is neither a civilian soft-profiler
nor even a female, which Poutrincourt's probably known ever since Steeply'd lit his Flanderfume with the elbow of his lighter-arm out instead of in,
which only males and radically butch lesbians ever do, and which together with the electrolysis-rash comprises the only real chink in the operative's
distaff persona, and would require an almost professionally hypervigilant and suspicious person to notice the significance of. 267 Trois-Rivières-region idiom, meaning basically 'reason to get out of bed in the morning.’ 268 Where was Mrs. Pemulis all this time, late at night, with dear old Da P. shaking Matty 'awake' until his teeth rattled and little Micky curled up
against the far wall, shell-breathing, silent as death, is what I'd want to know.
269 The kid's the former E.T.A. whose name keeps eluding and torturing Hal, who hasn't gone over twenty-four hours without getting high in secret
for well over a year, and doesn't feel very good at all, and finds the kid's name's elusiveness infuriating. 270 Anhedonia was apparently coined by Ribot, a Continental Frenchman, who in his 19th-century Psychologic des Sentiments says he means it to
denote the psychoequivalent of analgesia, which is the neurologic suppression of pain. 271 This had been one of Hal's deepest and most pregnant abstractions, one he'd come up with once while getting secretly high in the Pump Room.
That we're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that he goes around feeling like he
misses somebody he's never even met? Without the universalizing abstraction, the feeling would make no sense. 272 (the big reason why people in pain are so self-absorbed and unpleasant to be around) 273 S.S.R.I.s, of which Zoloft and the ill-fated Prozac were the ancestors. 274 A crude and cheap form of combustible methedrine, favored by the same sort of addictive class that sniffs gasoline fumes or coats the inside of
a paper bag with airplane glue and puts the bag over their face and breathes until they fall down and start to convulse.

275 This has got to be a mispronunciation or catachresis on R.v.C.'s part, since Clonidine — 2-(2,6-Dichloroanilino)-2-imidazoline — is a decidedly
adult-strength anti-hypertensive; the infant'd have to be N.F.L.-sized to tolerate it.
276 Kate G.'s never done Ice, or crack/'base/crank, nor even cocaine or low-impact 'drines. Drug addicts tend to fall into different classes: those who
like downs and Mr. Hope rarely enjoy stimulants, while coke- and 'drine-fiends as a rule abhor marijuana. This is an area of potentially fruitful study
in addictionology. Note that pretty much every class of addicts drinks, though.
277 Since last winter, when a stale smell, litter of dental stimulators, and single slender spit-wet butt signified that a certain upperclassman had been
smoking panatelas late at night in V.R.3.
278 The Continent's Best Yogurt®. 279 In point of a fact wholly unknown to Hal, BS:OTN was in fact a very sad self-hate-festival on Himself's part, a veiled allegory of sponsorship and
Himself's own miserable distaste for the vacant grins and reductive platitudes of the Boston AA that M.D.s and counselors kept referring him to. 280 Whether the girl's hideous facial burn-scars are the result of a freebase accident is never made explicit in the film. Bernadette Longley says she
kind of hopes that's the case, because otherwise the scars would function as symbols of some deeper and more spiritual wound/hideousness, and
the symbolic equation of facial with moral deformity strikes everybody over thirteen in the room as terribly gooey and heavy and stock. 281 After a heyday during the pre-millennial self-help craze, CA's receded back to being a splinter of the still-enormous Narcotics Anonymous; and
Pat Montesian and the Ennet House Staff, while they have nothing against a resident with cocaine-issues hitting the occasional CA venue, strongly
suggest that residents stick with AA or NA and not make splinters like CA or Designer Drug Addicts Anonymous or Prescription Tranquilizers
Anonymous their primary fellowship for recovery, mostly because the splinters tend to have way fewer Groups and meetings — and some none at
all in certain parts of the U.S. — and because their extremely specific Substance-focus tends to narrow the aperture of recovery and focus too
much on abstinence from just one Substance instead of complete sobriety and a new spiritual way of life in toto. 282 Fearful partly because the Ennet House Staff strongly discourages residents forming any kind of sentimental attachment to members of the
opposite sex during their nine-month stay,3
 to say nothing of attachments to Staffers.
a. This is a corollary of Boston AA's suggestion that single newcomers not get romantically involved for the first year of sobriety. The big reason for
this, Boston AAs with time will explain if pinned down, is that the sudden removal of Substances leaves an enormous ragged hole in the psyche of
the newcomer, the pain of which the newcomer's supposed to feel and be driven kneeward by and pray to have filled by Boston AA and the old
Higher Power, and intense romantic involvements offer a delusive analgesic for the pain of the hole, and tend to make the involvees clamp onto
one another like covalence-hungry isotopes, and substitute each other for meetings and Activity in a Group and Surrender, and then if the
involvement doesn't pan out (which like how many between newcomers do you suppose do) both involvees are devastated and in even more holepain than before and now don't have the intensive-work-in-AA-dependent strength to make it through the devastation without going back to the
Substance. Relevant gnomes here might include 'Addicts Don't Have Relationships, They Take Hostages' (sic) and 'An Alcoholic Is a Relief-Seeking
Missile.' And so on. The no-involvement thing tends to be the Waterloo of all suggestions, for newcomers, and celibacy's often the issue that
separates those who Hang from those who Go Back Out There.
283 Apparently the current colored word for other coloreds. Joelle van Dyne, by the way, was aculturated in a part of the U.S.A. where verbal
attitudes toward black people are dated and unconsciously derisive, and is doing pretty much the best she can — colored and so on — and anyway
is a paragon of racial sensitivity compared to the sort of culture Don Gately was conditioned in.
284 It's a Boston-colored thing on Commitments to make all speech a protracted apostrophe to some absent 'Jim,' Joelle's observed in a neutral
sociologic way.
285 Boston Housing Authority. 286 Mixes 5/1 with ferric chloride to produce 'A + B Blood,' an F/X staple of low-budget splatter-films. 287 The cartridge's repetitive emphasis on the Mother Superior's desire to silence the novitiate leads B. Boone — a lazy student but very bright girl
— to opine that the silent brown-cowled Trappists who've been hanging superfluously around the film's edges like some mute Greek chorus have
been serving a symbolic rather than a narrative function, which strikes Hal as perceptive. 288 It's also a sly Schtitt-directed à-clef, of course, amounting to something like We Are What We Revile or We Are What We Scurry Around As Fast
As Possible With Our Eyes Averted, though when Schtitt mentions the motto he never attaches any moral connotation to it, or for that matter ever
translates it, allowing prorectors and Big Buddies to adjust their translations to suit the needs of the pedagogical moment. 289 © the Commonwealth of MA's Lottery Authority. 290 Easily found when pawning a cordless M. Cafe® Café-au-Lait Maker at a Brookline shop of pawning, for Fortier and Marathe and the A.F.R.
knew well M. DuPlessis's passion of breakfast cafe au lait. 291 Having in her M.B.A. program absorbed the litigatory lessons of music producers v. cassette-tape manufacturers and film-production
companies v. videotape-rental chains, Noreen Lace-Forché protected InterLace's golden goose's copyrights by specifying that all consumer-TPcompatible laser cartridges be engineered as Read-Only — copyable Master cartridges require special OS-codes and special hardware to run,a
 and
you need licenses for both the codes and the hardware, which keeps most consumers out of the bootleg-cartridge business but is not a hard hurdle
to clear if you've got financial resources and political incentive (i.e., to dupe off a Master).
a. N.L.-F. had even rigged it so that Masters have to be run at 585 r.p.m. instead of a consumer-TP's cartridge-drive's 450 r.p.m. 292 Thanks to the betrayal of Marathe, this pure-malice agenda is known to the Office of Unspecified Services, though it is not impossible that
Fortier deliberately allowed Marathe to pass along this datum, Marathe knows, for the hope of instilling even deeper chills of fear in Sans-Chrìste
Gentle and his O.N.A.N. chiens-courants. Suspected but unknown by Marathe, Fortier plans to have Marathe view the Entertainment by force
before plans for the dissemination of copies from a Master are firm in execution. This not because Fortier for a moment suspects Marathe's love of
his wife's health of prompting his betrayal of Leur Rai Pays — Fortier had overseen both jeux du procbain train* at which Marathe's elder brothers
had been struck and killed, and Fortier has long nursed a suspicion that Marathe nurses dreams of redress for this.
a. Q.v. Note 304 sub. 293 Though hope springs eternal in the breasts, this news had been expected by Broullîme and Fortier the moment they witnessed the shop's
brothers active and alert. For they believed no Master cartridge would have lain unshelved in a bag or damp box: even the dim brothers Antitoi,
seeing the unique case and slightly larger size of a Master, would have put this to the special side, and arranged for the special 585-r.p.m.
hardware to view it to check for special value, and been already lost. 294 Q.v. @ 2O3Oh. on 11 November Year of the D.A.U., 308 Subdorm B, Enfield Tennis Academy, where James Albrecht Lockley Struck Jr. sits
slumped, chin in hands, forehead slathered in (C2H5CO)2O2a
, elbows on tiny cleared spots on desktop, TP compactly humming, word-processing
converter plugged into its green-lit dock, HD screen set atop the cartridge-viewer chassis on its fold-out support like a loved one's photo, keyboard
hauled out of McGee-like chaos of closet and set on Heavy Touch, cursor throbbing softly at screen's upper left before Struck, hunched blearily over
what's starting to emerge as like unabsorbable amounts of research material for his post-Midterm termpaper for Ms. Pout-rincourt's History of
Canadian Unpleasantness course thing. Struck always refers mentally to his classes as 'things.' Original hopes for at least originality of topic have
long since gone over the side of the boat, emotionally. It turns out the more luridly absorbing the angle of topic you choose, the more people have
already been there before you with their footprints to fill and their obscurely academic-type-journal articles to try and absorb and, like, synthesize.
Struck's been at this over an hour, and his original sights have lowered considerably. He's been feeling a bit punk all day, sinuses with that infallible
storm's-on-the-way feeling of weight and clot and a goalie-mask headache that throbs with his heart, and he's now trying to find some new
resource in the piles that's obscure and amateurish enough for him to transpose and semi-plagiarize without worrying about Poutrincourt having
read it or smelling a rat in the woodpile.
'Almost as little of irreproachable scholarly definitiveness is known about the infamous Separatist "Wheelchair Assassins" (Les Assassins des
Fauteuils Rollents or A.F.R.s) of southwestern Quebec as is accepted as axiomatic about the herds of oversized "Feral Infants" allegedly reputed to 

inhabit the periodically overinhabitable forested sections of the eastern Reconfiguration.’
A B.P.L. ArchFax database search off the conjunctive key terms A.F.R., wheelchair, fauteuil rollent, Quebec, Quebec, Separatism, terrorist,
Experialism, history, and cult, which you'd think would narrow things down nicely, yielded over 400 items, articles, essays, and papers, in
everything from The Continent to Us, from Foreign Affairs to something called Wild Conceits, a woebegone little marginal archaic desktop-pub.-
looking thing put out by someplace called Bayside Community College up 1-93 in Med-ford, nowhere near any bays, and edited by the same-named
guy whose Wild Conceits wheelchair-killers essay Struck, after having to read the first sentence a bunch of times to even make sense of it, gauges
he's pretty safe in ripping off, since no way Poutrincourt'd have spent the time to E.S.L. her way through U.S. Academese this insufferable:
'... that the prenominate oversized infants reputedly do exist, are anomalous and huge, grow but do not develop, feed on the abundance of
annularly available edibles the overgrowth periods in the region represent, do deposit titanically outsized scat, and presumably do crawl
thunderously about, occasionally sallying south of murated retention lines and into populated areas of New New England.' In a twist on the usual
plagiarism-situation, the hardest work for Struck here is going to be sanitizing the prose in this Wild Conceits guy's thing, or at least bringing the
verbs and modifiers down out of the like total ozone, which the Academese here on the wr
hole sounds to Struck like the kind of foam-flecked
megalograndiosity he associates with Quaaludes and red wine and then the odd Preludin to pull out of the grandiose nosedive of the Quaaludes
and red wine. Plus let's not even mention repair-work on the freewheeling transitions; Poutrincourt has a fetishy thing about transitions.
