PRE-DAWN, 1 MAY Y.D.A.U. OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON AZ U.S.A., STILL

PRE-DAWN, 1 MAY Y.D.A.U.

OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON

AZ U.S.A., STILL

M. Hugh Steeply spoke quietly, after a prolonged silence of both operatives alone with their thoughts, upon this mountain. Steeply faced still out, standing on the outcropping’s lip, bare arms around him for some warmth, his dress’s soiled back to Marathe. Around the bonfire, far out below upon the desert floor, rotated a ring of smaller and palsied fires,

persons carrying torches or fires. ‘Do you ever think of viewing it?’ Marathe did not reply. It was not impossible that the young persons carrying the torches were dancing. ‘Whether or not the A.F.R. ever even recover this alleged Master copy from the DuPlessis burglary,’ Steeply said quietly; ‘still, you guys have a Read-Only copy, at least one, you’ve told us, no?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Nobody has this mysterious Master, but we’ve all got Read-Only’s — all the anti-O.N.A.N. cells have at least one Read-Only, we’re pretty sure.’ Marathe said, ‘M. Brullîme, he tells Fortier he thinks the CPCP of Alberta do not have any copy.’ ‘Fuck the Albertans,’ Steeply said. ‘Who’s worried about the Albertans?

The Albertans’ idea of a blow to the U.S. plexus is they blow up rangeland in Montana. They’re wackos.’ ‘I have not been tempted,’ Marathe said.

Steeply’s sound appeared as if he did not hear. ‘We have more than one.

Copies. Sure we can assume your boys know this.’ Marathe dryly laughed. ‘Confiscated from razzles of Berkeley, Boston.

But who can know what is on them? Who can study the Entertainment

while detached?’ Steeply’s scratch on the arm had become overnight puffed, and there were cross-hatches of his scratching. ‘But just between us two, though. Tête to tête. You’ve never been even slightly tempted? I mean personally. You the person. Wife’s condition be damned. Kids be damned. Just for a second, slip into wherever you guys keep it and load it and have a quick look? To see what’s all the fuss, the irresistible pull of the thing?’ He pivoted on one heel and looked, and cocked his head in a way of cynicism that seemed to Marathe consummately U.S.A.

Marathe coughed softly into his fist. His own dead father’s Kenbeck pacemaker, it had been damaged accidentally by a videophonic pulse of waves. This from a telephone call from the telephone company, a video call, advertising the videophony. M. Marathe had picked up the ringing telephone; the videophonic pulse, it had come; M. Marathe had fallen, still holding a telephone Rémy had never been instructed to answer first, to check. The advertisement, which was recorded, played its audible portion out upon the floor beside his father’s ear, audible between Marathe’s mother’s cries.

Steeply raised and lowered himself on his shoes’ toes. ‘Us, Rod the God Tine’s got Tom Flatto’s I/O boys running tests around the clock. 24-dash-7.’ ‘Flatto, Thomas M., B.S.S. director of Input/Output testing, resident of Falls Church’s community, a widower with three children, one child with cystic fibrosis.’ ‘Funny as an impacted follicle, Rémy. And no doubt the insurgent cells are all each doing work of your own, you guys with your own Dr. Brullent or whomever, trying to find out what the Entertainment’s appeal could be without sacrificing any of your own.’ Steeply again turned; he did this for emphasis. ‘Or maybe you’re willingly sacrificing your own. Yes? Willing volunteers in chairs. Sacrificing self for the Greater and all that. By adult choice and all that. Just for the sake of causing us harm. Wouldn’t even want to think about how the A.F.R.’s conducting tests of the thing.’ ‘C’est ça.’ ‘But not so much for content,’ Steeply said. ‘Input/Output’s exhaustive testing. Flatto’s got them working on conditions and environments for possible nonlethal viewing. Certain departments in Virginia, the developing theory is that it’s holography.’

‘The samizdat.’ ‘The filmmaker’d been a cutting-edge optics man. Holography, diffraction. He’d used holography a couple times before, and in the context of a kind of filmed assault on the viewer. He was of the Hostile School or some such shit.’ ‘Also a maker of reflecting panels for thermal weapons, and an important Annulateur, also, and amasser of the capital from opticals, before hostility and film,’ Marathe said.

Steeply embraced himself. ‘Tom Flatto’s personal theory is the appeal’s got something to do with density. The visual compulsion. Theory’s that with a really sophisticated piece of holography you’d get the neural density of an actual stage play without losing the selective realism of the viewer- screen.

That the density plus the realism might be too much to take. Dick Desai in Data Production wants to go in with ALGOL and see if there are Fourier Equations in the root code’s ALGOL, which would signify holo- grammatical activity going on.’ ‘M. Fortier finds the theories of content irrelevant.’ Steeply cocked his head sometimes in a way that was both feminine and birdlike. He did this most often during silences. Also he again removed something small from his painted lip. Also he spoke with more feminine inflection. Marathe committed all this to his memories.

WINTER, B.S. 1963, SEPULVEDA CA

208 I remember I was eating lunch and reading something dull by Bazin when my father came into the kitchen and made himself a tomato juice beverage and said that as soon as I was finished he and my mother needed my help in their bedroom. My father had spent the morning at the commercial studio and was still all in white, with his wig with its rigid white parted hair, and hadn’t yet removed the television makeup that gave his real face an orange cast in daylight. I hurried up and finished and rinsed my dishes in the sink and proceeded down the hall to the master bedroom.

My mother and father were both in there. The master bedroom’s valance curtains and the heavy lightproof curtain behind them were all slid back and

the venetian blinds up, and the daylight was very bright in the room, the decor of which was white and blue and powder-blue.

My father was bent over my parents’ large bed, which was stripped of bedding all the way down to the mattress protector. He was bent over, pushing down on the bed’s mattress with the heels of his hands. The bed’s sheets and pillows and powder-blue coverlet were all in a pile on the carpet next to the bed. Then my father handed me his tumbler of tomato juice to hold for him and got all the way on top of the bed and knelt on it, pressing down vigorously on the mattress with his hands, putting all his weight into it. He bore down hard on one area of the mattress, then let up and pivoted slightly on his knees and bore down with equal vigor on a different area of the mattress. He did this all over the bed, sometimes actually walking around on the mattress on his knees to get at different areas of the mattress, then bearing down on them. I remember thinking the bearing-down action looked very much like emergency compression of a heart patient’s chest. I remember my father’s tomato juice had grains of pepperish material floating on the surface. My mother was standing at the bedroom window, smoking a long cigarette and looking at the lawn, which I had watered before I ate lunch. The uncovered window faced south. The room blazed with sunlight. ‘Eureka,’ my father said, pressing down several times on one particular spot.

I asked whether I could ask what was going on. ‘Goddamn bed squeaks,’ he said. He stayed on his knees over the one particular spot, bearing down on it repeatedly. There was now a squeaking sound from the mattress when he bore down on the spot. My father looked up and over at my mother next to the bedroom window. ‘Do you or do you not hear that?’ he said, bearing down and letting up. My mother tapped her long cigarette into a shallow ashtray she held in her other hand. She watched my father press down on the squeaking spot.

Sweat was running in dark orange lines down my father’s face from under his rigid white professional wig. My father served for two years as the Man from Glad, representing what was then the Glad Flaccid Plastic Receptacle Co. of Zanesville, Ohio, via a California-based advertising agency. The tunic, tight trousers, and boots the agency made him wear were also white.

My father pivoted on his knees and swung his body around and got off the mattress and put his hand at the small of his back and straightened up, continuing to look at the mattress. ‘This miserable cock-sucking bed your mother felt she needed to hang on to and bring with us out here for quote sentimental value has started squeaking,’ my father said. His saying ‘your mother’ indicated that he was addressing himself to me. He held his hand out for his tumbler of tomato juice without having to look at me. He stared darkly down at the bed. ‘It’s driving us fucking nuts.’ My mother balanced her cigarette in her shallow ashtray and laid the ashtray on the windowsill and bent over from the foot of the bed and bore down on the spot my father had isolated, and it squeaked again. ‘And at night this one spot here we’ve isolated and identified seems to spread and metastisate until the whole Goddamn bed’s replete with squeaks.’ He drank some of his tomato juice. ‘Areas that gibber and squeak,’ my father said, ‘until we both feel as if we’re being eaten by rats.’ He felt along the line of his jaw. ‘Boiling hordes of gibbering squeaking ravenous rapacious rats,’ he said, almost trembling with irritation.

I looked down at the mattress, at my mother’s hands, which tended to flake in dry climates. She carried a small bottle of moisturizing lotion at all times.

My father said, ‘And I have personally had it with the aggravation.’ He blotted his forehead on his white sleeve.

I reminded my father that he’d mentioned needing my help with something. At that age I was already taller than both my parents. My mother was taller than my father, even in his boots, but much of her height was in her legs. My father’s body was denser and more substantial.

My mother came around to my father’s side of the bed and picked the bedding up off the floor. She started folding the sheets very precisely, using both arms and her chin. She stacked the folded bedding neatly on top of her dresser, which I remember was white lacquer.

My father looked at me. ‘What we need to do here, Jim, is take the mattress and box spring off the bed frame under here,’ my father said, ‘and expose the frame.’ He took time out to explain that the bed’s bottom mattress was hard-framed and known uniformly as a box spring. I was looking at my sneakers and making my feet alternately pigeon-toed and

then penguin-toed on the bedroom’s blue carpet. My father drank some of his tomato juice and looked down at the edge of the bed’s metal frame and felt along the outline of his jaw, where his commercial studio makeup ended abruptly at the turtleneck collar of his white commercial tunic. ‘The frame on this bed is old,’ he told me. ‘It’s probably older than you are. Right now I’m thinking the thing’s bolts have maybe started coming loose, and that’s what’s gibbering and squeaking at night.’ He finished his tomato juice and held the glass out for me to take and put somewhere. ‘So we want to move all this top crap out of the way, entirely’ — he gestured with one arm — ‘entirely out of the way, get it out of the room, and expose the frame, and see if we don’t maybe just need to tighten up the bolts.’ I wasn’t sure where to put my father’s empty glass, which had juice residue and grains of pepper along the inside’s sides. I poked at the mattress and box spring a little bit with my foot. ‘Are you sure it isn’t just the mattress?’ I said. The bed’s frame’s bolts struck me as a rather exotic first- order explanation for the squeaking.

My father gestured broadly. ‘Synchronicity surrounds me. Concord,’ he said. ‘Because that’s what your mother thinks it is, also.’ My mother was using both hands to take the blue pillowcases off all five of their pillows, again using her chin as a clamp. The pillows were all the overplump polyester fiberfill kind, because of my father’s allergies. ‘Great minds think alike,’ my father said.

Neither of my parents had any interest in hard science, though a great uncle had accidentally electrocuted himself with a field series generator he was seeking to patent.

My mother stacked the pillows on top of the neatly folded bedding on her dresser. She had to get up on her tiptoes to put the folded pillowcases on top of the pillows. I had started to move to help her, but I couldn’t decide where to put the empty tomato juice glass. ‘But you just want to hope it isn’t the mattress,’ father said. ‘Or the box spring.’ My mother sat down on the foot of the bed and got out another long cigarette and lit it. She carried a little leatherette snap-case for both her cigarettes and her lighter.

My father said, ‘Because a new frame, even if we can’t get the bolts squared away on this one and I have to go get a new one. A new frame. It

wouldn’t be too bad, see. Even top-shelf bed frames aren’t that expensive.

But new mattresses are outrageously expensive.’ He looked at my mother. ‘And I mean fucking outrageous.’ He looked down at the back of my mother’s head. ‘And we bought a new box spring for this sad excuse for a bed not five years ago.’ He was looking down at the back of my mother’s head as if he wanted to confirm that she was listening. My mother had crossed her legs and was looking with a certain concentration either at or out the master bedroom window. Our home’s whole subdivision was spread along a severe hillside, which meant that the view from my parents’ bedroom on the first floor was of just sky and sun and a foreshortened declivity of lawn. The lawn sloped at an average angle of 55° and had to be mowed horizontally. None of the subdivision’s lawns had trees yet. ‘Of course that was during a seldom-discussed point in time when your mother had to assume the burden of assuming responsibility for finances in the household,’ my father said. He was now perspiring very heavily, but still had his white professional toupee on, and still looked at my mother.

My father acted, throughout our time in California, as both symbol and spokesman for the Glad F.P.R. Co.’s Individual Sandwich Bag Division. He was the first of two actors to portray the Man from Glad. He was inserted several times a month in a mock-up of a car interior, where he would be filmed in a tight trans-windshield shot receiving an emergency radio summons to some household that was having a portable-food-storage problem. He was then inserted opposite an actress in a generic kitchen- interior set, where he would explain how a particular species of Glad Sandwich Bag was precisely what the doctor ordered for the particular portable-food-storage problem at issue. In his vaguely medical uniform of all white, he carried an air of authority and great evident conviction, and earned what I always gathered was an impressive salary, for those times, and received, for the first time in his career, fan mail, some of which bordered on the disturbing, and which he sometimes liked to read out loud at night in the living room, loudly and dramatically, sitting up with a nightcap and fan mail long after my mother and I had gone to bed.

I asked whether I could excuse myself for a moment to take my father’s empty tomato juice glass out to the kitchen sink. I was worried that the residue along the inside sides of the tumbler would harden into the kind of precipitate that would be hard to wash off.

‘For Christ’s sake Jim just put the thing down,’ my father said.

I put the tumbler down on the bedroom carpet over next to the base of my mother’s dresser, pressing down to create a kind of circular receptacle for it in the carpet. My mother stood up and went back over by the bedroom window with her ashtray. We could tell she was getting out of our way.

My father cracked his knuckles and studied the path between the bed and the bedroom door.

I said I understood my part here to be to help my father move the mattress and box spring off the suspect bed frame and well out of the way.

My father cracked his knuckles and replied that I was becoming almost frighteningly quick and perceptive. He went around between the foot of the bed and my mother at the window. He said, ‘I want to let’s just stack it all out in the hall, to get it the hell out of here and give us some room to

maneuver.’ ‘Right,’ I said.

My father and I were now on opposite sides of my parents’ bed. My father rubbed his hands together and bent and worked his hands between the mattress and box spring and began to lift the mattress up from his side of the bed. When his side of the mattress had risen to the height of his shoulders, he somehow inverted his hands and began pushing his side up rather than lifting it. The top of his wig disappeared behind the rising mattress, and his side rose in an arc to almost the height of the white ceiling, exceeded 90°, toppled over, and began to fall over down toward me.

The mattress’s overall movement was like the crest of a breaking wave, I remember. I spread my arms and took the impact of the mattress with my chest and face, supporting the angled mattress with my chest, outspread arms, and face. All I could see was an extreme close-up of the woodland floral pattern of the mattress protector.

The mattress, a Simmons Beauty Rest whose tag said that it could not by law be removed, now formed the hypotenuse of a right dihedral triangle whose legs were myself and the bed’s box spring. I remember visualizing and considering this triangle. My legs were trembling under the mattress’s canted weight. My father exhorted me to hold and support the mattress. The respectively sharp plastic and meaty human smells of the mattress and protector were very distinct because my nose was mashed up against them.

My father came around to my side of the bed, and together we pushed the mattress back up until it stood up at 90° again. We edged carefully apart and each took one end of the upright mattress and began jockeying it off the bed and out the bedroom door into the uncarpeted hallway.

This was a King-Size Simmons Beauty Rest mattress. It was massive but had very little structural integrity. It kept curving and curling and wobbling. My father exhorted both me and the mattress. It was flaccid and floppy as we tried to jockey it. My father had an especially hard time with his half of the mattress’s upright weight because of an old competitive- tennis injury.

While we were jockeying it on its side off the bed, part of the mattress on my father’s end slipped and flopped over and down onto a pair of steel reading lamps, adjustable cubes of brushed steel attached by toggle bolts to the white wall over the head of the bed. The lamps took a solid hit from the mattress, and one cube was rotated all the way around on its toggle so that its open side and bulb now pointed at the ceiling. The joint and toggle made a painful squeaking sound as the cube was wrenched around upward. This was also when I became aware that even the reading lamps were on in the daylit room, because a faint square of direct lamplight, its four sides rendered slightly concave by the distortion of projection, appeared on the white ceiling above the skewed cube. But the lamps didn’t fall off. They remained attached to the wall. ‘God damn it to hell,’ my father said as he regained control of his end of the mattress.

My father also said, ‘Fucking son of a…’ when the mattress’s thickness made it difficult for him to squeeze through the doorway still holding his end.

In time we were able to get my parents’ giant mattress out in the narrow hallway that ran between the master bedroom and the kitchen. I could hear another terrible squeak from the bedroom as my mother tried to realign the reading lamp whose cube had been inverted. Drops of sweat were falling from my father’s face onto his side of the mattress, darkening part of the protector’s fabric. My father and I tried to lean the mattress at a slight supporting angle against one wall of the hallway, but because the floor of the hallway was uncarpeted and didn’t provide sufficient resistance, the mattress wouldn’t stay upright. Its bottom edge slid out from the wall all the

way across the width of the hallway until it met the baseboard of the opposite wall, and the upright mattress’s top edge slid down the wall until the whole mattress sagged at an extremely concave slumped angle, a dry section of the woodland floral mattress protector stretched drum-tight over the slumped crease and the springs possibly damaged by the deforming concavity.

My father looked at the canted concave mattress sagging across the width of the hall and moved one end of it a little with the toe of his boot and

looked at me and said, ‘Fuck it.’ My bow tie was rumpled and at an angle.

My father had to walk unsteadily across the mattress in his white boots to get back to my side of the mattress and the bedroom behind me. On his way across he stopped and felt speculatively at his jaw, his boots sunk deep in woodland floral cotton. He said ‘Fuck it’ again, and I remember not being clear about what he was referring to. Then my father turned and started unsteadily back the way he had come across the mattress, one hand against the wall for support. He instructed me to wait right there in the hallway for one moment while he darted into the kitchen at the other end of the hall on a very brief errand. His steadying hand left four faint smeared prints on the wall’s white paint.

My parents’ bed’s box spring, though also King-Size and heavy, had just below its synthetic covering a wooden frame that gave the box spring structural integrity, and it didn’t flop or alter its shape, and after another bit of difficulty for my father — who was too thick through the middle, even with the professional girdle beneath his Glad costume — after another bit of difficulty for my father squeezing with his end of the box spring through the bedroom doorway, we were able to get it into the hall and lean it vertically at something just over 70° against the wall, where it stayed upright with no problem. ‘That’s the way she wants doing, Jim,’ my father said, clapping me on the back in exactly the ebullient way that had prompted me to have my mother buy an elastic athletic cranial strap for my glasses. I had told my mother I needed the strap for tennis purposes, and she had not asked any questions.

My father’s hand was still on my back as we returned to the master bedroom. ‘Right, then!’ my father said. His mood was now elevated. There

was a brief second of confusion at the doorway as each of us tried to step back to let the other through first.

There was now nothing but the suspect frame left where the bed had been. There was something exoskeletal and frail-looking about the bed frame, a plain low-ratio rectangle of black steel. At each corner of the rectangle was a caster. The casters’ wheels had sunk into the pile carpet under the weight of the bed and my parents and were almost completely submerged in the carpet’s fibers. Each of the frame’s sides had a narrow steel shelf welded at 90° to its interior’s base, so that a single rectangular narrow shelf perpendicular to the frame’s rectangle ran all around the frame’s interior. This shelf was obviously there to support the bed’s occupants and King-Size box spring and mattress.

My father seemed frozen in place. I cannot remember what my mother was doing. There seemed to be a long silent interval of my father looking closely at the exposed frame. The interval had the silence and stillness of dusty rooms immersed in sunlight. I briefly imagined every piece of furniture in the bedroom covered with sheets and the room unoccupied for years as the sun rose and crossed and fell outside the window, the room’s daylight becoming staler and staler. I could hear two power lawnmowers of slightly different pitch from somewhere down our subdivision’s street. The direct light through the master bedroom’s window swam with rotating columns of raised dust. I remember it seemed the ideal moment for a sneeze.

Dust lay thick on the frame and even hung from the frame’s interior support-shelf in little gray beards. It was impossible to see any bolts anywhere on the frame.

My father blotted sweat and wet makeup from his forehead with the back of his sleeve, which was now dark orange with makeup. ‘Jesus will you look at that mess,’ he said. He looked at my mother. ‘Jesus.’ The carpeting in my parents’ bedroom was deep-pile and a darker blue than the pale blue of the rest of the bedroom’s color scheme. I remember the carpet as more a royal blue, with a saturation level somewhere between moderate and strong. The rectangular expanse of royal blue carpet that had been hidden under the bed was itself carpeted with a thick layer of clotted dust. The rectangle of dust was gray-white and thick and unevenly layered, and the only evidence of the room’s carpet below was a faint sick bluish

cast to the dust-layer. It looked as if dust had not drifted under the bed and settled on the carpet inside the frame but rather had somehow taken root and grown on it, upon it, the way a mold will take root and gradually cover an expanse of spoiled food. The layer of dust itself looked a little like spoiled food, bad cottage cheese. It was nauseous. Some of the dust-layer’s uneven topography was caused by certain lost- and litter-type objects that had found their way under the bed — a flyswatter, a roughly Variety-sized magazine, some bottletops, three wadded Kleenex, and what was probably a sock — and gotten covered and textured in dust.

There was also a faint odor, sour and fungal, like the smell of an overused bathmat. ‘Jesus, there’s even a smell,’ my father said. He made a show of inhaling through his nose and screwing up his face. ‘There’s even a fucking smell.’ He blotted his forehead and felt his jaw and looked hard at my mother. His mood was no longer elevated. My father’s mood surrounded him like a field and affected any room he occupied, like an odor or a certain cast to the light. ‘When was the last time this got cleaned under here?’ my father asked my mother.

My mother didn’t say anything. She looked at my father as he moved the steel frame around a little with his boot, which raised even more dust into the window’s sunlight. The bed frame seemed very lightweight, moving back and forth noiselessly on its casters’ submerged wheels. My father often moved lightweight objects absently around with his foot, rather the way other men doodle or examine their cuticles. Rugs, magazines, telephone and electrical cords, his own removed shoe. It was one of my father’s ways of musing or gathering his thoughts or trying to control his mood. ‘Under what presidential administration was this room last deep- cleaned, I’m standing here prompted to fucking muse out loud,’ my father said.

I looked at my mother to see whether she was going to say anything in reply.

I said to my father, ‘You know, since we’re discussing squeaking beds, my bed squeaks, too.’

My father was trying to squat down to see whether he could locate any bolts on the frame, saying something to himself under his breath. He put his hands on the frame for balance and almost fell forward when the frame rolled under his weight. ‘But I don’t think I even really noticed it until we began to discuss it,’ I said. I looked at my mother. ‘I don’t think it bothers me,’ I said. ‘Actually, I think I kind of like it. I think I’ve gradually gotten so used to it that it’s become almost comforting. At this juncture,’ I said.

My mother looked at me. ‘I’m not complaining about it,’ I said. ‘The discussion just made me think of it.’ ‘Oh, we hear your bed, don’t you worry,’ my father said. He was still trying to squat, which drew his corset and the hem of his tunic up and allowed the top of his bottom’s crack to appear above the the waist of his white pants. He shifted slightly to point up at the master bedroom’s ceiling. ‘You so much as turn over in bed up there? We hear it down here.’ He took one steel side of the rectangle and shook the frame vigorously, sending up a shroud of dust. The bed frame seemed to weigh next to nothing under his hands. My mother made a mustache of her finger to hold back a sneeze.

He shook the frame again. ‘But it doesn’t aggravate us the way this rodential son of a whore right here does.’ I remarked that I didn’t think I’d ever once heard their bed squeak before, from upstairs. My father twisted his head around to try to look up at me as I stood there behind him. But I said I’d definitely heard and could confirm the presence of a squeak when he’d pressed on the mattress, and could verify that the squeak was no one’s imagination.

My father held a hand up to signal me to please stop talking. He remained in a squat, rocking slightly on the balls of his feet, using the rolling frame to keep his balance. The flesh of the top of his bottom and crack-area protruded over the waist of his pants. There were also deep red folds in the back of his neck, below the blunt cut of the wig, because he was looking up and over at my mother, who was resting her tailbone on the sill of the window, still holding her shallow ashtray. ‘Maybe you’d like to go get the vacuum,’ he said. My mother put the ashtray down on the sill and exited the master bedroom, passing between

me and the dresser piled with bedding. ‘If you can… if you can remember where it is!’ my father called after her.

I could hear my mother trying to get past the King-Size mattress sagging diagonally across the hall.

My father was rocking more violently on the balls of his feet, and now the rocking had the sort of rolling, side-to-side quality of a ship in high seas. He came very close to losing his balance as he leaned to his right to get a handkerchief from his hip pocket and began using it to reach out and flick dust off something at one corner of the bed frame. After a moment he pointed down next to a caster. ‘Bolt,’ he said, pointing at the side of a caster. ‘Right there’s a bolt.’ I leaned in over him. Drops of my father’s perspiration made small dark coins in the dust of the frame. There was nothing but smooth lightweight black steel surface where he was pointing, but just to the left of where he was pointing I could see what might have been a bolt, a little stalactite of clotted dust hanging from some slight protrusion. My father’s hands were broad and his fingers blunt. Another possible bolt lay several inches to the right of where he pointed. His finger trembled badly, and I believe the trembling might have been from the muscular strain on his bad knees, trying to hold so much new weight in a squat for an extended period. I heard the telephone ring twice. There had been an extended silence, with my father pointing at neither protrusion and me trying to lean in over him.

Then, still squatting on the balls of his feet, my father placed both hands on the side of the frame and leaned out over the side into the rectangle of dust inside the frame and had what at first sounded like a bad coughing fit.

His hunched back and rising bottom kept me from watching him. I remember deciding that the reason the frame was not rolling under his hands’ pressure was that my father had so much of his weight on it, and that maybe my father’s nervous system’s response to heavy dust was a cough- signal instead of a sneeze-signal. It was the wet sound of material hitting the dust inside the rectangle, plus the rising odor, that signified to me that, rather than coughing, my father had been taken ill. The spasms involved made his back rise and fall and his bottom tremble under his white commercial slacks. It was not too uncommon for my father to be taken ill shortly after coming home from work to relax, but now he seemed to have been taken really ill. To give him some privacy, I went around the frame to

the side of the frame closest to the window where there was direct light and less odor and examined another of the frame’s casters. My father was whispering to himself in brief expletive phrases between the spasms of his illness. I squatted easily and rubbed dust from a small area of the frame and wiped the dust on the carpet by my feet. There was a small carriage-head bolt on either side of the plating that attached the caster to the bed frame. I knelt and felt one of the bolts. Its round smooth head made it impossible either to tighten or loosen. Putting my cheek to the carpet and examining the bottom of the little horizontal shelf welded to the frame’s side, I observed that the bolt seemed threaded tightly and completely through its hole, and I decided it was doubtful that any of the casters’ platings’ bolts were producing the sounds that reminded my father of rodents.

Just at this time, I remember, there was a loud cracking sound and my area of the frame jumped violently as my father’s illness caused him to faint and he lost his balance and pitched forward and lay prone and asleep over his side of the bed frame, which as I rolled away from the frame and rose to my knees I saw was either broken or very badly bent. My father lay face- down in the mixture of the rectangle’s thick dust and the material he’d brought up from his upset stomach. The dust his collapse raised was very thick, and as the new dust rose and spread it attenuated the master bedroom’s daylight as decisively as if a cloud had moved over the sun in the window. My father’s professional wig had detached and lay scalp-up in the mixture of dust and stomach material. The stomach material appeared to be mostly gastric blood until I recalled the tomato juice my father had been drinking. He lay face-down, with his bottom high in the air, over the side of the bed frame, which his weight had broken in half. This was how I accounted for the loud cracking sound.

I stood out of the way of the dust and the window’s dusty light, feeling along the line of my jaw and examining my prone father from a distance. I remember that his breathing was regular and wet, and that the dust mixture bubbled somewhat. It was then that it occurred to me that when I’d been supporting the bed’s raised mattress with my chest and face preparatory to its removal from the room, the dihedral triangle I’d imagined the mattress forming with the box spring and my body had not in fact even been a closed figure: the box spring and the floor I had stood on did not constitute a continuous plane.

Then I could hear my mother trying to get the heavy canister vacuum cleaner past the angled Simmons Beauty Rest in the hall, and I went to help her. My father’s legs were stretched out across the clean blue carpet between his side of the frame and my mother’s white dresser. His feet’s boots were at a pigeon-toed angle, and his bottom’s crack all the way down to the anus itself was now visible because the force of his fall had pulled his white slacks down even farther. I stepped carefully between his legs. ‘Excuse me,’ I said.

I was able to help my mother by telling her to detach the vacuum cleaner’s attachments and hand them one at a time to me over the width of the slumped mattress, where I held them. The vacuum cleaner was manufactured by Regina, and its canister, which contained the engine, bag, and evacuating fan, was very heavy. I reassembled the vacuum and held it while my mother made her way back across the mattress, then handed the vacuum cleaner back to her, flattening myself against the wall to let her pass by on her way into the master bedroom. ‘Thanks,’ my mother said as she passed.

I stood there by the slumped mattress for several moments of a silence so complete that I could hear the street’s lawnmowers all the way out in the hall, then heard the sound of my mother pulling out the vacuum cleaner’s retractable cord and plugging it into the same bedside outlet the steel reading lamps were attached to.

I made my way over the angled mattress and quickly down the hall, made a sharp right at the entrance to the kitchen, crossed the foyer to the staircase, and ran up to my room, taking several stairs at a time, hurrying to get some distance between myself and the vacuum cleaner, because the sound of vacuuming has always frightened me in the same irrational way it seemed a bed’s squeak frightened my father.

I ran upstairs and pivoted left at the upstairs landing and went into my room. In my room was my bed. It was narrow, a twin bed, with a head- board of wood and frame and slats of wood. I didn’t know where it had come from, originally. The frame held the narrow box spring and mattress much higher off the floor than my parents’ bed. It was an old-fashioned bed, so high off the floor that you had to put one knee up on the mattress and clamber up into it, or else jump.

That is what I did. For the first time since I had become taller than my parents, I took several running strides in from the doorway, past my shelves’ collection of prisms and lenses and tennis trophies and my scale- model magneto, past my bookcase, the wall’s still-posters from Powell’s Peeping Tom and the closet door and my bedside’s high-intensity standing lamp, and jumped, doing a full swan dive up onto my bed. I landed with my weight on my chest with my arms and legs out from my body on the indigo comforter on my bed, squashing my tie and bending my glasses’ temples slightly. I was trying to make my bed produce a loud squeak, which in the case of my bed I knew was caused by any lateral friction between the wooden slats and the frame’s interior’s shelf-like slat-support.

But in the course of the leap and the dive, my overlong arm hit the heavy iron pole of the high-intensity standing lamp that stood next to the bed. The lamp teetered violently and began to fall over sideways, away from the bed. It fell with a kind of majestic slowness, resembling a felled tree. As the lamp fell, its heavy iron pole struck the brass knob on the door to my closet, shearing the knob off completely. The round knob and half its interior hex bolt fell off and hit my room’s wooden floor with a loud noise and began then to roll around in a remarkable way, the sheared end of the hex bolt stationary and the round knob, rolling on its circumference, circling it in a spherical orbit, describing two perfectly circular motions on two distinct axes, a non-Euclidian figure on a planar surface, i.e., a cycloid on a sphere:

The closest conventional analogue I could derive for this figure was a cycloid, L’Hôpital’s solution to Bernoulli’s famous Brachistochrone Problem, the curve traced by a fixed point on the circumference of a circle rolling along a continuous plane. But since here, on the bedroom’s floor, a circle was rolling around what was itself the circumference of a circle, the

cycloid’s standard parametric equations were no longer apposite, those equations’ trigonometric expressions here becoming themselves first-order differential equations.

Because of the lack of resistance or friction against the bare floor, the knob rolled this way for a long time as I watched over the edge of the comforter and mattress, holding my glasses in place, completely distracted from the minor-D shriek of the vacuum below. It occurred to me that the movement of the amputated knob perfectly schematized what it would look like for someone to try to turn somersaults with one hand nailed to the floor.

This was how I first became interested in the possibilities of annulation.

The night after the chilly and sort of awkward joint Interdependence Day picnic for Enfield’s Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, Somerville’s Phoenix House, and Dorchester’s grim New Choice juvenile rehab, Ennet House staffer Johnette Foltz took Ken Erdedy and Kate Gompert along with her to this one NA Beginners’ Discussion Meeting where the focus was always marijuana: how every addict at the meeting had gotten in terrible addictive trouble with it right from the first duBois, or else how they’d been strung out on harder drugs and had tried switching to grass to get off the original drugs and but then had gotten in even terribler trouble with grass than they’d been in with the original hard stuff. This was supposedly the only NA meeting in metro Boston explicitly devoted to marijuana. Johnette Foltz said she wanted Erdedy and Gompert to see how completely nonunique and unalone they were in terms of the Substance that had brought them both down.

There were about maybe two dozen beginning recovering addicts there in the anechoic vestry of an upscale church in what Erdedy figured had to be either west Belmont or east Waltham. The chairs were arranged in NA’s traditional huge circle, with no tables to sit at and everybody balancing ashtrays on their knees and accidentally kicking over their cups of coffee.

Everybody who raised their hand to share concurred on the insidious ways marijuana had ravaged their bodies, minds, and spirits: marijuana destroys slowly but thoroughly was the consensus. Ken Erdedy’s joggling foot knocked over his coffee not once but twice as the NAs took turns concurring on the hideous psychic fallout they’d all endured both in active marijuana-dependency and then in marijuana-detox: the social isolation,

anxious lassitude, and the hyperself-consciousness that then reinforced the withdrawal and anxiety — the increasing emotional abstraction, poverty of affect, and then total emotional catalepsy — the obsessive analyzing, finally the paralytic stasis that results from the obsessive analysis of all possible implications of both getting up from the couch and not getting up from the couch — and then the endless symptomatic gauntlet of Withdrawal from delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol: i.e. pot-detox: the loss of appetite, the mania and insomnia, the chronic fatigue and nightmares, the impotence and cessation of menses and lactation, the circadian arrhythmia, the sudden sauna-type sweats and mental confusion and fine-motor tremors, the particularly nasty excess production of saliva — several beginners still holding institutional drool-cups just under their chins — the generalized anxiety and foreboding and dread, and the shame of feeling like neither M.D.s nor the hard-drug NAs themselves showed much empathy or compassion for the ‘addict’ brought down by what was supposed to be nature’s humblest buzz, the benignest Substance around.

Ken Erdedy noticed that nobody came right out and used the terms melancholy or anhedonia or depression, much less clinical depression; but this worst of symptoms, this logarithm of all suffering, seemed, though unmentioned, to hang fog-like just over the room’s heads, to drift between the peristyle columns and over the decorative astrolabes and candles on long prickets and medieval knockoffs and framed Knights of Columbus charters, a gassy plasm so dreaded no beginner could bear to look up and name it. Kate Gompert kept staring at the floor and making a revolver of her fore-finger and thumb and shooting herself in the temple and then blowing pretend-cordite off the barrel’s tip until Johnette Foltz whispered to her to knock it off.

As was his custom at meetings, Ken Erdedy said nothing and observed everybody else very closely, cracking his knuckles and joggling his foot.

Since an NA ‘Beginner’ is technically anybody with under a year clean, there were varying degrees of denial and distress and general cluelessness in this plush upscale vestry. The meeting had the usual broad demographic cross-section, but the bulk of these grass-ravaged people looked to him urban and tough and busted-up and dressed without any color-sense at all, people you could easily imagine smacking their kid in a supermarket or lurking with a homemade sap in the dark of a downtown alley. Same as AA.

Motley disrespectability was like the room norm, along with glazed eyes and excess spittle. A couple of the beginners still had the milky plastic I.D. bracelets from psych wards they’d forgotten to cut off, or else hadn’t yet gotten up the drive to do it.

Unlike Boston AA, Boston NA has no mid-meeting raffle-break and goes for just an hour. At the close of this Monday Beginners’ Meeting everybody got up and held hands in a circle and recited the NA- Conference-Approved ‘Just For Today,’ then they all recited the Our Father, not exactly in unison. Kate Gompert later swore she distinctly heard the tattered older man beside her say ‘And lead us not into Penn Station’ during the Our Father.

Then, just as in AA, the NA meeting closed with everybody shouting to the air in front of them to Keep Coming Back because It Works.

But then, kind of horrifically, everyone in the room started milling around wildly and hugging each other. It was like somebody’d thrown a switch. There wasn’t even very much conversation. It was just hugging, as far as Erdedy could see. Rampant, indiscriminate hugging, where the point seemed to be to hug as many people as possible regardless of whether you’d ever seen them before in your life. People went from person to person, arms out and leaning in. Big people stooped and short people got up on tiptoe.

Jowls ground into other jowls. Both genders hugged both genders. And the male-to-male hugs were straight embraces, hugs minus the vigorous little thumps on the back that Erdedy’d always seen as somehow requisite for male-to-male hugs. Johnette Foltz was almost a blur. She went from person to person. She was racking up serious numbers of hugs. Kate Gompert had her usual lipless expression of morose distaste, but even she gave and got some hugs. But Erdedy — who’d never particularly liked hugging — moved way back from the throng, over up next to the NA-Conference- Approved-Literature table, and stood there by himself with his hands in his pockets, pretending to study the coffee urn with great interest.

But then a tall heavy Afro-American fellow with a gold incisor and perfect vertical cylinder of Afro-American hairstyle peeled away from a sort of group-hug nearby, he’d spotted Erdedy, and the fellow came over and established himself right in front of Erdedy, spreading the arms of his fatigue jacket for a hug, stooping slightly and leaning in toward Erdedy’s personal trunk-region.

Erdedy raised his hands in a benign No Thanks and backed up further so that his bottom was squashed up against the edge of the Conference- Approved-Literature table. ‘Thanks, but I don’t particularly like to hug,’ he said.

The fellow had to sort of pull up out of his pre-hug lean, and stood there awkwardly frozen, with his big arms still out, which Erdedy could see must have been awkward and embarrassing for the fellow. Erdedy found himself trying to calculate just what remote sub-Asian locale would be the maximum possible number of km. away from this exact spot and moment as the fellow just stood there, his arms out and the smile draining from his

face. ‘Say what?’ the fellow said.

Erdedy proffered a hand. ‘Ken E., Ennet House, Enfield. How do you do. You are?’ The fellow slowly let his arms down but just looked at Erdedy’s proffered hand. A single styptic blink. ‘Roy Tony,’ he said. ‘Roy, how do you do.’ ‘What it is,’ Roy said. The big fellow now had his handshake-hand behind his neck and was pretending to feel the back of his neck, which Erdedy didn’t know was a blatant dis. ‘Well Roy, if I may call you Roy, or Mr. Tony, if you prefer, unless it’s a compound first name, hyphenated, “Roy-Tony” and then a last name, but well with respect to this hugging thing, Roy, it’s nothing personal, rest

assured.’ ‘Assured?’ Erdedy’s best helpless smile and an apologetic shrug of the GoreTex anorak. ‘I’m afraid I just don’t particularly like to hug. Just not a hugger.

Never have been. It was something of a joke among my fam—’ Now the ominous finger-pointing of street-aggression, this Roy fellow pointing first at Erdedy’s chest and then at his own: ‘So man what you say you saying I’m a hugger? You saying you think I go around like to hug?’ Both Erdedy’s hands were now up palms-out and waggling in a like bonhommic gesture of heading off all possible misunderstanding: ‘No but see the whole point is that I wouldn’t presume to call you either a hugger or a nonhugger because I don’t know you. I only meant to say it’s nothing personal having to do with you as an individual, and I’d be more than happy

to shake hands, even one of those intricate multiple-handed ethnic handshakes if you’ll bear with my inexperience with that sort of handshake, but I’m simply uncomfortable with the whole idea of hugging.’ By the time Johnette Foltz could break away and get over to them, the fellow had Erdedy by his anorak’s insulated lapels and was leaning him way back over the edge of the Literature table so that Erdedy’s waterproof lodge boots were off the ground, and the fellow’s face was right up in Erdedy’s face in a show of naked aggression: ‘You think I fucking like to go around hug on folks? You think any of us like this shit? We fucking do what they tell us. They tell us Hugs Not Drugs in here. We done motherfucking surrendered our wills in here,’ Roy said. ‘You little faggot,’ Roy added. He wedged his hand between them to point at himself, which meant he was now holding Erdedy off the ground with just one hand, which fact was not lost on Erdedy’s nervous system. ‘I done had to give four hugs my first night here and then I gone ran in the fucking can and fucking puked. Puked,’ he said. ‘Not comfortable? Who the fuck are you? Don’t even try and tell me I’m coming over feeling comfortable about trying to hug on your James-River-Traders-wearing-Calvin-Klein- aftershave-smelling-goofy-ass motherfucking ass.’ Erdedy observed one of the Afro-American women who was looking on clap her hands and shout ‘Talk about it!’ ‘And now you go and disrespect me in front of my whole clean and sober set just when I gone risk sharing my vulnerability and discomfort with you?’ Johnette Foltz was sort of pawing at the back of Roy Tony’s fatigue jacket, shuddering mentally at how the report of an Ennet House resident assaulted at an NA meeting she’d personally brought him to would look written up in the Staff Log. ‘Now,’ Roy said, extracting his free hand and pointing to the vestry floor with a stabbing gesture, ‘now,’ he said, ‘you gone risk vulnerability and discomfort and hug my ass or do I gone fucking rip your head off and shit down your neck?’ Johnette Foltz had hold of the Roy fellow’s coat now with both hands and was trying to pull the fellow off, Keds scrabbling for purchase on the smooth parquet, saying ‘Yo Roy T. man, easy there Dude, Man, Esse, Bro, Posse, Crew, Homes, Jim, Brother, he’s just new is all’; but by this time

Erdedy had both arms around the guy’s neck and was hugging him with such vigor Kate Gompert later told Joelle van Dyne it looked like Erdedy was trying to climb him.

‘We’ve lost a couple already,’ Steeply admitted. ‘During the testing. Not just volunteers. Some idiot intern in Data Analysis yielded to temptation and wanted to see what all the fuss was for and got hold of Flatto’s I/O lab’s clearance card and went in and viewed.’ ‘From among the many Read-Only copies of your stock of the Entertainment.’ ‘No great tragic loss in itself — lose some idiot-child intern. C’est la guerre. The real loss was that his supervisor tried to go in after him and pull him out. Our head of Data Analysis himself.’ ‘Hoyne, Henri or pronounce “Henry,” middle initial of F., with the wife, with his adult diabetes he controls.’ ‘Did control. Twenty-year man, Hank. Damn good man. He was a friend. He’s in four-point restraints now. Nourishment through a tube. No desire or even basic survival-type will for anything other than more

viewing.’

‘Of it.’ ‘I tried to visit.’ ‘With your sleeveless skirt and different breasts.’ ‘I couldn’t even stand to be in the same room, see him like that. Begging for just even a few seconds — a trailer, a snatch of soundtrack, anything.

His eyes wobbling around like some drug-addicted newborn. Break your fucking heart. In the next bed, restrained, the idiot intern: this was the sort of undisciplined selfish child you like to talk about, Rémy. But Hank Hoyne was no child. I watched this man put down all sugar and treats when he first got diagnosed. Just put them down and walked away. Not even a whimper

or backward glance.’ ‘A will of steel.’ ‘An American adult of exemplary self-control and discretion.’ ‘The samizdat is not to be played crazily about with, so. We too have lost persons. It is serious.’ The legs of the constellation of Perseus were amputated by the earth’s horizon. Perseus, he wore the hat of a jongleur or pantalone. Hercules’

head, this head was square. It was not long to dawn also because at 32° N Pollux and Castor became visible. They were over Marathe’s left shoulder, as if giants were looking over his shoulder, one of Castor’s legs inbent in a feminine manner. ‘But do you ever consider?’ Steeply lit another cigarette. ‘Fantasize, you are meaning.’ ‘If it’s that consuming. If it somehow addresses desires that total,’ Steeply said. ‘Not even sure I can imagine what desires that total and utter even are.’ Up and down upon the toes. Turning above the waist only to look back at Marathe. ‘You ever think of what it’d be like, speculate?’ ‘Us, we think of what ends the Entertainment may serve. We find its efficacy tempting. You and we are tempted in different ways.’ Marathe could identify no other Southwest U.S.A. constellations except the Big Dipper, which at this latitude appeared attached to the Great Bear to form something resembling the ‘Big Bucket’ or the ‘Great Cradle.’ The chair gave small squeaks when he shifted his weight upon it.

Steeply said ‘Well I can’t say I’ve been tempted in the strictest sense of tempted.’ ‘Perhaps we are meaning different things by this.’ ‘Frankly, when I think of it I’m as much terrified as I am intrigued.

Hank Hoyne is an empty shell. The iron will, the analytic savvy. His love of a fine cigar. All gone. His world’s as if it has collapsed into one small bright point. Inner world. Lost to us. You look in his eyes and there’s nothing you can recognize in them. Poor Miriam.’ Steeply kneaded a bare shoulder. ‘Willis, on the I/O night-shift, came up with a phrase for their eyes. “Empty of intent.” This appeared in a memo.’ Marathe pretended to sniff. ‘The temptation of the passive Reward of terminal p, this all seems complex to me. Terror seems part of the temptation for you. Us of Québec’s cause, we have never felt this temptation for the Entertainment, or knowing. But we respect its power.

Thus, we do not fool crazily about.’ It was not that the sky was lightening so much as that the stars’ light had paled. There became a sullenness about their light. Now, also, strange- looking U.S.A. insects whirred actively past from time to time, moving jaggedly and making Marathe think of many windblown sparks.

10 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

The following things in the room were blue. The blue checks in the blue-and-black-checked shag carpet. Two of the room’s six institutional- plush chairs, whose legs were steel tubes bent into big ellipses, which wobbled, so that while the chairs couldn’t really be rocked in they could be sort of bobbed in, which Michael Pemulis was doing absently as he waited and scanned a printout of Eschaton’s highly technical core ESCHAX directory, i.e. bobbing in his chair, which produced a kind of rapid rodential squeaking that gave Hal Incandenza the howling fantods as he sat there kitty-corner from Pemulis, also waiting. The printout kept rotating in Pemulis’s hands. Each chair had a 105-watt reading lamp attached to the back on a flexible metal stalk that let the reading lamp curve out from behind and shine right down on whatever magazine the waiting person was looking at, but since the curved lamps induced this unbearable sensation of somebody feverish right there reading over your shoulder, the magazines (some of whose covers involved the color blue) tended to stay unread, and were fanned neatly out on a low ceramic coffeetable. The carpet was a product of something called Antron. Hal could see streaks of lividity where somebody’d vacuumed against the grain.

Though the magazines’ coffeetable was nonblue — a wet-nail-polish red with E.T.A. in a kind of gray escutcheon — two of the unsettlingly attached lamps that kept its magazines unread and neatly fanned were blue, although the two blue lamps were not the lamps attached to the two blue chairs. Dr.

Charles Tavis liked to say that you could tell a lot about an administrator by the decor of his waiting room. The Headmaster’s waiting room was part of a little hallway in the Comm.-Ad. lobby’s southwest corner. The premie violets in an asymmetrical sprig in a tennis-ball-shaped vase on the coffee- table were arguably in the blue family. And also the overenhanced blue of the wallpaper’s sky, which the wallpaper scheme was fluffy cumuli arrayed patternlessly against an overenhancedly blue sky, incredibly disorienting wallpaper that was by an unpleasant coincidence also the wallpaper in the Enfield offices of a Dr. Zegarelli, D.D.S., which Hal’s just come back from, after a removal: the left side of his face still feels big and dead, with this persistent sensation that he’s drooling without being able to feel it or stop it.

No one’s sure what C.T.’s choice of this wallpaper is supposed to communicate, especially to parents who come with prospective kids in tow to scout out E.T.A., but Hal loathes sky-and-cloud wallpaper because it makes him feel high-altitude and disoriented and sometimes plummeting.

The sills and crosspieces of the waiting room’s two windows have always been dark blue. There was a nautical-blue border of braid around the bill of Michael Pemulis’s jaunty yachting cap. Hal was confident Pemulis would remove the insouciant hat the minute they were called in on what was presumably going to be the carpet.

Also blue: the upper-border slices of sky in the framed informal photos 209 of E.T.A. students that hung on the walls; the chassis of Alice Moore’s Intel 972 word processor w/ modem but no cartridge-capability; also Ms.

Moore’s fingertips and lips. The E.T.A. Headmaster’s receptionist and administrative assistant is known to the players as Lateral Alice Moore. In her youth Lateral Alice Moore had been a helicopter pilot and airborne traffic reporter for a major Boston radio station until a tragic collision with another station’s airborne traffic-report helicopter — plus then the cataclysmic fall to the rush hour’s Jamaica Way six-laner below — had left her with chronic oxygen debt and a neurological condition whereby she was able to move only from side to side. So hence the sobriquet Lateral Alice Moore. An effective time-killer while sitting there waiting for whatever administrator’s summoned you is to have Lateral Alice Moore drum rapidly on her chest and give imitations of her old Boston rush-hour traffic reports in a stuttered helicopterish reporter-voice. Neither Hal, continually checking his chin for drool, nor Pemulis, scanning and bobbing, nor Ann Kittenplan nor Trevor Axford — about whom there was today not even a hint of the color blue — are in the mood for this right now, awaiting what they presume to be some kind of administrative fallout from Sunday’s horrendous Eschaton fiasco. The presumption is based on who’s been summoned here, to wait.

The two different-sized offices that open off the waiting room (through the open and only other door of which the dusky blue Mannington shag of the Comm.-Ad. lobby is visible) belong to Dr. Charles Tavis and to Mrs.

Avril Incandenza. Tavis’s office’s outer door is real oak and has his name

and degree and title in (nonblue) letters so big that the total I.D. crowds the door’s margins. There’s also an inner door.

Avril, whose feelings about enclosure are well known, has no door on her office. Her office is bigger than C.T.’s, though, and has a seminar table it’s always been obvious he covets. Avril’s office’s blue-and-black- checkered shag is deeper than the waiting room’s shag, so that the border between the two is like a mowed v. unmowed lawn. Avril serves (pro bono) as E.T.A.’s Dean of Academic Affairs and Dean of Females. She’s in there unenclosed right now with pretty much every E.T.A. female under thirteen except Ann Kittenplan, whose tattooed knuckles are bruised and who looks somehow cross-dressed in a dress and (nonblue) barrette. Avril has vividly white hair — as of the last few months before Himself’s felo de se — that looks like it never went through the gray stage (it mostly didn’t) and legs whose taper you can see T. Axford is appraising with the frankness of adolescence as she paces a bit in front of the crowded seminar table, in full 210if kind of oblique-angled view of the people in the waiting room.

Though it’s not technically in the waiting room with Hal, the plastic fine-tip felt pen Avril taps professionally against her incisors as she paces and considers is: blue.

Administrative diddle-checks have been required at all North American tennis academies since the infamous case of coach R. Bill (‘Touchy’) Phiely at California’s Rolling Hills Academy, whose hair-raising diary and collection of telephotos and tiny panties — discovered only after his disappearance into the Humboldt County hill country with a thirteen-year- old companion — created what might be conservatively termed a climate of concern among the continent’s tennis parents. At the Enfield Tennis Academy, for the last four years, Dr. Dolores Rusk is supposed to hold a kind of distaff community meeting with all female players judged naïve and moppetish enough to be potential diddlees — the youngest of these is Rhode Island’s pint-sized Tina Echt, just seven but a true cannibal off the backhand side — to interface in a discreet but nurturingly empowering group setting, etc., and nip any potential Phielyisms in the bud. Monthly diddle-checks are in Rusk’s contract because they’re in E.T.A.’s O.N.A.N.T.A. accreditation-charter.

Dean of Females Avril M. Incandenza presides over the diddle-check when Dr. Rusk is otherwise engaged, and Rusk is so very rarely legitimately engaged that the fact that it’s the Moms doing diddle- prevention duty today leads Hal to fear that Rusk is maybe in there in the Headmaster’s office getting ready to be in on the upcoming disciplinary scene: C.T. would have to be really upset to want to have Rusk included; Rusk might be there more for C.T. than for any studential psyches.

Axhandle has his eyes closed and is repeating a mnemonic limerick about Brewster’s Angle for the Leith-taught Quadrivial colloquium ‘Reflections on Refraction.’ Michael Pemulis is still scanning a serrated scroll of EndStat-axiomatic Pink, which looks to be all math and spiky2 brackets, and bobbing, ignoring Ann Kittenplan’s murderous looks and tubercular throat-clearings at the squeaking of his bobbing blue chair. You can tell Pemulis really is studying because he keeps turning something upside-down and then rightside-up. Hal declines to share his Rusk-being-in- there-with-Tavis worries with Michael Pemulis, not just because Hal avoids ever mentioning Rusk’s name but also because Pemulis loathes Rusk with a hard and gem-like flame, and though he’d never admit it is already clearly nauseated with worry that he’s going to get the lion’s share of the blame for damage to Lord and Possalthwaite and not only receive corrective on-court discipline but maybe get denied a spot on the trip to Tucson’s WhataBurger, 211or worse.

Avril is indirect but syntactically crisp with the couple dozen little girls in there, probing. The girls’ outfits involve blue at many levels of hue and intensity in varied combination. Avril Incandenza’s voice is higher on the register than one would expect from a woman so imposingly tall. It is high and sort of airy. Oddly insubstantial, is the E.T.A. consensus. Orin says one reason Avril dislikes music is that whenever she hums along she sounds insane.

The absence of a door to the Moms’s office means you might as well be in there, in terms of being able to hear what’s going on. She has little sense of spatial privacy or boundary, having been so much alone so much when a child. Lateral Alice Moore wears a sort of surreal combination of black Lycra Spandex and filmy green tulle. The portable-stereo headphones she wears — entering what appear to be Response-macros for 80+ received

invitations to next week’s WhataBurger Invitational — are powder-blue.

Her typing is clearly in synch with something’s backbeat. Her lips and cheek-points are the vague robin’s-egg of cyanosis.

Just why Michael Pemulis hates Dr. Rusk is unclear and seems free- floating; Hal gets a different answer from Pemulis every time. Hal himself feels uncomfortable around Dolores Rusk and avoids her but isn’t aware of any particular reason for being uncomfortable around her. But Pemulis positively detests Rusk. It was Pemulis who’d dickied in at night and hooked a Delco battery up to the inside brass knob of her locked office door, at age fifteen, Rusk’s office door, the first door over in the other little hallway at the lobby’s NE corner, next to the shift-nurses’ office and infirmary, then exiting Rusk’s office by a window and thorny hedge, which Pemulis was extremely fortunate no one but Hal and Schacht and maybe Mario knew he authored the hot knob, because the whole scheme turned quickly disastrous, because it was an elderly Brighton-Irish cleaning lady who got to the hot knob first, at like 0500h., and it turned out Pemulis had seriously under-calculated the brass-conducted Delco voltage involved, and if the cleaning lady hadn’t been wearing yellow rubber cleaning-lady gloves she would have ended up with way worse than the permanent perm and irreversible crossed eyes she regained consciousness with, and the cleaning lady’s Ward Boss was upper Brighton’s infamous F. X. (‘Follow That Ambulance’) Byrne, rapacious personal-injury J.D., and the Academy’s Workman’s Comp. premiums had skyrocketed, and the whole thing was still in litigation.

Avril had eschewed an office door even before the cleaning-lady kert- wang, for simple enclosure-reasons.

Recrossed legs and closer inspection reveal that Trevor Axford’s left sock, though not his right sock, is blue.

Sinistral, his right hand missing digits from a fireworks accident three Interdependence Days past, Axhandle is several cm. shorter than Hal Incandenza and is a true redheaded person, with copper-colored hair and that moist white freckle-chocked skin that even through two layers of summer Pledge only reddens and peels, plus there’s the matter of the enormous and forever chapped lips; and as a tennis player he is like a less effective version of John Wayne — he does nothing but blast from the baseline, w/o discernible spin. He’s a junior from Short Beach CT and

under enormous family pressure to continue the male Axford tradition of attending Yale and is academically so marginal that he knows his only chance to go to Yale is to play tennis for Yale, which would effectively blow any chance at a Show-level future, and is high-ranked but has set his competitive sights on nothing past a Ride-offer to Yale. Though Ingersoll’s informally in Hal’s Big Buddy contingent, he’s technically in Axhandle’s, they’re both aware; and Hal’s a little uncomfortable about his relief that 212 none of the real Eschaton casualties were technically his Buddies. The only real thing Axford and Hal have in common on the court is a curious habit of refusing to ask for help from other courts when their balls go astray.

213 Pemulis has finally quit with the bobbing and folded the printout scroll of Pinkinto a big ragged square and has sidled over to Lateral Alice2 Moore’s horseshoe-shaped desk and is bantering with her very casually, looking all around him as he banters, trying subtly to feel her out re whether maybe one of these WhataBurger Jr. Invitational invitations stacked cruciform, female athwart male, in Lateral Alice’s IN box concerns anybody with the male initials M.M.P., by any chance. Pemulis and Moore would be less tight if she knew he dickied in at night and used her WATS and modem, though she’s very laid-back and easygoing and not at all like the little framed thing by her name plaque with a scowling woman saying I’VE GOT ONE NERVE LEFT AND YOU’RE GETTING ON IT. The little cartoon is just a standard like office-worker gag. She’d summoned them out of Sixth Hour with the same ancient intercom-and-mike system Troeltsch et al. get to commandeer for Saturdays’ WETA (Troeltsch has had to be prohibited from playing with her chair), and her transmitted voice had not been ungentle. Hal’s face’s left side feels queerly inflated, but then when he runs his right hand over it it’s always regulation-size.

Administrative assistants worth their health benefits are synaptically evolved to the point where they can banter, accept compliments on a Spandex-and-tulle ensemble, effortlessly deflect unauthorized info-probes, listen to something bass-intensive on personal-stereo headphones, and word-process effortlessly to the headphones’ backbeat, all simultaneously.

Lateral Alice Moore’s bluish fingertips make her painted nails ten little sunsets. Lateral Alice Moore’s desk’s chair’s wheels fit on a track with an

electrified third rail, so she can slide from one corner of the horseshoe’s arc to the other — more or less laterally — at the touch of a cerise desktop button. For post-Delco-incident legal reasons, the name-plaque on her reception desk has DANGER: THIRD RAIL instead of the name Lateral Alice Moore.

Hal can hear Avril saying ‘Now. If I speak to all of you very gently about being touched by a tall person in an uncomfortable way, will you know what I mean? Have any of you been kissed or nuzzled or hugged or rubbed or pinched or probed or fondled or in any way touched by a tall person in a way that’s made you uncomfortable?’ Hal can see one of his Moms’s stockinged legs, terminating in a trim ankle and a very white Reebok, extruding from stage-right into the frame of the empty doorway, the Reebok tapping patiently, and one arm crossed over Avril’s chest, and the other arm’s elbow resting on that arm and fluttering in and out of view as Avril taps at her teeth with a blue pen. ‘Gramma pinches my cheek,’ one girl volunteers. She’d actually raised her hand to be called on, her wrist with its touching little (blue) terry wrist- band. Hal hasn’t seen so many pigtails and button noses and small berry- shaped mouths convened in one indoor place in who knows how long. Very few of the sneakered feet reach all the way to the thick shag in there. Much leg-dangling and absent uncomfortable sneaker-swinging. A couple fingers in nostrils in absent contemplation. Ann Kittenplan, in her blue chair, is coolly appraising the little wash-offable tattoos she applies daily to the knuckles of her hands. ‘Not quite what we’re trying to speak of together right now, Erica,’ from someplace above the tapping foot and in-and-out arm. Hal knows the register and inflections of his mother’s voice so well it almost makes him uncomfortable. His left ankle gives a sick squeak when he flexes it. Cords in his left forearm stand out and subside as he squeezes his tennis ball. The left side of his face feels like something far away that means him harm and is coming gradually closer. He can make out just the whistly fricatives of Charles Tavis’s distant voice from behind his double office doors; it sounds somehow like he’s speaking to more than one person in there. Charles Tavis’s office’s inner door also has the I.D. DR. CHARLES TAVIS on it, and below that his E.T.A. motto about the man who knows his limitations having none.

‘She does it really hard,’ rebuts what must be Erica Siress. ‘I’ve seen her do it,’ what sounds like Jolene Criess confirms.

Another: ‘I hate that.’ ‘I hate it when some adult pats my head like I’m a schnauzer.’ ‘The next adult that calls me adorable is in for a really unpleasant surprise let me tell you.’ ‘I hate it when my hair is tousled or smoothed in any way.’ ‘Kittenplan’s tall. Kittenplan gives Indian rub-burns after lights-out.’ Avril gives them verbal space, tries gently to steer the topic closer to true Phielyism; she’s subtle and very good with small children. ‘… that my daddy gives me these small little shoves in the small of the back when he wants me to go into rooms. It’s like he influences me into rooms from behind. This tiny little irritating push, that makes me want to let

him have it in the shin.’ ‘Mmmmmm-hmm,’ Avril muses.

It’s impossible not to overhear, because things out in the waiting room right now are so comparatively silent except for the tinny hiss of Lateral Alice Moore’s disengaged headphones and the conspiratorial murmur of Michael Pemulis trying to get her to drum on her chest and describe I-93 South’s Neponset exit-ramp as one very long thin parking lot. Things are so quiet because the anxiety level in Tavis’s waiting room is high. ‘You’re all in for some serious Pukers is my prediction,’ Ann Kittenplan had said to Pemulis as they all first answered the intercom’s summons, which was also about the time that Pemulis started in with the rodential chair-squeaking that made one half of Kittenplan’s face spasm.

One of the tricky and sinister things about corrective discipline at a tennis academy is that punishments can take the form of what might look like straight-out athletic conditioning. Q.v. the drill sergeant telling the recruit to drop and give him fifty, etc. So but this is why Gerhardt Schtitt and his prorectors are way more feared than Ogilvie or Richardson-Levy- O’Byrne-Chawaf or any of the regular academics. It’s not just that Schtitt’s corporal reputation preceded him here. It’s that Schtitt and deLint make out the daily schedules for A.M. drills and P.M. matches and resistance-training and conditioning runs. But especially the A.M. drills. Certain drills are well known to be nothing more than attitude-adjusters, designed to do nothing but dramatically lower life-quality for a few minutes. Too brutal to be

assigned on the daily basis that would contribute to genuine aerobic 214 conditioning, drills like the disciplinary version of Tap & Whack are known to the kids simply as Pukers. Puker-drills are really meant to do nothing but hurt you and make you think long and hard before repeating whatever you did to merit them; but they’re still to all outward appearances exempt from any kind of VIII-Amendment protest or sniveling calls home 215to parents, insidiously, since they can be described to parents and police alike as just drills assigned for your overall cardiovascular benefit, with all the actual sadism completely sub rosa.

Kittenplan’s prediction that the upperclassmen are going to wear the whole brown helmet for the Eschaton free-for-all is hopefully rebuttable by Pemulis’s observation that Eschaton’s extracurricular impulse and structure had been firmly in place before any of them’d even enrolled. All Michael Pemulis had done was codify basic principles and impose a sort of matrix of decidable strategy. Maybe helped create a mythology and established, mostly through personal example, a certain level of expectation. All Hal’d done was act as amanuensis on a lousy manual. The I.-Day Combatants had been out there of their own volition. Pemulis and Axford’d gotten Hal to write out most of all this in maximally rhetorical diction, which Pemulis had then embedded in a Pinkprintout so he could carry it around and study2 it and have it all nailed down before Tavis tried any boom-lowering. The strategy is to let Pemulis do all the talking but let Hal interject at will, the voice of reason, good-cop/bad. Axford’s been instructed to count the Antron fibers between his shoes the whole time they’re in there.

Hal has no idea what it might signify that the Headmaster’s summons hasn’t come for almost 48 hours. It might be odd that it hadn’t once occurred to him to see Tavis personally, or to go to HmH and ask the Moms for intercession or info. It’s not like he had the urge but resisted it; it hadn’t even occurred to him.

For somebody who not only lives on the same institutional grounds as his family but also has his training and education and pretty much his whole overall raison-d’être directly overseen by relatives, Hal devotes an unusually small part of his brain and time ever thinking about people in his family qua family-members. Sometimes when he’ll be chatting with somebody in the endless registration-line for a tournament or at a post-meet

dance or something and somebody’ll say something like ‘How’s Avril getting along?’ or ‘I saw Orin kicking the everliving shit out of the ball on an O.N.A.N.F.L. highlights cartridge last week,’ there will be this odd tense moment where Hal’s mind will go utterly blank and his mouth slack and flabby, working soundlessly, as if the names were words on the tip of his tongue. Except for Mario, about whom Hal will talk your ear off, it’s almost like some ponderous creaky machine has to get up and running for Hal even to think about members of his immediate family as standing in relation to himself. It’s a possible reason Hal avoids Dr. Dolores Rusk, who always wants to probe him on issues of space and self-definition and something she 216keeps calling the ‘Coatlicue Complex.’ Hal’s maternal half-uncle Charles Tavis is a little like the late Himself in that Tavis’s C.V. is a back-and-forth but not indecisive mix of athletics and hard science. A B.A. and doctorate in engineering, an M.B.A. in athletics administration — in his professional youth Tavis had put them together as a civil engineer, his specialty the accommodation of stress through patterned dispersal, i.e. distributing the weight of gargantuan athletic-spectatorial crowds. I.e., he’d say, he’d handled large live audiences; he’d been in his own small way a minor pioneer in polymer-reinforced cement and mobile fulcra. He’d been on design teams for stadia and civic centers and grandstands and micological-looking superdomes. He’d admit up-front that he’d been a far better team-player engineer than out there up-front stage- center in the architectural limelight. He’d apologize profusely when you had no idea what that sentence meant and say maybe the obfuscation had been unconsciously deliberate, out of some kind of embarrassment over his first and last limelighted architectural supervision, up in Ontario, before the rise of O.N.A.N.ite Interdependence, when he’d designed the Toronto Blue Jays’ novel and much-ballyhooed SkyDome ballpark-and-hotel complex.

Because Tavis had been the one to take the lion’s share of the heat when it turned out that Blue Jays’ spectators in the stands, many of them innocent children wearing caps and pounding their little fists into the gloves they’d brought with hopes of nothing more exotic than a speared foul ball, that spectators at a distressing number of different points all along both foul- lines could see right into the windows of guests having various and sometimes exotic sex in the hotel bedrooms over the center-field wall. The

bulk of the call for Tavis’s rolling head had come, he’d tell you, when the cameraman in charge of the SkyDome’s Instant-Replay-Video Scoreboard, disgruntled or professionally suicidal or both, started training his camera on the bedroom windows and routing the resultant multi-limbed coital images up onto the 75-meter scoreboard screen, etc. Sometimes in slow motion and with multiple replays, etc. Tavis will admit his reluctance to talk about it, still, after all this time. He’ll confess that his usual former-career-summary is to say just that he’d specialized in athletic venues that could safely and comfortably seat enormous numbers of live spectators, and that the market for his services had bottomed out as more and more events were designed for cartridge-dissemination and private home-viewing, which he’ll point out is not technically untrue so much as just not entirely open and forthcoming.

Lateral Alice Moore is printing out WhataBurger RSVPs. The Intel 972 is cutting-edge, but she clings to a hideous old dot-matrix printer she refuses to replace as long as Dave Harde can keep it going. It’s the same with the intercom system and its antiquated iron stand-up mike that Troeltsch says is an affront to the whole broadcasting profession. Lateral Alice has queer eccentric pockets of intransigence and Ludditism, due possibly to her helicopter-crash and neurologic deficits. The printer’s needly sound fills the waiting room. Hal finds he can be confident of his face’s symmetry and saliva only when he sits there with his right hand over his left cheek. Each line of Alice’s printed response sounds like some sort of supposedly unrippable fabric getting ripped, over and over, a dental and life-denying sound.

For Hal, the general deal with his maternal uncle is that Tavis is terribly shy around people and tries to hide it by being very open and expansive and wordy and bluff, and that it’s excruciating to be around. Mario’s way of looking at it is that Tavis is very open and expansive and wordy, but so clearly uses these qualities as a kind of protective shield that it betrays a frightened vulnerability almost impossible not to feel for. Either way, the unsettling thing about Charles Tavis is that he’s possibly the openest man of all time. Orin and Marlon Bain’s view was always that C.T. was less like a person than like a sort of cross-section of a person. Even the Moms Hal could remember relating anecdotes about how as a teenager, when she’d taken the child C.T. or been around him at Québecois functions or gatherings involving other kids, the child C.T. had been too self-conscious

and awkward to join right in with any group of the kids clustered around, talking or plotting or whatever, and so Avril said she’d watch him just kind of drift from cluster to cluster and lurk around creepily on the fringe, listening, but that he’d always say, loudly, in some lull in the group’s conversation, something like ‘I’m afraid I’m far too self-conscious really to join in here, so I’m just going to lurk creepily at the fringe and listen, if that’s all right, just so you know,’ and so on.

But so the point is that Tavis is an odd and delicate specimen, both ineffectual and in certain ways fearsome as a Headmaster, and being a relative guarantees no special predictive insight or quarter, unless certain maternal connections are exploited, the thought of doing which literally does not occur to Hal. This odd blankness about his family might be one way to manage a life where domestic and vocational authorities sort of bleed into each other. Hal squeezes his tennis ball like a madman, sitting there in the needly printout-noise, right palm against his left cheek and elbow hiding his mouth, wanting very much to go first to the Pump Room and then to brush vigorously with his portable collapsible Oral-B. A quick chew of Kodiak is out of the question for several reasons.

The only other time this year that Hal was officially summoned to the Headmaster’s waiting room had been in late August, right before Convocation and during Orientation period, when Y.D.A.U.’s new kids were coming in and wandering around clueless and terrified, etc., and Tavis had wanted Hal to take temporary charge of a nine-year-old kid coming in from somewhere called Philo IL, who was allegedly blind, the kid, and apparently had cranium-issues, from having originally been one of the infantile natives of Ticonderoga NNY evacuated too late, and had several eyes in various stages of evolutionary development in his head but was legally blind, but still an extremely solid player, which is all kind of a long tale in itself, given that his skull was apparently the consistency of a Chesapeake crabshell but the head itself so huge it made Booboo look microcephalic, and the kid apparently had on-court use of only one hand because the other had to pull around beside him a kind of rolling IV-stand appliance with a halo-shaped metal brace welded to it at head-height, to encircle and support his head; but anyway Tex Watson and Thorp had broken C.T. down over the kid’s admission and tuition-waver, and C.T. now figured the kid would need to say the least some extra help getting oriented

(literally), and he wanted Hal to be the one to take him in hand (again literally). It turned out a couple days later that the kid had some kind of either family or cerebro-spinal-fluid crisis at home in rural IL and wasn’t matriculating now till the Spring term. But back in August Hal had sat in the very chair Trevor Axford is now nodding off in, very late in the day, like dusk, having had an informal exhibition match with a visiting Latvian Satellite pro go an encouraging three sets that P.M. so that he’d missed Mrs.

C.’s stuffed peppers at supper, his stomach making those where’s-the-food noises from around the transverse colon, alone in the blue room, waiting, the chair bobbing reflexively, with Lateral Alice Moore gone home to her long apartment with rooms only 2 m. wide in Newton and an opaque plastic dust-thing wrapped tight over her Intel processor and intercom-console and the little red danger-light on her DANGER: THIRD RAIL plaque unlit, and the only lights besides the weak dusk outside were the hot 105W of his chairback’s creepy blue-shaded magazine-lamp, plus the multiple lamps on in Charles Tavis’s office (Tavis has a phobic thing about overhead lighting) as Tavis was doing a late-day Intake interview on impossibly tiny little Tina Echt, who just matriculated this fall at age seven. His doors were open because it was a brutal August and F. D. V. Harde had somehow rigged Lateral Alice’s air-conditioner vent in the waiting room so it really put out.

Tavis’s office’s outer door opened out while the inner door opened in, which gave his little inter-door vestibule kind of a jaw-like quality, when exposed.

August Y.D.A.U. had been when Hal’s chronic left ankle had been almost the worst it’s ever been, after an erumpent but grueling summer tour of getting to at least the Quarters of just about everything, mostly on hard 217 asphalt, and he could feel his pulse in the vessels in the raw ligaments of the ankle as he sat flipping the shiny pages of a new World Tennis and watching the little ad-cards fall out and flutter; but he also couldn’t help exploiting the open-jawed view of a substantial section of Charles Tavis at his office desk, looking as usual oddly foreshortened and small and with his hands together on the massive desktop across from a partial-profile view of a girl who looked like she couldn’t be much more than five or six, preparing to receive Intake papers as she listened to Tavis. There’d been no Echt parents or guardians anywhere in view. Some kids just get dropped off.

Sometimes the parents’ cars barely even stop, just slow down, throw gravel as they accelerate away. Tavis’s desk drawers have squeaky casters. Jim Struck’s folks’ Lincoln hadn’t even much slowed. Struck had been helped to his feet and taken immediately to the locker room to shower the gravel out of his hair. Hal had been in charge of his Orientation, too, when Struck transferred, booted out of Palmer Academy after his pet tarantula (named Simone — another long story) escaped and wouldn’t even have dreamed of biting the Headmaster’s wife if she hadn’t screamed and passed out and fallen right on it, Struck explained as Hal helped pick up suitcases tumbled all over the drive.

Like many gifted bureaucrats, Hal’s mother’s adoptive brother Charles Tavis is physically small in a way that seems less endocrine than perspectival. His smallness resembles the smallness of something that’s 218 farther away from you than it wants to be, plus is receding. This weird appearance of recessive drift, together with the compulsive hand- movements that followed his quitting smoking some years back, helped contribute to the quality of perpetual frenzy about the man, a kind of locational panic that it’s easy to see explains not only Tavis’s compulsive energy — he and Avril, pretty much the Dynamic Duo of compulsion, between them, sleep, in their second-floor rooms in the Headmaster’s House — separate rooms — tend to sleep, between them, about as much as any one normal insomniac — but maybe also contributes to the pathological openness of his manner, the way he thinks out loud about thinking out loud, a manner Ortho Stice can imitate so eerily that he’s been prohibited by the male 18’s from doing his Tavis-impression in front of the younger players, for fear that the littler kids will find it impossible to take the real Tavis seriously at the times he needs to be taken seriously.

As for the older kids, Stice can make them all double up now merely by shielding his eyes with his hand and assuming a horizon-scan expression whenever Tavis heaves into view, seeming to recede even as he bears down.

C.T. as Headmaster always has a number of introductory questions for matriculants, and Hal, now, in November, can’t remember which one of these Tavis opened with with Echt, but he remembers seeing the little girl’s 219 sucker-stick sweep the air and a plastic Mr. Bouncety-Bounce no-pierce

earring swing wildly as she shook her head. Hal’d marvelled at her size.

How high could somebody this little be ranked, even regionally, in 12’s?

And then yes the sumptuous squeak of Tavis’s big seagrass chair coming back forward as his elbows took his weight and he laced his fingers together out across meters of polymer-reinforced shale desktop, custom-designed.

The Headmaster’s smile as he leaned back, though hidden from Hal because 220 of the shadow of the office’s enormous StairBlaster, was nevertheless audible because of the thing with Charles Tavis’s teeth, about which maybe the less said the better. Looking discreetly in, Hal had felt an involuntary rush of affection for C.T. His maternal uncle’s hair was straight and very precisely combed over, and his little mustache was never quite symmetrical.

One eye was also set at a slightly different angle than the other, so that besides holding his hand up to scan Stice would also cock his head slightly to the side whenever C.T. came near. Hal’s involuntary grin is lopsided and only half-felt, now, remembering. The Axhandle’s sitting there slumped, with his fist to his chin, a posture that he thinks makes him look meditative but that really makes him look in utero, and Kittenplan is chewing at her knuckles’ tattoos, which is what she does instead of washing them off.

Then Ortho Stice had entered the hot waiting room, shirt wet and crew cut matted from the courts and toting his Wilsons, and made right for the AC-vent’s downdraft outside Tavis’s little vestibule. Stice’s clothes were comped by Fila and when he played any sort of match he wore all black, and at E.T.A. and on the tour was known as The Darkness. He had a crew cut and the beginnings of jowls. He and Hal exchanged the very slight sorts of nods people use when they like each other past all need for politeness.

