7 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

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 self-involvement.

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 tobacco-nist 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 over-flow 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 0130h. 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 veilless 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 TIMEȧ, 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 78(9) Year of Glad

Jim’s eldest, Orin — punter extraordinaire, dodger of flung acid extra- ordinaire — 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 fleur-de-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 multi-lensed length, and refused 79 to share what he’d made of it, and died w/o a note. 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 turn-signal 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 Boylston’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 T-stop 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 gentle-faced 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 anecdotally 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 home-entertainment-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 80 lovers or what, or that Joelle even now lives hand-to-lung 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 magnumhe’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-death-cosmology 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 doorway’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, Iaccarino 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 ‘Ich 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.’ ‘À 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 reupped 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 aioli. Mutton stuffed with foie gras, double chocolate rum cake. Seven kinds of cheese. A kiwi glacé 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 café 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 vomitingbut 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 EZ-Widers 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 head-board, 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 Shoesand rather curiously the offprinted page of J. van Dyne, M.A.’s one and only published 81 film-theory monograph. 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 Storrow, 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 whiskerbits 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 oven-mitt 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 irides-cent 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 hard-ened 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 Loand 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 bathroom door composed of thirty-six that’s three times a lengthwise twelve recessed two-bevelled squares in a warped rectangle of steam-softened 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 Podiatric Research, regional shiny-truck, land-barge, and catapult facilities for the O.N.A.N.-subsidized Empire Waste Displacement Co. (what the Québecois 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 Enfield, 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 Φ’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 82 bedding 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-ching 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 propitiatethe divine spell.’

‘I 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, Hallie. 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 Popogatapec 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-miss-type 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 wheelchaired 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 doi- lies 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.’ ‘I 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 Québec and Royal Victoria, the Moms and immigration, Himself and annulation, 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 Wilc, 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?’ ‘I 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 work-related 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 communiqué 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 long-nailed 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.’ 83 ‘The B.P.D. 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 84 Someone You Love, 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 grief-therapist 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 grief-stricken 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, I 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 High-Affect 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 earsplitting 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 inutero 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.’ ‘Is 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.’ ‘I’ll 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.