'The massive, feral infants, formed by toxicity and sustained by annulation, however, are, from the vulgate perspective of this Year of the
Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster, essentially passive icons of the Experialist gestalt. Would that the infamous Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents
were, as well.' Struck can almost see Poutrincourt putting a big red triple-underlined QUOI? under a transition this tortured and freewheeling.
Struck pictures the Wild Conceits guy totally strafed as he goes, weaving over his foam-flecked desktop, almost. Tor the infamous Quebecker
Separatist A.F.R. cell's claims to irreduce-ably active status include the following. The legless Quebecker Wheelchair Assassins, although legless and
confined to wheelchairs, nevertheless contrive to have situated large reflective devices across odd-numbered United States highways for the
purpose of disorienting and endangering northbound Americans, to have disrupted pipelines between processing points in the eastern
Reconfiguration's annular fusion grid, have been linked to attempts at systemic damage of the federally contracted Empire Waste Displacement's
launch and reception facilities on both sides of the Reconfigured intracontinental border, and, perhaps most infamously, derive their cell's own
sobriquet in the vox populi------
"Wheelchair Assassins"------from the active practice of assassinating prominent Canadian officials who support or even tolerate what they------
the A.F.R.s, in infrequent public communiques------regard as both Quebec and Canada in íoío's "Sudetenlandization"
by the------as the A.F.R. characterize it------same American-dominated Organization of North American Nations which forced ecologically
distorted and possibly mutagenic territory into their------the nation of Canada, and most specifically and intensively the province of Quebec------
aegis in the newly subsidized Year of the Whopper . ..' — Struck, canted slightly in his desk-chair from the overdevelopment of his body's right side,
is also trying to carve up each of this diarrheatic G. T. Day, M.S. guy's clauses into less-long self-contained sentences that sound more earnest and
pubescent, like somebody earnestly struggling toward truth instead of flecking your forehead with spittle as he ranted grandiosely — '. . . the
Wheelchair Assassins at these all too publicly familiar assassinations materializing, quote "as if from nowhere" unquote, masters of stealth, striking
terror into prominent, Canadian hearts, affording no warning excepting the ominous squeak of slow wheels, striking swiftly and without warning,
assassinating prominent Canadians and then dissolving back into the dark night' — as opposed to a light night? Struck forces sudden air through
his full nose, producing a low and horn-like derisive sound — 'striking always at night, a type of performative signature, to strike at night only,
leaving behind only sinuous networks of thin, double tracks in snow, dew, leaves, or earth, as performative signatures, such that a double sinuous
5 shaped line across the traditional fleur-de-lis motif of Quebecois Separatism is the A.F.R. cell's standard, its escutcheon or "symbol," if you will, in
their infrequent and always hostile communiques to the administrations of Canada and O.N.A.N. Such that, quote, "To hear the squeak," unquote,
is now an understood euphemismic locution among officials highly placed in Quebecois, Canadian, and O.N.A.N.ite power structures for instant,
terrifying, and violent death. And for the media, as well. As in, quote, "Before many thousands of shocked subscribers, newly elected Bloc
Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe and an aide, guarded by no fewer than a dozen units of the Domestic Detail's elite mounted Cuirassiers,
nevertheless heard the squeak last night during a spontaneously disseminated address at the lakeside resort of Pointe Clare."*
Struck, clutching his head with one hand, is trying to find euphemismic in the TP's Lex-Base.
'. .. Affiliations, sometimes purported, between the Root Cult core of Les Assassins on one hand and the more extreme and violently subversive
of Quebec's Séparatisteur
organizations------the Fronte de la Liberation de la Quebec, the Fils de Montcalm, the ultra right anti-Reconfigurative vishnu of the Bloc
Quebecois------tend, however, to be contradicted by both stated agendas------the conventional Separatist phalances demanding only the
independent secession of provincial Quebec and the elimination of Anglo-American cognates from public discourse, while the A.RR.s' stated aims
being nothing less total than the total return of all Reconfigured territories to American administration, the cessation of all E.W.D. airborne waste
displacement and ATHSCME rotary air mass displacement activity within 175 kilometers of Canadian soil, the removal of all fission/ waste/fusion
annulars north of the 42°-N. Parallel, and the secession of Canada in toto
from the Organization of North American Nations------and by the fact that all too many
prominent figures in the recent sociohistory of the Separatist movement------for e.g., Schnede, Charest, Remillard, both Sr. and Jr. Bouchards----
--have, in the last 24 months------particularly, in the violent and bloody autumn of the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar------"heard the squeak." ‘
Struck's little TP's internal Lex files confirm vishnu, at least. Plus there's a kind of almost savage edge to the article's incoherence that Struck's
getting almost to like, a little: he keeps imagining the little hyphen of wrinkle Poutrincourt gets between her eyebrows when she doesn't follow
something and can't quite tell if it's your English's fault or her English's fault. 'Prior to Y.P.W.c.'s Freedom of Speculation Act, credible sociohistorical
data on the origins and evolution of Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents from obscure, adolescent, nihilistic Root Cult to one of the most feared
cells in the annals of Canadian extremism was regrettably patchy and dependent on the hearsay of sources whose scholarly veracity was of an
integrity somewhat less than unimpeachable.' Struck here pictures Thierry Poutrincourt, who tends to get that little annoyed-confusion wrinkle
sometimes even with the lucidest of term papers, lowering her tall head and charging into a wall. One sinus feels noticeably bigger than the other
sinus, and there's something not quite right with his neck from sitting hunched all this time, and he'd kill relatives for a quick DuBois.
'Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents of Quebec are essentially cultists, locating both their political raison d'etre and their philosophical dasein
within the North American sociohistorical interval of intensive special interest diffraction that preceded------nay, one might daresay stood in integral
causal relation with respect to------the nearly simultaneous inaugurations of O.N.A.N.ite governance, continental Interdependence, and the
commercial subsidization of a lunar O.N.A.N. calendar. Like most Canadian cult extensions, however, the Wheelchair Assassins and their cultic
derivations have proven substantially more fanatical, less benign, less reasonable, and substantially more malignant------in sum, more difficult for
responsible authorities to anticipate, control, 4
 CBC/PATHÉ 1200h.-0000h. Summary Cartridge * 911-24-04, 4 May Y.P.Wc., © Y.P. We., PATHÉ
Nouvelle Toujours, Ltd. interdict, or reason with than even the most passionate U.S. kabals. This scholarly essay concurs in many essential respects
with the thesis that Canadian and other non American Root Cults, in contrast to all but what Phelps and Phelps argue are isolated pockets of
antihistorical American stelliformism, persist so queerly in directing their reverent fealty toward principles, quote, "often not only isomorphic with
but activally opposed to the cultists' own individual pleasure, comfort, cut bono, or entertainment as to be all but outside the ken of both the
sophisticated predictive models of psychosocial science and the rudimentary comprehension of human reason."5
’
This all takes serious labor for Struck to decoct the gist out of and then recast in rather less uptown and more basic studential prose. Twice in
the hall outside his and Shaw's and Pemberton's room, Rader and Wagenknecht and some other 16's-sounding males go down the hall, all of them
together going 'Er, ah, ee, oo, ah, er, ah, ee .. .,' and so on. 'It is an accepted fact that Les Assassins' Root Cult, in a fashion typical of those whose
objects are divorced from the rational advancement of individual interest, takes, for its rites and personality, rituals intimately bound up with "Les
jeux pour-memes" formal competitive games whose end is less any sort of "prize" than it is a manner of basic identity: i.e., that is, "game" as 

metaphysical environment and psychohistorical locus and geatalt.' Struck's own historical dad, during Jim's own childhood in Rancho Mirage, was
an inveterate red-wine-with-heavy-tranqs-on-the-side drinker, who used to make late-night phone calls to people he didn't know very well and
make statements he later had to retract at great length, until finally one autumn night the Dad had staggered out and attempted a one-and-a-half
tuck into the Struck family's backyard pool that he hadn't recalled had been drained, resulting in a neck brace for life that ended his career as a
low-80s golfer, resulting in incredible bitterness and family trauma, before little J.A.L.S. Jr. was shipped off to the Rolling Hills Academy.
'It is, for example, largely conceded that Les Assassins' confinement to their epithetic wheelchairs can be traced to rural southwestern preExperialist Quebec's infamous "Le ]eu du Prochain Train," and that the A.F.R.'s Root Cult itself was comprised largely or perhaps even entirely of
veteran devotees and practitioners of this savage, nihilistic, and mettle testing jeu pour-meme.
' "La Culte du Prochain Train," often translated as "The Cult of the Next Train," is known to have originated at least a decade prior to
Reconfiguration among the male offspring of asbestos, nickel and zinc miners in the desolate Papineau region of what was then extreme southwest
Quebec. The chilling game's competition and its upspringing cult soon spread throughout the network of non-ionized and pre-Interdependent
railroad lines which carried raw minerals south to Ottawa and the United States' Great Lake Ports.' Over Struck's little desk hangs a model airplane
made entirely from different parts of beer cans. While Inc was keen on the whole lurid mirror-across-highway terrorism thing of early O.N.A.N., and
Schacht's paper's focus was the violent French-Catholic protests against municipal fluoridation under Mulroney, Struck had picked the A.F.R.-andRussian-Roulettish-train-jumping-cult-thing connection, and was sticking to it with the same tenacity that kept him on the 18's A-squad despite a
serve that deLint described as resembling a debutante's curtsy. The plane's got flattened cans for wings, smunched-flat cans for wheels, part of a
tallboy for fuselage and snout.
'As with many games, Le Jeu du Prochain Train was itself substantially simpler than 5
 in Phelps and Phelps, The Cults of the Unwavering I: A
Field Guide to Cults of Currency Speculation, Melanin, Fitness, Bioflavinoids, Spectation, Assassination, Stasis, Property, Agoraphobia, Repute,
Celebrity, Acraphobia, Performance, Amway, Fame, Infamy, Deformity, Scopophobia, Syntax, Consumer Technology, Scopophilia, Presleyism,
Hunterism, Inner Children, Eros, Xenophobia, Surgical Enhancement, Motivational Rhetoric, Chronic Pain, Solipsism, Survivalism, Preterition, AntiAbortionism, Kevorkianism, Allergy, Albinism, Sport, Chiliasm, and Telentertainment in pre-O.N.A.N. North America, © Y.P.W. the organization of
the competition.' A cool smile from Struck. 'It was played after sunset at specified sites, specifically les passages a niveau de vote ferrée that
marked every rural Quebecker road's intersection with a railroad track. In the Year of the Whopper, there were over two thousand (2,000) such
intersections in the Papineau region alone, though not all saw heavy enough flow to accommodate the complexities of true competition.
'Six boys, miners' sons, ages ten to roughly sixteen, Quebecois French speaking boys, line up on six railroad ties' juts just outside the track. Two
hundred sixteen (216) boys------never either more nor less------are involved in a night's opening rounds, organized into sixes, each group of six
taking its turn with a different train, standing on consecutive juts just outside one track, waiting, doubtless tense, awaiting the procession of a
fearsome bride, indeed. The night's heavily travelled crossing's schedule of trains is known to Lejeu du Prochain Train's episcopate of les directeurs
dejeu------older, post-adolescent boys, veterans of previous les jeux, many of them legless and in wheelchairs or------for the sons of asbestos
miners, many orphaned and desperately poor------on crude rolling boards.