They had similar games, although most of Stice’s touch was at the net. Stice raised one hand to his eyes and cocked his head slightly in the direction of the office’s lamplight. ‘The little guy going to be a long time in there?’ ‘You have to ask?’ Tavis was saying ‘What actually we do for you here is to break you down in very carefully selected ways, take you apart as a little girl and put you back together again as a tennis player who can take the court against any little girl in North America without fear of limitation. With a perspective unmarred by the eyelashes of whatever pockets you brought

here. A little girl now who can regard the court as a mirror whose reflection holds no illusions or fear for you.’ ‘Now the thing with the skull,’ Stice said. Hal had watched gooseflesh rise on Stice’s arms and legs as he stood under the cold air and faced up and breathed, hugging his gear to his chest. ‘One possible way of couching it is to choose to say that we will take apart your skull very gently and reconstruct a skull for you that will have a highly developed bump of clarity and a slight concave dent where the fear- instinct used to be. I’m doing my best to cast all this in terms the you you are right now can be comfortable with, Tina. Though I need to tell you I feel uncomfortable adjusting a presentation toward or down toward anyone in any way, since I’m terribly vain, both as a man and an educator, about my reputation for candor,’ Tavis said. The audible smile. ‘It is one of my limitations.’ Stice withdrew without even having to say goodbye to Hal. They were at complete ease with one another. It had been a bit different the year before, when Hal was still in Boys’ 16’s. Hal heard Stice say something to somebody out in the lobby. Part of C.T.’s impression of distance just past the eye’s focal length was the fact that the two sides of his face didn’t quite go together. It wasn’t as drastic as a stroke-victim’s face or a deformity; the subtlety of it was part of it, the essential vagueness about himself that Tavis fought by sort of peeling his skull back and exposing his brain to you without any sort of warning or invitation; it was part of the man’s preoccupied frenzy.

Between Ortho Stice’s exit and the Moms’s entry Hal had been flexing the ankle and watching the swelling shift slightly under the multiple socks.

He stood and put his weight on the ankle experimentally a couple times and then sat back down and flexed it, watching the swelling very intently. The way he knew suddenly that he was going to go down and get high in secret in the Pump Room before showering was that it hadn’t occurred to him to ask The Darkness about making some sort of arrangements to eat together, since Stice had missed supper too. His viscera were putting out the sound of one of those teakettles that doesn’t have a whistle and so just rumbles as it boils. A competitive athlete cannot skip meals without terrific metabolic distress.

After a little while Avril Incandenza, E.T.A.’s Dean of Academic Affairs, had lowered her head under the waiting room’s jamb and come in, looking fresh and totally untouched by the heat. She had one of the Orientation packets in its customary red-and-gray binder.

The Moms always had this way of establishing herself in the exact center of any room she was in, so that from any angle she was somehow in the line of all sight. It was part of her, and so to that extent dear to Hal, but it was noticeable and kind of unsettling. His brother Orin, during a late- night round of Family Trivia, had once described Avril as The Black Hole of Human Attention. Hal had been pacing, rising up on the toes of the left foot, trying to gauge the exact level of physical discomfort he was feeling.

That’s when she’d come in. Hal and the Moms always greeted each other kind of extravagantly. When Avril entered a room, any sort of pacing reduced to orbiting, and Hal’s pacing became vaguely circular around the waiting room’s perimeter as Avril rested her tailbone on the receptionist’s desk and crossed her ankles and produced her cigarette case. Her manner always became very casual and almost sort of male when she and Hal were

alone in a room.

She watched him walk. ‘The ankle?’ He hated himself for exaggerating the limp even slightly. ‘Tender. Sore at the very worst. More like tender.’ ‘No, now, now no need to cry,’ C.T. was exclaiming as he knelt at the side of the chair from which little legs dangled and were spasming around. ‘I didn’t mean literally break, as in break open your head, Tina. Please let me acknowledge that this is totally my fault my dear for presenting what we’ll be up to here in just exactly the wrong sort of light.’ Avril had casually produced a 100-mm. rodney from the flat brass case and tamped it on an unlined knuckle. Hal produced no lighter. Neither of them had looked toward Tavis’s office’s maw. Avril’s smock-type dress was blue cotton, with a kind of scalloped white doily around the shoulders and white stockings and painfully white Reebok cross-trainers. ‘I am horrified that I’ve made you cry like this.’ Tavis’s voice had assumed that stressed character of issuing from the end of a long corridor. ‘Just please know that a totally unthreatening lap is available if you want a lap, is all I can think of to say.’

Avril always smoked with her smoking-arm up and elbow resting in the crook of the other arm. She would frequently hold a rodney just this same way without lighting it or even putting it in her mouth. She permitted herself to smoke only in her E.T.A. office and HmH study and one or two other venues outfitted with air-filtration equipment. Her posture, that night, with her coccyx against something and looking down the length of her legs, was awfully close to the way Himself used to stand around. She indicated

C.T.’s door with her head. ‘I gather he’s been in there a while.’ Hal despised even the very slight suggestion of whine that came in: ‘I’ve been waiting here coming up on an hour.’ And that he liked it a little that she looked pained for him as her tiny eyebrows (unplucked, just naturally

tiny and arched) went up.

‘You’ve had nothing to eat, then, yet?’ ‘I was summoned.’ Tavis’s voice in there: ‘I’ll invite you right here and now to sit in my lap and let me make such soothing sounds as There There There.’ ‘Want my Mommy and Daddy.’ Avril said, ‘That’s the old tum making those sounds then, and not the air conditioner?’ with that smile that was also a kind of wince. ‘Couldn’t even start to describe the sounds coming from down there, like that whistleless kettle Himself used to leave on when —’ An apple appeared from a deep pocket in her smock. ‘Happen to have a spare Granny Smith here, to tack body to soul while we wait.’ He smiled tiredly at the big green apple. ‘Moms, that’s your apple.

That’s all you’re going to eat between 12 and 23, I happen to know.’ Avril made a distended gesture. ‘Stuffed. Huge lunch with a set of parents not three hours ago. I’ve been staggering around since.’ Looking at the apple like she had no idea where it’d even come from. ‘I’ll probably

pitch this out.’ ‘You will not.’ ‘Please,’ rising from the desk’s edge without seeming to use muscles, apple held out like something distasteful, cigarette down at her side where it would be putting a hole in the smock if lit. ‘You’d be doing us both a favor.’ ‘This drives me bats. You know this drives me bats.’

Orin and Hal’s term for this routine is Politeness Roulette. This Moms- thing that makes you hate yourself for telling her the truth about any kind of problem because of what the consequences will be for her. It’s like to report any sort of need or problem is to mug her. Orin and Hal had this bit, during Family Trivia sometimes: ‘Please, I’m not using this oxygen anyway.’ ‘What, this old limb? Take it. In the way all the time. Take it.’ ‘But it’s a gorgeous bowel movement, Mario — the living room rug needed something, I didn’t know what til right this very moment.’ The special fantodish chill of feeling both complicit and obliged. Hal despised the way he always reacted, taking the apple, pretending to pretend his reluctance to eat her supper was a pretense. Orin believed she did it all on purpose, which was way too easy. He said she went around with her feelings out in front of her with an arm around the feelings’ windpipe and a Glock 9 mm. to the feelings’ temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot.

The Moms held the red binder out to Hal without moving. ‘Have you seen Alice’s new packets?’ The apple was good-sour but perfumy from the pocket of the Moms’s smock, and it stimulated a torrent of saliva. The binder had different little informal and action photos from the waiting-room walls, and offprints of clippings, and three rings for the packet of guidelines and Honor-Code pledges, all done up by Moore in a Gothic ital.

Hal looked up from the binder, indicating C.T.’s office with his head. ‘You’re taking the girl around yourself?’ ‘We’re encouragingly short-staffed. Thierry and Donni won their qualifying round at Hartford, so they’re staying over.’ She leaned way forward and looked in at C.T. so he could see she was out here. She smiled.

Hal followed her look. ‘The girl’s name’s Tina something and she’ll come up to about your knee.’ ‘Echt,’ Avril said, looking at something on a printout.

Hal looked at her while he chewed. ‘You don’t like her already?’ ‘Tina Echt. Pawtucket. Father apparently some sort of unleavened baker, mother a public relations person for the Red Sox A.A.A. baseball there.’ Hal had to wipe his chin as he smiled. ‘Triple-A. Not A.A.A.’ Avril was leaning forward at the waist with the binder to her breast the way females hold flat things, still trying to catch the Headmaster’s eye.

Hal said ‘Troeltsch finally has some competition in the repulsive-last- name department.’

‘Lord she is a small one isn’t she.’ ‘I can’t see her being more than maybe five.’ ‘Oh golly let’s see: age seven, high I.Q., somewhat impoverished- looking M.M.P.I., played out of Providence Racquet and Bath in East Providence. Ranked thirty-first in Eastern 12’s as of June.’ ‘She can’t be much taller than her damn stick out there, when she plays.

Schtitt’s going to keep her here what, twelve years?’ ‘The girl’s father has been calling about admission for her for over two years, Charles said.’ ‘He was doing that thing about taking skulls apart and she yelled bloody murder.’ Avril’s laugh’s onset was high-pitched and alarming and distinctive, so now at least C.T. would for sure know the Moms was out here waiting and would wind things up and maybe get to Hal so Hal could go get high in secret. ‘Well good for her,’ Avril said.

The orbit took him around Lateral Alice Moore’s desk in a kind of thick ellipse. Every time his left foot came down he either dipped down or raised up briefly to tip-toe, flexing the ankle. ‘Ten years here and she’ll lose her mind. If she starts at seven she’ll either be ready for the Show at fourteen or by fourteen she’ll start getting that burned-out look that makes you want to wave your hand in front of her face.’ There was the sound of Tavis’s squeaky right Nunn Bush pacing faster, which meant real conclusion. ‘I’m going to predict it’s probably hard to see yourself as a great athlete at this stage, Tina, not being able to see over the net yet, but possibly even harder to see yourself as providing entertainment, engaging people’s attention. As a high-velocity object people can project themselves onto, forgetting their own limitations in the face of the nearly limitless potential someone as young as yourself represents.’ The apple generated tremendous amounts of saliva. ‘He’ll put her in the Show before menses, there’ll be another enormous fuss and high-rental cartridges of a girl no larger than her racquet beating up on hairy Slavic lesbians, and then by fourteen she’ll be like old coal in the bottom of a backyard grill.’ Some old military joke about apples kept running through.

Eat the Apple, Fuck the Core. Hal couldn’t remember what it was supposed to signify.

The Moms was snapping her fingers silently and working her forehead. ‘There’s some term for coals reduced to residue after all day in a grill. I’m trying to think.’ Hal hates this. ‘Clinkers,’ he said instantly. ‘From klinker low German and klinckaerd old Dutch, to sound, ring, nominated to substantive around 1769: a hard mass formed by the fusion of the earthy impurities of like coal, iron ore, limestone.’ He hated it that she could even dream he’d be taken in by the aphasiac furrowing and finger-snapping, and then that he’s always so pleased to play along. Is it showing off if you hate it? ‘Clinker.’ ‘A grill wouldn’t have clinkers. Charcoal’s refined to burn right down to dust. Clinkers are sort of metallic, I think. See for example the ring-dash- sound etymology.’ ‘I like to suspect this is why so many of our older players like to project me into this carnival-barker persona with tiny balance sheets revolving in my eyes, that I’m up-front with every incoming addition to our family that this is where the resources come from for professional tennis, and for the North American junior development system for gifted children who want to scale the heights to professionalism or to a competitive college career, and so ultimately for an Academy like this one’s considerable operating expenses, and for scholarships like the partial one we’re so happy to be able to offer your parents for you.’ ‘So then perhaps you’d care to join us for dinner. We’ll also have Ms.

Echt if she can stay up that long.’ The core made a very-muffled-cymbal sound in the bottom of Lateral Alice’s wastebasket. ‘I can’t get out of dawns. Wayne and I are supposed to 221 play Slobodan and Hartigan at some corporate-spectacle thing at Auburndale right after lunch.’ ‘Have you had Barry speak to Gerhardt about the ankle not getting better?’ ‘The clay’ll be good to it. Schtitt knows all about the ankle.’ ‘Well best of British luck to you both.’ Avril’s purse looked more like soft luggage than like a purse. ‘May I lend you the key to the kitchen, then.’ It’s always the Moms’s left shoulder Hal looks over, whenever he orbits, and his plans emerged between Avril’s invitations to accept some sort of

politeness-act. ‘The Darkness and I were going to blast down the hill and grab something if and when I ever get out of here.’ ‘Oh.’ Then he wondered with dread what Stice might have said to her on her way in, re supper. ‘Maybe Pemulis too, I think Pemulis said.’ ‘Well do not, under any circumstances, enjoy yourself.’ Echt and Tavis were both standing, now, in there. Their handshake looked, for the first split-second he looked, like C.T. was jacking off and the little girl was going Sieg Heil. Hal thought he was maybe starting to lose his mind. Even the meat of the Granny Smith smelled like perfume.

Three months later, earlier today, before being again summoned, at the dentist’s, the dentist’s office had had a weird sharp clean sweet smell about it, the olfactory equivalent of fluorescent light. Hal had felt the cold stab in the gum and then the slow radial freeze, his face ballooning to become one of the frozen cumuli against the aftershave-blue of the dental wallpaper’s sky. Zegarelli D.D.S. had dry dark green eyes that bulged above his mint- blue mask, as in like olives where eyes should be, as he leaned in to proceed, his dental overhead light’s corona giving him one of those malperspectived medieval halos that seem to stand on end. Even masked, Zegarelli’s breath is infamous — E.T.A.s forced for the first time by their E.T.A. Group Plan to recline below Zegarelli are counselled on how to respire, to inhale when Zegarelli inhales and exhale right back out with him, to avoid doubling the amount of suffering Hal’s already gone through, just today.

Charles Tavis is not a buffoon. The thing that’s keeping things so tensely quiet out here amid all this waiting-room blue is that there are historically at least two Charles Tavises, the three older boys know. The openly cross- sectional and free-associating and arms-waving-on-the-perspectival-horizon dithering hand-wringing Total-Worry persona is really Tavis’s version of social composure, his way of trying to get along with you. But just ask Michael Pemulis, whose sneakers have been on Tavis’s carpet so often they’ve left an unvacuumable impression in the checked Antron: when Tavis loses his composure, when the integrity or smooth function of the Academy or his unquestioned place at the E.T.A. tiller is God forbid threatened, Hal’s openly adjustable uncle becomes a different man, one not to be fucked with. It’s not necessarily pejorative to compare a cornered

bureaucrat to a cornered rat. The danger-sign to watch out for is if Tavis suddenly gets very quiet and very still. Because then he seems, perspectivally, to grow. He seems, sitting there, to rush in at you, dopplering in at a whisper. Almost looming over you from across the huge desk. If shit meets administrative fan, kids coming out of his mandible-doored office come out pale and rubbing their eyes, not from tears but from this depth- perspective skewing that C.T. suddenly effects, when there’s shit.

Another alert is when Lateral Alice Moore gets formally buzzed to bring you and the others in, instead of the office doors ever opening from inside, and when she gets up and edges over to show you in like you’re some sort of hat-holding salesman, without once meeting your eye, as if there’s shame. One big family.

The diddle-check seems like it’s degenerated into the girls all getting very excited and exchanging data on what kinds of animals members of their own biologic families either imitate or physically resemble, and Avril’s out of sight and silent and apparently letting them go with it for a while and vent stress. Hal keeps checking for jaw-drool with the back of his hand. Pemulis, in a cyrillic-lettered T-shirt, takes off the hat and looks around himself and makes reflexive tie-straightening movements, taking one last look at his lines on the printout while Axford stands there needing three tries to work the outside door’s knob. Ann Kittenplan, on the other hand, wears an expression of almost regal calm, and precedes them through the inner door like someone stepping down off a dais.

And it also seems somehow sinister that she’s apparently been in here all this time, this Clenette person, one of the nine-month temps from down the hill, pretty-eyed and so black she’s got a bluish cast, with hair ironed straight and then pinned up and the standard E.T.A.-custodial teal-blue zip- upable jumpsuit, emptying Tavis’s personal brass wastebaskets into her big cart with its gray canvas sides. The way she stares at a point just to the side of Hal’s own stare as she and her cart wait at C.T.’s inner door for Hal and the others to be ushered sideways through by Lateral Alice Moore. The cart, like poor Otis Lord’s own game-master’s cart, has a crazy wheel, and clatters a bit even buried in shag, trying to maneuver around Moore as she reverses back along the vestibule’s wall. Neither Schtitt nor deLint is in here, but from the hiss of Pemulis’s inhale Hal can tell that Dr. Dolores Rusk is in the room even before he takes his eyes from a C.T. who’s sitting

pulsing with swollen proximity in his seagrass swivel-chair and almost done coolly bending a giant paper clip into a sort of cardioid or else sloppy circle: Tavis’s window-lit shadow now reaches all the way past the StairBlaster to the red-and-gray-fabric ottoman along the east wall, in which sits sure enough Rusk, her hose laddered and face betraying nothing; and then next to her is poor old Otis P. Lord, the Hitachi monitor still over his head like the sallet of some grotesque high-tech knight, slumped and with his sneakers pointing at each other in the blue and black shag, hands in his lap, two crude eye-holes cut into the black plastic casing of the monitor’s base, Lord not meeting Pemulis’s eye, and wicked hanging shards of glass from the screen he fell through pointing — some nearly touching, even — his slim neck and throat, so he has to hold his head very still, despite the heavings of his shallow chest, with the day-shift E.T.A. nurse standing behind him and inclined over the back of the sofa to hold the monitor very carefully in place, the incline producing cleavage which Hal would gladly choose to be the sort of person not to note. Lord’s eyes move to Hal and blink dolefully through the holes, and he can be heard sniffing moistly in there, complexly muffled; and Pemulis is just finishing moving his feet precisely into their familiar impressions in the office carpet when C.T., seeming direly to rise from his chair without getting up, quietly asks the room’s last occupant — the scrubbed young button-nosed urologist in an O.N.A.N.T.A. blazer, severely underdue at E.T.A., seated back in the shadow of the open inner door in the room’s southeast corner, so he’s hidden right behind them from the start and there’s the opportunity for this stagy incriminating-type whirl-and-kertwang-face from Axford and Hal as they hear Charles Tavis addressing the urine expert behind them, asking him very quietly please to close both doors.

PRE-DAWN AND DAWN, 1 MAY Y.D.A.U.

OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON AZ U.S.A., STILL

‘You can’t say it’s only a U.S. thing,’ Steeply said again. ‘I went through school when multiculturalism was inescapable. We read about the Japanese and Indonesians, for example, having a mythic figure. I forget its name.

Oriental myth. It’s a woman covered with long blond hair. Entirely. Her whole body with blond down all over it.’ ‘This type of passive temptation, part of it seems to include a felt lack. A perceived deprivation. Orientals are not bodily a hairy culture.’ ‘These multicultural Oriental myths always had young Oriental men happening upon her by some body of water combing her body-hair and singing. And they have sex with her. Apparently she’s simply too exotic and intriguing or seductive to resist. Even the young Oriental men who know of the myths can’t resist, according to the myths.’ ‘And are rendered paralyzed with stasis by this intimate act,’ Marathe said. When now he dreamt of his father, it was of the two skating, young Marathe and M. Marathe, at a St. Remi-d’Amherst outdoor rink, M.

Marathe’s breath visible and his pacemaker a boxy bulge in his Brunswickian cardigan. ‘Killed outright, usually. The pleasure’s too intense. No mortal can stand

it. Kills them. M-o-r-t-s.’ Marathe sniffed. ‘The analogous part is how even the ones who know the pleasure of it

will kill them, they go ahead anyway.’ Marathe coughed.

Some of the insects flying had multiple pairs of wings and were bioluminescent. They seemed very intent, flying past the outcropping and darting jaggedly off on a course, on their way to something urgent. The sound of them, the insects, made Marathe think of playing cards in the bicycle spokes of the bicycle of a boy with legs. Both men were silent. This is the time of false dawns. Venus moved east away from them. The softest light imaginable seeped into the desert and spread into the strange tan vistas around them, something heating just below the ring of night. His blanket of

the lap was covered in burrs and small spiked seeds of some species. The U.S.A. desert began to rustle with life of which most remained hidden. In the American sky, the stars fluttering like banked flames above a low- resolution seepage of glow. But none of the pinkening of genuine dawn.

Both the U.S.A. Office of Unspecified Services and les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents looked forward to these meetings of Marathe and Steeply. They accomplished little. It was their sixth or seventh. Meeting.

Steeply had volunteered to be liaison with Marathe’s betrayal, despite 222 language. The A.F.R. believed Marathe functioned as a triple agent, pretending to betray his nation for his wife, memorizing every detail of the meetings with B.S.S. According to Steeply, Steeply’s B.S.S. superiors did not know that Fortier knew that Steeply knew he (Fortier) knew Marathe was here. Steeply held this fact back from his superiors. It satisfied some U.S.A. desire to hold some small thing back from one’s superiors, Marathe felt. Unless Steeply was deceiving Marathe about this. Marathe did not know. M. Fortier did not know Marathe had reached the internal choice that he loved his skull-deprived and heart-defective wife Gertraud Marathe more than he loved the Separatist and anti-O.N.A.N. cause of the nation Québec, making Marathe no better than M. Rodney ‘the God’ Tine. If Fortier knew of this, he would understandably drive a railroad spike through Gertraud’s boneless right eye, killing her and Marathe both.

The real Marathe gestured outward at the glowing but unpink east. ‘A false dawn.’ ‘No,’ Steeply said, ‘but your own francophone myth of your Odalisk of Theresa.’ ‘L’Odalisque de Sainte Th´ erèse.’ Marathe rarely yielded to the temptation to correct Steeply, whose horrid pronunciation and the syntax as well Marathe could never determine for sure either was or was not an intentional irritant, intended to discomfit Marathe.

Steeply said ‘The multicultural myth being that the Odalisk’s so beautiful that mortal Québecois eyes can’t take it. Whoever looks at her

turns into a diamond or gem.’

‘In most versions an opal.’ ‘A Medusa in reverse, one might say.’ 223Both men, well versed in this, mirthlessly laughed.

Marathe said ‘The Greeks, they did not fear beauty. They feared ugliness. Hence I think beauty and pleasure, these were not fatal temptations for the Greek type.’ ‘Or like a combination of Medusa and Circe, your Odalisk’ said Steeply.

He was smoking either his last or one of his purse’s pack’s last cigarettes — the American’s habit to throw the butts off the outcropping had prevented Marathe from counting the consumed butts. Marathe knew that Steeply knew that filters of cigarettes did not biodegrade for the environment. The two men, by this juncture of time, each knew the other.

A hidden bird twittered. ‘The Greek mythic personality, it had also pregnancy by rain and rape by fowl.’ ‘And haven’t we come a long way,’ Steeply said ironically. ‘This irony and contempt for selves. These also are part of your U.S.A. type’s temptation, I think.’ ‘Whereas your type’s a man of only actions, ends,’ Steeply said, with Marathe could not tell whether irony or maybe not.

The desert floor was brightening by imperceptible degrees, its surface the color of overtanned hide. The saguaro cactus reptile-hued. Potentially young forms in down sleeping bags of coffinous shape were now discernible around the black remains of the night’s bonfire. The air smelled of green wood. A tasteless odor of dust. The distant construction site’s payloaders were urine-colored and appeared frozen in the middle of various actions. It was still chill. Marathe’s teeth had a palpable film on them, of perhaps a paste of dust, especially the front teeth. No sun’s top arc was appearing, and Marathe could cast no shadow yet on the shale behind them.

Rémy Marathe’s resting pulse rate was very low: no legs to require blood from the heart. He very rarely felt phantom pains, and then only in the stump of the left. All A.F.R.s have enormous arms, particularly upper arms. Marathe was left-handed. Steeply manipulated his cigarette with his left hand and used his right arm to cradle the left elbow. But Marathe knew quite well that Steeply was right-handed. The little wens of his fieldpersona’s electrolysis were now brightly pink against the pallor of Steeply’s face, which appeared both puffy and drawn.

The cloudless sky above the east’s Mountains of Rincon range was the faint sick pink of an unhealed burn. The whole imperceptibly lightening

scene of the vistas had a stillness about it that suggested photography.

Marathe had long ago placed his watch in his windbreaker’s pocket, to keep from continually checking. Steeply enjoyed imagining that his interface dictated its own period and time; Marathe had chosen to indulge this.

Marathe realized about himself that some of his pretended sniffing was for the purpose of alerting Steeply to the breaking of a silence. ‘You could seat yourself briefly, if you have fatigue. The shoes’ straps…’ He gestured slightly.

Steeply made a show of looking down and prodding at the tan stone’s dust with the toes of his shoe. ‘It looks like there might be things.’ ‘I must soon leave.’ Marathe’s hand was imprinted with the texture of the Sterling’s pebbled grip. ‘It has been good to be in the air for a night.

Soon I must leave.’ ‘Crawling around. The skirt, it makes one sensitive about simply plop- ping down wherever you wish. Possibility of things… crawling up.’ He looked up at Marathe. He appeared sad. ‘I’d never realized.’

0450H., 11 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT FRONT OFFICE, ENNET HOUSE D.A.R.H., ENFIELD MA

‘Didn’t know whether to shit or shout Dixie after it went off. And the look on his face.’ ‘One of the times for me was I’m in some bar in Lowell with some guys I’m crewing around with and we were there with some other guys, just fucking Lowell knuckleheads, your young drunks that are just getting to be your young working-type drunks that stop off after work for just a couple and don’t make it home til closing. Just putting away boilermakers and playing darts and this and that. And this one guy on the crew starts making moves on this one guy’s girl, this real ordinary-looking guy’s in there with his girl and one of our guys starts saying this and that to her, trying to pick her up, and her date got pissed off, you know, who can blame him, and there was words exchanged and so on and so forth, and we was all there with this first guy, in our like group, he was the one talking the shit to this guy’s girl but he was our boy, we’re all in the crew, so we all crew up on

this girl’s date and push him around somewhat, you know how it is, say he’s talking shit to our boy, he gets a little bit of a beating, dope-slaps, nothing like extreme or blood, and we kick his ass around a little bit and toss him out of this bar and get this girl to drink boilermakers with us and the one guy that was making the moves on her in the first place gets her to start playing strip-darts, like taking off bits of clothes for points in darts, which the keep isn’t too like thrilled but these boys are his customers, it’s like family. We’re all real drunk and playing strip-darts.’ ‘I get the picture. Sounds like a real nice picture.’ ‘Except when I got a little smarter later I learned you never in a neighborhood bar fu— you don’t ever mess with a local guy with a girl and make him look small in front of the girl and then stay there where it happened if he leaves, because it’s this kind of guy always comes back.’ ‘You learned to leave.’ ‘Because this guy like a half-hour later on he comes back packing.

Packing means there’s a Item involved, now, see.’ ‘Item?’ ‘A gun. This wasn’t a big one, I’m remembering a .25 somewhat, in that range, but in he comes and comes straight over to the dart game and the girl that’s down to her slip and pulls it out and without saying nothing up and comes right over and shoots our boy, that’d taken his girl and made him look small, shoots him right in the head, right in the back of the head.’ ‘Boy was crazy as a shithouse rat.’ ‘Well Joelle he’d got made small in front of his girl, and we stayed, and he came back and plugged him in the back of the head.’ ‘And killed him dead.’ ‘Not right away he didn’t die. The negativest part for me is what we do.

All us guys with the guy that was shot. We are all very fucked up by this point in time. I remember it not seeming real. The keep’s busy calling the Finest, the guy drops the Item and the keep grabbed him and covered him with the bar piece and called the Finest and kept the guy back behind the bar, I think mostly now to keep us from eliminating his map right there, out of payback. We’re all blotto-zombie drunk by this juncture. The girl, there was blood all down the side of her slip. And here our boy’s shot in the head, the guy’d shot him right through the back of the head from the side, and blood’s all over. You always maybe think of individuals bleeding in this one

way, like steady. But your serious bleeding comes with the pulse, if you didn’t know. It like shoots out and dies down and shoots out.’ ‘Don’t have to tell me.’ ‘Well I don’t know you, Joelle, am I right? I don’t know what you seen or know.’ ‘I saw an old boy cut his hand off with a chainsaw cutting back brush back of the Cumberland when I was fishing with my Daddy. Like to have bled to death right there. My Daddy had to use his belt. Before he got it tied off the blood came like that, with the pulse. My Daddy got him to the hospital in his car, like to saved his life. He’d had some training. He could save lives like that.’ ‘I tell you, what still gets me is we was so drunk we didn’t even somehow take it seriously, because everything seemed like a movie when I got real drunk. I still wish we’d thought to take him to the hospital right away. We could of piled him in. He wasn’t dead yet even though he didn’t look good. We didn’t even lay him down, we got this idea, one of the guys started walking him around. We all walked him around in circles like some kind of O.D., thought if we could keep him walking til the wagon came he’d be OK. By the end we was dragging him, I think then he was dead.

Blood all over everybody. The gun wasn’t more than an old .25. People was yelling at us to pile him in and take him to the hospital, but we’d got this walking-him-around idea into our heads, to hold him up and walk him in circles, the girl’s screaming and trying to put her stockings on and we’re yelling to the guy that’d shot him how we were going to off with his map and so on and so forth, till the keep called an ambulance and they came and

he was dead as a stick.’ ‘Gately that’s really bad.’ ‘Why are you even up, don’t have to work.’

‘…’ ‘…’ ‘I like it when it snows real early like this. This is the best window. But you learned a lesson.’ ‘His name was Chuck or Chick. The one that got shot that time.’ ‘Did you hear that McDade person at supper? You know how some folks have one of their legs shorter than the other?’ ‘I don’t listen to those guys’ crap.’

‘It was down at the far end of the table at supper. He was telling Ken and me how he had a counselor when he was in Juvenile in Jamaica Plain, he had this counselor he said she had this condition where each leg was shorter

than the other.’

‘…’

‘…’ ‘I don’t think I follow you, Joelle.’ ‘Each of the woman’s legs was shorter than the other.’ ‘How can a leg that’s shorter than the other leg have the other leg shorter than it?’ ‘He was having us on. He said the point was an AA point, that it defied sense and explaining and you just had to accept it on faith. That creepy Randy guy with the white wig was backing him up with a very straight face.

McDade said she walked like a metronome. He was making fun of us, but I still thought it was funny.’ ‘Maybe tell me about this veil of yours, then, Joelle, if we’re talking about defied sense.’ ‘Waaaay out to one side. Then waaaay out to the other side.’ ‘Really. Let’s really interface if you’re in here. How come with the

veil?’

‘Bridal thing.’

‘…’ ‘Aspiring Muslim.’ ‘I didn’t mean to pry in. You can just tell me if you don’t want to talk about the veil.’ ‘I’m also in another fellowship, with almost four years in.’ ‘U.H.I.D.’ ‘It’s the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed. The veil is a

sort of fellowship caparison.’ ‘What’s it compared to?’ ‘We all wear one. Almost all of us, with some time in.’ ‘But if you don’t mind, how come you’re in it? U.H.I.D.? How’re you supposed to be deformed? It’s nothing that sticks way out, if I can say it.

Are you, like, missing something?’ ‘There’s a brief ceremony. It’s a bit like giving out chips over at the Better Late Than Never meeting, for Varying Lengths. The new U.H.I.D.s

stand and receive the veil and don the veil and stand there and recite that the veil they’ve donned is a Type and a Symbol, and that they are choosing freely to be bound to wear it always — a day at a time — both in light and darkness, both in solitude and before others’ gaze, and as with strangers so with familiar friends, even Daddies. That no mortal eye will see it withdrawn. That they hereby declare openly that they wish to hide from all

sight. Unquote.’ ‘…’ ‘I’ve also got a membership card that spells out everything you could ever want to know, and more.’ ‘Except I’ve asked Pat and Tommy S. and still the thing I don’t get is why join a fellowship just to hide? I can see if somebody is like — you know, hideously — and they’ve been hiding away in the dark all their life, and they want to Come In and join a fellowship where everybody’s equal and everybody can Identify because they all spent their whole life hiding also, and you join a fellowship so you can step out of the dark and into the group and get support and finally show yourself minus eyes or with three ti — arms or whatever and be accepted by people that know just what it’s like, and like in AA they say they’ll love you till you can like love yourself and accept yourself, so you don’t care what people see or think anymore, and you can finally step out of the cage and quit hiding.’

‘That’s AA?’ ‘Kind of, a little bit, I think.’ ‘Well Mr. Gately what people don’t get about being hideously or improbably deformed is that the urge to hide is offset by a gigantic sense of shame about your urge to hide. You’re at a graduate wine-tasting party and improbably deformed and you’re the object of stares that the people try to conceal because they’re ashamed of wanting to stare, and you want nothing more than to hide from the covert stares, to erase your difference, to crawl under the tablecloth or put your face under your arm, or you pray for a power failure and for this kind of utter liberating equalizing darkness to descend so you can be reduced to nothing but a voice among other voices, invisible, equal, no different, hidden.’ ‘Is this like this thing they talked about about people hating their faces on videophones?’

‘But Don you’re still a human being, you still want to live, you crave connection and society, you know intellectually that you’re no less worthy of connection and society than anyone else simply because of how you appear, you know that hiding yourself away out of fear of gazes is really giving in to a shame that is not required and that will keep you from the kind of life you deserve as much as the next girl, you know that you can’t help how you look but that you are supposed to be able to help how much you care about INFINITE JEST / LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY / 6/21/:0 / PAGE 535 how you look. You’re supposed to be strong enough to exert some control over how much you want to hide, and you’re so desperate to feel some kind of control that you settle for the appearance of control.’ ‘Your voice gets different when you talk about this shit.’ ‘What you do is you hide your deep need to hide, and you do this out of the need to appear to other people as if you have the strength not to care how you appear to others. You stick your hideous face right in there into the wine-tasting crowd’s visual meatgrinder, you smile so wide it hurts and put out your hand and are extra gregarious and outgoing and exert yourself to appear totally unaware of the facial struggles of people who are trying not to wince or stare or give away the fact that they can see that you’re hideously, improbably deformed. You feign acceptance of your deformity.

You take your desire to hide and conceal it under a mask of acceptance.’ ‘Use less words.’ ‘In other words you hide your hiding. And you do this out of shame, Don: you’re ashamed of the fact that you want to hide from sight. You’re ashamed of your uncontrolled craving for shadow. U.H.I.D.’s First Step is admission of powerlessness over the need to hide. U.H.I.D. allows members to be open about their essential need for concealment. In other words we don the veil. We don the veil and wear the veil proudly and stand very straight and walk briskly wherever we wish, veiled and hidden, and but now completely up-front and unashamed about the fact that how we appear to others affects us deeply, about the fact that we want to be shielded from all sight. U.H.I.D. supports us in our decision to hide openly.’ ‘You seem like you drift in and out of different ways of talking.

Sometimes it’s like you don’t want me to follow.’

‘Well I’ve got a brand-new life, just out of the wrapper, which you all say’ll take some time to fit.’ ‘So they teach you how to accept your nonacceptance, the Union, you’re saying.’ ‘You followed very well. You didn’t need fewer words at all. If you don’t mind my saying so, my sense is that you think you’re not bright but

you’re not.’ ‘Not bright?’ ‘I put that poorly. You’re not not bright. As in you’re incorrect in thinking you have nothing upstairs.’ ‘It’s a self-esteem issue, then, you’re seeing in me after like three days here, then. I feel low esteem about how I think I’m not bright enough for some people.’ ‘Which is fine, U.H.I.D. would say, to illustrate the U.H.I.D. take versus an apparently more AA take. U.H.I.D.’d say it’s fine to feel inadequate and ashamed because you’re not as bright as some others, but that the cycle becomes annular and insidious if you begin to be ashamed of the fact that being unbright shames you, if you try to hide the fact that you feel mentally inadequate, and so go around making jokes about your own dullness and acting as if it didn’t bother you at all, pretending you didn’t care whether others perceived you as unbright or not.’ ‘This makes the front of my head hurt, trying to follow this.’ ‘Well you’ve been up all night.’ ‘Then now I have to go to my other fucking job.’ ‘You’re way brighter than you think, Don G., although I doubt anything anyone else says can get in there into the gnawed ragged place where you’re afraid you’re slow and dull.’ ‘And what makes you think I think I’m not bright, unless it’s you’re saying it’s obvious to anybody I’m not bright?’ ‘I didn’t mean to pry. Just tell me if you don’t want to speak to someone you barely know about it.’ ‘Now you’re being sarcastic on what I said before.’ ‘…’ ‘I got kicked off of football my tenth-grade year for flunking English.’ ‘You played American football?’ ‘I was good til I got kicked off. They gave me a tutor and I still flunked.’

‘I used to twirl a baton at halftimes. I went to a special camp six

summers running.’ ‘…’ ‘But a lot of the forms of self-hatred there is no veil for. U.H.I.D.’s taught a lot of us to be grateful that there’s at least a veil for our form.’

‘So the veil’s a way to not hide it.’

‘To hide openly, is more like it.’ ‘…’ ‘I’m already seeing it’s very different from the drug-recovery agenda,

the AA and NA program.’ ‘Can I ask how you’re deformed?’ ‘The best is when the sun’s coming up right through the snow and

everything looks so white.’ ‘…’ ‘I almost forgot why I came on in, that that Kate girl said Ken E. like to get killed by some son of a bitch last night at that Waltham NA thing and they want somebody to tell Johnette not to make them go back again if they

don’t want.’

‘…’ ‘…’ ‘One is Kate and Ken can talk for themselves with Johnette and I don’t need to pry in and you sure don’t need to pry in and rescue nobody else.

Two is you’re all of a sudden talking different again, and when you were talking about the veil you didn’t sound like you to me. And three is don’t think I can’t see you’re coming out sideways all over the place about when I asked can I ask what deformity you’re not hiding the fact that you’re hiding under that thing. The Staff part of me wants to say if you don’t want to answer it just say so, but don’t try and go around the side and think you can distract me into forgetting I asked it.’ ‘The U.H.I.D. in me would say you’re trapped in shame about the shame, in response, and that the shame-circle keeps you from really being present for your Staff job, Don. You’re more bugged by the possibility that I’m treating you as unbright and distractable than you are about a resident’s inability to come right out and openly exercise her right to refuse to answer an incredibly private and drug-unrelated question.’

‘And now she’s back to talking like a fucking English teacher again. But ignore that. That’s not the point. Look at how you’re trying to get our dialogue all distracted up in shame and me again instead of saying Yes or No to me asking Will you tell me what you’re missing behind that veil.’ ‘Oh you’re good at hiding Mr. G. you’re good. The minute we start to poke at any inadequacies you’re ashamed of, see, you drop behind your own protective mask of House Staff and start probing areas that you now know I can’t bring myself to be open about — since you got me to tell you all about U.H.I.D.’s philosophy of hiding — so that your own sense of inadequacy gets either buried or used as a backlight to illuminate my own inability to be open and straightforward. The best defense is a good offense isn’t it Mr. Football Player.’ ‘Aspirin-time, now, with all the words. You win. Go watch the snow come down someplace else.’ ‘The thing is, Mr. Staff, I’ve already just completely opened up about my shame and my inability to be open and straightforward about this.

You’re exposing something I’ve already held up to view. It’s your shame about being ashamed of what you’re afraid might be seen as a lack of brightness that’s getting to stay buried under this dead horse of my deformity that you’re trying to whip.’ ‘And then meantime you still didn’t say a straight-on Yes or No to Can I ask what’s up behind there, are you cross-eyed or have a like beard, or do you have like really bad skin under there even though your skin everyplace

that isn’t hidden looks —’ ‘Looks what? My unhidden skin is what?’ ‘See, this is you keep trying to sidetrack instead of just saying No to Can I ask. Just say No. Try it. It’s OK. Nothing bad’ll happen. Just try it straight out.’ ‘Perfect. You were going to say every visible expanse of my skin is just drop-dead creamy perfect.’ ‘Jesus, why am I even here? Why don’t you just interface with yourself if you think you know all my issues and shames and everything I’m going to say? Why not take the suggestion to say No? Why come in here? Did I come to you, to talk? Was I just sitting in here trying to keep awake and do the Log and getting ready to go mop shit with a shoe-freak and did or didn’t you waltz on in and sit down and come to me?’

‘Don, I’m perfect. I’m so beautiful I drive anybody with a nervous system out of their fucking mind. Once they’ve seen me they can’t think of anything else and don’t want to look at anything else and stop carrying out normal responsibilities and believe that if they can only have me right there with them at all times everything will be all right. Everything. Like I’m the solution to their deep slavering need to be jowl to cheek with perfection.’

‘Now with the sarcasm.’ ‘I am so beautiful I am deformed.’ ‘Now with the nonrespectful acting-out of treating me like I’m stupid for trying to get her to walk through her fear to give a straight-out No, which

she isn’t willing.’ ‘I am deformed with beauty.’ ‘You want to see my professional Staff face here’s my Staff face. I nod and smile, I treat you like somebody I have to humor by nodding and smiling, and behind the face I’m going with my finger around and around my temple like What a fucking yutz, like Where’s the net.’ ‘Believe what you want. I’m powerless over what you believe, I know.’ ‘See the professional Staffer writing in the Meds Log: “Six extra-strong- kind aspirin for Staff after sarcasm and sideways refusal to walk through fears and sarcastic acting out by newcomer who thinks she knows

everybody else’s issues.’ ‘What position did you play?’ ‘… that the Staffer wonders how come she’s even here in treatment then, if she knows so much.’

It is starting to get quietly around Ennet House that Randy Lenz has found his own dark way to deal with the well-known Rage and Powerlessness issues that beset the drug addict in his first few months of abstinence.

The nightly AA or NA meetings get out at 2130h. or 2200h., and curfew isn’t until 2330, and every Ennet resident mostly carpools back to the

House with whatever residents have cars, or some of them go out in cars for massive doses of ice cream and coffee.

Lenz is one of the ones with a car, a heavily modified old Duster, white with what look like 12-gauge blasts of rust over the wheelwells, with over- sized rear tires and an engine so bored-out for heavy-breathing speed it’s a small miracle he still has a license.

Lenz sets loafer one outside Ennet House only after sunset, and then only in his white toupee and mustache and billowing tall-collared topcoat, and goes only to the required nightly meetings; and the thing is that he’ll never drive his own car to the meetings. He always thumbs along with somebody else and adds to the crowd in their car. And then he always has to sit in the northernmost seat in the car, for some reason, using a compass and napkin to plot out what the night’s major direction of travel’ll be and then figuring out what seat he’ll have to be in to stay maximally north. Both Gately and Johnette Foltz have had to make a nightly routine of telling the other residents that Lenz is teaching them valuable patience and tolerance.

But then after the meeting lets out, Lenz never thumbs back with anybody. He always walks back to the House after meetings. He says it’s that he needs the air, what with being shut up in the crowded House all day and avoiding doors and windows, hiding from both sides of the Justice System.

And then one Wednesday after the Brookline Young People’s AA up Beacon by Chestnut Hill it takes him right up to 2329 to get home, almost two hours, even though it’s like a half-hour walk and even Burt Smith did it in September in under an hour; and Lenz gets back just at curfew and without saying a word to anybody books right up to his and Glynn’s and Day’s room, Polo topcoat flapping and powdered wig shedding powder, and sweating, and making an unacceptable classy-shoed racket running up the men’s side’s carpetless stairs, which Gately didn’t have time to go up and address because of having to deal with Bruce Green and Amy J. separately both missing curfew.

Lenz abroad in the urban night, solo, on almost a nightly basis, sometimes carrying a book.

Residents who seem to make it a point to go off alone a lot are redflagged at Thursday’s All-Staff Meeting in Pat’s office as clear relapse- risks. But they’ve pulled spot-urines on Lenz five times, and the three times

the lab didn’t fuck up the E.M.I.T. test Lenz’s urine’s come back clean.

Gately’s basically decided to just let Lenz be. Some newcomers’ Higher Power is like Nature, the sky, the stars, the cold-penny tang of the autumn air, who knows.

So Lenz abroad in the night, unaccompanied and disguised, apparently strolling. He’s mastered the streets’ cockeyed grid around Enfield-Brighton- Allston. South Cambridge and East Newton and North Brookline and the hideous Spur. He takes side-streets home from meetings, mostly. Low-rent dumpster-strewn residential streets and Projects’ driveways that become alleys, gritty passages behind stores and dumpsters and warehouses and loading docks and Empire Waste Displacement’s mongo hangars, etc. His loafers have a wicked shine and make an elegant dancerly click as he walks along with his hands in his pockets and open coat flared wide, scanning. He scans for several nights before he even becomes aware of why or what he 224 might be scanning for. He moves nightly through urban-animal territory.

Liberated housecats and hard-core strays ooze in and out of shadows, rustle in dumpsters, fuck and fight with hellish noises all around him as he walks, senses very sharp in the downscale night. You got your rats, your mice, your stray dogs with tongues hanging and countable ribs. Maybe the odd feral hamster and/or raccoon. Everything slinky and furtive after sunset.

Also non-stray dogs that clank their chains or bay or lunge, when he goes by yards with dogs. He prefers to move north but will move east or west on the streets’ good sides. His shoes’ fine click precedes him by several hundred meters on cement of varying texture.

Sometimes near drainage pipes he sees serious rats, or sometimes near cat-free dumpsters. The first conscious thing he did was a rat that this one time he came on some rats in a wide W-E alley by the loading dock out behind the Svelte Nail Co. just east of Watertown on N. Harvard St. What night was that. It’d been coming back from East Watertown, which meant More Will Be Revealed NA with Glynn and Diehl instead of St. E.’s Better Late Than Never AA with the rest of the House’s herd, so a Monday. So on a Monday he’d been strolling through this one alley, his steps echoing trebled back off the cement sides of the docks and the north left wall he hugged, scanning without knowing what he was scanning for. Up ahead there was the Stegosaurus-shape of a Svelte Co. dumpster as versus your

lower slimmer E.W.D.-type dumpster. There were dry skulky sounds issuing from the dumpster’s shadow. He hadn’t consciously picked anything up. The alley’s surface was coming apart and Lenz barely broke his dancerly stride picking a kilo-sized chunk of tar-shot concrete. It was rats.

Two big rats were going at a half-eaten wiener in a mustardy paper tray from a Lunchwagon in a recess between the north wall and the dumpster’s barge-hitch. Their hideous pink tails were poking out into the alley’s dim light. They didn’t move as Randy Lenz came up behind them on the toes of his loafers. Their tails were meaty and bald and like twitched back and forth, twitching in and out of the dim yellow light. The big flat-top chunk came down on most of one rat and a bit of the other rat. There’d been godawful twittering squeaks, but the major hit on the one rat also made a very solid and significant noise, some aural combination of a tomato thrown at a wall and a pocketwatch getting clocked with a hammer. Material came out of the rat’s anus. The rat lay on its side in a very bad medical way, its tail twitching and anus material and there were little beads of blood on its whiskers that looked black, the beads, in the sodium security-lights along the Svelte Nail Co. roof. Its side heaved; its back legs were moving like it was running, but this rat wasn’t going anywhere. The other rat had vanished under the dumpster, dragging its rear region. There were more chunks of dismantled street lying all over. When Lenz brought another down on the head of the rat he consciously discovered what he liked to say at the moment of issue-resolution was: ‘There.’ Demapping rats became Lenz’s way of resolving internal-type issues for the first couple weeks of it, walking home in the verminal dark.

Don Gately, House chef and shopper, buys these huge econo-size boxes 225 of Hefty bags that get stored under the kitchen sink for whoever’s got Trash for their weekly chore. Ennet House generates serious waste.

So after vermin started to get a little ho-hum and insignificant, Lenz starts cabbaging a Hefty bag out from under the sink and taking it with him to meetings and walking back home with it. He keeps a trashbag neatly folded in an inside pocket of his topcoat, a billowing top-collared Lauren- Polo model he loves and uses a daily lint-roller on. He also takes along a little of the House’s Food-Bank tunafish in a Zip-loc baggie in another

pocket, which your average drug addict has expertise in rolling baggies into a cylinder so they’re secure and odor-free.

The Ennet House residents call Hefty bags ‘Irish Luggage’ — even McDade — it’s a street-term.

Randy Lenz found that if he could get an urban cat up close enough with some outstretched tuna he could pop the Hefty bag over it and scoop up from the bottom so the cat was in the air in the bottom of the bag, and then he could tie the bag shut with the complimentary wire twist-tie that comes with each bag. He could put the closed bag down next to the vicinity’s northernmost wall or fence or dumpster and light a gasper and hunker down up next to the wall to watch the wide variety of changing shapes the bag would assume as the agitated cat got lower on air. The shapes got more and more violent and twisted and mid-air with the passage of a minute. After it stopped assuming shapes Lenz would dab his butt with a spitty finger to save the rest for later and get up and untie the twist-tie and look inside the bag and go: ‘There.’ The ‘There’ turned out to be crucial for the sense of brisance and closure and resolving issues of impotent rage and powerless fear that like accrued in Lenz all day being trapped in the northeastern portions of a squalid halfway house all day fearing for his life, Lenz felt.

There evolved for Lenz a certain sportsman’s hierarchy of types of cats and neighborhoods of types of your abroad cats; and he becomes a connoisseur of cats the same way a deep-sea sportsman knows the fish- species that fight most fiercely and excitatingly for their marine lives. The best and most fiercely alive cats could usually claw their way out of a Hefty bag, though, which created this conundrum where the ones most worth watching assuming bagged shapes were the ones Lenz risked maybe not getting his issues resolved on. Watching a spike-furred hissing cat run twisting away still half wrapped in a plastic bag made Lenz admire the cat’s fighting spirit but still feel unresolved.

So the next stage is Lenz gives Ms. Charlotte Treat or Ms. Hester Thrale some of his own $ when they go down to the Palace Spa or Father/Son to buy smokes or LifeSavers and has them start to get him special Hefty Steel- 226 Sak trashbags, fiber-reinforced for your especially sharp or uncooperative waste needs, described by Ken E. as ‘Irish Guccis,’ extra resilient and a businesslike gunmetal-gray in tone. Lenz has such a panoply

of strange compulsive habits that a request for SteelSaks barely raises a brow on anybody.

And then he doubles them, the special reinforced bags, and employs industrial-growth pipe-cleaners as twist-ties, and then now the grittiest most salutary cats make the doubled bags assume all manners of wickedly abstract twisting shapes, even sometimes moving the closed bags a couple dozen m. down the alley in a haphazard hopping-like fashion, until finally the cat runs out of gas and resolves itself and Lenz’s issues into one nightly shape.

Lenz’s interval of choice for this is the interval 2216h. to 2226h. He doesn’t consciously know why this interval. Anchovies turn out to be even more effective than tuna. A Program of Attraction, he recalls coolly, strolling along. His northern routes back to the House are restricted by the priority to keep Brighton Best Savings Bank’s rooftop digital Time and Temperature display in view as much as possible. B.B.S.B. displays both EST and Greenwich Mean, which Lenz approves of. The liquid-crystal data sort of melts upward into view on the screen and then disappears from the bottom up and is replaced by new data. Mr. Doony R. Glynn said at the House’s Community Meeting Monday once that one time in B.S. 1989 A.D. after he’d done a reckless amount of a hallucinogen he’d refer to only as ‘The Madame’ he’d gone around for several subsequent weeks under a Boston sky that instead of a kindly curved blue dome with your clouds and your stars and sun was a flat square coldly Euclidian grid with black axes and a thread-fine reseau of lines creating grid-type coordinates, the whole grid the same color as a D.E.C. HD viewer-screen when the viewer’s off, that sort of dead deepwater gray-green, with the DOW Ticker running up one side of the grid and the NIKEI Index running down the other, and the Time and Celsius Temp to like serious decimal points flashing along the bottom axis of the sky’s screen, and whenever he’d go to a real clock or get a Herald and check the like DOW the skygrid would turn out to have been totally accurate; and that several unbroken weeks of this sky overhead had sent Glynn off first to his mother’s Stoneham apartment’s fold-out couch and then into Waltham’s Metropolitan State Hospital for a month of Haldol 227 and tapioca, to get out from under the empty-grid accurate sky, and says it makes his ass wet to this day to even think about the grid-interval; but

Lenz had thought it sounded wicked nice, the sky as digital timepiece. And also between 2216 and 2226 the ATHSCME giant fans off up at the Sunstrand Plaza within earshot were typically shut off for daily de-linting, and it was quiet except for the big Ssshhh of a whole urban city’s vehicular traffic, and maybe the odd E.W.D. airborne deliverer catapulted up off Concavityward, its little string of lights arcing northeast; and of course also sirens, both the Eurotrochaic sirens of ambulances and the regular U.S.- sounding sirens of the city’s very Finest, Protecting and Serving, keeping the citizenry at bay; and the winsome thing about sirens in the urban night is that unless they’re right up close where the lights bathe you in red-blue- red they always sound like they’re terribly achingly far away, and receding, calling to you across an expanding gap. Either that or they’re on your ass.

No middle distance with sirens, Lenz reflects, walking along and scanning.

Glynn hadn’t come right out and said Euclidian, but Lenz had gotten the picture all right. Glynn had thin hair and an invariant three-day growth of gray stubble and diverticulitis that made him stoop somewhat over, and remaining physique-type issues from a load of bricks falling on his head from a Workers Comp scam gone rye that included crossed eyes that Lenz overheard the veiled girl Joe L. tell Clenette Henderson and Didi Neaves the man was so cross-eyed he could stand in the middle of the week and see both Sundays.

Lenz has gotten high on organic cocaine two or three, maybe half a dozen times tops, secretly, since he came into Ennet House in the summer, just enough times to keep him from going totally out of his fucking mind, utilizing lines from the private emergency stash he kept in a kind of rectangular bunker razor-bladed out of three hundred or so pages of Bill James’s gargantuan Large-Print Principles of Psychology and The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion. Such totally occasional Substance-ingestions in a rundown sloppy-clocked House where he’s cooped up and under terrible stress all day every day, hiding from threats from two different legal directions, with, upstairs at all times, calling to him, a 20-gram stash from the under-reported South End two-way attempted scam whose very bad luck had forced him into hiding in squalor and rooming with the likes of fucking Geoffrey D. — cocaine-ingestion this occasional and last-resort is such a marked reduction of Use & Abuse for Lenz that it’s a bonerfied miracle and clearly constitutes as much miraculous sobriety as total

abstinence would be for another person without Lenz’s unique sensitivities and psychological makeup and fucking intolerable daily stresses and difficulty unwinding, and he accepts his monthly chips with a clear conscience and a head unmuddled by doubting: he knows he’s sober. He’s smart about it: he’s never ingested cocaine on his solo walks home from meetings, which is where the Staff’d expect him to ingest if he was going to ingest. And never in Ennet House itself, and only once in the forbidden #7 across the roadlet. And anybody with half a clue can beat an E.M.I.T. urine- screen: a cup of lemon juice or vinegar down the hatch’ll turn the lab’s reading into gibberish; a trace of powdered bleach on the fingertips and let the stream play warmly over the fingertips on its way into the cup while you banter with Don G. A Texas catheter’s a pain to get piss for and put on, plus the obscene size of the thing’s receptacle for his Unit gives Lenz inadequacy-issues, and he’s only used it twice, both times when Johnette F. took the urine and he could embarrass her into turning away. Lenz owns a Texas Cathy from his last halfway house in Quincy, in what Lenz recalls as the Year of the Maytag Quietmaster.

And then it turned out, when a cat aggrieved Lenz by scratching his wrist in a particularly hostile fashion on the way into the receptacle, that doubled Hefty SteelSaks were such quality-reinforced products they could hold something razor-clawed and frantically in-motion and still survive a direct swung hit against a NO PARKING sign or a telephone pole without splitting open, even when what was inside split nicely open; and so that technique got substituted around United Nations Day, because even though it was too quick and less meditative it allowed Randy Lenz to take a more active role in the process, and the feeling of (temporary, nightly) issues- resolution was more definitive when Lenz could swing a twisting ten-kilo burden hard against a pole and go: ‘There,’ and hear a sound. On banner nights the doubled bag would continue for a brief period of time to undergo a subtle flux of smaller, more subtle and connoisseur-oriented shapes, even after the melony sound of hard impact, along with further smaller sounds.

Then it was discovered that resolving them directly inside the yards and porches of the people that owned them provided more adrenal excitation and thus more sense of what Bill James one time called a Catharsis of resolving, which Lenz felt he could agree. A small can of oil in its own little baggie, for squeaky gates. But because SteelSak trashbags — and then also

tunafish mixed with anchovies and Raid ant poison from behind the Ennet residents’ fridge — caused too much resultant noise to allow for lighting a gasper and hunkering down to meditatively watch, Lenz developed the habit of setting the resolution in motion and then booking on out of the yard into the urban night, his Polo topcoat billowing, hurdling fences and running over the hoods of cars and etc. For a period during the two-week interval of give-them-poison-tuna-and-run Lenz had brief recourse to a small Caldor-brand squeeze-bottle of kerosene, plus of course his lighter; but a Wednesday night on which the alight cat ran (as alight cats will, like hell) but ran after Lenz, seemingly, leaping the same fences Lenz hurdled and staying on his tail and not only making an unacceptable attention- calling racket but also illuminating Lenz to the scopophobic view of passing homes until it finally decided to drop to the ground and expire and smolder thereupon — Lenz considered this his only really close call, and took an enormous and partly non-north route home, with every siren sounding up- close and on his personal ass, and barely got in by 2330h., and ran right up to the 3-Man room. This was the night Lenz had to have another recourse to the hollowed-out cavity in his Principles of Psychology and The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion after just beating curfew home, which who wouldn’t need a bit of an unwinder after a stressful close-call-type situation with a flaming cat chasing you and screaming in a way that made porch lights go on all up and down Sumner Blake Rd.; except but instead of an unwinder the couple or few lines of uncut Bing proved to be on this occasion an un-unwinder — which happens, sometimes, depending on one’s like spiritual condition when ingesting it through a rolled dollar bill off the back of the john in the men’s can — and Lenz barely made it through switching his car’s parking spot at 2350h. before the verbal torrent started, and after lights-out had only gotten up to age eight in the oral autobiography that followed in the 3-Man when Geoff D. threatened to go get Don G. and have Lenz forcibly stifled, and Lenz was scared to go downstairs to find somebody to listen and so for the rest of the night he had to lie there in the dark, mute, with his mouth twisting and writhing — it always twisted and writhed on the times the Bing proved to be a rev-upper instead of a rough-edge-smoother — and pretending to be asleep, with phosphenes like leaping flaming shapes dancing behind his quivering lids, listening to Day’s moist gurgles and Glynn’s apnea and thinking that each

siren abroad out there in the urban city was meant for him and coming closer, with Day’s illuminated watchface in his fucking tableside drawer instead of out where anybody with some stress and anxiety could check the time from time to time.

So after the incident with the flaming cat from hell and before Halloween Lenz had moved on and up to the Browning X444 Serrated he even had a shoulder-holster for, from his previous life Out There. The Browning X444 has a 25-cm. overall length, with a burl-walnut handle with a brass butt-cap and a point Lenz’d sharpened the clip out of when he got it and a single-edge Bowie-style blade with .1-mm. serrations that Lenz owns a hone for and tests by dry-shaving a little patch of his tan forearm, which he loves.

The Browning X444, combined with blocks of Don Gately’s highly portable cornflake-garnish meatloaf, were for canines, which your urban canines tended to be nonferal and could be found within the confinement of their pet-owners’ fenced yards on a regularer basis than the urban-cat species, and who are less suspicious of food and, though more of a personal-injury risk to approach, do not scratch the hand that feeds them.

For when the dense square of meatloaf is taken out and unwrapped from the Zip-loc and proffered from the edgelet of yard out past the fence by the sidewalk, the dog at issue invariably stops with the barking and/or lunging and its nose flares and it becomes totally uncynical and friendly and comes to the end of its chain or the fence Lenz stands behind and makes interested noises and if Lenz holds the meat-item just up out of reach the dog if its rope or chain will permit it it’ll go up on the hind legs and sort of play the fence with its front paws, jumping eagerly, as Lenz dangles the meat.

Day had had some Recovery-Issue paperback he was reading that Lenz had a look at one P.M. in their room when Day was downstairs with Ewell and Erdedy telling each other their windbagathon stories, lying on Day’s mattress with his shoes on and trying to fart into the mattress as much as possible: some line in the book had arrested Lenz’s attention: something about the more basically Powerless an individual feels, the more the likelihood for the propensity for violent acting-out — and Lenz found the observation to be sound.

The only serious challenge to using the Browning X444 is that Lenz has to make sure to get around behind the dog before he cuts the dog’s throat,

because the bleeding is far-reaching in its intensity, and Lenz is now on his second R. Lauren topcoat and third pair of dark wool slacks.

Then once near Halloween in an alley behind Blanchard’s Liquors off Allston’s Union Square Lenz comes across a street drunk in a chewed- looking old topcoat in the deserted alley taking a public leak against the side of a dumpster, and Lenz envisualizes the old guy both cut and on fire and dancing jaggedly around hitting at himself while Lenz goes ‘There,’ but that’s as close as Lenz comes to that kind of level of resolution; and it’s maybe to his credit that he’s a little off his psychic feed for a few days after that close call, and inactive with pets circa 2216h.

Lenz has nothing much against his newer fellow resident Bruce Green, and when one Sunday night after the White Flag Green asks can he walk along with Lenz on the walk back after the Our Father Lenz says Whatever and lets Green walk with him, and is inactive during this night’s 2216 interval as well. Except after a couple nights of Green strolling home along with him, first from the White Flag and then from St. Columbkill’s on Tuesday and a double 1900–2200 shot of St. E.’s Sharing and Caring NA and then BYP on Wed., Green following him around like a terrier from mtg. to mtg. and then home, it begins to like emerge on Lenz that Bruce G. is starting to treat this walking-through-the-urban-P.M.-with-Randy-Lenz thing as like a regular fucking thing, and Lenz starts to jones about it, the unresolved Powerless Rage issues that the thing is now he’s gotten so he’s used to resolving them on a more or less nightly basis, so that being unable to be freely alone to be active with the Browning X444 or even a SteelSak during the 2216– 2226h. interval causes this pressure to build up like almost a Withdrawal-grade pressure. But on the other side of the hand, walking with Green has its positive aspects as well. Like that Green doesn’t complain about lengthy detours to keep a mainly north/northeastern orientation to the walks when possible. And Lenz enjoys a sympathetic and listening ear to have around; he has numerous aspects and experiences to mull over and issues to organize and mull, and (like many people hardwired for organic stimulants) talking is sort of Lenz’s way of thinking. And but most of the ears of the other residents at Ennet House are not only unsympathetic but are attached to great gaping flapping oral mouths which keep horning into the conversation with the mouths’ own opinions and issues and aspects — most of the residents are the worst listeners Lenz has

ever seen. Bruce Green, on the hand’s positive side, hardly says anything.

Bruce Green is quiet the way certain stand-up type guys you want to have there with you beside you if a beef starts going down are quiet, like self- contained. Yet Green is not so quiet and unresponding that it’s like with some silent people where you start to wonder if he’s listening with a sympathizing ear or if he’s really drifting around in his own self-oriented thoughts and not even listening to Lenz, etc., treating Lenz like a radio you can tune in or out. Lenz has a keen antenna for people like this and their stock is low on his personal exchange. Bruce Green inserts low affirmatives and ‘No shit’s and ‘Fucking-A’s, etc., at just the right places to communicate his attentions to Lenz. Which Lenz admires.

So it’s not like Lenz just wants to blow Green off and tell him to go peddle his papers and let him the fuck alone after Meetings so he can solo.

It would have to be handled in a more diplomatic fashion. Plus Lenz finds himself nervous at the prospect of offending Green. It’s not like he’s scared of Green in terms of physically. And it’s not like he’s concerned Green would be the Ewell- or Day-type you have to stressfully worry about maybe going and ratting out on Lenz’s place of whereabouts to the Finest and everything like that. Green has a strong air of non-rat about him which Lenz admires. So it’s not like he’s frightened to blow Green off; it’s more like very tense and tightly wound.

Plus it agitates Lenz that he has the feeling that it really wouldn’t be any big deal to Green that much one way or the other, and that Lenz feels like he’s spending all this stress tensely worrying about his side of something that Green would barely think about for more than a couple seconds, and it enrages Lenz that he can know in his head that the tense worry about how to diplomatize Green into leaving him alone is unnecessary and a waste of time and tension and yet still not be able to stop worrying about it, which all only increases the sense of Powerlessness that Lenz is impotent to resolve with his Browning and meatloaf as long as Green continues to walk home with him.

And the schizoid cats with clotted fur that lurk around Ennet House cringing and neurotic and afraid of their own shadow are too risky, for the female residents are always formulating attachments to them. And Pat M.’s Golden Retrievers would be tattlemount to legal suicide. On a Saturday c.

2221h., Lenz found a miniature bird that had fallen out of some nest and

was sitting bald and pencil-necked on the lawn of Unit #3 flapping ineffectually, and went in with Green and ducked Green and went back outside to #3’s lawn and put the thing in a pocket and went in and put it down the garbage disposal in the kitchen sink of the kitchen, but still felt largely impotent and unresolved.

Except for Pat Montesian’s bay-windowed front office and the House Manager’s phone-booth-sized back office and the two live-in Staff bedrooms down in the basement, none of the doors inside Ennet House have locks, for predictable reasons.

EARLY NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

The only bona fide blackmailable thing about Rodney Tine, Chief, U.S.

Office of Unspecified Services: his special metric ruler. In a locked drawer of his bathroom cabinets at home on Connecticut Ave. NW in the District is kept a special metric ruler, and Tine measures his penis every A.M., like clockwork; has since twelve; still does. Plus a special telescoping travelling model of the ruler he travels with, for on-the-road-A.M.-penis- 228 measurement. President Gentle has no N.S.A. as such. Tine’s in metro Boston because of the N.S. implications of what they’d first come to Unspecified Services about two summers past, both the head of D.E.A. and the Chair of the Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, now both here standing on one foot and then the other and twidgelling the brims of their hats. This unwatchable underground Entertainment-cartridge that at first seemed to be just popping haphazardly up in random locales: a film with certain he’s given to understand from briefings quote ‘qualities’ such that whoever saw it wanted nothing else ever in life but to see it again, and then again, and so on. It had popped up in Berkeley NCA, in the home of a film- scholar and his male companion, neither of whom had appeared for appointments for days; and now lost to meaningful human activity henceforward, by all appearances, were the scholar and companion, the two cops dispatched to the Berkeley home, the six cops dispatched after the two cops never followed up their Code-Five, the watch sergeant and partner dispatched after them — seventeen police, paramedics, and teleputer-

technicians in all, until the lethality of whatever they’d caught sight of presented itself with enough clarity for somebody to think to go around back and kill the Berkeley home’s power. The Entertainment had popped up in New Iberia LA. Tempe AZ had lost two-thirds of the attendees of an avant-garde film festival in Arizona State U.’s Entertainment Studies amphitheater before a level-headed custodian killed the building’s whole grid. J. Gentle had been apprised about the thing only after it had popped up and taken out a diplomatically immune Near Eastern medical attaché and a dozen incidentals here in Boston MA late last spring. These persons now all in wards. Docile and continent but blank, as if on some deep reptile-brain level pithed. Tine had toured a ward. The persons’ lives’ meanings had collapsed to such a narrow focus that no other activity or connection could hold their attention. Possessed of roughly the mental/ spiritual energies of a moth, now, according to a diagnostician out of C.D.C. The Berkeley cartridge had vanished from an S.F.P.D. Evidence Room an electron- microscopy toss of which had revealed flannel fibers. The D.E.A. had lost four field researchers and a consultant before they’d bowed to the intractable problems involved in trying to have somebody view the confiscated Tempe cartridge and articulate the thing’s lethal charms. The strongest possible language had been necessary to restrain a certain Famous Crooner from attempting a personal review of the thing’s qualities. Neither C.D.C. nor the entertainment pros wanted any part of any controlled- viewing tests. Three members of the Academy of D.A.S. had received unlabelled copies in the mail, and the one who’d actually sat down to have a look now needed a receptacle under his chin at all times. Reports of the thing popping up yet again in metro Boston MA remain unsubstantiated.

Tine’s been dispatched here in part to coordinate substantiation. There’s also the special pocket-Franklin-Plannersized chart he charts the daily A.M. penis-measurement in, daily, though to the uninitiated the little leather notebook could look like almost anything statistical at all. By now several U.S.O. test-subjects, volunteers from the federal and military penal systems, have been lost in attempts to produce a description of the cartridge’s contents. The Tempe and New Iberia cartridges are in custody, vaulted. A sociopathic and mentally retarded Lance Corporal at Leavenworth, strapped down with electrode appliqués and headset-recorder, was able to report that the thing apparently opens with an engaging and high-quality cinematic

shot of a veiled woman going through a large building’s revolving doors and catching a glimpse of someone else in the revolving doors, somebody the sight of whom makes her veil billow, before the subject’s mental and spiritual energies abruptly declined to a point where even near-lethal voltages through the electrodes couldn’t divert his attention from the Entertainment. Tine’s staff had sifted through dozens of entries before deciding that the intelligence community’s terse little name for the allegedly enslaving Entertainment would be ‘the samizdat.’ P.E.T.s on sacrificed subjects revealed unexceptional wave-activity, with not near enough alpha to indicate hypnosis or induced dopamine-surges. Attempts to trace the matrix of the samizdat without viewing it — from induction on postal codes, e-microscopies on the brown padded mailers, immolation and chromatography on the unlabelled cartridge-cases, extensive and maddening interviews of those civilians exposed — place the likely dissemination-point someplace along the U.S. north border, with routing hubs in metro Boston/New Bedford and/or somewhere in the desert Southwest. The U.S.’s Canadian Problem is U.S.O.U.S. Anti-Anti- 229 O.N.A.N. Activities’ Agency’s special province. So to speak. The possibility of Canadian involvement in the lethally compelling Entertainment’s dissemination is what has brought to metro Boston Rodney Tine, his retinue, and his ruler.

LATE P.M., MONDAY 9 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

For reasons that Pemulis couldn’t for the life of him, Ortho Stice seemed to be in there in Dr. Dolores Rusk’s office, interfacing with Dr. Rusk well after regular hours. Pemulis paused at the door on his way by. ‘— nical assessment, after our work together on your fear of weights, would be that your presenting maladjustment, Ortho, like many males and athletes, is that you’re suffering from counterphobia.’ ‘Fear of linoleum?’ It was unmistakably the flat twang of The Darkness in there through the door’s wood. ‘On the level of objects and a projective infantile omnipotence where you experience magical thinking about your thoughts and the behavior of

objects’ relation to your narcissistic wishes, the counterphobia presents as the delusion of some special agency or control to compensate for some repressed wounded inner trauma having to do with absence of control.’ ‘Over linoleum?’ ‘My suggestion might be to forget linoleum and objects in general. In for instance an analytic model, the types of traumas counterphobic reactions cover are almost always pre-Oedipal, at which stage objects’ cathexis is Oedipal and symbolic. For example small children’s dolls and Action- Figurines.’ ‘I don’t play with no goddamn Action-Figurines.’ ‘GI Joe typically being cathected as an image of the potent but antagonistic father, the “military” man, with “GI” representing at once the “General Issue” of a “weapon” the Oedipal child both covets and fears and a well-known medical acronym for the gastro-intestinal tract, with all the attendant anal anxieties that require repression in the Oedipal phase’s desire to control the bowels in order to impress or quote “win” the mother, of whom the Barbie might be seen as the most obviously reductive and phallocentric reduction of the mother to an archetype of sexual function and availability, the Barbie as image of the Oedipal mother as image.’ ‘So you’re saying I’m overestimating objects?’ ‘I’m saying there’s a very young Ortho in there with some very real abandonment-issues who needs some nurturing and championing from the older Ortho instead of indulging in fantasies of omnipotence.’ ‘I ain’t omnipotent and I don’t want to X no Goddamn Barbiedoll.’ Then Dark’s voice went way up and cracked as he said something about his bed.

Dr. Rusk’s office door had a nonconducting rubberized sheath on the knob, and Dr. Rusk’s name and degrees and title, and a needlepoint sampler with a little heart inside a big heart and a cursive exhortation to Champion An Inner Child Today, which the little kids at E.T.A. find puzzling and upsetting. Pemulis, pausing by habit first at the silent locked infirmary door and then Rusk’s bottom-crack-lit door on his way across the Comm.-Ad. lobby, was wearing the most insolent ensemble he could throw together. He wore maroon paratrooper’s pants with green stovepipe stripes down the sides. The pants’ cuffs were tucked into fuchsia socks above ancient and radically uncool Clark’s Wallabies with dirty soles of eraserish gum. He wore an orange fake-silk turtleneck under an English-cut sportcoat in a

purple-and-tan windowpane check. He wore naval shoulder-braid at the level of ensign. He wore his yachting cap, but with the bill bent up at a bumpkinish angle. He looked less insolent than just extremely poorly dressed, really. Dr. Rusk’s door was cool against his ear. Jim Troeltsch had been coming down B’s hall just as Pemulis was leaving and said Pemulis looked like a hangover. Through the door, Rusk was urging Stice to name his anger and Stice was proposing to name his anger Horace after his old man’s late pointer that had got into some coyote bait when The Darkness was nine and was much missed by the whole Stice brood, back in Kansas.

The old Wallabies were from Pemulis’s older brother’s incomplete public- school career and had boogerish little greebles of dirty gum all around the soles’ perimeter. The socks belonged to Jennie Bash and she made it explicit she wanted them back laundered. The sportcoat’s checked arms were several cm. too short and exposed ribbed cuffs of shiny orange acetate esters.

The Community & Administration Bldg.’s downstairs was real quiet. It was like 2100h., supposedly mandatory Study Period, and Harde’s crew had gone home but the custodial graveyard shift hadn’t come on yet. Pemulis moved noiselessly NE-SW across the lobby’s shag. Except for lines of lamplight from under a couple doors the E.T.A. lobby was pitch-black, and the outer Academy doors locked. There was an odd vehicular shape near the north wall’s trophy case that Pemulis didn’t pause to investigate. He lifted up slightly to keep the little SW hall’s door from squeaking as he opened it and entered the administrative reception area, snapping his fingers softly to himself. A loose music played in his head. Tavis’s reception area was empty and dim, the wallpaper’s clouds now stormy-dark. It wasn’t totally quiet.

Light came from Mrs. Inc’s doorway and from the crack under Tavis’s inner door. Lateral Alice Moore had gone home. Pemulis activated her Third Rail and played with her chair as he made a very quick survey of the material on her desk. Activating the P.A. mike was out of all question. Two of her five drawers were still locked. Pemulis scanned behind him and popped another breath mint and sat quietly for a moment as Moore’s chair slid back and forth along the rail, his fingers in a steeple under his nose, considering.

Light shone from the crack of Tavis’s inner door because the outer door stood open. Pemulis didn’t even have to put any kind of ear to the wood of the inside door. He could hear the hiss and high-speed grind of Tavis’s

StairBlaster, and Tavis’s breathless recessive voice. You could tell there was nobody else in there. You could tell Tavis had no shirt on and an E.T.A. towel around his neck and his hair a sweaty curtain down one side of his little head as he ran to keep up with what reminded everybody of a Satanishly-possessed Filene’s escalator. He was exhorting himself in a kind of fast rhythmic chant that sounded to Pemulis like either ‘Total worry total worry’ or ‘No don’t worry no don’t worry’ and c. Pemulis could envision Tavis’s round belly and little titties of fat bouncing with the action of the StairBlaster. You could hear the sudden muffling when he probably brought the towel up to dab at his slanted mustache. Tavis’s doorknob had no insulating rubber sheath, Pemulis noticed.

Pemulis’s ensemble’s belt was a plastic thing with chintzy fake-Navajo beading, purchased by little Chip Sweeny at one of last fall’s WhataBurger’s souvenir stands and subsequently transferred to Pemulis during a Big Buddy tennis-as-game-of-chance exercise. The beading- patterns were in Gila-monster orange and black, the orange a different shade than Pemulis’s turtleneck.

He could never resist biting down once a mint’d melted to a certain size and texture.

The doorless Dean of Academic Affairs’s office was a blazing rectangle of light. The light didn’t spill very far into the reception area, however. At close-range, sounds issued from the office, but not exactly words. Pemulis checked his fly and snapped his fingers under his own nose and assumed a businesslike stride and rapped firmly on the doorless jamb without breaking stride. The heavier blue shag of the office itself slowed him down a bit. He stopped once he was all the way in. 18-A John Wayne and Hal’s Mumsly- Wumsly were both in the front of the office. They were about maybe two meters apart. The room was lit overhead and by four standing lamps. The seminar table and chairs cast a complicated shadow. Two homemade pompoms of shredded paper and what looked like the amputated handles of wooden tennis racquets were on the seminar table, which was otherwise bare. John Wayne wore a football helmet and light shoulderpads and a Russell athletic supporter and socks and shoes and nothing else. He was down in the classic three-point stance of U.S. football. Inc’s incredibly tall and well-preserved mother Dr. Avril Incandenza wore a little green-and- white cheerleader’s outfit and had one of deLint’s big brass whistles

hanging around her neck. She was blowing on the whistle, which appeared to be minus the little inside pellet because no whistling sound resulted. She was about two meters from Wayne, facing him, doing near-splits on the heavy shag, one arm up and pretending to blow the whistle while Wayne produced the classic low-register growling sounds of U.S. football. Pemulis made rather a show of pushing the bumpkin-billed yachting hat back to scratch his head, blinking. Mrs. Inc was the only one looking at him. ‘I probably won’t even waste everybody’s time asking if I’m interrupting,’ Pemulis said.