No timepieces are permitted the players, who are under the absolute discretion of the game's directeurs, whose decisions are final and often
brutally enforced. They all are silent, listening for the sound of the engine's whistle, a sound which is sad and cruel at the same time, as the sound
approaches and begins to subtly undergo Doppler Effects. They tense palely muscled legs beneath hand me down corduroys as the next train's one
white eye rounds the track's curve and bears down on the game's waiting boys.’
Struck keeps bogging down in these parts where it seems like the guy just totally abandons a scholarly tone, and even probably starts making up
or hallucinating details which there's no way Jim Struck could represent himself as having been there to see, and he's blue-delete-looping all over
the place, plus grinding his eye and picking at his forehead, his two more or less constant responses to creative stress.
'Le Jeu du Prochain Train itself is simplicity in motion. The object: Be the last of your round's six to jump from one side of the tracks to the
other------that is, across the tracks------before the train passes. Your only real opponents are your six's other five.
Never is the train itself regarded as an opponent. The speeding, screaming train is regarded rather as le jeu'$ boundary, arena, and reason. Its
size, its speed down the extremely gradual north-to-south grade of what was then southwestern Quebec, and the precise mechanical specifications
of each scheduled train------these are known to the directeurs, they comprise the constants in a game the variables of which are the respective
wills of the six ranged along the track, and their estimates of one another's will to risk all to win.’
Struck transposes clearly nonadolescent uptown material like this into: 'The variable of the game isn't so much a matter of the train, but the
player's courage and will.’
'The last few instants, vanishingly small, when the player may hurl himself athwart the expanse of track, across timber ties, creosote stench,
gravel and scarred iron, amid the ear splitting scream of the whistle almost overhead, able to feel the huge push of terrible air from the transport's
cow catcher or express train's rounded nose, to go sprawling in the gravel past the tracks' other side and roll to see wheels and flanges, couplings
and driving rods, the furious back and forth of transverse axles, feeling the whistle's steam condense to drizzle all around------these few seconds
are known, familiar as their own pulse, to the boys who assemble and play.' Struck's now progressed to grinding the whole heel of his hand into his
eyesocket, producing a kind of ectoplasmic pinwheel of red in there. Did like even pre-bullet railroad engines have flanges and cowcatchers and
whistles that steamed?
In a disastrous lapse, Struck copies hurl himself athwart, a decidedly un-Struckish-sounding verb phrase, verbatim into his text.
'. . . that the true variable which renders le Jeu du Prochain Train a contest and not merely a game involves the nerve and heart and willingness
to risk all of any or all of the five waiting beside you at the track. How long can they wait? When will they choose? Their lives and limb worth how
much Queen-headed coin this night? More radical by far than the American youth automobile game of "Chicken" to which its principle is frequently
compared (five, not one, different wills to comparatively gauge, in addition to your own will's resolve, and no motion or action to distract you from
the tension of waiting motionlessly to move, waiting as one by one the other five quail and save themselves, leap to beat the train .. .,' and then
the sentence just ends, without even a close to the parenthesis, though Struck, with a canny sense for this sort of thing, knows the analogy to
Chicken'11 ring just the right bell, term-paper-wise.
'Le Jeu's historic best, reportedly, however, ignore their five competitors completely, concentrating their entire attention on determining the last
viable instant in which to leap, regarding the last, final, and only true opponent in the game to be their own will, mettle, and intuition about the last
viable instant in which to leap. These nerveless few, le Jeu's finest------many of whom will go on to directeur future jeux (if not, often, to
membership in Les Assassins or its stelliform offshoots)------these nerveless and self-contained virtuosi never see their opponents' flinches or tics or
the darkenings at corduroys' crotches, none of the normal signs of will faltering which lesser players scan for------for the game's finest players
frequently close their eyes entirely as they wait, trusting the railroad ties' vibration and the whistle's pitch, as well as intuition, and fate, and
whatever numinous influences lie just beyond fate.' Struck at certain points imagines himself gathering this Wild Conceits guy's lapels together with
one hand and savagely and repeatedly slapping him with the other — forehand, backhand, forehand.
'The cult's game's principle is simple. The last of the six to jump before the train and land intact wins the round. The fifth through the second to
leap have lost, but acquitted themselves.
'The first in a round to quail and jump walks home from there, alone under the moon, disgraced and ashamed.
'But even the first to quail and jump has jumped. Far beyond prohibited, not to jump at all is regarded as impossible. To "perdre son coeur" and
not jump at all is outside le Jeu's limit. The possibility simply does not exist. It is unthinkable. Only once, in le Jeu du Prochain Train's extensive oral
history, has a miner's son not jumped, lost his heart and frozen, remaining on his jut as the round's train passed. This player later drowned. "Perdre son coeur" when it is mentioned at all, is known also as "Faire un Bernard Wayne," in dubious honor of this lone unjumping asbestos miner's
son, about whom little beyond his subsequent drowning in the Baskatong Reservoir is known, his name denoting a figure of ridicule and disgust
among speakers of the Papineau Region vulgate.' Disastrously, Struck blithely transposes this stuff too, with not even a miniature appliance-size 

bulb flickering anywhere over his head.
'The game's object is to jump last and land still fully limbed upon the opposite embankment.
'Expresses are 30 k.p.h. faster than conventional transports, but a transport's cow catcher mangles. A boy struck head on by a moving train is
shot as from a cannon, knocked out of his shoes, describes a towering, flailing arc, and is transported home in a burlap sack. A player caught
beneath a wheel and run over is frequently spread out along a hundred red meters or more of reddened track, and is transported home in a
number of ceremonial asbestos and nickel mining shovels provided by the Jeu's older and frequently dismembered directeurs.
'As happens more often, purportedly, a boy who has dived more than half way across the tracks when he is struck and hit, loses one or more
legs------either there on the spot, if lucky, or later, under surgical gas and orthopedic saws applied to what are customarily violently angled masses
of unrecognizably contuded meat.' The paradox here for Struck as plagiarist, who needs something with sufficient detail to be able to basically just
rehash, is that this thing here has almost too much detail, much of it purple; it doesn't even seem all that scholarly; it seems more like the Wild
Conceits Bayside C.C. guy seemed to get more and more tipsy as the thing went on until he felt free to make a lot of it up, like e.g. the contudedmeat bits, etc. What's interesting to Hal Incandenza about his take on Struck, sometimes Pemulis, Evan Ingersoll, et al. is that congenital plagiarists
put so much more work into camouflaging their plagiarism than it would take just to write up an assignment from conceptual scratch. It usually
seems like plagiarists aren't lazy so much as kind of navigationally insecure. They have trouble navigating without a detailed map's assurance that
somebody has been this way before them. About this incredible painstaking care to hide and camouflage the plagiarism — whether it's dishonesty
or a kind of kleptomaniacal thrill-seeking or what — Hal hasn't developed much of any sort of take.
'It is frightfully simple and straightforward. Sometimes the last of the six to jump is struck; then the second to last leaper becomes the last and
victor, and advances, each winner literally "surviving" into the game's next round, a sort of sextupled semi final, six rounds of six Canadian boys
each: the, quote, "Les Trente-Six" for the evening. the initial rounds' boys------those who have been neither the last nor the disgraceful first to
leap------are permitted to stay at the le passage a niveau de vote ferree, assembled to become the semi finals' silent audience. The entire Le Jeu
du Prochain Train is customarily conducted in silence.' In a disastrous and maybe unconsciously self-destructive set of lapses, Struck rehabilitates
the prose but keeps a lot of the hallucinatory specific descriptive stuff in, unfootnoted, though there's obviously no way he could pretend to have
been there.
'The surviving losers from among the Les Trente-Six then swell the ranks of the silent gallery as the six nerveless winners------the finalists, this
night's "attendants longtemps ses tours"------some bleeding or gray with shock, survivors already of two separate long delayed leaps and
hairbreadth escapes, eyes blank or closed, mouths working in savored distaste, await the nightly 2359 Express, the ultra ionized "Le Train de la
Foudre" from Mont Tremblant to Ottawa. They will jump athwart the tracks in front of its high speed nose at the final moment, each trying to be
the last to leap and live. It is not rare for several of the le Jeu's finalists to be struck.' Struck tries to decide whether it'd be unrealistic or unselfconsciously realistic to keep using his own name as a verb — would a man with anything to camouflage use his own name as a verb?
'. . . that several among the La Culte du Prochain Train's survivors and organizational directorate went on to found and comprise Les Assassins
des Fauteuils Rollents is beyond sociohistorical dispute, though the precise ideological relation between the B.S. era's simultaneously chivalric and
nihilistic Cult of the Train's savage tournaments and the present's limbless cell of anti-O.N.A.N. extremists remains the subject of the same scholarly
debate that surrounds the evolution of northern Quebec's La Culte de Baiser Sans Fin into the not particularly dreaded but media savvy Fils de
Montcalm cell credited with the helicoptered dropping of the 12 meter, human waste filled, pie shell onto the rostrum of U.S. President Gentle's
second Inaugural.
'As with the La Culte du Prochain Train, the Cult of the Endless Kiss of the iron mining regions surrounding the Gulf of St. Lawrence, coalesced
around a periodic, tournament style competition, this one comprised of 64 adolescent Canadian participants, of whom one half were female.6
 Thus,
the first round pitted 32 couples, each of which consisted of one male and one female Quebecker.' Struck is trying to phone Hal, but gets only his
room's wearisome phone-machine-message; can you ever say pitted without some kind of against in there someplace later in the sentence? Struck
envisions the Wild Conceit scholar utterly strafed by this time, the guy's eyes crossed and his head lolling and having to cover one eye with a hand
just to see a single screen, and typing with his nose. But with the apparent self-destructive credulity that characterizes many plagiarists, no matter
how gifted, Struck goes ahead and puts in the complementless pitted, imagining forehand and backhand slaps all the while. 'Of each pair, one half,
designated by lot, filled his or her lungs to capacity with inhaled air, while the other exhaled maximally to empty his or hers. Their mouths were
then fitted together and quickly sealed by an 6
 Except in certain very esoteric variations on the game.
organizing cultist with occlusive tape, who then expertly employed the thumb and forefinger of both hands to seal the combatants' nostrils. Thus,
the battle of the Endless Kiss had been joined. The entire lung contents of the designatedly inhaled player was then exhaled orally into the emptied
lungs of his or her opponent, who in turn exhaled the inhalation back to its original owner, and so forth, back and forth, the same air being traded
back and forth, with oxygen and carbon dioxide ratios becoming progressively more Spartan, until the organizer holding their nostrils closed
officially declared one combatant or the other to be "evanoui" or, "swooned," either fallen to the ground or out on his or her feet. The theoretics of
the contest lends itself to an appreciation of the patient, attritive, grinding down tactics of traditional Quebecois Séparatisteurs such as Les Fils de
Montcalm and the Fronte de la Liberation du Quebec, as opposed to the viciousness and brinksmanship of "Le Prochain Train"'s Root Cult's disabled
heirs. The figurative object of the "Bai$ser" competition appears------according to Phelps and Phelps------to involve using what one is given with
maximally exhaustive levels of efficiency and endurance before excreting it back whence it came, a stoic stance toward waste utilization that the
Phelps somewhat cavalierly employ to illuminate the Montcalmistes' relative indifference to a continental Reconfiguration that constitutes Les
Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents' whole "raison de la guerre outrance" '
b
a. Pimple cream.
b. 'Reason for all-out war,' which Struck inserts without bothering even to check for the definition Day'd been too befogged to give, which is in and
of itself almost suicidal, given that Poutrincourt knows exactly how much French facility Struck's got, or rather hasn't. 295 (she thought then) 296 Some of her and Jim's best arguments had been over the connotations of 'Everybody's a critic,' which Jim had liked to repeat with all different
shades and pitches of ironic double-edge.
297 Joelle van Dyne and Orin Incandenza each remember themselves as the original approachee. It's unclear which if cither's memory is accurate,
though it's noteworthy that this is one of only two total times Orin has perceived himself as the approachee, the other being the 'Swiss hand-model'
on whose nude flank he's been furiously tracing infinity signs all during the Moment Subject's absence. 298 = point of view. 299 In the Chestnut Hills Shopping Center on Boylston/Rte. 9, which the E.T.A. A-squad staggers past several times a week, on runs — a chain, but
a very top-shelf and fine one, and the Brookline Legal puts on a particularly fine marine spread, and the boniface seemed to know Dr. Incandenza
and called him by name, and brought him a double bonded without being asked.
300 Jargon: Film/Cartridge Studies. 301 Trilateral North American immigration bureaucracy. 302 Boston AA jargon. Y.E.T. is 'You're Eligible Too,' a denial-buster for those who compare others' ghastly consequences to their own so far, the
point being to get you to see the street-guy with socks for gloves drinking Listerine at O7OOh. as just slightly farther down the same road you're
on, when you Come In. Or something close to that.
303 The bureaucracy of Quebecois pensions, which had ruled against buying anything more than a used Kenbeck pacemaker for Marathe's father,
now deceased.
304 See Note 304 supra.

305 Marathe's malentendu of live-in, 316. Like e.g. the times C.T. and the Moms would come out to Logan to pick Mario and Himself up from a
filming trip, Mario lugging gear, Himself damp and pasty from the cabin pressure and not enough leg-room and his sportcoat pockets always
clicking with little plastic bottles with unopenable caps, and in the car up to Enfield Mario's uncle would keep up an Opheliac mad monologue of
chatter that would get Himself's poor teeth grinding so bad that when they pulled over to the breakdown lane and Mario came around to open the
door and let Himself lean out and be ill there'd be grit in the throw-up that came out, white dental visible grit, from all the grinding. 306
307 © B.S. 1981, Routledge & Kegan Paul Pic, London UK, wildly expensive hdcover; not on disk. 308 Maine having been lost altogether, recall. 309 Incandenza family idiom for leftovers. 310 Main library, M.I.T., East Cambridge.
311 Q.v. for a confirming example !93Oh. Thurs., 12 November Y.D.A.U., Rm. 204 Sub-dorm B:
'No, look, it's still Rise Over Run. The derivative's the slope of the tangent at some point along the function. It doesn't matter what point until
they give you the point on the test.’
'Will this even be on the Boards? Do they go past trig?’
'This is fucking trig. They'll give you word problems that may involve changing quantities — something accelerating, a voltage, inflation of
O.N.A.N. currency over U.S. currency. Differentiation'll save you half the time, all those triangles inside triangles to figure change with trig. Trig's a
Unit-bender on rate-changes. Derivatives're just trig with some imagination. You imagine the points moving inexorably toward each other until for
all practical purposes they're the same point. The slope of a defined line becomes the slope of a tangent to one point.’
'One point that's in fact actually two points?’
'You use your goddamn imagination, Inc, plus a couple prescribed limits. Which they won't fuck with you on limits on the general test, trust me.
This is a big pink titty compared to an Eschaton calculation. You move the two points you're doing Rise-over-Run on infitesimally close together,
you end up with a plug-in formula.’
'Can I tell you about my dream now and then we'll use the momentum from that to plow through this?’
'Just write this on your wrist or something. Function x, exponent n, the derivative's going to be nx + xn-1 for any kind of first-order rate-ofincrease thing they're going to ask you. This assumes a definable limit, of course, which no way they're going to fuck with you on limits on the
fucking Boards.’
'It was a DMZ-dream.’
'Do you see how you're going to apply this to a rate-of-increase-type little story they'll pose?’
'It involved your experimental soldier, the massive dose.’
'Let me just close this door, here.’
'It was the Leavenworth convict. The one you said had left the planet. The one belting out Ethel Merman. It was horrific, Mikey. In the dream I
was the soldier.’
'So you're now going to assume a real you-know-what experience will be similar to the experience of a nightmare.’
'Aha. Why nightmare? Why do you assume it was a nightmare? Did I use the word nightmare?’
'You used the word horrific. I assume it wasn't a romp through the heather.’
'In the dream the horror was that I wasn't really singing "There's No Business Like Show Business." I was really screaming for help. I was
screaming like "Help! I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers! It's me! It's me, screaming for help!" ‘
'A Rusk-level dream, Inc. A standard nobody-understands-me dream. The DMZ and Mermanization were incidental.’
'There was a quality of loneliness to it, though. Unlike anything. To be screaming that I'm screaming for help instead of singing a show-tune and
to have the wardens and doctors gathered around snapping their fingers and tapping their feet.’
'Have I mentioned DMZ doesn't show up on a G.C./M.S.? Struck tracked this down off an obscure Digestive-Flora footnote. It's the fitviavi-mold
base. If the stuff shows up at all it shows as a slight case of unbalanced yeast.’
'I thought only girls got yeast.’
'Inc, don't be so fucking naïve. Data number two is Struck is halfway toward nailing down that this stuff's original intent was to induce what they
called quote transcendent experiences in get this chronic alcoholics in the like 1960s at Verdun Protestant Hospital in Montreal.’
'How come everywhere I turn this fall now everybody's suddenly mentioning Quebec in all kinds of radically different contexts? Orin's calling with
some protracted obsession about anti-O.N.A.N. Québecers.’
'. . . Tavis up and announces Quebec are the lambs in this year's fundraiser. Your Mum's from Quebec.’
'And then this term of all terms I take Poutrincourt's insurgency class, which is basically a Québecathon.' .
'Oh I definitely I'd suspect some kind of conspiracy or trap. It's obvious everything's pointing toward getting you in a cell belting out Mermanalia.
Inc, I think your hinges are starting to squeak. I think this is what plateaux-hopping up to the top does to somebody. I think a meaningful
transcendent DMZ-type non-uremic-fallout interlude before Tucson is just what the carpenter ordered, for the old hinges. Keep you from going
back to just smoking that Bob Hope day in day out when the test's up. Shit'll kill your lungs. Shit'll make you fat, soft, moist and pale, Inc. Seen it
happen. You need something more than a 30-day cleanout. The tu-sais-qué could be just the reconfiguration you need to start branching out,
leave the Bob Hope alone, find something you can take to college or the Show and not get paralyzed. Shit'll paralyze you over time, Incblob. Saw it
happen time and over, back in the neighborhood. Once-promising stand-up guys spending their lives in front of the TP, eating Nutter Butters and
whacking off into an old sock. The shit-fairy moves in with luggage for an extended stay, Inc. Plus indecisive? You haven't seen indecisive til you've
seen a guy with little fat-titties slumped in a chair in his tenth year of nonstop Bob Hope. It's not pretty. Incster my friend it's not pretty at all. A
transcendent experience with me and the Axhandle could be just what the hinges are squeaking for. Be around some other people for a change.
Don't make me sit there with just Axhandle babbling about Yale. Leave the Visine at home.’
'Was it transcendent? The term in Struck's literature? Or was it transcendental?’
' 's the difference for Christ's sake?’
'Mike, what if I said I've been moving toward more than just a month off.’
'Abandon All Hope.3
 This what I was talking.’
'I mean maybe make a decision. Forever. What if it was that I was doing it more and more and it was getting less fun but I was still doing it
more and more, and the only way to moderate would be to like wave a hankie at it altogether.’
'I applaud. Some low-risk transcendentalism with me and the Human Hatchet could be just the impotence for this kind of like major re—’
'But it'd be everything. Blue Flames, the odd 'drine. If I do anything I know I'd go back to the Bob. I'd drop Madame Psychosis with you guys
and all my firmest resolve would melt and I'd have the one-hitter out and be sniveling at you to spring some eternal Hope on me.’
'You're so naïve, Inc. You're so sharp in one way and such a little bald little fat-legged baby in the woods in others. You think you're just going to
go Here I go, deciding, and reverse total thrust and quit everything?’
'What I said was what if.’
'Hal, you are my friend, and I've been friends to you in ways you don't even have a clue. So brace yourself for a growth-spurt. You want to quit
because you're starting to see you need it, and —’
'That's exactly it. Peems, think how horrible that'd be, if somebody needed it. Not just liked it a great great great deal. Needing it becomes a
whole separate order of. ... It seems horrific. It seems like the difference between really loving something and being —’
'Say the word, Inc.’
'Because you know why? What if it's true? The word. What if you are? So the answer's just walk away? If you're addicted you need it, Hallie, and 

if you need it what do you imagine happens if you just hoist the white flag and try to go on without it, without anything?’
'You lose your mind, Inc. You die inside. What happens if you try and go without something the machine needs? Food, moisture, sleep, O2?
What happens to the machine? Think about it.’
'You were just now applauding the idea of Abandoning All Hope. You were just invoking an image of me with breasts, masturbating into laundry,
with cobwebs between my ass and a chair.’
'That's the Bob. I didn't hear me say everything. If you need the Bob, Inc, you can only quit the Bob if you move onward and up to something
else.’
'Harder drugs. Just like those old filmstrips about pot opening the door to larger drugs, where Jiminy Cricket —’
'Oh fuck you. It doesn't have to be harder. It just has to be something. I know guys quit heroin, coke. How? They make the strategic move to a
case a day of Coors. Or to methadone, whatever. I know hard-drinking guys Inc that got off the booze by switching to the Bob Hope. Me myself,
you've seen, I switch all the time. The trick is the right switch for a man's wiring. I'm saying a real cobweb-blaster with me and Axford after the
Fundraiser could help you get some serious perspective, cut the babytalk and sweeping bullshit decisions there's no way you can do and start
getting a real handle on how you're going to branch out away from this Bob thing, which I applaud the getting away from the Bob for you, Inc, it's
not your thing, you were starting to get that look of a guy that'll end up with tits.’
'So you're in a very subtle way lobbying for a DMZ-drop by saying you don't believe I could simply quit everything. Since you sure don't plan to
quit. With your left eye wobbling all over the place. You haven't even quit the Tenuate. "Winners don't ever have to quit" and all deLint's little —’
'I didn't hear me say none of that. And I think you probably could quit it all. For a while. You're not a pussy. You've got balls, I know. I bet you
could gut it out.’
'For a while, you're saying.’
'And but what do you think would happen after a while, though? Without something you need?
'What, you're saying I'd grab my chest and keel over? Clutch my head in the middle of a Tap & Whack and die of an aneurism like that girl last
year at Atwood?’
'No. But you'd die inside. Maybe outside too. But what I've seen, if you're the real thing and need it and just cut yourself off of it altogether, you
die inside. You lose your mind. I've seen it happen. Cold Turkey they call it, the Bird. White-knuckling. Guys that'd just quit everything because they
were in too deep and quit it all and just died.’
'A Clipperton, you mean? You're saying Himself killed himself because he got sober? Because he didn't get sober. There was a thing of Wild
Turkey right there on the counter by the oven he blew his fucking head up with. So don't try to kertwang me with him, Mike.’
'Inc, what I know about your Da could be inscribed with a blunt crayon along the rim of a shot glass. I'm talking guys I know. Wolf Spiders.