Mrs. Inc seemed frozen in place. Her one hand was still up in the air, fine fingers splayed. Wayne craned his neck to look over at Pemulis from under his helmet without changing his three-point stance. The football- noises trailed off. Wayne’s got a narrow nose and close-set witchy eyes. He wore a plastic mouthguard. The musculature of his legs and buttocks was clearly outlined as he squatted forward with his weight on his knuckles.

There was way less time passing in the office than there seemed to be. ‘Hoping for a second of your time,’ Pemulis told Mrs. Inc. He was standing schoolboy-straight, hands clasped demurely over his fly, which on Pemulis this posture did look insolent.

Wayne straightened up and moved toward his clothing with no little dignity. His sweats were neatly folded on the Dean’s desk at the rear of the office. The mouthguard was attached to the facemask and hung from it when removed. The chin strap had several snaps Wayne had to undo. ‘Nice-looking helmet,’ Pemulis told him.

Wayne, pulling hard on his sweatpants’ cuffs to fit them over a shoe, didn’t reply. He was so fit that his supporter’s straps didn’t even dent his buttocks.

Mrs. Incandenza removed the mute whistle. She was still split down on the floor. Pemulis made rather a show of not looking south of her face. She pursed her lips to chuff hair out of her eyes. ‘I predict this’ll take about two minutes at most,’ Pemulis said, smiling.

WEDNESDAY 11 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

Lenz wears a worsted topcoat and dark slacks and Brazilian loafers with a high-wattage shine and a disguise that makes him look like Andy Warhol with a tan. Bruce Green wears a cheesy off-the-rack leather jacket of stiff cheap leather that makes the jacket creak when he breathes. ‘This is when you man this is when you find out your like what like true character, is when it’s pointed right at you and some bugeyed fucking spic’s 230 not five mitts away pointing it, and I strangely I get real calm see and said I said Pepito I said I Pepito man you go on and do what you need to do man go on and shoot but man you better I mean fucking better kill me with the first shot man or you won’t get another one I said. Not even bullshitting man I’m serious it’s like I found right then I meant it. You know what I’m saying?’ Green lights both their smokes. Lenz exhales with that hiss of people in a rush to drive their point home. ‘You know what I’m saying?’ ‘I don’t know.’ It’s an urban November P.M.: very last leaves down, dry gray hairy grass, brittle bushes, gap-toothed trees. The rising moon looks like it doesn’t feel very well. The click of Lenz’s loafers and the crunchy thud of Green’s old asphalt-spreader’s boots with the thick black soles. Green’s little noises of attention and assent. He says he’s been broken by life, is all he’ll personally say. Green. Life has kicked his ass, and he’s regrouping.

Lenz likes him, and there’s always this slight hangnail of fear, like clinging, whenever he likes somebody. It’s like something terrible could happen at any time. Less fear than a kind of tension in the region of stomach and ass, an all-body wince. Deciding to go ahead and think somebody’s a stand-up guy: it’s like you drop something, you give up all of your power over it: you have to stand there impotent waiting for it to hit the ground: all you can do is brace and wince. It kind of enrages Lenz to like somebody. There would be no way to say any of this out loud to Green. As it gets past 2200h. and the meatloaf in his pocket’s baggie’s gotten dark and hard from disuse the pressure to exploit the c. 2216 interval for resolution builds to a terrible pitch, but Lenz still can’t yet quite get it up to ask Green to walk back some

other way at least once in a while. How does he do it and still have Green know he thinks he’s OK? But you don’t come right out there and let somebody hear you say you think they’re OK. When it’s a girl you’re just trying to X it’s a different thing, straightforwarder; but like for instance where do you look with your eyes when you tell somebody you like them and mean what you say? You can’t look right at them, because then what if their eyes look at you as your eyes look at them and you lock eyes as you’re saying it, and then there’d be some awful like voltage or energy there, hanging between you. But you can’t look away like you’re nervous, like some nervous kid asking for a date or something. You can’t go around giving that kind of thing of yourself away. Plus the knowing that the whole fucking thing’s not worth this kind of wince and stress: the whole thing’s enraging. The afternoon of tonight earlier at circa 1610h. Lenz’d sprayed RIJID-brand male hairspray in the face of a one-eyed Ennet House stray cat that had wandered by mischance into the men’s head upstairs, but the result: unsatisfying. The cat had just run away downstairs, clunking into the bannister only once. Lenz then got diarrhea, which always disgusts him, and he had to stay in the head and open the little warped frosted-glass window and run the shower on C until the smell’s evidence cleared, with fucking Glynn pounding on the door and attracting attention howling about who’s flailing the whale in there all this time is it by any chance Lenz. But then how would he be supposed to act henceforward toward Green if he blows him off and says to let him walk solo home? How would he be supposed to act if it’d seemed like he’d like spurned Green? What does he henceforward say if he and Green pass each other in the aisle at Saturday Night Lively or both reach for the same sandwich at the raffle-break at White Flag, or get caught standing there half-naked in towels in the hall waiting for somebody to get out of the shower? What if he like spurns Green and Green ends up in the 3-Man room while Lenz is still in there and they have to room together and interface constantly? And if Lenz tries to temper the spurning by telling Green he likes him, where the fuck is he supposed to look when he says it? If trying to X a female species Lenz would have nullo problemo with where to look. He’d have no problem with looking deep into some bitch’s eyes and looking so sincere it’s like he’s dying inside him. Or if like assuring a bad-complected Brazilian he hadn’t

231 stepped on a half-kilo three separate times with Inositol. Or if high: zero problem. If he got high, he’d have no problem telling somebody he liked him even if he really did. For it’d give his spirits a voltage that’d more than overweigh whatever upsetting voltage might hang in the air between somebody. A few lineskers and there’d be no stress-issues about telling Bruce G. with all due respects to screw, go peddle his papers, go play in the freeway, go play with a chain saw, go find a short pier, that no disrespect but Lenz needed to fly solo in the urban night. So after the incident with the cat and diarrhea and some hard words with D. R. Glynn, who was slumped holding his abdomen down against the south wall of the upstairs hall, Lenz decides enough is enough and goes and gets a little square of foil off the industrial roll Don G. keeps under the Ennet sink and goes and takes a half- gram, maybe a gram at most out of the emergency stash out of the vault- thing he’s razored out of the Principles of Natural Lectures Far from your scenario of relapsing, the Bing is medicinal support for assertively sharing his need for aloneness with Green, so that issues of early sobriety can get resolved before standing in the way of spiritual growth — Lenz will use cocaine in the very interests of sobriety and growth itself.

So then like strategically, at the Brookline Young People’s Mtg. over on Beacon near the Newton line on a Wednesday, at the raffle-break, at 2109h., Lenz moistens his half-gasper and puts it carefully back in the pack and yawns and stretches and does a quick pulse-check and gets up and saunters casually into the Handicapped head with the lockable door and the big sort of crib built around the shitter itself for crippled lowering onto the toilet and does like maybe two, maybe three generous lines of Bing off the top of the toilet-tank and wipes the tank-top off both before and after with wet paper towels, ironically rolling up the same crisp buck he’d brought for the meeting’s collection and utilizing it and cleaning it thoroughly with his finger and rubbing his gums with the finger and then putting his head way back in the mirror to check the kidney-shaped nostrils of his fine aqua-line nose for clinging evidence in the trim hair up there and tasting the bitter drip in the back of his frozen throat and taking the clean rolled buck and back-rolling it and smoothing it out and hammering it with his fist on the lip of the sink and folding it neatly into half of half its original Treasury Dept. size so that all evidence anybody ever even had a passing thought of rolling

the buck into a hard tight tube is, like, anileated. Then sauntered back out like butter wouldn’t soften anywhere on his body, knowing just where to look at all times and casually hefting his balls before he sat back down.

And then aside from the every so often hemispasm of the mouth and right eye he hides via the old sunglasses and pretend-cough tactic the second half of the mtg.’s endless oratory goes fine, he supposes, even though he did smoke almost a whole expensive pack of gaspers in 34 minutes, and the holier-than-you Young-People AAs over in what were supposed to be the Nonsmoking rows of chairs against the east wall to his right shot him over some negative-type looks when perchance he happened to find he had one going in the little tin ashtray and two at once going in his mouth, but Lenz was able to play the whole thing off with insousistent aplomb, sitting there in his aviator sunglasses with his legs crossed and his topcoated arms resting out along the backs of the empty chairs on either side.

The night-noises of the metro night: harbor-wind skirling on angled cement, the shush and sheen of overpass traffic, TPs’ laughter in interior rooms, the yowl of unresolved cat-life. Horns blatting off in the harbor.

Receding sirens. Confused inland gulls’ cries. Broken glass from far away.

Car horns in gridlock, arguments in languages, more broken glass, running shoes, a woman’s either laugh or scream from who can tell how far, coming off the grid. Dogs defending whatever dog-yards they pass by, the sounds of chains and risen hackles. The podiatric click and thud, the visible breath, gravel’s crunch, creak of Green’s leather, the snick of a million urban lighters, the gauzy far-off humming ATHSCMEs pointing out true plumb north, the clunk and tinkle of stuff going into dumpsters and rustle of stuff in dumpsters settling and skirl of wind on the sharp edges of dumpsters and unmistakable clanks and tinkles of dumpster-divers and can-miners going after dumpsters’ cans and bottles, the district Redemption Center down in West Brighton and actually even boldly sharing a storefront with Liquor World liquor store, so the can-miners can do like one-stop redeeming and shopping. Which Lenz finds repellent to the maximus, and shares the feelings with Green. Lenz observes to Green how myriadly ironic are the devices by which the Famous Crooner’s promise to Clean Up Our Urban Cities has come to be kept. The noises parallaxing in from out over the city’s winking grid, at night. The wooly haze of monoxides. You got your

faint cuntstink of the wind off the Bay. Planes’ little crucifi of landing lights well ahead of their own noise. Crows in trees. You got your standard crepuscular rustles. Ground floors’ lit windows laying little rugs of light out into their lawns. Porch lights that go on automatically when you stroll by. A threnody of sirens somewhere north of the Charles. Bare trees creaking in the wind. The State Bird of Massachusetts, he shares to Green, is the police siren. To Project and to Swerve. The cries and screams from out across who knows how many blocks, who knows the screams’ intent. Sometimes the end of the scream is at the sound of the start of the scream, he opines. The visible breath and the rainbowed rings of streetlights and headlights through that breath. Unless the screams are really laughing. Lenz’s own mother’s laugh had sounded like she was being eaten alive.

Except — after the maybe five total lines hoovered in a totally purposive medicinal nonrecreational spirit — except then instead of assuring Green he’s a blue-chip commodity on Lenz’s Exchange but to please screw and let Lenz stroll home solo with his meatloaf and agenda, it eventuates that Lenz 232 has again miscalculated the effect the Bing’s hydrolysis will have, he always like previsions the effect as cool nonchalant verbal sangfroid, but instead Lenz on the way home finds himself under huge hydrolystic compulsion to have Green right there by his side — or basically anyone who can’t get away or won’t go away — right there with him, and to share with Green or any compliant ear pretty much every experience and thought he’s ever had, to give each datum of the case of R. Lenz shape and visible breath as his whole life (and then some) tear-asses across his mind’s arctic horizon, trailing phosphenes.

He tells Green that his phobic fear of timepieces stems from his stepfather, an Amtrak train conductor with deeply unresolved issues which he used to make Lenz wind his pocketwatch and polish his fob daily with a chamois cloth and nightly make sure his watch’s displayed time was correct to the second or else he’d lay into the pint-sized Randy with a rolled-up copy of Track and Flange, a slick and wicked-heavy coffee-table-sized trade periodical.

Lenz tells Green how spectacularly obese his own late mother had been, using his arms to dramatically illustrate the dimensions involved.

He breathes between about every third or fourth fact, ergo about once a block.

Lenz tells Green the plots of several books he’s read, confabulating them.

Lenz doesn’t notice the way Green’s face sort of crumples blankly when Lenz mentions the issue of late mothers.

Lenz euphorically tells Green how he once got the tip of his left finger cut off in a minibike chain once and how but within days of intensive concentration the finger had grown back and regenerated itself like a lizard’s tail, confounding doctoral authorities. Lenz says that was the incident in youth after which he got in touch with his own unusual life-force and energois de vivre and knew and accepted that he was somehow not like the run of common men, and began to accept his uniqueness and all that it entailed.

Lenz clues Green in on it’s a myth the Nile crocodile is the most dreaded species of crocodile, that the dreaded Estuarial crocodile of saltwater habits is a billion times more dreaded by those in the know.

Lenz theorizes that his compulsive need to know the time with microspic precision is also a function of his stepfather’s dysfunctional abuse regarding the pocketwatch and Track and Flange This segues into an analysis of the term dysfunction and its revelance to the distinctions between, say, psychology and natural religion.

Lenz tells how once in the Back Bay on Boylston outside Bonwit’s a pushy prosthesis-vendor gave him a hard time about a glass-eye item of jewelry and got his issues’ juices flowing and then down the prosthesis- vendor line another vendor simply would not take No of any sort about a bottle of A.D.A.-Approved Xero-Lube Saliva Substitute with a confabulated celeb-endorsement from J. Gentle F. Crooner on it and Lenz utilized akido to break the man’s nose with one blow and then drive the bone’s shards and fragments up into the vendor’s brain with the follow-up heel of his hand, a maneuver known by a secret ancient Chinese term meaning The Old One-Two, eliminating the saliva guy’s map on the spot, so that Lenz had learned about the lethality of his whatever-was-beyond-black belt in akido and his hands’ deadliness as weapons when his issues were provoked and tells Green how he’d taken a solemn vow right there, running like hell down Boylston for the Auditorium T-Stop to evade prosecution,

vowed never to use his lethally adept akido skills except in the most compulsory situation of defending the innocent and/or weak.

Lenz tells Green how once he was at a Halloween party where a hydro- cephalic woman wore a necklace made of dead gulls.

Lenz shares about this recurving dream where he’s seated under a tropical ceiling fan in a cane chair wearing an L.L. Bean safari hat and holding a wickerware valise in his lap, and that’s all, and that’s the recurving dream.

On the 400 block of W. Beacon, around 2202h., Lenz demonstrates for Bruce Green the secret akido 1-2 with which he’d demapped the saliva- monger, breaking the move down into slo-mo constituent movements so that Green’s untrained eye could follow. He says there’s another recurving nightmare about a clock with hands frozen eternally at 1830 that’s so trouser-foulingly scary he won’t even burden Green’s fragile psychology with the explicits of it.

Green, lighting both their smokes, says he either doesn’t remember his dreams or doesn’t dream.

Lenz adjusts his white toupee and mustache in a darkened InterLace outlet’s window, does the odd bit of t’ai-chi stretching, and blows his nose into W. Beacon’s cluttered gutter Euro-style, one nostril at a time, arching to keep his coatfront well back from what he expels.

Green’s one of these muscle-shirt types that carries his next gasper tucked up over his ear, which the use of RIJID or other brands of quality hair-fixative makes impossible for the reason that residues of spray on the cigarette cause it to burst unexpectedly into flame at points along its length.

Lenz regales how at that Halloween Party with the necklace of birds there’d been allegedly a Concavity-refugee infant there, at the party, at the home of a South Boston orthodontist that dealt Lidocaine to Bing-retailers on the 233 prescriptional dicky, a normal-size and unferal infant but totally without a skull, lying in a kind of raised platform or dais by the fireplace with its shapeless and deskulled head-region supported and, like (shuddering), contained in a sort of lidless plastic box, and its eyes were sunk way down in its face, which was the consistency of like quicksand, the face, and its nose concave and its mouth hanging out over either side of the boneless face, and the total head had like conformed to the inside of the containing

box it was contained in, the head, and appeared roughly square in overall outline, the head, and the woman with the lei of gull-heads and other persons in costumes had ingested hallucinogens and drank mescal and ate the little worms in the mescal and had performed circled rituals around the box and platform around 2355h., worshipping the infant, or as they termed it simply The Infant, as if there were only One.

Green lets Lenz know the time at roughly two-minute intervals, maybe once a block, from his cheap but digital watch, when the critical B.B.S.B. liquid-crystal sign is obscured by the urban night’s strolling skyline.

Lenz’s labial writhing occurs worst on diphthongs involving o-sounds.

Lenz clues Green in that AA/NA works all right but there’s no fucking question it’s a cult, he and Green’ve apparently got themselves to the point where the only way out of the addictive tailspin is to enlist in a fucking cult and let them try and brainwash your ass, and that the first person tries to lay a saffron robe or tambourine on Lenz is going to be one very sorry cableyarrow indeed, is all.

Lenz claims to remember some experiences which he says happened to him in vitro.

Lenz says the Ennet graduates who often come back and take up living- room space sitting around comparing horror stories about former religious cults they’d tried joining as part of their struggle to try to quit with the drugs and alcohol are not w/o a certain naïve charm but are basically naïve.

Lenz details that robes and mass weddings and head-shaving and pamphleteering in airports and selling flowers on median strips and signing away inheritances and never sleeping and marrying whoever they tell you and then never seeing who you marry are small potatoes in terms of bizarre- cult criterion. Lenz tells Green he knows individuals who’ve heard shit that would blow Green’s mind out his ear-sockets.

At lunchtime, Hal Incandenza was lying on his bunk in bright sunlight through the window with his hands laced over his chest, and Jim Troeltsch poked his head in and asked Hal what he was doing, and Hal told him photosynthesizing and then didn’t say anything else until Troeltsch went away.

Then, 41 breaths later, Michael Pemulis stuck his head in where

Troeltsch’s had been. ‘Did you eat yet?’

Hal made his stomach bulge up and patted it, still looking at the ceiling. ‘The beast has killed and gorged and now lies in the shade of the Baobob

tree.’

‘Gotcha.’

‘Surveying his loyal pride.’ ‘I gotcha.’ Over 200 breaths later, John (‘N.R.’) Wayne opened up the ajar door a little more and put his whole head in and stayed like that, with just his head in. He didn’t say anything and Hal didn’t say anything, and they stayed like that for a while, and then Wayne’s head smoothly withdrew.

Under a streetlamp on Faneuil St. off W. Beacon, Randy Lenz shares a vulnerable personal thing and tilts his head back to show Bruce Green where his septum used to be.

Randy Lenz reguiles Bruce Green about certain real-estate cults in S.

Cal. and the West Coast. Of Delawareans that still believed Virtual-Reality pornography even though it’d been found to cause bleeding from the eye- corners and real-world permanent impotence was still the key to Shrangi-la and believed that some sort of perfect piece of digito-holographic porn was circulating somewhere in the form of a bootleg Write-Protect-notched software diskette and devoted their cultic lives to snuffling around trying to get hold of the virtual kamasupra diskette and getting together in dim Wilmington-area venues and talking very obliquely about rumors of where and just what the software was and how their snufflings for it were going, and watching Virtual fuckfilms and mopping the corner of their eyes, etc.

Or of something called Stelliform Cultism that Bruce Green isn’t even near ready to hear about, Lenz opines. Or like e.g. of a suicidal Nuck cult of Nucks that worshipped a form of Russian Roulette that involved jumping in front of trains and seeing which Nuck could come the closest to the train’s front without getting demapped.

What sounds like Lenz chewing gum is really Lenz trying to talk and grind his teeth together at the same time.

Lenz recalls orally that his stepfather’s blue-vested gut had preceded the conductor into rooms by several seconds, fob glinting above the watch- pocket’s sinister slit. How Lenz’s mother back in Fall River had made it a

point of utilizing Greyhound for voyages and sojourns, basically to piss her stephusband off.

Lenz discusses how a serious disadvantage to dealing Bing retail is the way customers’ll show up pounding on your door at 0300 sporting lint in the terms of resources and putting their arms around your shins and ankles and begging for just a half-gram or tenth of a gram and offering to give Lenz their kids, like Lenz wants to fucking deal with anybody’s kids, which these scenes were always constant drags on his spirits.

Green, who’s hoovered his share, says cocaine always seemed like it grabbed you by the throat and just didn’t let go, and he could relate to why the Boston AAs call Bing the ‘Express Elevator To AA.’ In a dumpster-lined easement between Faneuil St. and Brighton Ave., Brighton, right after Green almost steps in what he’s pretty sure is human vomit, Lenz proves logically why it’s all too likely that Ennet House resident Geoffrey D. is a closet poofta.

Lenz reports how he’s been approached in the past to male-model and act, but that the male-model and acting profession is pretty much crawling with your closet pooftas, and it’s no kind of work for a man that’s confronted the ins and outs of his own character.

Lenz speculates openly on how there are purportaged to be whole packs and herds of feral animals operating in locust-like fashion in the rhythmic lushness of parts of the Great Concavity to the due northeast, descended reputedly from domestic pets and abandoned during the relocational transition to an O.N.A.N.ite map, and how teams of pro researchers and amateur explorers and intrepid hearts and cultists have ventured northeast of Checkpoints along the Lucited ATHSCMulated walls and never returned, vanishing in toto from the short-wave E.M. bands, as in like dropping off the radar.

Green turns out to have no conceptions or views on the issues of fauna of the Concavity at all. He literally says he’s never given it one thought one way or the other.

Whole NNE cults and stelliform subcults Lenz reports as existing around belief systems about the metaphysics of the Concavity and annular fusion and B.S.-1950s-B-cartridge-type-radiation-affected fauna and overfertilization and verdant forests with periodic oasises of purportaged desert and whatever east of the former Montpelier VT area of where the

annulated Shawshine River feeds the Charles and tints it the exact same tint of blue as the blue on boxes of Hefty SteelSaks and the ideas of ravacious herds of feral domesticated housepets and oversized insects not only taking over the abandoned homes of relocated Americans but actually setting up house and keeping them in model repair and impressive equity, allegedly, and the idea of infants the size of prehistoric beasts roaming the overfertilized east Concavity quadrants, leaving enormous scat-piles and keening for the abortive parents who’d left or lost them in the general geopolitical shuffle of mass migration and really fast packing, or, as some of your more Limbaugh-era-type cultists sharingly believe, originating from abortions hastily disposed of in barrels in ditches that got breached and mixed ghastly contents with other barrels that reanimated the abortive feti and brought them to a kind of repelsive oversized B-cartridge life thundering around due north of where yrstruly and Green strolled through the urban grid. Of one local underground stelliform offshoot from the Bob Hope–worshipping Rastafarians who smoked enormous doobsters and wove their negroid hair into clusters of wet cigars like the Rastafarians but instead of Rastafarians these post-Rastas worshipped the Infant and every New Year donned tie-dyed parkas and cardboard snowshoes and ventured northward, trailing smoke, past the walls and fans of Checkpoint Pongo into the former areas of VT and NH, seeking The Infant they called it, as if there were only One, and toting paraphernalia for performing a cultish ritual referred to in oblique tones only as Propitiating The Infant, whole posses of these stelliform pot-head reggae-swaying Infant-cultists disappearing forever off the human race’s radar every winter, never heard or smelled again, regarded by fellow cultists as martyrs and/or lambs, possibly too addled by blimp-sized doobsters to find their way back out of the Concavity and freezing to death, or en-swarmed by herds of feral pets, or shot by property-value-conscious insects, or… (face plum-colored, finally breathing) worse.

Lenz shudders just at the thought of the raging Powerlessness he’d feel, he shares, lost and disorientated, wandering in circles in blinding white frozen points due north of all domesticated men, forget the time not even knowing what fucking date it was, his breath an ice-beard, with just his tinder and wits and character to live by, armed just with a Browning blade.

Green opines that if Boston AA is a cult that like brainwashes you, he guesses he’d got himself to the point where his brain needed a good brisk washing, which Lenz knows is not an original view, being exactly what big blockheaded Don Gately repeats about once a diem.

SELECTED SNIPPETS FROM THE INDIVIDUAL-RESIDENT- INFORMAL-INTERFACE MOMENTS OF D. W. GATELY, LIVE-IN STAFF, ENNET HOUSE DRUG AND ALCOHOL RECOVERY HOUSE, ENFIELD MA, ON AND OFF FROM JUST AFTER THE BROOKLINE YOUNG PEOPLE’S AA MTNG. UP TO ABOUT 2329H., WEDNESDAY 11 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U.

‘I don’t know why all this shit about wanting to hear about the football all the time. And I’m not going to make my goddamn muscle. It’s stupid.’ ‘Okey-doke.’ ‘It’s inappropriate, since you like words like that.’ ‘But this Sharing and Caring Commitment guy, the Chair, the Sudbury Half-Measures Avail Us Nothing Group, he had a power about him. The Chair, he said he used to be a nuclear auditor. For the Defense industry. This man who was very quiet and broken-seeming and fatherly and strange.

There was this kind of broken authority about him.’

‘I know what you mean. I can I.D.’ ‘… that seemed fatherly somehow.’ ‘The sponsor type. My sponsor’s like that, Joelle, in White Flag.’ ‘Can I ask? Is your own personal Daddy still alive?’ ‘I dunno.’ ‘Oh. Oh. My mother’s dead. Worm-farming. My own personal Daddy’s still sucking air, though. That’s how he puts it — still sucking air. In

Kentucky.’ ‘…’ ‘My mother’s a worm-farmer from way back, though.’ ‘But so what about this Half Measures guy hit you so hard?’

‘Harrd. Harrrrrd. Sound it out.’ ‘Real funny.’

‘Don well it started out as that he spoke about himself like he used to be somebody else. Like a whole different person. He said he used to wear a four-piece suit and the fourth piece was him.’ ‘An Allston Group guy says that all the time, that joke.’ ‘He had on a real nice white thick-weave cotton shirt opened at the throat and wheat-colored pants and loafers without socks, which I’m up here ten years Don and I still can’t follow this thing up here about y’all all wearing nice shoes and then wrecking them by wearing them without socks.’ ‘Joelle, you’re maybe about the last person to be taking somebody’s inventory about weird ways they dress, under there, maybe.’ ‘Kiss my rosy red ass, maybe.’ ‘Remind me to Log how it’s real positive to see you coming out of this shell of yours.’

‘Well and I got reservations on this Don but Diehl and Ken are telling me to come in to you with this issue of what’s like occurring out there which Erdedy says it’s a Staff-type issue and duh-duh duh-duh.’ ‘Had a little coffee tonight have we Foss?’ ‘Well Don and like you know and duh-duh.’ ‘Take a second. Inhale and blow out. I’m not going anywheres.’ ‘Well Don I hate a cheese-nibbler much as the next man but Geoff D. and Nell G. are out in the living room going around to all the new people asking them to think about if their Higher Power is omni-potent enough to make a suitcase that’s too heavy for him to lift. They’re doing it to everybody that’s new. And that skittery kid Dingley —’ ‘Tingley. The new kid.’ ‘Well Don he’s sitting in the linen closet with his legs sticking out of the linen closet with his eyes bugging out with like smoke coming out his ears and duh-duh duh-duh going like He Can but He Can’t but He Can, respecting the suitcase and duh-duh, and Diehl says it’s a matter for Staff, it’s a negative thing Day’s doing and Erdedy says I’m Senior Res. and to go

to Staff with it and eat cheese.’ ‘Shit.’ ‘Diehl said a case this negative and duh-duh, no way it’s like ratting.’ ‘No, I appreciate. It ain’t ratting.’

‘Plus I brought in this really good like tollhouse-butterscotch cookie thing Hanley made a plate of, which Erdedy said it’s not like kissing ass so much as commonplace decency.’ ‘Erdedy’s a community pillar. I got to stay in here with the phone.

Maybe you could tell Geoff and Nell to like waltz on in if they can take time out from torturing the new people.’ ‘I’ll probably leave out the torturing part if it’s OK with you, Don.’ ‘Which by the way here I am looking at this cookie still in your hand,

notice.’

‘Jesus, the cookie. Jesus.’ ‘Try and relax a little, kid.’

‘I got to stay down with the phones till 2200. Try a plunger and let me know and I can call Services.’

‘I’m thinking it’d be doing a favor if Staff clued in anybody new that comes in on the fact that the H-faucet in the shower that its H really stands for Holy Cow That’s Cold.’ ‘Are you saying in a sideways way there’s some trouble with the water- temp in the head, McDade?’ ‘Don, I’m saying just what I came in here to say. And can I say by the way nice shirt. My dad used to bowl, too, when he still had a thumb.’

‘I don’t care what the sick bastard told you, Yolanda. Getting on your knees in the A.M. to Ask For Help does not mean getting on your knees in the A.M. while this sick yutz stands in front of you and unzips his fly and you Ask For Help into his fly. I’m praying this is not a male resident said this. This is the sort of thing why same-sex sponsors only are a suggestion.

Is that there’s some sick bastards around the rooms, you get me? Any AA tells a new female in the Program to use his Unit for her Higher Power, I’d give that guy a wide detour. You get what I’m saying?’ ‘And I didn’t even tell you yet how he suggested I should thank the Higher Power at night.’ ‘I’d cross a broad street to avoid an AA like this guy, Yolanda.’ ‘And how he said how I always have to be on the south of him, like stay on his south side, and I have to buy a digital watch.’

‘Holy Christ this is Lenz. Is this Lenz you’re telling me about?’ ‘I ain’t use no names in here. All I say he seemed real friendly and fly at first, and helpful, when I first came, this dude I ain’t say no name.’ ‘You have trouble with the part of the Second Step that’s about insanity and you’ve been using Randy Lenz for a sponsor?’ ‘This is a nomonous Program, you know what I’m saying?’ ‘Jesus, kid.’

Orin (‘O.’) Incandenza stands embracing a putatively Swiss hand-model in a rented room. They embrace. Their faces become sexual faces. It seems clear evidence of a kind of benign fate or world-spirit that this incredible specimen had appeared at Sky Harbor Int. Airp. just as Orin stood with his fine forehead against the glass of the Gate overlooking the tarmac after actually volunteering to drive Helen Steeply all the nightmarish way down I-17/-10 to the ghastly glittering unnavigable airport and the Subject seemed, in the car, not only not especially grateful, and hadn’t let him so much as place a friendly and supportive palm on her incredible quadricep during the ride, but had been irritatingly all-business and had continued to pursue lines of family-linen inquiry he’d all but begged her to quit 234 subjecting him to the inappropriateness of — that, as he stood there after having received little other than a cool smile and a promise to try to say hello to Hallie, with his forehead against the glass of the Weston back door — or rather the Delta gate window — this incredible specimen had — unbidden, unStrategized — come up to him and started a lush foreign- accented conversation and revealed professionally lovely hands as she rooted in her tripolymer bag to ask him to autograph for her toddlerage son a Cardinal-souvenir football she had right there (!) in her bag, along with her Swiss passport — as if the universe were reaching out a hand to pluck him from the rim of the abyss of despair that any real sort of rejection or frustration of his need for some Subject he’d picked out always threatened him with, as if he’d been teetering with his arms windmilling at a great height without even idiotic red wings strapped to his back and the universe were sending this lovely steadying left hand to pull him gently back and embrace him and not so much console him as remind him of who and what he was about, standing there embracing a Subject with a sexual face for his sexual face, no longer speaking, the football and pen on the neatly made

bed, the two of them embracing between the bed and the mirror with the woman facing the bed so that Orin can see past her head the large hanging mirror and the small framed photos of her Swiss family arrayed along the 235 wood-grain dresser below the window, the tubby-faced man and Swiss- looking kids all smiling trustingly into a nothing somewhere up and to their right.

They have shifted into a sexual mode. Her lids flutter; his close. There’s a concentrated tactile languor. She is left-handed. It is not about consolation. They start the thing with each other’s buttons. It is not about conquest or forced capture. It is not about glands or instincts or the split- second shiver and clench of leaving yourself; nor about love or about whose love you deep-down desire, by whom you feel betrayed. Not and never love, which kills what needs it. It feels to the punter rather to be about hope, an immense, wide-as-the-sky hope of finding a something in each Subject’s fluttering face, a something the same that will propitiate hope, somehow, pay its tribute, the need to be assured that for a moment he has her, now has won her as if from someone or something else, something other than he, but that he has her and is what she sees and all she sees, that it is not conquest but surrender, that he is both offense and defense and she neither, nothing but this one second’s love of her, of-her, spinning as it arcs his way, not his but her love, that he has it, this love (his shirt off now, in the mirror), that for one second she loves him too much to stand it, that she must (she feels) have him, must take him inside or else dissolve into worse than nothing; that all else is gone: that her sense of humor is gone, her petty griefs, triumphs, memories, hands, career, betrayals, the deaths of pets — that there is now inside her a vividness vacuumed of all but his name: O., O.

That he is the One. (This is why, maybe, one Subject is never enough, why hand after hand must descend to pull him back from the endless fall. For were there for him just one, now, special and only, the One would be not he or she but what was between them, the obliterating trinity of You and I into We. Orin felt that once and has never recovered, and will never again.) And about contempt, it is about a kind of hatred, too, along with the hope and need. Because he needs them, needs her, because he needs her he fears her and so hates her a little, hates all of them, a hatred that comes out

disguised as a contempt he disguises in the tender attention with which he does the thing with her buttons, touches the blouse as if it too were part of her, and him. As if it could feel. They have stripped each other neatly. Her mouth is glued to his mouth; she is his breath, his eyes shut against the sight of hers. They are stripped in the mirror and she, in a kind of virtuoso jitterbug that is 100% New World, uses O.’s uneven shoulders as support to leap and circle his neck with her legs, and she arches her back and is supported, her weight, by just one hand at the small of her back as he bears her to bed as would a waiter a tray.

‘Hoompf.’ ‘Herrmmp.’ ‘Well in excess of a thousand pardons for my collision.’ ‘Arslanian? Is that you?’ ‘It is I, Idris Arslanian. Who is this other?’ ‘It’s Ted Schacht, Id. Why the blindfold?’ ‘Where have I come, please. I became disoriented upon a set of stairs. I became panicked. I nearly removed my blindfold. Where are we? I detect many odors.’ ‘You’re just off the weight room, in the little hall off the tunnel that isn’t the little hall that goes to the sauna. Why the blindfold, though?’ ‘And the origin of this sound of hysterical weeping and moans, this is —?’ ‘It’s Anton Doucette in there. He’s in there clinically depressed. Lyle’s trying to buck him up. Some of the crueler guys are in there watching like it’s entertainment. I got disgusted. Somebody in pain isn’t entertainment. I

did my sets, now I’m a vapor-trail.’

‘You exude vapor?’ ‘Always nice running into you, Id.’ ‘Await. Please conduct me upstairs or into the locker for a lavatory visit.

The blindfold I am wearing is experimental on the part of Thorp. You are told of the visually challenged player who will matriculate?’ ‘The blind kid? From like Nowheresburg, Iowa? Dempster?’ ‘Dymphna.’ ‘He’s not coming in til next term. He delayed, Inc said they said. Dural edema or something.’

‘Though age only nine, he is in his Midwest region’s ranking of Twelve and Belows highly ranked. Coach Thorp tells this.’ ‘Well, I’d say for a blind, soft-skulled kid he’s real high-ranked, Id, yeah.’ ‘But Dymphna. I hear Thorp tell that the highness of the ranking may be due to the blindness itself. Thorp and Texas Watson were who scouted this player.’ ‘I wouldn’t mention the name Watson near that weight room in there if I were you.’ ‘Thorp tells that his excellence of play is scouted by them to be his anticipation. As in the player Dymphna arrives at the necessary location well before the opponent player’s ball, through anticipation.’ ‘I know what anticipation is, Id.’ ‘Thorp tells to me that this excellence in anticipation in the blind is because of hearing and sounds, because sounds are merely… here. Please read the comment I have carefully notated upon this folded piece of paper.’ ‘ “Sound Merely ‘Variations In Intensity’ — Throp.” Throp?’ ‘It was meaning Thorp, in excitement. He tells that one may, perforce, 236 judge the opponent player’s VAPS in more detail by the ear than the eye.

This is experimental theory of Thorp. This is explaining why the highly ranked Dymphna appears to always have floated by magic to the necessary spot where a ball is soon to land. Thorp tells this in a convincing manner.’ ‘Perforce?’ ‘That this blind person is able to judge the necessary spot of landing by the intensity of the sound of the ball against the opponent player’s string.’ ‘Instead of watching the contact and then imaginatively extending the beginning of its flight, like those of us hobbled by sight.’ ‘I, Idris Arslanian, am compelled with Thorp’s telling.’ ‘Which helps explain the blindfold.’ ‘I therefore experiment with volunteer blindness. Training the ear in degrees of intensity in play. Today versus Whale I was wearing the

blindfold to play.’ ‘How’d it go?’ ‘Not as well as hoped. I frequently faced the wrong direction for play. I frequently judged by the intensity of balls struck on adjacent courts and ran

onto adjacent courts, intruding on play.’ ‘We sort of wondered what all the ruckus was down there at the 14’s end.’ ‘Thorp tells that training the ear is a process of time, in encouragement.’ ‘Well, later, Id.’ ‘Stop. Wait before leaving. Please conduct me to a lavatory. Ted

Schacht? Are you as yet there?’

‘…’ ‘Are you as yet there? I very —’ ‘Whuffff watch where you’re going kid for Christ’s sake.’ ‘Who is this please.’ ‘Troeltsch, James L., slightly doubled over.’ ‘It is I, Idris Arslanian, wearing a rayon handkerchief as a blindfold over my features. I am disoriented and wishing badly for a lavatory. Wondering also what is ensuing inside the weight room, where Schacht alleges you are all watching Doucette weep in clinical depression.’ ‘Kertwannnggg! Just kidding, Ars. It’s really Mike Pemulis.’ ‘Then you, Mike Pemulis, may even now be questioning why is this blindfold upon Idris Arslanian.’ ‘What blindfold? Ars, no, you’re wearing a fucking blindfold too?’ ‘You, Mike Pemulis, are also wearing a blindfold?’ ‘Just kertwanging on you, brother.’ ‘I became disoriented on a stairway, then conversed with Ted Schacht. I am suspecting I do not trust your sense of laughter enough to conduct me back upstairs.’ ‘You should feel your way in and just for one second see the amount of high-stress sweat Lyle’s taking off Anton (‘‘The Booger’’) Doucette in there, Ars.’ ‘Doucette is the two-hand player whose mole appears to be material from a nostril, clinically depressing Doucette at its appearance.’ ‘Rog on the mole. Except that’s not what’s depressing the Booger this time. This one we decided we’d describe him as more like anxiously depressed than depressed.’ ‘One can be depressed of different types?’ ‘Boy are you young, Ars. The Booger’s got himself convinced he’s going to get the academic Boot. He’s been on proby this whole year, since

apparently some trouble last year with Thorp’s cubular trig —’ ‘I am sympathizing with this in toto.’ ‘— and but except now he claims he’s close to flunking in Watson’s laughable Energy survey class, which would obviously mean the old Boot at term’s end, if he really does flunk. He’s thought himself into a brainlock of anxiety. He’s in there clutching his skull with Lyle and Mario, and some of the like less kind guys in there have a pool going on whether Lyle can pull him back from the brink.’ ‘Texas Watson the prorector, teaching of energy in models of resource- scarcity and resource-plenty.’ ‘Ars, I’m nodding in confirmation. Fossil fuels all the way up to annular fusion/fission cycles, DT-lithiumization, so on and so forth. All on a real superficial-type level, since Watson’s basically got like a little liquid-filled nubbin at the top of his spine where his brain ought to be.’ ‘Texas Watson does not overwhelm with brightness, it is true.’ ‘But Doucette’s got himself convinced he’s got this insurmagulate conceptual block that keeps him from grasping annulation, even superficially.’ ‘After we converse you will conduct me to micturate, please.’ ‘It’s the same sort of block some people get with the Mean-Value Theorem. Or in Optics when we get to color fields. At a certain level of abstraction it’s like the brain recoils.’ ‘Causing pain of impact within the skull, resulting in clutching the head.’ ‘Watson’s gone the extra click with him. Watson’s good-hearted if nothing else. He’s tried flash-cards, mnemonic rhymes, even claymation filmstrips from over at Rindge-Latin Remedial.’ ‘You are saying without avail.’ ‘I’m saying apparently the Boogster just sits there in class, eyes bugging out, stomach in fucking knots, dope-slapped by anxiety. I’m saying frozen.’ ‘You are saying recoiling.’ ‘The right side of his face frozen in this anxiety-tic. Envisioning any possible tennis career as with these little wings on it, flying off. Talking all kinds of crazy self-injuring anxious-depression talk. It all started with him and Mario and me in the sauna, him breaking down, me and Mario trying to talk him out of the crazy washed-up-at-fifteen-type depressed talk, Mario

exploiting a previous like therapeutic bond with the kid from about the mole, then with me putting DT-annulation in broad-stroke terms a freaking invertebrate could have understood for Christ’s sake. Just about passing out from the sauna all through this. Finally taking him in to Lyle even with the 18’s still doing circuits in there. Lyle’s working with the Booger now.

Between the anxiety and the marathon sauna-time it’s a real feeding frenzy for old Lyle let me tell you.’ ‘I too confess experiences of anxiety for annulation with Tex Watson, though I am Trivially thirteen and not yet required to grapple in hard science.’ ‘Mario in the sauna kept telling Doucette to just imagine somebody doing somersaults with one hand nailed to the ground, which what the fuck is that, and lo and surprise didn’t help the Booger a whole lot.’

‘Did not part the veil of Maya.’ ‘Didn’t do jack.’ ‘Annular energy cycles are intensively abstract, my home nation believes.’ ‘But my whole message to Boog was that DT-cycles aren’t all that fucking hard if you don’t paralyze your brain with career-with-wings brain- cartoons. The extra-hot breedering and lithiumization stuff gets hairy, but the whole fusion/fission waste-annulation thing in toto you can imagine as nothing but a huge right triangle.’ ‘You are presaging to give the thumbnail lecture.’ ‘Commit this one simple model to your little Pakistani RAM-cells, and you’ll tapdance right through Watson’s kiddie-physics and up into Optics, which is where the abstracto-conceptual fur really flies, kid, let me tell you.’ ‘I am one of the seldom of my home nation whose talents are weak in science, unhappily.’ ‘This is why God also gave you quick hands and a wicked lob off the backhand, though. Just picture a kind of massive pseudocartographic right 237 triangle. You’ve got your central, impregnately-guarded O.N.A.N.- Sun- strand waste-intensive fusion facility up in what used to be Montpelier in what used to be Vermont, in the Concavity. From Montpelier the process’s waste’s piped to two sites, one of which is that blue glow at night up by the

Methuen Fan-Complex, just south of the Concavity, right flush up against the Wall and Checkpoint Pongo —’ ‘Which our tall and sleep-depriving fans in our area point at to blow away from the south.’ ‘— Roger that, where the toxo-fusion’s waste’s plutonium fluoride’s refined into plutonium-239 and uranium-238 and fissioned in a standard if somewhat hot and risky breeder-system, much of the output of which is waste U-239, which gets piped or catapulted or long-shiny-trucked way up to what used to be Loring A.F.B. — Air Force Base near what used to be Presque Isle Maine — where it’s allowed to decay naturally into neptunium-239 and then plutonium-239 and then added to the UF4 fractional waste also piped up from Montpelier, then fissioned in a purposely ugly way in such a way as to create like hellacious amounts of highly poisonous radioactive wastes, which are mixed with heavy water and specially heated-zirconium-piped through special heavily guarded heated zirconium pipes back down to Montpelier as raw matériel for the massive poisons needed for toxic lithiumization and waste-intenseness and annular

fusion.’ ‘My head is spinning on its axis.’ ‘Just a moving right-triangular cycle of interdependence and waste- creation and -utilization. See? And when are we going to get you out on the old Eschaton map for a little geopolitical sparring, Ars, what with those hands and wicked lob? Incidentally, the arrhythmic meaty whacking sound is Booger hitting himself in the thigh and chest in there, which self-abuse is a textbook symptom of an anxiously depressed episode.’ ‘With this I can create sympathy. For, confusingly to me, fusion produces no waste. This we are taught in the science of my home nation.

This is the very essence of the promise of the attraction of fusion for a densely populous and waste-impacted nation such as mine, we are taught fusion to be self-sufficient and wasteless perpetuation. Alas, my need to visit the lavatory is becoming distended.’ ‘But except no, although this was the very roadblock that’d stymified annulation, and what had to be overcome, and was overcome, though in a way so unintuitive and abstracto-conceptual that this is where your Third World educational system’s real sadly in need of like a massive up-to-date-

textbook airlift or something. It’s also at just this point in the fusion- wastelessness problem where our own glorious optical Founder, Inc’s ex-

Da, Mrs. Inc’s poor cuc —’ ‘I know who you refer.’ ‘The man himself, at just this point, makes his final lasting contribution to state science after he quit designing neutron-diffusion reflectors for Defense. You’ve seen the coprolite placque in Tavis’s office. This is from the A.E.C., for the Incster’s Da’s, like, lasting contribution to the energy of waste.’ ‘The purpose for which I was upon the stairs and became disoriented was to visit a lavatory. This was long ago.’ ‘Hold your water one second is all this’ll take. You wouldn’t even fucking be here without Inc’s Da, you know. What the guy did was he helped design these special holographic conversions so the team that worked on annulation could study the behavior of subatomics in highly poisonous environments. Without getting poisoned themselves.’ ‘They thus are studying holographic conversions of the poisons instead of the poisons.’ ‘Men’s Sanity in Corporate Sterno, Ars. Like an optical glove-box. The

ultimate prophylactic.’ ‘Please conduct me.’ ‘Like but for instance did your nation know that the whole annular theory behind a type of fusion that can produce waste that’s fuel for a process whose waste is fuel for the fusion: the whole theory behind the physics of it comes out of medicine?’ ‘This means what? A bottle of medicine?’ ‘The study of medicine, Ars. Your part of the world takes annular medicine for granted now, but the whole idea of treating cancer by giving the cancer cells themselves cancer was anathematic just a couple decades

back.’ ‘Anathematic?’ ‘As in like radical, fringe. Wacko. Laughed out of town on a rail by quote mainstream established science. Whose idea of treatment was to like poison the whole body and see what was left. Though annular chemotherapy did start out kind of wacko. You can see these early microphotos Schacht’s got that poster of that he won’t take down even after

you’re sick of it, the early microphotos of cancer cells getting force-fed micromassive quantities of overdone beef and diet soda, forced to chain- 238smoke microsized Marlboros near tiny little cellular phones —’ ‘I am standing first upon one foot then upon another foot.’ ‘— except and corollarying out of the micromedical model was this equally radical idea that maybe you could achieve a high-waste annulating fusion by bombarding highly toxic radioactive particles with massive doses of stuff even more toxic than the radioactive particles. A fusion that feeds on poisons and produces relatively stable plutonium fluoride and uranium tetrafluoride. All you turn out to need is access to mind-staggering volumes of toxic material.’ ‘Therefore placing the natural fusion site in the Great Concavity.’ ‘Roger and Jawohl. Here things get abstractly furry and I’ll just skim through the fact that the only kertwang in the whole process environmentally is that the resultant fusion turns out so greedily efficient that it sucks every last toxin and poison out of the surrounding ecosystem, all inhibitors to organic growth for hundreds of radial clicks in every direction.’ ‘Hence the eastern Concavity of anxiety and myth.’ ‘You end up with a surrounding environment so fertilely lush it’s

practically unlivable.’

‘A rain forest on sterebolic anoids.’ ‘Close enough.’ ‘Therefore rapacial feral hamsters and insects of Volkswagen size and infantile giganticism and the unmacheteable regions of forests of the mythic eastern Concavity.’ ‘Yes Ars and you find you need to keep steadily dumping in toxins to keep the uninhibited ecosystem from spreading and overrunning more ecologically stable areas, exhausting the atmosphere’s poisons so that everything hyperventilates. And thus and such. So this is why E.W.D.’s major catapulting is from the metro area due north.’ ‘Into the eastern Concavity, keeping it at bay.’ ‘See how it all comes together?’ ‘Mr. Thorp will evince keen disappointment if I resort to remove my blindfold to locate a lavatory.’

‘Ars, I hear you. I hear fine. You don’t need to go on and on. The thing to keep in mind for if you have to take Watson is the cyclic effects of the waste-delivery and fusion. Major catapulting is on what days?’ ‘The dates which are in each month prime numbers, until midnight.’ ‘Which eradicates the overgrowth until the toxins are fused and utilized.

The satellite scenario is that the eastern part of Grid 3 goes from overgrown to wasteland to overgrown several times a month. With the first week of the month being especially barren and the last week being like nothing on earth.’ ‘As if time itself were vastly sped up. As if nature itself had desperately to visit the lavatory.’ ‘Accelerated phenomena, which is actually equivalent to an incredible slowing down of time. The mnemonic rhyme Watson tried to get the Boog to remember here is “Wasteland to lush: time’s in no rush.” ’ ‘Decelerated time, I have got you.’ ‘And this is what the Boog’s saying is eating him alive the worst, conceptually. He says he’s toast if he can’t wrap his head around the concept of time in flux, conceptually. It jacklights him for the whole annular model overall. Granted, it’s abstract. But you should see him. One half of the face is like spasming around while the half with the mole just like hangs there staring like a bunny you’re about to run over. Lyle’s trying to walk him real slowly through the most basic kiddie-physical principles of the relativity of time in extreme organic environments. In between Booger’s trips back to the sauna. The irony for the Boogerman is you don’t really even have to know that much about the temporal-flux stuff, since Watson’s forehead gets all mottled and pruny-looking when he thinks about it himself.’ ‘Do not please necessitate begging from me, Idris Arslanian.’ ‘The eastern Concavity of course being a whole different kettle of colored horses from what Inc calls the barren Eliotical wastes of the western Concavity, let me tell you.’ ‘I will let you tell me anything as long as it is told to me over the porcelain of a lavatory.’ ‘Interesting step you’re doing there, Id, I have to say.’ ‘I beg without frequency. My home culture views begging as low-caste.’

‘Hmm. Ars, I’m standing here thinking we could work something out, maybe.’ ‘I commit no illegal or degrading acts. But I will, if forced, beg.’ ‘Forget that. I’m just thinking. You’re Muslimic, isn’t that right?’ ‘Devoutly. I pray five times daily in the prescribed fashion. I eschew representational art and carnality in all its four-thousand-four-hundred-and-

four forms and guises.’ ‘Body a temple and suchlike? ‘I eschew. Neither stimulants nor depressing compounds pass my lips, as is prescribed in the holy teachings of my faith.’ ‘I’m wondering if you had any specific plans for this urine you’re so

anxious to get rid of, Ars, then.’ ‘I am not following.’ ‘What say we hash it all out over some porcelain, then, brother.’ ‘Mike Pemulis, you are in motion a prince and in repose a sage.’ ‘Brother, it’ll be a cold day in a warm climate when this kid right here’s in repose.’

It was strange upon strange; it was almost as if the legless and pathologically shy punting-groupies were somehow afraid of Moment’s Junoesque Ms. Steeply — Orin had seen his last wheelchair the day before she came up, and now (he realized, driving) it was only hours after she’d left that they were now back, with their shy ruses. The Excitement-Hope- Acquisition-Contempt cycle of seduction always left Orin stunned and wrung out and not at his quickest on the uptake. It was only after he’d cleaned up and dressed and exchanged the standard compliments and assurances, taken the elevator’s glass pod down the tall hotel’s round glass core into the lobby, gone out through the pressurized revolving door into the scalp-crackling gust of Phoenix heat, waited for the car’s directional AC to render the steering wheel touchable, and then injected himself into the teeming arteries of Rt. 85 and Bell Rd. west, back out toward Sun City, ruminating as he drove, that it kertwanged on him that the handicapped man at the hotel room’s door had had a wheelchair, that it was the first wheelchair he’d seen since Hal’d hit him with his theory, and that the legless surveyer had had (stranger) the same Swiss accent as the hand- model.

En route, R. Lenz’s mouth writhes and he scratches at the little rhynophemic rash and sniffs terribly and complains of terrible late-autumn leaf-mold allergies, forgetting that Bruce Green knows all too well what coke-hydrolysis’s symptoms are from having done so many lines himself, back when life with M. Bonk was one big party.

Lenz details how the vegetarian new Joel girl’s veil is because of this condition people get where she’s got only one eye that’s right in the middle of her forehead, from birth, like a seahorse, and asks Green not even to think of asking how he knows this fact.

While Green acts as lookout while Lenz relieves himself against a Market St. dumpster, Lenz swears Green to secrecy about how poor old scarred-up diseased Charlotte Treat had sworn him to secrecy about her secret dream in sobriety was to someday get her G.E.D. and become a dental hygienist specializing in educating youngsters pathologically frightened of dental anesthesia, because her dream was to help youngsters, and but how she feared her Virus has placed her secret dream forever out of 239reach.

All the way up the Spur’s Harvard St. toward Union Square, in a barely NW vector, Lenz consumes several minutes and less than twenty breaths sharing with Green some painful Family-Of-Origin Issues about how Lenz’s mother Mrs. Lenz, a thrice-divorcée and Data Processor, was so unspeakably obese she had to make her own mumus out of brocade drapes and cotton tablecloths and never once did come to Parents’ Day at Bishop Anthony McDiardama Elementary School in Fall River MA because of the parents had to sit in the youngsters’ little liftable-desktop desks during the Parents’ Day presentations and skits, and the one time Mrs. L. hove her way down to B.A.M.E.S. for Parents’ Day and tried to seat herself at little Randall L.’s desk between Mrs. Lamb and Mrs. Leroux she broke the desk into kindling and needed four stocky cranberry-farmer dads and a textbook- dolly to arise back up from the classroom floor, and never went back, fabricating thin excuses of busyness with Data Processing and basic disinterest in Randy L.’s schoolwork. Lenz shares how then in adolescence (his), his mother died because one day she was riding a Greyhound bus from Fall River MA north to Quincy MA to visit her son in a Commonwealth Youth Corrections facility Lenz was doing research for a

possible screenplay in, and during the voyage on the bus she had to go potty, and she was in the bus’s tiny potty in the rear of the bus going about her private business of going potty, as she later testified, and even though it was the height of winter she had the little window of the potty wide open, for reasons Lenz predicts Green doesn’t want to hear about, on the northbound bus, and how this was one of the last years of Unsubsidized ordinational year-dating, and the final fiscal year that actual maintenance- work had ever been done on the infernous six-lane commuter-ravaged Commonwealth Route 24 from Fall River to Boston’s South Shore by the pre-O.N.A.N.ite Governor Claprood’s Commonwealth Highway Authority, and the Greyhound bus encountered a poorly marked UNDER CONSTRUCTION area where 24 was all stripped down to the dimpled- iron sheeting below and was tooth-rattlingly striated and chuckholed and torn up and just in general basically a mess, and the poorly marked and unflag-manned debris plus the excessive speed of the northbound bus made it jounce godawfully, the bus, and swerve violently to and forth, fighting to maintain control of what there was of the road, and passengers were hurled violently from their seats while, meanwhile, back in the closet-sized rear potty, Mrs. Lenz, right in the process of going potty, was hurled from the toilet by the first swerve and proceeded to do some high-velocity and human-waste-flinging pinballing back and forth against the potty’s plastic walls; and when the bus finally regained total control and resumed course Mrs. Lenz had, freakishly enough, ended up her human pinballing with her bare and unspeakably huge backside wedged tight in the open window of the potty, so forcefully ensconced into the recesstacle that she was unable to extricate, and the bus continued on its northward sojourn the rest of the way up 24 with Mrs. Lenz’s bare backside protruding from the ensconcing window, prompting car horns and derisive oratory from other vehicles; and Mrs. Lenz’s plaintiff shouts for Help were unavailed by the passengers that were arising back up off the floor and rubbing their sore noggins and hearing Mrs. Lenz’s mortified screams from behind the potty’s locked reinforced plastic door, but were unable to excretate her because the potty’s door locked from the interior by sliding across a deadbolt that made the door’s outside say OCCUPIED/OCCUPADO/OCCUPÉ, and the door was locked, and Mrs. Lenz was wedged beyond the reach of arm-length and couldn’t reach the deadbolt no matter how plaintiffly she reached out her

mammoth fatwattled arm; and, like fully 88% of all clinically obese Americans, Mrs. Lenz was diagnosed clinically claustrophobic and took prescription medication for anxiety and ensconcement-phobias, and she ended up successfully filing a Seven-Figure suit against Greyhound Lines and the almost-defunct Commonwealth Highway Authority for psychiatric trauma, public mortification, and second-degree frostbite, and received such a morbidly obese settlement from the Dukakis-appointed 18th-Circus Civil Court that when the check arrived, in an extra-long-size envelope to accommodate all the zeroes, Mrs. L. lost all will to Data Process or cook or clean, or nurture, or finally even move, simply reclining in a custom- designed 1.5-meter-wide recliner watching InterLace Gothic Romances and consuming mammoth volumes of high-lipid pastry brought on gold trays by a pastry chef she’d had put at her individual 24-hour disposal and outfitted with a cellular beeper, until four months after the huge settlement she ruptured and died, her mouth so crammed with peach cobbler the paramedics were hapless to administer C.P.R., which Lenz says he knows, by the way — C.P.R.

By the time they hit the Spur, their northwest tacking has wheeled broadly right to become more truly north. Their route down here is a Mondrian of alleys narrowed to near-defiles from all the dumpsters. Lenz goes first, blaze-trailing. Lenz gives these sort of smoky looks to every female that passes within eyeshot. Their vector is now mostly N/NW. They stroll through the rich smell of dryer-exhaust from the backside of a laundromat off Dustin and Comm. The city of metro Boston MA at night.

The ding and trundle of the B and C Greenie trains heading up Comm.

Ave.’s hill, west. Street-drunks sitting with their backs to sooted walls, seeming to study their laps, even the mist of their breath discolored. The complex hiss of bus-brakes. The jagged shadows distending with headlights’ passage. Latin music drifting through the Spur’s Projects, twined around some 5/4 ’shine stuff from a boombox over off Feeny Park, and in between these a haunting plasm of Hawaiian-type music that sounds at once top-volume and far far away. The zithery drifting Polynesian strains make Bruce Green’s face spread in a flat mask of psychic pain he doesn’t even feel is there, and then the music’s gone. Lenz asks Green what it’s like to work with ice all day at Leisure Time Ice and then himself theorizes on what it must be like, he’ll bet, with your crushed ice and ice cubes in pale-

blue plastic bags with a staple for a Twistie and dry ice in wood tubs pouring out white smoke and then your huge blocks of industrial ice packed in fragrant sawdust, the huge blocks of man-sized ice with flaws way inside like trapped white faces, white flames of internal cracks. Your picks and hatchets and really big tongs, red knuckles and rimed windows and thin bitter freezer-smell with runny-nosed Poles in plaid coats and kalpacs, your older ones with a chronic cant to one side from all the time lugging ice.

They crunch through iridescent chunks of what Lenz I.D.s as a busted windshield. Lenz shares feelings on how between three ex-husbands and feral attorneys and a pastry-chef that used pastry-dependence to warp and twist her into distorting a testament toward the chef and Lenz’s being through red-tape still in Quincy’s Y.C.A. hold and in a weak litigational vantage, the ruptured Mrs. L.’s will had left him out in the cold to self-fend by his urban wits while ex-husbands and patissiers lay on Riviera beach- furniture fanning themselves with high-denomination currency, about all which Lenz says he grapples with the Issues of on a like daily basis; leaving Green a gap to make understanding sounds. Green’s jacket creaks as he breathes. The windshield-glass is in an alley whose fire escapes are hung with what look like wet frozen tarps. The alley’s tight-packed dumpsters and knobless steel doors and the dull black of total grime. The blunt snout of a bus protrudes into the frame of the alley’s end, idling.

Dumpsters’ garbage doesn’t have just one smell, depending. The urban lume makes the urban night only semidark, as in licoricey, a luminescence just under the skin of the dark, and swelling. Green keeps them updated re time. Lenz has begun to refer to Green as ‘brother.’ Lenz says he has to piss like a racehorse. He says the nice thing about the urban city is that it’s one big commode. The way Lenz pronounces brother involves one r. Green moves up to stand in the mouth of the alley, facing out, giving Lenz a little privacy several dumpsters behind. Green stands there in the start of the alley’s shadow, in the bus’s warm backwash, his elbows out and hands in the jacket’s little pockets, looking out. It’s unclear whether Green knows Lenz is under the influence of Bing. All he feels is a moment of deep wrenching loss, of wishing getting high was still pleasurable for him so he could get high. This feeling comes and goes all day every day, still. Green takes a gasper from behind his ear and lights it and puts a fresh one on-deck behind the ear. Union Square, Allston: Kiss me where it smells, she said, so

I took her to Allston, unquote. Union Square’s lights throb. Whenever somebody stops blowing their horn somebody else starts blowing their horn. There’s three Chinese women waiting at the light across the street from the guy with the lobsters. Each of them’s got a shopping bag. An old VW Bug like Doony Glynn’s VW Bug idling mufflerless outside Riley’s Roast Beef, except Doony’s Bug’s engine is exposed where the back hood got removed to expose the Bug’s guts. It’s like impossible to ever spot a Chinese woman on a Boston street that’s under sixty or over 1.5 m. or not carrying a shopping bag, except never more than one bag. If you close your eyes on a busy urban sidewalk the sound of everybody’s different footwear’s footsteps all put together sounds like something getting chewed by something huge and tireless and patient. The searing facts of the case of Bruce Green’s natural parents’ deaths when he was a toddler are so deeply repressed inside Green that whole strata and substrata of silence and mute dumb animal suffering will have to be strip-mined up and dealt with a Day at a Time in sobriety for Green even to remember how, on his fifth Xmas Eve, in Waltham MA, his Pop had taken the hydrant-sized little Brucie Green aside and given him, to give his beloved Mama for Xmas, a gaily 240 Gauguin-colored can of Polynesian Mauna Loa-brand macadamia nuts, said cylindrical can of nuts then toted upstairs by the child and painstakingly wrapped in so much foil-sheen paper that the final wrapped present looked like an oversized dachshund that had required first bludgeoning and then restraint at both ends with two rolls each of Scotch tape and garish fuchsia ribbon to be subdued and wrapped and placed under the gaily lit pine, and even then the package seemed mushily to struggle as the substrata of paper shifted and settled.

Bruce Green’s Pop Mr. Green had at one time been one of New England’s most influential aerobics instructors — even costarring once or twice, in the decade before digital dissemination, on the widely rented Buns of Steel aerobics home-video series — and had been in high demand and very influential until, to his horror, in his late twenties, the absolute prime of an aerobics instructor’s working life, either one of Mr. Green’s legs began spontaneously to grow or the other leg began spontaneously to retract, because within weeks one leg was all of a sudden nearly six inches longer than the other — Bruce Green’s one unrepressed visual memory of

the man is of a man who progressively and perilously leaned as he hobbled from specialist to specialist — and he had to get outfitted with a specialized orthopedic boot, black as a cauldron, that seemed to be 90% sole and resembled an asphalt-spreader’s clunky boot, and weighed several pounds, and looked absurd with Spandex leggings; and the long and short of it was that Brucie Green’s Pop was aerobically washed up by the leg and boot, and had to career-change, and went bitterly to work for a Waltham novelty or notions concern, something with ’N in the name, Acme Novelties ’N Notions or some such, where Mr. Green designed sort of sadistic practical- joke supplies, specializing in the Jolly Jolt Hand Buzzer and Blammo Cigar product-lines, with a sideline in entomological icecubes and artificial dandruff, etc. Demoralizing, sedentary, character-twisting work, is what an older child would have been able to understand, peering from his nightlit doorway at an unshaven man who clunkily paced away the wee hours on a nightly basis down in the living room, his gait like a bosun’s in heavy seas, occasionally breaking into a tiny tentative gluteal-thruster squat-and-kick, almost falling, muttering bitterly, carrying a Falstaff tallboy.

Something touching about a gift that a toddler’s so awfully overwrapped makes a sickly-pale and neurasthenic but doting Mrs. Green, Bruce’s beloved Mama, choose the mugged-dachshund-foil-sheen-cylinder present first, of course, to open, on Xmas morning, as they sit before the crackling fireplace in different chairs by different windows with views of Waltham sleet, with bowls of Xmas snacks and Acme-’N-logoed mugs of cocoa and hazelnut decaf and watch each other taking turns opening gifts. Brucie’s little face aglow in the firelight as the unwrapping of the nuts proceeds through layer and stratum, Mrs. Green a couple times having to use her teeth on the rinds of tape. Finally the last layer is off and the gay-colored can in view. Mauna Loa: Mrs. Green’s favorite and most decadent special- treat food. World’s highest-calorie food except for like pure suet. Nuts so yummy they should be spelled S-I-N, she says. Brucie excitedly bobbing in his chair, spilling cocoa and Gummi Bears, a loving toddler, more excited about his gift’s receipt than what he’s going to get himself. His mother’s clasped hands before her sunken bosom. Sighs of delight and protest. And an EZ-Open Lid, on the can.

Which the contents of the macadamia-labelled can is really a coiled cloth snake with an ejaculatory spring. The snake sprongs out as Mrs. G.

screams, a hand to her throat. Mr. Green howls with bitterly professional practical-gag mirth and clunks over and slaps little Bruce on the back so hard that Brucie expels a lime Gummi Bear he’d been eating — this too a visual memory, contextless and creepy — which arcs across the living room and lands in the fireplace’s fire with a little green siss of flame. The cloth snake’s arc has terminated at the imitation-crystal chandelier overhead, where the snake gets caught and hangs with quivering spring as the chandelier swings and tinkles and Mr. Green’s thigh-slapping laughter takes a while to run down even as Brucie’s Mama’s hand at her delicate throat becomes claw-shaped and she claws at her throat and gurgles and slumps over to starboard with a fatal cardiac, her cyanotic mouth still open in surprise. For the first couple minutes Mr. Green thinks she’s putting them on, and he keeps rating her performance on an Acme interdepartmental 1-8 Gag Scale until he finally gets pissed off and starts saying she’s drawing the gag out too long, that she’s going to scare their little Brucie who’s sitting there under the swinging crystal, wide-eyed and silent.

And Bruce Green uttered not another out-loud word until his last year of grade school, living by then in Winchester with his late mother’s sister, a decent but Dustbowly-looking Seventh-Day Adventist who never once pressed Brucie to speak, probably out of sympathy, probably sympathizing with the searing pain the opaque-eyed child must have felt over not only giving his Mama a lethal Xmas present but over then having to watch his widowed asymetrical Pop cave psycho-spiritually in after the wake, watching Mr. Green pace-and-clunk around the living room all night every night after work and an undermicrowaved supper-for-two, in his Frankensteinian boot, clunking around in circles, scratching slowly at his face and arms until he looked less scourged than brambled, and in loosely associated mutters cursing God and himself and Acme Nuts ’N Serpents or whatever, and leaving the fatal snake up hanging from the fake-crystal fixture and the fatal Xmas tree up in its little red metal stand until all the strings of lights went out and the strings of popcorn got dark and hard and the stand’s bowl of water evaporated so the tree’s needles died and fell brownly off onto the rest of the still-unopened Xmas presents clustered below, one of which was a package of Nebraska corn-fed steaks whose cherub-motif wrapping was beginning ominously to swell…; and then finally the even more searing childhood pain of the public arrest and media-

scandal and Sanity Hearing and Midwest trial as it was established after the fact that the post-Xmas Mr. Green — whose one encouraging sign of holding some tattered remnants of himself together after the funeral had been the fact that he still went faith-fully every day to work at Acme Inc. — had gone in and packed a totally random case of the company’s outgoing Blammo Cigars with vengefully lethal tetryl-based high explosives, and a V.F.W., three Rotarians, and 24 Shriners had been grotesquely decapitated across Southeastern Ohio before the federal A.T.F. traced the grisly forensic fragments back to B. Green Sr.’s Blammo lab, in Waltham; and then the extradition and horribly complex Sanity Hearing and trial and controversial sentencing; and then the appeals and deathwatch and Lethal Injection, Bruce Green’s aunt handing out poorly reproduced W. Miller tracts to the crowds outside the Ohio prison as the clock ticked down to Injection, little Bruce in tow, blank-faced and watching, the crowd of media and anti- Capital activists and Defarge-like picnickers milling and roiling, many T- shirts for sale, and the red-faced men in sportcoats and fezzes, oh their rage- twisted faces the same red as their fezzes as the men careened this way and that in their little cars, formations of motorized Shriners buzzing the gates of the O.D.C.-Maximum facility and shouting Burn Baby Burn or the more timely Get Lethally Injected Baby Get Lethally Injected, Bruce Green’s aunt with her center-parted hair visibly graying under the pillbox hat and face obscured for three Ohio months behind the black mesh veil that fluttered from the pillbox hat, clutching little Bruce’s head to her underwired bosom day after day until his blank face was smooshed in on one side. … Green’s guilt, pain, fear and self-loathing have over years of unprescribed medication been compressed to the igneous point where he now knows only that he compulsively avoids any product or service with ’N in its name, always checks a palm before a handshake, will go blocks out of his way to avoid any parade involving fezzes in little cars, and has this silent, substratified fascination/horror gestalt about all things even remotely Polynesian. It’s probably the distant and attenuated luau-music echoing erratically back and forth through angled blocks of Allston cement that causes Bruce Green to wander as if mesmerized out of Union Square and all the way up Comm. Ave. into Brighton and up to like the corner of Comm.

Ave. and Brainerd Road, the home of The Unexamined Life nightclub with its tilted flickering bottle of blue neon over the entrance, before he realizes

that Lenz is no longer beside him asking the time, that Lenz hadn’t followed him up the hill even though Green had stood there outside the Union Square alley way longer than anybody could have needed to take a legitimate whiz.

He and Lenz have become separated, he realizes. Now way southwest of Union on Comm., Green looks around at traffic and T-tracks and bar- patrons and T.U.L.’s huge bottle’s low-neon flutter. He wonders whether he’s somehow blown Lenz off or whether Lenz’s blown him off, and that’s all he wonders, that’s the total complexity the speculation assumes, that’s his thought for the minute. It’s like the whole nut-can-and-cigar traumas drained into some psychic sump at puberty, sank and left only an oily slick that catches the light in distorted ways. The warbly Polynesian music’s way clearer up here. He starts up the steep hill on Brainerd Rd., which terminates at the Enfield line. Maybe Lenz can’t move straightforwardly south at all past a certain time. The acclivity is not kind to asphalt- spreader’s boots. After the initial crazed-gerbil-in-brain phase of early Withdrawal and detox, Bruce Green has now returned to his normal psychorepressed cerebral state where he has about one fully developed thought every sixty seconds, and then just one at a time, a thought, each materializing already fully developed and sitting there and then melting back away like a languid liquid-crystal display. His Ennet House counselor, the extremely tough-loving Calvin T., complains that listening to Green is like listening to a faucet with a very slow drip. His rap is that Green seems not serene or detached but totally shut down, disassociated, and Calvin T. tries weekly to draw Green out by pissing him off. Green’s next full thought is the realization that even though the hideous Hawaiian music had sounded like it was drifting up northward from down at the Allston Spur, it’s somewhat louder now the farther west he moves toward Enfield’s Cambridge St. dogleg and St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Brainerd between Commonwealth and Cambridge St. is a sine wave of lung-busting hills through neighborhoods Tiny Ewell had described as Depressed Residential, unending rows of crammed-together triple-decker houses with those tiny sad architectural differences that seem to highlight the essential sameness, with sagging porches and psoriatic paint-jobs or aluminum siding gone carbuncular from violent temperature-swings, yard-litter and dishes and patchy grass and fenced pets and children’s toys lying around in discarded attitudes and eclectic food-smells and wildly different-patterned curtains or

blinds in a house’s different windows due to these old houses are carved up inside into apartments for like alienated B.U. students or Canadian and Concavity-displaced families or even more alienated B.C. students, or probably it looks like the bulk of the lease-holders are Green-and- Bonkesque younger blue-collar hard-partying types that have posters of the Fiends In Human Shape or Choosy Mothers or Snout or the Bioavailable 241 Five in the bathroom and black lights in the bedroom and oil-change stains in the driveway and that throw their supper dishes into the yard and buy new dishes at Caldor instead of washing their dishes and that still, in their twenties, ingest Substances nightly and use party as a verb and put their sound-systems’ speakers in their apartments’ windows facing out and crank the volume out of sheer high-spirit obnoxiousness because they still have their girlfriends to pound beers with and do shotguns of dope into the mouth of and do lines of Bing off various parts of the naked body of, and still find pounding beers and doing bongs and lines fun and get to have fun on a nightly after-work basis, cranking the tunes out into the neighborhood air. The street’s bare trees are densely limbed, they’re a certain type of tree, they look like inverted brooms in the residential dark, Green doesn’t know his tree-names. The Hawaiian music is what’s pulled him southwest, it emerges: it’s originating from someplace in this very neighborhood somewhere around W. Brainerd, and Green moves upriver toward what sounds like the source of the sound with a blankly horrified fascination.

Most of the yards are fenced in stainless-steel chainlink fencing, and occasional yard-dogs whine or more commonly bark and snarl and leap territorially at Green from behind their fences, the fences shivering from the impact and the chainlink stuff dented outward from previous impacts from previous passersby. The thought that he isn’t scared of dogs develops and recedes in Green’s midbrain. His jacket creaks with every step. The temperature is steadily dropping. The fenced front yards are the toy-and- beer-can-strewn type where the brown grass grows in uneven tufts and the leaves haven’t been raked and are piled in wind-blown lines of force along the base of the fence and unpruned hedges and overfull wastebaskets and untwisted trash-bags are on the sagging porch because nobody’s gotten around to taking them down to the E.W.D. dumpster at the corner and garbage from the overfull receptacles blows out into the yard and mixes

with the leaves along the fences’ base and some gets out into the street and is never picked up and eventually becomes part of the composition of the street. A nonpeanut M&M box is like intaglioed into the concrete of the sidewalk under Green, so bleached by the elements it’s turned bone-white and is only barely identifiable as a nonpeanut M&M box, for instance. And, looking up from identifying the M&M box’s make, Green now espies Randy Lenz. Green has happened upon Lenz, way up here on Brainerd, now strolling briskly alone up ahead of Green, not close but visible under a functioning streetlight about a block farther uphill on Brainerd. There’s some disincentive to call out. The incline on this block isn’t bad. It’s cold enough now so his breath looks the same whether he’s smoking or not. The tall curved streetlamps here look to Green just like the weaponish part of the Martian vessels that fired fatal rays in their conquest of the planet in an ancient cartridge Tommy Doocy’d never tired of that he labelled the case ‘War of the Welles.’ The Hawaiian music dominates the aural landscape by this point, now, coming from someplace up near where he sees the back of Lenz’s coat. Someone has put Polynesian-music speakers in their window, pretty clearly. Creepy slack-key steel guitar balloons across the dim street, booms off the sagging facades opposite, it’s Don Ho and the Sol Hoopi Players, the grass-skirt-and-foamy-breakers sound that makes Green put his fingers in his ears while at the same time he moves more urgently toward the Hawaiian-music source, a pink or aqua three-decker with a second-floor dormer and red-shingled roof with a blue and white Quenucker flag on a pole protruding from a window in the dormer and serious JBL speakers facing outward in the two windows on either side of the flag, with the screens off so you can see the woofers throbbing like brown bellies hulaing, bathing the 1700 block of W. Brainerd in dreadful ukuleles and hollow-log percussives. All the blunt fingers in his ears do is add the squeak of Green’s pulse and the underwater sound of his respiration to the music, though.

Figures in plaid-flannel or else floral Hawaiian shirts and those flower necklaces melt in and out of lit view behind and over the window-speakers with the oozing quality of large-group chemical fun and dancing and social intercoursing. The lit windows make slender rectangles of light out across the yard, which the yard is a sty. Something about Randy Lenz’s movements up ahead, the high-kneed tiptoed skulk of a vaudeville fiend up to no good at all, keeps Green from calling out to him even if he could have

made himself heard over what to him is a roar of blood and breath and Ho.

Lenz moves through the one operative streetlight’s cone across the sidewalk and over to the stainless chainlink of the same Quenucker house, holding something out to a Shetland-sized dog whose leash is attached to a fluorescent-plastic clothesliney thing by a pulley, and can slide. It’s cold and the air is thin and keen and his fingers are icy in his ears, which ache with cold. Green watches, rapt on levels he doesn’t know he has, drawn slowly forward, moving his head from side to side to keep from losing Lenz in the fog of his breath, not calling out, but transfixed. Green and Mildred Bonk and the other couple they’d shared a trailer with T. Doocy with had gone through a phase one time where they’d crash various collegiate parties and mix with the upper-scale collegiates, and once in one February Green found himself at a Harvard U. dorm where they were having a like Beach- Theme Party, with a dumptruck’s worth of sand on the common-room floor and everybody with flower necklaces and skin bronzed with cream or UV- booth-salon visits, all the towheaded guys in floral un-tucked shirts walking around with lockjawed noblest oblige and drinking drinks with umbrellas in them or else wearing Speedos with no shirts and not one fucking pimple anyplace on their back and pretending to surf on a surfboard somebody had nailed to a hump-shaped wave made of blue and white papier mâché with a motor inside that made the fake wave sort of undulate, and all the girls in grass skirts oozing around the room trying to hula in a shimmying way that showed their thighs’ LipoVac scars through the shimmying grass of their skirts, and Mildred Bonk had donned a grass skirt and bikini-top out of the pile by the keggers and even though almost seven months pregnant had oozed and shimmied right into the mainstream of the swing of things, but Bruce Green had felt awkward and out of place in his cheap leather jacket and haircut he’d dyed orange with gasoline in a blackout and the EAT THE RICH patch he’d perversely let Mildred Bonk sew onto the groin of his police-pants, and then they’d finally got tired of the ‘Hawaii Five-0’ theme and started in with the Don Ho and Sol Hoopi CDs, and Green had gotten so uncomfortably fascinated and repelled and paralyzed by the Polynesian tunes that he’d set up a cabana-chair right by the kegs and had sat there overworking the pump on the kegs and downing one plastic cup after another of beer-foam until he got so blind drunk his sphincter had failed and he’d not only pissed but also actually shit his pants, for only the second

time ever, and the first public time ever, and was mortified with complexly layered shame, and had to ease very gingerly into the nearest-by head and remove his pants and wipe himself off like a fucking baby, having to shut one eye to make sure which him he saw was him, and then there’d been nothing to do with the fouled police-pants but crack the bathroom door and reach a tattooed arm out with the pants and bury them in the living room’s sand like a housecat’s litterbox, and then of course what was he supposed to put on if he ever wanted to leave that head or dorm again, to get home, so he’d had to hold one eye shut and reach one arm out again and like strain to reach the pile of grass skirts and bikini-tops and snatch a grass skirt, and put it on, and slip out of the Hawaiian dorm out a side door without letting anybody see him, and then ride the Red Line and C-Greenie and then a bus all the way home in February in a cheap leather jacket and asphalt- spreader’s boots and a grass skirt, the grass of which rode up in the most horrifying way, and he’d spent the next three days not leaving the trailer in the Spur, in a paralyzing depression of unknown etiology, lying on Tommy D.’s crusty-stained sofa and drinking Southern Comfort straight out of the bottle and watching Doocy’s snakes not move once in three days, in their tank, and Mildred had given him two days of high-volume shit for first sulking antisocially by the keg and then screwing out and abandoning her at seven months gone to a sandy room full of tanly anomic blondes who said catty things about her tattoos and creepy boys who talked without moving their lower jaw and asked her things like where she ‘summered’ and kept offering her advice on no-load funds and inviting her upstairs to check out their Dürer prints and saying they found overweight girls terribly compelling in their defiance of culturo-ascetic norms, and Bruce Green lay there with a head full of Hoopi and unresolved pain and didn’t say a word or even have a fully developed thought for three days, and had hidden the grass skirt under the dustruffle of the couch and later savagely torn it to shreds and sprinkled the clippings over Doocy’s hydroponic-marijuana development in the tub, for mulch. Lenz goes in and out of Green’s focus several times within a dozen andante strides, still out in front of the Canadian-refugee-type house that’s drawn Green on, Lenz holding a little can of something up over one side of the fence’s gate and dribbling something onto the gate, holding something else that suddenly engages the dog’s full attention. For some reason Green thinks to check his watch. The

pink or orange clothesline quivers as the leash’s pulley runs along it as the dog comes up to meet Lenz inside the gate he’s slowly opened. The huge dog seems neither friendly nor unfriendly toward Lenz, but his attention is engaged. The leash and pulley could never hold him if he decided Lenz was food. There’s bitter-smelling material from his ear on Green’s finger, which he can’t help but sniff. He’s forgotten and left the other finger in his ear.

He’s now pretty close, standing in a van’s shadow just outside the pyramid of sodium light from the streetlight, like two houses down from the source of the grisly sound, which all of a sudden is in the silence between cuts of Ho’s early Don Ho: From Hawaii With All My Love, so that Green can hear baritone Canadianese party-voices through the open windows and also the low lalations of baby-talk of some sort from Lenz, ‘Pooty ooty doggy woggy’ and whatnot, presumably directed at the dog, who’s coming over to Lenz in a sort of neutrally cautious but attentive way. Green has no clue what kind of dog it is, but it’s big. Green can remember not the sight but the two very different sounds of the footfalls of his Pop the late Mr. Green pacing the Waltham living room, the crinkle of the paper bag around the tallboy in his hand. It’s well after 2245h. The dog’s leash slides hissing to the end of the Day-Glo line and stops the dog a couple paces from the inside of the gate, where Lenz is standing, inclined in the slight forward way of somebody who’s talking baby-talk to a dog. Green can see that Lenz has a slightly gnawed square of Don G.’s hard old meatloaf out in front of him, holding it toward the straining dog. Lenz has the blankly intent look of a short-haired man with a Geiger counter. The hideously compelling Ho starts again with the total abruptness that makes CDs so creepy. Green’s got one finger in one ear, shifting around slightly to keep Lenz’s lampshadow from blocking the view. The music balloons and booms. The Nucks have turned it way up for ‘My Lovely Launa-Una Luau Lady,’ a song that’s always made Green want to put his head through a window. Part of the instrumentals sounds like a harp on acid. The hollow-log percussives are like a heart in your extremest-type terror. Green fancies he can see windows in the houses opposite vibrate from the horrific vibration. Green’s having way more than one thought p.m. now, the squeak of the gerbil-wheel starting to crank deep inside. The undulating shiver is a slack-steel guitar that fills little Brucie’s head with white sand and undulating tummies and heads that resemble New Year’s subsidized parade balloons, huge soft shiny

baggy wrinkled grinning heads nodding and bobbing as they slowly inflate to the shape of a giant head, tilted forward, straining at the ropes they’re pulled by. Green hasn’t watched a New Year’s parade since the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad’s, which had been obscene. Green’s close enough to see that the Hawaiianized Nuck house is 412 W. Brainerd. Blue-collar-type cars and 4×4s and vans are all up and down the street packed in in a somehow partyish attitude, as in parked in a hurry, some of them with Canadian lettering on the plates. Fleur-de-lis stickers and slogans in Canadian on some of the windows also. An old Montego cammed out into a slingshot dragster is parked square in front of 412 in a sort of menacing way with two wheels up on the curb and a circle of flowers hung jauntily over the antenna, and the ellipses of dull fade in the paintjob of the hood that show the engine’s been bored out and the hood gets real hot, and Lenz has gotten down on one knee and breaks off some of the meatloaf and tosses it underhand to the ground inside the leash’s range. The dog goes over and lowers its head to the meat. The distinctive sound of Gately’s meatloaf getting chewed plus the ghastly music’s zithery warbling roar. Lenz now rises and his movements in the yard have a melting and wraithlike quality in the different shades of shadow. The lit window farthest from the limp flag has solid swarthy guys in beards and loud shirts passing back and forth snapping their fingers under their elbows with flower-strewn females in tow. Many of the heads are thrown back and attached to Molson bottles.

Green’s jacket creaks as he tries to breathe. The snake had leapt from the can with a sound like: spronnnnng. His aunt at the Winchester breakfast nook, in dazzling winter dawnlight, quietly doing a word-search puzzle.

Two dormer windows are half-blocked by the throbbing rectangles of the JBLs. Green’s the type that can recognize a JBL speaker and Molson-green bottle from way far away.

A developed thought coheres: Ho’s voice has the quality of a type of: ointment.

Any displaced and shaggy Nuck head in these windows chancing to look out into the yard now would be able to probably see Lenz depositing another chunk of meat in front of the pet and removing something from up near his shoulder under his topcoat as he’s melting stealthily all the way around behind the dog to sort of straddle the big dog from the rear, easing the last of the loaf down in front of the dog, the big dog hunched, the

crunch of Don’s cornflake topping and the goopy sound of a dog eating institutional meat. The arm comes out from under the coat and goes up with something that looks like it would glitter if the windows’ yardlight reached far enough. Bruce Green keeps trying to wave his breath out of the way.

Lenz’s fine coat billows around the dog’s flanks as Lenz braces and leans and gathers the hunched thing’s scruff in one hand and straightens up with a mighty grunting hoist that brings the animal up onto its hind legs as its front legs dig frantically at empty air, and the dog’s whine brings a lei-and- flannel shape to the lit space above one speaker overhead. Green doesn’t even think of calling out from his shadowed spot, and the moment hangs there with the dog upright and Lenz behind it, bringing the upraised hand down in front and hard across the dog’s throat. There’s a lightless arc from the spot Lenz’s hand crossed; the arc splatters the gate and the sidewalk outside it. The music balloons without cease but Green hears Lenz say what sounds like ‘How dare you’ with great emphasis as he drops the dog forward onto the yard as there’s a high-pitched male sound from the form at the window and the dog goes down and hits the ground on its side with the meaty crunch of a 32-kilo bag of Party-Size Cubelets, all four legs dog- paddling uselessly, the dark surface of the lawn blackening in a pulsing curve before its jaws that open and close. Green has moved unthinking out of the vanshadow toward Lenz and now thinks and stops between two trees by the street in front of 416 wanting to call to Lenz and feeling the strangled aphasia people feel in bad dreams, and so just stands there between the treetrunks with a finger in one ear, looking. The way Lenz stands over the hull of the big dog is like you stand over a punished child, at full height and radiating authority, and the moment hangs there distended like that until there’s the shriek of long-shut windows opening against the Ho and the dire sound of numerous high-tempo logger’s boots rushing down stairs inside 412. The creepily friendly bachelor that lived next to his aunt had had two big groomed dogs and when Bruce passed the house the dogs’ toenails would scrabble on the wood of the front porch and run with their tails up to the anodized fence as Bruce came by and jump up and like sort of play the metal fence with their paws, excited to see him. To just like set eyes on him.

Lenz’s arm with the knife is up again and ungleaming in the streetlight’s light as Lenz uses his other hand on the top of the fence to vault the fence sideways and tear-ass uphill up Brainerd Rd. in the southwest direction of

Enfield, his loafers making a quality sound on the pavement and his open coat filling like a sail. Green retreats to behind one of the trees as beefy flannel forms with leis shedding petals, their speech grunty-foreign and unmistakably Canadian, a couple with ukuleles, spill out like ants over the sagging porch and into the yard, mill and jabber, a couple kneel by the form of the former dog. A bearded guy so huge a Hawaiian shirt looks tight on him has picked up the meatloaf’s baggie. Another guy without very much hair picks what looks like a white caterpillar out of the dark grass and holds it up delicately between his thumb and finger, looking at it. Yet another huge guy in suspenders drops his beer and picks up the limp dog and it lies across his arms on its back with its head way back like a swooned girl, dripping and with one leg still going, and the guy is either screaming or singing. The original massive Nuck with the baggie clutches his head to signal agitation as he and two other Nucks run heavily to the slingshot Montego. A first-floor light in the house across Brainerd lights up and backlights a figure in a sort of suit and metal wheelchair sitting right up next to the window in the sideways way of wheelchairs that want to get right up next to something, scanning the street and Nuck-swarmed yard.

The Hawaiian music has apparently stopped, but not abruptly, it’s not like somebody took it off in the middle. Green has retreated to behind a tree, which he sort of one-arm-hugs. A thick girl in a horrible grass skirt is saying ‘Dyu!’ several times. There are obscenities and heavily accented stock phrases like ‘Stop!’ and ‘There he goes!,’ with pointing. Several guys are running up the sidewalk after Lenz, but they’re in boots, and Lenz is way ahead and now disappears as he cuts like a tailback left and disappears down either an alley or a serious driveway, though you can still hear his fine shoes. One of the guys actually shakes his fist as he gives chase. The Montego with the twin cam reveals muffler problems and clunks down off the curb and lays two parentheses as it 180s professionally around in the middle of the street and peels out up in Lenz’s direction, a very low and fast and no-shit car, its antenna’s gay lei tugged by speed into a strained ellipse and leaving a wake of white petals that take forever to stop falling. Green thinks his finger might be frozen to his ear’s inside. Nobody seems to be gesticulating about anything about maybe an accomplice. There’s no evidence they’re looking around for any other unwittingly guilty accessory- type party. Another wheelchaired form has appeared just behind and to the

right of the first seated backlit form across the street, and they’re both in a position to see Green up against the tree with his hand to his ear so it looks like he’s maybe receiving communiqués from some kind of earpiece. The Nucks are still milling around the yard in a way that’s indescribably foreign as the one Nuck staggers in circles under the weight of the expired dog, saying something to the sky. Green is getting to know this one tree very well, spread out against its lee side and breathing into the bark of the tree so his exhaled breath won’t plume out from behind the tree and be seen as an accomplice’s breath, potentially.

Mario Incandenza’s nineteenth birthday will be Wednesday 25 November, the day before Thanksgiving. His insomnia worsens as Madame Psychosis’s hiatus enters its third week and WYYY tries bringing back poor Miss Diagnosis again, who’s started in on a Pig-Latin reading of the Revelation of John that makes you so embarrassed for her it’s uncomfortable. For a couple nights in the HmH living room he tries falling asleep to WODS, an AM-fringe outfit that plays narcotizing orchestral arrangements of old Carpenters songs. It makes things worse. It’s weird to feel like you miss someone you’re not even sure you know.

He gets a serious burn on his pelvis leaning against a hot steel stove talking to Mrs. Clarke. His hip is swaddled in bandages under Orin’s old corduroys, and there’s a sucking sound of salve when he walks, late at night, unable to sleep. The birth-related disability that wasn’t even definitively diagnosed until Mario was six and had let Orin tattoo his shoulder with the red coil of an immersion heater is called Familial Dysautonomia, a neurological deficit whereby he can’t feel physical pain very well. A lot of the E.T.A.s kid him about they should have such problems, and even Hal’s sometimes felt a twinge of envy about it, but the defect is a serious hassle and actually very dangerous, see for instance the burnt pelvis, which wasn’t even discovered until Mrs. Clarke thought she smelled her eggplant overcooking.

At HmH he lies on the air mattress in a tight down bag on the edge of the violet plant-light with the wind rattling the big east window, listening to buttery violins and what sounds like a zither. There’s sometimes a scream upstairs, shrill and drawn out, from where C.T.’s and the Moms’s rooms are.

Mario listens closely for whether the sound ends up as Avril laughing or

Avril screaming. She gets night terrors, which are like nightmares but worse, and which afflict small children and apparently also adults who eat the day’s biggest meal right before bed.

His nighttime prayers take almost an hour and sometimes more and are not a chore. He doesn’t kneel; it’s more like a conversation. And he’s not crazy, it’s not like he hears anybody or anything conversing back with him, Hal’s established.

Hal had asked him when he’ll start coming back to their room to sleep, which made Mario feel good.

He keeps trying to imagine Madame Psychosis — whom he imagines as being very tall — lying in an XL beach chair on a beach smiling and not saying anything for days, resting. But it doesn’t work very well.

He can’t tell if Hal is sad. He is having a harder and harder time reading Hal’s states of mind or whether he’s in good spirits. This worries him. He used to be able to sort of preverbally know in his stomach generally where Hal was and what he was doing, even if Hal was far away and playing or if Mario was away, and now he can’t anymore. Feel it. This worries him and feels like when you’ve lost something important in a dream and you can’t even remember what it was but it’s important. Mario loves Hal so much it makes his heart beat hard. He doesn’t have to wonder if the difference now is him or his brother because Mario never changes.

He hadn’t told the Moms he was going to walk around after he left her office after their interface: Avril usually tries in a nonintrusive way to discourage Mario from taking walks at night, because he doesn’t see well at night, and the areas around the E.T.A. hill are not the best neighborhood, and there’s no skirting the fact that Mario would be easy prey for just about anybody, physically. And, though one perk of Familial Dysautonomia is a 242 relative physical fearlessness, Mario keeps to a pretty limited area 243 during insomniacal strolls, out of deference to Avril’s worry. He’ll sometimes walk around the grounds of the Enfield Marine P.H.H. at the bottom of the hill’s east side because they’re pretty much enclosed, the grounds are, and he knows a couple of the E.M. Security officers from when his father got them to portray Boston police in his whimsical Dial C for Concupiscence; and he likes the E.M. grounds at night because the 244 different brick houses’ window-light is yellow lamplight and he can see

people on the ground floors all together playing cards or talking or watching TP. He also likes whitewashed brick regardless of its state of upkeep. And a lot of the people in the different brick houses are damaged or askew and lean hard to one side or are twisted into themselves, through the windows, and he can feel his heart going out into the world through them, which is good for insomnia. A woman’s voice, calling for help without any real urgency — not like the screams that signify the Moms laughing or screaming at night — sounds from a darkened upper window. And across the little street that’s crammed with cars everybody has to move at 0000h. is Ennet’s House, where the Headmistress has a disability and had had a wheelchair ramp installed and has twice invited Mario in during the day for a Caffeine-Free Millennial Fizzy, and Mario likes the place: it’s crowded and noisy and none of the furniture has protective plastic wrap, but nobody notices anybody else or comments on a disability and the Headmistress is kind to the people and the people cry in front of each other. The inside of it smells like an ashtray, but Mario’s felt good both times in Ennet’s House because it’s very real; people are crying and making noise and getting less unhappy, and once he heard somebody say God with a straight face and nobody looked at them or looked down or smiled in any sort of way where you could tell they were worried inside.

People from the public can’t be in there after 2300, though, because they have a Curfew, so Mario just totters past on the broken sidewalk and looks in the ground windows at all the different people. Every window is lit up with light and some are slid partly open, and there is the noise of being outside a house full of people. From one of the upstairs windows facing the street comes a voice going ‘Give it here, give it here.’ Someone is crying and someone else is either laughing or coughing very hard. An irritable man’s voice from a kitchen window at the side says something to somebody else that just said something like ‘So get dentures,’ followed by curse words. Another upstairs window, over at the side by the wheelchair ramp and the kitchen window where the ground is soft enough to take the stress of a police lock and lead block nicely, the upper window has a billowing lengthwise flag for a curtain and an old bumper sticker on the glass half scraped off so it says ONE DAY A in cursive, and Mario is arrested by the quiet but unmistakable sound of a recording of a broadcast of ‘Sixty Minutes More or Less with Madame Psychosis,’ which Mario has never

taped a show of because he feels it wouldn’t be right for him but is strangely thrilled to hear someone in Ennet’s thinking enough of to tape and replay. What’s coming from behind the open window with a billowing flag for a curtain is one of the old ones, from the Year of the Wonderchicken, Madame’s inaugural year, when she’d sometimes talk all hour and had an accent. A hard east wind blows Mario’s thin hair straight back off his head.

His standing angle is 50°. A female girl in a little fur coat and uncomfortable-looking bluejeans and tall shoes clicks past on the sidewalk and goes up the ramp into Ennet’s back door without indicating she saw somebody with a really big head standing braced by a police lock on the lawn outside the kitchen window. The lady had had on so much makeup she’d looked unwell but the wake of her passage smells very good. For some reason Mario felt like the person behind the flag in the window was also a female. Mario thinks it might not be out of the question that she might lend tapes to a fellow listener if he could ask. He usually checks etiquette questions with Hal, who is incredibly knowledgeable and smart.

When he thinks of Hal his heart beats and his forehead’s thick skin becomes wrinkled. Hal will also know the term for private tapes made of broadcast things on the air. Perhaps this lady owns multiple tapes. This one is from ‘Sixty Minutes +/ȹ’ ’s first year, when Madame still had a slight accent and often spoke on the show as if she were talking exclusively to one person or character who was very important to her. The Moms revealed that if you’re not crazy then speaking to someone who isn’t there is termed apostrophe and is valid art. Mario’d fallen in love with the first Madame Psychosis programs because he felt like he was listening to someone sad read out loud from yellow letters she’d taken out of a shoebox on a rainy P.M., stuff about heartbreak and people you loved dying and U.S. woe, stuff that was real. It is increasingly hard to find valid art that is about stuff that is real in this way. The older Mario gets, the more confused he gets about the fact that everyone at E.T.A. over the age of about Kent Blott finds stuff that’s really real uncomfortable and they get embarrassed. It’s like there’s some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn’t happy. The worst-feeling thing that happened today was at lunch when Michael Pemulis told Mario he had an idea for setting up a Dial-a-Prayer telephone service for atheists in which the atheist dials the number and the line just rings and rings and no one answers. It was a joke

and a good one, and Mario got it; what was unpleasant was that Mario was the only one at the big table whose laugh was a happy laugh; everybody else sort of looked down like they were laughing at somebody with a disability. The whole issue was far above Mario’s head, and he was unable to understand Lyle’s replies when he tried to bring the confusion up. And Hal was for once no help, because Hal seemed even more uncomfortable and embarrassed than the fellows at lunch, and when Mario brought up real stuff Hal called him Booboo and acted like he’d wet himself and Hal was going to be very patient about helping him change.

A lot of people are appearing out of the dark and walking by to go in for the Curfew. They all seem afraid and scowl to pretend they’re not shy. The men have their hands in their coat pockets and the females have their hands at their coats’ throats, keeping them shut. One young person Mario’s never seen sees him struggling with the police lock and helps him disengage the bar and get the lead block into his backpack. Just that little bit of help that makes the difference. Mario is suddenly so sleepy he’s not sure he can get up the hill to go home. The musics that played at the beginning of Madame Psychosis’s career are the exact same that played to the end, what sounds so unacceptable without her there.

Mario’s forward list is perfect for walking up hills, however. His pelvis’s salve makes a sound but doesn’t hurt. In the big protruding window of Ennet’s House’s Headmistress’s office that the window overlooks the Avenue and the train tracks and the Ngs’ clean Father and Son Grocery, where they give Mario yellow tea in the A.M. when he comes by when it’s cold, the last thing Mario can see, before the hillside’s trees close behind him and reduce the Ennet House to shattered yellow lighting, is a wide square-headed boy bent over something he’s writing at the Headmistress’s black desk, licking a pencil-end and hunched all uncomfortably with one arm curled out around what he’s writing in, like a slow boy over a class theme at Rindge and Latin Special.

Live-in Staffers’ evening duties are divided pretty evenly between the picayune and the unpleasant. Somebody has to hit the area meetings to verify residents’ attendance, while somebody else has to miss a nightly meeting to man the empty House and phones and do the picayune Daily Log. After the meetings let out, Gately’s supposed to do a head-count every

hour and make a Log-entry on who all’s there and what’s going on. Gately has to do a Chore-patrol and Log-entry on Chore-performance and nail down tomorrow’s Chore-assignments off the weekly sheet. The residents need to have everything expected of them spelled out in advance so they can’t bitch if they get popped for something. Then people who haven’t performed on their Chore have to be told they’re on a week’s Restriction, which tends to be unpleasant. Gately has to unlock Pat’s cabinets and get the key to the meds locker and open the meds locker. Residents on meds respond to the sound of the meds locker the way a cat will respond to the sound of a can-opener. They just like materialize. Gately has to dispense oral insulin and Virus-meds and pimple medicine and antidepressants and lithium to the residents who materialize for meds, and then he has to enter everything in the Medical Log, which the M. Log is an incredible fucking mess. He has to get out Pat’s Week-At-A-Glance book and print out her next day’s appointments on a sheet of paper in block letters, because Pat finds her own palsied handwriting impossible to read. Gately has to confer with Johnette Foltz about how different residents conducted themselves at St. E.’s Sharing and Caring and Brookline’s B.Y.P. and a Women’s NA Step down in East Cambridge they let a couple of the senior females go to, and then Log all the data. Gately has to go up and check on Kate G., who claimed to be too sick to hit AA again tonight and has been in bed in her room more or less steadily for three days, reading somebody called Sylvia Plate. Going up onto the women’s side of the upstairs is an incredible pain in the ass because he has to unlock a little steel cage over a little button at the bottom of their stairway by the back office and press the button to sound an upstairs buzzer and shout up the stairs ‘Male on the floor’ and then give the female residents as much time as they need to get decent or whatever before he can come up. Going up there has been educational for Gately because he’d always had this idea that women’s areas were essentially cleaner and pleasanter than men’s areas. Having to verify the Chore in the women’s two bathrooms smashed his longstanding delusion that women didn’t go to the bathroom with the same appalling vigor that men did.

Gately’d done a fair amount of cleaning up after his mother, but he’d never much thought of her as a woman. So the whole unpleasant thing’s been an education.

Gately has to check on Doony Glynn, who has recurrent diverticulitis and has to lie fetal on his bunk when he gets an attack and has to be brought Motrin and a SlimFast shake that Gately had to make with 2% milk because there was no skim left, and then Food Bank crackers and a tonic out of the basement’s machine when Glynn can’t drink the 2% shake, and then Log Glynn’s comments and condition, neither of which are good.

Somebody has made those disgusting marshmallowy Rice Krispie things in the kitchen and then not cleaned up after themselves, and Gately has to clomp around finding out who’s responsible and get them to clean it up, and the code about ratting among the residents is such that you’d think he was a narc all of a sudden. The daily bullshit here is hip-deep and not so much annoying as soul-sucking; a double-shift here now empties him out by dawn, just in time to clean real shit. It hadn’t been this way at the start, the soul-sucking aspect, and Gately every couple minutes wonders again what he’ll end up doing when his year’s Staff term is up and his soul is sucked out and he’s sober but without any money and still clueless and has to leave here and do something back Out There.

Kate Gompert, when he buzzed and went up to the 5-Woman room to 245look in, had made a possible sideways comment about hurting herself, and Gately has to call Pat at home about it, and she’s out or not picking up, so then he has to call the House Manager and relay the verbatim comment and let her interpret it and tell Gately what action to take and how the comment stands in relation to Gompert’s Suicide Contract and how the whole thing should be Logged. A resident at Ennet had hung herself from a heating pipe in the basement a couple years before Gately arrived, and there are now baroque procedures for monitoring ideation among residents with psych issues. The number of 5-East at St. Elizabeth’s is on a red card in Pat’s Rolodex.

Gately has to collect the previous week’s counselor-reports and collate them and get the residents’ files together and get any updates or changes printed out and into the files for tomorrow’s All-Staff Meeting, where the Staff gets together in Pat’s office and interfaces on how each resident seems to be doing. Residents have a pretty good idea that their alumni counselors basically rat them out in toto at each Staff meeting, which is why counselling sessions tend to be so incredibly dull that only really grateful

giving Ennet alumni are willing to serve as counselors. Filing-organization is picayune, and for Gately using the back office’s TP array to print stuff out is unpleasant, mostly because each of his fingers covers almost three keys of the keyboard and he has to hit each key carefully with the tip of a pen, which sometimes he forgets to retract the nub of, leaving blue smears on the keys that the House Manager always gives him an ass-chewing for.

And Gately has to have each newer resident in to the office for at least a couple minutes to like touch base and see how they’re doing and make it clear they’re regarded as existing so they can’t just melt into the living room’s decor and disappear. The newest guy’s still sitting in the linen closet claiming he’s comfortablest there with the door open and the new ‘helpless’ Amy Johnson hasn’t come back yet. A brand-new Court-Ordered female, Ruth van Cleve, who looks like one of those people you see in pictures of African famine, has to fill out Intake forms and go through Orientation, and Gately goes over the House rules with her and gives her a copy of the Ennet House Survival Guide, which some resident years gone had written for Pat.

Gately has to answer the phone and tell people who call the office for a resident that residents can receive calls only on the pay phone in the basement, which he has to say yes is frequently busy all the time. The House prohibits cellular/mobiles and has a Boundary about the office phone for residents. Gately has to kick residents off down there when other residents in line come and complain they’ve exceeded their five minutes.

This also tends to be unpleasant: the pay phone down there is undigital and unshutoffable and a constant source of aggravation and beefs; every conversation is life-and-death; crisis down there 24/7. There’s a special way to kick somebody off a pay phone that’s respectful and nonshaming but also firm. Gately has gotten good at assuming a blank but not passive expression when residents are abusive. There’s this look of weary expertise the House Staffers cultivate, then have to flex their face to get rid of when they’re off- duty. Gately’s gotten so stoic in the face of abuse that a resident has to mention actual unnatural acts in connection with his name for Gately to Log the abuse and give out a Restriction. He’s respected and well-liked by almost all the residents, which the House Manager says causes the veteran Staff some concern, because Gately’s job is not to be these people’s friend all the time.

Then in the kitchen with the fucking Krispie-treat bowls and pans still a fucking mess Wade McDade and some other residents were standing around waiting for various things to toast and boil and McDade was using his finger and pushing the tip of his nose up so that his nostrils faced straight out at everybody. He was looking piggishly around and asking if people knew any people where their nose looked like this right here, and some people said yes, sure, why. Gately checked the fridge and again saw evidence that his special meatloaf had a secret admirer, it looked like, another big rectangle cut out of the leftovers he’d carefully wrapped and laid out on the sturdiest shelf in there. McDade, who Gately struggles daily with the urge to hit McDade so hard there’d be nothing but eyes and a nose down over the tops of his cowboy boots, McDade’s telling everybody he’s constructing a Gratitude List at Calvin T.’s tough-love suggestion and he says he’s decided one of the things he’s grateful for is his nose don’t look like this here. Gately tries not to judge on the basis of who laughs and who doesn’t. When Pat’s phone rings and Gately leaves, McDade’s squunching his upper lip up in his hand and asking people about acquaintance with cleft palates.

Gately has to monitor the like emotional barometer in the House and put a wet finger to the wind for potential conflicts and issues and rumors. A subtle art here is maintaining access to the residents’ gossip-grapevine and keeping on top of rumors without seeming like you’re inducing a resident to cross the line and actually eat cheese on another resident. The only thing a resident is actually encouraged to rat out another resident on here is picking up a Substance. All other-type issues it’s supposed to be Staff’s job to glean and ferret out etc., to decoct legitimate infractions out of the tides of innuendo and bullshit complaint 20+ bored crammed-together street-canny people in detox from wrecked lives can generate. Rumors that so-and-so blew so-and-so on the couch at 0300, that thus-and-such’s got a knife, that X was using what had to be some kind of code on the pay phone, that Y’s gone back to carrying a beeper, that so-and-so’s making book on football out of the 5-Man room, that Belbin had led Diehl to believe she’d clean up if he made Krispie Treats and then she weaseled out, and etc. Almost all of it’s picayune and, over time, as it accretes, unpleasant.

Rarely a feeling of outright unalloyed sadness as such, afterward — just an abrupt loss of hope. Plus there is the contempt he belies so well with gentleness and caring during that postcoital period of small sounds and adjustments.

Orin can only give, not receive, pleasure, and this makes a contemptible number of them think he is a wonderful lover, almost a dream-type lover; and this fuels the contempt. But he cannot show the contempt, since this would pretty clearly detract from the Subject’s pleasure.

Because the Subject’s pleasure in him has become his food, he is conscientious in the consideration and gentleness he shows after coitus, making clear his desire to stay right there very close and be intimate, when so many other male lovers, the Subjects say, seem afterward to become uneasy, contemptuous, or distant, rolling over to stare at the wall or tamping down a smoke before they’ve even stopped twitching.

The hand-model told him very softly how the photograph’s big pink Swiss husband after coitus hove himself off her and lay there stunned under his stomach’s weight, his eyes narrowed to piggy slits and the faint smirk on his face that of a gorged predator: not like the punter: uncaring. As was S.O.P. with Subjects she became then briefly stricken and anxious and said no one must ever know, she could lose her children. Orin administered the standard assurances in a very soft intimate voice. Orin was resoundingly gentle and caring afterward, as she could somehow just intuitively tell he would be. It was true. It gave him real pleasure to give the impression of care and intimacy in this interval; if someone asked about his favorite part of the anticlimactic time after the Subject lay back and glisteningly opened and he could see her eyes holding him whole, Orin would say his #2 favorite is this post-seminal interval of clingy vulnerability on the Subject’s part and gentle intimate care on his own.

When the knock on the room door came it seemed like a further grace, for the Subject had been up on an elbow in bed, exhaling slim tusks of cigarette-smoke from her nose and starting to ask him to tell her things about his own family, and Orin was stroking her very tenderly and watching the twin curves of smoke pale and spread and trying not to shudder at the thought of what the inside of the Subject’s fine nose must look like, what gray-white tangles of necrotic snot must hang and twine up in there, from the smoke, whether she had the stomach to look at a hankie she’d used or

whether she balled the thing up and flung it from her with the sort of shudder O. knew he’d feel; and when the brisk action of male knuckles sounded against the room’s door he watched her face whiten from the forehead down as she pleaded that no one must know of her whoever was there and stabbed out her butt and dove beneath the blankets as he called out for patience to the door and veered to the bathroom to wrap a towel around him before he went to it, the sort of bland hotel door you used a card and not a key for. The defiled, guilty, and frightened married hand-model’s wrist and hand protruded for a moment from the edge of the bedding and felt the floor for shoes and clothes, the hand moving like a blind spider and sucking things up under the blankets. Orin didn’t ask who it was at the door; he had nothing to hide. His mood at the door became extraordinarily fine. When the wife and mother had erased all evidence of herself and heaped the bedding over her so she could lie there sniffing grayly and imagining that she was hidden from view, just one lumpy part of a celibate napper’s dishevelled bed, Orin checked the door’s fish-eye peeper, saw only the hallway’s claret-colored wall opposite, and opened the door with a smile he felt all the way down to his bare soles. Swiss cuckolds, furtive near- Eastern medical attachés, zaftig print-journalists: he felt ready for anything.

The man in the hall at the door was handicapped, challenged, in a wheelchair, looking up at him from well below peephole-range, bushy- haired and mostly nose and looking up into the swell of Orin’s pectorals, making no attempt to see around him into the room. One of the disabled.

Orin looked down and felt both let down and almost touched. The little fellow’s wheelchair shiny and his lap blanketed and his string tie half- hidden by the clipboard he held to his chest with a curled and motherly arm. ‘Survey,’ the man said, nothing else, joggling the clipboard a little like an infant, presenting it as evidence.

Orin imagined the terrified Subject lying there hidden and trying to hear, and despite a sort of mild disappointment he felt touched at whatever this shy ruse of an excuse for proximity to his leg and autograph might be. He felt for the Subject the sort of clinical contempt you feel for an insect you’ve looked down and seen and know you’re going to torture for a while.

From the way she smoked and performed certain other manual operations, Orin’d noted she was left-handed.

He said to the man in the wheelchair, ‘Goody.’

‘Plus or minus three percent sample.’ ‘Eager to cooperate in any way.’ The man cocked his head in that way people in wheelchairs do. ‘Scholarly academic study.’ ‘Pisser.’ Leaning against the jamb with arms crossed, watching the man try to process the dissimilarity in the size of his limbs. No shins or extremities, however withery, extended below the wheelchair’s blanket’s hem. The guy was like totally legless. Orin’s rising heart went out. ‘Chamber of Commerce survey. Concerned veterans’ group systematic inquiry. Consumer advocacy polling operation. Three percentage points error on either of two sides of the issue.’ ‘Bully.’ ‘Consumer-advocacy group opinion sweep. Very little time involved.

Government study. Ad council demographic assessment. Sweeps. Random anonymity. Minimum in terms of time or trouble.’ ‘I’m clearing my mind to be of maximum help.’ When the man had taken out his pen with a flourish and looked down at his board Orin got a look at the yarmulke of skin in the center of the seated man’s hair. There was something almost unbearably touching about a bald

spot on a handicapped man. ‘What do you miss, please?’ Orin smiled coolly. ‘Very little, I like to think.’

‘Backtrack. U.S.A. citizen?’

‘Yes.’

‘You have how many years?’

‘Age?’

‘You have which age?’ ‘Age is twenty-six.’ ‘Over twenty-five?’ ‘That’d follow.’ Orin was waiting for the ruse involving the pen that’d get him to sign something so the very shy fan club’d get their autograph. He tried to remember from Mario’s childhood how long under blankets before it got unbearably hot and you started to smother and thrash.

The man pretended to notate. ‘Employed, self-employed, unemployed?’

Orin smiled. ‘The first.’ ‘Please list what you miss.’

The whisper of the vent, hush of the wine-colored hallway, vaguest 2whisper of rustling sheets behind, imagining the growing bubble of CO under the sheets. ‘Please list lifestyle elements of your U.S.A. lifetime you recall, and/or

at present lack, and miss.’ ‘I’m not sure I follow.’ The man flipped a page over to check. ‘Pine, yearn, winsome, nostalgia.

Lump of throat.’ Flipping one more sheet. ‘Wistful, as well.’ ‘You mean childhood memories. You mean like cocoa with half-melted marshmallows floating on top in a checker-tiled kitchen warmed by an enamel gas range, that sort of thing. Or omnissent doors at airports and Star Markets that somehow knew you were there and slid open. Before they

disappeared. Where did those doors go?’

‘Enamel is with the e?’ ‘And then some.’ Orin’s gaze now was up at the ceiling’s acoustic tile, the little blinking disk of the hall’s smoke detector, as if memories were always lighter than air. The seated man stared blandly up at the throb of Orin’s internal jugular vein. Orin’s face changed a little. Behind him, under the blankets, the non- Swiss woman lay very calmly and patiently on her side, breathing silently into the portable O-mask w/ canister from the purse beside her, one hand in2 the purse on the Schmeisser GBF miniature machine pistol. ‘I miss TV,’ Orin said, looking back down. He no longer smiled coolly. ‘The former television of commercial broadcast.’ ‘I do.’ ‘Reason in several words or less, please, for the box after REASON,’ displaying the board. ‘Oh, man.’ Orin looked back up and away at what seemed to be nothing, feeling at his jaw around the retromandibular’s much tinier and more vulnerable throb. ‘Some of this may sound stupid. I miss commercials that were louder than the programs. I miss the phrases “Order before midnight tonight” and “Save up to fifty percent and more.” I miss being told things were filmed before a live studio audience. I miss late-night anthems and shots of flags and fighter jets and leathery-faced Indian chiefs crying at litter. I miss “Sermonette” and “Evensong” and test patterns and being told

how many megahertz something’s transmitter was broadcasting at.’ He felt his face. ‘I miss sneering at something I love. How we used to love to gather in the checker-tiled kitchen in front of the old boxy cathode-ray Sony whose reception was sensitive to airplanes and sneer at the commercial

vapidity of broadcast stuff.’ ‘Vapid ditty,’ pretending to notate. ‘I miss stuff so low-denominator I could watch and know in advance what people were going to say.’ ‘Emotions of mastery and control and superiority. And pleasure.’ ‘You can say that again, boy. I miss summer reruns. I miss reruns hastily inserted to fill the intervals of writers’ strikes, Actors’ Guild strikes. I miss Jeannie, Samantha, Sam and Diane, Gilligan, Hawkeye, Hazel, Jed, all the syndicated airwave-haunters. You know? I miss seeing the same things over and over again.’ There were two muffled sneezes from the bed behind him that the handicapped man didn’t even acknowledge, pretending to write, brushing his string tie’s dangle away again and again as he wrote. Orin tried not to imagine the topography of the sheets the Subject’d sneezed into. He no longer cared about the ruse. He did feel tender, somehow, toward him.

The man tended to look up at him like people with legs look up at buildings and planes. ‘You can of course view entertainments again and again without surcease on TelEntertainment disks of storage and retrieval.’ Orin’s way of looking up as he remembered was nothing like the seated guy’s way of looking up. ‘But not the same. The choice, see. It ruins it somehow. With television you were subjected to repetition. The familiarity

was inflicted. Different now.’ ‘Inflicted.’ ‘I don’t think I exactly know,’ Orin said, suddenly dimly stunned and sad inside. The terrible sense as in dreams of something vital you’ve forgotten to do. The inclined head’s bald spot was freckled and tan. ‘Is there

a next item?’

‘Things to tell me you do not miss.’

‘For symmetry.’

‘Balance of opinion.’

Orin smiled. ‘Plus or minus.’ ‘Just so,’ the man said.

Orin resisted an urge to lay his hand tenderly over the arc of the disabled man’s skull. ‘Well how much time do we have here?’ The skyscraper-gawking aspect was only when the man’s gaze went higher than Orin’s neck. They were not shy or indirect or even the eyes of someone in any way disabled, was what struck Orin later as odd — besides the Swiss accent, the absence of a signature-ruse, the Subject’s patience with the wait and the absence of gasping when O. pulled the covers abruptly back, later. The man had looked up at Orin and flicked his eyes slightly past him, at the room behind with pantyless floor and humped covers. Orin was meant to see the glance past him. ‘Can return at later time which we specify. You are, comme on dit, engaged?’ Orin’s smile wasn’t as cool as he thought as he told the seated figure that that was a matter of opinion.

As at all D.S.A.S.-certified halfway facilities, Ennet House’s resident curfew is 2330h. From 2300 to 2330, the Staffer on night-duty has to do head-counts and sit around like somebody’s mom waiting for different residents to come in. There’s always ones that always like to cut it close and play with the idea of getting Discharged for something picayune so it won’t be their fault. Tonight Clenette H. and the deeply whacked-out Yolanda W.

246 come back in from Footprints around 2315 in purple skirts and purple lipstick and ironed hair, tottering on heels and telling each other what a wicked time they just had. Hester Thrale undulates in in a false fox jacket at 2320 as usual even though she has to be up at like 0430 for the breakfast- shift at the Provident Nursing Home and sometimes eats breakfast with Gately, both of their faces nodding down perilously close to their Frosted Flakes. Chandler Foss and the spectrally thin April Cortelyu come in from someplace with postures and expressions that arouse comments and force Gately to Log a possible issue about an in-House relationship. Gately has to bid goodnight to two craggy-faced brunette ex-residents who’ve been planted on the couch all night talking cults. Emil Minty and Nell Gunther and sometimes Gavin Diehl (who Gately did three weeks of a municipal bit with, once, at Concord Farm) make a nightly point of going to smoke outside on the front porch and coming in only after Gately says twice he’s got to lock the door, just as some limp rebellious gesture. Tonight they’re closely followed by a mustacheless Lenz, who sort of oozes through the

door just as Gately’s going through his keys to get the key to lock it, and kind of brushes by and goes up to the 3-Man without a word, which he’s been doing a lot lately, which Gately has to Log, plus the fact that it’s now after 2330 and he can’t account for either the semi-new girl Amy J. or — more upsetting — Bruce Green. Then Green knocks at the front door at 2336 — Gately has to Log the exact time and then it’s his call whether to unlock the door. After curfew Staff doesn’t have to unlock the door. Many a bad-news resident gets effectively bounced this way. Gately lets him in.

Green’s never come close to missing curfew before and looks godawful, skin potato-white and eyes vacant. And a big quiet kid is one thing, but Green looks at the floor of Pat’s office like it’s a loved one while Gately gives him the required ass-chewing; and Green takes the standard dreaded 247 week’s Full House Restriction in such a vacantly hangdog way, and is so lamely vague when Gately asks does he want to tell him where he’s been at and why he couldn’t make 2330 and whether there’s anything that’s an issue that he might want to share with Staff, so unresponsive that Gately feels like he has no choice but to pull an immediate spot-urine on Green, which Gately hates doing not only because he plays cribbage with Green and feels like he’s taken Green under the old Gately wing and is probably the closest thing to a sponsor the kid’s got but also because urine samples taken after 248 Unit #2’s clinic’s closed have to be stored overnight in the little Staff miniature fridgelette in Don Gately’s basement room — the only fridge in the House that no resident could conceivably dicky into — and Gately hates to have a warm blue-lidded cup of somebody’s goddamn urine in his fridgelette with his pears and Polar seltzer, etc. Green submits to Gately’s cross-armed presence in the men’s head as Green produces a urine so efficiently and with so little bullshit that Gately is able to take the lidded cup between gloved thumb and finger and get it downstairs and tagged and Logged and down in the fridgelette in time to not be late for getting the residents’ cars moved, the night-shift’s biggest pain in the ass; but then his final head-count at 2345 reminds Gately that Amy J. isn’t back, and she hasn’t called, and Pat has told him the decision to Discharge after a missed curfew is his call, and at 2350 Gately makes the decision, and has to get Treat and Belbin to go up into the 5-Woman room and pack the girl’s stuff up in the same Irish Luggage she’d brought it in Monday, and Gately has to

put the trashbags on the front porch with a quick note explaining the Discharge and wishing the girl good luck, and has to call Pat’s answering device down in Milton and leave word of a mandatory Curfew-Discharge at 2350h., so Pat can hear about it first thing in the A.M. and schedule interviews to fill the available bed ASAP, and then with a hissed curse Gately remembers the anti-big-hanging-gut situps he’s sworn to himself to do every night before 0000, and it’s 2356, and he has time to do only 20 with his huge discolored sneakers wedged under the frame of the office’s black vinyl couch before it’s unavoidably time to supervise moving the residents’ cars around.

Gately’s predecessor as male live-in Staff, a designer-narcotics man who’s now (via Mass Rehab) learning to repair jet engines at East Coast AeroTech, once described residents’ vehicles to Gately as a continuing boil on the ass of night Staff. Ennet House lets any resident with a legally registered vehicle and insurance keep their car at the House, if they want, during residency, to use for work and nightly meetings, etc., and the Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital goes along, except they put authorized parking for all the Units’ clients out in the little street right outside the House. And since metro Boston’s serious fiscal troubles in the third year of Subsidized Time there’s been this hellish municipal deal where only one side of any street is legal for parking, and the legal side switches abruptly at 0000h., and cruisers and municipal tow trucks prowl the streets from 0001h. on, writing $95.00 tickets and/or towing suddenly-illegally-parked vehicles to a region of the South End so blasted and dangerous no cabbie with anything to live for will even go there. So the interval 2355h.–0005h. in Boston is a time of total but not very spiritual community, with guys in skivvies and ladies in mud-masks staggering out yawning into the crowded midnight streets and disabling their alarms and revving and all trying to pull out and do a U and find a parallel-parking place facing the other way.

There’s nothing very mysterious about the fact that metro Boston’s battery- and homicide-rates during this ten-minute interval are the highest per diem, so that ambulances and paddy wagons are especially aprowl at this hour, too, adding to the general clot and snarl.

Since the E.M.P.H.H. Units’ catatonics and enfeebled people rarely own registered vehicles, it’s generally pretty easy to find places along the little road to switch to, but it’s a constant sore point between Pat Montesian and

the E.M.P.H.H. Board of Regents that Ennet House residents don’t get to park overnight in the big off-street lot by the condemned hospital building — the lot’s spaces are reserved for all the different Units’ professional staff starting at 0600h., and E.M. Security got sick of staffs’ complaints about drug addicts’ poorly maintained autos still sitting there taking up their spots in the A.M. — and that Security won’t consider changing the little E.M. streetlet’s nightly side-switch to 2300h., before Ennet Houses’s D.S.A.S.- required curfew; E.M.’s Board claims it’s a municipal ordinance that they can’t be expected to mess with just to accommodate one tenant, while Pat’s memos keep pointing out that the Enfield Marine Hospital complex is state- not city-owned, and that Ennet House residents are the only tenants who face the nightly car-moving problem, since just about everyone else is catatonic or enfeebled. And so on.

But so every P.M. at like 2359 Gately has to lock up the lockers and Pat’s cabinets and desk drawers and the door to the front office and put the phone console’s answering machine on and personally escort all residents who own cars out post-curfew outside into the little nameless streetlet, and for somebody with Gately’s real limited managerial skills the headaches involved are daunting: he has to herd the vehicular residents together just inside the locked front door; he has to threaten the residents he’s herded together into staying together by the door while he clomps upstairs to get the one or two drivers who always forget and fall asleep before 0000 — and this straggler-collecting is a particular pain in the ass if the straggler’s a female, because he has to unlock and press the Male Coming Up button by the kitchen, and the ‘buzzer’ sounds more like a klaxon, and wakes the edgiest female residents up with an ugly surge of adrenaline, and Gately as he clomps up the stairs gets roundly bitched out by all the mud-masked heads sticking out into the female hall, and he by regulation can’t go into the sleeper’s bedroom but has to pound on the door and keep shouting out his gender and get one of the straggler’s roommates to wake her up and get her dressed and to the bedroom door; so he has to retrieve the stragglers and chew them out and threaten them with both a Restriction and a possible tow while herding them quick-walking down the staircase to join the main car- owner herd as quickly as possible before the main herd can like disperse.

They’ll always disperse if he takes too long getting stragglers; they’ll get distracted or hungry or need an ashtray or just get impatient and start

looking at the whole car-moving-after-curfew thing as an imposition on their time. Their early-recovery Denial makes it impossible for them to imagine their own car getting towed instead of, say, somebody else’s car.

It’s the same Denial Gately can see at work in the younger B.U. or -C. students when he’s driving Pat’s Aventura to the Food Bank or Purity Supreme when they’ll fucking walk right out in the street against the light in front of the car, whose brakes are fortunately in top shape. Gately’s snapped to the fact that people of a certain age and level of like life- experience believe they’re immortal: college students and alcoholics/addicts are the worst: they deep-down believe they’re exempt from the laws of physics and statistics that ironly govern everybody else. They’ll piss and moan your ear off if somebody else fucks with the rules, but they don’t deep down see themselves subject to them, the same rules. And they’re constitutionally unable to learn from anybody else’s experience: if some jaywalking B.U. student does get splattered on Comm. or some House resident does get his car towed at 0005, your other student’s or addict’s response to this will be to ponder just what imponderable difference makes it possible for that other guy to get splattered or towed and not him, the ponderer. They never doubt the difference — they just ponder it. It’s like a kind of idolatry of uniqueness. It’s unvarying and kind of spirit-killing for a Staffer to watch, that the only way your addict ever learns anything is the hard way. It has to happen to them to like upset the idolatry. Eugenio M. and Annie Parrot always recommend letting everybody get towed at least once, early on in their residency, to help make believers out of them in terms of laws and rules; but Gately for some reason on his night-shifts can’t do it, cannot fucking stand to have one of his people get towed as long as there’s something he can do to prevent it, and then plus if they do get towed there’s the nail-chewing hassle of arranging their transport to the South End’s municipal lot the next day, fielding calls from bosses and supplying verification of residents’ carlessness in terms of getting to work without letting the boss know that the carless employee is a resident of a halfway house, which is totally sacred private residents’ private information to give out or not — Gately breaks a full-body sweat just thinking about the managerial headaches involved in a fucking tow, so he’ll spend time herding and regathering and chewing the absentminded asses of residents

who Gene M. says have such calloused asses still it’s a waste of Gately’s 249time and spirit: you have to let them learn for themselves.

250 Gately alerts Thrale and Foss and Erdedy and Henderson, and Morris Hanley, and drags the new kid Tingley out of the linen closet, and Nell Gunther — who’s fucking sacked out slack-mouthed on the couch, in violation — and lets them all get coats and herds them together by the locked front door. Yolanda W. says she left personal items in Clenette’s car and can she come. Lenz owns a car but doesn’t answer Gately’s yell up the stairs. Gately tells the herd to stay put and that if anybody leaves the herd he’s going to take a personal interest in their discomfort. Gately clomps up the stairs and into the 3-Man room, plotting different fun ways to wake Lenz up without bruises that’d show. Lenz is not asleep but is wearing personal-stereo headphones, plus a jock strap, doing handstand-pushups up against the wall by Geoffrey Day’s rack, his bottom only inches from Day’s pillow and farting in rhythm to the pushups’ downstrokes, as Day lies there in pajamas and Lone Ranger sleep mask, hands folded over his heaving chest, lips moving soundlessly. Gately’s maybe a little rough about grabbing Lenz’s calf and lifting him off his hands and using his other big hand on Lenz’s hip to twirl him around upright like a drill-team’s rifle, but Lenz’s cry is of over-ebullient greeting, not pain, but it sends both Day and Gavin Diehl bolt-upright in their racks, and then they curse as Lenz hits the floor. Lenz starts saying he’d let time completely get away from him and didn’t know what time it was. Gately can hear the herd down by the front door at the bottom of the stairs stamping and chuffing and getting ready to maybe disperse.

Up this close, Gately doesn’t even need his Staffer’s eerie seventh sense to sense that Lenz is clearly wired on either ’drines or Bing. That Lenz has been visited by the Sergeant at Arms. Lenz’s right eyeball is wobbling around in its socket and his mouth writhing in that way and he has that Nietzschean supercharged aura of a wired individual, and all the time he’s throwing on slacks and topcoat and incognitoizing wig and getting almost pitched head-first down the stairs by Gately he’s telling this insane breathless whopper about his finger once getting cut off and then spontaneously regentrifying itself back on, and his mouth is writhing in that fish-on-a-gaff way distinctive of a sustained L-Dopa surge, and Gately

wants to pull an immediate urine, immediate, but meanwhile the cars’ herd’s edges are just starting to widen in that way that precedes distraction and dispersal, and they’re angry not at Lenz for straggling but at Gately for even bothering with him, and Lenz pantomimes the akido Serene But Deadly Crane stance at Ken Erdedy, and it’s 0004h. and Gately can see tow trucks aprowl way down on Comm. Ave., coming this way, and he jangles his keys and unlocks all three curfew-locks on the front door and gets everybody out in the scrotum-tightening November cold and out down the walk to the line of their cars in the little street and stands there on the porch watching in just orange shirtsleeves, making sure Lenz doesn’t bolt before he can pull a spot-urine and extract an admission and Discharge him officially, feeling a twinge of conscience at so looking forward to giving Lenz the administrative shoe, and Lenz jabbers nonstop to whoever’s closest all the way to his Duster, and everybody goes to their car, and the backwash around Gately from the open House door is hot and people in the living room provide loud feedback on the draft from the open door, the sky overhead immense and dimensional and the night so clear you can see stars hanging in a kind of lacteal goo, and out on the streetlet a couple car doors are squeaking and slamming and some people are conversing and delaying just to make Staff have to stand there in shirtsleeves on the cold porch, a small nightly sideways ball-busting rebellious gesture, when Gately’s eye falls on Doony R. Glynn’s specialty-disembowelled old dusty-black VW Bug parked with the other cars on the now-illicit street-side, its rear-mount engine’s guts on full glittered display under the little street’s lights, and Glynn’s upstairs in bed tonight legitimately prostrate with diverticulitis, which for insurance reasons means Gately has to go back in and ask some resident with a driver’s license to come move Glynn’s VW across the street, which is humiliating because it means admitting publicly to these specimens that he, Gately, doesn’t have a valid license, and the sudden heat of the living room confuses his goose-pimples, and nobody in the living room will admit to have a driver’s license, and it turns out the only licensed resident who’s still vertical and downstairs is Bruce Green, who’s in the kitchen expressionlessly stirring a huge amount of sugar into a cup of coffee with his bare blunt finger, and Gately finds himself having to ask for managerial assistance from a kid he likes and has just bitched out and extracted urine from, which Green minimizes the humiliation of the whole

thing by volunteering to help the second he hears the words Glynn and fucking car, and goes to the living room closet to get out his cheap leather jacket and fingerless gloves, and but Gately now has to leave the residents outside still unsupervised for a second to go clomping upstairs and verify 251 that it’s kosher with Glynn for Bruce Green to move his car. The 2-Man seniorest males’ bedroom has a bunch of old AA bumper-stickers on it and a calligraphic poster saying EVERYTHING I’VE EVER LET GO OF HAS CLAW MARKS ON IT, and the answer to Gately’s knock is a moan, and Glynn’s little naked-lady bedside lamp he brought in with him is on, he’s in his rack curled on his side clutching his abdomen like a kicked man.

McDade is illicitly sitting on Foss’s rack reading one of Foss’s motorcycle magazines and drinking Glynn’s Millennial Fizzy with stereo headphones on, and he hurriedly puts out his cigarette when Gately enters and closes the little drawer in the bedside table where Foss keeps his ashtray just like 252 everybody else. The street outside sounds like Daytona — a drug addict is like physically unable to start a car without gunning the engine. Gately looks quickly out the west window over Glynn’s rack to verify that all the unsupervised headlights going down the little street are Uing and coming back the right way to repark. Gately’s forehead is wet and he feels the start of a greasy headache, from managerial stress. Glynn’s crossed eyes are glassy and feverish and he’s softly singing the lyrics to a Choosy Mothers song to a tune that isn’t the song’s tune. ‘Doon,’ Gately whispers.

One of the cars is coming back down the street a little fast for Gately’s taste. Anything involving residents that happens on the grounds after curfew is his responsibility, the House Manager’s made clear. ‘Doon.’ It’s the bottom eye, grotesquely, that rolls up at Gately. ‘Don.’

‘Doon.’ ‘Don Doon the witch is dead.’ ‘Doon, I need to let Green move your car.’ ‘Vehicle’s black, Don.’ ‘Brucie Green needs your keys so’s we can switch your car over, brother, it’s midnight.’

‘My Black Bug. My baby. The Roachmobile. The Doonulater’s wheels.

His mobility. His exposed baby. His slice of the American Pie. Simonize

my baby when I’m gone, Don Doon.’ ‘Keys, Doony.’ ‘Take them. Take it. Want you to have it. One true friend. Brought me Ritz crackers and a Fizz. Treat it like a roachlady. Shiny, black, hard, mobile. Needs Premium and a weekly wax.’ ‘Doon. You got to show me where’s the keys, brother.’ ‘And the bowel. Gotta weekly shine the pipes in the bowel. Exposed to view. With a soft cloth. The mobile roach. The bowelmobile.’ The heat coming off Glynn is face-tightening. ‘You feel like you got a fever, Doon?’ At one point elements of Staff thought Glynn might be playing sick to get out of looking for a job after losing his menial job at Brighton Fence & Wire. All Gately knows about diverticulitis is that Pat said it’s intestinal and alcoholics can get it in recovery from impurities in bottom-shelf blends that the body’s trying to expel. Glynn’s had physical complaints all through his residency, but nothing like this here. His face is gray and waxy with pain and there’s a yellowish crust on his lips. Glynn’s got a real severe adtorsion, and the bottom eye is rolled up at Gately with a terrible delirious glitter, the top eye rolling around like a cow’s eye. Gately still cannot bring himself to feel another man’s forehead. He settles for punching Glynn very lightly on the shoulder. ‘You think we need to take you over to St. E.’s to get your intestine

looked at, Doon, do you think?’

‘Hoits, Don.’ ‘You think you —?’ Because he’s worrying about what if a resident comas or dies on his shift, and then feeling shame that this is his worry, the squeal of brakes and raised voices’ noises down out front hasn’t registered on Gately right away, but Hester Thrale’s unmistakable high-B# scream does — i.e. register — and now serious feet running up the stairs: Green’s face in the doorway, red in round patches high on his cheeks:

‘Come out.’

‘The fuck’s the problem out —’ Green: ‘Come now Gately.’

Glynn sotto: ‘Mother.’ Gately doesn’t get to even ask Green what the fuck again on the stairs because Green is down ahead out the door so fast; the damn front door’s been open all this time. A watercolor of a retrieverish dog cants and then falls from the wall on the staircase from the vibrations of Gately taking two stairs down at a time. He doesn’t take time to grab his coat off Pat’s couch.

All he’s got on is a donated orange bowling shirt with the name Moose cursive-stitched on the breast and SHUCO-MIST M.P.S. in ghastly aqua 253 blocks across the back, and he feels every follicle on his body hump up again as the cold encases him on the front porch and the wheelchair-ramp down to the little walkway. The night is cold and glycerine-clear and quite still. Very distant sounds of car horns and raised voices down on Comm.

Green’s receding at a run off up the little streetlet into a glare of highbeams that diffracts in the clouds of Gately’s breath, so even as Gately walks 254 briskly in Green’s leather-smelling backwash toward a rising hubbub of curses and Lenz’s high-speed voice and Thrale’s glass-shattering cries and Henderson and Willis talking shit angrily to somebody and the sound of Joelle v.D.’s veiled head in an upstairs window that isn’t the 5-Women room’s shouting something down to Gately as he appears in the street, even as he closes in it takes a while for the scene to decoct out of the fog of his breath and its shifting spears of color against the headlights. He passes Glynn’s disembowelled and illegally parked Bug. Several of the residents’ cars are idling at haphazard angles of mid-U-turn in the middle of the street, and in front of them is a modified dark Montego with highbeams and jacked rear wheels and a turbo’s carnivorous idle. Two almost Gately-sized bearded guys in loose like bowling-wear shirts with flowers or suns on them and what look like big faggy necklaces of flowers around what would be their necks if they had necks turn out to be chasing Randy Lenz around this Montego car. Yet another guy with a necklace and a plaid Donegal is holding the rest of the residents at bay on the lawn of #4 with a nasty- 255 looking Item expertly held. Everything now slightly slows down; at the sight of an Item held on his residents there’s almost a kind of mechanistic click as Gately’s mind shifts into a different kind of drive. He gets very cool and clear and his headache recedes and his breathing slows. It’s not so much that things slow as break into frames.

The ruckus has aroused the old nurse in #4 who Asks For Help, and her spectral figure is splayed in a nightie against an upstairs #4 window yelling ‘Eeeeeeeyelp!’ Hester Thrale now has her pink-nailed hands over her eyes and is screaming over and over for nobody to hurt nobody especially her.

It’s the Bulldog Item that holds the attention. The two guys chasing Lenz around the Montego are unarmed but look coldly determined in a way Gately recognizes. They’re not wearing coats either but they don’t look cold. All this appraisal’s taking only seconds; it only takes time to list it.

They have vaguely non-U.S. beards and are each about [[frac43]] Gately’s size. They take turns coming around the car and running past the headlights’ glare and Gately can see they have similar froggy lippy pale foreign faces. Lenz is talking at the guys nonstop, mostly imprecating.

They’re all three going around and around the car like a cartoon. Gately’s still walking up as he sees all this. It’s obvious to appraisal the foreignish guys aren’t real bright because of they’re chasing Lenz in tandem instead of heading around the car in opposite directions to trap him in like a pincer.

They all three stop and start, Lenz across the car from them. Some of the at- bay residents are yelling to Lenz. Like most coke-dealers Lenz is quick on his feet, his topcoat billowing and then settling whenever he stops. Lenz’s voice is nonstop — he’s alternately inviting the guy to perform impossible acts and advancing baroque arguments for how whatever they think he did there’s no way he was even in the same area code as whatever happened that they think he did. The guys keep speeding up like they want to catch Lenz just to shut him up. Ken Erdedy has his hands up and his car keys in his hand; his legs look like he’s about to wet himself. Clenette and the new black girl, clearly veterans at gunpoint-etiquette, are prone on the lawn with their fingers laced behind their heads. Nell Gunther’s assumed Lenz’s old martial-arts Crane stance, hands twisted into flat claws, eyeing the guy’s .44, which pans coolly back and forth over the residents. This smaller guy gets the most frames the slowest. He’s got on a plaid hunting cap that keeps Gately from seeing if he’s foreign also. But the guy’s holding the weapon in the classic Weaver stance of somebody that can really shoot — left foot slightly forward, slightly hunched, a two-handed grip with the right arm cocked elbow-out so the Item’s held high up in front of the guy’s face, up to his sighting eye. This is how policemen and Made Guys from the North End shoot. Gately knows weapons way better than sobriety, still. And the

Item — if the guy trig-pulls on some resident that resident’s going down — the Item’s some customized version of a U.S. .44 Bulldog Special, or maybe a Nuck or Brazilian clone, blunt and ugly and with a bore like the mouth of a cave. The stout alcoholic kid Tingley has both hands to his cheeks and is 100% at bay. The piece’s been modified, Gately can appraise.

The barrel’s been vented out near the muzzle to cut your Bulldog’s infamous recoil, the hammer’s bobbed, and the thing’s got a fat Mag Na Port or -clone grip like the metro Finest favor. This is not a weekend- warrior or liquor-store-holdup type Item; it’s one that’s made real specifically for putting projectiles into people. It’s not a semiauto but is throated for a fucking speed-loader, which Gately can’t see if the guy’s got a speed-loader under the loose floral shirt but needs to assume the guy’s got near-unlimited shots with a speed-loader. The North Shore Finest on the other hand wrap their grips in this like colored gauze that wicks sweat.

Gately tries to recall a past associate’s insufferable ammo-lectures when under the influence — your Bulldog and clones can take anything from light target loads and wadcutter to Colt SofTip dum-dums and worse. He’s pretty sure this thing could put him down with one round; he’s not sure.

Gately’s never been shot but he’s seen guys shot. He feels something that is neither fear nor excitement. Joelle van D. is shouting stuff you can’t make out, and Erdedy at bay on the lawn’s calling out to her to get her head out of the whole picture. Gately’s been bearing down this whole brief time, both seeing his breath and hearing it, beating his arms across his chest to keep some feeling in his hands. You could almost call what he feels a kind of jolly calm. The unAmerican guys chase Lenz and then stop across the car facing him for a second and then get furious again and chase him. Gately guesses he ought to be grateful the third guy doesn’t come over and just shoot him. Lenz puts both hands on whatever part of the car he stops at and sends language out across the car at the two guys. Lenz’s white wig is askew and he’s got no mustache, you can see. E.M. Security, normally so scrupulous with their fucking trucks at 0005h., is nowhere around, lending weight to yet another cliché. If you asked Gately what he was feeling right this second he’d have no idea. He’s got a hand up shading his eyes and closes on the Montego as things further clarify. One of the guys now you can see has Lenz’s disguise’s mustache in two fingers and keeps holding it up and brandishing it at Lenz. The other guy issues stilted but colorful

threats in a Canadian accent, so it emerges on Gately it’s Nucks, the trio Lenz has managed to somehow enrage is Nucks. Gately cops a black surge of Remember-Whenning, the babbling little football-head Québecer he’d killed by gagging a man with a bad cold. This line of thinking is intolerable.

Joelle’s overhead shout to for Christ’s sake somebody call Pat mixes in and out of the Help lady’s cries. It occurs to Gately that the Help lady has cried Wolf for so many years that real shouts for real help are all going to be ignored. The residents all look to Gately as he crosses the street directly into the Montego’s wash of light. Hester Thrale screams out Look out there’s a Item. The plaid-hat Nuck pans stiffly to sight at Gately, his elbow up around his ear. It occurs to Gately if you fire with an Item right up to your sighting-eye like that won’t you get a face full of cordite. There’s a break in the circular action around the throbbing car as Lenz shouts Don with great gusto just as the Help lady shouts for Help. The Nuck with the Item has backed up several steps to keep the residents in his peripheral vision while he sights square on Gately as the massive Nuck holding the mustache across the car tells Gately if he was him he’d return to whence he came, him, to avoid the trouble. Gately nods and beams. Nucks really do pronounce the with a z. Both the car and Lenz are between Gately and the large Nucks, Lenz’s back to Gately. Gately stands quietly, wishing he felt different about potential trouble, less almost jolly. Late in Gately’s Substance and burglary careers, when he’d felt so low about himself, he’d had sick little fantasies of saving somebody from harm, some innocent party, and getting killed in the process and getting eulogized at great length in bold-faced Globe print. Now Lenz breaks away from the hood of the car and dashes Gately’s way and around behind him to stand behind him, spreading his arms wide to put a hand on each of Gately’s shoulders, using Don Gately like a shield. Gately’s stance has the kind of weary resolution of like You’ll Have to Go Through Me. The only anxious part of him can see the Log entry he’ll have to make if residents come to physical grief on his shift. For a moment he can almost smell the smells of the penitentiary, armpits and Pomade and sour food and cribbage-board-wood and reefer and mopwater, the rich piss stink of a zoo’s lion house, the smell of the bars you lace your hands through and stand there, looking out. This line of thinking is intolerable. He’s neither goosepimpled nor sweating. His senses haven’t been this keen in over a year. The stars in their jelly and dirty sodium

lamplight and stark white steer-horns of headlights splayed at residents’ different angles. Star-chocked sky, his breath, faraway horns, low trill of ATHSCMEs way to the north. Thin keen cold air in his wide-open nose.

Motionless heads at #5’s windows.

The Nuck duo with flowers chasing Lenz come around this side and now break away from the car toward them. Now Hester Thrale at Gately’s right periphery breaks away from the cluster and runs for it off into the night across the lawn and behind #4, waving her arms and screaming, and Minty and McDade and Parias-Carbo and Charlotte Treat appear out of Ennet House’s back door across the hedge and mill and jostle amid the mops and old furniture on Ennet’s back porch, watching, and a couple of the more mobile catatonics appear on the porch of the Shed across the little street, staring at the spect-op, all this flummoxing the smaller one so he keeps swinging the Item stiffly this way and that way, trying to keep way more people at potential bay. The two alien foreigners that want Lenz’s map bear down slowly across the Montego’s headlights toward where Lenz is holding Gately like a shield. The larger one that’s so large his luauish shirt won’t even button all the way holding out the mustache adopts the overly reasonable tone that always precedes a serious-type beef. He reads Gately’s bowling shirt in the headlight and says reasonably that Moose still has a chance to keep out of what they’ve got no beef with him, them. Lenz is pouring a diarrheatic spatter of disclaimers and exhortations into Gately’s right ear. Gately shrugs at the Nucks like he’s got no choice but to be here.

Green’s just looking at them. It occurs to Gately by White Flag suggestion that who gives a fuck how it’d look, he ought to hit his knees right here on the headlit blacktop and ask for guidance on this from a Higher Power. But he stands there, Lenz chattering in his shadow. The fingernails of Lenz’s hand on Gately’s shoulder have horseshoes of dried blood in the creases between nail and finger, and there’s a coppery smell off Lenz that isn’t just fear. It occurs to Gately that if he’d pulled the instant spot-urine he’d wanted on Lenz this whole snafu wouldn’t maybe be happening. The one Nuck is holding Lenz’s disguise’s mustache out at them like a blade. Lenz hasn’t asked the time once, notice. Then the other Nuck’s got his hand down at his side and a real blade’s gleam appears in that hand with the familiar snick. At the blade’s sound the situation becomes even more automatic and Gately feels adrenaline’s warmth spread through him as his subdural hardware clicks deeper into a worn familiar long-past track.

Having no choice now not to fight and things simplify radically, divisions collapse. Gately’s just one part of something bigger he can’t control. His face in the left headlight has dropped into its fight-expression of ferocious

good cheer. He says he’s responsible for these people on these private grounds tonight and is part of this whether he wants to be or not, and can they talk this out because he doesn’t want to have to fight them. He says twice very distinctly that he does not want to fight them. He’s no longer divided enough to think about whether this is true. His eyes are on the two men’s maple-leaf belt buckles, the part of the body where you can’t get suckered by a feint. The guys shake their manes and say they’re going to unembowel this craven bâtard here like this sans-Christe bâtard killed somebody they call either Pépé or Bébé, and if Moose has any self-interest he’ll backpedal away from there’s no way it is his duty to get frapped or fropped for this sick gutless U.S.A. bâtard in his womanly wig. Lenz, apparently thinking they’re Brazilian, pops his head around Gately’s flank and calls them maricones and tells them they can suck his bâtard is what they can do. Gately has just division enough to almost wish he didn’t feel such a glow of familiar warmth, a surge of almost sexual competence, as the two shriek at Lenz’s taunts and split and curve in at them an arm’s length apart, walking gradually faster, like unstoppable inertia, but stupidly too close together. At two meters off they charge, shedding petals and unisonly bellowing something in Canadian.

It’s always that everything always speeds up and slows down both.

Gately’s smile broadens as he’s shoved slightly forward by Lenz as Lenz recoils backward off him to run from the guys’ shrieking charge. Gately takes the shove’s momentum and bodychecks the enormous Nuck holding the mustache into the Nuck holding the blade, who goes down with an euf of expelled air. The first Nuck has hold of Gately’s bowling shirt and rips it and punches Gately in the forehead and audibly breaks his hand, letting go of Gately to grab his hand. The punch makes Gately stop thinking in any sort of spiritual terms at all. Gately takes the man’s broken hand’s arm he’s holding out and with his eyes on the ground’s other Nuck breaks the arm over his knee, and as the guy goes down on one knee Gately takes the arm and pirouettes around twisting the broken arm behind the guy’s back and plants his sneaker on the guy’s floral back and forces him forward so there’s a sick crack and he feels the arm come out of the socket, and there’s a high foreign scream. The Nuck with the blade who was down slashes Gately’s calf through his jeans as the guy rolls gracefully left and starts to rise, up on one knee, knife out front, a guy that knows his knives and can’t be closed

with while he’s got the blade up. Gately feints and takes one giant step and gets all his weight into a Rockette kick that lands high up under the Nuck’s beard’s chin and audibly breaks Gately’s big toe in the sneaker and sends the man curving out back into the dazzle of the highbeams, and there’s a metallic boom of him landing on the Montego’s hood and the click and skitter of the blade landing somewhere on the street beyond the car. Gately on one foot, holding his toe, and his slashed calf feels hot. His smile is broad but impersonal. It’s impossible, outside choreographed entertainment, to fight two guys together at once; they’ll kill you; the trick to fighting two is to make sure and put one down for long enough that he’s out of the picture long enough to put the other guy down. And this first larger one with the extreme arm-trouble is clutching himself as he rolls, trying to rise, still perversely holding the white mustache. You can tell this is a real beef because nobody’s saying anything and the sounds from everybody else have receded to the sounds stands’ crowds make and Gately hops over and uses the good foot to kick the Nuck twice in the side of the big head and then without a thought in his head moves down the guy and lines it up and drops to one knee with all his weight on the guy’s groin, resulting in an indescribable sound from the guy and a shout from J.v.D. overhead and a flat crack from the lawn and Gately’s punched so hard in the shoulder he’s spun around on one knee and almost goes over backwards and the shoulder goes hotly numb, which tells Gately he’s gotten shot instead of punched in the shoulder. He never got shot before. SHOT IN SOBRIETY in bold headline caps goes across his mind’s eye like a slow train as he sees the third Nuck with his cap pushed back and Nuck face contorted with cordite in his good stance with elbow back up drawing a second bead on Don’s big head from #4’s lawn with the bore’s lightless eye and a little pubic curl of smoke coming up from the vented muzzle, and Gately can’t move and forgets to pray, and then the bore zagging up and away as it blooms orange as good old Bruce Green’s got the Nuck from behind in a half-nelson with his hand in the necklace of flowers and with the other hand is forcing the cocked elbow down and the Item skyward away from Gately’s head as it blooms with that flat crack of a vented muzzle. The first thing somebody’s who’s shot wants to do is throw up, which by the way the larger Nuck with the breezeblocked crotch under Gately’s doing all over his beard and flower necklace and Gately’s leg’s thigh as Gately weaves on one knee on the

guy’s groin still. The lady yells for Help. Now a meaty thwack as Nell Gunther on the lawn leaps several twirling meters and kicks the Nuck Green’s half-nelsoning in the face with her paratrooper-boot’s heel, and the guy’s hat flies off and his head snaps back and hits Green’s face, and there’s the pop of Green’s nose breaking but he doesn’t let go, and the guy’s slumped forward in the Parkinsonian half-bow of a guy in a quality half- nelson, with the guy’s Item-hand’s arm still up in the air with Green’s arm like they’re dancing, and good old Green doesn’t even let go to hold his spurting nose, and now that the Nuck’s restrained, notice, here comes Lenz barrelling in howling from the hedge’s shadows and leaping and he tackles the Nuck and Green both, and they’re a roil of clothes and legs on the lawn, the Item not in sight. Ken Erdedy still has his hands up. Gately, still kneeling shot on the Nuck’s sickeningly softened groin, Gately hears the second Nuck trying to slide himself off the hood of the Montego and hops and wobbles over. Joelle v.D. keeps yelling something monosyllabic from what can’t be her window. Don goes to the Montego’s front bumper and punches the large man carefully in the kidneys with his good arm and takes him by the thick foreign hair and slides him back up the hood and begins banging his head off the Montego’s wind-shield. He remembers how he’d stay in luxury furnished North Shore apts. with G. Fackelmann and T. Kite and they’d gradually strip the place and sell the appointments off until they were sleeping in a totally bare apartment. Green has risen bloody-faced, and Lenz is on the lawn with his heaving topcoat covering him and the third Nuck, and Clenette H. and Yolanda W. are now up and not at bay and circling them and getting solid high-heel kicks into the Nuck’s and sometimes hopefully Lenz’s ribs, reciting ‘Motha-fucka’ and landing a kick each time they get to fu. Gately, canted way over to the side, methodically beats his Nuck’s shaggy head against the wind-shield so hard that spidered stars are appearing in the shatterproof glass until something in the head gives with a sort of liquid crunch. Petals from the guy’s necklace are all over the hood and Gately’s torn shirt. Joelle v.D. in her terry robe and gauze veil and still clutching a toothbrush has climbed out onto the little balcony outside the 5-Woman’s window and into a skinny ailanthus beside it and is coming down, showing about two meters of spectacularly undeformed thigh, shouting Gately’s name by the first name, which he likes. Gately leaves the largest Nuck prone on the idling hood, his head resting in a

shatter-frosted head-shaped recession in the windshield. It occurs to Ken Erdedy, looking up into the oak past his upraised hands, that this deformed veiled girl likes Don Gately in an extracurricular way, it would seem.