Allston guys, that quit. Some did a Clipperton, yes. Some ended up in the Mental Marriott. Some got through by they joined NA or a cult or some
bug-eyed church and went around with ties talking about Jesus or Surrendering, but that shit's not going to work for you because you're too sharp
to ever buy the God-Squad shit. Most nothing big happened, that needed it and quit. They got up and went to work and came home and ate and
went to sleep and got up, day after day. But dead. Like machines; you could almost see the keys in their backs. You looked into their maps and
something was gone. The walking dead. They loved it so much they needed it and gave it up and now they were waiting to die. Something was all
over, inside.’
'Their joie de vivre. The fire in the belly.’
'Hal, it's been what, now, for you, two-and-a-half days without? three days? How you feeling in there already, brother?’
'I'm all right.’
'Uh-huh. Incpuddle, all I know's I'm your friend. I am. You don't want to communate with the Madame, you can hold me and Ax's purses for us.
You do what you want and point me toward whoever tells you different. I'm just giving you the advice to look a little further past that second of
deciding something I know you won't let yourself take back.’
'Some vital part of my like personhood would die without something to ingest. This is your view.’
'Sometimes you don't listen real well, Hallie. That's all right. Spend some time figuring out this needing. Like what part of you's come to need it,
do you think.’
'You're alleging that's the part that'll die.’
'Just whatever part you feel has come to need what you're planning to take away from it.’
'The part that's dependent or incomplete, you mean. The addict.'1
'That's just a word.’
a. q.v. Note 334 sub. 312 Johnette F., whose very first stepmother had been a Chelsea MA police officer, was conditioned in early childhood to refer to police as 'police' or
'the Law,' since most B.P.D. personnel find the street term the Finest sardonic. 313 People outside the Boston AA community always use The and say The Ennet House; this is one way to always tell somebody new or from
outside the community. 314 17 NOVEMBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT Sometimes at odd little times of day the E.T.A. males' locker room
downstairs in Comm.-Ad. is empty, and you can go in there and sort of moon around and listen to the showers drip and the drains gurgle. You can
feel the odd stunned quality customarily crowded places have at empty times. You can take your time dressing, flex in front of the big plate mirror
over the sink; the mirror has projecting side-mirrors so you can check out the old biceps from either side, see the jawline in profile, practice
expressions, try to look all natural and uncomposed so you can try to see what you really might normally look like to other people. The air in the
locker room hangs heavy with the smells of underarms, deodorant, benzoin, camphonated powder, serious feet, old steam. Also Lemon Pledge and
a slight smell of electrical burn from overused blow-dryers. Traces of powder and fuller's earth3
 on the blue carpeting, down in too deep to get out
without a steamer. You can take a comb out of the big jar of Barbicide on the shelf by the sink, and like a .38-caliber blow-dryer, and experiment
boldly. It's the best mirror in the Academy, intricately lit from all perspectives. Dr. J. O. Incandenza knew his adolescents. At slack times, sometimes head custodian Dave ('F.D.V.') Harde can be found in here, taking a tiny nap on one of the benches that run in front of the lockers, which he
claims the benches do something palliative for his spinal funiculi. More often there's one of Dave's incredibly old and interchangeable menial-task
janitors in here running a carpet sweeper or spraying industrial disinfectant in the urinals. You can go into the shower area and not turn the water
on and sing, really let go. Michael Pemulis's own vocals sound pro-quality good to him, but only when he's surrounded by shower-tile. Sometimes
when it's empty in here you can catch snatches of voices and intriguing feminine-hygienic noises from the females' locker room on the other side of
the lockers' wall.
At most other times of day, your certain type of more delicately constituted E.T.A. jr. uses the primitive subdorm hall showers and sinks and
avoids the packed locker room at almost all costs. No way Western man ever should have conceived of commodes and hot showers in the same
crowded air-space. T. Schacht can clear out most of a steamy locker room just by lumbering into a commode-stall and driving the latch home with
a certain purposeful force.
The prorectors have their own showers in a kind of lounge near their rooms in the secondary tunnel, with a Viewer and recliners and a little
fridgelet and a dicky-proof door.
When M. M. Pemulis came down to dress for P.M.S at about 1420h.,b
 the only people in the locker room were 14-A lobber nonpareil Todd
Possalthwaite, hunched and weeping, and Keith Freer, whom Pemulis was to play and who looked in no hurry to get dressed and out there to play,
and could very possibly have been the thing that was making Postal Weight weep. The so-called 'Viking' was shirtless and had a towel around his
neck and was at the mirror ministering to his skin. He had high hard white-blond hair and an extremely muscular neck and lower jaw, with a certain
type of protrusive gonions that made his upper face look tapered and sly. His hair always reminded Hal Incandenza of frozen surf, Hal said. Todd 

Possalthwaite was near-nude and hunched on the bench under his locker, his face in his hands, with its nose's white bandages visible through
spread fingers, weeping softly, shoulders trembling.
Pemulis, who's Postal Weight's Big Buddy and sort of lob-and-Eschaton-mentor and genuinely likes the kid, dropped his gear and gave him a sort
of male-affectionate fake one-two punch like Think Fast. ' 's the nose, Todder?' Like all of them, Pemulis could do his locker's combination by feel,
from months and years of constant combination-doing. He was looking all around himself and the room. Freer made a slight noise when Pemulis
asked the Postman if there was anything he could do.
Nothing's true,' Postal Weight sobbed, his voice palm-muffled, rocking slightly on the bench. His locker was open and little-boy cluttered. He was
wearing only an an unbuttoned little flannel shirt and a Johnson & Johnson jr. jock strap, and had tiny white feetc and delicate little shell-like toes.
He was supposed to be in Donni Stott's Valley-Map laugher right now, Pemulis knew.
'What, metaphysical angst at thirteen?' Pemulis directs the question to the quote-Viking's reflection's eye in the mirror. Freer's back is tapered
and uncolloped and for a tennis player's back has superb latissimal definition but is mottled slightly from repeated applications and defoliations of
Pledge, Freer being a profligate Pledge-user because he is complexion-obsessed and has the sort of Nordicular skin that peels instead of tanning.
He still has his jeans and loafers on, Pemulis sees. Pemulis keeps waiting for the distinctive attitudinal upswing of two pre-match Tenuate
spansules.d
 Pemulis's locker is both full and very precisely ordered, practically alphabetized, like the trunk of an experienced seaman.
Disassemblable scale and armamentarium and mood-altering substances used to be concealed in several factory-concealed niches in the special
system of niche-riddled portable shelving Pemulis had installed at age 15. Plus small cloth packets of ground cayenne pepper, to foil the alwaysremotely-possible sniffer-dog, when he was a callow youth. This was before the discovery of the ultimate entrepot above the false ceiling in
Subdorm B's male hallway.
'Just a disappointed dinkle.' Freer's chuckle tends to be mirthless. 'What I could get out of him before the waterworks, Postal Weight's old man
promised him so-and-so if the kid accomplishes thus-and-such.' His speech was distorted because he was ballooning his cheek with his tongue and
applying flesh-tinted cream to a possible pimple there. 'And the Postmaster here feels like he's held up his side of the accomplishment, and now I
get the drift Daddy's backing out.’
Possalthwaite's shoulders continued to tremble as he cried into his hands.
'In other words welching you're saying the Dad is,' Pemulis said to Freer.
'I gather now the Dad's trying to restructure the original deal all of a sudden.’
Pemulis undid his belt. 'The dangled carrot's snatched away, the brass ring plays hard to get, to coin a maxim.’
'Something about Disney World, before the wa-wa started.’
Pemulis removed his nonplay sneakers by scraping downward at one heel with the other sneaker's toe, looking down into the tender little whorl
in the center of Possalth-waite's hair. He'd never be so ephebic as to verbally ask Freer if he had plans to suit up so they could get out there; he'd
never let Freer think he was renting Freer space in his head before the match started. 'Postman, is this because of the Eschaton incident? Is it
because of the nose? Because I can get on the horn and tell old Postal Weight Sr. they're blaming nobody under 17, it turns out, you should tell
him, Todder. There's whole land-barges of shit, but none of it's spraying in you guys's direction, you should take comfort.’
'Nothing's true," Possalthwaite keened, not looking up, muffled, ílat-nippled, fatless in the young gut, feet spectral below his legs' brown,
rocking, shaking his head, looking terribly young and innocently vulnerable, sort of pre-moral. Little white strips of bandage protuded from his
palms' outer edges, from I.-Day's apocalypse.
'Well, not much is fair, anyway,' Pemulis conceded. The Viking made a noise at himself.
Pemulis calls Postal Weight's father up on-screen. Minneapolis-area developer. Malls, corporate parks, bustling places at the edges of roaring
beltways. Late forties, slim, an overmanaged tan, a little oversharp in the dress dept., with a motivational-seminar-type hard-sell charm. A dagger
of a Dad, with a pencil mustache and blinding shoe-leather. He tried to conjure an image of this paternal figure hitting Keith Freer on the noggin
with a rolling pin and a bald cartoon lump rising from Freer's skull. (Pemulis calculates a win or even three-setter w/ Freer would mean a place on
the WhataBurger plane, is why he's willing to violate a kind of personal honor-code and take pre-match Tenuate, which even with the 36-hourelimination curve is kind of cavalier, given that he and Inc'd escaped on-spot urinalysis only because Pemulis implied to Mrs. Incandenza that he'd
tell the Incster about Avril having some sort of major-sport interlude with John Wayne, and Avril is kind of a coldly-biding-her-time-not-to-befucked-with administrative figure, and along with C. ['Gretel the Cross-Sectioned Cow'] Tavis isn't exactly a fan of Pemulis anyway, certainly since
the electrified-Rusk-doorknob-and-litigation incident. The 'drines didn't seem to be kicking in. Instead of the surge of stomachless competitive
verve, all Pemulis felt was a slight unpleasant spaciness and a kind of enforced-feeling dryness in his eyes and mouth, like he's facing into a warm
wind.) Pemulis had never once seen his own Da in anything other than a white Hanes T-shirt gone permanent yellow under the arms.
'Nothing's fair because nothing's true,' Possalthwaite wept into his palms. His little flannel shoulders shook.
Something old in one of the shower drains sighed and gurgled, a nauseous sound.
'Buck up.' Pemulis was removing all necessary match-articles and refolding them and placing them in his noncomplimentary Dunlop gear-bag
with military precision. He put a foot on the bench and looked briefly to either side. 'Because if that's your burr then rest in my assurance,
Postalcode: certain things are rock-solid, high-grade true.’
Freer had made a pincer of his fingers and was at the other cheek. 'Let him cry. Let baby have his dinkle. Piss and moan. Thirteen for Christ's
sake. A kid thirteen hasn't even been in the same room with real disappointment yet. Hasn't even locked eyes across a room with real disillusion
and and frustration and pain. Thirteen: pain's a rumor. What's the word. Angst. Baby wouldn't know genuine-article angst if it walked up and got
him in a headlock.’
'Not like real true real possible-little-cheek-pimple angst, Vike, hey?’
'Flip it over and squat, Pemulis,' without bothering to look. Both Pemulis and Freer had pronounced a hard g in angst, Hal would have observed.
The Viking contorted his mouth and raised his big chin to check the flesh of his jaw, turning slightly to use the side-mirrors as well.
Pemulis smiled broadly, trying to envision Keith Freer sitting in a canvas restraint-wrap in full lotus, staring blankly, hitting all the high notes in
'No Business Like Show Business' as orderlies in boiled whites and prim nurses in bent hats stand around snapping their fingers, clean white cheap
institutional-care sneakers tapping noiselessly through all eternity. He was down to chinos and bare light-brown feet. He considered a blue T-shirt
with a black wolf-spider on it v. a coincidentally red-on-gray T-shirt that had 'Vodka is the Enemy of Production' in presumably Russian. His good
four Dunlop sticks were stacked on the bench to Possalthwaite's left. He picked up two and tested the strings' tension by hitting the side of one
stick's head against the the strung face of the other and listening to the strings and then switching sticks and repeating the process. The exact right
tension has a certain pitch. Midsized Dunlop Enqvist TL Composites. $304.95 U.S. retail. Real catgut strings have a kind of a dentalish sweet stink.
The dot-and-circumflex logo. He didn't much look at Possalthwaite. He chose the Cyrillic shirt with the bottle-glyph. He rolled it up and put his head
through the head-hole first, his late great Da's old-fashioned way. The upscaler kids here all did the arm-holes first. Then they did the head. You
can also tell the scholarship kids because for some reason they put on a sock and a shoe and then a sock and a shoe. See for instance Wayne,
who'd been in their room right after lunch when Pemulis had made the decision to come up for some pre-match Tenuate. Wayne's room was right
nearby and he was standing there over Troeltsch's pharmacopic bedside table with no shirt and wet hair, rheumy-eyed and shiny-nostriled from
moisturizer on his Kleenex-chafed nostrils. The Viking was squeezing a damp tennis ball with his left hand while he scanned his forehead by mostly
feel. Pemulis's psychic counter-strategy was not to appear in any hurry to dress and stretch and get out there either. Pemulis — who feared and
hated unauthorized people being in his room, and who was constantly on Schacht's back about forgetting to lock up when he left, and who wasn't
intimidated by Wayne's talent and success and affectless reserve, but was cautious around him, John Wayne, sort of the way a formidable predator
will be unintimidated but cautious around another formidable predator, particularly since the virtuosic but tense performance in a certain
administrative office a week ago, which had been mentioned by neither man — had coolly asked Wayne if he could help him, and Wayne had just
as coolly not looked up from rattling through sickly Jim Troeltsch's bedside table's stuff and said he'd come in for some of Troeltsch's Seldane6
, 

which Pemulis had indeed heard Troeltsch at breakfast describing to a nose-blowing Wayne as the battlefield-nuke of anti-histamines that didn't
make you too drowsy to function at an incredibly high level of function. Pemulis adjusted his jock's rear straps, trying to remember this Waynememory's point. Wayne had wanted a clear head and high pulmonary function because he was down to play the Syrian Satelliter in an informal
exhibition at I5l5h. Wayne hadn't offered this explanation; Pemulis got it off the e-board. One reason Pemulis was cautiously unassertive about
Wayne's unauthorized presence in the room was the leaflet, which given a certain office-incident it wasn't impossible Wayne might choose to
suspect seeing Pemulis's hand in the Olde-English-fonted leaflet up at various boards and inserted on the E.T.A. TPs' communal e-board for 11/14
announcing a joint John Wayne/Dr. Avril Incandenza arithmetic presentation to the pre-quadrivial 14-and-Unders on how 17 can actually go into 56
way more than 3.294 times. The point was that the half-dressed Wayne had been standing there with one foot bare and one in a sock and shoe.
Pemulis shook his head slightly and looked down at Possalthwaite and tried to gather spit.
The speaker out up by the clock in the cement hall by the sauna crackled to life for the start of weekly WETA, with its glass-shattering Joan
Sutherland theme. Pemulis put his street-sneakers on his street-shoe shelf. 'Buck up, T.P. It's just an angst-spasm. You're just reeling from a
temporary paternal kertwang. Philosophical truth's jutting out all over the place. Disney World or no. Nose or no. Eschaton lives on, believe me.
Underground or no. You have a calling, a talent. A missileman of your caliber. Reach down and rally, me little button.’
Possalthwaite had taken his face from his hands and was staring stonily up somewhere past Pemulis, lips moving in the habitual sucking reflex
for which he took so much guff. His face had the pink scrubbed look of a crying child all right. His hands had left brown spiders of tincture of
benzoin on his cheeks. He had two little smudges of bruise under the eyes. He sniffed meatily through a nose still covered in horizontal strips of
surgical tape. 'I ab dot a little button.’
'That's what all the little buttons say, kid,' the Viking said levelly, removing something from a nostril with tweezers. Pemulis's sinuses felt like
four-laners and his sense of smell was a lot keener than a man in a locker room might wish. Freer's locker next to Gloeckner's next to good old
Inc's was agape, the bolted colposcope gleaming in the overhead lights and his Fox large-head sticks a nauseous West-Coast fluorescent orange
with the trademark fox-glyph painted on the strings.
Possalthwaite scratched at one foot with the nails of the other foot. 'If you can't trust your folks. . .’
'Let me both validate and remind you that the kertwang you're reeling under is emotion-based and not fact-based.’
Possalthwaite opened his mouth.
'You're getting ready to say if you can't trust the ostensively loving patriarchal bosom you can't trust anyone at all, and if you can't trust people
what can you trust, in terms of unvarying dependability, Postal Weight, am I right?’
'Oh Jesus H. Christmastree here it comes,' the Viking said to his forehead's reflection.
Pemulis was putting on a sock and a shoe, his mouth right down by Postal Weight's ear. 'This is not a bullshit problem. This is a like serious
emotiono-philosophical deal you're confronting. I think it's a good sign you're coming to me instead of holding it all impactedly inside.’
'Who's coming to you?' Freer turned the big face this way and that. 'He was already in here having his little wa-wa-dinkle.’
Pemulis tried envisioning Keith Freer being bent over the net by Bedouins in purple turbans and roundly buggered, making the sort of sounds
Leith's historical b/w J. Gleason made when in pain. To Possalthwaite he was saying 'Cause I can remember staring down the exact same-type
thing, though from a more like philosophicalized kertwang than emotions.’
Freer said 'Do not ask him what he means, kid.’
Then a couple of 16s came in, G. ('Yardguard') Rader and a marginal Slavic kid whose first name was Zoltan and whose last name nobody could
pronounce, and ignored Freer's advice to run for their lives because the good Dr. Pemulis had been prescribing for himself again and was going to
begin to rant, and threw down their gear and proceeded immediately to get fresh towels from the dispenser over by the showers and to snap them
at each other.
'What do you mean?' said Possalthwaite.
'The snare closes, the trap closes, here it comes.’
Rader rolled his wrists and spiraled the towel for what he called maximum painage. The Viking turned and said if he felt so much as a terrycloth
breeze on this personal ass right here they were toast, the two. Pemulis was taking racquets out. E.T.A.'s male 16s were as a group inbent,
conspiratorial, glandular, cliqueish. They excluded anyone not in their set. They had techniques and strategems of exclusion way more advanced
than the 18s or 14s. (They tended to exclude Stice, mostly because he roomed with Coyle and drilled a lot of the time up with the 18s, and mixed
with them, and more recently Kornspan, excluded, basically because he was cretinous and cruel and now consensually suspected of having tortured
and killed the two collarless cats whose burnt corpses had been found on the hillside during pre-drill sprints a couple weeks back.) They had their
own dialect and codes, in-jokes inside in-jokes.f
 And at E.T.A. only 16s snapped towels, and only for a year or two, but they went at it with a
vengeance, towel-snapping, a brief flared genuflection to jock-stereotype, a stage where there's this primate-like passion for red-assed bonding in
steamy rooms. They were the age staring down the barrel not of Is anything true but of Am I true, of What am I, of What is this thing, and it made
them strange.
Then 18's-B/C fence-sitter Duncan van Slack, the kid who carried a guitar around with himself everyplace but never played it, and refused all
late-night-sitting-around-someone's-room requests to play, and who was suspected of not being able to play the thing at all, and whose own Da
was supposedly a redoubted gene-sequencer in Savannah, poked his head and guitar's neck in the door and said to come quick and then withdrew
his head before anybody could ask what was up.
'If you didn't have such a way with a launch-vector I wouldn't be sure you're ready to hear this, Postalscale.’
'It occurs to me this is your boring man's true talent: the talent for ensnaring,' says the Viking. 'Flee while you can, kid.’
Possalthwaite blew his nose in the crook of his elbow and left it there.
Pemulis, who still used genuine catgut strings, zipped the two sticks he'd chosen into their Dunlop covers. He put an arch-support shoe up on the
bench by Postalweight's bottom, looking quickly right and left:
'Todder, you can trust math.’
Freer said 'You heard it here first.’
Pemulis compulsively zipped and unzipped one of the covers. 'Take a breather, Keith. Todd, trust math. As in Matics, Math E. First-order
predicate logic. Never fail you. Quantities and their relation. Rates of change. The vital statistics of God or equivalent. When all else fails. When the
boulder's slid all the way back to the bottom. When the headless are blaming. When you do not know your way about. You can fall back and
regroup around math. Whose truth is deductive truth. Independent of sense or emotionality. The syllogism. The identity. Modus Tollens.
Transitivity. Heaven's theme song. The nightlight on life's dark wall, late at night. Heaven's recipe book. The hydrogen spiral. The methane,
ammonia, H2O. Nucleic acids. A and G, T and C. The creeping inevibatility. Caius is mortal. Math is not mortal. What it is is: listen: it's true.’
'This from a man on academic probation for who knows the length.’
Something involving Freer and a saline-moistened cattle-prod refused to quite mentally gel. There was still none of Tenuate's stomachless verve
or well-being, just a glittered hum in his head and sinuses that felt like wind-tunnels. Pemulis tended to be a mouth-breather. The Viking raised one
leg to fart toward Pemulis in a vaudevillian way, getting a laugh from Csikszentmihalyi and Rader, who'd mostly undressed and taken seats on the
bench opposite Pemulis and Postal Weight, towels hung unwinding in their hands, watching, and were only every once in a while and in a
halfhearted way pretending to look like they were getting ready to snap each other.
'I'm not a math person, Dad says,' said Postal Weight. Again the nose made the words come out dot and bath and persod. Csikszentmihalyi
feinted a lunge and then really lunged and there was brief flurry of terrycloth.
Pemulis unzipped the cover. 'The axiom. The lemma. Listen: "If two different sets of parametric equations represent the same curve J, but the
curve is traced in opposite directions in the two cases, then the two sets of equations produce values for a line integral over J that are negatives of
each other." Not "If thus-and-such." Not "unless a gladhand-ing commercial realtor from Boardman MN in $400 Banfi loafers changes his mind." 

Always and ever. As in puts the am a priori. An honest lamp in the inkiest black, Tod-dleposter.’
There were voices and running feet like some sort of ruckus. McKenna stuck his head in and looked wildly around and withdrew without saying
anything. Csikszentmihalyi went out after him. Freer and Rader both said What the fuck. Pemulis had only one button of his fly buttoned and was
pointing at the ceiling with a finger:
'. . . Only that at times like this, when you're directionless in a dark wood, trust to the abstract deductive. When driven to your knees, kneel and
revere the double S. Leap like a knight of faith into the arms of Peano, Leibniz, Hubert, L'Hôpital. You will be lifted up. Fourier, Gauss, LaPlace,
Rickey. Borne up. Never let fall. Wiener, Reimann, Frege, Green.’
Csikszentmihalyi came back in with Ortho Stice, their color high.
Pemulis compulsively zips and unzips zippers, is the reason why he wears only button-fly pants and tennis shorts.
Cs/yi said 'There is expression. You must immediately come.’
Freer turned from the mirror, both hands on a comb. 'What the fuck's going on?’
'John Wayne is insanely holding forth innermost thoughts for public ears.’
'Never trust the father you can see,' Pemulis told Possalthwaite.