Gately, toe and shoulder or no, has looked strictly all-business this whole time. He’s projected a sort of white-collar attitude of cheery competence and sangfroid. Erdedy’s found he rather likes standing there with his hands up in a gesture of noncombatant status while the Afro-American girls curse and kick and Lenz continues to roll around with the unconscious man hitting him and going ‘There, there,’ and Gately moves backward between the second fellow in the windshield and the first fellow he’d originally disarmed, his smile now as empty as a pumpkin’s grin. Chandler Foss is trying on the third fellow’s plaid hunting cap. There’s a sound in #4 of somebody trying to force a warped window. An Empire W.D.V. is launched with a kind of spronging thud and whistles overhead, climbing, its warning- light wrap of like Xmas lights winking red and green as Don Gately starts to come over in the direction of the lawn and the fellow who appears to have winged him and then veers drunkenly and changes direction and in three one-foot hops is over to the vomit-covered first Nuck, the one who’d called Gately Moose and punched him in the forehead. There’s the slow trundle of the Green T and exhortations from Minty as Gately begins stomping on the supine face of the Nuck with the heel of his good foot as if he were killing cockroaches. The guy’s movable arm is waggling pathetically in the air around Gately’s shoe as it rises and falls. Gately’s hideous torn orange shirt’s whole right side is dark and his right arm drips blackly and seems weirdly set in its socket. Lenz is up and adjusting his wig and brushing off. The veiled girl has hit a rough part some three meters up and is hanging from a limb and kicking, Erdedy staring Copernicanly up her flapping robe. The new Tingley kid sits cross-legged in the grass and rocks as the black ladies continue stomping the inert Nuck. You can hear Emil Minty and Wade McDade exhorting Yolanda W. to use the spike heel.

Charlotte Treat is reciting the Serenity Prayer over and over. Bruce Green has his head back and his finger held like a mustache under his nostrils.

Hester Thrale can still be heard way off down Warren Street, receding, as Gately wobbles back from the Nuck’s map and sits heavily down in the little street, in shadow except for his huge head in the Nucks’ car’s lights, sitting there with his head on his knees. Lenz and Green move in toward

him the cautious way you approach a big animal that’s hurt. Joelle van Dyne lands on her feet. The lady at the high warped window shouts for Helphelphelphelphelp. Minty and McDade come down off the back porch, finally, McDade for some reason wielding a mop. Everybody except Lenz and Minty looks unwell.

256 Joelle runs just like a girl, Erdedy notes. She gets out through the many-angled cars into the street just as Gately decides to lie down.

It’s not like passing out. It’s just a decision Gately makes to like lie back with his knees bent and pointing up into the sky’s depth, which seems to bulge and recede with the pulse in his right shoulder, which has now gone dead cold, which means there will very soon be pain, he predicts.

He waves off concern with the left hand and goes ‘Flesh-wound’ the second Joelle’s bare feet and robe’s hem are in view.

‘Son of a fucking bitch.’

‘Flesh-wound.’

‘Are you ever bleeding.’ ‘Thanks for the feedback.’ You can hear Henderson and Willis off in the background still going ‘fu.’ ‘I think you can tell them he’s probably subdued,’ Gately pointing off in what he thinks is #4’s lawn’s direction. His lying flat gives him a double- chin, he can feel, and pulls his big face into a smile. His big present fear is throwing up in front of and maybe partly on Joelle v.D., whose calves he’s noted.

Now Lenz’s lizard-skin loafers with grass stains at the toes. ‘Don what can I say.’ Gately struggles to sit back up. ‘You got fucking armed Nucks wanting your ass too?’ Revealing a kind of blackly kimonoish thing under, Joelle has taken off the terry robe and folds the robe into a kind of trapezoidal pad and is kneeling over Gately’s shoulder, straddling his arm, pressing down on the

pad with the heels of her hands.

‘Owie.’ ‘Lenz he’s really bleeding bad here.’ ‘I’m groping to even know what to begin to say, Don.’

‘You owe me urine, Lenz.’ ‘I think there’s two of them, like, desisted.’ Wade McD.’s unlaced high-

tops, his voice breathy with awe.

‘He’s bleeding really bad I said.’ ‘You mean deceased.’ ‘There’s one of their shoes in one of them’s fucking eye.’ ‘Tell Ken to put his hands down for Christ’s sake.’ ‘Oh fucking God.’ Gately can feel his eyes crossing and uncrossing by themselves. ‘He soaking right through it man look at that shit.’ ‘This man needs an ambulance.’ Somebody else female says God again and Gately’s hearing warbles a bit as Joelle snaps at her to shut up. She leans down and in, so Gately can see up at what looks like a regular human female chin and makeupless lower lip under the veil’s billowing hem. ‘Whom should we call?’ she asks him. ‘Call Pat’s machine and Calvin. You have to dial 9. Tell them to come

down.’

‘I’m going to be sick.’ ‘Airdaddy!’ Minty is shouting at Ken E. ‘Tell her to call Annie and the E.M. office down there and do some like strategic thing.’ ‘Where the fuck is Security when it isn’t just innocent recovering cars to

get towed?’ ‘And call Pat,’ Gately says.

A forest of footwear and bare feet and shins all around him, and heads too high to see. Lenz screaming back to somebody in the House: ‘Call a

fucking ambulance already.’ ‘Regulate the voice, man.’ ‘Fucking call about five ambulances is more like it.’

‘Mothafucka.’

‘Ssshh.’ ‘I just never saw anything like that.’ ‘Nuh-uh,’ Gately gasps, trying to rise and deciding he just likes it better

lying down. ‘Don’t call one for me.’ ‘This is the straight and narrow?’

‘By doze is fide.’ ‘He doesn’t want one he said.’ Green’s and Minty’s boots, Treat’s purple plastic shower-thongs.

Somebody has on Clearasil, he can smell. ‘Seen some righteous ass-kickings in my past, brother, but —’ Somebody male screams back off to the right. ‘Just don’t try and walk me around,’ Gately grins up. ‘Dipshit.’ ‘He can’t go in no E.R. with a gunshot,’ Minty says to Lenz, whose shoes keep moving to get himself north of everybody.

‘Somebody turn off the car will you?’ ‘I wouldn’t touch nothing.’ Gately focuses at where the Joelle girl’s eyes would be. Her thighs are forked way wide to straddle his arm, which is numb and doesn’t feel like his. She’s bearing down on him. She smells strange but good. She’s got all her weight on her bathrobe’s pad. She weighs roughly nothing. The first threads of pain are starting to radiate out of the shoulder and down the side and into the neck. Gately hasn’t looked down at the shoulder, on purpose, and he tries to wedge his left hand’s finger under the shoulder to see if anything went through. The night’s so clear the stars shine right through

people’s heads.

‘Green.’

‘I’b dot touchig dothig, dud worry.’ ‘Look at his head.’ Her kimono’s shoulders are humped and glassy black in the Montego’s light. Gately’s brain keeps wanting to go away inside himself. When you start to feel deeply cold that’s shock and blood-loss. Gately sort of wills himself to stay right here, looks over past Joelle’s hand at Lenz’s fine shoes.

‘Lenz. You and Green. Get me inside.’ ‘Green!’ The circle of stars’ heads’ faces above are all faceless from the headlights’ shadows. Some car engines have shut off and some haven’t.

One of the cars has a twittering fan-belt. Somebody’s suggesting to call the genuine Finest — Erdedy — which everybody greets with scorn at his naïveté. Gately’s figuring Staff from the Shed or #4 has called them or at least dialed down to Security. By the time he was ten only his pinkie-finger

would fit in the dialer’s holes of his mother’s old princess phone; he exerts will to un-cross his eyes and stay right here; he in the worst way does not want to be lying here with a gunshot in shock trying to deal with the Finest. ‘I think one of these guys is, like, expired.’ ‘No shit Shylock.’ ‘Nobody call.’ Gately yells it up and out. He’s afraid he’s going to vomit when they stand him up. ‘Nobody call nobody til you get me in.’ He can smell Green’s leather jacket overhead. Bits of grass and whatnot drifting down onto him from where Lenz is still brushing off his clothes, and coins of blood on the street from Green’s nose. Joelle tells Lenz if he doesn’t cut something out she’s going to hand him his ass. Gately’s whole right side had gone deadly cold. To Joelle he says, ‘I’m Supervised. I’ll go to jail sure.’ ‘You got fucking eyewitnesses out the ass behind you Don man,’ either McDade or Glynn says, but it can’t be Glynn, for some reason he tries to bring up inside him. And it seems like Charlotte T.’s voice saying Ewell’s trying to get in Pat’s office to call but Gately locked Pat’s door. ‘Nobody call anyone!’ Joelle shouts up and out. She smells good. ‘They’re calling!’ ‘Get him off the phone! Say prank for Christ’s sake! You hear me?’ Her kimono smells good. Her voice has a Staff-like authority. The scene out here has changed: Gately’s down, Madame Psychosis is in charge. ‘We’re going to get him up and we’re going to get him inside,’ she says to the circle. ‘Lenz.’ There’s impending static-crackle and the sound of a serious set of keys.

Her voice is that one Madame lady’s voice on no-subscription radio, from out of nowhere he’s all of a sudden sure, is where he heard that odd empty half-accented voice before. ‘Secyotty! Hold it right thaah.’ It’s at least luckily one of the ex-football E.M. Security guys, that spends half his shift down at the Life and then goes up and down the streetlet all night playing with his service baton and singing sea chanties off-key, that’s just impressively qualified to Come In to

AA with them.

Joelle: ‘Erdedy — deal with him.’

‘Pardon me?’ ‘It’s the drunk,’ Gately gets out.

Joelle’s looking up at presumably Ken E. ‘Go over and look high- income and respectable at him. Verbalize at him. Distract him while we get him inside before the real ones come.’ ‘How am I supposed to explain all these prone figures draped over cars?’ ‘For Christ’s sake Ken he’s not a mental titan — distract him with something shiny or something. Get your thumb out of your ass and move.’ Gately’s smile has reached his eyes. ‘You’re Madame on the FM, is how I knew you.’ Erdedy’s squeaky shoe and the obese guy’s radio and keys. ‘Who hold

it? As in desist?’ ‘Secyotty I said halt!’ Green and Lenz bending in, white breath all over and Green’s dripping nose the same copper smell as Lenz. ‘I knew I knew you,’ Gately says to Joelle, whose veil remains inscrutable. ‘If I could ask you to specify halt from what.’ ‘Get his back up here first,’ Green tells Lenz. ‘Not crazy about all this blood,’ Lenz is saying.

Many hands slide under his back; the shoulder blooms with colorless fire. The sky looks so 3-D you could like dive in. The stars distend and sprout spikes. Joelle’s warm legs shift with her weight to keep pressure on the pad. The squishing sound Gately knows means the robe’s soaked through. He wants somebody to congratulate him for not having thrown up.

You can tell some of the stars are nearer and some far, down there. What Gately’s always thought of as the Big Question Mark is really the Big Dipper. ‘I’m oddering desist until who’s in chahge that I can repot the sichation.’ The Security guy’s hammered, his name’s Sidney or Stanley and he wears his Security-hat and baton shopping in the Purity Supreme and always asks Gately how it’s hanging. His shoes’ uppers are blasted along the feet’s insides the way fat men that have to walk a lot’s are; his ex- ballplayer’s collops and big hanging gut are one of Gately’s great motivators for nightly situps. Gately turns his head to throw up a little on both Green and Joelle, who both ignore it. ‘Oh sorry. Oh shit I hate that.’

Joelle v.D. runs a hand down Gately’s wet arm that leaves a warm wake, the hand, and then gently squeezes as much of the wrist as she can get her

hand around. ‘And Lo,’ she says softly. ‘Jesus his leg’s all bloody too.’ ‘Boy do I know guys loved that show you did.’ A tiny bit more throwing up. ‘Now we’re going to lift him very gently and get the feet under.’ ‘Here Green man get over here on the south why don’t you.’ ‘I’m oddering the whole sitchation halt it right thaah whey aah.’ Lenz and Green’s shoes coming together and moving apart at either side of Gately, faces coming down in a fish-eye lens, lifting: ‘Ready?’

Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment: InterLace TelEntertainment, 932/1864 R.I.S.C. power-TPs w/ or w/o console, Pink, post-Primestar2 D.S.S. dissemination, menus and icons, pixel-free InterNet Fax, tri- and quad-modems w/ adjustable baud, post-Web Dissemination-Grids, screens so high-def you might as well be there, cost-effective videophonic conferencing, internal Froxx CD-ROM, electronic couture, all-in-one consoles, Yushityu ceramic nanoprocessors, laser chromatography, Virtual- capable media-cards, fiber-optic pulse, digital encoding, killer apps; carpal neuralgia, phosphenic migraine, gluteal hyperadiposity, lumbar stressae.

Half of all metro Bostonians now work at home via some digital link. 50% of all public education disseminated through accredited encoded pulses, absorbable at home on couches. Ms. Tawni Kondo’s immensely popular exercise program spontaneously disseminated daily in all three O.N.A.N. time zones at 0700h., a combination of low-impact aerobics, Canadian Air Force calisthenics, and what might be termed ‘cosmetic psychology’ — upwards of 60 million North Americans daily kicking and genuflecting with Tawni Kondo, a mass choreography somewhat similar to those compulsory A.M. tai chi slo-mo exercise assemblies in post-Mao China — except that the Chinese assemble publicly together. One-third of those 50% of metro

Bostonians who still leave home to work could work at home if they wished. And (get this) 94% of all O.N.A.N.ite paid entertainment now absorbed at home: pulses, storage cartridges, digital displays, domestic decor — an entertainment-market of sofas and eyes.

Saying this is bad is like saying traffic is bad, or health-care surtaxes, or the hazards of annular fusion: nobody but Ludditic granola-crunching freaks would call bad what no one can imagine being without.

But so very much private watching of customized screens behind drawn curtains in the dreamy familiarity of home. A floating no-space world of personal spectation. Whole new millennial era, under Gentle and Lace- Forché. Total freedom, privacy, choice.

Hence the new millennium’s passion for standing live witness to things.

A whole sub-rosa schedule of public spectation opportunities, ‘spect-ops,’ the priceless chance to be part of a live crowd, watching. Thus the Gapers’ Blocks at traffic accidents, sewer-gas explosions, muggings, purse- snatchings, the occasional Empire W.D.V. with an incomplete vector splatting into North Shore suburbs and planned communities and people leaving their front doors agape in their rush to get out and mill around and spectate at the circle of impacted waste drawing sober and studious crowds, milling in rings around the impact, earnestly comparing mental notes on just what it is they all see. Hence the apotheosis and intricate pecking-order of Boston street musicians, the best of whom now commute to work in foreign autos. The nightly chance to crank back the drapes and face out into the streets at 0000h., when all street-parked vehicles have to switch sides and everyone goes nuts and mills, either switching or watching. Street fights, supermarket-checkout confrontations, tax-auctions, speeders stopped for ticketing, coprolaliac Touretters on downtown corners, all drawing liquid crowds. The fellowship and anonymous communion of being part of a watching crowd, a mass of eyes all not at home, all out in the world and pointed the same way. Q.v. the crowd-control headaches at crime-scenes, fires, demonstrations, rallies, marches, displays of Canadian insurgency; crowds brought together now so quickly, too quickly even to see them, a kind of visual inversion of watching something melt, the crowds collect and are held tight by an almost seemingly nucleic force, watching together.

Almost anything can do it. Street vendors are back. Homeless vets and twisted figures in wheelchairs with hand-lettered signs outlining

entitlement. Jugglers, freaks, magicians, mimes, charismatic preachers with portable PAs. Hardcore pan-handlers stem like they’re selling nostrums to small crowds; the best pan-handling now verges on stand-up comedy, and is rewarded by watching crowds. Cultists in saffron with much percussion and laser-jet leaflets. Even some old-style Eurobeggars, black-browed persons in striped leggings, mute and aloof. Even local candidates, activists, advocates and grass-roots aides have returned full-circle to the public stump — the bunting-hung platform, the dumpster-lid, vehicles’ roofs, awnings, anything overhead, anything raised to a crowd-collecting public view: people climb and declaim, drawing crowds.

One top Back Bay public spect-op every November is watching expressionless men in federal white and municipal cadet-blue drain and scrub the Public Gardens’ man-made duck pond for the upcoming winter.

They drain it sometime in November every year. It’s publicly unannounced; there’s no fixed schedule; long shiny trucks just all of a sudden appear in a ring at pond’s rim; it’s always a weekday c. mid-November; it’s also always somehow a gray raw sad windy Boston day, gulls cartwheeling in a sky the color of dirty glass, people mufflered and with new gloves on. Not your ideal sylvan-type day for conventional lounging or public spectation. But a massive crowd always collects and thickens in a dense ring along the banks of the Public Gardens’ pond. The pond has ducks. The pond is perfectly round, its surface roughened to elephant skin by the wind, geometrically round and banked with lawn-quality grass and shrubbery in even-spaced clumps, with park-type benches between the shrubs overhung by white- barked willows who’ve now wept their yellow autumn grit onto the green benches and grass banks where an arc of crowd now forms and thickens, watching duly designated authorities commence to drain the pond. Some of the pond’s flightier ducks have already decamped for points south, and more leave on some phylogenic cue just as the shiny trucks pull up, but the main herd remains. Two private planes fly in lazy ellipses just under the cloud-cover overhead, banners strung out behind them advertising four different levels of comfort and protection from Depend. The wind keeps blowing the banners sideways, möbiusizing them and then straightening them back out with the loud pop of flags unfurling. From the ground the engines and banners’ pops are too faint to hear above the crowd-noise and ducks and wind’s mean whistle. The swirling groundwind’s so bad that U.S.

Chief of Unspecified Services Rodney Tine, standing with his hands at the small of his back at a window on the eighth floor of the State House Annex on Beacon and Joy Sts., looking southwest and down at the concentric rings of pond and crowd and trucks, can see wind-driven leaves and street-grit swirling right outside and pecking at this very window he stands before, massaging his coccyx.

Dr. James O. Incandenza, filmmaker and almost a scopophile about spect-ops and crowds, never once missed this spectacle, when alive and in town. Hal and Mario have both been to a few. So have several Ennet residents, though some of them weren’t in much of a position to remember.

It seems as if everyone in metro Boston’s seen at least one pond-draining.

It’s always the same sort of grim windy Northeast November day where if you were at home you’d be eating earth-tone soups in a warm kitchen, listening to the wind and glad of home and hearth. Every year Himself came was the same. The deciduous trees were always skeletal, the pines palsied, the willows wind-whipped and nubbly, the grass dun and crunchy underfoot, the water-rats always seeing the big drainage-picture first and gliding like night to the cement sides to flee. Always a crowd in thickening rings. Always rollerblades on the Gardens’ paths, lovers joined at the hand, Frisbee in the distance on the rim of the Gardens’ other side’s hillside’s slope, which faces away from the pond.

U.S. Office of Unspecified Services Chief Rodney Tine stands at the unclean window for much of the morning, ruminative, his posture a martial at-ease. A stenographer and an aide and a Deputy Mayor and the Director of the Massachusetts Division for Substance Abuse Services, and 257 Unspecified Services Regional Operatives Rodney Tine Jr. and Hugh 258 Steeply all sit silently in the conference room behind him, the stenographer’s Gregg pen poised in mid-dictation. The eighth-floor window’s purview goes all the way to the ridge of the hillside at the Gardens’ other end. Two Frisbees and what looks like a disembowelled ring of Frisbee float back and forth along this ridge, dreamily floating back and forth, sometimes dipping below the ridge and lost, for a moment, to the specular vision of Tine.

Trying at the same time to give his bad skin some quality UV and a good chill’s chap, the grad-work-study engineer of M.I.T.’s WYYY-109 lies

bare-chested on a silvery NASA-souvenir space blanket, supine and cruciform at about the angle of a living-room recliner on the Public Gardens’ far hillside. This is out by Arlington St., in the Gardens’ southwest corner, hidden by its ridge from the pond’s basin and tourism booth and pavilion and the hub of radial paths and the giant verdigrised statues of ducklings in a row commemorating Robert McCloskey’s beloved and timeless Make Way for Ducklings. The Gardens’ only other slope is now the bowl of the former pond. The hillside’s grassy decline, not too steep, runs at a wedge’s angle down toward Arlington St. and is one broad greensward, free of dog droppings because dogs won’t go to the bathroom on inclined terrain. Frisbees float on the ridge behind the engineer’s head, and four lithe boys on the ridge play a game with a small beanbaggy ball and bare blue feet. It is 5° C. The sun has the attenuated autumn quality of seeming to be behind several panes of glass. The wind is bitter and keeps flopping unmoored sections of NASA blanket over parts of the engineer’s body. Goose-pimples and real pimples jostle each other for space on his exposed flesh. The student engineer’s is the hillside’s only metallic space blanket and bare torso. He lies there splayed, wholly open to the weak sun.

The WYYY student engineer is one of roughly three dozen human forms scattered over the steep slope, a human collection without pattern or cohesion or anything to bind them, looking rather like firewood before it’s been gathered. Wind-bronzed sooty men in zipperless parkas and mismatched shoes, some of the Gardens’ permanent residents, sleeping or in stupors of various origin. Curled on their sides, knees drawn up, unopen to anything. In other words huddled. From the great height of one of Arlington St.’s office buildings, the forms look like things dumped onto the hillside from a great height. An overhead veteran’d be apt to see a post- battle-battlefield aspect to the array of forms. Except for the WYYY engineer, all the men are textured in urban scuz, unshaven, yellow-fingered and exposure-bronzed. They have coats and bedrolls for blankets and old twine-handle shopping bags and Glad bags for recyclable cans and bottles.

Also huge camper’s packs without any color to them. Their clothes and appurtenances are the same color as the men, in other words. A few have steel supermarket-carts filled with possessions and wedged by their owners’ bodies against a downhill roll. One of the cart-owners has vomited in his sleep, and the vomit has assumed a lava-like course toward the huddled

form of another man curled just downhill. One of the shopping carts, from upscale Bread & Circus, has an ingeniously convenient little calculator on its handlebar, designed to let shoppers subtotal their groceries as they select them. The men have sepia nails and all somehow look toothless whether they have teeth or not. Every so often a Frisbee lands among them. The loose ball makes a beanbaggy sound against players’ feet above and behind them. Two skinny and knit-capped boys descend very close to the engineer, chanting very softly ‘Smoke,’ ignoring all the other forms, which anyone could tell are undercapitalized for purchasing Smoke. When his eyes are open he’s the only one on the hillside to see the round bellies of ascending ducks pass low overhead, catching a thermal off the hillside and rising to wheel away left, due south. His WYYY-109 T-shirt and inhaler and glasses and M. Fizzy and spine-split copy of Metallurgy of Annular Isotopes are just off the edge of the reflecting blanket. His torso is pale and ribby, his chest covered with tough little buttons of acne scar. The hillside’s grass is still pretty viable. One or two of the scattered fetal forms have black cans of burnt-out Sterno beside them. Bits of the hillside are reflected in Arlington’s storefronts and office windows and the glass of passing cars. An unexceptional white Dodge or Chevy-type van pulls out of Arlington’s traffic and does some pretty impressive parallel parking along the curb at the hillside’s bottom. A man in an ancient NATO-surplus wool greatcoat is up on his hands and knees to the engineer’s lower left, throwing up. Bits of chyme hang from his mouth and refuse to detach. There’s little bloody threads in it. His hunched form looks somehow canine on the uneven slope.

The fetal figure wedged unconscious under the front wheels of the shopping cart nearest the engineer has only one shoe, and that shoe’s without laces.

The exposed sock is ash-colored. Besides the HANDICAPPED license plate, the only exceptional things about the van now idling at the curb far below are the tinted windows and the fact that the van is spotless and twinkly with wax to about halfway up its panelled side, but above that line dirty and rust-saucered and shamefully neglected-looking. The engineer has been turning his head this way and that, trying to tan evenly along his whole jawline. The curbside van idles at a distant little point between his heels.

Some of the hillside’s forms have curled themselves around bottles and pipes. A smell comes off them, rich and agricultural. The student engineer doesn’t usually try to sun and chap his skin at the same time, but chapping-

ops have lately been scarce: since Madame Psychosis of ‘60+/ȹ’ took her sudden leave of medical absence, the student engineer hasn’t once had the heart to sit out on the Union’s convoluted roof and monitor the substitute shows.

The engineer moves his upturned face back and forth. First, Madame was replaced by a Mass Comm. graduate student who proved a crushing disappointment as a Miss Diagnosis; then Madame was publicly deemed irreplaceable by management, and the engineer is now paid simply to cue her background music and then sit monitoring a live mike for a noiseless 60 minutes, which means he has to stay in his booth maintaining 0-levels with a live mike and can’t ascend with his receiver and cigarettes even if he wanted to. The station’s student manager’s given the engineer written instructions on just what to say when people phone in during the hour to inquire and wish Psychosis a speedy recovery from whatever might ail her.

At once denying and encouraging rumors of suicide, institutionalization, spiritual crisis, silent retreat, pilgrimage to the snow-capped East. The disappearance of someone who’s been only a voice is somehow worse instead of better. A terrible silence now, weeknights. A different silence altogether from the radio-silence-type silence that used to take up over half her nightly show. Silence of presence v. silence of absence, maybe. The silences on the tapes are the worst. Some listeners have actually come in and down through the deep cortex and into the cold pink studio itself, to inquire. Some to allay this firm conviction that Madame was still actually still showing up and sitting there by the mike but not saying anything.

Another of the men sleeping nearby keeps punching at the air in his sleep.

Almost all the personal wee-hour inquiries are from listeners somehow bent, misshapen, speech-defective, vacantly grinning, damaged in some way. The type whose spectacles have been repaired with electrician’s tape.

Shyly inquiring. Apologies for bothering someone they can clearly see is not even there. Before the student manager’s written instructions, the student engineer’d wordlessly directed their attention to Madame’s triptych screen with no silhouette behind it. Another white Dodge van, just as unevenly clean and opaque-windowed, has appeared on the ridge above and behind the hillside’s littered forms. It casts no visible shadow. A Frisbee- ring caroms off the clean grille of its snout. It idles, its panel door facing the declivity and the other white van’s panel door far below. One hideous little

inquirer had had a hat with a lens on it and seemed about to fall forward into the engineer’s lap. His attendant wanting some address where they might send something supportive and floral. The NASA blanket’s micronized aluminumoid coating is designed to refract every possible UV ray into the student engineer’s bare skin. The engineer knows about the ambulance and the Brigham and Women’s ICU and five-day rehab ward from the thick swart girl Notkin, the one with the disreputable hat and Film- Dept. I.D. who came down via the Basilar elevator late at night to retrieve some old tapes of the program for the Madame’s personal listening use, she said, and was fortunate enough to know the Madame in private life, she said. The term is Treatment, Madame Psychosis is in long-term Treatment at something the bearded girl in the sooty hat obliquely described as only half a house in some unbelievably unpleasant and low-rent part of the metro- area. This is the precise total of what the WYYY engineer knows. He is shortly to have occasion to wish he knew a great deal more. Q.v. the dimpled steel ramp now protruding from the squeakily opened panel door of the van on the ridge above and behind him. Q.v. the utter darkness inside the idling van down along the Arlington St. curb, whose side panel’s also been slid open from within. The southwest hillside is copless: the Gardens’ platoon of M.D.C. Finest are all in their souped-up golf carts over at the drained pond, throwing curved sections of glazed doughnut into the ducks’ shrubbery and telling a largely-dispersed-already crowd to please move along. The ridge’s Frisbees and hackysackers have abruptly vanished; there’s now an eerie stillness like a reef when a shark cruises through; the ridge’s van’s idling maw open and black, silver-tongued.

Q.v. also the wheelchair that now all of a sudden shoots down the hillside’s van’s ramp as a madly squeaking brass-colored blur, a snowplow- like scoop-type thing welded to it and out front skimming the ground and throwing off chaff from the swath of grass it’s mowing, moving terrifically fast, brakes unapplied, the legless figure up on burly stumps in the chair fleur-de-lis-with-sword-stem-masked and bent far forward for a skier’s pure speed, the huddled fetal hillside figures the speeding chair slaloms, the dim glittered movements of arrangement for reception deep within the curbside van way at the bottom of the steep grade, the engineer arching his neck way out to capture sun on the scarred hollows under his jaw, the shopping cart with the calculator clipped by a squeaking rubberized wheel at an angle and

sent clattering off down the hillside, spraying possessions, the homeless shoe to which it had been roped skittering empty behind it and the cart’s now shoeless unconscious owner just waving at the air in front of his face in sleep as if at a bad D.T.-dream of lost shoe and worldly goods, the calculating cart whumping into the side of the hunched man vomiting and flipping over and bouncing several times and the vomiting man rolling and yelping, vulgarities echoing, the WYYY engineer now to be seen hiking himself up on a chill-reddened elbow with a start and starting to turn and look above and behind him up at the ridge just as the speeding wheelchair with the hunched figure reaches him and the chair’s shovel scoops the engineer and his NASA blanket and shirt and book up and runs over the glasses and bottle of M. Fizzy with one wheel and bears the engineer in the scoop up and away and down the steep grade toward the idling van at the bottom, a van whose own angled ramp now slides out like a tongue or Autoteller’s transaction-receipt, the NASA blanket blowing away from the scooped engineer’s flailing form about halfway down and suddenly aloft in a hillside thermal and blown far out over Arlington St. traffic by the keen November wind, the madly squeaking wheelchair aloft over hillside moguls and coming back down and up again, the snatched engineer in the chair’s scoop appearing to the hillside’s roused figures mostly as a hallucinatory waggle of bare limbs and strangely wheezy shrieks for Help or at least to Look Out Below, all as the modified chair squeaks frantically straight down the hillside’s most efficient downward line toward the van with the ramp now idling in gear, its pipe’s exhaust beating the street in high-rpm idle, the NASA blanket twisting coruscant in the air high above the street, and the shriek-roused figures on the hillside lying there still bent in and barely moving, stiff with cold and general woe, except for the hunched man, the unwell man who’d been hit by the dislodged cart, who’s rolled to a stop and is thrashing, holding the parts that were hit.

11 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

1810h., 133 kids and thirteen assorted staff sitting down at suppertime, the E.T.A. dining hall taking most of the first floor of West House, a sort of

airy atrium-like commons, broad and knotty-pine-panelled, the east wall hugely fenestrated and columns running the length of the room at center, with ceiling fans high overhead circulating the rich and slightly sour smell of bulk-prepared food, the oceanic sound of 20 different tables’ conversation, the flat clink of utensils on plates, much chewing, the clank and tinkle of the dishwasher’s conveyor belt behind the tray-bus window with its sign saying YR MOTHER DOES NOT LIVE HERE; BUS YR TRAY, the muffled shouts of kitchen workers in steam. The top upperclassmen get the best table, an un-spoken tradition, the one nearest the gas fireplace in winter and the AC venting in July, the one whose chairs’ legs are all pretty much even, both seats and backs with thin corduroy cushions in E.T.A. red and gray. The prorectors have their own permanent table near the carbs bar; the Syrian Satelliter and enormous peasant-skirted Moment soft-profiler are with them.

The players can all do some very serious eating, some of them still in sweaty sweats with salt-stiff hair, too hungry after three-set P.M.s to shower before refueling. Coed tables are quietly discouraged. The Boys 18’s and the cream of the 16’s are all at the best table. Ortho (‘The Darkness’) Stice, E.T.A.’s 16’s A-1, has just this P.M. gone three sets with Hal Incandenza, seventeen, E.T.A.’s second-best overall boy, taking Hal all the way to 7–5 in the third in an off-record nonchallenge exhibitionish engagement Schtitt had them play out on the West Courts that afternoon for reasons no one has yet pinned down. The match’s audience had grown steadily as other challenges got done and people came up from the weight room and showers. News that Stice had very nearly beaten an Inc nobody but John Wayne has been able to beat has made its figure-eight way around the tables and serving line and salad bar, and lots of younger kids keep looking to the best table and Stice, sixteen, crew-cutted and still in his black Fila sweats with no shirt under the unzipped top, assembling a complex sandwich on his plate, and they let their eyes widen and postures sag to communicate awe: R.H.I.P.

Stice, oblivious, bites into his sandwich like it’s the wrist of an assailant.

The only sound at the table for the first few minutes is of forkwork and mastication and the slight gasping sounds of people trying to breathe while they eat. You rarely speak for the first few minutes here, eating. Supper is deadly-serious. Some of the kids even start in on their trays while still in

line at the milk dispenser. Now Coyle bites in. Wayne has made his entree into a sandwich and lowers and bites. Keith Freer’s eyes are half closed as his jaw muscles bulge and slacken. Some of the players’ inclined heads are hard to see over the height of their food. Struck and Schacht, side by side, bite in sync and chew. The only one at the table not eating like a refugee is Trevor Axford, who as a small child back in Short Beach CT once fell off his bike onto his head and received a tiny lesion-type brain injury after which all food everywhere tastes horrible to him. His clearest explanation of the way food tastes to him is that it tastes the way vomit smells. He’s discouraged from speaking at meals and holds his nose while he eats and eats with the neutral joyless expression of somebody dispensing fuel into his car. Hal Incandenza dismantles the stelliform-mold shape E.T.A. mashed potatoes come in, mixing baby-boileds in with the mashed.

Petropolis Kahn and Eliot Kornspan eat with such horrible P.O.W.ish gusto that nobody else will sit with them — they’re by themselves at a small table behind Schacht and Struck, utensils glittering amid a kind of fine mist or spray. Jim Troeltsch keeps holding a clear tumbler of milk up to the ceiling’s full-spectrum lights and swirling the milk around in the light, looking at it. Pemulis chews with his mouth open, producing moist noises, a habit so family-of-origin-ingrained no amount of peer pressure can break him of it.

Eventually The Darkness clears his throat to speak. In the showers he’d gotten up to the middle of an Xmas story about one of his parents’ epic rows. His parents had met and fallen in love in a Country/Western bar in Partridge KS — just outside Liberal KS on the Oklahoma border — met and fallen in star-crossed love in a bar playing this popular Kansas C/W- bar-game where they put their bare forearms together and laid a lit cigarette in the little valley between the two forearms’ flesh and kept it there till one of them finally jerked their arm away and reeled away holding their arm.

Mr. and Mrs. Stice each discovered somebody else that wouldn’t jerk away and reel away, Stice explained. Their forearms were still to this day covered with little white slugs of burn-scar. They’d toppled like pines for each other from the git-go, Stice explained. They’d been divorced and remarried four or five times, depending on how you defined certain juris-prudential precepts. When they were on good domestic terms they stayed in their bedroom for days of squeaking springs with the door locked except for brief

sallies out for Beefeater gin and Chinese take-out in little white cardboard pails with wire handles, with the Stice children wandering ghostlike through the clapboard house in sagging diapers or woolen underwear subsisting on potato chips out of econobags bigger than most of them were, the Stice kids. The kids did somewhat physically better during periods of nuptial strife, when a stony-faced Mr. Stice slammed the kitchen door and went off daily to sell crop insurance while Mrs. Stice — whom both Mr. Stice and The Darkness called ‘The Bride’ — while The Bride spent all day and evening cooking intricate multicourse meals she’d feed bits of to The Brood (Stice refers to both himself and his six siblings as ‘The Brood’) and then keep warm in quietly rattling-lidded pots and then hurl at the kitchen walls when Mr. Stice came home smelling of gin and of cigarette-brands and toilet-eau not The Bride’s own. Ortho Stice loves his folks to distraction, but not blindly, and every holiday home to Partridge KS he memorizes highlights of their connubial battles so he can regale the E.T.A. upperclassmen with them, mostly at meals, after the initial forkwork and gasping have died down and people have returned to sufficient levels of blood-sugar and awareness of their surroundings to be regaled. Some of them listen, drifting in and out. Troeltsch and Pemulis are arguing about whether E.T.A.’s kitchen staff has started trying to slip them powdered milk on the sly. Freer and Wayne are still hunched and chewing, very intent.

Hal’s making some sort of structure out of his food. Struck keeps both elbows on the table at all times and utensils in his clenched fists like a parody of a man eating. Pemulis always listens to Stice’s tales, often repeating little phrases, shaking his head in admiration. ‘I’m just going to go up and refuse to eat one more thing with a utensil that’s gone down the disposal.’ Schacht is holding up a fork with crazy tines. ‘Just look at it. Who could eat with something like that.’ ‘The old man is a son of a bitch that is cool under fire, in terms of The Bride,’ Stice says, leaning in to bite and chew. The tendency at E.T.A. is to take the entree and unless it’s a wet entree to take wheat bread and make it a sandwich, for the extra carbs. It’s like Pemulis can’t really taste his food unless he mashes it against his palate. The Academy’s wheat bread is bicycled in by guys in Birkenstock sandals from Bread & Circus Quality Provisions in Cambridge, because it’s got to be not only sugarless but low in glutens, which Tavis and Schtitt believe promote torpor and excess

mucus. Axford, who lost to Tall Paul Shaw in straight sets and if he loses to him again tomorrow goes down to #5-A, stares stonily into space, his motions less like somebody eating than like somebody miming eating. Hal’s made an intricate fortification-structure of his food, complete with turrets and archer-slits, and even though he’s not much eating or drinking his six cranberry juices he keeps swallowing a lot, studying his structure. As the eating slows down at the best table the more observant of them give Hal and Ax-ford tiny sideways looks, the players’ different CPUs humming through Decision Trees on whether a still-publicly-undiscussed but much- rumored showdown with Dr. Tavis and the O.N.A.N.T.A. urology guy, plus now this loss to Shaw and near-loss to Ortho Stice, might not have shaken Inc and Axhandle along some psychic competitive fault-line, different guys with different rankings calculating the permuted advantages to themselves of Hal and Axford having a deeply distracted and anxious week. Though Michael Pemulis, the other rumored O.N.A.N.T.A. urine-scannee, ignores Axford’s expression and Hal’s excessive swallowing altogether, though 259possibly studiously ignoring them, staring meditatively at the squeegees taken down off the wall and leaning against the unlit fireplace, fingers steepled before his lips, hearing out Troeltsch, who blows his nose with one hand and rattles his tumbler of half-drunk milk on the tabletop with the other.

Pemulis shakes his head very seriously at Troeltsch. ‘Not a chance, brother.’ ‘I’m telling you man this milk is powdered.’ Troeltsch peering down into the tumbler, probing the milk’s surface with a thick finger. ‘Me I can tell from powdered. I have growing-up domestic confirmed traumas around powdered. The day Mother announced milk was too heavy to keep lugging back from the store and switched to powdered, with Father’s OK. Father knuckling under like Roosevelt at Yalta. My big sister ran away from home, and the rest of us were traumatized around it, this switch to powdered, which is unmistakable if you know what to look for.’ Freer makes a snoring noise. ‘And do I ever know what to look for, to verify.’ Troeltsch is hoarse, and one of these people who speaks to more than one person at once by looking from one person to one person to one person; he’s not a born public speaker.

‘Namely your telltale residues along the sides of the glass, when swished.’ W/ great flourished swishings of the milk. ‘Except Troeltsch you can turn around and see them fucking loading the bags into the dispenser every twenty minutes. Bags of milk. That say MILK on them, the bags. Liquid, sloshy, hard to handle. It’s milk.’ ‘You see bags, you see the word MILK. They’re counting on the packaging. Image management. Sensory management.’ Responding to Pemulis but looking at Struck. ‘Part of some larger overall kertwang.

Possible punishment for the Eschaton thing.’ Eyes going briefly to Hal. ‘Covert vitamins possibly next. Let’s not even mention saltpeter. Put aside deductions from bags a second. I’m sticking to facts. Fact: this is verifiably powdered milk.’ ‘You’re saying they mix powdered milk and then try and pour it into milk-bags, all to allay?’ Schacht clears his mouth and swallows mightily. ‘Tavis can’t even regrout tile in the locker room without calling a Community Meeting or appointing a committee. The Regrouting Committee’s been dragging along since May. Suddenly they’re pulling secret 0300 milk-switches? It doesn’t ring true, Jim.’ ‘And Troeltsch has a cold, he said,’ Freer observes, indicating the little bottle of Seldane next to Troeltsch’s squeezing-ball, by his plate. ‘You can’t even taste, Troeltsch, if you got a real cold.’ ‘Trevor should have the cold, Axhandle, no?’ Schacht says, tapping carminative capsules onto his palm from his own amber bottle.

With supper they can choose milk or else cranberry juice, that most carb-caloric of juices, which froths redly in its own clear dispenser by the salad bar. The milk dispenser stands alone against the west wall, a big huge 24-liter three-bagger, the milk inserted in ovaloid mammarial bags into its refrigerated cabinet of brushed steel, with three receptacles for tumblers and three levers for controlled dispensing. There’s two levers for skim and one for supposedly high-lecithin chocolate skim, which every new E.T.A. tries exactly once and discovers tastes like skim with a brown crayon melted into it. There’s a sign in a kitchen-staffer’s crude black block caps taped to the dispenser’s façade that says MILK IS FILLING; DRINK WHAT YOU TAKE. The sign used to say MILK IS FILLING, DRINK WHAT YOU TAKE until the comma was semicolonized by the insertion of a blue dot by

260 a fairly obvious person. The line for seconds on entrees now stretches out past the milk dispenser. The best thing about satiation and slowing down on the eating is leaning back and feeling autolysis start in on what you ate and tending to your teeth while you gaze around the airy room at crowds and clumps of kids, observing behaviors and pathologies with a clear and sated head. The littler kids running in tight circles trying to follow the shadow of the ceiling fan. Girls laughing crumpled against their seatmates’ shoulders. People protecting their plates. The blurred sexuality and indecisive postures of puberty. Two marginal male 16’s have their heads directly in the bowls in the salad bar, and some of the surrounding females are commenting. Different kids are illustrating points with different gestures. John Wayne and Keith Freer stroll purposefully through the serpentine crowd and up to the front of the Seconds line and insert themselves in front of a little boy who’s tearing at a held bagel with great violent movements of head and neck. The 18-A’s get free buttinskis: R.H.I. literal P., at E.T.A. Jim Struck spears one of the cherry tomatoes out of Hal’s salad bowl with a savage fork-gesture; Hal makes no comment.

Troeltsch has run his thick finger around the inside of the tumbler and is holding the digit out at different guys around the table. ‘Note a certain bluish cast to it. Traces and remains. Suspicious foam. Minute grains of not quite altogether dissolved particulate powdered stuff. Powdered always leaves its telltale signs.’ ‘Your fucking head is a minute grain, Troeltsch.’

‘Put that finger away.’ ‘Tryna eat here.’ ‘Paranoia,’ Pemulis says, scooping up stray peas with the flat of his knife. ‘Base tuition of 21,700 scooters, not counting,’ Troeltsch says, moving the finger back and forth in the air — the stuff drying on the finger does not, admittedly, exactly look appetite-whetting — ‘and yet let’s note how the Lung’s not up in spite of rampant weather and Achilles’-complaints, and today’s lunch a total déjà vu of yesterday’s lunch, and the bread and bagels they’ve started getting us Day-Old with the yellow stickers on the bags, and there’s dinette sets in the tunnels and acoustic tiles in the halls and lawn- mowers in the kitchen and tripods in the grass and squeegees on the wall

and Stice’s bed moves around, and there’s a ball machine in the girls’ lockers, Longley reports, that for this kind of tuition none of this stuff the staff can get around to cleaning up bef—’ Stice’s head has jerked up, a trace of mashed potato on his nose. ‘Who says my bed moves? How’s it you know anything about any beds moving?’ But it’s true. The Husky VI tripod of Mario’s near-fatal encounter with the U.S.S. Millicent Kent was only the beginning. Starting with the mysterious and continuing fall of acoustic ceiling-tiles from their places in the subdorms’ drop ceilings, inanimate objects have either been moved into or just out of nowhere appearing in wildly inappropriate places around E.T.A. for the past couple months in a steadily accelerating and troubling cycle. Last week a grounds-crew lawnmower sitting clean and silent and somehow menacing in the middle of the dawn kitchen gave Mrs. Clarke the fantods and resulted in Eggplant Parmesan for two suppers in a row, which sent shock waves. Yesterday A.M. there’d been a cannonesque ball machine — no small feat to move around anywhere or get through doors — in the Females’ Sauna, which machine some of the upperclass girls had found and screamed at when they went in for the dawn saunas that help alleviate some vague female-type problem that none of the guys quite fathom. And two black girls on the breakfast crew reportedly found a set of squeegees on the dining hall’s north wall, several meters up and hung crossed in a kind of saltire, placed there by parties unknown. F. D. V. Harde’s A.M. groundsmen reportedly took the things down, and now they’re leaning by the fireplace.

The inappropriate found objects have had a tektitic and sinister aspect: none of the cheery odor of regular pranksterism; they’re not funny. To varying degrees they’ve given everyone the fantods. Mrs. Clarke had taken the morning off again, was why the repeat-lunch. Stice’s eyes are back on his plate, which is nearly clean. Unmentioned is the fact that Schacht and Tall Paul Shaw at lunch went over the whole part of the north wall the black girls said they found the squeegees on and could find neither nails nor holes from nails, as in no visible means of attachment. The whole thing’s been studiously not talked about, adding to everybody’s discomfort at Troeltsch’s hoarse complaints about tuition, which vary in specifics but are otherwise routine. ‘And then now the ultimate dietary cluster-fuck: attempted powdered milk.’

‘Trying to foist it you’re saying.’ ‘I’m saying and look at us and what do we do?’ ‘Fake a cold and stay in bed playing sportscaster with the TP, in protest?’ says Pemulis.

Troeltsch uses the bottle of Seldane to point for emphasis. ‘We don’t want to hear about it. We look the other way with our heads in the sand.’ ‘Sounds fucking painful.’ ‘Go find some fucking synonyms for beat.’ Stice swallows hugely: ‘Never open your eyes underground: my old man’s dictum.’ ‘And so we distract ourselves,’ Troeltsch says; ‘we yuck it up.’ Pemulis makes a k-sound. ‘Here’s the real question: how dumb is Troeltsch?’ ‘Troeltsch’s so dumb he thinks a manila folder’s a Filipino contortionist.’ ‘Troeltsch, who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?’ Kyle Coyle says surely they’ve all heard the one about what do Canadian girls put behind their ears to attract boys. John Wayne gives him not a look. Wayne’s peering inside his own tumbler, where there does seem to be some sort of residue. There are fragments of lettuce in his eyelashes.

Ortho Stice’s cheeks are ballooned with food, his eyes on his own salad’s remains, expression abstract and furrowed. A terrible kind of community energy in the whole dining hall, a kind of anxious sound-carpet under the surf of voices and the tinkle of flatware, and The Darkness is at some vague center of this energy, somehow, you can feel. Neither Wayne nor Hal’s been approachable all fall, on-court. Kids at other tables say low-toned things to their seatmates, and then the seatmate looks covertly over at Stice’s table.

Forehead purply crumpled, Stice stares hard at his salad and tries to block input from his phenomenal peripheral vision. Two 14’s are contending over toast. Petropolis Kahn is preparing to catapult a chickpea at somebody. Jim Struck points out Bridgette Boone and the U.S.S. Millicent Kent returning for what Struck counts as Fourths, and Stice blocks the sight out. The sad pretty sunset out over the hilltops of Newton cannot be seen because the room’s big windows face east, out over the hillside and the Enfield Marine complex that the Academy has bathed in shadow, so E.M.’s porch lights are already on, and tall cubist bits of the old metropolis beyond that, east, with

shadows encroaching. The afternoon just past was a glory, scrubbed and cool and windless, cloud-free, the sun a disk, the sky a dome, soaked in light, even the northern horizons bell-clear against a faint green-yellow cast.

Schacht has about eight amber bottles of various medicines for his Crohn’s Disease, and a whole ritual of administration. A couple of the black girls who work kitchen and custodial day-shifts can be seen against the shadowy tree-line, making their way down the steep hillside’s unauthorized path back down to the halfway-house thing for wretched people who come up here to work short-time. The girls’ bright cheap jackets are vivid in the shadow and trees’ tangle. The girls are having to hold hands against the grade, walking sideways and digging heavily in at each step. The black girl Clenette Hal had read fear in as she left C.T.’s office with his litter now has a bulging 261 backpack on her back, as in bulging maybe with dumpster-pilferage, her arms strung way out between the other black girl Didi and the trees she grabs and digging in sideways with each step, the hesitancy of steep dark slopes, rooty and shot through with briers.

A girl with bangs rises and tings her tumbler with a spoon to make an announcement; nobody pays any attention.

Now Kahn’s by custom allowed to come over and sit with them at the best table, post-prandially.

Wayne and Stice both shiver at the same time as the overhead lighting suddenly becomes the big room’s primary light.

There’s a brief and sort of ignorant discussion on why girls who hit backhands one-handed seem prone to having different-sized breasts. Hal recalls his brother’s late-in-college thing of seeing if he could take a girl out somewhere public and then meet and have covert sex with a whole different girl while still out with the first girl. This was after the girl Orin had been wildly in love with and Himself had compulsively used in films had been disfigured. Orin kept a record of Subjects that was sort of a cross between a chart and a journal. He used to come home and leave it out just pleading to be read. This was back when his brother Orin needed only to have sexual intercourse with them instead of getting them to fall so terribly in love with him they’d never be able to want anyone else. He’d taken obscure massage and psych courses and read tantric books whose illustrations seemed about as sexy to Hal as Twister.

Coyle says ‘Their ankles’; everybody ignores him. Wayne’s already left the table.

Little 14-C Bernard Makulic, two tables over from the milk dispenser and constitutionally delicate and not long for E.T.A., throws up in a silky tan cataract onto the floor by his chair, and there is the shriek of the feet of other chairs being scooted in a star pattern away from the table, and the protracted vowels of repulsed children.

Struck, Pemulis, Schacht and Freer have all had sexual intercourse.

Coyle’s a probable, but reticent. Axford has trouble even publicly showering, much less submitting nude to a female’s inspection. Hal is maybe the one male E.T.A. for whom lifetime virginity is a conscious goal.

He sort of feels like O.’s having enough acrobatic coitus for all three of them. Freer even has a like souvenir-colposcope bolted to the inside of his locker door where a pin-up’d have been in days of yore, and Pemulis and Struck have allegedly patronized the Combat Zone after the fiscally pressed city’d buckled and rehung the Combat Zone’s red lights, east of the Common. But Jim Troeltsch and sex: no way. And with Wayne and Stice the question seems somehow beside the point. Hal’s mouth feels like it’s overflowing with spit. He should by all rights have lost to Stice today, and he knows it. Stice was in physical control of the third set. Stice choked it away only because he didn’t believe he could beat Hal yet, deep down, since Hal’s competitive explosion. But the crisis of faith that cost Stice the match had concerned a different Hal, Hal can tell. It’s now a whole new Hal, a Hal who does not get high, or hide, a Hal who in 29 days is going to hand his own personal urine over to authority figures with a wide smile and exemplary posture and not a secretive thought in his head. No one except Pemulis and Axford know it’s a whole new and chemical-free Hal who should by all rights have lost to a 16-year-old out there in public on what ended up a gorgeous NNE autumn day.

Wayne had gotten up and bussed his tray in the middle of the jejune breast thing. Ortho (‘The Darkness’) Stice is still staring into his salad. If you could open Stice’s head you’d see a wheel inside another wheel, gears and cogs being widgeted into place. Stice has a secret suspicion about a secret that has more to do with the actual table than with the people at the table. A lot of the guys interpret his intense distraction as Stice’s still being in the magic can’t-miss Zone from this P.M.’s match.

‘The idea being that Nuck girls can only attract guys by being really easy to X, is the joke,’ Coyle says into the noise.

Then there’s a brief rippling lull in the whole dining hall as little Evan Ingersoll emerges from the Entree Line’s end on crutches, his cast new and sailor-hat-white, unsigned, prorector Tony Nwangi behind him with his hatchet-face stony, carrying the kid’s tray for him. The hall’s unease is almost visible, a corona around Ingersoll and the ruptured patellar tendon that’ll cost him at least six months of competitive development. Penn, whose femoral fracture’ll cost him a year, isn’t even back yet from St. E.’s orthopedic. But at least Ingersoll’s back. Hal gets up to go over, Troeltsch rising to accompany him after a long look at Trevor Axford, Ingersoll’s B.B. of record, who’s sitting in his chair with his eyes shut tight, unable to make any sort of conciliatory gesture. A match-sore Hal not limping but stiff-legged and shoulders slightly rolling as he and Troeltsch move serpentine around tables, steering way clear of the custodian and dull-steel bucket on rollers and the mop spreading and diluting Makulic’s chyme out in a thinning circle that clears three tables, which Hal and Troeltsch avoid with practiced curves around tables whose layout they all know well, Hal to say Hey and How’s the Limb, Troeltsch to say Hey and be basically relieved he’s away from a discussion of females as sexual objects.

Troeltsch’s never come close to even dating anybody. Some guys here never do. It’s the same at all the academies, this asexual contingent. Some junior players don’t have the emotional juice left over after tennis to face what dating requires. Bold nerveless guys on the court who go slack and pale at the thought of approaching a female in any social context. Certain things not only can’t be taught but can be retarded by other stuff that can be taught. The whole Tavis/Schtitt program here is supposedly a progression toward self-forgetting; some find the whole girl-issue thing brings them face to face with something in themselves they need to believe they’ve left far behind in order to hang in and develop. Troeltsch, Shaw, Axford: any sort of sexual tension makes them feel like they need more oxygen than is available right then. A couple of the girls at E.T.A. are kind of slutty, and some of the more aggressive Freer-type guys can break some of the girls down and get them to have sex — there’s nothing if not time and proximity here. But E.T.A. is mostly a comparatively unsexual place, maybe almost surprisingly so, considering the constant roar and gurgle here of adolescent

glands, the emphasis on physicality, the fears of mediocrity, the back-and- forth struggles with ego, the loneliness and close proximity. There’s scattered homosexuality, much of it emotional and unconsummated. Keith Freer’s pet theory is that the bulk of E.T.A. females are nascent lesbians who don’t know it yet. That like any serious female athletes they’re basically vigorously male inside, and so Sapphic-tending. The ones that get 262 to the W.T.A. Show’ll probably be the only ones who find out that they are, he believes — dykes that is. The rest will marry and spend a lifetime by the club pool wondering why the hair on their husbands’ backs makes them shudder. E.g. the U.S.S. Millicent Kent, sixteen and phenomenal on the incline bench-press, with breasts like artillery and a butt like two bulldogs in a bag (Stice’s term, which caught on), already looks like a Penal Matron, Freer likes to observe. And no one likes the fact that Carol Spodek’s carried and prized the same single large-grip Donnay stick for going on five straight years.

Ortho Stice of southwest Kansas looks briefly up at Hal and Troeltsch’s departure before returning his attention to a certain cherry tomato perched somehow halfway up the shallow incline of his salad bowl. It’s possible that the cherry tomato is attached halfway up the incline by an adhesive bit of yogurt dressing rather than just sitting there defying gravity on its own.

Stice doesn’t use a finger to move the tomato and check this. He’s using only his concentrated will. He’s trying to will the cherry tomato to roll of its own objectile power down the incline and into the bowl’s center. He stares at the cherry tomato with enormous concentration, chewing his tri-level skinless-chicken-fillet sandwich. The chewing makes overlapping plates of muscle all the way up one side of his face and crew-cut scalp bulge and roll.

He’s trying to flex some kind of psychic muscle he’s not sure he even has.

The crew cut lends his head an anvil-like aspect. Complete concentration makes his round red fleshy face look crumpled. Stice is one of those athletes whose body you know is an unearned divine gift because its conjunction with his face is so incongruous. He resembles a poorly spliced photo, some superhuman cardboard persona with a hole for your human face. A beautiful sports body, lithe and tapered and sleekly muscled, smooth — like a Polycleitos body, Hermes or Theseus before his trials — on whose graceful neck sits the face of a ravaged Winston Churchill, broad and slab-

featured, swart, fleshy, large-pored, with a mottled forehead under the crew cut’s V-shaped hairline, and eye-pouches, and jowls that hang and whenever he moves suddenly or lithely make a sort of meaty staccato sound like a wet dog shaking itself dry. Tony Nwangi is saying something acerbic to Hal, who looks like he’s kneeling penitent before Ingersoll, everyone at the surrounding tables inclined very subtly away from Hal. Troeltsch is signing Ingersoll’s cast as he speaks into his fist. Off the court, Ortho Stice’s flattop crew cut and penchant for cuff-rolled bluejeans and button-down short- sleeves with a checkered pattern are strictly from hick. The facial scrunching that attends concentration adds crevices and seams and an uneven flush to the bulldog face. His cheeks are ballooned with food as he stares at the perched cherry tomato, trying to respect this object with all his might. Summoning the sort of coercive reverence he’d felt this P.M. as several balls’ sudden anomalous swerves against wind and their own vectors half convinced Stice they’d become sensitive to his inner will, at crucial times. He’d mishit one cross-court volley and seen the thing head for an area wide even of the doubles sideline and then curve like a drenched spitter back to land just inside the singles corner, and this at a time when the grounds’ pines behind Hal Incandenza were breeze-leaning in the exact opposite direction. Hal had given Stice a little bit of a look on that one.

Stice couldn’t finally tell whether Hal noticed anything amiss in the mysterious curves and downdrafts that seemed to favor The Darkness alone; Hal had played with the wide-eyed but unfocused look of a tennis player right on the verge of falling apart out there, and yet strangely affectless, as if deep inside some well of his own private troubles; and Stice wills himself again not to wonder what had passed with the Headmaster and the O.N.A.N.T.A. urologist, whose lab-equipped van’s unscheduled appearance in the E.T.A. parking lot yesterday afternoon had caused a tsunami of panic just before supper, especially since Pemulis and his supply of lab-ready Visine bottles were nowhere to be found.

Even among the small circle who know Hal gets secretly high, it doesn’t make much sense that Hal’s misery’d be Tavis- or urine-related, since Pemulis has never seemed blither than today; and if anyone were going to get the boot, chemically or otherwise, it was not going to be the E.T.A. administration’s relative and second-best boy.

Hal and his brother Mario both know that the skim milk at E.T.A. has been pre-mixed powdered milk since Charles Tavis assumed the helm four years back and told Mrs. Clarke he wanted the kids’ animal-fat intake halved in a month by any and all means. The kitchen’s graveyard shift power-mixes it in enormous steel bowls and then strains out the foam and pours the milk into real-milk milk-dispenser bags for a kind of placebo effect; it’s mostly just the concept of powdered milk that gags people.

Struck has traded his shiny clean plate for the absent Incandenza’s fortification-structured plate of uneaten fillets, low-gluten bread, corn- bread, baby boileds, a pea-chickpea-based olla, half a fresh squash, mashed potatoes packed in a stelliform gelatin mold, and a shallow bowl of dessert- tsimmes featuring mostly it seemed like plums. Hal is still down on one knee by Ingersoll’s chair, his elbows on his knee, listening across Ingersoll and a blindfolded Idris Arslanian to Tony Nwangi. Keith Freer remarks blandly on how Hal seems like he’s feeling sort of punk this evening, checking Stice for a reaction. Struck utters truisms about wasting food and global hunger through a full mouth. Struck is wearing a Sox cap to the side so the bill shadows half his face. The bread is unkind to his braces. Freer is wearing the leather vest with no shirt under, which is what he favors after weights have pumped his torso full of air. Stice had had a traumatic psychic experience at fourteen when he’d set the weight on the pull-down station too high, and Dr. Dolores Rusk has authorized his exemption from all but very basic weights, pending resolution of his fear of weights. The joke around E.T.A. is that Stice, who’s surely Show-bound after graduation, has no fear of heights, but does fear weights. Keith Freer, though kind of a second-rank junior player, does look beautiful in his calfskin vest — his face and body match. Troeltsch wants a sportscasting career, but Freer is the E.T.A. with looks InterLace would favor. Freer’s from inland Maryland, originally, his family’s riches nouveaux, a family Amway business that hit big in the B.S. ’90s with his now-deceased father’s invention of a Pet- Rockish novelty that was ubiquitous in stockings for two straight pre- millennial Xmases — the so-called Phoneless Cord. Stice dimly recalls his old man getting a Phoneless Cord in his stocking, ostentatiously packaged, on Ortho’s first recallable Xmas, back in Partridge KS, the old man cocking an eyebrow and The Bride laughing and slapping her big knee. Nobody

now much even gets the remembered gag, though, so few things needing cords anymore. But Freer’s old man had invested his windfall shrewdly.

1 MAY Y.D.A.U.

OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON AZ U.S.A.

‘My own father,’ Steeply said. Steeply again faced outward, one hip out and a hand on that hip. The scratch on his triceps was now ugly and puffed.

Also, an area of Steeply’s left finger was whiter than the skin around it. The removal of a university ring, or more probably a wedding band. It seemed curious to Marathe that Steeply would undergo electrolysis but not take trouble to fix his finger’s annular pallor.

Steeply said ‘My own father, sometime around midlife. We watched him get consumed with a sort of entertainment. It wasn’t pretty. I was never sure how it started or what it was about.’ ‘You are now imparting a personal anecdote of you,’ Marathe stated.

Steeply did not shrug. He was pretending to study something particular out on the floor of the desert. ‘But nothing like this sort of Entertainment — a plain old television program.’ ‘Television of broadcasting and — how did one express it? — the passivity.’ ‘Yes. Broadcast television. The program in question was called “M*A*S*H.” The title was an acronym, not a command. As a boy I can recall some confusion on this point.’ ‘I am knowing of the U.S.A. historical broadcast television comedy program “M*A*S*H,” ’ Marathe stated. ‘The fucking thing ran forever, it seemed. The program that would not die. B.S. ’70s and ’80s before it finally died, mercifully. Set in a military hospital during the U.N.’s action on Korea.’ Marathe remained without expression. ‘Police Action.’ Many small birds of the mountain of the outcropping had begun to whistle and twitter somewhere off above and behind them. Also maybe the tentative rattle of some serpent. Marathe pretended to search for the watch in his pocket.

Steeply said ‘Now, nothing prima facie exceptional about getting attached to a show. God knows I was attached to my share of shows. That’s all it started as. An attachment or habit. Thursday nights at 2100h. “Nine O’Clock Eastern, Eight O’Clock Central and Mountain.” They used to broadcast this, to alert you to when to watch, or if you were going to tape it.’ Marathe watched the big man shrug from behind. ‘So the show was important to him. So, fine. OK. So he took pleasure in the program. God knows the guy was entitled — he’d worked like a dog his whole life. So OK, so at the start he scheduled his Thursday around the show, to an extent.

It was hard to pinpoint anything wrong or consumptive. He was, yes, always home from work by 2050 on Thursdays. And he always had his supper watching the program. It seemed almost cute. Mummykins used to tease him, think it was adorable.’ ‘Cuteness in fathers, this is rare.’ There was no way Marathe was going to touch the evident U.S.A. childhood expression Mummykins. ‘My old man worked for a heating-oil distributorship. Home heating-oil.

Have your files got this? A tidbit for M. Fortier: U.S.O.U.S.’s Steeply, H.H.: late father a heating-oil-delivery dispatcher, Cheery Oil, Troy, New York.’ ‘State of New York, U.S.A., prior to Reconfiguration.’ Hugh Steeply turned around but not all the way, scratching absently at his wens. ‘But then: syndication. “M*A*S*H.” The show was incredibly popular, and after a few years of Thursday nights it started also to run daily, during the day, or late at night, sometimes, in what I remember all too well was called syndication, where local stations bought old episodes and chopped them up and loaded them with ads, and ran them. And this, note, was while all-new episodes of the show were still appearing on Thursdays

at 2100. I think this was the start.’ ‘The cuteness, it was over.’ ‘My old man started to find the syndicated reruns extremely important to him, too. As in like not to be missed.’ ‘Even though he had viewed and enjoyed them before, these reruns.’ ‘The fucking show ran on two different local stations in the Capital District. Albany and environs. For a while, this one station even had a “M*A*S*H” hour, two of them, back to back, every night, from 2300. Plus another half an hour in the early P.M., for the unemployed or something.’

Marathe said ‘Virtually a bombardment of this U.S.A. broadcast comedy program.’ After a brief pause of attention to some wens of the face, Steeply said ‘He started to keep a small television down at work. Down at the

distributor-ship.’ ‘For the broadcast of afternoon.’ Steeply appeared to Marathe uncalculating in his statements. ‘Broadcast TVs, toward the end they made some of them really small. Kind of a pathetic try at keeping cable down. Some as small as like wrist-size. You’d be too young to remember.’ ‘I remember well a pre-digital television.’ Marathe, if Steeply’s anecdote of himself had a political point or communiqué, Marathe could not yet determine this.

Steeply moved his foul Belgian cigarette into his right hand to flick it out into the space below. ‘It progressed very slowly. The gradual immersion. The withdrawal from life. I remember guys from his bowling league calling, that he’d quit. Our Mummykins found out he’d dropped out of Knights of Columbus. Thursdays the jokes and cuteness stopped — him all hunched in front of the set, barely even eating from his tray. And every night late at night, for the nightly hour, the old man too wide awake, and hunched over weirdly, head out, as if pulled toward the screen.’ ‘I too have seen this posture of viewing,’ Marathe grimly said, recalling his second-oldest of brothers and the Canadiens of the N.L. of H. ‘And he got anxious, ugly, if something made him miss even one. Even one episode. And he’d get ugly if you pointed out he’d already seen most of them about seven times before. Mummykins began to have to lie to get them out of engagements that would have infringed. Neither of them talked about it. I don’t remember any of us trying to name the thing out loud — this dark shift in his attachment to the program “M*A*S*H.” ’ ‘The organism of family simply shifted to accommodate.’ ‘Which it wasn’t even all that consuming an entertainment,’ Steeply said. He sounded to Marathe uncalculated and somewhat younger. ‘I mean it was OK. But it was broadcast TV. Broad comedy and canned laughter.’ ‘I am remembering well this rerunning program, do not worry about me,’ said Marathe.

‘It was at some point during this gradual shift the notebook first appeared. He began writing notes in a notebook as he viewed. But only when viewing “M*A*S*H.” And he never left the notebook lying around where you could get any kind of look at it. He wasn’t openly secretive about it; you couldn’t even point to that and say something was wrong. The “M*A*S*H” notebook just never seemed to be lying around.’ With the hand that was not below the blanket still gripping the Sterling UL35, Marathe was holding his thumb and forefinger up against the smear of red which was just over the Mountains of Rincon and craning his neck to see his shadow behind them on the hillside.

Steeply changed the hip which was out, in his standing, to his other hip. ‘As a child, this is when it became impossible to ignore the odor of obsession about the whole thing. The secrecy about the notebook, and the secrecy about the secrecy. The scrupulous recording of tiny details, in careful order, for purposes you could just tell were both urgent and furtive.’ ‘This is unbalance,’ Marathe concurred. ‘This attaching of excessive

importance.’ ‘Jesus, you don’t know the half of it.’ ‘And for you also,’ Marathe said, ‘excessive unbalance. For your father progresses downhill in this obsessing, but always so slowly that always you could question yourself, whether you were maybe yourself the one out of balance, attaching too much importance to any one thing — a notebook, a

posture. Crazy making.’ ‘And the toll on Mummykins.’ Marathe had turned the chair to a slight angle to be able to see his shadow, which appeared blunt and deformed by the topography of the steep hillside above the outcropping, and in general pathetic and small. There would be no titanic or menacing Bröckengespenstphänom with the sunrise of dawn. Marathe said ‘The whole organism of family becomes out of balance, questioning its perceptions.’ ‘The old man — then he started developing this habit of quoting little lines and scenes from “M*A*S*H,” to illustrate some idea, make some point in conversation. At the beginning of the habit he seemed casual about it, as if the little bits and scenes simply occurred to him. But this changed, but slowly. Plus I remember he started seeking out feature films that also featured the television program’s actors.’

Marathe pretended to sniff. ‘Then at some point it was as if he was no longer able to converse or communicate on any topic without bringing it back to the program. The topic. Without some system of references to the program.’ Steeply gave small indications of paying attention to the small squeaks as Marathe turned his chair slightly this way and that way, achieving different angles of sight on his small shadow. Steeply exhaled air through the nostrils with a forceful sound. ‘Though it wasn’t as though he was wholly uncritical of it.’ It sometimes from somewhere blue occurred to Marathe that he did not dislike this Steeply, though like or respect would be too far in going, to say. ‘It was not that type of obsession with it, it, you are saying.’ ‘It was gradual and slow. He started at some point I remember to refer to the kitchen as the Mess Tent and his den as the Marsh or Swamp. These were fictional locations on the show. He began renting films with even crowd-extra or cameo appearances by the program’s actors. He bought what 263 was then called a Betamixer, a kind of early magnetic-video recorder.

He began a practice of magnetically recording each week’s 29 broadcasts and reruns. He stored the tapes, organizing them in baroque systems of cross-reference that had nothing discernible to do with dates of recording. I remember Mummykins didn’t say anything when he moved his bedding and began to sleep at night in the easy chair in his den, the Swamp. Or pretend to. Sleep.’ ‘But you had your suspicions of not real sleeping.’ ‘It was gradually obvious he was viewing his magnetic recordings of the program “M*A*S*H” throughout the night, probably over and over again, using a crude white plastic earplug to hide the noise, scribbling feverishly in his notebook.’ In contrast with the violence and transperçant puncturing of the sunset, the dawn sun seemed slowly exhaled from the more rounded salience of the Mountains of Rincon, its heat a moister heat and the light the vague red of a type of fond sentiment; and U.S.O.U.S.’s Steeply’s standing shadow was cast back over the outcropping toward Marathe behind him, close enough that Marathe might reach his arm out and touch the shadow. ‘You can tell I don’t have a good recall of the exact progression of the thing,’ Steeply said.

‘The gradual.’ ‘I do know that Mummykins, I remember one day in the garbage can out behind the house she found a number of letters addressed to a “M*A*S*H” character named — this I fucking-A sure remember — Major Burns. She found them.’ Marathe did not allow himself the chuckle. ‘While searching inside the can of waste in the back. For evidence of unbalance.’ Steeply waved Marathe off. He was incapable of amused. ‘She didn’t search through the garbage. Mumkinsky had too much class. She probably forgot and threw away the day’s Troy Record before she’d clipped her food- coupons. She was an inveterate coupon-clipper.’ 264 ‘This was prior to the days of North American laws of recircling of newspapers.’ Steeply did not wave off or give a glare. He wore the look of concentrating. ‘This character — this I remember, too well — was portrayed by I remember the actor Maury Linville, a plain old employee of 20th Century Fox.’ ‘Which later upstarted the fourth network of the Large Four.’ Steeply’s luridly run makeup from the heat of the day before had now over the night hardened into a configuration of almost horror. ‘But the letters, the letters were addressed to Major Burns. Not to Maury Linville.

And not c/o Fox Studios or wherever, but addressed to an involved military

address, with a Seoul routing code.’ ‘In the South Korea of history.’ ‘The letters were hostile, savage, and lavishly descriptive. He’d come to think the show’s character Major Burns embodied some type of cataclysmic, Armageddon-type theme that was slowly assembling itself on the program and progressively being hinted at and emerging in the gradual succession of seasons of this “M*A*S*H.” ’ Steeply felt at his lip. ‘I remember Mummykins never mentioned the letters. From the garbage. She just left them around where my kid sister and I would see them.’ ‘You are not meaning your sister was a goat.’ Steeply was not provokable into some different emotion, however, Marathe observed. ‘Younger sister. But my old man, the progression of the

program from fun to obsession — crucial distinctions had collapsed, I think, now. Between the fictional Burns and this Linville who portrayed Burns.’ Marathe raised a brow for concurring: ‘This is signifying a severe loss of balance.’ ‘I remember something about he seemed to believe the name of the character Burns also somehow hiddenly signified the English verb for the promise of the consuming fire of apocalypse.’ Marathe looked puzzled or else squinted because of a rising sun. ‘But he threw the letters into the waste receptacle, you stated, instead of the Snail’s Mail.’ ‘He’d already started missing whole weeks at a time from work. He’d been at Cheery for decades. He was only a few years from retirement.’ Marathe was looking at his lap’s blanket’s brightening colors of plaid. ‘Mo Cheery and the old man — they’d bowled together, they were in Knights of Columbus together. Missing all the weeks of work made things awkward. Mo didn’t want to can the old man. He wanted the old man to see

somebody.’ ‘A professional person.’ ‘A lot of this I wasn’t even there for. The “M*A*S*H” thing. I was at college by the time the really crucial distinctions had collapsed.’ ‘Studying the multiple cultures.’ ‘My kid sister had to keep me abreast of developments during the term.

Good old Mo Cheery’d come by the house, view magnetic tapes of the show with the old man a while, listen to the old man’s theories and views, then on his way out he’d collar Mummykins and take her out into the garage and talk to her very quietly about the fact that the old man was in a high-angle psychic nose-dive and needed with all due regard in his opinion to see somebody in the direst fucking way. My kid sister said the Mumkinsky always acted like she had no idea what Mo Cheery was talking

about.’ Marathe smoothed at his blanket. ‘Mumkinsky being a type of pet family name,’ Steeply said, looking a

little bit of embarrassed.

Marathe nodded. ‘I’m trying to reconstruct this out of memory,’ Steeply said. ‘The old man is by this time pretty much unable to converse about anything except

the television program “M*A*S*H.” The theory of the theme of this Burns- slash-Burning apocalypse now sort of spreads out to become huge and complex theories about wide-ranging and deeply hidden themes having to do with death and time, on the show. Like evidence of some sort of coded communication to certain viewers about an end to our familiar type of world-time and the advent of a whole different order of world-time.’ ‘Your mother continues to play-act at normalcy, however.’ ‘I’m trying to reconstruct things that weren’t even clear at the time,’ Steeply said, his wet and then dried makeup now grotesque in his concentration in the sunrise, like a mask of a mentally ill clown. He said ‘One theory involved the fact, which the old man found extremely significant, that the historical Korean Police Action of the U.N. lasted only roughly two-odd years, but that “M*A*S*H” itself was by then into something like its seventh year of new episodes. Some characters of the program were getting gray hair, receding hair, face-lifts. The old man was convinced this signified intentional themes. According to my kid sister, who bore the brunt of time spent with him, watching,’ Steeply said, ‘the old man’s theories were almost inconceivably complex and wide-ranging. As the years of new seasons went on and some actors retired and characters were replaced by other characters, the old man generated baroquoco theories about what it was that had quote-underline “really” happened to the absent characters. Where they’d gone, where they were, what it all augured.

Then the next thing was one or two of the letters started to appear, canceled and returned, stamped as undeliverable, or to addresses that were not just nonexistent but absurd.’ ‘Unbalanced letters were no longer being discarded as waste, but now mailed.’ ‘And Mummykins was uncomplaining throughout. It was enough to break your heart. She was a rock. She did, granted, begin taking prescription anti-anxiety medication.’ Land of the freely brave: Marathe did not say this aloud. He looked at his pocket’s watch and was trying to remember a time when he had ever with Steeply had to consider the tact of departing.

Steeply, at this time, gave the impression somehow of having several cigarettes going at one time. ‘Somewhere along late in the progression the old man let it be known he was working on a secret book that revised and

explicated much of the world’s military, medical, philosophical and religious history by analogies to certain subtle and complex thematic codes in “M*A*S*H.” ’ Steeply would stand on one foot to raise the other foot to look at a shoe’s inflicted damage, all the time smoking. ‘Even when he went in to work, there were problems. Heating-oil customers who called for deliveries or information or whatever began to complain that the old man kept trying to engage them in bizarre theoretical discussions of the thematics of “M*A*S*H.” ’ ‘Because it is necessary that I leave soon, a central point must be soon emerging,’ Marathe worked in as gracefully as possible.

Steeply seemed not to hear this other man. He seemed not only uncalculated and self-enmeshed; his demeanor itself seemed more young, that of some young person. This unless this was part of some performance beyond Marathe, Marathe knew he must consider. ‘Then the double blow,’ Steeply said. ‘In B.S. 1983. My memory’s clear on this. The Mumkinsky opened an alarming letter from attorneys for CBS and 20th Century Fox. Certain letters had been apparently rerouted by dogoodnik military postal clerks to Fox. The old man’d been trying to correspond with different past and present “M*A*S*H” personas in letters the family never saw get mailed but whose content, the attorneys said, raised quote grave concern and could quote constitute grounds for strenuous legal action.’ Steeply raised the foot to look, his face in pain. He said, ‘Then the program’s final episode ran. Late autumn of B.S. 1983. I was on an ROTC marching-band trip to Fort Ticonderoga. My kid sister, who’d by this time left home herself, and who could blame the kid, she reported that the Mumkinsky was talking very casually and uncomplainingly of the old man’s now refusing to leave his den.’ ‘This, the final enclosing isolation of obsession.’ Steeply looked over his shoulder on one awkward foot to look slightly at Marathe. ‘As in even to go to the bathroom, now, the not leaving.’ ‘Your mother’s prescriptions prevented some episodes of great anxiety, I think.’ ‘He’d gotten a special A.C.D.C. cable hook-up that brought in extra syndication. When reruns weren’t running, the video-magnetic tapes ran constantly. He was haggard and spectral and his easy chair was all but unrecognizable. Cheery Oil was keeping him on the books until he could

get his thirty years in at age sixty. My kid sister and I started reluctantly discussing intervening on Mummykins to intervene on the old man and

force him to see somebody.’ ‘Yourselves, you could not reach him.’ ‘He died just before his birthday. He died in his easy chair, set at full Recline, watching an episode in which Alda’s Hawkeye can’t stop sleepwalking and fears he’s going out of his fucking mind until a professional military therapist reassures him, I remember.’ ‘Me, I too have seen this episode rerunning, in my childhood.’ ‘All I can recall of it is the army professional telling Alda not to worry, that if he was truly crazy he’d sleep like a newborn, as did the notorious Burns-slash-Linville.’ ‘The program’s character of Burns slept exceptionally well, I remember.’ ‘His secret book’s manuscript filled scores of notebooks. This is what the notebooks turned out to be. One closet in the den had to be forced open.

All these notebooks tumbled out. The whole thing was written in a kind of medical-slash-military-looking code, though, indecipherable — Sis and her first husband and I spent some time trying to decode them. After his death in the chair.’ ‘His unbalance of temptation cost him life. An otherwise harmless U.S.A. broadcast television program took his life, because of the consuming obsession. This is your anecdote.’ ‘No. It was a transmural infarction. Blew out a whole ventricle. His whole family had a history: the heart. The pathologist said it was amazing he’d lasted this long.’ Marathe shrugged. ‘The obsessed frequently endure.’ Steeply shook the head. ‘It must have been hell on the poor old

Mumkinsky.’ ‘She never complained, however.’ Already the sun was up and pulsing. Light ran over everything in a sickening yellow way like gravy. All birds and living animals had been silenced, stunned already by heat, and the site’s bright loaders had not yet been started in movement. All was calm. All was bright. Steeply’s shadow on the shelf was squat and blunt, already shorter than the living figure of Steeply himself, who was leaning outward to try to find a spot far below to

litter with a crumpled Belgian packing with one prayed no more finally to smoke.

Marathe took his watch from out of the windbreaker’s pocket.

Steeply shrugged. ‘I think you’re right, that it’s part of both the horror and the pull. When I’m east and thinking of Flatto’s lab and I sort of look

up and find myself tempted.’ ‘About the Entertainment of now.’ ‘And I kind of half-picture Hank Hoyne in the old man’s old recliner,

hunched and scribbling feverishly.’ ‘In military coding.’ ‘His eyes, they got like that, too, the old man’s, like Hoyne’s.

Periodically.’ Heat began to shimmer, as well, off the lionhide floor of a desert. The mesquite and cactus wobbled, and Tucson AZ resumed once more the appearance of the mirage, as it had appeared when Marathe had first arrived and found his shadow so entrancing in its size and reach. The sun of A.M. had no radial knives of light. It appeared brutal and businesslike and harmful to look upon. Marathe allowed himself a few diverting seconds of watching the Mountains of the Rincons’ widening shadows melt slowly backward into the base of the Mountains of the Rincons. Steeply hawked and spat, still holding the last crumpled pack of Flanderfumes. ‘My time is sharply finite to remain.’ Marathe said this. Every change of his postures brought small squeaks of leather and metal. ‘I would feel gratitude if you departed first.’ Steeply figured Marathe wanted him to have no idea how he got up and down, in and out. To no real purpose; a personal point of pride. Steeply squatted for adjusting the straps of his high heels. His prostheses were still not quite aligned. He spoke with the faintly breathless quality of large men trying to bend: ‘Well. Rémy, but I don’t think Dick Willis’s “empty of intent” quite does it. Captures it. The eye-factor. Hoyne, the Arab internist. The old man. Not for eyes like that.’ ‘You would say it does not capture these eyes’ expression.’ Looking up while squatting, this made Steeply’s neck appear thick. He stared past Marathe, at the shale. He said ‘The expressions seem more like — fuck, how to say it. Fuck,’ Steeply said in concentration.

‘Petrified,’ Marathe said. ‘Ossified. Inanimate.’ ‘No. Not inanimate. More like the opposite. More as if… stuck in some way.’ Marathe’s neck itself was stiff from so much time looking out and down from a height. ‘What is it this wishes here to mean? Glued?’ Steeply was doing something to a toenail’s cracked polish. ‘Stuck.

Fixed. Held. Trapped. As in trapped in some sort of middle. Between two things. Pulled apart in different directions.’ Marathe’s eyes searched the sky, which this was already too light blue for his pleasure, filmed with a sort of eggy plura of heat. ‘Meaning between different cravings of great intensity, this.’ ‘Not even cravings so much. Emptier than that. As if he were stuck wondering. As if there was something he’d forgotten.’

‘Misplaced. Lost.’

‘Misplaced.’

‘Lost.’

‘Misplaced.’ ‘As you wish.’

13 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

0245h., Ennet House, the hours that are truly wee. Eugenio M., voluntarily filling in for Johnette Foltz on Dream Duty, is out in the office playing some sort of hand-held sports game that blips and tweets. Kate Gompert and Geoffrey Day and Ken Erdedy and Bruce Green are in the living room with the lights mostly out and the old jumpy-picture D.E.C. viewer on. Cartridges not allowed after 0000h., to encourage sleep. Sober cocaine-and stimulant-addicts sleep pretty well by the second month, straight alcoholics by the fourth. Abstinent pot- and tranq-addicts can pretty much forget about sleep for the first year. Though Bruce Green is asleep and would be in violation of the no-lying-on-the-couch rule if his legs weren’t twisted over and his feet on the floor. All the Ennet House viewer gets on Spontaneous Dissemination is basic InterLace, and from 0200 to 0400 InterLace NNE downloads for the next dissemination-day and cuts all

transmissions except one line’s four straight redissemms of ‘The Mr.

Bouncety-Bounce Daily Program,’ and when Mr. Bouncety-Bounce appears in his old cloth-and-safety-pin diaper and paunch and rubber infant-head mask he is not a soothing or pleasant figure at all, for the sleepless adult.

Ken Erdedy has started to smoke cigarettes and sits smoking, joggling one leather slipper. Kate Gompert and Geoffrey Day are on the nonleather couch. Kate Gompert sits cross-legged on the couch with her head all the way forward so her forehead touches her foot. It looks like some kind of spiritually advanced yoga position or stretching exercise, but it’s really just the way Kate Gompert has been sitting on the sofa all night every night since Wednesday’s free-for-all unpleasantness with Lenz and Gately in the streetlet, from which the whole House is still reeling and spiritually palsied.

Day’s bare calves are completely hairless and look sort of absurd with dress shoes and black socks and a velour bathrobe, but Day’s proven kind of admirably resistant to caring what other people think, in a way. ‘Like you really care.’ Kate Gompert’s voice is toneless and hard to hear because it issues from out of the circle formed by her crossed legs. ‘It isn’t a question of caring or not caring,’ Day says quietly. ‘I meant only that I identify to an extent.’ Gompert’s sarcastic chuff of air raises a section of her unwashed bangs.

Bruce Green doesn’t snore, even with his nose broken and cross-hatched in white tape. Neither he nor Erdedy is listening to them.

Day speaks softly and doesn’t cross his legs to incline over to the side

toward her. ‘When I was a little boy —’ Gompert chuffs air again. ‘— just a boy with a violin and a dream and special roundabout routes to school to avoid the boys who took my violin case and played keep-away over my head with it, one summer afternoon I was upstairs in the bedroom I shared with my younger brother, alone, practicing my violin. It was very hot, and there was an electric fan in the window, blowing out, acting as an exhaust fan.’ ‘I know from exhaust fans, believe you me.’ ‘The direction of flow is beside the point. It was on, and its position in the window made the glass of the upraised pane vibrate somehow. It produced an odd high-pitched vibration, invariant and constant. By itself it was strange but benign. But on this one afternoon, the fan’s vibration

combined with some certain set of notes I was practicing on the violin, and the two vibrations set up a resonance that made something happen in my head. It is impossible really to explain it, but it was a certain quality of this

resonance that produced it.’ ‘A thing.’ ‘As the two vibrations combined, it was as if a large dark billowing shape came billowing out of some corner in my mind. I can be no more precise than to say large, dark, shape, and billowing, what came flapping out of some backwater of my psyche I had not had the slightest inkling was

there.’ ‘But it was inside you, though.’ ‘Katherine, Kate, it was total horror. It was all horror everywhere, distilled and given form. It rose in me, out of me, summoned somehow by the odd confluence of the fan and those notes. It rose and grew larger and became engulfing and more horrible than I shall ever have the power to convey. I dropped my violin and ran from the room.’ ‘Was it triangular? The shape? When you say billowing, do you mean like a triangle?’ ‘Shapeless. Shapelessness was one of the horrible things about it. I can say and mean only shape, dark, and either billowing or flapping. But because the horror receded the moment I left the room, within minutes it had become unreal. The shape and horror. It seemed to have been my imagination, some random bit of psychic flatulence, an anomaly.’ A mirthless laugh into the ankle. ‘Alcoholics Anomalous.’ Day hasn’t switched legs or moved, and he isn’t looking at her ear or her scalp, which are in view. ‘In just the way any child will probe a wound or pick at a scab I returned shortly to the room and the fan and picked up the violin again. And produced the resonance again immediately. And immediately again the black flapping shape rose in my mind again. It was a bit like a sail, or a small part of the wing of something far too large to be seen in totality. It was total psychic horror: death, decay, dissolution, cold empty black malevolent lonely voided space. It was the worst thing I have ever confronted.’ ‘But you still forgot and went back up there and brought it back. And it was inside you.’

Completely incongruously, Ken Erdedy says ‘His head’s shaped like a mushroom.’ Day has no idea what he was referring to or talking about. ‘Set free somehow by that one-day-only resonance of violin and fan, the dark shape began rising out of my mind’s corner on its own. I dropped the violin again and ran from the room once again, clutching my head at the front and back, but this time it did not recede.’ ‘The triangular horror.’ ‘It was as if I’d awakened it and now it was active. It came and went for a year. I lived in horror of it for a year, as a child, never knowing when it would rise up billowing and blot out all light. After a year it receded. I think I was ten. But not all the way. I’d awakened it somehow. Every so often.

Every few months it would rise inside me.’ It isn’t like a real interface or conversation. Day doesn’t seem to be addressing anybody in particular. ‘The last time it ever rose up billowing was my second year of college. I attended Brown University in Providence RI, graduating magna cum laude. One sophomore night it came up out of nowhere, the black shape, for the first time in years.’ ‘But there was an inevitability-feeling about it, too, when it came.’ ‘It is the most horrible feeling I have ever imagined, much less felt.

There is no possible way death can feel as bad. It rose up. It was worse now

that I was older.’ ‘Tell me all about it.’ ‘I thought I’d have to hurl myself out of my dormitory’s window. I simply could not live with how it felt.’ Gompert’s head isn’t all the way up, but now it’s about halfway up; her forehead has a major red impression-spot from her ankle-bone. She’s looking roughly halfway between straight ahead and Day beside her. ‘And there was this idea underneath that you’d brought it on, that you’d wakened it up. You went back up to the fan that second time. You like despised yourself for waking it up.’ Day is looking straight ahead. Mr. Bouncety-Bounce’s head is in no way mushroom-shaped, though it is large and — in the rubber infant-mask — apt to appear to the adult viewer kind of grotesque. ‘Some boy I hardly knew in the room below mine heard me staggering around whimpering at the top of my lungs. He came up and sat up with me until it went away. It took most of the night. We didn’t converse; he didn’t try to comfort me. He

spoke very little, just sat up with me. We didn’t become friends. By graduation I’d forgotten his name and major. But on that night he seemed to be the piece of string by which I hung suspended over hell itself.’ Green in his sleep cries out something that sounds like ‘For God’s sake no Mr. Ho don’t light it!’ His swollen black eyes and R.E.M.’s non sequiturs, plus the capering 130-kilo infant on the viewer, plus Day and Gompert conversing while both staring into space, all backed by the blurps and wonks of Gene M.’s hand-held game in the office, give the dark living room a dreamy and almost surreal atmosphere.

Day finally uncrosses his legs and switches them. ‘It’s never come back.

Over twenty years. But I’ve not forgotten. And the worst times I have felt since then were like a day at the foot-masseur’s compared to the feeling of that black sail or wing rising inside me.’ ‘Billowing.’ ‘Not the nuts Jesus God not the nutsss.’ ‘ I understood the term hell as of that summer day and that night in the sophomore dormitory. I understood what people meant by hell. They did not mean the black sail. They meant the associated feelings.’ ‘Or the corner it came up out of, inside, if they mean a place.’ Kate Gompert is now looking at him. Her face doesn’t look better but does look different. Her neck’s clearly stiff from having been contorted. ‘From that day, whether I could articulate it satisfactorily or not,’ Day says, holding the knee of the leg just crossed, ‘I understood on an intuitive level why people killed themselves. If I had to go for any length of time with that feeling I’d surely kill myself.’ ‘Time in the shadow of the wing of the thing too big to see, rising.’ ‘Oh God please,’ Green says very distinctly.

Day says: ‘There is no way it could feel worse.’

11 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

Apparently some higher-up had sent Mary Esther Thode out on her little yellow Vespa with the order for their match; she’d pulled up alongside Stice and Wayne just as they cleared the Hammond golf course, Hal a good half km. behind them with galumphers Kornspan and Kahn. Schtitt was inscrutable about the whole thing. The match wasn’t like a ladder- challenge; Stice and Hal were in different age-divisions this year. The match was more like maybe an exhibition, and by the second set, as people got done with the weight room and showers, it was attended like one. The match. Helen Steeply of Moment, possessed of a certain thuggish allure but hardly the pericardium-piercer that Orin had made her sound like, to Hal, sat through the whole thing, accompanied for the first set by Aubrey deLint before Thierry Poutrincourt stole his spot on the bleacher. It was the first high-caliber junior tennis she’d ever seen, she said, the massive journalist.

They played on #6, the best of the east Show Courts. Also the scene of some of the recent Eschaton’s worst carnage. It was a conditioning-heavy day, a very light schedule of matches. Bags of smoke burped steadily up from Schtitt’s crow’s nest high overhead, and sometimes you could hear the weatherman’s pointer tapping absently on the transom’s iron. The only other thing nearby was down on #10, a challenge in Girls’ 14’s, two baseliners sending parabolas back and forth: ponytails, an air of baseline attrition, the ball’s high heavy arc that of a loogy spat for distance. Shaw and Axford were also way out on #23, warming up. No one paid them or the 14’s much mind. The bleachers behind the Show Court filled steadily up. Schtitt had Mario film the whole first set from above, leaning way out over the transom’s railing with Watson braced and gripping his vest from behind, Mario’s police lock protruding and casting a weird needly shadow slanted northeast of Court 9’s net. ‘This is the first real match I’ve seen, after hearing so much about the junior tour,’ Helen Steeply told deLint, trying to cross her legs on a cramped bleacher a few tiers from the top. Aubrey deLint’s smile was notoriously bad, his face seeming to break into crescents and shards, wholly

without cheer. It was almost more like a grimace. Orders that deLint keep the mammoth soft-profiler in direct sight at all times were explicit and emphatic. Helen Steeply had a notebook, and deLint was filling in both players’ names on performance charts Schtitt won’t ever let anyone look at.

The P.M. was moving fast from a chilly noon cloud-cover into blue autumn glory, but in the first set it was still very cold, the sun still pale and seeming to flutter as if poorly wired. Hal and Stice didn’t have to stretch and barely warmed up at all, after the run. They’d changed clothes and were both expressionless. Stice was in all-black, Hal in E.T.A. sweats with his left shoe’s upper bulging distended around his AirStirrup brace.

A born net-man, Ortho Stice played with a kind of rigid, liquid grace, like a panther in a back-brace. He was shorter than Hal but better-built and with quicker feet. A southpaw with factory-painted W’s on his Wilson Pro Staff 5.8 si’s.

Hal was left-handed too, which complicated strategy and percentages hideously, deLint told the journalist beside him.

The Darkness’s service motion was in the McEnroe-Esconja tradition, legs splayed, feet parallel, a figure off an Egyptian frieze, side so severely to the net he’s almost facing away. Both arms out straight and stiff on the serve’s downswing. Hal bobbed on his feet’s balls a little in the ad court, waiting. Stice started his service-motion motion in little segments — it looks a little like bad animation — then grimaced, tossed, pivoted netward and served it with a hard flat spang way out to Hal’s forehand, pulling Hal wide. The finish of Stice’s pivot lets his momentum carry him naturally up to net, following the serve. Hal lunged for the serve and chipped a little forehand return down the line and scrambled right to get back into court.

The return was lucky, a feeble chip that just cleared the net’s tape, so shallow that Stice had to half-volley it at the service line, still moving in, his backhand two-handed and clumsy for half-volleys; he had to sort of scoop it and hit up soft so it wouldn’t float out deep. Axiom: the man who has to hit up from the net is going to get passed. And Stice’s half-volley landed in the ad court squishy and slow and sat up for Hal, who was waiting for it. Hal’s stick was back for the forehand, waiting, and there was a moment of total mentation as the ball hung there. Statistically, Hal was book to pass a left-handed volleyer cross-court off a ball this ripe, though he also always loved a good humiliating topspin lob, and Stice’s fractional

chance at saving the point was to guess what Hal would do — Stice couldn’t crowd the net because Hal would put it up over him; he stayed a couple stick-lengths off the net, leaning for a cross. Everything seemed to hang distended in air now so clear it seemed washed, after the clouds. The bleachers’ people could feel Hal feel Stice letting the point go, inside, figuring it lost, knowing he could only guess and stab, hoping. Little hope of Hal fucking up: Hal Incandenza does not fuck up passes off floater half- volleys. Hal’s forehand’s wind-up was nicely disguised, prepped for either lob or pass. When he hit it so hard his forearm’s musculature stood starkly out it was a pass but not cross-court; he went inside-out on it, a flat forehand as hard as he could from the baseline’s center back toward Stice’s deuce-sideline. Stice had finally guessed lob at the start of the stroke and had half-turned to sprint back for where it would land, and the inside-out pass wrong-footed him; he could do no more than stand there flat-footed and watching as the fresh ball landed a meter fair to get Hal back to deuce in the fifth game. There was applause off thirty hands for the point as a whole, which was faultless and on Hal’s part imaginative, anti-book. One of very few total inspired points from Incandenza, deLint’s chart would show.

Neither player’s face moved as a couple people shouted for Hal. The basic 265 ten-level R.A.S.U. from the Universal Bleacher Co. sat right behind the court. At the start it was mostly staff and the A’s who were running alongside when Thode brought Stice and Hal the directive to play. But the stands gradually filled as word got down to the locker rooms that The Darkness was playing 18’s A-2 dead-even in the first set of something Schtitt had actually dispatched a scooter to order. The bleachers’ E.T.A.s hunched forward with hands warmed in the crease between hamstrings and calves, or else gloved and layered and stretched out with their heads and bottoms and heels on three different levels, watching both sky and play. The lozenges of shadow from the court’s mesh fences elongated as the sun wheeled southwest to west. Several sets of legs and sneakers hung swinging from the transom above. Mario allowed himself several reaction-shots from staff and partisans in the bleachers. Aubrey deLint spent the set with the punter’s cathected profiler, who allegedly came to see Hal only about Orin but whom Charles Tavis won’t let see Hal yet, even chaperoned, Tavis’s reasons for the reticence too detailed for Helen Steeply to understand,

probably, but she was watching from the Show-bleachers’ top row, poised over a notebook, wearing a fuchsia ski cap with a rooster-comb top instead of a pompom top, blowing into her fist, her weight making the bleacher below her bow and inclining deLint oddly toward her. For the spectators not perched on the transom overhead, the players looked waffle-cut by the chain-link fencing. The green windscreens that wrecked spectation were used only in the spring in the weeks right after the Lung’s disassembly.

DeLint hadn’t stopped talking into the big lady’s ear.

All the E.T.A. players loved the Show Courts 6–9 because they loved to be watched, and also hated the Show Courts because the transom’s crow’s- nested shadow covered the north halves of the courts around noon and all through the P.M. wheeled around gradually east like some giant hooded shadowed moving presence, brooding. Sometimes just the sight of Schtitt’s little head’s shadow could make a younger kid on the Show Courts clutch and freeze. By Hal and Stice’s seventh game, the sky was cloudless, and the transom’s monolithic shadow, black as ink, gave everyone watching the fantods as it elongated along the nets, completely obscuring Stice when he followed a serve in. Another advantage of the Lung was that it afforded no overhead view, which was one more reason why staff waited as long as possible before its erection. There was no indication Hal even saw it, the shadow, hunched and waiting for Stice.

The Darkness splayed out stiff on the deuce side of the center line, ratcheting slowly into his service motion. He overhit the first serve long and Hal angled it softly off-court, moving two steps in for the second ball. Stice hit his second serve as hard as he could again and netted it, and pursed his thick lips a little as he walked into the net’s shadow to retrieve the ball, and Hal jogged over to the fence behind the next court to get the ball he’d angled over. DeLint was putting a pejorative hieroglyphic in a box on his chart marked STICE.

At just this moment, @1200 meters east and downhill and one level below ground, Ennet House live-in Staff Don Gately lay deeply asleep in his Lone-Rangerish sleeping mask, his snores rattling the deinsulated pipes along his little room’s ceiling.

Four-odd clicks to the northwest in the men’s room of the Armenian Foundation Library, right near the onion-domed Watertown Arsenal, Poor Tony Krause hunched forward in a stall in his ghastly suspenders and

purloined cap, his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, getting a whole new perspective on time and the various passages and personae of time.

M. M. Pemulis and J. G. Struck, wet-haired after their P.M. runs, had blarneyed their way past the library-attendant at the B.U. School of Pharmacy 2.8 clicks down Commonwealth on Comm. and Cook St. and were seated at a table in Reference, Pemulis’s yachting cap pushed way back to accommodate his rising eyebrows, licking his finger to turn pages.

H. Steeply’s green sedan with its neuralgiac full-front Nunhagen ad on the side sat in an Authorized Guest parking spot in the E.T.A. lot.

266 Between appointments, in an office whose west windows yielded no view of the match, Charles Tavis had his head mashed up against the upholstered seat-rail of his sofa, his arm under the gray-and-red ruffle and sweeping back and forth for the bathroom scale he keeps under there.

Avril Incandenza’s whereabouts on the grounds were throughout this interval unknown.

At just this moment M.S.T., Orin Incandenza was once again embracing a certain ‘Swiss’ hand-model before a wall-width window in a rented suite halfway up a different tall hotel (from before) in Phoenix AZ. The windowlight was fiery with heat. Way below, tiny cars’ roofs glared so bright with reflected light their colors were obscured. Pedestrians hunched and sprinted between different areas of shade and refrigeration. The cityscape’s glass and metal twinkled but seemed to sag — the whole vista looked somehow stunned. The cool air through the room’s vent whispered.

They’d put down their glasses of ice and come together upright and embraced. The embrace was not like a hug. There was no talking — the only sound was the vent and their breath. Orin’s linen knee probed the deltoid fork of the hand-model’s parted legs. He let the ‘Swiss’ woman grind against the muscular knee of his good leg. They got so close no light shone between them, and ground together. Her lids fluttered; his closed; their breath became somehow coded. Again the concentrated tactile languor of the sexual mode. Again they stripped each other to the waist and she, in that same kind of jitterbug jape they didn’t have the breath to laugh at, she hopped up at him and forked her legs the same way over his shoulders and arched back until his arm stopped her fall and he supported her like that, the

left hand horned with old callus at the small of her satiny back, and bore her.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe the sun’s the same sun over all different parts of the planet. The NNE sun was at this same moment the color of hollandaise and gave off no heat. Between points, both Hal and Stice switched their sticks to their right hands and clamped their left hands tight under their arms to keep from losing sensation in the chill. Stice was double-faulting more than his average because he was trying to get enough on his second serve to follow it credibly to net. DeLint estimated he was 267 charting Stice at one double-fault per 1.3 games, and his a./d.f. ratio was an undistinguished .6, but he, deLint, told Helen Steeply of Moment, spread way out next to him on the third row from the top and using Gregg shorthand, deLint told this Ms. Steeply that Stice was nevertheless wise to crank the second serve and eat the occasional double-fault. Stice wound up to serve so stiff, his motion so sprocketed and serial, that the journalist told deLint Stice looked to her as if he’d learned to serve by studying still photos of the motion’s different stages, no offense intended. There was none of real high-speed motion’s liquid flow until the very end, when Stice pivoted toward the net and seemed to sort of fall out into the court, his tennis racquet whirling behind his back and snapping upward to impact the yellow ball hanging at just the height of his maximum reach, and there was a solid pock as this Stice cracked it flat into Orin’s brother’s body, handcuffing Hal at such speeds the ball’s movement presented only as afterimage, the creamy retinal trail of something too fast to track. Hal’s awkward return had too much slice, and floated, and Stice hurtled forward to volley it chest-high, blocking it acute into open court for a clean winner.

There was mild applause. DeLint invited Helen Steeply to note that The Darkness really won that point on the serve itself. Hal Incandenza walked to the fence to retrieve the ball, impassive, wiping his nose against his sweatshirt’s sleeve; ad-in. Hal was up 5–4 in the first and had saved three ads off Stice’s fifth service game, two off double-faults; but deLint still maintained Stice was wise. ‘Hal’s got to the point in the last year here where a kid’s only real chance is to totally press, attack at all times, whale the serve, haul ass to the net, assume the aggressor role.’

‘Does Herr Schtitt wear eye makeup?’ Helen Steeply asked him. ‘I was noticing.’ ‘You stay back against this Hal kid, you try to out-think him and move him around, he’ll yank you back and forth and chew you up and spit you out and step on the remains. We’ve spent years getting him to this point.

Nobody stays back and out-controls Incandenza anymore.’ Pretending to flip to a fresh page, Helen Steeply dropped her pen, which fell into the bleachers’ struts and supports and clattered as only something dropped into a system of metal bleachers can clatter. The prolonged noise made Stice take some extra bounces before he served. He bounced the ball several times, leaning forward, lined up splayed and violently sideways. He went into his odd segmented windup; Helen Steeply produced another pen from the pocket of her fiberfill parka; Stice cracked it flat down the center, aiming for an ace on the service lines’ T. It went by Hal unplayable and literally too close to call. There are no linesmen for internal E.T.A. matches.

Hal looked down the line at where the thing hit and skidded, pausing before indicating his call, the hand to his cheek indicating deliberation. He shrugged and shook his head and laid a hand out flat in the air before him to signify to Stice he was calling the serve good. This meant game Stice. The Darkness was walking toward the net, kneading his neck, looking at where Hal was still standing. ‘We can go on and play two,’ Stice said. ‘Didn’t see it neither.’ Hal was coming in closer to Stice because he was going to the net-post for his towel. ‘Not your job to see it.’ He looked unhappy and tried to smile. ‘You hit it too hard to see, you deserve the point.’ Stice shrugged and nodded, chewing. ‘You take the next gimme then.’ He sliced two balls soft so they ended their roll down near the opposite baseline, where Hal could use them to serve. The Darkness still made huge mandibular chewing faces on-court even though he hadn’t been allowed to chew gum in play since he accidentally inhaled gum and had to be Heimliched by his opponent in the semis of last spring’s Easter Bowl. ‘Ortho’s saying how the next debatable call goes immediately to Hal; they don’t take two,’ deLint said, darkening in half-squares on the two

charts. ‘Take two?’

‘Play a let, babe. Do it over. Two serves: one point.’ Aubrey deLint was a lightly pockmarked man with thick yellow hair in an anchorman’s helmety style and a hypertensive flush, and eyes, oval and close-set and lightless, that seemed like a second set of nostrils in his face. ‘Do a whole lot of sports at Moment do you?’ ‘So they’re being sporting,’ Steeply said. ‘Generous, fair.’ ‘We inculcate that as a priority here,’ deLint said, gesturing vaguely at the space around them, head bent to his charts. ‘They seem like friends.’ ‘The angle here for Moment might be the good-friends-off-the-court- andremorseless-pitiless-foes-on-court angle.’ ‘I mean they seem like friends even playing,’ Helen Steeply said, watching Hal dry off his leather grip with a white towel as Stice jumped up and down in place back at his deuce corner, one hand in his armpit.

DeLint’s laugh sounded to Steeply’s keen ear like the laugh of a much older and less fit man, the mucoidal fist-at-chest laugh of a lap-blanketed old man in a lawn chair on his gravel backyard in Scottsdale AZ, hearing his son say his wife claimed no longer to know who he was. ‘Don’t kid yourself, babe,’ de Lint got out. The Vaught twins on the bleacher below looked up and around and pretended to shush him, the left mouth grinning, deLint with that bad cold-eyed shard of a smile back at them as Hal Incandenza bounced the ball three times and went into his own service motion.

Several little boys were strung busily out along the sides of a small utility tunnel twenty-six meters below the Show Courts.

Steeply’s face looked as if the journalist were trying to think of pithy images for a motion as unexceptional and fluid as Hal Incandenza’s serve.

At the start a violinist maybe, standing alert with his sleek head cocked and racket up in front and the hand with the ball at the racket’s throat like a bow.

The down-together-up-together of the downswing and toss could be a child making angels in the snow, cheeks rosy and eyes at the sky. But Hal’s face was pale and thoroughly unchildlike, his gaze somehow extending only half a meter in front of him. He looked nothing like the punter. The service motion’s middle might be a man at a precipice, falling forward, giving in sweetly to his own weight, and the serve’s terminus and impact a hammering man, the driven nail just within range at the top of his tiptoed

reach. But all these were only parts, and made the motion seem segmented, when the smaller crew-cutted jowly boy was the one with the stuttered motion, the man of parts. Steeply had played tennis only a couple times, with his wife, and had felt ungainly and simian out there. The punter’s discourses on the game had been lengthy but not much use. It was unlikely that any one game figured much in the Entertainment.

Hal Incandenza’s first serve was a tactically aggressive shot but not immediately identifiable as such. Stice wanted to serve so hard he could set himself up to put the ball away on the next shot, up at net. Hal’s serve seemed to set in motion a much more involved mechanism, one that took several exchanges to reveal itself as aggressive. His first serve hadn’t Stice’s pace, but it had depth, plus a topspin Hal achieved with an arched back and faint brushing action over the back of the ball that made the serve curve visibly in the air, egg-shaped with spin, to land deep in the box and hop up high, so that Stice couldn’t do more than send back a deep backhand chip from shoulder-height, and then couldn’t come in behind a return that’d been robbed of all pace. Stice moved to the baseline’s center as the chip floated back to Hal. Hal’s pivot moved him right so he could take it on the 268 forehand another looper dripping with top, right back in the same corner he’d served to, so that Stice had to stop and sprint back the same way he’d come. Stice drove this backhand hard down the line to Hal’s forehand, a blazing thing that made the audience inhale, but as the samizdat’s director’s other son glided a few strides left Steeply could see that he now had a whole open court to hit cross-court into, Stice having hit so hard he’d backpedalled a bit off the shot and was now scrambling to get back out of the deuce corner, and Hal hit the flat textbook drive cross-court into green lined space, hard but not flamboyantly so, and the diagonal of the ball kept it travelling out wide after it hit Stice’s ad sideline, carrying it away from the boy in black’s outstretched racquet, and for a second it looked as if Stice at a dead run might get his strings on the ball, but the ball stayed tantalizingly just out of reach, still travelling at a severe cross-court diagonal, and it passed Stice’s racquet half a meter past its rim, and Stice’s momentum carried him almost halfway into the next court. Stice slowed to a jog to go retrieve the ball. Hal stood slightly hipshot on the ad side, waiting for Stice to get back and let him serve again. DeLint, whose

peripheral vision’s acuity and disguise was an E.T.A. legend, observed the big journalist chew her nib for a second and then put down nothing more than the Gregg ideogram for pretty, shaking her fuchsia cap. ‘Wasn’t that pretty,’ he said blandly.

Steeply rooted for a hankie. ‘Not exactly.’ ‘Hal’s in essence a torturer, if you want his essence as a player, instead of a straight-out killer like Stice or the Canadian Wayne,’ deLint said. ‘This is why you don’t stay back or play safe against Hal. This way of the ball seeming just in reach, to keep you trying, running. He yanks you around.

Always two or three shots ahead. He won that point on the deep forehand after the serve — the second he had Stice wrong-footed you could see the angle open up. Though the serve set the whole thing up in advance, and without the risk of much pace on it. The kid doesn’t need pace, we’ve helped him find.’ ‘When might I get a chance to talk to him?’ ‘Incandenza took a lot of bringing along. He didn’t used to quite have the complete game to be able to do this. Slice the court up into sections and chinks, then all of a sudden you see light through one of the chinks and you see he’s been setting up the angle since the start of the point. It makes you think of chess.’ The journalist blew her red nose. ‘ “Chess on the run.” ’ ‘Nice term.’ Hal went into his service motion to the ad court.

‘Do the students play chess here?’

A mirthless chuckle. ‘No time.’ ‘Do you play chess?’ Stice hit a backhand winner off Hal’s second serve; mild applause. ‘I don’t have time to play anything,’ deLint said, filling in a square. You could tell by the sound that the other boy’s racquet was strung tighter than Hal’s. ‘When do I get to sit down with Hal directly?’ ‘I don’t know. I don’t think you do.’ The journalist’s rapid head-movement reconfigured the flesh of her neck. ‘Pardon me?’ ‘It’s not my decision. My guess is you don’t. Dr. Tavis didn’t already tell you?’

‘I really couldn’t tell what he was telling me.’ ‘We’ve never had a kid here interviewed. The Founder let you guys on the grounds, versus Tavis this is an exception your even getting in.’ ‘I’m here for background only, for your alumnus, the punter.’ DeLint was making his lips look like he was whistling even though no whistling-sound was emerging. ‘We’ve never let somebody do any kind of interview on a kid here while he’s still in training and inculcation.’ ‘Does the student have some sort of say in who he talks to and why?

What if the boy wants to chat with me about his brother’s transition from tennis to football?’ DeLint kept his concentration on the match and the chart in a way that was supposed to let you know you had very little of his attention. ‘Talk to

Tavis about it.’ ‘I was in there for over two hours.’ ‘You pick up how to do questions with him after a while. Tavis you have to back into a Yes-No corner where you can finally say I need a Yes or a No. It takes about twenty minutes if you’re sharp. This is your whole business, getting answers out of people. The answer’s not for me to officially say, but I’m guessing a No. The Boston press guys come around after a big event, they get match results and physical stats and hometowns and nothing more.’ ‘Moment is a national magazine for and about exceptional people, not some sportswriter with a cigar and a deadline.’ ‘It’s a command-decision, babe. I’m not in command. I know they teach us to teach that this place is about seeing instead of being seen.’ ‘I’m here only for the human-interest perspective of a talented boy on his talented brother’s bold transition to a major sport where he’s shown himself to be even more talented. One exceptional brother on another. Hal is not the profile’s focus.’ ‘Get Tavis in the right corner and he’ll tell you about seeing and being seen. These kids, the best of them are here to learn to see. Schtitt’s thing is self-transcendence through pain. These kids —’ gesturing at Stice running madly up for a drop-volley that stopped rolling well inside the service line; mild applause — ‘they’re here to get lost in something bigger than them. To have it stay the way it was when they started, the game as something bigger, at first. Then they show talent, start winning, become big fish in their ponds

out there in their hometowns, stop being able to get lost inside the game and see. Fucks with a junior’s head, talent. They pay top dollar to come here and go back to being little fish and to get savaged and feel small and see and develop. To forget themselves as objects of attention for a few years and see what they can do when the eyes are off them. They didn’t come here to get read about as some soft-news item or background. Babe.’ DeLint read Steeply’s expression as some kind of tic. The tiniest tuft of nostril-hair protruded from one of her nostrils, which deLint found repellent. She said, ‘Were you ever written about, as a player?’ DeLint smiled coolly at his charts. ‘Never had the sort of ranking or promise this issue’d even come up for me.’ ‘But some of these do. Hal’s brother did.’ DeLint felt along his lip’s outline with his pencil, sniffed. ‘Orin was OK.

Orin was essentially a one-trick pony as a player. And between you and me and the fence he was kind of a head-case. His game left here on the down- swing. Now his little brother’s got a future in tennis if he wants. And Ortho.

Wayne for sure. A couple of the girls — Kent, Caryn and Sharyn here,’ indicating the Vaught-apparition below them. ‘The really gifted ones, the ones that make it out of here still on the upswing, if they get to the Show —

’ ‘Meaning professional you mean.’ ‘In the Show they’ll get all they want of being made into statues to be looked at and poked at and discussed, and then some. For now they’re here to get to be the ones who look and see and forget getting looked at, for now.’ ‘But even you call it “The Show.” They’ll be entertainers.’ ‘You bet your ass they will be.’ ‘So audiences will be the whole point. Why not also prepare them for the stresses of entertaining an audience, get them used to being seen?’ The two boys were at the near net-post, Stice blowing his nose into a towel. DeLint made kind of a show of putting his clipboard down. ‘Assume wrongly for a second that I can speak for the Enfield Academy. I say you do not get it. The point here for the best kids is to inculcate their sense that it’s never about being seen. It’s never. If they can get that inculcated, the Show won’t fuck them up, Schtitt thinks. If they can forget everything but the game when all of you out there outside the fence see only them and want

only them and the game’s incidental to you, for you it’s about entertainment and personality, it’s about the statue, but if they can get inculcated right they’ll never be slaves to the statue, they’ll never blow their brains out after winning an event when they win, or dive out a third-story window when they start to stop getting poked at or profiled, when their blossom starts to fade. Whether or not you mean to, babe, you chew them up, it’s what you

do.’ ‘We chew statues?’ ‘Whether you mean to or no. You, Moment, World Tennis, Self, Inter- Lace, the audiences. The crowds in Italy fucking literally. It’s the nature of the game. It’s the machine they’re all dying to throw themselves into. They don’t know the machine. But we do. Gerhardt’s teaching them to see the ball out of a place inside that can’t be chewed. It takes time and total focus.

The man’s a fucking genius. Profile Schtitt, if you want to profile somebody.’ ‘And I’m not going to be allowed even to ask the students what it looks like, this inside chew-proof place. It’s a secret place.’ Hal mishit a second serve and it flew off his frame and way down to where the girls were sending each other squeaks and lobs, and Stice had now broken him to go up 6–5, and the murmurs in the bleachers were like a courtroom at an unpleasant revelation. DeLint rounded his lips and made a kind of bovine sound in Ortho Stice’s direction. Hal chipped his balls out along the baseline and made some small adjustments in his cross-hatched strings as he walked around for the side-change. A couple of the nastier kids applauded Hal’s mishit a little. ‘Get sardonic with me all you want. I already said it’s not my command- decision. I wouldn’t get sardonic with Tavis, though.’ ‘But if it were. Your command.’ ‘Lady, if it was me you’d be pressing your nose between the bars of the gate down there is as far in as you’d get. You’re coming into a little slice of space and/or time that’s been carved out to protect talented kids from exactly the kind of activities you guys come in here to do. Why Orin, anyway? The kid appears four times a game, never gets hit, doesn’t even wear pads. A one-trick pony. Why not John Wayne? A more dramatic story, geopolitics, privation, exile, drama. A better player than Hal even. A more complete game. Aimed like a fucking missile at the Show, maybe the Top

Five if he doesn’t fuck up or burn down. Wayne’s your ideal food-group.

Which is why we’ll keep you off him as long as he’s here.’ The soft-profiler looked around at the scalps and knees in the stands, the bags of gear and a couple incongruous cans of furniture polish. ‘Carved out of what, though, this place?’

From the Desk of Helen Steeply

Contributing Editor

Moment Magazine

13473 Blasted Expanse Blvd.

Tucson, AZ, 857048787/2

Mr. Marlon K. Bain

Saprogenic Greetings, Inc.

BPL-Waltham Bldg.

1214 Totten Pond Road

Waltham, MA, 021549872/4.

November Y.D.A.U.

Dear Mr. Bain:

In Phoenix on other business, it has been my good fortune to meet your adolescent friend, Mr. Orin J. Incandenza, and to have become intrigued with the possibilities of a profile of the Incandenza family and its accomplishments in not only sports but wide-ranging topics such as independent film circa metropolitan Boston, past and present.

I am writing to ask for your cooperation in contacting you with questions which you could answer in writing, as I am informed by Mr. Orin Incandenza you dislike to meet people outside your home and office.

I am hoping to hear from you in response to this request at your earliest convenience,

Etc. etc. etc.

*Saprogenic Greetings WHEN YOU CARE ENOUGH TO LET A PROFESSIONAL SAY IT FOR YOU

Ms. Helen Steepley

And So On November Y.D.A.U.

Dear Ms. Steepley: Fire away.

V.D.,

MK Bain Saprogenic Greetings/ACMÉ

From the Desk of Helen Steeply

Contributing Editor

Moment Magazine

13473 Blasted Expanse Blvd.

Tucson, AZ, 857048787/2

Mr. MK Bain

Saprogenic Greetings Inc.

BPL-Waltham Bldg.

1214 Totten Pond Road

Waltham, MA, 021549872/4.

November Y.D.A.U.

Dear Mr. Bain: 269Q, Q, Q (Q, Q[Q], Q, Q, Q), Q, Q (Q), Q, Q.

Carved out of sedimentary shale and ferrous granite and generic morphic crud — at more or less the same time the hilltop’s bulge was shaved off and rolled and impacted level for tennis — are E.T.A.’s abundant tunnels. There are access tunnels and hallway tunnels, with rooms and labs and Pump Room’s Lung-nexus off both sides, utility tunnels and storage tunnels and little blunt off-tunnels connecting tunnels to other tunnels.

Maybe about sixteen different tunnels in all, in a shape that’s more generally ovoid than anything else.

11/11, 1625h., LaMont Chu, Josh Gopnik, Audern Tallat-Kelpsa, Philip Traub, Tim (‘Sleepy T.P.’) Peterson, Carl Whale, Kieran McKenna — the bulk of the ambulatory sub-14 male Eschatonites — plus ten-year-old Kent Blott — are 26 meters directly below the Hal/Darkness match’s Show Court 270 with Glad Handle-Tie trashbags and B.P. low-diffusion compact mercuric flashlights. Plus Chu has a clipboard with a pen attached to its clamp with twine. The sounds of competitive sneaker-movement and spectatorial bleacher-squeaks on the surface, travelling down through meters of compacted crud and polymerized cement tunnel-ceiling w/ parget-layer, sound rather like the stealthy dry scuttle of rodents, vermin.

And this heightens the excitement that’s part of why they’re really down here.

One part of the reason they’re down here is that small U.S. boys seem to have this fetish for getting down in the enclosed fundaments underneath things — tunnels, caves, ventilator-shafts, the horrific areas beneath wooden porches — rather the way older U.S. boys like great perspectival heights and spectacular views encompassing huge swaths of territory, this latter fetish accounting for why E.T.A.’s hilltop site is one of its trump- cards in the recruiting war with Port Washington and other Eastern- seaboard academies.

Another part is a semi-punitive shit detail in which certain players — judged to have been involved in the recent Eschaton nonstrategic-combat 271 debacle, but who are uninjured and not in the much severer hot water that the Big Buddies on the scene are in — have been punitively remanded below ground in P.M. shifts on what’s supposed to constitute an unpleasant chore, to scout out the tunnelled route the TesTar All-Weather Inflatable

Structures Corp.’s professional guys will have to take as they haul out from the Lung-Storage Room the fiberglass struts and crosspieces and dendriurethane folds that compose the Lung, for erection of the Lung, when the E.T.A. administration finally decides that the late-fall weather has gone beyond character-building and become an impediment to development and morale. This will be soon. Because the prorectors live in rooms off the larger tunnels and F. D. V. Harde’s Physical Plant and Maintenance guys have their offices and supplies down here, and because Dr. James Incandenza’s old optics and editing facilities are down here off one of the main tunnels and get used for Leith/Ogilvie classes in entertainment production and for optical science tutorials etc., and because a couple of the secondary and off-tunnels are used for temporary storage by departing seniors who can’t tote eight or more years’ worth of accumulated stuff in one post-graduate load — especially if they jet off to some novitiate-pro Satellite circuit for the summer, because that means air travel, two bags plus gear, max — some of the tunnels become badly littered in the warm season with trash-type material. And sometimes there’s bulky-possession-type overflow from the little curved storage tunnels off the prorectors’ hallway.

Smaller kids are perfect for recons into low narrow tunnels partly blocked with dross, and even though it’s no secret around E.T.A. that the smaller boys spend a fair amount of time down in the tunnels anyway, a retributive aspect is lent to this recon-detail by making the kids take down Handle-Tie trashbags to clear away littered exam papers and lab-handouts, calculator- batteries and banana peels and Kodiak smokeless-tobacco tins and spirals of synthetic-gut racquet-string, and Maintenance guys’ hideous cigar-butts — Sleepy T.P. finds two bright Trojan wrappers just off the prorectors’ hallway-tunnel, and then a couple meters farther along the floor the vermiform gleam of an actual condom, and there’s some high-register debate about whether it’s a used condom or not, and poor old Kent Blott is finally put in charge of picking it up and putting it in a trashbag, just in case it’s a used condom — and empty boxes of complimentary corporate gear, and full boxes of faggy or poorly-absorbent gear nobody wants, and Habitant can-wrappers, and senior trunks and dorm-sized fridgelettes, etc.; and also to move whatever boxes they can heft, clear them out of the TesTar guys’ access-route into the Lung-Storage and Pump Rooms; and LaMont Chu is supposed to note the location of any boxes or objects too bulky for

them to move out of the way, and beefy custodial guys will be dispatched to handle them as they see fit.

This is why a fair number of the smaller E.T.A. males don’t see Stice take a set off Hal Incandenza and nearly beat him, is that they were remanded down here by Neil Hartigan right after post-conditioning showers.

As noted already, they don’t much mind it, being down here, now in one of the child-size-diametered off-tunnels between the prorectors’ hallway and the Lung-Storage Room. The Eschatonites are down here quite a lot anyway. In fact the sub-14 E.T.A.s historically have a kind of Tunnel Club.

Like many small boys’ clubs, the Tunnel Club’s unifying raison d’être is kind of vague. Tunnel Club activities mostly involve congregating informally in the better-lit main tunnels and hanging out and catching each other in lies about their lives and careers before E.T.A., and recapitulating the most recent Eschaton (usually only about five a term); and the Club’s only formal activity is sitting around with a yellowed copy of Robert’s Rules endlessly refining and amending the rules for who can and can’t join the Tunnel Club. A true boy-type club, the Tunnel Club’s least vague raison d’être has to do with exclusion. The vital No-Girls exclusion is the only 272 ironclad part of the Tunnel Club’s charter. With the exception of Kent Blott, every boy down here on this detail is an Eschatonite and a member of the Tunnel Club. Kent Blott, ineligible for Eschaton because he’s a humanities-type kid and hasn’t even taken quadrivial Algebra yet, and excluded from the Club under every incarnation of the eligibility requirements thus far, is down here solely because he was heard to maintain at lunch that he was in the north part of the main tunnel between the Comm.-Ad. locker rooms and the subterranean laundry room this A.M., short-cutting back to his room in West House after drills and a sauna, and claimed to have espied — scuttling out of his mercuric light toward one of the secondary tunnels to Subdorms C and D and the East Courts and this same general tunnel-area they’re now in — to have sighted what was either a rat or, he said, what looked even more like a Concavitated feral hamster.

So the Eschatonites are also enthusiastic to be down here for potential rodent-recon, checking out Blott’s claim, and they’ve brought what’s either a very nervous or very excited Blott down with them, so they can trace the

possible routes Blott said he saw the rodent maybe take, filling their Glad Handle-Ties and noting heavy items along the way, and also so they can immediately encircle and discipline Kent Blott if it turns out he was yanking people’s chains.

Plus they make Blott be the one to take full trashbags and tie their plastic handles together and drag them back to where the expedition started — the entrance to the large smooth main tunnel by the boys’ sauna — since none of them enjoys dragging full trashbags solo through dark tunnels with the rodential squeaking of match play and spectation far above. Chu holds a penlight in his teeth and writes heavy stuff down. They’ve filled several bags and gotten the lighter shit stacked off back enough to create a narrow route almost all the way to the Pump Room, around which Room hangs a strange sweet stale burny smell that none of them can place. The applause as Hal Incandenza barely takes the first set above sounds down here like faraway rain. The off-tunnel’s dark as a pocket, but warm and dry, and there’s surprisingly little dust. Ducts and coaxials running along the low ceiling make Whale and Tallat-Kelpsa have to crouch as they walk Point, clearing boxes and trying unsuccessfully to move fridgelettes back out of the way. There are several pockets of small but heavy dorm-size Maytag fridgelettes, the kind of thing no graduate takes with him, panelled in dark wood-grain plastic, some of them old models with three-prong plugs instead of chargers. Some of the empty fridgelettes have been indifferently scrubbed out and have their doors partway open and smell stale. Most of Chu’s inventory for beefy-adult removal are either fridgelettes or locked trunks full of what sound like magazines and eight-year accumulations of pennies. The muffled rodential squeak of sneakers far overhead excites the Tunnel Club boys and puts them on edge. Philip Traub keeps making little squeaky noises and secretly tickling the back of people’s necks, causing enormous excitement and much stopping and starting and tightly-enclosed whirling around, until Kieran McKenna captures Traub tickling Josh Gopnik in the bright beam of his P.B. light and Gopnik punches Traub in the radial nerve, and Traub clutches his arm and weeps and says he’s quitting and going topside — Traub’s the youngest kid here except for Blott and is a probationary second-string launcher in most Eschatons — and they have to stop and let Chu note and mark two discarded fridgelettes while

Peterson and Gopnik try to distract and amuse Traub into staying and not retreating back up to Nwangi and making a high-pitched stink.

Discarded fridgelettes, empty boxes, immovable and complexly- address-labelled trunks, used athletic tape and Ace bandages, the occasional empty Visine bottle (which Blott stashes in his sweatshirt-pouch, for Mike Pemulis’s next contest), Optics I & II lab reports, broken ball machines and stray tennis balls too dead even for the repressurization machine, broken or discarded TP cartridges of stroke-analysis filmings or worn-out entertainments, an anomalous set of parfait glasses, fruit peels and AminoPal energy-bar-wrappers that the Club itself had left down here after meetings, discarded curls of grip and tensile string, several incongruous barrettes, several old broadcast televisions some older kids used to like to keep around to watch the static, and, along the seam of wall and floor, brittle limb-shaped husks of exfoliated Pledge, expanses of arm and leg already half-decayed into fragrant dust — this comprising the bulk of the crud down here, and the kids don’t much mind scanning and inventorying and bagging it, because their minds are diverted by something else very exciting, a kind of possible raison d’être for the Club itself, unless Blott had been tweaking their Units, in which case look out Blott, is the consensus.

Gopnik to a sniffling Traub, while Peterson shines his flashlight on the clipboard for Chu: ‘Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere that Mary went, the lights became erratic.’ Carl Whale pretends to be immensely fat and moves along the wall with a blimpish splay-legged waddle.

Peterson to Traub, while Gopnik holds the light: ‘Eighteen-year-old top- ranked John Wayne / Had sex with Herr Schtitt on a train / They had sex again / And again and again / And again and again and again,’ which the slightly older kids find more entertaining than Traub does.

Kent Blott asks why a wispy-dicked blubberer like Phil gets to be in the Tunnel Club while his own applications get turned down, and Tallat-Kelpsa cuts him short by doing something to him in the dark that makes Blott shriek.

It’s utterly dark except for the dime-sized discs of their low-diffusion B.P.s, because they’ve left the tunnels’ strings of bare overhead bulbs off, because Gopnik, who’s originally from Brooklyn and knows from rodents, says only a complete booger-eating moron would do rat-reconnaissance in

the light, and it seems reasonable to assume that feral hamsters, also, have a basically ratty attitude toward light.

Chu has Blott see whether he can lift a bulky old doorless microwave oven that’s lying on its side up next to one wall, and Blott tries and barely lifts it, and pules, and Chu marks the oven down for the adults to lift and tells Blott to drop it, which invitation Blott takes literally, and the crash and tinkle infuriate Gopnik and McKenna, who say that scanning for rodents with Blott is like fly-fishing with an epileptic, which cheers Traub up quite a bit.

Feral hamsters — bogey-wise right up there with mile-high toddlers, skull-deprived wraiths, carnivorous flora, and marsh-gas that melts your face off and leaves you with exposed gray-and-red facial musculature for the rest of your ghoulish-pariah life, in terms of late-night hair-raising Concavity narratives — are rarely sighted south of the Lucite walls and ATHSCME’d checkpoints that delimit the Great Concavity, and only once in a blue moon anywhere south of like the new-border burg of Methuen MA, whose Chamber of Commerce calls it ‘The City That Interdependence Rebuilt,’ and anyway pace Blott are hardly ever seen solo, being the sort of rapacious locust-like mass-movement creature that Canadian agronomists call ‘Piranha of the Plains.’ An infestation of feral hamsters in the waste- rich terrain of metro Boston, to say nothing of the clutter-tunnelled E.T.A. grounds, would be an almost grand-scale public-health disaster, would cause simply no end of adult running-in-circles and knuckle-biting, and would consume megacalories of displaced pre-adolescent stress for the E.T.A. players. Every ear-cocked eye-peeled bag-toting kid in the off-tunnel this afternoon is hoping hamster in a big way, except for Kent Blott, who’s hoping simply and fervently for some sort of rodential sighting or scat- sample that’ll keep him from being disciplinarily hung upside-down in a lavatory stall to shriek until a staff-member finds him. He reminds the Tunnel Clubbers that it’s not like he’d claimed he espied the thing actually heading in this direction, he’d only seen the thing scuttling in a way that seemed to suggest a tendency or like probability of heading in this direction.

One whole box on its side with its frayed strapping tape split has spilled part of a load of old TP-cartridges, old and mostly unlabelled, out onto the tunnel floor in a fannish pattern, and Gopnik and Peterson complain that the

cartridge-cases’ sharp edges put holes in their Glad bags, and Blott is dispatched with three bags of cartridges and fruit rinds, each only about half full, back to the lit vestibule outside the Comm.-Ad. tunnel’s start, where a serious pile of bags is starting to pile fragrantly up.

Plus a confirmed feral-hamster sighting, Chu and Gopnik and ‘S.T.P.’ Peterson have agreed, could well distract the Headmaster’s office from post-Eschaton reprisals against Big Buddies Pemulis, Incandenza and Axford, whom the Club’s Eschatonite faction doesn’t want to see reprised against, particularly, though the consensus is nobody would much mind seeing the malefic Ann Kittenplan hung out to dry in a serious way. Plus hamster-incursions could be posited to account for the occult appearance of large and incongruous E.T.A. objects in inappropriate places, which started in August with the thousands of practice balls found scattered all over the blue lobby carpeting and the carefully arranged pyramid of AminoPal energy bars found on Court 6 at dawn drills in mid-September and has gained momentum in a way no one cares for one bit — feral hamsters being notorious draggers and rearrangers of stuff they can’t eat but feel compelled to fuck with anyway, somehow — and so ease the communal near-hysteria the objects have caused among aboriginal blue-collar staff and sub-16 E.T.A. alike. Which would make the Tunnel Club guys something like heroes, foreseeably.

They move along the tunnel, their mercuric lights Xing and separating and forming jagged angles, colored faintly pink.

But even a confirmed rat would be a coup. Dean of Academic Affairs Mrs. Inc has a violent phobic thing about vermin and waste and insects and overall facility hygiene, and Orkin men with beer-bellies and playing cards with naked girls in high-heeled shoes on the backs (McKenna’s claim) spray the bejeesus out of the E.T.A. grounds twice a semester. None of the younger E.T.A. boys — who have the same post-latency fetish for vermin they have about subterranean access and exclusive Clubs — none of them has ever once gotten to see or trap a rat or roach or even so much as a lousy silverfish anyplace around here. So the unspoken consensus is that a hamster’d be optimal but they’d settle for a rat. Just one lousy rat could give the whole Club a legit raison, an explicable reason for congregating underground — all of them are a bit uneasy about liking to congregate underground for no good or clear reason.

‘Sleeps, you think you could lift that and carry it?’ ‘Chu man I wouldn’t even get up next to whatever that is much less touch it.’ Blott’s footfalls and tuneless whistling can be heard from far away, returning, and the distant squeak of overhead sneakers.

Gopnik stops and his light pans, playing on faces. ‘OK. Somebody farted.’ ‘What’s this up next to it, Sleeps?’ Chu backing up to widen his light’s beam on something broad and squat and dark. ‘Could I get some lights over here on this you guys?’ ‘Because did somebody go ahead and cut one in this little unventilated

space?’ ‘Chu, it’s a room fridge, that’s all.’ ‘But it’s bigger than the room fridges.’

‘But it’s not as big as a real fridge.’ ‘It’s in-between.’ ‘I do smell something, though, Gop, I admit.’ ‘There is a smell. If somebody farted, speak up.’

‘Otherwise it’s a smell.’ ‘ Don’t try to describe it.’ ‘Sleeps, that’s no human fart I’ve ever smelled.’ ‘It’s too powerful for a fart.’ ‘Maybe Teddy Schacht was having an attack and staggered down here just to cut one.’ Peterson trains his light on the midsized brown fridge. ‘You don’t

possibly think…’

Chu says ‘No way. No way.’

‘What?’ Blott says. ‘Don’t even think it,’ Chu says. ‘I don’t even think any kind of mammal could fart that bad, Chu.’ Peterson’s looking at Chu, both of their faces pale in the mercuric light. ‘No way somebody’d graduate and leave and put their fridge down here

without taking the food out.’

Blott goes ‘Is that the smell?’ ‘Was this Pearson’s fridge last year?’ Sleepy T.P. turns around. ‘Who smells a, like, a like decay-element?’

Lights on the tunnel ceiling from upraised hands. ‘Quorum on decay-type odor.’ ‘Should we check?’ Chu says. ‘Blott’s hamster might be in there.’ ‘Gnawing on something unspeakable, maybe.’ ‘You mean open it?’ ‘Pearson had a bigger than usual fridge.’ ‘Open it?’ Chu scratches behind his ear. ‘Me and Gop’ll light it up, Peterson opens

it.’ ‘Why me?’ ‘You’re closest, Sleeps. Hold your breath.’ ‘Jesus. Well back off up here so I can jump way back if anything like flies out.’ ‘Nobody could be so low. Who would go off and leave a full fridge?’ ‘Happy to back way, way off,’ says Carl Whale, his light receding. ‘Not even Pearson could be that low, leaving food in an unplugged fridge.’ ‘This could explain rodent-attraction and then some.’

‘Now look out… ready?… hummph.’

‘ Ow! Get off!’

‘Put the light ov— oh my God.’

‘Eeeeeeeyu.’

‘Hhhhwwwww.’

‘Oh my God.’

‘ Bllaaaaarrr.’ ‘Such a smell I’m smelling!’ ‘There’s mayonnaise! He left mayonnaise in there.’ ‘Why the bulge in the top of the lid?’ ‘The ballooning carton of orange juice!’ ‘Nothing could live in that, rodent or otherwise.’

‘So why’s that sandwich-meat moving?’

‘Maggots?’

‘Maggots!’ ‘Shut it! Sleeps! Kick it shut!’ ‘This right here is exactly as close as I’m ever getting to that fridge ever again, Chu.’

‘The smell’s expanding!’ ‘I can smell it from here!’: Whale’s tiny distant voice. ‘I’m not enjoying this at all.’ ‘This is Death. Woe unto those that gazeth on Death. The Bible.’ ‘What’re maggots?’ ‘Should we just run really fast the other way?’ ‘Second that.’ ‘This is probably what the rat or hamster smelled,’ Blott ventures. ‘Run!’ High receding voices, bobbing lights, Whale’s light way out front.

After Stice and Incandenza split the first two sets and Hal dashed into the locker room at the break to put Collyrium-brand eyewash in eyes that were bothering him and deLint made warped crashing sounds on the tiers as he walked down the bleachers and over to have a word with Stice, who was squatting against the net-post holding his left arm up like a scrubbed surgeon and applying a towel to the arm, deLint’s place up next to Helen Steeply was taken by female prorector Thierry Poutrincourt, freshly showered, long-faced, a non-U.S. citizen, a tall Québecer former Satellite pro in rimless specs and a violetish ski cap just enough of a shade away from the journalist’s hat to make the people behind them pretend to shield their eyes from the clash. The putative newshound introduced herself and asked Poutrincourt who the heavy-browed kid was at the end of the top bleacher behind them, hunched over and gesturing and speaking into his empty fist. ‘James Troeltsch of Philadelphia is better to leave alone to play the broadcaster to himself. He is a strange and unhappy,’ Poutrincourt said, her face long and cavern-cheeked and not terribly happy-looking itself. Her slight shrugs and way of looking elsewhere while speaking were not unlike Rémy Marathe’s. ‘When we hear you are the journalist for shiny perfumed magazines of fad and trend we are told be unfriendly, but me, I think I am friendly.’ Her smile was rictal and showed confused teeth. ‘My family’s loved ones also are large of size. It is difficult to be large.’ Steeply’s pre-assignment decision was to let all size-references pass as if there was some ability to screen out any reference to size or girth,

originating possibly in adolescence. ‘Your Mr. deLint certainly held himself aloof.’ ‘DeLint, when we prorectors are suggested to do a thing, he asks to himself only: how can I perfectly do this thing so the superiors will smile with pleasure at deLint.’ Poutrincourt’s right forearm was almost twice the size of her left. She wore white sneakers and a Donnay warmup of a deep glowing neutron-blue that clashed hideously with both their caps. The circles beneath her eyes were also blue. ‘Why the instructions to be unfriendly?’ Poutrincourt always nodded for a while before she replied to anything, as if things had to go through various translation-circuits. She nodded and scratched at her long jaw, thinking. ‘You are here to make publicity a child 273 player, one of our étoiles, and Dr. Tavis, he is how you say quantified —

‘

‘Quarantined. Suspicious. Guarded.’

‘No. …’ ‘Confused. Torn. In a quandary.’ ‘Quandary is how. Because this is a good place, and Hal is good, better since before the present, perhaps now he is étoile.’ A shrug, long arms akimbo. Hal reemerged from Comm.-Ad. and, ankle-brace or no, displayed a slow loose thoroughbred trot past the pavilion and bleachers and to the gate in #12’s southern fence, acting as if unwatched by people in bleachers, and tapped two of his big-headed tennis racquets together to listen for the strings’ pitch, exchanging some neutral words with deLint, who was standing with Stice at the edge of the transom’s shadow, Stice breaking into a half-laugh at something, twirling his racquet and walking back to serve as Hal retrieved a ball along the north fence. Both players’ racquets had large heads and thick frames. Thierry Poutrincourt said ‘And by nature who does not wish the shiny attention, that the magazines with cologne on their pages say this is étoile, Enfield Tennis Academy it is good?’ ‘I’m here to do a soft inoffensive profile on his brother, with Hal mentioned only as part of an American family exceptional in several respects. I don’t see what’s quandariacal for Dr. Tavis about this.’ The tiny plump officious man who seemed to have a phone tucked under his chin at all times, the kind of frenzied over-cooperation that’s a technical

interviewer’s worst nightmare for an interrogation; the little man’s monologue had done to Steeply’s brain kind of what a flashbulb does to your eyes, and if he’d explicitly denied him access to the brother then the denial had been slipped in after he’d worn Steeply down.

There was the slight shaken-saw wobble of bleachers as deLint walked back up, stacked charts against his chest like a schoolgirl’s books, his smile at the Québecois player in his seat as if he’d never met her before, settling in heavily on Steeply’s other side, glancing down at where the profiler’d bracketed notes on the possible sounds a string-hit ball sounds like in cold air: cut, king, ping, pons, pock, cop, thwa, thwat.

The samizdat Entertainment’s director’s other son chipped a return that caught the tape and sat there a moment and fell back.

“Veux que nous nous parlons en français? Serait plus facile, ça?’ This invitation because Poutrincourt’s eyes had gone hooded the minute the de- Lint person joined them.

Poutrincourt’s shrug was blasé: Francophones are never impressed that anyone else can speak French. ‘Very well then look:’ she said (Poutrincourt did, in Québecois), ‘pubescent stars are nothing new to this sport. Lenglen, Rosewall. In A.D. 1887 a fifteen-year-old girl won Wimbledon, she was the first. Evert in the semifinals of the US Open at sixteen, ’71 or ’2. Austin, Jaeger, Graff, Sawamatsu, Venus Williams. Borg. Wilander, Chang, Treffert, Medvedev, Esconja. Becker of the A.D. ’80s. Now this new Argentinean Kleckner.’ Steeply lit a Flanderfume that made deLint’s face spread with distaste. ‘You compare it is like gymnastics, figure skating, competitive to-swim.’ Poutrincourt made no comment on Steeply’s syntax. ‘Just so, then.

Good.’ Steeply was adjusting the long peasant skirt and crossing legs so he was inclined away from deLint, gazing at a kind of translucent mole on Poutrincourt’s long cheek. Poutrincourt’s thick rimless specs were like a scary nun’s. She looked more male than anything, long and hard and breastless. Steeply tried to exhale away from everyone. ‘The world-plateau tennis not being required to have neither the size and muscle of the hockey nor the basketball nor the American football, for example.’ Poutrincourt nodded. ‘But yes, nor the millimetric precision of your baseball’s hitting, nor how the Italians say the senza errori, the never-miss

consistency, that keeps the golfers from true mastery until they have thirty or more years.’ The prorector switched for just a moment to English, possibly for deLint’s benefit: ‘Your French is Parisian but possible. Me, mine is Québecois.’ Steeply now got to give that same sour Gallic shrug. ‘You’re saying to me serious tennis doesn’t need of an athlete anything already adolescents do not possess, if they are exceptional for it.’ ‘The medicinists of sports science know well what top tennis requires,’ Poutrincourt said, back in French. ‘Too well, which are the agility, the 274 reflexes, the short-range speed, the balance, some coordination between the hand and the eye, and very much endurance. Some strength, with particular importance for the male. But all these are achievable by the period of puberty, for some. But yes, but wait,’ she said, putting a hand on the notebook as Steeply started to pretend to inscribe. ‘The thing you have put as the question to me. This is why the quandary. The young players, they have the advantage in psyche, also.’ ‘The edge of mentality,’ Steeply said, trying to ignore the boy speaking into his hand several seats over. DeLint seemed to be ignoring everything around him, engrossed in the match and his statistics. The Canadian prorector’s hands moved in small circles out front to indicate engagement in the conversation. Americans’ conversational hands sit like lumps of dough most of the time, Rémy Marathe had pointed out once. ‘But yes, so, the formidable mental edge that their psyches are still not yet adult in all ways — therefore, so, they do not feel the anxiety and pressure in the way it is felt by adult players. This is every story of the teenager appearing from no location to upset the famous adult in professional play — the ephebic, they do not feel the pressure, they can play with abandon, they are without fear.’ A cold smile. Sunlight blazed on her lenses. ‘At the beginning. At the beginning they are without pressure or fear, and they burst from seemingly no location onto the professional stage, instant étoiles, phenomenal, fearless, immunized to pressure, numb to anxiety — at first. They seem as if they are like the adult players only better — better in emotion, more abandoned, not human to the stress or fatigue or the airplaning without end, to the publicity.’ ‘The English expression of the child in the store of candy.’

‘Seemingly unfeeling of the loneliness and alienation and everyone

wants a thing from the étoile.’ ‘The money, also.’ ‘But it is soon you start to see the burning out which the place like ours is hoping to prevent. You remember Jaeger, burned out at sixteen, Austin at twenty. Arias and Krickstein, Esconja and Treffert, too injured to play on by their late teenage years. The much-promising Capriati, the well-known tragedy. Pat Cash of Australia, fourth on earth at eighteen, vanished by the twenties of age.’ ‘Not to be mentioning the large money. The endorsings and appearings.’ ‘Always so, for the young étoile. And now worse in today, that the sponsors have no broadcasting to advertise with. Now the ephebe who is famous étoile, who is in magazines and the sports reports aux disques, he is pursued to become the Billboard Who Walks. Use this, wear this, for money.

Millions thrown at you before you can drive the cars you buy. The head swells to the size of a balloon, why not?’ ‘But can pressure be far behind the back?’ Steeply said. ‘Many times the same. Winning two and three upset matches, feeling suddenly so loved, so many talking to you as if there is love. But always the same, then. For then you awaken to the fact that you are loved for winning only. The two and three wins created you, for people. It is not that the wins made them recognize something that existed unrecognized before these upset wins. The from-noplace winning created you. You must keep winning to keep the existence of love and endorsements and the shiny magazines

wanting your profile.’ ‘Enter the pressure,’ Steeply said. ‘Pressure such as one could not imagine, now that to maintain you must win. Now that winning is the expected. And all alone, in the hotels and the airplanes, with any other player you could speak to of the pressure to exist wanting to beat you, wanting to be exist above and not below. Or the others, wanting from you, and only so long as you play with abandon, winning.’ ‘Hence the suicides. The burn-out. The drugs, the self-indulging, the spoilage.’ ‘What is the instruction if we shape the ephebe into the athlete who can win fearlessly to be loved, yet we do not prepare her for the time after fear comes, no?’

‘Therefore the terrible pressure here. They are being tempered. Oven- toughened.’ Hal served wide and this time followed it in, the serve, taking a stutter- step at the service line. Stice’s body seemed to elongate as he reached and got the stick up over the return, driving a forehand. Hal volleyed it too short and took a couple steps off the net as Stice came in, winding up for an easy pass. Hal guessed a direction and started to his left, and The Darkness chipped a lob right over him and hit the heel of his hand against his strings as Hal gave it up halfway back, Stice not rubbing it in but exhorting himself. Hal’s sweat was way heavier than the Kansan’s, but Stice’s face was almost maroon with flush. Each player twirled his stick in his hand as Hal walked back to retrieve the ball. Stice took his position in the deuce court, pulling up his socks. ‘Still smart for Hal to follow the serve in once a game or so,’ deLint said into Steeply’s ear.

And irritating throughout was the heavy-browed red-nostriled kid James Troeltsch at the very end of the top bleacher, speaking into his fist, coming at the fist from first one angle and then another, pretending to be two people: ‘Incandenza the controller. Incandenza the tactician. ‘Rare tactical lapse for Incandenza, following the serve in when he’s just finally started establishing control from the baseline. ‘Have a look at Incandenza standing there waiting for Ortho Stice to finish futzing with his socks so he can serve. The resemblance to statues of Augustus of Rome. The regal bearing, the set of the head, the face impassive and emanating command. The chilly blue eyes. ‘The chilly reptilian film of concentration in the cold blue eyes, Jim. ‘The Halster’s been having some trouble controlling his volleys. ‘Personally, Jim, I think he’d be better off with his old midsized graphite stick than that large head the creepy Dunlop guy got him to switch to. ‘Stice being the younger player out there, he’s grown up with the extra- large head. A large head is all The Darkness knows. ‘You could say Stice was born with a large head, and that Incandenza’s a man who’s adapted his game to a large head. ‘Hal’s career dating back to before your polycarbonate resins changed the whole power-matrix of the junior game, too, Jim.

‘And what a day for tennis. ‘What a day for family fun of all kinds. ‘This Bud’s for the Whole Family. It’s the Bud Match of the Week.

Brought to you. ‘Incandenza even reported to have modified his grip, all to accommodate the large head. ‘And by the Multiphasix family of fine graphite-reinforced polycarbonate resins, Ray. ‘Jim, Ortho Stice — impossible to even visualize Stice without his trusty

large head. ‘It’s all they know, these kids.’ DeLint hiked back onto an elbow on the tier above and told James Troeltsch to regulate the volume or he was going to take a personal interest in seeing Troeltsch suffer.

Hal bounced the ball three times, tossed, rocked farther back on the toss, and absolutely crunched the serve, spinless and wickedly angled out wide, Stice grotesquely off-balance, lunging too far and hitting the backhand cramped, down the line and shallow. Hal moved in to the service line for it, hunched and with his stick cocked up behind him, looking somehow insectile. Stice stood in the middle of the baseline awaiting pace and was helpless when Hal shortened the stroke and dribbled it at an angle cross- court, barely clearing the net and distorted with backspin and falling into the half-meter of fair space the acuteness of the angle allowed. ‘Hal Incandenza has the greater tennis brain,’ Poutrincourt said in English.

Hal aced Stice down the center to go up either 2–1 or 3–2 in the third. ‘The thing you want to know about Hal, babe, is he’s got a complete game,’ deLint said as the boys changed ends of the court, Stice holding two balls out before him on the face of his racquet. Hal went to the towel again.

The children along the bottom tier were leaning left and then right in tandem, amusing themselves. The apparition with the lens and metal pole was gone, overhead. ‘What you want to know, watching juniors at this level,’ deLint says, still back on an elbow so his upper body was out of sight and he was just legs and a voice in Steeply’s cold ear. ‘They all have different strengths, areas of the game they’re better at, and you can drown in profiling a match

or a player in terms of the different strengths and the number of individual strengths.’ ‘I am not here to profile the boy,’ Steeply said, but in French again.

DeLint ignored him. ‘It’s not just the strengths or the number of strengths. It’s do they come together to make a game. How complete is a kid. Has he got a game. Those kids at lunch you got to meet.’ ‘But not speak to.’ ‘The kid in the idiotic hat, Pemulis, Mike’s got great, great volleys, he’s a natural at net, great, great hand-eye. Mike’s other strength is he’s got the best lob in East Coast juniors bar none. These are his strengths. The reason both of these kids you’re looking at out here right now can beat the living shit out of Pemulis is Pemulis’s strengths don’t give him a complete game.

Volleys’re an offensive shot. A lob’s a baseliner’s weapon, counterpuncher.

You can’t lob from the net or volley from the baseline.’ 275‘He says Michael Pemulis’s abilities cancel each other out,’ Poutrincourt said in the other ear.

DeLint made the small salaam of iteration. ‘Pemulis’s strengths cancel each other out. Now Todd Possalthwaite, the littler kid with the bandage on his nose from the soap-and-shower-slipping thing, Possalthwaite’s also got a great lob, and while Pemulis’d take him right now on pure age and power Possalthwaite’s the technically superior player with the better future, because Todd’s built a complete game out of his lob.’ ‘This deLint is wrong,’ Poutrincourt said in Québecois, smiling rictally across Steeply at deLint. ‘Because Possalthwaite won’t come in to net. Possalthwaite hangs back at any cost, and unlike Pemulis he works to develop the groundstrokes to let him stay back and draw the other guy in and use that venomous lob.’ ‘Which means at fourteen his game, it will never change or grow, and if he grows strong and wishes to attack he will never be able,’ Poutrincourt said.

DeLint displayed so little curiosity about what Poutrincourt inserted that Steeply wondered if he had some French on the sly, and made a private ideogram to this effect. ‘Possalthwaite’s a pure defensive strategist. He’s got a gestalt. The term we use here for a complete game is either gestalt or complete game.’

Stice aced Hal out wide on the ad court again, and the ball got stuck in an intersticial diamond in the chain-link fencing, and Hal had to put his stick down and use both hands to force the thing out. ‘Maybe for your article, though, the poop on this kid, the punter’s brother — Hal can’t lob half as good as even Possalthwaite, and compared to Ortho or Mike his net-play’s pedestrian. But unlike his brother when he was here, see, Hal’s strengths have started to fit together. He’s got a great serve, a great return of serve, and great, great groundstrokes, with great control and great touch, great command of touch and spin; and he can take a defensive player and yank the kid around with his superior control, and he can take an attacking player and use the guy’s own pace against him.’ Hal passed Stice off the backhand down the line and the ball looked sure to land fair, and then at the last possible second it veered out, an abrupt tight curve out of bounds as if some freak gust came out of nowhere and blew it out, and Stice looked more surprised than Hal did. The punter’s brother’s face registered nothing as he stood at the ad corner, adjusting something on his strings. ‘But perhaps one does attain this, to win. Imagine you. You become just what you have given your life to be. Not merely very good but the best. The good philosophy of here and Schtitt — I believe this philosophy of Enfield is more Canadian than American, so you may see I have prejudice — is that you must have also — so, leave to one side for a moment the talent and 276 work to become best — that you are doomed if you do not have also within you some ability to transcend the goal, transcend the success of the best, if you get to there.’ Steeply could see, off in the parking lot behind the hideous bulging neo- Georgian cube of the Community and Administration Building, several small boys carrying and dragging white plastic bags to the nest of dumpsters that abutted the pines at the parking lot’s rear, the children pale and wild-eyed and conferring among themselves and casting anxious looks across the grounds at the crowd behind the Show Court. ‘Then,’ Poutrincourt said, ‘and for the ones who do become the étoiles, the lucky who become profiled and photographed for readers and in the U.S.A. religion make it, they must have something built into them along the path that will let them transcend it, or they are doomed. We see this in

experience. One sees this in all obsessive goal-based cultures of pursuit.