Stice was already on his way back out and said over his shoulder, 'Troeltsch's got Wayne on the air and Wayne's lost his mind.’
a. Like dry loamy clay, highly absorbent, used by some for traction on their grips, eschewed by others because it has a lot of aluminum silicates
and the Y.T.M.P.'s 'aluminum-causes-impotence' panic still weighs hard on some pubescent players' minds.
b. A good many seniors' schedules have no last-period classes, or have Independent-Study stuff slated for last period, and when two of these
seniors — e.g. Pemulis & Freer — are scheduled for a P.M. challenge-match, they get to start at 1430h. instead of 1515h., and usually then finish
up early, which is a great perk, given that they'll get to hit both the weight room and the locker room at slack and empty times.
c. An advantage of competitive mediocrity is you get to sit in the stands and get lots of sun on your feet and chest, because you're knocked out
of competition by like the second round. Hence grotesquely pale feet are sort of a perverse mark of competitive status, maybe like toothlessness in
hockey or something.
d. Specially engineered to react very fast with the hydrolytic enzyme esterase and thus to be completely out of the tissues within 36 hrs.
e. Q.v. Note 22 supra.
f. For example, during the first month of last summer's Euroclay junket, at some prearranged signal the male 16s would all hunch and hop around
brachiatishly with their knuckles just off the ground in a circle, hitting their chests and going 'Er ah ee oo ah,' over and over, until prorector N.
Hartigan finally lost his patience as they did it again in the line for Customs at L'Aéroport Orly and had hysterics so gruesome in someone that tall
that the practice stopped as mysteriously as it'd started.
315 (whose theories of detection and interview are strongly informed by the b/w noir films Tine so enjoyed as a boy late at night on local broadcast
television, and misses)
316 (and then some) 317 Bolex H64, -32 and -16 models come with a turret that accepts three C-mount lenses, which gives the models a kind of multi-eyed, alien-facial
look.
318 (though never unveiled) 319 (which is actually complete horseshit, but goes unchallenged by the O.U.S. operatives, who are pretty savvy at choosing their heuristic battles) 320 (given the guy's track record with ingestion) 321 Picaresque pretty obviously referring to the comic-Surrealist tradition of Bay Area avant-gardeists like Peterson & Broughton, since Peterson's
Potted Psalm's mother-and-Death stuff and The Cage's cranial-imprisonment and disconnected-eyeball stuff are pretty obvious touchstones in a lot
of Himself's more parodic-slapstick productions. 322 17 NOV. Y.D.A.U.
'Gracious me and mine,' Pemulis said, clutching the ankle of the leg he'd crossed to keep the foot from joggling.
'Rusk and Charles and Mrs. Incandenza are with him now. Schtitt's been up to see him. Loach has done a thorough reflex-check. John Wayne's
going to be OK.’
'Well thank heavens for that load off everyone's mind,' Pemulis said.
It was Pemulis, deLint, Nwangi, and Watson in the Dean of Academic Affairs' Office. Mrs. Inc's ventilator hissed and something up in there
whirred a little. DeLint was behind the high desk, looking like a mean little boy. Nobody'd said if anybody higher up than deLint was going to show.
Pemulis didn't know if this was good or bad.
'Let's make perfectly sure we got this in order and in your words.' Nwangi and Watson were window-dressing. This was A. deLint's show. His
face kind of came apart when he smiled. 'With no prior knowledge of anything untoward, you're pulled from the locker room and stand out in the
hall with several other students, which is your first knowledge anything's untoward with Wayne.’
Pemulis figured none of the administrators had heard the thing; they always shut their soundproof doors at I435h.; Pemulis had no idea what
Wayne's said about anything, or Jim Troeltsch, who very prudently hasn't shown facial-feature one in their room since the apocalyptic broadcast.
It'd taken Pemulis about half the salivaless sprint up to B-204 to figure out what had happened and to find his pilfered Tenuates in the little
pecker's Sel-dane bottle. Pemulis sort of shuddered to imagine the impact of the 'drine on Wayne's cherry-red and virgin bloodstream. The slight
whir of his cortex working at full speed was masked by the hiss of the ventilator and the sound of whistles and play and Schtitt's megaphone
outside.
'I'm in there suiting up waiting for Freer and doing a little B.B.-intervention on Pos-salthwaite who was in crisis and Zoltan and The Darkness
come like spasming in saying Troeltsch'd jury-rigged the Duke into candid sharing for the WETA broadcast.’
'They said what, that Troeltsch had tricked Wayne into speaking candidly without awareness it's going out over WETA into all the rooms?’
Pemulis realized the limpness of this, in like that anybody'd see that Wayne'd have to have been sitting right there with Troeltsch by the little
old-time gunmetal handheld mike at Lateral Alice Moore's curved desk. He'd already heard from Lateral Alice that it was more like Wayne had come
rattling in and shoved Troeltsch aside and grabbed the mike and started ranting while Troeltsch and Lateral Alice Moore had looked on aghastly;
and that Dave Harde, down doing some maintainance to L.A.M.'s deactivated third rail, had been so aghasted he'd pitched forward narcoleptically
and stayed like that with his face in the blue carpet and ass in the air for nearly an hour, and that Lateral Alice's own stress had brought on an
aggravation of her chronic cyanosis to the point where her whole face was still blue-tinged and between her knees when Pemulis had got to her.
'This was more like a general sort of impression which I feel like I might have misbegotten from the agitation of the guys. Plus how completely
un-Wayneish Wayne sounded, like how could anybody ever have said that shit if they thought it wasn't just them and Troeltsch alone, much less
Wayne, who as we all know is pretty much reserve in motion.’
DeLint's nostrils got that pale flare they got, Pemulis knew, when he smelled horseshit and knew you knew it. Pemulis knows deLint's been laying
for him ever since the incident with the P.W.T.A. guy who started to wobble and then rant down at P.W.T.A., which was a totally different type of
deal. The irony was that the Wayne-dosing had been a total accident and in no way Pemulis's deal, if anybody's Troeltsch's, but the cortex couldn't
nail down any way to get this across without admitting to possession of a 'drine, which given the shaky pharmaceutical ground since the Eschaton
and O.N.A.N.T.A. urologist would be tantamount to Clippertonizing himself. Nwangi showed almost blinding 3rd-World teeth but was saying
nothing. Watson's eyes had almost this nictitater of stupidity-film on them, less a dullness than a deadness, the dead porch light of nobody home at
chez Tex Watson. Pemulis saw the leaflet about Wayne and Mrs. I. and deviant division in the papers deLint held.
'Which is in your words your first knowledge of untowardness with Wayne.’
'My first is I get out there still trying to counsel the Postheimer and here on the speaker's Wayne doing what Keith observed may have been a
sort of imitation of Dr. Tavis.’ 

It had been uncanny. It had made Stice look like a rank amateur. Wayne had told Troeltsch to pretend he was some adolescent girl: this was
adolescent Tavis asking her for a date; Pemulis shuddered; he couldn't exactly remember all the little mannerisms, which Wayne'd clearly gotten
locked down from Tavis always sitting next to him on the bus back from victories going at him nonstop, but in outline it was Chuckie Tavis coming
up to some Canadian cheerleader or something and telling her he was going to be completely open with her: he had a terrible fear of rejection; he
was telling her up-front now that tomorrow he was going to ask her out for a date and was begging her not openly to reject him if she didn't want
to go, to think up some plausible excuse — though of course he said he realized that what he was saying would make that excuse hard to believe,
now that he's openly asked her to make up an excuse.
'Whereupon the whole Academy hears Mr. Troeltsch prompt Wayne into making public castigations of his various peers and instructors.’
'I've got to say it did seem like Troeltsch had kind of orchestrated things somehow, sir, was my impression.’
'Referring to Corbett Thorp as a —' pretending to riffle through the papers so Pemulis'd have to see the 17-into-56 leaflet several times as it
came up in the riffle.
'I believe the expression was "a palsied twit," ' Nwangi said to deLint.
'Yes "palsied twit." And Francis Unwin quote "has the on-court look of a cornered rodent." And Disney R. Leith: the quote "sort of man you
always end up sitting next to at civic functions." Ms. Richardson-Levy-o'Byrne-Chawaf as chair of some sort of committee dealing with the topic of
the quote "Itty Bitty Titty." On Coach Schtitt, quote, seeming as if he'd been "denied some kind of vitally important moisture from birth henceforward." Our own Mr. Nwangi here being in rough quote if I've got it quote "the sort of fellow who'll be in a Chinese restaurant with you and won't
even share food or trade food." ‘
'Meaning mean-spirited.' Nwangi threw his head back and beamed like he was blind. What was chilling was that in Wayne's scenario Tavis does
succeed, Wayne projects, in seducing the Canadian cheerleader or whatever, even when he's totally open on the date about the fact that he'd
deliberately told her he was afraid of rejection in the first place only as a strategy to make him seem to her different from other boys, more honest
and open, so that the scenario was that the honesty was so exhausting she'd basically just laid back exhausted and let him X her just to shut him
up. Except — chillingly — he hadn't shut up.
'— including some sort of imitation of Dr. Tavis carrying on a monologue during the act of sexual intercourse,' deLint said, trying to find it in the
sheaf. 'On Bernadette Long-ley: "Bernadette Longley looks like her hair grew her head instead of the other way around." On Mary Esther Thode: "a
face like a pancake." On the Academy's own late Founder and husband of the Dean of Ac.-Aff.: "so full of himself he could have shit limbs."
Unquote. On his own doubles partner Hal Incandenza: "by all appearances addicted to everything that is not tied down, cannot outrun him, and is
fittable in the mouth." ‘
'I'm remembering the word as insertable.' Pemulis kicked himself, mentally. The pancake thing had been expanded to like fifteen seconds as
Wayne had sketched M. E. Thode's face as circular, burned, freckled, cratered, doughy, shiny, soggy, on and on. Plus somehow even more chilling
was that Pemulis knew from Inc that Wayne's pseudo-Tavis 'I-live-in-fear-of-rejection' ploy was actually in the top five or ten of the troubling
'Strategies' that Inc's brother Orin the punter called up to Hal about employing to X young married women.
'Donni Stott has we're informed "skin like an attache case and is a compelling advertisement for sunscreen." I myself am, here I quote, quote "a
man who would not lend his own mother a quarter for a rubber tip for her crutch." ‘
'Is the emerging point that this is going to impact my getting to go on the WhataBurger trip?’
Nwangi crumpled and slapped his knee. His face literally looked like a very dark hatchet. Tex Watson reached down behind the console he was
slumped in his chair by and brought out Pemulis's special yachting cap and dangled it like something you want a dog to jump for. From someplace
under Nwangi's chair were brought out two pharmaceutical scales, several jeweller's loupes, the tow truck's supply of empty sterile Visine bottles,
and plus every bottle from Troeltsch's bedside table, which clearly Troeltsch had eaten some enormous wedge of putrid deal-cutting cheese.
Pemulis tasted the metallic taste of a seriously anxious stomach. 'I request to see the Dean of Ac.-Aff. before any of this goes further.’
'We have again Ms. Heath, apparently on someone's mind very much today, now said to be the sort of person who quote "cries at card tricks."
We have a Rik Dunkel who "could not find his own bottom with both hands and a nautical compass of exacting precision." We have a return
engagement with Ms. Heath, described as "dwelling always at the edge of some vast continent of menstrual hysteria." We have our own beloved
Tex, sitting right here, described as having "a tiny liquid-filled nubbin at the top of the spine" in lieu of higher cortex function.’
'Aubs, no kidding: something pressing I have to interface about with Mrs. Inc. Tell her it concerns U.S.-Canadian relations.’
Nwangi's laugh was high and had the slight teakettle-wheeze to it of the laughs of large black men the world over. 'She sends you her regards,
the Dean said to tell you.' He slapped his knee three times.
DeLint looked a little less happy because he clearly didn't know what any of it was about and didn't like playing coded messenger, but he still
looked pretty happy: 'Michael Mathew Pemulis, the Academy's Dean of Academic Affairs said to tell you the administration's too naturally concerned
about the state of one of our two very finest current talents, who it's clear he's been unwittily dosed with an artificial stimulant prohibited by federal
statute, O.N.A.N.T.A. regulations, and the Enfield Tennis Academy Honor-Code Specs on Artificial Substances, to permit itself the satisfaction of
giving you the Dean's very best regards and her wish that quote "may the road rise up to meet you whitherever your future travels lie." ' DeLint
probed his ear. 'I think that was it in a nutshell.’
Pemulis got very cool and brass-mask-faced. He was breathing very clearly through his nose, and the office air seemed mentholated. Everything
got very cool and formal inside and glycerine-clear. 'Aubs, before anything gets nailed in stone that we'll all I promise you and Mrs. Inc we'll all of
us regret —’
DeLint said 'I was given to understand you can either finish out the term for credit or you can hit the trail with your little sailing cap full of
pockets on a stick like a bandanna to some other O.N.A.N.T.A. institution and see if they'll take a senior without any kind of positive reference,
which the sense I get is the administration says fat chance on any kind of reference.’
Tex Watson said something about urine.
Pemulis recrossed his leg. DeLint looked at Nwangi:
'I believe the kid is speechless.’
'I believe he has nothing to say.’
'I don't believe it.’
'And something about you're invited to shout whatever you threatened the administration to shout about from the highest hill you can find,
which pretty soon won't be this one.’
Nwangi got out through laughter: 'And that the administrative office doorknobs have been rubberized and grounded, the administrative files all
recryptographilated, everyone's room's mirrors reanodized and sealed with Plastic Wood, Mrs. Inc said to tell you.’
The little deck-of-cards riffle of the wings of the Shit Fairy, which he privately envisions as a kind of violet incubus with the Da's saggy frown.
Pemulis scratched very coolly next to his ear. 'And this affects the WhataBurger, my chances?’
DeLint told Pemulis he just fucking slayed him while Watson looked from face to face and Nwangi rocked and wheezed and slapped at his knee,
and Pemulis, close-mouthed and breathing with terrible ease, found their good humor almost infectious. 323 Put out by the Mass Division of S.A.S., listing meetings of all but the very most lunatic-fringe-type 12-Step Programs in city, sub-, and exurbs, all
up and down both Shores, the Cape, and Nantucket.
324 Hal's Pemulis-inspired trope for putting down the secret daily Bob H., which started as a wry dark mental joke and now within a week has
become the way Hal characterizes abstinence to himself, which any Boston AA would tell him isn't a very promising way to think about it at all, in
terms of self-pity.
325 Except of course for a certain hardwired type of pornography- and onanistic sex-addict, which has given rise to a couple exceptionally icky Stepbased fellowships.

326 (according to his sudoriferous and and agora-compulsive younger brother, M. Bain) 327 Latin blunder for self-defense's se defendendo is sic, either a befogged muddling of a professional legal term, or a post-Freudian slip, or (least
likely) a very oblique and subtle jab at Gately from a Ewell intimate with the graveyard scene from Hamlet — namely V.i. 9. 328 Ketorolac tromethamine, a non-narcotic analgesic, little more than Motrin with ambition — ®Syntex Labs. 329 International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. 330 Doxycycline hyclate, an I.V.-antibiotic — ®Parke-Davis Pharmaceuticals. 331 Oxycodone hydrochloride + acetaminophen, a Schedule C-III narcotic oral analgesic — ®Du Pont Pharmaceuticals. 332 Or possibly Babel. 333 Boston AA slogan meaning trying to quit addictive Substance-use without working any kind of Recovery Program. 334 E.T.S.V Advanced Placement Standardized Subject Tests, which Hal Incandenza's signed up to take in English and (Parisian) French.
a. Educational Testing Service Inc., Princeton NJ.
335 The College of Basic Studies Bldg. on Commonwealth and Granby, approx. 3 clicks east-southeast of E.T.A. 336 Montreal International Airport-D'Orval, Cartierville Airport being now restricted to intra-Québec flights only. 337 (Which in fact she doesn't, but she had had perfume on the last time she wore the hulpil.) 338 An R. Catholic church just off Brighton Center. 339 Sic.
340 Or a face writhing in involuntary disgust at Don G.'s own armlessness and hook, maybe. 341 As in a combination of the First and Twelfth Steps, goes the AA joke: 'My Life Is Unmanageable and I'd Like to Share It With You.’ 342 Reference to January-February Y.D.A.U., when person or persons unknown went around coating selected toothbrushes of the Boys and Girls
16's with what was finally pinpointed as betel-nut extract, causing panic and internecine finger-pointing and resulting in serial oxidation-treatment
visits to Dr. E. Zegarelli, D.D.S., by half a dozen E.T.A.s until the brush-tamperings ceased as suddenly as they'd begun; and now nine months later
no one still has the slightest idea re perpetrator or point.
343 Which runs not to Enfield-Brighton but to Roxbury and Mattapan, places where it is very bad nighttime joss indeed to be both white and
incapacitated.
344 Q.v. note a to Note 12. 345 Anexsia — ®SmithKline Beecham Laboratories. 346 Levo-Dromoran— ®Roche Laboratories. 347 Numorphan, kind of a watered-down Dilaudid — ®Du Pont Pharmaceuticals. 348 Perwin NX — ® Bos well Medications Ltd., Canada — which accounts for the C-III, because the Canadians are notoriously insane when it comes
to forecasting abuse-potential.
349 A.k.a. Chlordiazepoxide hydrochloride — ®Roche, Inc. — a low-grade Valiumish tranq. 350 A C-III and sort of entry-level oral narcotic, the side-effects and inconsistent buzz of which often send abusers up the ladder to C-II compounds. 351 A.k.a. hyoscyamine sulfate — ®Schwarz Pharma Kremers Urban, Inc. — an anti-spasmodic for anything from colitis to Irritable Bowel
Syndrome.
352 A.k.a. methaqualone, now manufactured outside O.N.A.N. jurisdiction under the trade name Parestol. 353 Later one-third of the rent-and-strip-luxury-apts. crew, and even later Gately's trusted colleague on some of his most disastrous and bottomhastening home-invasions, including that of one G. DuPlessis, which Kite ended up regretting exponentially more than Gately did, once the A.F.R.
got through with him.
354 MDA, MDMA ('X'), MMDA-2 ('Love Boat'), MMDA-3a ('Eve'), DMMDA-2
('Starry Night'), etc.
355 Long-Term Institution.
356 Sounding rather suspiciously like Professor H. Bloom's turgid studies of artistic influenza — though it's unclear how either Flood- or deadancestor discussions have any connection to S. Peterson's low-budget classic The Cage, which is mostly about a peripatetic eyeball rolling around,
other than the fact that J. O. Incandenza loved this film and stuck little snippets of it or references to it just about anywhere he could; maybe the
'disjunction' or 'disconnection' between the screen's film and Ph.D.'s scholastic discussion of art is part of the point.3
a. (Which of course assumes there's a point.)
357 Though they did, just as in depictions of organized crime in popular entertainment, often change the cell-phones they used, to avoid potential
taps or Pen Registers — Sorkin buying new units and #s, Gately more often borrowing student R.N.s' cellulars and then returning them after a few
days. One of Gately's biggest challenges in this career was remembering all the different fucking phone numbers and addresses of luxury-apts.-ofthe-week when he was strafed on Barn-Bams just about all the time.
358 Cimetidine — ®SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals — 8oo-mg. spansules for generalized cranio-vascular woe (derived, kind of interestingly,
from the same ergot rye-mold as LSD).
359 For the two maps Sorkin had to have eliminated altogether during this period, it's maybe worth observing that he eschewed both Towers and
instead used the thuggish ex-Québecer muscleboys DesMontes and Pointgravè, who had no real loyalties or membership in any community and
hired themselves out as enforcers for books and high-interest lenders all up and down both Shores. Gately did, as a coercive collector, demap one
person, but it was essentially an accident — the debtor had been blond, and drinking Heinekens, and then when things got physical he'd squirted
Gately in the face with Mace, and a red curtain of rage had descended over Gately's sight, and when he'd come back to himself the debtor's head
was turned 180° around on his neck and had the little Mace can all the way up one nostril, and it was the most professionally horrified Gately had
ever been up until the thing with the suffocated Canadian P.I.T., which anyway occurred much later and when Gately was way more nonviolenceprone.
360 Purified pork insulin in a zinc suspension — ®Lilly Pharmaceuticals. 361 An elite private high school up near the Methuen salient. 362 Surely skeet and vig, meaning debt and bookmaker's automatic percentage (usually 10% subtracted from winnings or added to skeet) are not
just metro Boston terms.
363 A.k.a. Acetylcysteine-zo — ®Bristol Laboratories — a nebulizable prophylaxis against the post-traumatic buildup of abnormal, viscid, or
inspissated mucus.
364 With the hard-ch sound distinctive of North Shore pronun. of words like Chicago and champagne. 365 Known less sensitively among neuro-urology residents as 'Dizzy Dick Disorder' or sometimes just '3-D.’ 366 Knoll Laboratories' good old Dilaudid — $666.00/g. wholesale and $5/mg. street at Y.W.-Q.M.D. valuations. 367 A 'Phillips Screwdriver,' vodka and Milk of Magnesia, which Gately finds nauseous and privately refers to as a 'lowball.’ 368 (As opposed to self-confronting, presumably.) 369 See Note 144 supra. 370 The 1.3:1-aspect-ratio rectangle scanned by electron beams in video imaging, now replaced by multi-interlace3
 solid-field HD digital imaging.
a. Why Noreen Lace-Forché's seminal corporation's name was a kind of wry pun: 2:1 interlace was pre-HD television's term for breaking the picture
frame into two 262.5-line fields for standard 525-line raster-scanning. ... A very in-type joke designed to appeal to the same Big Four that Noreen
L.-F. was then wooing. 371 More like B.S. 1926, according to the Still Photo Archive at NNY City's Museum of Modern Art. Plus n.b. the print — which Hal correctly
remembers Avril always loathing a
 — long pre-dated J.O.I.'s ever picking up a camera. 

a. Hence the relative queerness of its still being up on the HmH living room wall four years after Incandenza's felo de se — it's not like anybody
asked her to keep the thing up.
372 Whether in singles against him or doubles alongside, when Hal is on-court with Wayne he always gets the creepy feeling that Wayne has control
out there not just of his voluntary CNS but also of his heartrate and blood pressure, the diameter of his pupils, etc., which feeling is not only creepy
but distracting, adding to the tension of playing with Wayne. 373 Winter Park FL facility for enmeshment-, codependency-, and compulsivity-related Issues. 374 A.k.a. Lorazepam — ®Wyeth-Aherst Labs — a venerable anti-anxiety tranq, of which 25 mg./day is enough to anxiolytize a good-sized
Clydesdale.
375 Probably meaning Doryx, Parke-Davis's doxycycline hyclate, the Cruise missile of gram-negative antibiotics. 376 Nalaxone hydrochloride, the Exocet missile of narcotic antagonists — ®DuPont Pharm. — 2 ml./2Oml.-saline pre-filled syringes. 377 Metro Boston's third-hardest thing to street-cop after raw Vietnamese opium and the incredibly potent DMZ, Sunshine is pentazocine
hydrochloride and mefenamic acid3
 — ®Sanofi Winthrop, Canada, Inc. — w/ trade-name Talwin-PX — Day-Glo-yellow serum, 7ml./20ml.-saline
pre-filled syringes.
a. A non-narc analgesic marketed in the U.S. as Ponstel — ®Parke-Davis — mostly (oddly enough) for dysmenorrhea, sort of like nuclear-grade
Mydol.