Look at the Japonois, the suicide rates of their later years. This task of us at the Enfield is more delicate still, with the étoiles. For, you, if you attain your goal and cannot find some way to transcend the experience of having 277 that goal be your entire existence, your raison de faire, so, then, one of two things we see will happen.’ Steeply had to keep breathing on the pen to keep the point thawed. ‘One, one is that you attain the goal and realize the shocking realization that attaining the goal does not complete or redeem you, does not make everything for your life “OK ” as you are, in the culture, educated to assume it will do this, the goal. And then you face this fact that what you had thought would have the meaning does not have the meaning when you get it, and you are impaled by shock. We see suicides in history by people at these pinnacles; the children here are versed in what is called the saga of

Eric Clipperton.’ ‘With two p’s?’ ‘Just so. Or the other possibility of doom, for the étoiles who attain.

They attain the goal, thus, and put as much equal passion into celebrating their attainment as they had put into pursuing the attainment. This is called here the Syndrome of the Endless Party. The celebrity, money, sexual behaviors, drugs and substances. The glitter. They become celebrities instead of players, and because they are celebrities only as long as they feed the culture-of-goal’s hunger for the make-it, the winning, they are doomed, because you cannot both celebrate and suffer, and play is always suffering, just so.’ ‘Our best boy is better than Hal, you’ll see him play tomorrow if you want, John Wayne. No relation to the real John Wayne. A fellow compatriot of Terry here.’ Aubrey deLint was sitting back up beside them, the cold giving his pitted cheeks a second flush, two feverish harlequin ovals. ‘John Wayne’s got a gestalt because Wayne’s simply got everything, and everything with him’s got the sort of pace that a touch-artist and thinker like Hal just can’t handle.’ ‘This was the Founder’s philosophy, too, of doom, the punter Incandenza’s father, who also I am being told dabbled in filming?’ Steeply asked the Canadian.

Poutrincourt’s shrug could have meant too many things to note. ‘I came after. M. Schtitt, his different goal for the étoiles is to walk between these.’ Nor did Steeply quite notice the woman’s shifts between dialects. ‘To map out some path between needing the success and mockery-making of the success.’ DeLint leaned in. ‘Wayne’s got everything. Hal’s strength has become knowing he doesn’t have everything, and constructing a game as much out of what’s missing as what’s there.’ Steeply pretended to arrange the cap but was really adjusting the wig. ‘It all sounds awfully abstract for something so physical.’ Poutrincourt’s shrug pushed her glasses slightly up. ‘It is contradictory.

Two selves, one not there. M. Schtitt, when the Academy Founder died…’ ‘The punter’s father, who dabbled in films.’ Steeply’s raglan sweater had been his wife’s.

Again nodding blandly, Poutrincourt: ‘This academic Founder, M.

Schtitt tells that this Founder was a student of types of sight.’ DeLint said ‘Wayne’s only possible limits being also his strength, the tungsten-steel will and resolve, the insistence on imposing his game and his will on his man, totally unwilling to change the pace of his game if he’s not doing good. Wayne’s got the touch and the lobs to hang back on an off-day, but he won’t — if he’s down or things aren’t going his way, he just hits harder. His pace is so overwhelming he can get away with being uncompromising about attack against North American juniors. But in the Show, which Wayne’ll go pro maybe as soon as next year, in the Show flexibility is more important, he’ll find. What do you call, a humility.’ Poutrincourt was looking at Steeply almost too carelessly, it almost seemed. ‘The studying was not so much how one sees a thing, but this relation between oneself and what one sees. He translated this numerously across different fields, M. Schtitt tells.’ ‘The son described his father as quote “genre-dysphoric.”’ Poutrincourt cocked her head. ‘This does not sound like Hal Incandenza.’ DeLint sniffed meatily. ‘But Wayne’s gestalt’s chief edge over Hal is the head. Wayne is pure force. He doesn’t feel fear, pity, remorse — when a point’s over, it might as well have never happened. For Wayne. Hal actually has finer groundstrokes than Wayne, and he could have Wayne’s pace if he

wanted. But the reason Wayne is Three continentally and Hal’s Six is the head. Hal looks just as perfectly dead out there, but he’s more vulnerable in terms of, like, emotionally. Hal remembers points, senses trends in a match.

Wayne doesn’t. Hal’s susceptible to fluctuations. Discouragement. Set-long lapses in concentration. Some days you can almost see Hal like flit in and out of a match, like some part of him leaves and hovers and then comes

back.’ The Troeltsch person said ‘Holy crow.’ ‘So to survive here for later is, finally, to have it both ways,’ Thierry Poutrincourt said quietly, in nearly accentless English, as if to herself. ‘This emotional susceptibility in terms of forgetting being more commonly a female thing. Schtitt and I think it’s a will issue. Susceptible wills are more common to the top girls here. We see it in Longley, we see it in Millie Kent and Frannie Unwin. We don’t see this forgetful will in the Vaughts, or in Spodek, who you can watch if you want.’ The Troeltsch person said ‘Could we see that again, Ray, do you think?’ Steeply was looking at the side of Poutrincourt’s face as deLint on the other side was saying ‘But the one we see this most in is Hal.’

14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

The Man o’ War Grille on Prospect: Matty sat in the hot clatter of the Portuguese restaurant with his hands in his lap, looking at nothing. A waiter brought his soup. The waiter had bits of either bloodstain or soup on his apron, and for no discernible reason wore a fez. Matty ate his soup without once slurping. He’d been the neat eater in the family. Matty Pemulis was a prostitute and today he was twenty-three.

The Man o’ War Grille is on Prospect Street in Cambridge and its front windows overlook the heavy foot traffic between Inman and Central Squares. As Matty waited for his soup he’d seen across the restaurant and out the front’s glass a bag-lady-type older female in several clothing-layers lift her skirts and lower herself to the pavement and move her scaggly old bowels right there in full view of passersby and diners both, then gather all her plastic shopping bags together and walk stolidly out of view. The pile of

bowel movement sat there on the pavement, steaming slightly. Matty’d heard the college kids at the next table say they didn’t know whether to be totally illed or totally awed.

A big rangy kid, with a big sharp face and tight short hair and a smile and a shave-twice jaw since he was fourteen. Now balding smoothly back from a high clear forehead. A permanent smile that always seemed like he was trying not to but just couldn’t help it. His Da always formerly saying to Wipe it off.

Inman Square: Little Lisbon. The soup has bits of calamari that make the muscles in his face flex, chewing.

Now two Brazilians in bellbottoms and tall shoes along the sidewalk across the window over the diners’ heads, what might be a brewing street- fight, one walking forward and one walking backward, facing off as they move, each missing the dollop of bowel-movement on the walk, speaking high-volume street-Portuguese muffled by windows and hot clatter, but each looking around and then pointing at his own chest like: ‘You saying this shit to me?’ Then the forward man’s sudden charge carrying them both past the window’s right frame.

Matty’s Da’d come over on a boat from Louth in Lenster in 1989.

Matty’d been three or four. Da’d worked on the Southie docks, coiling lengths of rope as big around as phone poles into tall cones, and had died when Matty was seventeen, of pancreatic complaints.

Matty looked up from the roll he was dipping in the soup and saw two underweight interracial girls moving across the window, one a nigger, neither even looking at the shit everyone’s stepping around; and then a few seconds behind them Poor Tony Krause, who because of the trousers and cap Matty didn’t even recognize as Poor Tony Krause until he’d looked back down and then up again: Poor Tony Krause looked godawful: sucked- out, hollow-eyed, past ill, grave-ready, his face’s skin the greenish white of extreme-depth marine life, looking less alive than undead, identifiable as poor old Poor Tony only by the boa and red leather coat and the certain way he held his hand to his throat’s hollow as he walked, that way Equus Reese always said always reminded him of black-and-white-era starlets descending curved stairs into some black-tie function, Krause never so much walking as making an infinite series of grand entrances into pocket after pocket of space, a queenly hauteur now both sickening and awesome

given Krause’s spectral mien, passing across the Grille’s window, his eyes either on or looking right through the two skinny girls plodding ahead of him, following them out of the window’s right-hand side.

His Da’d begun fucking Matty up the ass when Matty was ten. A fook in t’boom. Matty had complete recall of the whole thing. He’d seen sometimes where persons that had unpleasant things happen to them as children blocked the unpleasantness out in their mentality as adults and forgot it. Not so with Matty Pemulis. He remembered every inch and pimple of every single time. His father outside the little room Matt and Micky slept in, late at night, the cat’s-eye sliver of lit hallway through the crack in the door Da’d opened, the door on well-oiled hinges opening with the implacable slowness of a rising moon, Da’s shadow lengthening across the floor and then the man his very self weaving in behind it, crossing the moonlit floor in darned socks and that smell about him that later Matty’d know was malt liquor but at that age he and Mickey called something else, when they smelled it. Matty lay and pretended to sleep; he didn’t know why tonight he pretended not to know the man was there; he was afraid. Even the first time.

Micky just five. All the times were the same. Da drunk. Tacking across the bedroom floor. A certain stealth. Managing somehow never to break his neck on the toy trucks and tiny cars scattered on the floor, left there that first time by accident. Sitting on the edge of the bed so his weight changed the bed’s angle. A big man smelling of tobacco and something else, his breath always audible when drunk. Sitting on the edge of the bed. Shaking Matty ‘awake’ to the point where Matty’d have to pretend to wake up.

Asking if he’d been asleep, sleeping, there, was he. Tenderness, caresses that were somehow just over the line from true ethnic-Irish fatherly affection, the emotional largesse of a man without a Green Card who daily broke his back for his family’s food. Caresses that were in some vague way just over the line from that and from the emotional largesse of something else, drunk, when all the rules of mood were suspended and you never knew from minute to minute whether you were to be kissed or hit — impossible to say how or even know how they were just over those lines. But they were, the caresses. Tenderness, caresses, low soft oversweet hot bad breath, soft apologies for some flash of savagery or discipline from the day. A way of cupping the pillow-warm cheek and jaw in the hollow of the hand, the huge pinkie finger tracing the hollow between throat and jaw. Matty’d

shrink away: shy are we sone scared are we? Matty’d shrink away even after he knew the shrinking fear was part of what brought it on, for Da’d get angry: who are we scared of, then? Then who are we, a sone, to be scared so of our own Da? As if the Da that broke daily his back were nothing more than a. Can’t a Da show his son some love without being taken for a. As if Matty could lie here with his food inside him under bedding he’d paid for and think his Da were no better than a. Is it a fookin you’re scared of, then.

You think a Da what comes in to speak to his sone and holds him as a Da has nought on his mind but a fook? As if the sone were some forty-dollar whore off the docks? As if the Da were a. Is that what you take me for. Is that what you take me for then. Matty shrinking back into a flattening pillow the Da’d paid for, the springs of the convertible bed singing with his fear; he shook. Why then so then I’ve a mind to give you just what you’re thinking t’fear. Take me for. Matty knew early on that his being afraid fueled the thing somehow, made his Da want to. He was unable not to be afraid. He tried and tried, cursed himself for a coward and deserving, all but calling his father a. It was years before he snapped to the fact that his Da’d have fooked him in t’boom no matter what he’d done. That the event was laid out before the first slim line of doorlight broadened, and whatever Matty’d felt or betrayed made no difference. An advantage to not blocking it out is you can snap to things later, with maturer perspective; you can come to see no sone on the planet could in any way ask for that, regardless.

At a certain later age he started lying there when his Da shook him and pretended to sleep on, even when the shakes got to where his teeth clacked together in a mouth that wore the slight smile Matty’d decided truly sleeping people’s faces always wore. The harder his father shook him, the tighter Matty’d shut his eyes and the more set the slight smile and the louder the rasps of the cartoon snores he alternated with exhaled whistles.

Mickey over in the cot by the window always silent as a tomb, on his side, face to the wall and hidden. Never a word between them about anything more than the chances of being kissed v. hit. Finally Da’d grab both his shoulders and flip him over with a sound of disgust and frustration. Matty thought just the smell of the fear was maybe enough to deserve it, until (later on) he got some maturer perspective. He remembered the oval sound of the cap coming off the jar of petroleum jelly, that special stone-in-pond plop of a Vaseline cap (not Child-Proof even in an era of Child-Proof caps),

hearing his Da muttering as he applied it to himself, feeling the ice-cold awful cold finger between him as his Da smeared the stuff roughly around Matty’s rosebud, his dark star.

It was only the maturer perspective of years and experience that let Matty find something to be thankful for, that the Da’d at least used a lube.

The origins of the big man’s clear familiarity with the stuff and its nighttime use not even adult perspective could illuminate, let Matty snap to, still, now, at twenty-three.

One hears, say, cirrhosis and acute pancreatitis and thinks of the subject clutching his middle like an old film’s gutshot actor and slumping quietly over to eternal rest with lids shut and face composed. Matty’s Da’d died choking on aspirated blood, a veritable fountain of the darkest possible blood, Matty coated a spray-paint-russet as he held the man’s yellow wrists and Mum lumbered off down the ward in search of a crash-cart team.

Particles aspirated so terribly fine, like almost atomized, so that they hung in the air like the air itself over the cribbed bed as the man expired, cat- yellow eyes wide open and face screwed into the very most godawful rictusized grin of pain, his last thoughts (if any) unknowable. Matty still toasted the man’s final memory with his first shot, whenever he indulged.

278

11 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

First thing after supper Hal drops around to Schtitt’s room off the Comm.-Ad. lobby to go through the motions of getting some input on just what had gone so terribly wrong against Stice. Also to get maybe some kind of bead on why he’d had to play The Darkness publicly in the first place, so close to the WhataBurger. I.e. like what the exhibition might have signified.

This endless tension among E.T.A.s about how the coaches are seeing you, gauging your progress — is your stock going up or down. But A. deLint’s the only one in there, working on some sort of oversized spreadsheetish chart, lying prone and shirtless on the bare floor with his chin in his hand and a pungent Magic Marker, and says Schtitt has gone off on the cycle somewhere after confections, but to sit down. Presumably meaning in a

chair. So Hal’s subjected to several minutes of deLint’s take on the match, complete with stats out of the prorector’s head. DeLint’s back is pale and constellated with red pits of old pimples, though the back’s nothing compared to Struck’s or Shaw’s back. There’s a cane chair and a wood chair. DeLint’s liquid-crystal laptop screen pulses grayly on the floor next to him. Schtitt’s room’s overlit and there’s no dust anywhere, not even in the very corners. Schtitt’s sound system’s lights are on but nothing’s playing. Neither Hal nor deLint mentions Orin’s profiler’s presence in the match’s stands, nor the big lady’s long interchange with Poutrincourt, which had been conspicuous. Stice’s and Wayne’s names are at the top of the huge chart on the floor, but Hal’s name isn’t. Hal says he can’t tell whether he’d made some sort of basic tactical error or whether he just wasn’t quite up to snuff this afternoon or what. ‘You just never quite occurred out there, kid,’ deLint apprises him. He has regressed certain figures to back this up, this nonoccurrence. His choice of words chills Hal to the root.

After which, during what’s supposed to be mandatory P.M. Study Period, and despite the three chapters of Boards-prep his Boards-prep schedule calls for, Hal sits alone up in Viewing Room 6, the bad leg out along the couch in front of him, flexing the bad ankle idly, holding the other leg’s knee to his chest, squeezing a ball but with the hand he doesn’t play with, chewing Kodiak and spitting directly into an unlined wastebasket, his expression neutral, watching some cartridges of his late father’s entertainments. Anyone else looking at him in there tonight would call Hal depressed. He watches several cartridges all in a row. He watches The American Century as Seen Through a Brick and Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell and then part of Valuable Coupon Has Been Removed, which is maddening because it’s all a monologue from some bespectacled little contemporary of Miles Penn and Heath Pearson who was almost as ubiquitous as Reat and Bain in Himself’s work but whose name right now Hal can’t for the life of him recall. He watches parts of Death in Scarsdale and Union of Publicly Hidden in Lynn and Various Small Flames and Kinds of Pain. The Viewing Room has insulated panelling behind the wallpaper and is essentially soundproof. Hal watches half of the ‘Medusa v.

Odalisque’ thing but takes it out abruptly when people in the audience start getting turned to stone.

Hal tortures himself by imagining swarthy leering types threatening to torture various loved ones if Hal can’t come up with the name of the kid in Valuable Coupon and Low-Temperature Civics and Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat.

There are two cartridges on V.R. 6’s glass shelves of Himself getting interviewed in various arty Community-Access-cable-type forums, which Hal declines to watch.

The lights’ slight flicker and subtle change in the pressure of the room is from the E.T.A. furnaces kicking on way down in the tunnels below Comm.-Ad. Hal shifts uneasily on the couch, spitting into the wastecan.

The very faint smell of burnt dust is also from the furnace.

A minor short didactic one Hal likes and runs twice in a row is Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat. A bureaucrat in some kind of sterile fluorescentlit office complex is a fantastically efficient worker when awake, but he has this terrible problem waking up in the A.M., and is consistently late to work, which in a bureaucracy is idiosyncratic and disorderly and wholly unacceptable, and we see this bureaucrat getting called in to his supervisor’s pebbled-glass cubicle, and the supervisor, who wears a severely dated leisure suit with his shirt-collar flaring out on either side of its rust-colored lapels, tells the bureaucrat that’s he’s a good worker and a fine man, but that this chronic tardiness in the A.M. is simply not going to fly, and if it happens one more time the bureaucrat is going to have to find another fluorescent-lit office complex to work in. It’s no accident that in a bureaucracy getting fired is called ‘termination,’ as in ontological erasure, and the bureaucrat leaves his supervisor’s cubicle duly shaken. That night he and his wife go through their Bauhaus condominium collecting every alarm clock they own, each one of which is electric and digital and extremely precise, and they festoon their bedroom with them, so there are like a dozen timepieces with their digital alarms all set for 0615h. But that night there’s a power failure, and all the clocks lose an hour or just sit there blinking 0000h. over and over, and the bureaucrat still oversleeps the next A.M. He wakes late, lies there for a moment staring at a blinking 0000. He shrieks, clutches his head, throws on wrinkled clothes, ties his shoes in the elevator, shaves in the car, blasting through red lights on the way to the commuter rail. The 0816 train to the City pulls in to the station’s lower level just as the crazed bureaucrat’s car screeches into the station’s parking lot,

and the bureaucrat can see the top of the train sitting there idling from across the open lot. This is the very last temporally feasible train: if the bureaucrat misses this train he’ll be late again, and terminated. He hauls into a Handicapped spot and leaves the car there at a crazy angle, vaults the turnstile, and takes the stairs down to the platform seven at a time, sweaty and bug-eyed. People scream and dive out of his way. As he careers down the long stairway he keeps his crazed eyes on the open doors of the 0816 train, willing them to stay open just a little longer. Finally, filmed in a glacial slo-mo, the bureaucrat leaps from the seventh-to-the-bottom step and lunges toward the train’s open doors, and right in mid-lunge smashes headlong into an earnest-faced little kid with thick glasses and a bow-tie and those nerdy little schoolboy-shorts who’s tottering along the platform under a tall armful of carefully wrapped packages. Kerwham, they collide.

Bureaucrat and kid both stagger back from the impact. The kid’s packages go flying all over the place. The kid recovers his balance and stands there 279 stunned, glasses and bow-tie askew. The bureaucrat looks frantically from the kid to the litter of packages to the kid to the train’s doors, which are still open. The train thrums. Its interior is fluorescent-lit and filled with employed, ontologically secure bureaucrats. You can hear the station’s PA announcer saying something tinny and garbled about departure. The stream of platform foot-traffic opens around the bureaucrat and the stunned boy and the litter of packages. Ogilvie’d once lectured for a whole period on this kid’s character as an instance of the difference between an antagonist and a deuteragonist in moral drama; he’d mentioned the child-actor’s name over and over. Hal tries whacking himself just over the right eye several times, to dislodge the name. The film’s bureaucrat’s buggy eyes keep going back and forth between the train’s open doors and the little kid, who’s looking steadily up at him, almost studious, his eyes big and liquid behind the lenses. Hal doesn’t remember who played the bureaucrat, either, but it’s the kid’s name that’s driving him bats. The bureaucrat’s leaning away, inclined way over toward the train doors, as if his very cells were being pulled that way. But he keeps looking at the kid, the gifts, struggling with himself. It’s a clear internal-conflict moment, one of Himself’s films’ very few. The bureaucrat’s eyes suddenly recede back into their normal places in his sockets. He turns from the fluorescent doors and bends to the kid and

asks if he’s OK and says it’ll all be OK. He cleans the kid’s spectacles with his pocket handkerchief, picks the kid’s packages up. About halfway through the packages the PA issues something final and the train’s doors close with a pressurized hiss. The bureaucrat gently loads the kid back up with packages, neatens them. The train pulls out. The bureaucrat watches the train pull out, expressionless. It’s anybody’s guess what he’s thinking.

He straightens the kid’s bow-tie, kneeling down the way adults do when they’re ministering to a child, and tells him he’s sorry about the impact and that it’s OK. He turns to go. The platform’s mostly empty now. Now the strange moment. The kid cranes his neck around the packages and looks up at the guy as he starts to walk away: ‘Mister?’ the kid says. ‘Are you Jesus?’ ‘Don’t I wish,’ the ex-bureaucrat says over his shoulder, walking away, as the kid shifts the packages and frees one little hand to wave Bye at the guy’s topcoat’s back as the camera, revealed now as mounted on the 0816’s rear, recedes from the platform and picks up speed.

Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat remains Mario’s favorite of all their late father’s entertainments, possibly because of its unhip earnestness.

Though to Mario he always maintains it’s basically goo, Hal secretly likes it, too, the cartridge, and likes to project himself imaginatively into the ex- bureaucrat’s character on the leisurely drive home toward ontological erasure.

As a kind of weird self-punishment, Hal also plans to subject himself to the horrific Fun with Teeth and Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators, then finally to one of Himself’s posthumous hits, a cartridge called Blood Sister: One Tough Nun that he’d always found kind of gratuitously nasty and overwrought, but which Hal has no idea that this piece of entertainment actually germinated out of James O. Incandenza’s one brief and unpleasant experience with Boston AA, in the B.S. mid-’90s, when Himself lasted two and a half months and then drifted gradually away, turned off by the simplistic God-stuff and covert dogma. Bob-Hopeless, Hal spits way more than is his norm, now, and also likes having the wastecan right nearby in case he might throw up. That afternoon he’d had zilch in the way of a kinesthetic sense: he couldn’t feel the ball on his stick. His nausea has nothing to do with watching his father’s cartridges. For the last year his arm’s been an extension of his mind and the stick an extension of the arm,

acutely sensitive. Each of the cartridges is a carefully labelled black diskette; they’re all signed neatly out on the clipboard by the egg-shaped glass bookshelf and are loaded in the cueing slots and waiting to drop, in order, and be digitally decoded.

14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

P. T. Krause: N. Cambridge: that infamous deceptive post-seizure feeling of well-being. That broken-fever, reversal-of-fortune-type highhearted feeling after a neuroelectric event. Poor Tony Krause awoke in the ambulance lizardless and continent and feeling right as rain. Lay there and flirted with the blue-jawed paramedic leaning over him, certain bawdy entendres on expressions like vital signs and dilation until the paramedic radioed ahead to Cambridge City’s E. Room to cancel the crash-cart.

Manipulated his skinny arms in a parodic Minimal Mambo, lying there.

Fiddle-de-dee’d the paramedic’s warning that post-seizure feelings of well- being were notoriously deceptive and transient.

And then also the little-mentioned advantage to being destitute and in possession of a Health Card that’s expired and not even in your name: hospitals show you a kind of inverted respect; a place like Cambridge City Hospital bows to your will not to stay; they all of a sudden defer to your subjective diagnostic knowledge of your own condition, which post-seizure condition you feel has turned the corner toward improvement: they bow to your quixotic will: it’s unfortunately not a free hospital but it is a free country: they honor your wishes and compliment your mambo and say Go with God.

It’s a good thing you can’t see what you look like, though.

And the serendipity of Cambridge City Hospital being just an eight- block stroll east on Cambridge St. and then south on Prospect, through mentholated autumn air, through Inman Square and up to Antitoi Entertainment, maybe the one last place where a renewed, post-seizure, on- the-diagnostic-upswing if still slightly shaky young gender-dysphoric might yet expect a bit of kindness, pharmacological credit, since the affairs of Wo and Copley Library and heart.

The big brick cake of the hospital behind Krause in purple twilight. The brisk click of his heels on pavement, boa semi-formally loose on his shoulders and down beneath each arm, hand holding red leather collar closed at the throat, head up and staying that way on its own, steady eyes meeting with blasé dignity the eyes of whoever passes. The dignity of a man risen by will from the ashes of Withdrawal and now on the upswing and with places to go and potentially considerate Canadians to see. A charming and potentially once again in the not-too-distant future gorgeous creature with the renewed wherewithal to now meet the eyes of Inman Sq. pedestrians veering sharply away from the residual smells of men’s room stall and subway vomit, the ashes from which he’s been rescued and risen once again, feeling righter than rain. A rind of moon hanging cocked above a four-spired church. And the emergent stars are yo-yos, you feel, after a seizure: Poor Tony feels as if he could cast them out, draw them in again at will.

The way Poor Tony Krause, Lolasister, and Susan T. Cheese became mercenary adjuncts to something dour Bertraund Antitoi had invited them to call the ‘Front-Contre-O.N.A.N.isme’ was that, for a heavily cut bundle to split six ways, Lolasister, Susan T. Cheese, P. T. Krause, Bridget Tenderhole, Equus Reese, and the late Stokely (‘Dark Star’) McNair had had to wear identical red leather coats and auburn wigs and spike heels and go and hang around the lobby of Harvard Square’s Sheraton Commander Hotel with six mannish-looking women in the same wigs and coats while an androgynous Québecer insurgent who filled out h/his red leather coat in a way that made Bridget Tenderhole dig his nails into his palms in sheer green envy came through the Commander’s revolving Lucite doors and strode purposefully into the crowded Epaulet Ballroom and threw foul semi-liquid violet waste from a souvenir miniature waste-displacement barrel in the face of the Canadian Minister of Inter-O.N.A.N. Trade, who was addressing the U.S. press from a leaf-shaped rostrum. The decoys were then required to mill hysterically in the lobby, all twelve of them, and then hit the revolving doors and disperse in a dozen different vectors as the androgynous waste-wielding Québecer legged it out of the Epaulet Ballroom and lobby pursued by white-suited men with earplugs and Cobray M–11 subautomatics, so the security guys’d see identical epicene figures high-heeling it away in different directions and get fuddled about who to

chase. Susan T. Cheese and Poor Tony’d met the Antitoi Bros. — only one of whom could or would speak, and who’d been in charge of the diversionary aspects of the Sheraton Commander operation, and had clearly been subordinate to still other Québecers of way higher I.Q. — Krause and S.T.C. had met them at Inman Square’s Ryle’s Tavern, which had Gender- Dysphoric Night every second Wednesday, and attracted comely and unrough trade, and which Poor Tony passed now (Ryle’s), just after the Man o’ War Grille, now only a block or so from the Antitois’ glass-and- novelty-shop front, feeling not so much quite ill again as just deeply tired, after only five or so blocks — that post-fever, sleep-for-a-week-type cellular fatigue — and is debating with himself about whether to have a go at the purses of the two young and unstriking women walking just a few steps ahead, both of their purses hanging only by the flimsiest of evening- gown-width straps from slumped shoulders, the duo interracial, rare and disquieting in metro Boston, the black girl talking a click a minute and the white one not responding, her weary stolid plod and air of inattention fairly begging for a purse-snatch, both of them with an air about them of routine victimization, the sort of demoralized lassitude Poor Tony felt always guaranteed a minimum of protest or pursuit — though the white girl wore formidable-looking running shoes under her tartan skirt. So intent was Poor Tony Krause on the logistics and implications of the possible purses dangled as if by God right before him — how different to hit the Antitois’ doorstep with liquid assets, to request a transaction rather than bare charity, more almost a social call than a contemptible Withdrawn snivel for compassion — so intent as he sidestepped an impressive pile of dog- droppings and passed across the broad windows of the Man o’ War that he never saw his old former crewmate Mad Matty Pemulis, a sure source of compassion, looking up and out and down and back up, aghast in recognition of what Poor Tony has come through the corridor to resemble.

Geoffrey Day’s noted the way most of the male residents of Ennet House have special little cognomens for their genitals. E.g. ‘Bruno,’ ‘Jake,’ ‘Fang’ (Minty), ‘The One-Eyed Monk,’ ‘Fritzie,’ ‘Russell the Love Muscle.’ He speculates this could be a class thing: neither he nor Ewell nor Ken Erdedy have named their Units. Like Ewell, Day enters a certain amount of comparative-class data in his journal. Doony Glynn called his penis ‘Poor Richard’; Chandler Foss confessed to the moniker ‘Bam-Bam.’

Lenz had referred to his own Unit as ‘the Frightful Hog.’ Day would die before admitting he missed either Lenz or his soliloquies about the Hog, which had been frequent. The penis in question had been that curious two or three shades darker than the rest of Lenz that people’s penises sometimes are. Lenz had brandished it at his roommates whenever he wished to emphasize a point. It had been short and thick and blunt, and Lenz described the Hog as a primo example of what he called the Polish Curse, viz. undistinguished length but sobering circumference: ‘Easy on the bottom but tears hell out of the sides, brother.’ This had been his description of the Polish Curse. A surprising amount of Day’s Recovery Journal is filled with quotations from R. Lenz. Lenz’s discharge had moved the tax- attorney Tiny Ewell up into the 3-Man room with Day. Ewell was the one man here with whom a conversation of anything remotely approaching depth could be held, so Day was nonplussed when he found himself, after a couple long nights, almost missing Lenz, his obsession with time, his patter, his way of leaning up against the wall upside-down in his briefs, or brandishing the Hog.

And re Ennet House resident Kate Gompert and this depression issue: Some psychiatric patients — plus a certain percentage of people who’ve gotten so dependent on chemicals for feelings of well-being that when the chemicals have to be abandoned they undergo a loss-trauma that reaches way down deep into the soul’s core systems — these persons know firsthand that there’s more than one kind of so-called ‘depression.’ One 280 kind is low-grade and sometimes gets called anhedonia or simple melancholy. It’s a kind of spiritual torpor in which one loses the ability to feel pleasure or attachment to things formerly important. The avid bowler drops out of his league and stays home at night staring dully at kick-boxing cartridges. The gourmand is off his feed. The sensualist finds his beloved Unit all of a sudden to be so much feelingless gristle, just hanging there.

The devoted wife and mother finds the thought of her family about as moving, all of a sudden, as a theorem of Euclid. It’s a kind of emotional novocaine, this form of depression, and while it’s not overtly painful its deadness is disconcerting and… well, depressing. Kate Gompert’s always thought of this anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content.

Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy — happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love — are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts. Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location. I.e. the anhedonic becomes, in the lingo of Boston AA, Unable To Identify.

It’s worth noting that, among younger E.T.A.s, the standard take on Dr.

J. O. Incandenza’s suicide attributes his putting his head in the microwave to this kind of anhedonia. This is maybe because anhedonia’s often associated with the crises that afflict extremely goal-oriented people who reach a certain age having achieved all or more than all than they’d hoped for. The what-does-it-all-mean-type crisis of middle-aged Americans. In fact this is in fact not what killed Incandenza at all. In fact the presumption that he’d achieved all his goals and found that the achievement didn’t confer meaning or joy on his existence says more about the students at E.T.A. than it says about Orin’s and Hal’s father: still under the influence of the deLint-like carrot-and-stick philosophies of their hometown coaches rather than the more paradoxical Schtitt/Incandenza/Lyle school, younger athletes who can’t help gauging their whole worth by their place in an ordinal ranking use the idea that achieving their goals and finding the gnawing sense of worthlessness still there in their own gut as a kind of psychic bogey, something that they can use to justify stopping on their way down to dawn drills to smell flowers along the E.T.A. paths. The idea that achievement doesn’t automatically confer interior worth is, to them, still, at this age, an abstraction, rather like the prospect of their own death — ‘Caius Is Mortal’ and so on. Deep down, they all still view the competitive carrot as the grail. They’re mostly going through the motions when they invoke anhedonia. They’re mostly small children, keep in mind. Listen to any sort of sub-16 exchange you hear in the bathroom or food line: ‘Hey there, how are you?’ ‘Number eight this week, is how I am.’ They all still worship the carrot. With the possible exception of the tormented LaMont Chu, they all

still subscribe to the delusive idea that the continent’s second-ranked fourteen-year-old feels exactly twice as worthwhile as the continent’s #4.

Deluded or not, it’s still a lucky way to live. Even though it’s temporary.

It may well be that the lower-ranked little kids at E.T.A. are proportionally happier than the higher-ranked kids, since we (who are mostly not small children) know it’s more invigorating to want than to have, it seems.

Though maybe this is just the inverse of the same delusion.

Hal Incandenza, though he has no idea yet of why his father really put his head in a specially-dickied microwave in the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, is pretty sure that it wasn’t because of standard U.S. anhedonia.

Hal himself hasn’t had a bona fide intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion since he was tiny; he finds terms like joie and value to be like so many variables in rarified equations, and he can manipulate them well enough to satisfy everyone but himself that he’s in there, inside his own hull, as a human being — but in fact he’s far more robotic than John Wayne. One of his troubles with his Moms is the fact that Avril Incandenza believes she knows him inside and out as a human being, and an internally worthy one at that, when in fact inside Hal there’s pretty much nothing at all, he knows.

His Moms Avril hears her own echoes inside him and thinks what she hears is him, and this makes Hal feel the one thing he feels to the limit, lately: he is lonely.

It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip — and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No?

We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion.

A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of

whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent (at least since the Reconfiguration). One of the things sophisticated viewers have always liked about J. O. Incandenza’s The American Century as Seen Through a Brick is its unsubtle thesis that naïveté is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America.

And since sin is the sort of thing that can be talked about only figuratively, it’s natural that Himself’s dark little cartridge was mostly about a myth, viz. that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive. Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the 281hip empty mask, anhedonia.

The American Century as Seen Through a Brick’s main and famous key- image is of a piano-string vibrating — a high D, it looks like — vibrating, and making a very sweet unadorned solo sound indeed, and then a little thumb comes into the frame, a blunt moist pale and yet dingy thumb, with disreputable stuff crusted in one of the nail-corners, small and unlined, clearly an infantile thumb, and as it touches the piano string the high sweet sound immediately dies. And the silence that follows is excruciating. Later in the film, after much mordant and didactic panoramic brick-following, we’re back at the piano-string, and the thumb is removed, and the high sweet sound recommences, extremely pure and solo, and yet now somehow, as the volume increases, now with something rotten about it underneath, there’s something sick-sweet and overripe and potentially putrid about the one clear high D as its volume increases and increases, the sound getting purer and louder and more dysphoric until after a surprisingly few seconds

we find ourselves right in the middle of the pure undampered sound longing and even maybe praying for the return of the natal thumb, to shut it up.

Hal isn’t old enough yet to know that this is because numb emptiness isn’t the worst kind of depression. That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain. Authorities term this condition clinical depression or involutional depression or unipolar dysphoria. Instead of just an incapacity for feeling, a deadening of soul, the predator-grade depression Kate Gompert always feels as she Withdraws from secret marijuana is itself a feeling. It goes by many names — anguish, despair, torment, or q.v. Burton’s melancholia or Yevtuschenko’s more authoritative psychotic depression — but Kate Gompert, down in the trenches with the thing itself, knows it simply as It.

It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self. Its emotional character, the feeling Gompert describes It as, is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency — sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying — are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.

It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed. There is no way Kate Gompert could ever even begin to make someone else understand what clinical depression feels like, not even another person who is herself clinically depressed, because a person in such a state is incapable of empathy with any other living thing. This anhedonic Inability To Identify is also an integral part of It. If a person in physical pain has a hard time 282 attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the

universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell. Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution. It is a hell for one.

The authoritative term psychotic depression makes Kate Gompert feel especially lonely. Specifically the psychotic part. Think of it this way. Two people are screaming in pain. One of them is being tortured with electric current. The other is not. The screamer who’s being tortured with electric current is not psychotic: her screams are circumstantially appropriate. The screaming person who’s not being tortured, however, is psychotic, since the outside parties making the diagnoses can see no electrodes or measurable amperage. One of the least pleasant things about being psychotically depressed on a ward full of psychotically depressed patients is coming to see that none of them is really psychotic, that their screams are entirely appropriate to certain circumstances part of whose special charm is that they are undetectable by any outside party. Thus the loneliness: it’s a closed circuit: the current is both applied and received from within.

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

But and so the idea of a person in the grip of It being bound by a ‘Suicide Contract’ some well-meaning Substance-abuse halfway house makes her sign is simply absurd. Because such a contract will constrain such a person only until the exact psychic circumstances that made the contract necessary in the first place assert themselves, invisibly and

indescribably. That the well-meaning halfway-house Staff does not understand Its overriding terror will only make the depressed resident feel more alone.

One fellow psychotically depressed patient Kate Gompert came to know at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Newton two years ago was a man in his fifties. He was a civil engineer whose hobby was model trains — like from Lionel Trains Inc., etc. — for which he erected incredibly intricate systems of switching and track that filled his basement recreation room. His wife brought photographs of the trains and networks of trellis and track into the locked ward, to help remind him. The man said he had been suffering from psychotic depression for seventeen straight years, and Kate Gompert had had no reason to disbelieve him. He was stocky and swart with thinning hair and hands that he held very still in his lap as he sat. Twenty years ago he had slipped on a patch of 3-In-1-brand oil from his model-train tracks and bonked his head on the cement floor of his basement rec room in Wellesley Hills, and when he woke up in the E.R. he was depressed beyond all human endurance, and stayed that way. He’d never once tried suicide, though he confessed that he yearned for unconsciousness without end. His wife was very devoted and loving. She went to Catholic Mass every day.

She was very devout. The psychotically depressed man, too, went to daily Mass when he was not institutionalized. He prayed for relief. He still had his job and his hobby. He went to work regularly, taking medical leaves only when the invisible torment got too bad for him to trust himself, or when there was some radical new treatment the psychiatrists wanted him to try. They’d tried Tricyclics, M.A.O.I.s, insulin-comas, Selective-Serotonin- 283 Reuptake Inhibitors, the new and side-effect-laden Quadracyclics.

They’d scanned his lobes and affective matrices for lesions and scars.

Nothing worked. Not even high-amperage E.C.T. relieved It. This happens sometimes. Some cases of depression are beyond human aid. The man’s case gave Kate Gompert the howling fantods. The idea of this man going to work and to Mass and building miniaturized railroad networks day after day after day while feeling anything like what Kate Gompert felt in that ward was simply beyond her ability to imagine. The rationo-spiritual part of her knew this man and his wife must be possessed of a courage way off any sort of known courage-chart. But in her toxified soul Kate Gompert felt only a

paralyzing horror at the idea of the squat dead-eyed man laying toy track slowly and carefully in the silence of his wood-panelled rec room, the silence total except for the sounds of the track being oiled and snapped together and laid into place, the man’s head full of poison and worms and every cell in his body screaming for relief from flames no one else could help with or even feel.

The permanently psychotically depressed man was finally transferred to a place on Long Island to be evaluated for a radical new type of psychosurgery where they supposedly went in and yanked out your whole limbic system, which is the part of the brain that causes all sentiment and feeling. The man’s fondest dream was anhedonia, complete psychic numbing. I.e. death in life. The prospect of radical psychosurgery was the dangled carrot that Kate guessed still gave the man’s life enough meaning for him to hang onto the windowsill by his fingernails, which were probably black and gnarled from the flames. That and his wife: he seemed genuinely to love his wife, and she him. He went to bed every night at home holding her, weeping for it to be over, while she prayed or did that devout thing with beads.

The couple had gotten Kate Gompert’s mother’s address and had sent Kate an Xmas card the last two years, Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Feaster of Wellesley Hills MA, stating that she was in their prayers and wishing her all available joy. Kate Gompert doesn’t know whether Mr. Ernest Feaster’s limbic system got yanked out or not. Whether he achieved anhedonia. The Xmas cards had had excruciating little watercolor pictures of locomotives on them. She could barely stand to think about them, even at the best of times, which the present was not.

14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

Ms. Ruth van Cleve’s first day off new residents’ three-day House Restriction. Allowed now to hit meetings outside Enfield if accompanied by some more senior resident the Staff judges safe. Ruth van Cleve in spike heels walking alongside a psychotically depressed Kate Gompert on

Prospect just south of Inman Square, Cambridge, a little after 2200h., yammering nonstop.

Ruth van Cleve is shaping up to be excruciating for Kate Gompert to be around. Ruth van Cleve hails from Braintree on the South Shore, is many kilos underweight, wears brass-colored lipstick, and has dry hair teased out 284-in the big-hair fashion of decades past. Her face has the late-stage Ice addict’s concave long-jawed insectile look. Her hair is a dry tangled cloud, with tiny little eyes and bones and projecting beak underneath. Joelle v.D.’d said it almost looked like Ruth van Cleve’s hair grew her head instead of the other way around. Kate Gompert’s hair is butcher-block cut and has recognizable color, at least.

Kate Gompert hasn’t slept in four nights, and her slumped progress up the Prospect sidewalk resembles the lazy tack of a boat in no rush. Ruth van Cleve talks nonstop into her right ear. It’s around 2200h. on Saturday and the sodium streetlights keep going off and then on again with a stuttered hum, some connection in them loose somewhere. Foot-traffic is dense, and the undead and drunks who live in the streets around Inman Square also crowd the sidewalk’s edges, and if Kate G. looks at the images of passersby in the darkened shop windows they become (pedestrians and undead stem- artists) just heads that seem to float across each window unconnected to anything. As in disconnected floating heads. In doorways by shops are incomplete persons in wheelchairs with creative receptacles where limbs should be and hand-lettered invitations to help them.

An oral narrative begins to emerge. Ms. Ruth v.C. has been remanded to Ennet House by D.S.S. and Family Court after her newborn baby was discovered in a Braintree MA alley swaddled in WalMart advertising circulars whose Harvest Moon Value Specials had expired 11/01, a Sunday.

Ruth van Cleve had rather unshrewdly left the hospital I.D. bracelet with its D.O.B. and her own name and Health Card # on the discarded infant’s wrist. The infant is apparently now in a South Shore hospital incubator, 285 attached to machines and tapering off the Clonidine it received for 286inutero addictions to substances Kate Gompert can only speculate about.

The father of Ruth van Cleve’s child, she reports, is under the protection and care of the Norfolk County Correctional Authority, awaiting sentencing

for what Ruth van Cleve describes several times as operating a pharmaceutical company without a license.

What’s remarkable to Kate Gompert is that she seems to be able to move forward without any sort of conscious moving-forward-type volitions. She puts her left foot in front of her right foot and then her right foot in front of her left foot, and she’s moving forward, her whole self, when all she’s capable of concentrating on is one foot and then the other foot. Heads glide by in the darkened windows. Some of the Latino males in the vicinity do a kind of sexual checking-out as they pass — even though underweight and dry-haired and kind of haggish, Ruth van Cleve’s manner and attire and big hair broadcast that she’s all about sexuality and sex.

A negative thing about opting for recovery in NA instead of AA is availability and location of meetings. In other words fewer NA meetings.

On a Saturday night you could stand on the roof of Ennet House in Enfield and be hard-pressed to spit in any direction without hitting some AA venue nearby. Whereas the closest Saturday-P.M. NA meeting is N. Cambridge’s Clean and Serene Group, infamous for cross-talk and chair-throwing, and the thing’s Beginner’s Mtng. goes from 2000 to 2100h. and the regular from 2100 to 2200h., purposely late, to offset the Saturday-night jones so many drug addicts suffer weekly, Saturday still being the week’s special mythic Party-Night even for persons who long ago ceased to be able to do anything but Party 24/7/365. But from Inman Square back to Ennet House is a ghastly hike — hoof up Prospect to Central Sq. and take the Red Line all the way to Park Street station and then the maddening Green Line B Train forever west on Comm. Ave. — and it’s now after 2215h., meaning Kate Gompert has 75 minutes to get herself and this hideous, despair-producing, slutty and yammering newcomer beside her back for Curfew. Ruth van Cleve’s chatter is as listener-interest-independent as anything Kate Gompert’s heard since Randy Lenz got invited to ingest Substances and abuse animals elsewhere, and left, which was who knows how many days or weeks ago.

The two move in and out of cones of epileptic light from fluttering street-lamps. Kate Gompert is trying not to shudder as Ruth van Cleve asks her if she knows someplace you can pick up a good toothbrush cheap. Kate Gompert’s entire spiritual energy and attention are focused on first her left foot and then her right foot. One of the heads she does not see, floating in

the windows with her own unrecognizable head and Ruth van Cleve’s cloud of hair, is the gaunt and spectral hollow-eyed head of Poor Tony Krause, who’s several steps behind them and matching their slightly serpentine course step for step, eyeing string purses he imagines contain more than just train-fare and NA Newcomers’ keychains.

The vaporizer chugs and seethes and makes the room’s windows weep as Jim Troeltsch inserts a pro-wrestling cartridge in the little TP’s viewer and dons his tackiest sportcoat and wet-combs his hair down smooth so it looks toupeeish and settles back on his bunk, surrounded by Seldane-bottles and two-ply facial tissue, preparing to call the action. His roommates have long since seen what was coming, and screwed.

Standing on tiptoe in Subdorm B’s curved hallway, using the handle of an inverted tennis racquet whose vinyl cover he can absently zip and unzip as he moves the handle around, Michael Pemulis is gently raising one of the panels in the drop-ceiling and shifting it on its aluminum strut, the panel, changing its lie on the strut from square-shaped to diamond-shaped, being careful not to let it fall.

Lyle hovers cross-legged just a couple mm. above the top of the towel dispenser in the unlit weight room, eyes rolled up white, lips barely moving and making no sound.

Coach Schtitt and Mario tear-ass downhill on W. Commonwealth on Schtitt’s old BMW, bound for Evangeline’s Low-Temperature Confections in Newton Center, right at the bottom of what usually gets called Heartbreak Hill, Schtitt intense-faced and leaning forward like a skier, his white scarf whipping around and whipping Mario’s face, in the sidecar, as Mario too leans way forward into their downhill flight, preparing to whoop when they bottom out.

Ms. Avril Incandenza, seeming somehow to have three or four cigarettes all going at once, secures from Information the phone and e-mail #s of a journalistic business address on East Tucson AZ’s Blasted Expanse Blvd.,

then begins to dial, using the stern of a blue felt pen to stab at the console’s keys.

‘AIYEE!’ cries the man, rushing at the nun, wielding a power tool.

The tough-looking nun yells ‘AIYEE!’ right back as she kicks at him expertly, her habit’s skirts whipping complexly around her. The combatants circle each other warily in the abandoned warehouse, both growling. The nun’s wimple is askew and soiled; the back of her hand, held out in a bladish martial-art fist, displays part of a faded tattoo, some wicked-clawed bird of prey. The cartridge opens like this, in violent medias res, then freezes in the middle of the nun’s leaping kick, and its title, Blood Sister: One Tough Nun, gets matte-dissolved in and bleeds lurid blood-colored light down into the performance credits rolling across the screen’s bottom.

Bridget Boone and Frances L. Unwin have come in uninvited and joined Hal in V.R. 6 and are curled up against the arms of the room’s other recumbency, their feet touching at the soles, Boone eating unauthorized frozen yogurt from a cylindrical carton. Hal’s turned the rheostat down low, and the film’s title and credits make their faces glow redly. Bridget Boone extends the confection-carton over in Hal’s direction in an inviting way, and by way of declining Hal points to the lump of Kodiak in his cheek and makes a display of leaning out to spit. He appears to be studying the

scrolling credits very closely. ‘So what is this?’ Fran Unwin says.

Hal looks over at her very slowly, then even more slowly raises his right arm and points around the tennis ball he’s squeezing at the monitor, where the cartridge’s 50-point title is still trickling redly over the credits and frozen scene.

Bridget Boone gives him a look. ‘What’s up your particular butt?’ ‘I’m isolating. I came in here to be by myself.’ She has this way that gets to Hal of digging the chocolate yogurt out with the spoon and then inverting the spoon, turning the spoon over, so that it always enters her mouth upside-down and her tongue gets to contact the confection immediately, without the mediation of cold spoon, and for some reason this has always gotten under Hal’s skin. ‘So then you should’ve locked the door.’ 287 ‘Except there aren’t locks on the V.R. doors, as you quite well know.’

Round-faced Frannie Unwin says ‘Sshhh.’ Then too sometimes Boone plays with the laden spoon, makes it fly around in front of her face like a child’s plane before inverting it and sticking it in. ‘Maybe this is partly because this is a public room, for everybody, that your thinking person probably wouldn’t choose to isolate in.’ Hal leans over to spit and lets the spit hang for a while before he lets it go, so it hangs there slowly distending.

Boone withdraws the clean spoon just as slowly. ‘No matter how sullen and pouty that person is over that person’s play or near-loss in full view of a whole crowd that day, I hear.’ ‘Bridget, I forgot to tell you I saw that Rite Aid’s having an enormous clearance on emetics. If I were you I’d scoot right over.’ ‘You are vile.’ Bernadette Longley sticks her long boxy head in the door and sees Bridget Boone and says ‘I thought I heard you in here’ and comes in

uninvited with Jennie Bash in tow.

Hal whimpers.

Jennie Bash looks at the large screen. The cartridge’s theme-music is female-choral and very heavy and ironic on the descants. Bernadette Longley looks at Hal. ‘You know there’s a totally huge lady cruising the halls looking for you, with a notebook and a very determined expression.’ Boone banks the spoon back and forth absently. ‘He’s isolating. He won’t respond and is spitting extra repulsively to get across the point.’ Jennie Bash says ‘Haven’t you got a huge paper due for Thierry tomorrow? There was moaning coming from Struck and Shaw’s room.’ Hal packs chew down with his tongue. ‘Done.’ ‘Figures,’ Bridget Boone says. ‘Done, redone, formatted, printed, proofed, collated, stapled.’ ‘Proofed to within its life,’ Boone says, barrel-rolling the spoon. Hal can tell she’s done a couple one-hitters. He’s looking straight at the wall’s screen, squeezing the ball so hard his forearm keeps swelling to twice its size. ‘Plus I hear your best friend in the whole world did something really funny today,’ Longley says. ‘She means Pemulis,’ Fran Unwin tells Hal.

Bridget Boone makes dive-bomber sounds and swoops the spoon around. ‘Sounds like too good a story not to save and let my craving for it build and build until finally it’s like I have to hear it or die right on the spot.’ ‘What is up his butt?’ Jennie Bash asks Fran Unwin. Fran Unwin’s a sort of hanuman-faced girl with a torso and trunk about twice as long as her legs, and a scuttly, vaguely simian style of play. Bernadette Longley wears knee-length candy-cane trousers and a sweatshirt with the fleecy inside out.

All the girls are now in socks. Hal notes that girls always seem to slip out of their shoes when they assume any kind of spectatorial posture. Eight empty white sneakers now sit mute and weird at various points, slightly sunk in carpet pile. No two of the shoes face quite the same exact direction. Male players, on the other hand, tend to leave the footwear on when they come in and sit down somewhere. Girls literally embody the idea of making yourself at home. Males, when they come in somewhere and sit down, project an air of transience. Remain suited up and mobile. It’s the same whenever Hal comes in and sits down someplace where people are already gathered. He’s aware that they sense he’s somehow there only in a very technical sense, that he’s got an air of moment’s-notice readiness to leave about him. Boone 288 extends her carton of TCBY toward Longley in an inviting way, even tilting it invitingly back and forth. Longley puffs her cheeks and blows air out with a fatigued sound. At least three different smells of cologne and skin-cream struggle for primacy in here. Bridget Boone’s free LA Gear shoes are both on their sides from the force of having been almost kicked off her feet. Hal’s spit makes a sound against the bottom of the wastebasket.

Jennie Bash has bigger arms than Hal. The Viewing Room is redly dim.

Bash asks Unwin what they’re watching.

Blood Sister: One Tough Nun, one of Himself’s few commercial successes, wouldn’t have made near the money it made if it hadn’t come out just as InterLace was starting to purchase first-run features for its rental menus and hyping the cartridges with one-time Spontaneous Disseminations. It was the sort of sleazy-looking shocksploitation film that would have had a two-week run in multiplex theaters 8 and above and then gone right to the featureless brown boxes of magnetic-video limbo. Hal’s critical take on the film is that Himself, at certain dark points when abstract

theory-issues seemed to provide an escape from the far more wrenching creative work of making humanly true or entertaining cartridges, had made films in certain commercial-type genre modes that so grotesquely exaggerated the formulaic schticks of the genres that they became ironic metacinematic parodies on the genres: ‘sub/inversions of the genres,’ cognoscenti taken in were wont to call them. The metacinematic-parody idea itself was aloof and over-clever, to Hal’s way of thinking, and he’s not comfortable with the way Himself always seemed to get seduced by the very commercial formulae he was trying to invert, especially the seductive formulae of violent payback, i.e. the cathartic bloodbath, i.e. the hero trying with every will-fiber to eschew the generic world of the stick and fist and but driven by unjust circumstance back to the violence again, to the cathartic final bloodbath the audience is brought to applaud instead of mourn. Himself’s best in this vein was The Night Wears a Sombrero, a Langesque meta Western but also a really good Western, with chintzy homemade interior sets but breathtaking exteriors shot outside Tucson AZ, an ambivalent-but-finally-avenging-son story played out against dust- colored skies and big angles of flesh-colored mountain, plus with minimal splatter, shot men clutching their chests and falling deliciously sideways, all hats staying on at all times. Blood Sister: One Tough Nun was a supposedly ironic lampoon of the avenging-cleric splatter-films of the late B.S. ’90s.

Nor did Himself make any friends on either side of the Concavity, trying to shoot the thing in Canada.

Hal tries to imagine the tall slumped tremulous stork-shape of Himself inclined at an osteoporotic angle over digital editing equipment for hours on end, deleting and inserting code, arranging Blood Sister: One Tough Nun into subversive/inversion, and can’t summon one shadowy idea of what Himself might have been feeling as he patiently labored. Maybe that was the point of the thing’s metasilliness, to have nothing really felt going on.

289 Jennie Bash has left V.R. 6’s door agape, and Idris Arslanian and Todd (‘Postal Weight’) Possalthwaite and Kent Blott all drift in and sit Indian- style in a loose hemisphere on the thick carpet between the girls’ recumbency and Hal’s recumbency, and are more or less considerately quiet. They all keep their sneakers on. Postal Weight’s nose is a massive proboscoid bandaged thing. Kent Blott wears a sportfisherman’s cap with

an extremely long bill. That queer faint smell of hot dogs that seems to follow Idris Arslanian around begins to insinuate itself into the room’s colognes. He isn’t wearing the rayon handkerchief as a blindfold but does have it tied around his neck; no one asks him about it. All the littler kids are consummate spectators and are sucked immediately into Blood Sister’s unfolding narrative, and the older females seem to take some kind of psychic cue from the little boys and subside, too, and watch, until after a while Hal’s the only person in the room who isn’t 100% absorbed.

The entertainment’s uptake is that a tough biker-chick-type girl from the mean streets of Toronto is found O.D.’d, beaten up, molested, and robbed of her leather jacket outside the portcullis of a downtown convent and is rescued, nursed, befriended, spiritually guided, and converted — ‘saved’ is the weak entendre made much of in the first act’s dialogue — by a tough- looking older nun who it turns out, she reveals (the tough older nun), had herself been hauled up out of a life of Harleys, narcotics-dealing and - addiction by an even tougher even older nun, a nun who had herself been saved by a tough ex-biker nun, and so on. The latest saved biker-chick becomes a tough and street-smart nun in the same urban order, and is known on the mean streets as Blood Sister, and wimple or not still rides her Hawg from parish to parish and still knows akido and is not to be fucked with, is the word on the streets.

The motivational crux here being that almost this whole order of nuns is staffed by nuns who’d been saved from Toronto’s mean, dead-end streets by other older tougher saved nuns. So, endless novenas later, Blood Sister eventually feels this transitive spiritual urge to go out and find a troubled adolescent female of her own, to ‘save’ and bring into the order, thereby discharging her soul’s debt to the old tough nun who’d saved her. Through processes obscure (a Toronto troubled-but-savable-adolescent-girl-directory of some sort? Bridget Boone cuts wise), Blood Sister eventually takes on a burn-scarred, deeply troubled adolescent punker-type Toronto girl who is sullen and, yes, reasonably tough, but is also vulnerable and emotionally tormented (the girl’s pink shiny burn-scarred face tends to writhe in misery whenever she thinks Blood Sister’s not looking) by the terrible depredations she’s endured as a result of her rapacious and unshakable addiction to crank cocaine, the kind you have to convert and cook up yourself, and with ether, which is highly combustible, and which people used before somebody

found out baking soda and temperature-flux would do the same thing, which dates the film’s B.S. time-period even more clearly than the tough 290tortured punk girl’s violet stelliform coiffure.

But so Blood Sister eventually gets the girl clean, by nurturing her through Withdrawal in a locked sacristy; and the girl becomes less sullen by degrees that almost have audible clicks to them — the girl stops trying to dicky the lock of the sacramental-wine cabinet, stops farting on purpose during matins and vespers, stops going up to the Trappists who hang around the convent and asking them for the time and other sly little things to try to make them slip up and speak aloud, etc. A couple times the girl’s face writhes in emotional torment and vulnerability even when Blood Sister’s looking. The girl gets a severe and somewhat lesbianic haircut, and her roots establish themselves as softly brown. Blood Sister, revealing biceps like nobody’s business, beats the girl at arm-wrestling; they both laugh; they compare tattoos: this marks the start of a brutally drawn-out Getting- to-Know-and-Trust-You montage, a genre-convention, this montage involving Harley-rides at such speeds that the girl has to keep her hand on Blood Sister’s head to keep B.S.’s wimple from flying off, and long conversational walks filmed at wide-angle, and protracted and basically unwinnable games of charades with the Trappists, plus some quick scenes of Blood Sister finding the girl’s Marlboros and dildo-facsimile lighter in the wastebasket, of the girl doing chores unsullenly under B.S.’s grudgingly approving eye, of candle-lit scripture-study sessions with the girl’s finger under each word she reads, of the girl carefully snipping the last bits of split violet ends from her soft brown hair, of the more senior tough nuns punching Blood Sister’s shoulder approvingly as the girl’s eyes start to get that impending-conversion gleam in them, then, finally, of Blood Sister and the girl habit-shopping, the girl’s burned lantern jaw and hairless Promethean brow frozen in a sunlit montage-climax shot under a novitiate wimple’s gull-wings — all accompanied by — no kidding — ‘Getting to Know You,’ which Hal imagines the Stork justified to himself as subversively saccharine. This all takes about half an hour. Bridget Boone, of the Indianapolis archdiocese, begins to declaim briefly on Blood Sister: One Tough Nun’s ironic anti-Catholic subthesis — that the deformed addicted girl’s ‘salvation’ here seemed simply the exchange of one will-

obliterating ‘habit’ for another, substituting one sort of outlandish head- decoration for another — and gets pinched by Jennie Bash and shushed by just about everyone in the room but Hal, who could pass for asleep except for the brief lists to port over the wastebasket, to spit, and in fact is experiencing some of the radical loss of concentration that attends THC- Withdrawal and is thinking about another, even more familiar J. O.

Incandenza cartridge even while he watches this one with the other E.T.A.s.

This other attention-object is the late Himself’s so-called ‘inversion’ of the corporate-politics genre, Low-Temperature Civics, an executive-suite soap opera filled with power plays, position-jockeyings, timid adulteries, martinis, and malignantly pretty female executives in elegant tight-fitting dress-for-successwear who eat their paunched and muddled male counterparts for political lunch. Hal knows that L-TC wasn’t an inversion or lampoon at all, but derived right from the dark B.S. ’80s period when Himself had changed careers from government service to private entreprenurism, when a sudden infusion of patent-receipts left him feeling post-carrot anhedonic and existentially unmoored, and Himself took an entire year off to drink Wild Turkey and watch broadcast-television tycoon- operas like Lorimar’s Dynasty et al. in a remote spa off Canada’s Northwest coast, where he supposedly met and bonded with Lyle, now of the E.T.A. weight room.

What’s intriguing but unknown to everyone in V.R. 6 is the way Boone’s take on Himself’s take on the substitution-of-one-crutch-for-another interpretation of substituting Catholic devotion for chemical dependence is very close to the way many not-yet-desperate-enough newcomers to Boston AA see Boston AA as just an exchange of slavish dependence on the bottle/pipe for slavish dependence on meetings and banal shibboleths and robotic piety, an ‘Attitude of Platitude,’ and use this idea that it’s still slavish dependence as an excuse to stop trying Boston AA, and to go back to the original slavish Substance-dependence, until that dependence has finally beaten them into such a double-bound desperation that they finally come back in with their faces hanging off their skulls and beg to be told just what platitudes to shout, and how high to adjust their vacant grins.

Some Substance-dependent persons, though, have already been so broken by the time they first Come In that they don’t care about stuff like substitution or banality, they’ll give their left nut to trade their original

dependence in for robotic platitudes and pep-rally cheer. They’re the ones with the gun to their head, the ones who stick and Hang. It remains to be determined whether Joelle van Dyne, whose first appearance in a James O.

Incandenza project occurred in this very Low-Temperature Civics, is one of these people who’ve come into AA/NA shattered enough to stick, but she’s starting to I.D. more and more with the Commitment speakers she hears who did come in shattered enough to know it’s get straight or die. A click and a half straight downhill from E.T.A., Joelle is hitting the Reality Is For People That Can’t Handle Drugs Group, a meeting of the NA-splinter 291 Cocaine Anonymous, mostly because the meeting’s in the St.

Elizabeth’s Hospital Grand Rounds Auditorium, just a couple floors down from where Don Gately, whom she just got done visiting and mopping the massive unconscious forehead of, is lying in the Trauma Wing in a truly bad way. CA meetings have a long preamble and endless little Xeroxed formalities they read aloud at the start, is one reason Joelle avoids CA, but the opening stuff is done by the time she gets down and comes in and gets some burnt urn-bottom coffee and finds an available seat. The only empty seats are in the meeting’s back row — ‘Denial Aisle,’ the back rows are usually called — and Joelle is surrounded by catexic newcomers crossing and uncrossing their legs every few seconds and sniffing compulsively and looking like they’re wearing everything they own. Plus there’s the row of standing men — there’s a certain hard-faced type of male in Boston fellowships who refuses ever to sit for meetings — standing behind the back row, legs set wide and arms crossed and talking to each other out the sides of their mouths, and she can tell the standing men are looking at her bare knees over her shoulder, making little comments about the knees and 292 the veil. She thinks with fearful sentiment of Don Gately, a tube down his throat, torn by fever and guilt and shoulderpain, offered Demerol by well-meaning but clueless M.D.s, in and out of delirium, torn, convinced that certain men with hats wished him ill, looking at his room’s semi-private ceiling like it would eat him if he dropped his guard. The big blackboard up on the stage says the Reality Is For People That Can’t Handle Drugs Group welcomes tonight’s Commitment speakers, the Freeway Access Group from Mattapan, which is deep in the colored part of Boston where Cocaine Anonymous tends to be most heavily concentrated. The speaker just starting

in at the podium when Joelle sits down is a tall yellowish colored man with a weightlifter’s build and frightening eyes, sloe and a kind of tannin-brown.

He’s been in CA seven months, he says. He eschews the normal CA drugologue’s macho war-stories and gets right to his Bottom, his jumping- off place. Joelle can tell he’s trying to tell the truth and not just posturing and performing the way so many CAs seem like they do. His story’s full of colored idioms and those annoying little colored hand-motions and gestures, but to Joelle it doesn’t seem like she cares that much anymore.

She can Identify. The truth has a kind of irresistible unconscious attraction at meetings, no matter what the color or fellowship. Even Denial Aisle and the standing men are absorbed by the colored man’s story. The colored man says his thing is he’d had a wife and a little baby daughter at home in Mattapan’s Perry Hill Projects, and another baby on the way. He’d managed to hang on to his menial riveter’s-assistant job at Universal Bleacher right up the street from here in Enfield because his addiction to crank cocaine wasn’t everyday; he smoked on your binge-type basis, mostly weekends.

Hellacious, psychopathic, bank-account-emptying binges, though. Like getting strapped to a Raytheon missile and you don’t stop till that missile stops, Jim. He says his wife had got temp work cleaning houses, but when she worked they had to put their little girl in a day-care that just about ate her day’s pay. So his paycheck was like their total float, and his weekend binges with the glass pipe caused them no end of Financial Insecurity, which he mispronounces. Which brings him to his last binge, the Bottom, which, predictably, occurred on a payday. This check just had to go for groceries and rent. They were two months back, and there was not jack-shit in the house in the way of to eat. At a smoke-break at Universal Bleacher he’d made sure and bought just one single vial, for just a tensky, for a Sunday-night treat after a weekend of abstinence and groceries and quality time with his pregnant wife and little daughter. The wife and little daughter were to meet him after work right off the bus stop at Brighton Best Savings, right under the big clock, to ‘help’ him deposit the paycheck right then and there. He’d let his wife stipulate the meeting at the bank because he knew in a self-disgusted way even then that there was this hazard of paycheck-type incidents from binges he’d pulled in the past, and their Financial Insecurity was now whatever word’s past the word deep shit, and he knew goddamn well he could not afford to fuck up this time.

He says that’s how he used to think of it to himself: fucking up.

He didn’t even make it to the bus after clocking out, he said. Two other 293 Holmeses in Riveting had three vials each, which vials they had, like, brandished at him, and he’d kicked in his one vial because two-and-a-third vials v. one thin-ass Sunday-night vial was only a fucking fool way out of touch with the whole seize-the-opportunity concept could pass that shit up.

In short it was the familiar insanity of money in the pocket and no defense against the urge, and the thought of his woman holding his little girl in her little knit cap and mittens standing under the big clock in cold March dusk didn’t so much get pushed aside as somehow shrink to a tiny locket-size picture in the center of a part of him he and the Holmeses had set out busily to kill, with the pipe.

He says he never made the bus. They passed a bottle of rye around the old Ford Mystique one of the Holmeses profiled, and fired up, right in the car, and after he once fired up with $ in his pocket the fat woman with the 294little helmet with horns on it done already like fucking sang, Jim.

The man’s hands grip the sides of the podium and he rests his weight on his elbow-locked arms in a way that conveys both abjection and pluck. He invites the CAs to let’s just draw the curtain of charity over the rest of the night’s scene, which after the check-cashing stop got hazy with missile- exhaust anyhow; but so he finally did get home to Mattapan the next morning, Saturday morning, sick and green-yellow and on that mean post- crank slide, dying for more and willing to kill for more and yet so mortified and ashamed of having done fucked up (again) that just going up the elevator to their apartment was maybe the bravest thing he’d ever done, up to that point, he felt.

It was like 0600 in the A.M. and they weren’t there. There was nobody home, and in the sort of way where the place’s emptiness pulsed and 295 breathed. An envelope was slid under the door from the B.H.A., not the salmon color of an Eviction Notice but a green Last Warning re rent. And he went into the kitchen and opened up the fridge, hating himself for hoping there was a beer. In the fridge was a jar of grape jelly near-empty and a half a can of biscuit mix, and that, plus a sour empty-fridge odor, was all, Jim. A little plastic jar of labelless Food-Bank peanut butter so empty its insides

had knife-scrapes on the sides and a little clotted box of salt was all there was in the whole rest of the kitchen.

But what sent his face clear down off his skull and broke him in two, though, was he said when he saw the Pam-shiny empty biscuit pan on top of the stove and the plastic rind of the peanut butter’s safety-seal wrap on top of the wastebasket’s tall pile. The little locket-picture in the back of his head swelled and became a sharp-focused scene of his wife and little girl and little unborn child eating what he now could see they must have eaten, last night and this morning, while he was out ingesting their groceries and rent. This was his cliff-edge, his personal intersection of choice, standing there loose-faced in the kitchen, running his finger around a shiny pan with not one little crumb of biscuit left in it. He sat down on the kitchen tile with his scary eyes shut tight but still seeing his little girl’s face. They’d ate some charity peanut butter on biscuits washed down with tapwater and a grimace.

Their apartment was six floors up in Perry Hill’s Bldg. 5. The window didn’t open but could be broke through with a running start.

He didn’t kill himself, though, he says. He just got up and walked out.

He didn’t leave his wife a note. Not nothing. He went and walked the whole four clicks to Shattuck Shelter in Jamaica Plain. He felt like for sure they’d of been better off without him, he said. But he said he didn’t know why but he didn’t kill himself. But he didn’t. He figures there was some God- involvement, sitting there on the floor. He just decided to go to Shattuck and Surrender and get straight and never ever have his little girl’s grimacing face in his hungover head ever again, James.

And Shattuck Shelter — by coincidence — that usually had a waiting list every March until it got warm, they’d just kicked out some sorry-ass specimen for defecating in the shower, and they took him, the speaker. He asked for a CA Meeting right away. And a Shattuck Staff guy called somebody Afro-American with a lot of clean recovered time, and the speaker got taken to his first CA Meeting. That was 224 days ago tonight.

That night, when the colored CA Crocodile dropped him off back at the Shattuck — after he’d wept in front of other colored men at his first meeting and told men he didn’t know from shit about the big clock and glass pipe and paycheck and the biscuits and his little girl’s face — and after he come back to the Shattuck and got buzzed through and the buzzer sounded for supper, it turned out — by coincidence — that the Saturday-

night Shattuck supper was coffee and peanut butter sandwiches. It was the end of the week and the Shelter’s donated food had run out, they only had PB on cheap-ass white bread and Sunny Square instant coffee, the cheap shit that doesn’t even quite dissolve all the way.

He’s got your autodidactic orator’s way with emotional dramatic pauses that don’t seem affected. Joelle makes another line down the Styrofoam coffee cup with her fingernail and chooses consciously to believe it isn’t affected, the story’s emotive drama. Her eyes feel sandy from forgetting to blink. This always happens when you don’t expect it, when it’s a meeting you have to drag yourself to and are all but sure will suck. The speaker’s face has lost its color, shape, everything distinctive. Something has taken the tight ratchet in Joelle’s belly and turned it three turns to the good. It’s the first time she’s felt sure she wants to keep straight no matter what it means facing. No matter if Don Gately takes Demerol or goes to jail or rejects her if she can’t show him the face. It’s the first time in a long time — tonight, 11/14 — Joelle’s even considered possibly showing somebody the face.

After the pause the speaker says all the other sorry motherfuckers in the Shattuck Shelter in there started in to bitching about what was this shit, peanut butter sandwiches for fucking supper. The speaker says how whatever he silently thanked for just that particular sandwich he held and chewed, washing it down with gritty Sunny Square coffee, that thing became his Higher Power. He’s now seven-plus months clean. Universal Bleacher let him go, but he’s got steady work at Logan, pushing a third-shift mop, and a Holmes on his crew’s also in the Program — by coincidence.

His pregnant wife, it turned out, had gone to a Unwed Mothers Shelter with Shantel, that night. She was still in there. D.S.S. still wouldn’t let him appeal his wife’s Restraining Order and see Shantel, but he got to talk to his little girl on the phone just last month. And he’s now straight, from Giving Up and joining the Freeway Access Group and getting Active and taking the voluntary suggestions of the Fellowship of Cocaine Anonymous. His wife was due to have her baby around Xmas. He said he didn’t know what was going to happen to him or his family. But he says he has received certain promises from his new family — the Freeway Access Group of Cocaine Anonymous — and so he had certain hope-type emotions about the future, inside. He didn’t so much conclude or make obligatory reference to

Gratitude or any of that usual shit as grip the lectern and shrug and say he’d started feeling just last month that the choice he made on the kitchen floor was the right choice, personally speaking.

Entertainment-wise, things take a rapid turn for the splattery once the tough girl Blood Sister seemed to have saved is found bluely dead in her novitiate’s cot, her habit’s interior pockets stuffed with all kinds of substances and paraphernalia and her arm a veritable forest of syringes.

Tight shot of B.S., face working purply, staring down at the ex-ex-punker.

Suspecting foul play instead of spiritual recidivism, Blood Sister, disregarding first the Other-Cheek pieties and then the impassioned pleas and then the direct orders of the Vice-Mother Superior — who happens now to be the tough nun who’d saved Blood Sister, way back — begins reverting to her former Toronto-mean-street pre-salvation tough-biker-chick ways: demufflering her Harley Hawg, hauling an age-faded stud-covered leather bike-jacket out of storage and squeezing it over her pectoral-swollen habit, unbandaging her most lurid tattoos, shaking down former altar boys for information, flipping off motorists who get in her bike’s way, meeting old street-contacts in dim saloons and tossing back jiggers with even the most cirrhotic of them, beating, bludgeoning, akido-ing, disarming thugs of power tools, avenging the desalvation and demapping of her young charge, determined to prove that the girl’s death was no accident or backslide, that Blood Sister had not failed with the soul she’d chosen to save to discharge her own soul’s debt to the tough old Vice-Mother Superior who’d saved her, Blood Sister, so far back. Several thuggish stuntmen and countless liters of 296 potassium thiocyanate later, the truth does out: the novitiate girl had been murdered by the Mother Superior, the order’s top and toughest nun.

This M.S. is the nun who’d saved the Vice-M.S. who’d saved Blood Sister, meaning, ironically, that the evidence Blood Sister needs to prove that her salvation-debt really was discharged is also evidence inimical to the legal interests of the tough nun to whom Blood Sister’s own saviour is obligated, so Blood Sister gets increasingly tortured and ill-tempered as evidence of the Mother Superior’s guilt accretes. In one scene she says fuck. In another she swings a censer like a mace and brains an old verger who’s one of the Mother Superior’s stooges, knocking his toothless head clean off. Then, in Act III, a veritable orgy of retribution follows the full emergence of the

sordid truth: it seems that the tough old Vice-Mother Superior, viz. the nun who’d saved Blood Sister, had in fact not been saved, truly, after all — had in fact, during 20+ years of exemplary novena-saying and wafer-baking, been suffering a kind of hidden degenerative recidivist soul-rot, and had resumed, the Vice-M.S., at about the time Blood Sister had donned the habit of full nunhood, had not only resumed Substance-dependence but had started actually dealing in serious weights of whatever at the time was most profitable (which after 20+ years had changed from Marseillese heroin to Colombian freebaseable-grade Bing Crosby) to support her own hidden habit, covertly operating a high-volume retail operation out of the order’s Community Outreach Rescue Mission’s little-used confessionals. This nun’s superior, the top tough Mother Superior nun, stumbling onto the drug- operation after the now-demapped verger informed her that a suspicious number of limousines were discharging gold-chained and not very penitent- looking persons into the order’s Community Outreach Rescue Mission, and disastrously unable to summon the pious humility to accept the fact that she’d failed, it seemed, at truly and forever saving the ex-dealer whose salvation the Mother Superior required to discharge the debt to the now- retired octogenarian nun who’d saved her — this Mother Superior herself is the one who murdered Blood Sister’s ex-punk novitiate, to silence the girl.

What emerges is that Blood Sister’s addicted punk-girl’s Substance-copping venue, when she was Out There pre-salvation, had been nothing other than the Vice-Mother Superior’s infamous Community Outreach Rescue Mission. In other words, the nun who’d saved Blood Sister but had herself been secretly unsaved had been the tough girl’s Bing-dealer, is why the tough non-Catholic girl’d been so mysteriously adept at the Confiteor. The order’s Mother Superior had figured that it was only a matter of time before the girl’s conversion and salvation reached the sort of spiritual pitch where her guarded silence broke and she told Blood Sister the seamy truth about the nun she (Blood Sister) thought had saved her (Blood Sister). So she (the Mother Superior) had eliminated the girl’s map — ostensibly, she (the Mother Superior) told her lieutenant, the Vice-Mother Superior, to save her (the Vice-Mother Superior) from exposure and excommunication and 297maybe worse, if the girl weren’t silenced.

This narratively prolix and tangled stuff all gets explicated at near- Kabuki volume during an appalling free-for-all in the office of the Mother Superior who hadn’t saved the Vice-M.S. who’d saved Blood Sister, with the two senior nuns — who’d been tough and unsaved back in the Ontarian days when men were men and so were drug-addicted bike-chicks — teaming up and kicking Blood Sister’s ass, the fight-scene a blur of swirling habitements and serious martial arts against the spot-lit backdrop of the wall’s huge decorative mahogany crucifix, with Blood Sister giving a good account of herself but still getting her wimple beat in and finally, after several whirling kicks to the forehead, starting to bid adieu to her corporeal map and commend herself to the arms of God; until the unsaved recidivist Vice-Mother Superior nun who’d saved Blood Sister, wiping blood from her eyes after a head-butt and seeing the Mother Superior about to decapitate Blood Sister with the souvenir Champlain-era tomahawk the Huron nun who’d been saved by the original founder of the Toronto tough- girl-saving order had used to decapitate Jesuit missionaries before she (the tough Huron nun) had been saved, seeing the tomahawk raised with both arms before the normally pious-eyed old Mother Superior’s face — a face now rendered indescribable in aspect by the absence of humility and the passion for truth-silencing that add up to pure and radical evil — seeing now the upraised hatchet and demonized face of the M.S., the unsaved Vice-nun has a moment of epiphanic anti-recidivist spiritual clarity, and averts Blood Sister’s demapping by leaping across the office and cold- cocking the Mother Superior with a large decorative mahogany Christian object so symbolically obvious it needn’t even be named, the object’s symbolic unsubtlety making both Hal and Bridget Boone cringe. Now Blood Sister has the Champlain-era hatchet, and the unsaved nun who’d saved her has an unnamed object whose mahogany’s no match for a hatchet, and they stand facing each other over the prone Mother Superior’s puddle of skirts, chests heaving, and the Vice-M.S. has a writhing expression under her askew wimple like Go ahead, make the circle of recidivist retribution against the nun you thought had saved you but ultimately couldn’t even save herself complete, complete the lapsarian circuit or whatever. They stare at each other for countless frames, the office wall behind them cruciformly pale where the unnamed object’d hung. Then Blood Sister shrugs in resignation and drops the tomahawk, and turns and with an ironic little

obeisance walks out the Mother Superior’s office door and through the little sacristy and over the altar and down the little convent nave (bike boots echoing on the tile, emphasizing the silence) and out the big doors whose tympanum overhead is carved with a sword and a ploughshare and a syringe and a soup-ladle and the motto CONTRARIA SUNT COMPLEMENTA, the heaviness of which makes Hal cringe so severely it’s 298 Boone who has to supply the translation Kent Blott asks for. On-screen, we’re still following the tough nun (or ex-nun). The fact that the hatchet she resignedly dropped fetched the prone Mother Superior a pretty healthy knock is presented as clearly accidental… because she (Blood Sister) is still walking away from the convent, moving emphatically and in a gradually deepening focus. Limping toughly eastward into the twittering Toronto dawn. The cartridge’s closing sequence shows her astride her Hawg on Toronto’s meanest street. About to lapse? Backslide back into her tough pre-saved ways? It’s unclear in a way that’s supposed to be rich: her expression is agnostic at best, but the huge sign of a discount Harley- muffler outlet juts just at the horizon she’s roaring toward. The closing credits are the odd lime-green of bugs on a windshield.

It’s hard to tell whether Boone and Bash’s applause is sarcastic. There’s that post-entertainment flurry of changed positions and stretched limbs and critical sallies. Out of nowhere Hal remembers: Smothergill. Possalthwaite says he and the Id-man brought Blott in to speak to Hal about something disturbing they encountered during their disciplinary shit-detail in the tunnels that P.M. Hal holds up a hand for the kids to hang on, flipping through cartridge cases to see whether Low-Temperature Civics is up here.

All the cases are clearly labelled.

The apparition receded, the red of its coat shrinking against the swinging view of Prospect St. and pavement and dumpsters and looming storefronts, Ruth van Cleve on its lurid tail and receding also, screaming bits of urban argot that became less faint than swallowed. Kate Gompert held her hurt head and heard it roar. Ruth van Cleve’s pursuit was slowed by her arms, which were waving around as she screamed; and the apparition was swinging their purses to clear a path on the sidewalk before it. Kate Gompert could see pedestrians leaping out into the street way up ahead to avoid getting clocked. The whole visual scene seemed tinged in violet.

A voice under a storefront awning right nearby somewhere said: ‘Seen it!’ Kate Gompert leaned over again and held the part of her head that surrounded her eye. The eye was palpably swelling shut, and her whole vision was queerly violet. A sound in her head like a drawbridge being drawn up, implacable trundle and squeaks. Hot watery spit was flooding her mouth, and she kept swallowing against nausea. ‘Seen it? Bet your ever-living goddamn life I seen it!’ A kind of gargoyle seemed to detach itself from a storefront hardware display and moved in, its motions oddly jerky, as in a film missing frames. ‘Seen the whole thing!’ it said, then repeated it. ‘I’m a witness!’ it said.

Kate Gompert put her other arm out against the lightpost and hauled herself mostly upright, looking at it. ‘Witnessed the whole god damn thing,’ it said. In the eye that wasn’t swelling shut the thing resolved violetly into a bearded man in an army coat and a sleeveless army coat over that coat, spittle in his beard. One eye had a system of exploded arteries in it. He shook like an old machine. There was a smell involved. The old man got right up close, looming in, so that pedestrians had to curve out around both of them together. Kate Gompert could feel her pulse in her eye. ‘Witness! Eye witness! The whole thing!’ But he was looking someplace else, like more around at people passing. ‘Seen it? I’m him!’ Not clear who he was shouting at. It wasn’t her, and the passersby were paying that studious, urban kind of no-attention as they broke and melted around them at the lightpost and then reformed. Kate Gompert had the idea that supporting herself against the lightpost would keep her from throwing up.

Concussion is really another word for a bruised brain. She tried not to think about it, that the impact had maybe sent one part of her brain slamming against her skull, and now that part was purply swelling, mashed up against the inside of her skull. The lightpost she held herself up with was what had hit her. ‘Fellow? I’m your fellow. Witness? Saw it all!’ And the old fellow was holding a trembling palm up just under Kate Gompert’s face, as if he wanted it thrown up into. The palm was violet, with splotches of some sort of possible fungal decay, and with dark branching lines where the pink palm-lines of people who don’t live in dumpsters usually are, and Kate

Gompert studied the palm abstractly, and the weather-bleached 299 GIGABUCKS ticket on the pavement below it. The ticket seemed to recede into a violet mist and then move back up. Pedestrians barely glanced at them and then looked studiously elsewhere: a drunk-looking pale girl and a street bum showing her something in his hand. ‘Witnessed the whole thing being committed,’ the man remarked to a passerby with a cellular on his belt. Kate Gompert couldn’t summon the juice to tell him to go screw.

That’s the way it was said down here in the real city, Go Screw, with a deft little thumb-gesture. She couldn’t even say Go Away, though the smell involved in the man made it worse, the nausea. It seemed terribly important not to vomit. She could feel her pulse in the eye the pole had hit. As if the strain of vomiting could aggravate the spongy purpling of the part of her brain the pole had bruised. The thought made her want to vomit in this horrid palm that wouldn’t stay still. She tried to reason. If the man had witnessed the whole thing then how could he think she’d have change to put in his hand. Ruth van Cleve had been listing some of her baby’s jailed father’s wittier aliases when Kate Gompert had felt a hand strike her back and close around the strap of her purse. Ruth van Cleve had cried out as the apparition of just about the most unattractive woman Kate Gompert had ever seen crashed forward between them, knocking them apart. Ruth van Cleve’s vinyl purse’s strap gave right away, but Kate Gompert’s thin but densely macramé’d strap held around her shoulder and she was pulled wrenchingly forward by the womanly apparition’s momentum as it tried to sprint up Prospect St., and the red hag-like figure was yanked wrenchingly back as the quality Filene’s all-cotton French-braidedly macramé’d purse- strap held, and Kate Gompert had got a whiff of something danker than the dankest municipal sewage and a glimpse of what looked like a five-day facial growth on the hag’s face as street-tough Ruth van Cleve got a grip on her/his/its red leather coat, proclaiming the thief a son of a mafun ho. Kate Gompert was staggering forward, trying to get her arm out of the strap’s loop. They all three moved forward together this way. The apparition spun itself violently around, trying to shake off Ruth van Cleve, and her/its spin with her purse took the strap-attached Kate Gompert (who didn’t weigh very much) out around in a wide circle (she’d had a flashback of reminiscence back to Crack-the-Whip at the Wellesley Hills Skating Club’s

rink’s ‘Wee Blades’ Toddler Skating Hour, as a child), gaining speed; and then a rust-pocked curbside lightpost rotated toward her, also gaining speed, and the sound was somewhere between a bonk and a clang, and the sky and the sidewalk switched places, and a violet sun exploded outward, and the whole street turned violet and swung like a clanging bell; and then she was alone and purseless and watching the two recede, both seeming to be shrieking for help.

14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

A disadvantage of your nasally ingested cocaine being that at a certain point somewhere past the euphoric crest — if you haven’t got the sense left to stop and just ride the crest, and instead keep going, nasally — it takes you into regions of almost interstellar cold and nasal numbness. Randy Lenz’s sinuses were frozen against his skull, numb and hung with crystal frost. His legs felt like they ended at the knees. He was trailing two very small-sized Chinese women as they lugged enormous paper shopping bags east on Bishop Allen Dr. under Central. His heart sounded like a shoe in the Ennet House basement’s dryer. His heart was beating that loud. The Chinese women scuttled at an amazing rate, given their size and the bags’ size. It was c. 2212:30–40h., smack in the middle of the former Interval of Issues-Resolution. The Chinese women didn’t walk so much as scuttle with a kind of insectile rapidity, and Lenz was heart-pressed to both keep up and seem to casually saunter, numb from the knee down and the nostril back.

They made the turn onto Prospect St. two or a few blocks below Central Square, moving in the direction of Inman Square. Lenz followed ten or thirty paces behind, eyes on the twine handles of the shopping bags. The Chinese women were about the size of fire hydrants and moved like they had more than the normal amount of legs, conversing in their anxious and high-pitched monkey-language. Evolution proved your Orientoid tongues were closer to your primatal languages than not. At first, on the brick sidewalks of the stretch of Mass. Ave. between Harvard and Central, Lenz had thought they might be following him — he’d been followed a great deal in his time, and like the well-read Geoffrey D. he knew only too well thank

you that the most fearsome surveillance got carried out by unlikely-looking people that followed you by walking in front of you with small mirrors in their glasses’ temples or elaborate systems of cellular communicators for reporting to the Command Center — or else also by helicopters, also, that flew too high to see, hovering, the tiny chop of their rotors disguised as your own drumming heart. But after he’d had success at successfully shaking the Chinese women twice — the second time so successfully he’d had to tear-ass around through alleys and vault wooden fences to pick them up again a couple blocks north on Bishop Allen Dr., scuttling along, jabbering — he’d settled down in his conviction about who was trailing who, here. As in just who had the controlling discretion over the general situation right here. The ejection from the House, which the ejection had at first seemed like the kiss of a death sentence, had turned out to maybe be just the thing. He’d tried the Straight On Narrow and for his pains had been threatened and dismissively sent off; he’d given it his best, and for the most part impressively; and he had been sent Away, Alone, and at least now could openly hide. R. Lenz lived by his wits out here, deeply disguised, on the amonymous streets of N. Cambridge and Somerville, never sleeping, ever moving, hiding in bright-lit and public plain sight, the last place They would think to find him.

Lenz wore fluorescent-yellow snowpants, the slightly shiny coat to a long-tailed tux, a sombrero with little wooden balls hanging off the brim, oversize tortoise-shell glasses that darkened automatically in response to bright light, and a glossy black mustache promoted from the upper lip of a mannequin at Lechmere’s in Cambridgeside — the ensemble the result of bold snatch-and-sprints all up and down the nighttime Charles, when he’d first gone Overground northeast from Enfield several-odd days back. The absolute blackness of the mannequin’s mustache — very securely attached with promoted Krazy Glue and made even glossier by the discharge from a nose Lenz can’t feel running — gives his pallor an almost ghostly aspect in the sombrero’s portable shade — another both advantage and disadvantage of nasal cocaine is that eating becomes otiose and optional, and one forgets to for extended periods of time, to eat — in his gaudy pastiche of disguise he passes easily for one of metro Boston’s homeless and wandering mad, the walking dead and dying, and is given a wide berth by all comers. The trick, he’s found, is to not sleep or eat, to stay up and moving at all times,

alert in all six directions at all times, heading for under the cover of T- station or enclosed mall whenever the invisible rotors’ cardiac chop betrayed surveillance at altitude.

He’d got quickly familiarized with Little Lisbon’s networks of alleys and transoms and back trash-lots, and its (dwindling) population of feral cats and dogs. The area was fertile in overhead clocks of banks and churches, dictating movements. He carried his Browning X444 Serrated in its shoulder-holster strapped inside his one sock just above the spats of the formal footwear he’d taken off the same A Formal Affair, Ltd. sidewalk display as the tux’s coat. His lighter was in a fluorescent zip-uppable slash pocket; quality trashbags were plentiful in dumpsters and Land Barges stopped at lights. The James Principles of the Gifford Lectures, its razored- out receptacled heart now quite a bit closer to empty than Lenz would be comfortable thinking about directly, he had in his hand tucked up under one formal arm. And the Chinese women scuttled centipedishly abreast, their mammoth shopping bags held in a right hand and left, respective, so the bags were side by side between them. Lenz was closing the gap behind them, but gradually and with no little nonchalant stealth, considering it was hard to walk stealthily when one couldn’t feel one’s feet, and when one’s eyeglasses darkened automatically whenever one went under a streetlight and then took their time lightening up again, after, so that no less than two of Lenz’s vital sensory street-senses were disorientated; but he still managed both stealth and nonchalance both. He had no clue how he really looked. Like many of the itinerant mad of metro Boston, he tended to confuse a wide berth with invisibility. The shopping bags looked heavy and impressive, their weight making the Chinese women lean in slightly toward each other. Call it 2214:10h. The Chinese women and then Lenz all passed a gray-faced woman squatting back between two dumpsters, her multiple skirts hiked up. Vehicles were packed bumper-flush all along the curb, with myriad double parking also. The Chinese women passed a man lined up at the curb with a toy bow and arrows, and when the glasses undarkened Lenz could see him as well as he passed also — the guy wore a rat-colored suit and was shooting a suction-cup arrow at the side of a For Lease building and then going up and drawing a miniature chalk circle on the brick around the arrow, and then another circle around that circle, and etc., as in a what’s the word. The women paid him no Orientoid mind. The suit’s string tie was

also brown in tone, unlike a rat’s tail. His wall’s chalk was more pinkish.

One of the women said something high-pitched, like an exclamation to the other. Your monkey-languages’ exclamatories have an explosive ricocheting sound to them. As in a component of boing to every word. A window up across the street was producing The Star-Spanned Banner all this time. The man had a string tie and fingerless little gloves, and he stepped back from the wall to examine his pink circles and almost collided with Lenz, and they both looked at each other and shook their heads like Look at this poor son of an urban bitch I’m on the same street with.

It was universally well known that your basic Orientoid types carried their earthly sum-total of personal wealth with them at all times. As in on their person while they scuttled around. The Orientoid religion prohibited banks, and Lenz had seen mammoth double-width twine-handled shopping bags in too many tiny Chinese women’s hands not to have deducted that the Chinese female species of Oriental used shopping bags to carry their personal wealth. He felt the energy required for the snatch-and-sprint increasing now with each stride, drawing nonchalantly closer, able now to distinguish different patterns in the clear like plastic flags they wrapped their little hair in. The Chinese women. His heartrate speedened to a steady warming gallop. He began to feel his feet. Adrenaline about what would shortly occur dried his nose and helped his mouth stop moving around on his face. The Frightful Hog was not and never numb, and now it stirred in the snowpants slightly with excitement of wits and the thrill of the hunt. Far from cutting-edge surveillance: the shoe was on the other foot: the unwitting Oriental women had no idea who they were dealing with, behind them, no idea he was back there surveilling them and closing the nonchalant gap, stumbling only slightly after each streetlight’s light. He was in total control of this situation. And they did not even know there was a situation.

Bull’s-eye. Lenz straightened the mustache with one finger and gave a tiny little Yellow-Brick-Road stutter-skip of pure controlling glee, his adrenaline invisible for all to see.

There were two ways of going, and Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents were prepared to pursue both these. Less better was the indirect route: surveillance and infiltrating the surviving associates of the Entertainment’s auteur, its actress and rumored performer, relatives — if necessary, taking

them and subjecting them to technical interview, leading with hope to the original auteur’s cartridge of the Entertainment. This had risks and exposures and was held abeyant until the directer route — to locate and secure a Master copy of the Entertainment on their own — had been exhausted. It was this way that thus they were now still here, in the Antitois’ shop of Cambridge, to — comme on dit — be turning all the stones.

14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

The secret to sprinting in high heels, Poor Tony Krause knew, was to run on one’s toes, inclined way forward, with so much forward momentum that one stayed well up on her toes and the heels never came into play. Evidently the wretched Creature behind him knew this trade-secret too. They careered up Prospect, the Creature’s clutching hand just mm. away from the trailing boa. Poor Tony held the two purses together tucked away against his side like a football in U.S. football. Pedestrians moved artfully aside, long- practiced. Poor Tony saw the pedestrians’ faces very clearly as his odor preceded him like a shock-wave. A man in a car coat made a smell-face and did a kind of artful veronica to let the two of them career past. Poor Tony’s breath came in great ragged stitchy gasps. He had not banked on victim- pursuit. He felt the Creature’s hand grope for purchase on the remains of his boa. The Donegal cap flew off and was not mourned. The Thing’s own breathing was also ragged, but the obscenities she hurled still came from the diaphragm, with conviction and vigor. The other Thing had impacted a pole with a meaty sound Tony had shuddered to hear. His own father had struck himself about the head and shoulders as he grieved for his symbolically dead son. The moment after the impact and the strap gave way, Tony was up on his toes and in full flight, not banking on pursuit from the other one, this black Creature screaming and just off his tail. For the first couple blocks the Creature had shouted for Help and to Stop The Bitch, and Poor Tony, then with a decent lead, had countered by also yelling Help! and For God’s Sake Stop Her, flummoxing any would-be citizens. An ancient trade- device among Harvard Square crews. But now the black Creature had

closed to within mm., and now it had real hold of the boa as they careered breathing at full speed on their toes, and Krause unlooped the thing from his neck with a flourish and sacrificed the boa to the Thing, but the loathsome Creature’s hand came right back, clutching at the air just over his leather collar, its ragged breath in his ear, cursing him. Poor Tony grieved in mid- stride at the thought that the Thing had doubtless just tossed the boa carelessly aside into the street or gutter. Their shoes’ toes formed complex and variable rhythms on the pavement; sometimes their footfalls were in sync, then they were not. The Thing stayed agonizingly just behind. Bold- print signs for FRESH-KILLED CHICKEN and COMPLETE DESTRUCTION flashed past; Antitoi Entertainment was just over two long north-south blocks distant. Krause and pursuer both jay-ran through a gridlocked intersection. Poor Tony shouted Help! and Please! The hand and hissed breath just behind him was like one of those simply horrid dreams where something unimaginable is chasing you for km. after km. and just before its talons close on the back of your collar you wake up sitting bolt upright; except this horrid Creature’s-clutching-hand-just-behind-him scenario went on and on, storefront and curb and leaping pedestrians all melting together at the periphery due right. Antitoi Ent.’s discreet back door was accessible by a parking alley that cut west off Prospect just before Broadway and went west to intersect a smaller and dumpster-lined north- south alley, one of whose dumpsters (in which Poor Tony had occasionally slept, when out late and short of train-fare) was within underhand-toss distance of the Canadian brothers’ rear exit. Poor Tony, purses under arm and the other hand clamped tight to the wig, calculated that if he could get a reasonable lead on the Creature by the time they hit the smaller alley the dumpsters would keep It from seeing just which hopefully unlocked rear door P.T. sought basic human kindly refuge behind. He feinted around a bodega’s sidewalk fruit display and shot a quick look back, hoping the Creature would crash itself ass-over-teakettle into the stacked fruit. It did not. It was still right there, breathing. Its stutter-step around two cardboard tiers of Cape cranberries was discouragingly deft. This Thing had all too clearly chased persons before. Its breath had a ragged implacability about it.

It was all too clearly in this for the long haul. It was no longer shouting Stop or gutterish obscenities. Poor Tony’s breaths felt flamish. It sounded as if he were weeping, almost. He tried to shout Help! and could not; he hadn’t the

breath to spare; black specks floated upward through his vision; only certain of the streetlamps worked; his heartbeat was zuckungzuckungzuckung. Poor Tony hurdled a queerly placed cardboard display for something wheelchaired and heard the Creature vault it also and land lightly on its toes. Its uppers were not straps and could not dig like the fine Aigners; Tony felt blood on his feet. The entrance to the parking alley west was between a Tax Preparer’s and something else; it was right around here; Krause squinted; the black specks were tiny rings with opaque centers and floated upward through his sight like balloons, lazily; Poor Tony was post- seizure, infirm, not to mention Withdrawn; his breath came in stitches and half-sobs; he could barely stay on his toes; he had not consumed food since before the library’s men’s room stall, which was how many days; he scanned the blurred storefronts ripping past; an elderly person went down with a noise as the Creature stiff-armed him; somewhere a rape-whistle blew; the Tax Preparer’s had the odd storefront announcement ON PARLE LE PORTUGAIS ICI. Its hand’s finger knocked the rim of Tony’s leather collar with each footfall until it moved up and Poor Tony could feel its fingers in the hair of the chignon he held clamped to his head with a hand.

Poor Tony’s father used to come home to 412 Mount Auburn Street Watertown at the completion of a long day of cesareans and sit in a chair in the darkening kitchen, scratching at his head where his mask’s green strings had dug into the head. Its doubtlessly luridly long-nailed fingers were twining for purchase in his wig’s hair when they hit the Preparer’s and Tony cut a sharp right, breaking a heel on the pivot but gaining several steps toward a lead as the Creature’s momentum carried it past the alley’s recessed mouth. Krause whimpered raggedly and flew west, up on his bloody toes, hearing his breath off both alley walls, negotiating broken glass and the homeless supine, hearing it back behind him several steps crying a tight-echoed Stop Motherfucking Stop! , with a supine person Krause vaulted lifting a decayed head from the alley floor to counter with: Go.

Having traced — through the strenuous technical interview of the sartorially eccentric cranio-facial-pain-specialist, whom they had traced 300through the regrettably fatal technical interview of the young burglar whose electrical-surge-tolerance proved considerably lower than that of his

room’s computer’s machinery — having traced their best chances at a copy to the hapless Antitois’ establishment, it had taken the A.F.R. then several days to find it there, the real Entertainment.

A.F.R.’s U.S.A. cell’s leader, Fortier, the son of a Glen Almond glass- blower, had allowed none of the mirrors to be broken or dismantled. In all other respects, the search had been methodical and thorough. It was a neat search and also orderly, with time taken. Because the viewer of the shop was visually dysfunctional, a consumer TP had been purchased and set up for volunteer viewing in the room of storage off the shop’s back room. Each cartridge of the shop’s exhaustive shelves was sampled by a volunteer, then discarded in one of the huge metal coffre d’amas in the alley outside the shop’s rear door. A detail had been assigned to roll the extinguished Antitoi brothers in construction-plastic and place them in a room of storage off the back room. This was for hygienic purposes. A detail also had procured an oilskin windowshade for the front door’s glass, also some printed signs which read CLOSED, ROPAS, and RELACHE. No person had knocked at the door after the first hours, thus.

Quickly, on the first day, in a liquor box which was damp and smelled, they had found an example of the rival F.L.Q.’s tactical street-display cartridges, with its crudely stamped smiling face and the ‘IL NE FAUT PLUS QU’ON PURSUIVE LE BONHEUR’ embossed upon it. And young Tassigny, with characteristic valor, volunteered to be rolled into the room of storage and strapped in, in order to verify this, and Fortier allowed this. All had drunk the gesture of a toast to Tassigny and promised to look after his aged father and fur-traps, and M. Fortier had embraced the young volunteer and kissed both his face’s cheeks as he was rolled in and fitted by M.

Broullîme with EEG wires and strapped in before the viewer placed in the room of storage.

Then the cartridge of the street-display turned out to be blank, void.

Then another from this box, also wet: also blank. Two blanks. Donc.

D’accord. Fortier, philosophical, counselled against disappointment or damage from a frustration — he and Marathe had counselled all along that the F.L.Q. displays of the Entertainment and the wheelchaired man were probably the hoax, instilling of terror only. The fact of the displays which featured wheel-chairs, a smack to the testicles of A.F.R. — this was ignored. A.F.R. wanted only to repossess this copy of the Entertainment. As

well, chiefly, now to determine: could this copy of DuPlessis itself be 301 copied? This was the real objective: a Master cartridge. Unlike the F.L.Q., les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents had no interest in blackmail or cartographic extortings for the Convexity’s return. Not in re- Reconfiguration of O.N.A.N. or even its charter’s dissolution. The A.F.R. were interested only in dealing the sort of testicular frappe to the underbelly of U.S.A. self-interests that would render Canada itself unwilling to face the U.S.A. retaliation for this — if A.F.R. could secure, copy, and disseminate the Entertainment, Québec would be not so much allowed as required by Ottawa to secede, to face on its own the wrath of a neighbor struck down by 302its own inability to say ‘Non’ to fatal pleasures.

Fortier bid the A.F.R. methodically to continue the search. Younger volunteers were rolled into the room of storage on a rotating basis to sample each set of cartridges. Aside from some bickering over the Portuguese pornography, the rotation proceeded with valor and care. The plastic- wrapped cadavers began to swell, but the plastic maintained hygienic conditions adequately for viewing samples of the many cartridges in the room of storage. The search and inventory proceeded in a painstaking and slow fashion.

M. Fortier was required to absent himself for a period, in the search’s middle, to help facilitate Southwest ops, the infiltration of that relative of the auteur felt most strongly (according to Marathe) to have knowledge or possession of a duplicable copy. There was reason to think M. DuPlessis had received his original copies from this relative, an athlete. Marathe felt U.S.B.S.S. felt this person may have borne responsibility for the razzles and dazzles of Berkeley and Boston, U.S.A. The Americans’ field-operative, jutting with prostheses, had been clinging to this person like a bad odor.

The nation U.S.A. treated wheelchaired persons with the solicitude that the weak substitute for respect. As if he were a sickly child, Fortier. Buses knelt, smooth ramps flanked steps, attendants pushed him aboard flights in full solicitous view of those standing upon legs. Fortier owned attachable legs of flesh-tone polymer resins whose interior circuitry was responsive to large-bundle neural stimuli from his stumps, which with metal crutches whose bracelets locked to his wrists allowed a sort of swirling parody of perambulation. But Fortier, he rarely wore the prostheses, not in U.S.A.,

and never for public transit. He preferred the condescension, the pretense of institutional ‘sensitivity’ to his ‘right’ of the ‘equal access’; it honed the edge of his senses of purpose. Like all of them, Fortier was willing to sacrifice.

14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

After so long not caring, and then now the caring crashes back in and turns so easily into obsessive worry, in sobriety. A few days before the debacle in which Don Gately got hurt, Joelle had begun to worry obsessively about her teeth. Smoking ’base cocaine eats teeth, corrodes teeth, attacks the enamel directly. Chandler Foss had explained all this to her at supper, showing her his corroded stumps. In her Latin cloth purse now she carried a traveller’s brush and expensive toothpaste with alleged enamel-revitalizers and anti-corrosives. Several of the Ennet House residents who’d hit bottom with the glass pipe had no teeth or blackened and disintegrating teeth; the sight of Wade McDade’s or Chandler Foss’s teeth gave Joelle the fantods like nothing at meetings could. The toothpaste was only recently available over the counter and was a whole level of power and expense above standard smoker’s polish.

As she lies on her side beside Kate Gompert’s empty bunk, her veil’s selvage tucked secure between pillow and jaw, and Charlotte Treat also asleep across the lit room, Joelle dreams that Don Gately, unhurt and mid- South-accented, is ministering to her teeth. He is bibbed in dental white, humming softly to himself, his big hands deft as he plucks instruments from the gleaming chair-side tray. Her chair is dental and canted back, yielding her face up to him, her legs shut tight and stretching up and out before her.

Dr. Don’s eyes are abstractly kind, concerned for her teeth; and his thick fingers, as he inserts things to hold her open, are gloveless and taste warm and clean. Even the light seems sterilely clean. There is no assistant; the dentist is solo, leaning in above her, humming absent chords as he probes.

His head is massive and vaguely square. In the dream she is concerned for her teeth and feels Gately shares her concern. She feels good that he makes no chitchat and probably doesn’t know her name. There’s very little eye-

contact. He is completely intent on her teeth. He is there to help if possible, is his whole demeanor’s message. His bib hangs by a necklace of tiny steel balls and could not be whiter, his head haloed with a strap and a polished metal disk attached to the strap just above his eyes, a tiny mirror of stainless steel, clean as the instruments’ tray; and the dream’s yielding and trustful quality of calm is undercut only by the view of her face in the halo’s mirror, the disk like a third eye in Gately’s broad clean forehead: because she can see her face, convexly distorted and ravaged by years of cocaine and not caring, her face all bug-eyes and sunken cheeks, lampblack-smudges beneath the pop-eyes; and as the dentist’s warm thick fingers gently draw her lips back she looks up into his head’s mirror at long rows of all canine teeth, tapered and sharp, with then more rows of canines behind them, in reserve. The countless rows of the teeth are all sharp and strong and unblackened but tinged at the tips with an odd kind of red, as of old blood, the teeth of a creature that carelessly tears at meat. These are teeth that have been up to things she hasn’t known about, she tries to say around the fingers. The dentist hums, probing. In the dream Joelle looks up into Don Gately’s forehead’s dental mirror’s disk and is seized with a fear of her teeth, a terror, and as her spread mouth spreads farther to cry out in fear all she can see in the little round mirror are endless red-stained rows of teeth leading back and away down a pitch-black pipe, and the image of all these rows of teeth in the disk blots out the big dentist’s good face as he probes with a hook and says he assures her that these can be saved.

Then, by the time Fortier was able to return to the dismantled shop, they had located a third cartridge emblazed with the embossed smile and letters disclaiming need of happy pursuit, and, after some regretful losses, they had secured and verified it, the samizdat cartridge of Entertainment burglared from the death of DuPlessis.

Fortier was told the story. The cell’s young Desjardins had been taking his turn in the viewing rotation, seated with young Tassigny in the room of storage during the hours of early morning, sampling the dregs of unshelved entertainments found in kitchen-can waste bags in the same closet the Antitois’ cadavers were swelling within. Desjardins had just moments before complained of the wasted time of cartridges scheduled for the coffre d’amas.

Tassigny, who had been in the room of storage with Desjardins, then was saved by the need to leave this room to change the bag of his partial colostomy. But, Marathe reported, they had lost Desjardins, and the older and valued Joubet also, who rolled against orders into the room of storage to see why Desjardins had not been sending out the tapes for more tapes to sample. Both were lost. They had not lost more only because someone had thought to wake up Broullîme, whom Fortier had briefed with care on procedures for if the actual Entertainment was found by this viewing. But two were lost — Joubet the red-bearded workhorse, who loved to pop wheelies, and young Desjardins, so filled with the idealism and so young as to be still feeling the phantom pains in his stumps. Rémy Marathe reported that the two had been made comfortable since their loss, allowed to remain in the locked room of storage and view the Entertainment again and again, silent behind the door except when the watch-detail reported the hearing of cries of impatience at the player’s rewinder, to rewind. Marathe reported they had declined to come out for water or food, or Joubet — who was diabétique — for his insulin. M. Broullîme estimated that it would be a matter of hours now for Joubet, perhaps maybe one day or two days for Desjardins. Fortier had sadly said ‘Bôf’ and acceptingly shrugged: all knew the sacrifices that might have been required: all viewing details had taken their chances at random in the rotation of viewing.

On Fortier’s return, Marathe delivered also the expected bad news of the finding of it: there was no need yet for high-rpm hardware of duplication: 303the found copy was Read-Only.

Philosophical, Fortier reminded the A.F.R. that they did now encouragingly know the Entertainment of such power did truly exist, for themselves, and could thus gird their courage and fortitude for the more indirect task of forfeiting hopes of securing a Master copy and instead striving to secure the original Master, the auteur’s own cartridge, from which all Read-Only copies had presumably been copied.

Thus, he said, now the more arduous and risky task of taking for technical interview known persons associated with the Entertainment and locating the original maker’s duplicable Master copy. None of this would have been worthy of the risk had they not now determined, through the heroic sacrifices of Joubet and Desjardins, that the device for extending

O.N.A.N.’s self-destructing logic to its final conclusion lay within their arduous grasp.

Fortier gave numerous orders. The platoon of A.F.R. remained in the closed Antitoi Entertainent shop, behind their lingual window shade.

Surveillance on the hated F.L.Q.’s bureau centrale, in the poorly disciplined house on Allston’s Rue de Brainerd — this was suspended, the A.F.R. personnel pulled in and relocated to this commandeered Inman Square shop, where Fortier and Marathe and M. Broullîme coordinated phases of activity in this next more arduous and indirect phase, and reviewed tactics also.

The deceased auteur’s colleagues and relations were under consistent surveillance. Their concentration of place worked in the favor of this. An employee at the Academy of Tennis of Enfield had been recruited and joined the Canadian instructor and student already inside for closer work of surveillance. In the Desert, the redoubtable Mlle. Luria P—— was winning necessary confidences with her usual alacrity. An expensive source in the Subject’s former department of the M.I.T. University had reported the Entertainment’s probable performer’s last known employment — the small Cambridge radio station which Marathe and Beausoleil had pronounced Weee — where she had donned the defacing veil of O.N.A.N.ite deformity.

Attentions were to be focused on the cartridge’s performer and on the Academy of Tennis of the auteur’s estate. The fact that the players of the Academy were to play a provincially-selected team from Québec would have been easier to exploit had the A.F.R. possessed a tennis player of talent and lower extremities. Inquiries into the composition and travel of the Québecois team were under way from sources at home in Papineau.

On the day of Fortier’s return also, the performer’s radio program’s technical engineer of radio had been acquired in a public but low-risk operation whose success had raised hopeful spirits for the acquisitions of more directly related persons to the Entertainment in this next phase. This person of U.S.A. radio had divulged all he professed to know under the mere descriptive threat of technical-interview procedures. Marathe, the best lay judge of Americans’ veracity which the cell possessed, believed the veracity of the engineer; but nevertheless a formal technical interview had proceeded, justified in order to verify. The young and eruption-studded person’s report remained consistent two levels past average U.S.A.

endurance, the only variance involving several curious claims that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was defensive in bed.

Today, Fortier himself, and Marathe, young Balbalis, R. Ossowiecke — all those with the better English — were thus now therefore making the rounds of all Substance-Difficulty-Rehabilitation facilities in hospitals, psychiatric institutions, and demi-maisons within a 25-km. radius.

Procedures for expanding the radius of inquiry by factors of two and three had been pre-formulated, teams assembled, lines rehearsed. Joubet and then Desjardins had succumbed and been transported north by van as well with the remains of the Antitois’ remains. The U.S.A. student radio engineering person, the veracity of whose limited statements of the Subject’s whereabouts Broullîme had verified to within +/ȹ (.35) of assurance well before debriefing-levels incompatible with physical existence, had been allowed several hours to recover, then had become of service as the A.F.R.’s first Subject in field-tests of the samizdat cartridge’s motivational range.

The room of storage again was utilized for this. His head immobilized with some straps, the test Subject had viewed the Entertainment twice at gratis, without the application of any motivational inquiry. For inquiry into the degree of motivation the cartridge will induce, M. Broullîme had rolled himself blindfolded into the room of storage holding an orthopedic saw and informed the Subject of the test that, as of beginning now, each subsequent reviewing of the Entertainment now would have the price of one digit from the Subject’s extremities. And handed the Subject the orthopedic saw in question, also. Broullîme’s explanation to Fortier was that thus a matrix could be created to compute the statistical relation between (n) the number of times the Subject replayed the Entertainment and (t) the amount of time he took to decide and remove a digit for each subsequent (n+I) viewing.

The goal was to confirm with statistical assurance the Subject’s desire for viewing and reviewing as incapable of satiation. There could be no index of diminishing satisfaction as in the econometrics of normal U.S.A. commodities. For the samizdat Entertainment’s allure to be macro- politically lethal, the ninth digit of extremities had to come off as quickly and willingly as the second. Broullîme, personally he had some skepticism about this. But this was Broullîme’s function in his role in the cell: expertise in combination with skepticism de coeur.

And then naturally also a wider range of field-test Subjects would then be required, to verify that this Subject’s responses were not merely subjective and typical only of a certain sensibility of entertainment- consumer. The bus window yielded a faint and ghostly reflection of Fortier, and, through that faint view, the lights of urban life outside the bus.

Somerville Massachusetts U.S.A.’s Phoenix House administrative person had listened to Fortier’s delivery with shows of great compassion, then explained with patience that they were unable to admit addicted persons for whom English was the secondary language. D’accord, though he was pretending disappointment. Fortier had been able to see the admitted addicts of Phoenix House holding a gathering in the room of living outside the office door: no person among them wore a veil of facial concealment, and so c’est ça. Four small teams were at this moment rolling through the streets and small streets and alleys of the unpleasant district of the Antitoi establishment, for the purpose of acquiring additional Subjects for M.

Broullîme for the time when the Subject’s digits were expended. The Subjects for suitability had to be passively undefended enough to be acquired publicly with quiet, yet not damaged in the brains or under the influence of the many of the district’s intoxicant compounds. The A.F.R. were highly trained in patience and to be disciplined.

The southbound bus, empty and (which he detested) fluorescently lit, climbs a thin hill off Winter Park, north Cambridge, heading for the Squares Inman and Central. Fortier looks out at the lights passing. He can smell snow coming; it soon will snow. He sees in his imagination two-thirds of NNE’s largest urban city inert, sybaritically entranced, staring, without bodily movement, home-bounded, fouling their divans and the chairs which may recline. He sees the district of business’s towers of buildings and luxury apartments striated as two of every three floors is darkened to lightless black. With here and there the vaguely blue flicker of expensive digital entertainment equipment flickering through darkened windows. He imagines M. Tine holding the hand holding the pen of President J. Gentle as the O.N.A.N.ite President signs declaring War. He imagines teacups clinking thinly beneath trembling hands in the interior sanctums of Ottawa’s sanctum of power. He adjusts his sportcoat’s lapel over his sweater and smooths the wiry hair that tends to bulge unsmoothly around the bare spot.

He watches the back of the bus driver’s neck as the driver stares straight ahead.

Sure enough the Chinkette women had been strengthless and lightweight, flew aside like dolls, and their bags were indeed treasure- heavy, hard to heft; but as Lenz cut left down the north-south alley he could hold the bags by their twine handles out slightly before him, so their weight’s momentum kind of pulled him along. The cruciform alleys through the blocks between Central and Inman in Little Lisbon were a kind of second city. Lenz ran. His breath came easy and he could feel himself from scalp to sole. Green and green-with-red dumpsters lined both walls and made the going narrow. He vaulted two sitting figures in khaki sharing a can of Sterno on the alley floor. He glided through the foul air above them, untouched by it. The sounds behind him were his footfalls’ echo off dumpsters and fire-escapes’ iron. His left hand ached nicely from holding both a bag’s handle and his large-print volume. A dumpster up ahead had been hitched to an E.W.D. truck and just left to sit: probably quitting time.

The Empire guys had an incredible union. In the recess of the hitch’s bar a small blue light flickered and died. This was a dozen dumpsters up ahead.

Lenz slowed to a brisk walk. His topcoat had slipped slightly off one of his shoulders but he had no free hand to fix it and wasn’t going to take time to put a bag down. His left hand felt cramped. It was somewhere vague between 2224 and 2226h. The alley was dark as a pocket. A tiny crash off somewhere south down the network of alleys was actually Poor Tony Krause rolling the steel waste-barrel that tripped up Ruth van Cleve. The tiny blue flame came on, hung still, flickered, moved, hung there, went back out. Its glow was dark blue against the back of the huge E.W.D. truck.

Empire trucks were unstrippable, hitches were valuable but locked down with a Kryptonite device thing you needed welding stuff to cut through.

From the recess of the hitch there were small sounds. When the lighter lit again Lenz was almost on them, two boys on the hitch and two squatting down by the hitch facing them, four of them, a fire-escape’s pull-ladder distended like a tongue and hanging just above them. None of the boys was over like twelve. They used a M. Fizzy bottle instead of a pipe, and the smell of burnt plastic hung mixed with the sicksweet smell of overcarbonated rock. The boys were all small and slight and either black or

spic, greedily hunching over the flame; they looked ratty. Lenz kept them in peripheral view as he strode briskly by, carrying his bags, spine straight and extruding dignified purpose. The lighter went out. The boys on the hitch eyed Lenz’s bags. The squatting boys turned their heads to look. Lenz kept them in peripheral view. None of them wore watches. One of them wore a knit cap and watched steadily. He locked eyes with Lenz’s left eye, made a gun of his thin hand, pretended to draw a slow bead. Like performing for the others. Lenz walked by with urban dignity, like he both saw them and didn’t. The smell was intense but real local, of the rock and bottle. He had to veer out to miss the Empire truck’s side mirror on its steel strut. He heard them say things as the truck’s grille fell behind, and unkind laughter, and then something called out in a minority agnate he didn’t know. He heard the lighter’s flint. He thought to himself Assholes. He was looking for someplace empty and a bit more lit, to go through the bags. And cleaner than this one north-south alley here, which smelled of ripe waste and rotting skin. He would separate the bags’ valuables from the nonvaluables and transfer the valuables to a single bag. He would fence the nonnegotiable valuables in Little Lisbon and refill the receptacle in his medical dictionary, and buy some attractiver shoes. The alley was devroid of cats and rodents both; he did not stop to reflect why. A rock or bit of brick courtesy of the junior crack-jockeys back there landed behind him and skittered past and rang out against something, and someone cried out aloud, a sexless figure lying back against a maybe duffel bag or pack against a dumpster, its hand moving furiously in its groin and its feet pointed out into the alley and turned out like a dead body’s, its shoes two different shoes, its hair a clotted mass around its face, looking up over at Lenz going past in the faint start of light from a broader alley’s intersection ahead, chanting softly what Lenz could hear as he stepped gingerly over the rot-smelling legs as ‘Pretty, pretty, pretty.’ Lenz whispered to himself ‘Jesus what a lot of fucked-up ass-eating fucking losers.’

‘Our cult burned money for fuel.’ ‘As in like currency.’ ‘We used Ones. The Semi Divine One advocated thrift. We’d bring them to Him at the stove. There was one stove. We had to bring them to Him on our knees with no part of our feet could touch the floor. He sat by the stove

in our blankets and fed it Ones. We got an extra slap if the currency was

new.’ ‘As in like crisp and new.’ ‘It was a cleansing. Somebody always played a drum.’ ‘Our cult’s Divinely Chosen Leader drove a Rolls. In neutral. We pushed him wherever he was Called to like be at. He never turned it on. The Rolls.

I got all muscled up.’ ‘In summer then they made us slither on our bellies. We had to embrace

our snake-nature. It was a cleansing.’ ‘As in like slithering.’ ‘Serious slithering. They took wire and bound our arms and legs.’

‘At least your wire wasn’t barbed.’ ‘I finally felt too cleansed to stay.’ ‘Meaning over-pure, I can I.D. totally.’ ‘It was too much love somehow to take.’ ‘I’m like feeling the Identification all over, this is —’ ‘Plus I was up to three bags a day, at the end.’ ‘And then our Divinely Chosen’s Love Squads made us chop wood with our teeth when it got cold. As in like subzero wintertime.’

‘Yours let you keep your teeth?’

‘Only the ones for gnawing. See?’

‘Sheesh.’ ‘Just the ones for gnawing.’ Rémy Marathe sat veiled and blanket-lapped in the much crowded living room evening of this Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, the last demi-maison on his portion of the list for this day. The hills of upper Enfield, they were de l’infere of difficulty, but the demi-maison itself had a ramp. A person with authority was conducting interviews to fill some vacancies of recent time in the place’s Office, of which its locked door was visible from this sitting. Marathe and others were invited to sit in the living room with a cup of unpleasant coffee. Urged to smoke if he liked. Everyone else was smoking. The living room smelled like an ashtray, and its ceiling was yellow like the fingers of long smokers. Also the living room evening resembled an anthill which had been stirred with a stick; it was too full of persons, all of them restless and loud. There were demi-maison patients viewing a cartridge of martial arts conflict, former patients and persons of

the upper Enfield area cohabiting on the furniture, conversing. A damaged woman, also in a fauteuil de rollent like Marathe, slumped inutile next to the cartridge’s viewer, while a male person of advanced pallor mimed the kicks and thrusts of martial arts at her motionless head, trying to force the woman to twitch or cry out. Also a man without hands and feet trying to negotiate the stairway. Other persons, presumably addicted, waiting in the room to seek admittance to the Recovery House. The room was loud and hot. Marathe could hear a person who will seek admittance vomiting in the shrubberies just outside the window. Marathe’s chair was locked down next to a divan’s arm and directly before a window. The window, one could wish it was open more than a crack, he felt. Upon the dull-colored carpet a tormented-appearing man scuttling like the crab while two hooligans in leather played a cruel game of jumping over him. Persons reading cartoon books and painting the nails of their extremities. A tall-haired woman brought her foot to her mouth to blow upon her toes. Another young girl seemed to remove her eye from her head and placed it in her mouth. No other in the room wore the veil of the Entertainment’s performer’s organization U.H.I.D. The smell of the U.S.A. cigarettes permeated his veil and made Marathe’s eyes water, and he thought of vomiting also. Two additional windows were open, but the room lacked all air.

During the time of his sitting, several persons approached Marathe, but they would say to him only the whispers ‘Pet the dogs’ or ‘Make sure and pet the dogs.’ This idiomatic expression was not in Marathe’s knowledge of U.S.A. idiom.

Also one person approached of a face whose skin seemed that it was rotting away from him in some way and asked him if he, Marathe, was court-ordered.

Marathe was one of few persons not smoking. He noted that none of the room’s persons appeared to regard the cheesecloth veil he wore over his face as unusual or curious or to be questioned. The old sportcoat he wore over a turtleneck sweater of Desjardin’s made Marathe more formally dressed than other of the applicants for treatment. Two of the Ennet House demi-maison current patients wore neckties, however. Marathe kept pretending to sniff; he did not know why. He sat up next to a divan of false velour at whose end beside him two women who had sought previous

treatment of addiction in religious cults were meeting and speaking together of their unenjoyable existences when in cults.

To whomever approached, Marathe carefully recited the introductory lines he and M. Fortier quickly had developed: ‘Good night, I am addicted and deformed, seeking residential treatment for addiction, desperately.’ Persons’ responses to his introductory lines were difficult to interpret. One of the older two men in neckties who had approached, he had clapped a hand to his soft face’s cheek and responded ‘How extraordinarily nice for you,’ in which Marathe could detect sarcasm. The two women of cult experience were inclined closely toward each other upon the divan. They touched each other’s arms several times in a kind of excitement as they conversed. When they laughed in delight they seemed to chew at the air.

One’s laughter involved also a snorting noise. A clatter and two shrieks: these came from one end of the dining room, in the demi-maison’s floor plans a large kitchen. The sounds were then followed by a roiling cloud of steam, with repeated obscenities from unseen persons. A bald large black man in a white cotton undershirt’s laughing became coughing that would not cease. The two patients in neckties and the girl whose eye could be removed spoke together intensively and also audibly at the end of one other divan. ‘But consider this quality of portability with respect to, say, a car. Is a car portable? With respect to a car it’s more as though I’m portable.’ ‘They’re portable when they’re on one of them semis where they got new cars stacked on with prices in the windows like a good couple dozen on them semis that swing all to fuck all over I-93 and make you think the cars are going to start falling out all over the road when you’re wanting to try and pass.’ The plump one who had been ironic toward Marathe, he was nodding: ‘Or, say, too, with respect to a tow truck or wrecker, if you suffer a breakdown. One might be in a position to say that a deactivated car can be quote portable, but that with respect to a functional car it is I who am portable.’ The girl’s nod caused the particular eye to wheel queasily in the socket of it. ‘I’ll buy that, Day.’ ‘If we’re jot-and-tittling with all possible precision regarding portable, that is.’

The other man continually rubbed at his shine of the shoes with a facial tissue, causing his necktie to touch the floor.

These conversers formed this triad on an unevenly sloped divan of leather-colored plastic across the room, which was now more airless yet from the roiling steam from the kitchen, infiltrating. Directly facing Marathe in a yellow chair against the wall by these conversers’ divan most directly across the living room from Marathe was an addicted man waiting for seeking treatment by admission. This one, he appeared to have several cigarettes burning at one time. He held a metal ashtray in his lap and jiggled the boot of his crossed leg with vigor. For Marathe, it was not difficult to ignore the fact that the addicted man was glaring at him. He noted it, and did not understand because of what the man glared, but he was unconcerned. Marathe was prepared to die violently at any time, which rendered him free to choose among emotions. U.S.A.’s B.S.S.’s M. Steeply had verified that U.S.A.s did not comprehend this or appreciate it; it was foreign to them. The veil allowed Marathe the liberty of staring calmly back at the addicted man without the man’s knowledge, which Marathe found he enjoyed. Marathe felt sick to his body, from the smoky room’s smoke.

Marathe had once, as a child, with legs, bent himself over and overturned a decaying log in the forests of the Lac de Deux Montaignes region of his 304 four-limbed childhood, before Le Culte du Prochain Train. The pallor of the things which had writhed and scuttled beneath the wet log was the pallor of this addicted man, who wore a square of the facial hair between lower lip and chin and had also a needle run through the flesh of the top of an ear, which the needle, it glistened and did not glisten rapidly in succession as it vibrated with the jiggle of the jiggling boot. Marathe gazed at him calmly through the veil while rehearsing his prepared lines within his head. The more idiomatic would be that the needle jiggled sympathetically with the jiggle of the boot, which was dull black and square-heeled, the motorcycle boot of persons who did not own motorcycles but wore the boots of those who did.

The addicted man rose slowly and carried the burning ashtray with him nearer to Marathe, trying to kneel. His Blue Jeans of Levi #501 were strangely torn in spots with tattered white strings which showed the pallor of the knees; the torn holes had the size and perimeter-damage of holes that

Marathe recognized had been made by shotgun-blasts of the high gauge.

Marathe was mentally memorizing every detail of all things, for both his reports. The addicted man kneeling before him, he leaned in closer, trying to remove something he believed was on his lip. Close in, the expression that through the veil had appeared as glaring corrected itself: the expression was more truly that the man’s eyes had the vacant intensity of those who have violently died.

The man whispered: ‘You real?’ Marathe looked through the veil at his facial square. ‘Are you real?’ again the man whispered. All the time leaning more and more in, slowly. ‘You’re real I can tell ain’t you,’ the man whispered. Quickly he looked behind him at the uproaring room before leaning once more in. ‘Listen then.’ Marathe kept his hands calmly in his lap, his machine pistol holstered securely to his right stump beneath the blanket. The whispering man’s searching fingers were leaving small bits of filth on the lip. ‘’s these poor fuckers’ — the man gestured slightly with indicating the room — ‘most of them ain’t real. So watch your six. Most of these fuckers are —: metal people.’ ‘I am Swiss,” Marathe experimentally said. It was the second of his lines of introduction. ‘Walking around, make you think they’re alive.’ The addicted man had the way with subtleness of looking all around himself which Marathe associated with intelligence professionals. One of his eyes had an exploded vein within it. ‘But that’s just the layer,’ he said. He leaned in so far Marathe could see pores through the veil. ‘There’s a micro-thin layer of skin. But underneath, it’s metal. Heads full of parts. Under a organic layer that’s micro-thin.’ The eyes of men violently dead were also the eye of a fish in a vendor’s crushed ice, studying nothing. The man’s smell suggested livestock on a hot day, a goatish, even through the smoke of the room.

Trans-3-methyl-2 hexenoic acid was a material, M. Broullîme had lectured to pass times in long surveillances, a chemical material in the sweat of grave mental illness. Marathe, he had no trouble timing his breath so his exhalation matched the addicted man’s, who leaned more in. ‘There’s one way to tell,’ he said. ‘Get right up close. Like right up flush next to: you can hear a whir. Micro-faint. This whirring. It’s the processors’

gears. It’s their flaw. Machines always whir. They’re good. They can quiet

down the whir.’ ‘I have no six.’ ‘But they can’t — can not — eliminate it.’ ‘I am Swiss, seeking residential treatment with desperation.’ ‘Not under no micro-thin tissue-layer they can’t.’ If the gaze were not vacant the gaze would be grim, frightened. Marathe distantly remembered the emotion fear. ‘Did you hear what she said?’ the ironic man on the divan laughed. ‘Potable means drinkable. It’s not even the same root. Did you hear what she said?’ The man’s breath, it smelled of trans-3-methyl acid as well. ‘I’m clueing y’in,’ he whispered. ‘They’re there to fool you. The real ones of us’re getting fooled. Nine-nine-plus per cent of the time.’ The flesh of the knees through the holes in the Blue Jeans was the white of long death. ‘But you, I could tell you were real.’ He indicated the veil. ‘No micro-thin layer. The metal ones — have faces.’ The smoke of his cigarette in the ashtray rose in a motion of corkscrewing. ‘Which this is why’ — feeling the lip — ‘why the ones on the T or in the street — they won’t let you right up close. Try it.

They’ll never let you right up close. It’s programming. They know to look scared and — like — offended and back away and move to another seat.

The real advanced ones, they’ll give you change, even, to let ’em back off.

Try it. Get right — up — like this — close.’ Marathe sat calmly behind the veil, feeling the veil move with the man’s breath, waiting patiently to inhale. The women with experiences in cults had smelled the odor of the man’s trans-3 odor and relocated farther away upon the divan. The man’s face smiled with one knowing side only of his mouth, acknowledging their movement away. He was so close that the nose of him touched the veil when Marathe finally inhaled. Marathe was prepared for death in all forms.

The smells were trans-3-methyl-2 and of digested cheese and the under of an arm, from the facial skin. Marathe ignored impulses to impale the eyesockets with one two-finger motion. The man had his hand to his ear in a mime of to listen closely. His smile disclosed what might have once been teeth. ‘Nothing,’ he smiled. ‘I knew. Not a sound.’ ‘The Swiss, we are a quiet people, and reserved. In addition, I am deformed.’

The man waved his cigarette with impatience. ‘Listen up. This is why.

You’re how come I was here. I only thought it was the habit. They can fool you.’ He scrubbed at the lip of his mouth. ‘I’m here to tell you. Listen. You ain’t here.’ ‘I have emigrated from my native Swiss.’ Still whispering: ‘You ain’t here. These fuckers are metal. Us — us that are real — there’s not many — they’re fooling us. We’re all in one room.

The real ones. One room all the time. Everything’s pro — jected. They can do it with machines. They pro — ject. To fool us. The pictures on the walls change so’s we think we’re going places. Here and there, this and that.

That’s just they change the pro — jections. It’s all the same place all the time. They fool your mind with machines to think you’re moving, eating,

cooking up, doing this and that.’ ‘I have come desperately here.’ ‘The real world’s one room. These so-called people, so-called’ — with again the flourish — ‘they’re everybody you know. You’ve met ’em before, hunnerts times, with different faces. There’s only 26 total. They play different characters, that you think you know. They wear different faces with different pictures they pro — ject on the wall. You get me?’ ‘This Recovery House was recommended highly.’ ‘You follow? Count. Coincidence? There’s 26 here, counting the one without feet on the stairs. Coincidence? Chance? This here’s every machine that’s played everbody you ever met. Are you hearin’ me? They fool us.

They take the machines in the back room and they — like —’ The visible door of the locked Office opened and an addicted patient emerged with a person in authority holding a clipboard. The addicted patient limped and leaned far to a side, though was attractive in the blond stereotype of the U.S.A. image-culture. ‘— change them. The thin organic layers. All the different people you know. So-called. They’re the same machines.’ ‘Physically challenged foreign person with unpronounceable name!’ the authority called with the clipboard. ‘I am being indicated,’ Marathe said, bending to release the clamps on his fauteuil’s wheels. ‘— why I’m in this pro — jection, to clue you. So that now you know.’ Marathe manipulated the fauteuil to the right with its trusty left wheel. ‘I

must be excused to plead for treatment.’ ‘Get right up close.’ ‘Good night,’ over his left shoulder. The inutile woman seemed to twitch slightly in her heavy fauteuil as he passed. ‘You only think you’re goin’ someplace!’ the addicted man called, still one-half kneeling.

Marathe rolled up to the person in authority as slowly as possible, hunched deep into the sportcoat and pathetically tacking. With significance, the large and clipboarded woman seemed without faze at the veil of U.H.I.D. Marathe extended a large hand in greeting which he made tremble. ‘Good night.’ The insane-smelling man on the carpet called out after: ‘Make sure and pet the dogs!’ Joelle used to like to get really high and then clean. Now she was finding she just liked to clean. She dusted the top of the fiberboard dresser she and Nell Gunther shared. She dusted the oval top of the dresser’s mirror’s frame and cleaned off the mirror as best she could. She was using Kleenex and stale water from a glass by Kate Gompert’s bed. She felt oddly averse to putting on socks and clogs and going down to the kitchen for real cleaning supplies. She could hear the noise of all the post-meeting nighttime residents and visitors and applicants down there. She could feel their voices in the floor. When the dental nightmare tore her upright awake her mouth was open to scream out, but the scream was Nell G. down in the living room, whose laugh always sounds like she’s being eviscerated. Nell preempted Joelle’s own scream. Then Joelle cleaned. Cleaning is maybe a form of meditation for addicts too new in recovery to sit still. The 5- Woman’s scarred wood floor had so much grit all over she could sweep a pile of grit together with just an unappliquéd bumper sticker she’d won at B.Y.P. Then she could use damp Kleenex to get up most of the pile. She had only Kate G.’s little bedside lamp on, and she wasn’t listening to any YYY tapes, out of consideration for Charlotte Treat, who was unwell and missed her Saturday Night Lively Mtng. on Pat’s OK and was now asleep, wearing a sleep mask but not her foam earplugs. Expandable foam earplugs were issued to every new Ennet resident, for reasons the Staff said would clarify for them real quick, but Joelle hated to wear them — they shut out exterior noise, but they made your head’s pulse audible, and your breath sounded

like someone in a space suit — and Charlotte Treat, Kate Gompert, April Cortelyu, and the former Amy Johnson had all felt the same way. April said the foam plugs made her brain itch.

It had started with Orin Incandenza, the cleaning. When relations were strained, or she was seized with anxiety at the seriousness and possible impermanence of the thing in the Back Bay’s co-op, the getting high and cleaning became an important exercise, like creative visualization, a preview of the discipline and order with which she could survive alone if it came to that. She would get high and visualize herself solo in a dazzlingly clean space, every surface twinkling, every possession in place. She saw herself being able to pick, say, dropped popcorn up off the rug and ingest it with total confidence. An aura of steely independence surrounded her when she cleaned the co-op, even with the little whimpers and anxious moans that exited her writhing mouth when she cleaned high. The place had been provided nearly gratis by Jim, who said so little to Joelle on their first several meetings that Orin kept having to reassure her that it wasn’t disapproval — Himself was missing the part of the human brain that allowed for being aware enough of other people to disapprove of them, Orin had said — or dislike. It was just how The Mad Stork was. Orin had referred to Jim as ‘Himself’ or ‘The Mad Stork’ — family nicknames, both of which gave Joelle the creeps even then.

It’d been Orin who introduced her to his father’s films. The Work was then so obscure not even local students of serious film knew the name. The reason Jim kept forming his own distribution companies was to ensure distribution. He didn’t become notorious until after Joelle’d met him. By then she was closer to Jim than Orin had ever been, part of which caused part of the strains that kept the brownstone co-op so terribly clean.

She’d barely thought consciously of any Incandenzas for four years before Don Gately, who for some reason kept bringing them bubbling up to mind. They were the second-saddest family Joelle’d ever seen. Orin felt Jim disliked him to the precise extent that Jim was even aware of him. Orin had spoken about his family at length, usually at night. On how no amount of punting success could erase the psychic stain of basic fatherly dislike, failure to be seen or acknowledged. Orin’d had no idea how banal and average his same-sex-parent-issues were; he’d felt they were some hideous exceptional thing. Joelle’d known her mother didn’t much like her from the

first time her own personal Daddy’d told her he’d rather take Pokie to the pictures alone. Much of the stuff Orin said about his family was dull, gone stale from years of never daring to say it. He credited Joelle with some strange generosity for not screaming and fleeing the room when he revealed the banal stuff. Pokie had been Joelle’s family nickname, though her mother’d never called her anything but Joelle. The Orin she knew first felt his mother was the family’s pulse and center, a ray of light incarnate, with enough depth of love and open maternal concern to almost make up for a father who barely existed, parentally. Jim’s internal life was to Orin a black hole, Orin said, his father’s face any room’s fifth wall. Joelle had struggled to stay awake and attentive, listening, letting Orin get the stale stuff out.

Orin had no idea what his father thought or felt about anything. He thought Jim wore the opaque blank facial expression his mother in French sometimes jokingly called Le Masque. The man was so blankly and irretrievably hidden that Orin said he’d come to see him as like autistic, almost catatonic. Jim opened himself only to the mother. They all did, he said. She was there for them all, psychically. She was the family’s light and pulse and the center that held tight. Joelle could yawn in bed without looking like she was yawning. The children’s name for their mother was ‘the Moms.’ As if there were more than one of her. His younger brother was a hopeless retard, Orin had said. Orin recalled the Moms used to tell him she loved him about a hundred times a day. It nearly made up for Himself’s blank stare. Orin’s basic childhood memory of Jim had been of an expressionless stare from a great height. His mother had been really tall, too, for a girl. He’d said he’d found it secretly odd that none of the brothers were taller. His retarded brother was stunted to about the size of a fire hydrant, Orin reported. Joelle cleaned behind the filthy room’s radiator as far as she could reach, being careful not to touch the radiator. Orin described his childhood’s mother as his emotional sun. Joelle remembered her own personal Daddy’s Uncle T.S. talking about how her own personal Daddy’d thought his own Momma ‘Hung the God Damn Moon,’ he’d said.

The radiators on Ennet House’s female side stayed on at all times, 24/7/365.

At first Joelle had thought Mrs. Avril Incandenza’s high-watt maternal love had maybe damaged Orin by bringing into sharper relief Jim’s remote self- absorption, which would have looked, by comparison, like neglect or dislike. That it had maybe made Orin too emotionally dependent on his

mother — why else would he have been so traumatized when a younger brother had suddenly appeared, specially challenged from birth and in need of even more maternal attention than Orin? Orin, late one night on the co- op’s futon, recalled to Joelle his skulking in and dragging a wastebasket over and inverting it next to his infant brother’s special crib, holding a heavy box of Quaker Oats high above his head, preparing to brain the needy infant. Joelle had gotten an A- in Developmental Psych. the semester before. And also dependent psychologically, Orin, it seemed, or even metaphysically — Orin said he’d grown up, first in a regular house in Weston and then at the Academy in Enfield, grown up dividing the human world into those who were open, readable, trustworthy, v. those so closed and hidden that you had no clue what they thought of you but could pretty damn well imagine it couldn’t be anything all that marvelous or else why hide it? Orin had recounted that he’d started to see himself getting closed and blank and hidden like that, as a tennis player, toward the end of his junior career, despite all the Moms’s frantic attempts to keep him from hiddenness. Joelle had thought of B.U.’s Nickerson Field’s 30,000 voices’ openly roared endorsement, the sound rising with the punt to a kind of amniotic pulse of pure positive noise. Versus tennis’s staid and reserved applause. It had all been so easy to figure and see, then, listening, loving Orin and feeling for him, poor little rich and prodigious boy — all this was before she came to know Jim and the Work.

Joelle scrubbed at the discolored square of fingerprints around the light- switch until the wet Kleenex disintegrated into greebles.

Never trust a man on the subject of his own parents. As tall and basso as a man might be on the outside, he nevertheless sees his parents from the perspective of a tiny child, still, and will always. And the unhappier his childhood was, the more arrested will be his perspective on it. She’s learned this through sheer experience.

Greebles had been her own mother’s word for the little bits of sleepy goo you got in your eyes’ corners. Her own personal Daddy called them ‘eyeboogers’ and used to get them out for her with the twisted corner of his hankie.

Though it’s not as if you could trust parents on the subject of their memory of their children either.

The cheap glass shade over the ceiling’s light was black with interior grime and dead bugs. Some of the bugs looked like they might have been from long-extinct species. The loose grime alone filled half an empty Carefree box. The more stubborn crud would take a scouring pad and ammonia. Joelle put the shade aside for until she’d shot down to the kitchen to toss out different boxes of crud and wet Kleenex and grab some serious Chore-type supplies from under the sink.

Orin had said she was the third-neatnikest person he knew after his Moms and a former player he’d played with with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, a dual diagnosis with which the U.H.I.D. membership was rife.

But at the time the import had missed her. At that time it had never occurred to her that Orin’s pull toward her could have had anything either pro or con to do with his mother. Her biggest worry was that Orin was pulled only by what she looked like, which her personal Daddy’d warned her the sweetest syrup draws the nastiest flies, so to watch out.

Orin hadn’t been anything like her own personal Daddy. When Orin was out of the room it had never seemed like a relief. When she was home, her own Daddy never seemed to be out of the room for more than a few seconds. Her mother said she hardly even tried to talk to him when his Pokie was home. He kind of trailed her around from room to room, kind of pathetically, talking batons and low-pH chemistry. It was like when she exhaled he inhaled and vice versa. He was all through the house. He was real present at all times. His presence penetrated a room and outlasted him there. Orin’s absence, whether for class or practice, emptied the co-op out.

The place seemed vacuumed and buffed sterile before the cleaning even started, when he went. She didn’t feel lonely in the place without him, but she did feel alone, what alone was going to feel like, and she, no one’s fool, 305 was erecting fortifications real early into it.

It was Orin, of course, who’d introduced them. He’d had this stubborn idea that Himself would want to use her. In the Work. She was too pretty for somebody not to want to arrange, capture. Better Himself than some weak- chinned academic. Joelle’d protested the whole idea. She had a brainy girl’s discomfort about her own beauty and its effect on folks, a caution intensified by the repeated warnings of her personal Daddy. Even more to the immediate point, her filmic interests lay behind the lens. She’d do the

capturing thank you very much. She wanted to make things, not appear in them. She had a student filmmaker’s vague disdain for actors. Worst, Orin’s idea’s real project was developmentally obvious: he thought he could somehow get to his father through her. That he pictured himself having weighty, steeple-fingered conversations with the man, Joelle’s appearance and performance the subjects. A three-way bond. It made her real uneasy.

She theorized that Orin unconsciously wished her to mediate between himself and ‘Himself,’ just as it sounded like his mother had. She was uneasy about the excited way Orin predicted that his father wouldn’t be able to ‘resist using’ her. She was extra uneasy about how Orin referred to his father as ‘Himself.’ It seemed painfully blatant, developmental-arrest-wise.

Plus she felt — only a little less than she made it sound, on the futon at night, protesting — she’d felt uneasy at the prospect of any sort of connection with the man who had hurt Orin so, a man so monstrously tall and cold and remotely hidden. Joelle heard a howl and a crash from the kitchen, followed by McDade’s tubercular laugh. Twice Charlotte Treat sat up in sleep, glistening with fever, and said in a flat dead voice something that sounded for all the world like ‘Trances in which she did not breathe,’ and then fell back, out. Joelle was trying to pin down a queer rancid- cinnamon smell that came from the back of a closet stuffed with luggage. It was especially hard to clean when you weren’t supposed to be allowed to touch any other resident’s stuff.

She might have known from the Work. The man’s Work was amateurish, she’d seen, when Orin had had his brother — the unretarded one — lend them some of The Mad Stork’s Read-Only copies. Was amateurish the right word? More like the work of a brilliant optician and technician who was an amateur at any kind of real communication. Technically gorgeous, the Work, with lighting and angles planned out to the frame. But oddly hollow, empty, no sense of dramatic towardness — no narrative movement toward a real story; no emotional movement toward an audience. Like conversing with a prisoner through that plastic screen using phones, the upperclassman Molly Notkin had said of Incandenza’s early oeuvre. Joelle thought them more like a very smart person conversing with himself. She thought of the significance of the moniker ‘Himself.’ Cold. Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell — mordant, sophisticated, campy, hip, cynical, technically mind-bending; but cold, amateurish, hidden: no risk of empathy with the

Job-like protagonist, whom she felt like the audience was induced to regard like somebody sitting atop a dunk-tank. The lampoons of ‘inverted’ genres: archly funny and sometimes insightful but with something provisional about them, like the finger-exercises of someone promising who refused to really sit down and play something to test that promise. Even as an undergrad Joelle’d been convinced that parodists were no better than camp- followers in ironic masks, satires usually the work of people with nothing 306 new themselves to say. ‘The Medusa v. the Odalisque’ — cold, allusive, inbent, hostile: the only feeling for the audience one of contempt, the meta- audience in the film’s theater presented as objects long before they turn to blind stone.

But there had been flashes of something else. Even in the early oeuvre, before Himself made the leap to narratively anticonfluential but unironic melodrama she helped prolong the arc of, where he dropped the technical fireworks and tried to make characters move, however inconclusively, and showed courage, abandoned everything he did well and willingly took the risk of appearing amateurish (which he had). But even in the early Work — flashes of something. Very hidden and quick. Almost furtive. She noticed them only when alone, watching, without Orin and his rheostat’s dimmer, the living room’s lights up high like she liked them, liked to see herself and everything else in the room with the viewer — Orin liked to sit in the dark and enter what he watched, his jaw slackening, a child raised on multi- channel cable TV. But Joelle began — on repeated viewing whose original purpose was to study how the man had blocked out scenes, for an Advanced Storyboard course she went the extra click in — she began to see little flashes of something. The M v. O.’s three quick cuts to the sides of the gorgeous combatants’ faces, twisted past recognition with some kind of torment. Each cut to a flash of pained face had followed the crash of a petrified spectator toppling over in her chair. Three split-seconds, no more, of glimpses of facial pain. And not pain at wounds — they never touched each other, whirling with mirrors and blades; the defenses of both were impenetrable. More like as if what their beauty was doing to those drawn to watch it ate them alive, up there on stage, the flashes seemed to suggest.

But just three flashes, each almost subliminally quick. Accidents? But not one shot or cut in the whole queer cold film was accidental — the thing was

clearly s-boarded frame by frame. Must have taken hundreds of hours.

Astounding technical anality. Joelle kept trying to Pause the cartridge on the flashes of facial torment, but these were the early days of InterLace cartridges, and the Pause still distorted the screen just enough to keep her from seeing what she wanted to study. Plus she got the creepy feeling the man had upped the film-speed in these few-frame human flashes, to thwart just such study. It was like he couldn’t help putting human flashes in, but he wanted to get them in as quickly and unstudyably as possible, as if they compromised him somehow.

Orin Incandenza had been only the second boy ever to approach her in a 307 male-female way. The first had been shiny-chinned and half blind on Everclear punch, an All-Kentucky lineman for the Shiny Prize Biting Shoats team back in Shiny Prize KY, at a cookout to which the Boosters had invited the Pep and Baton girls; and the lineman had looked like a little shy boy as he confessed, by way of apologizing for almost splashing her when he threw up, that she was just too Goddamn-all petrifyingly pretty to approach any other way but liquored up past all horror. The lineman’d confessed the whole team’s paralyzing horror of the prettiness of varsity Pep’s top twirler, Joelle. Orin confessed to his private name for her. The memory of that H.S. afternoon remained real strong. She could smell the mesquite smoke and the blue pines and the YardGuard spray, hear the squeals of the stock they butchered and cleaned in symbolic prep for the opener against the N. Paducah Technical H.S. Rivermen. She could still see the swooning line-man, wet-lipped and confessing, keeping himself upright against an immature blue pine until the blue pine’s trunk finally gave with a snap and crash.

Until that cookout and confession she’d somehow thought it was her own personal Daddy, somehow, discouraging dates and male-female approaches. The whole thing had been queer, and lonely, until she’d been approached by Orin, who made no secret of the fact that he had balls of unrejectable steel where horrifyingly pretty girls were concerned.

But it wasn’t even the subjective identification she felt, watching, she felt, somehow, for the flashes and seeming non-seqs that betrayed something more than cold hip technical abstraction. Like e.g. the 240- second motionless low-angle shot of Gianlorenzo Bernini’s ‘Ecstasy of St.

Teresa,’ which — yes — ground Pre-Nuptial…’s dramatic movement to an annoying halt and added nothing that a 15- or 30-second still shot wouldn’t have added just as well; but on the fifth or sixth reviewing Joelle started to see the four-minute motionless shot as important for what was absent: the 308 whole film was from the alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman’s POV, and the alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman — or rather his head — was on-screen every moment, even when split-screened against the titanic celestial marathon seven-card-stud-with-Tarot-cards game — his rolling eyes and temples’ dents and rosary of upper-lip sweat was imposed nonstop on the screen and viewer… except for the four narrative minutes the alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman stood in the Vittorio’s Bernini room, and the climactic statue filled the screen and pressed against all four edges. The statue, the sensuous presence of the thing, let the alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman escape himself, his tiresome ubiquitous involuted head, she saw, was the thing. The four-minute still shot maybe wasn’t just a heavy-art gesture or audience-hostile herring. Freedom from one’s own head, one’s inescapable P.O.V. — Joelle started to see here, oblique to the point of being hidden, an emotional thrust, since the mediated transcendence of self was just what the apparently decadent statue of the orgasmic nun claimed for itself as subject. Here then, after studious (and admittedly kind of boring) review, was an unironic, almost moral thesis to the campy abstract mordant cartridge: the film’s climactic statue’s stasis presented the theoretical subject as the emotional effect — self-forgetting as the Grail — and — in a covert gesture almost moralistic, Joelle thought as she glanced at the room-lit screen, very high, mouth writhing as she cleaned — presented the self-forgetting of alcohol as inferior to that of religion/art (since the consumption of bourbon made the salesman’s head progressively swell, horrendously, until by the film’s end its dimensions exceeded the frame, and he had a nasty and humiliating time squeezing it through the front door of the Vittorio).

It didn’t much matter once she’d met the whole family anyhow, though.

The Work and reviewings were just an inkling — usually felt on the small manageable bits of coke that helped her see deeper, harder, and so maybe not even objectively accessible in the Work itself — a lower-belly intuition

that the punter’s hurt take on his father was limited and arrested and maybe unreal.

With Joelle makeupless and stone-sober and hair up in a sloppy knot, the introductory supper with Orin and Himself at Legal Seafood up in 309 Brookline betrayed nothing much at all, save that the director seemed more than able to resist ‘using’ Joelle in any capacity — she saw the tall man slump and cringe when Orin told him the P.G.O.A.T. majored in F&C 310 — Jim’d told her later she’d seemed too conventionally, commercially pretty to consider using in any of that period’s Work, part of whose theoretical project was to militate against received U.S. commercial- prettiness-conventions — and that Orin was so tense in ‘Himself’ ’s presence that there wasn’t room for any other real emotion at the table, Orin gradually beginning to fill up silences with more and faster nonstop blather until both Joelle and Jim were embarrassed at the fact that the punter hadn’t touched his steamed grouper or given anyone else space for a word of reply.

Jim later told Joelle that he simply didn’t know how to speak with either of his undamaged sons without their mother’s presence and mediation. Orin could not be made to shut up, and Hal was so completely shut down in Jim’s presence that the silences were excruciating. Jim said he suspected he and Mario were so easy with each other only because the boy had been too damaged and arrested even to speak to until he was six, so that both he and Jim had got a chance to become comfortable in mutual silence, though Mario did have an interest in lenses and film that had nothing to do with fathers or needs to please, so that the interest was something truly to share, the two of them; and even when Mario was allowed to work crew on some of Jim’s later Work it was without any of the sort of pressures to interact or bond via film that there’d been with Orin and Hal and tennis, at which Jim (Orin informed her) had been a late-blooming junior but a top collegian.

Jim referred to the Work’s various films as ‘entertainments.’ He did this ironically about half the time.

In the cab (that Jim had hailed for them), on the way back home from Legal Seafood, Orin had beaten his fine forehead against the plastic partition and wept that he couldn’t seem to communicate with Himself without his mother’s presence and mediation. It wasn’t clear how the Moms mediated or facilitated communication between different family-members,

he said. But she did. He didn’t have one fucking clue how Himself felt about his abandoning a decade’s tennis for punting, Orin wept. Or about Orin’s being truly great at it, at something, finally. Was he proud, or jealously threatened, or judgmental that Orin had quit tennis, or what?

The 5-Woman’s room’s mattresses were too skinny for their frames, and the rims of the frames between the slats were appallingly clotted with dust, with female hair entwined and involved in the dust, so that it took one Kleenex just to wet the stuff down, several dry ones to wipe the muck out.

Charlotte Treat had been too sick to shower for days, and her frame and slats were hard to be near.

At Joelle’s first interface with the whole sad family unit — Thanksgiving, Headmaster’s House, E.T.A., straight up Comm. Ave. in Enfield — Orin’s Moms Mrs. Incandenza (‘Please do call me Avril, Joelle’) had been gracious and warm and attentive without obtruding, and worked unobtrusively hard to put everyone at ease and to facilitate communication, and to make Joelle feel like a welcomed and esteemed part of the family gathering — and something about the woman made every follicle on Joelle’s body pucker and distend. It wasn’t that Avril Incandenza was one of the tallest women Joelle had ever seen, and definitely the tallest pretty older woman with immaculate posture (Dr. Incandenza slumped something awful) she’d ever met. It wasn’t that her syntax was so artless and fluid and imposing. Nor the near-sterile cleanliness of the home’s downstairs (the bathroom’s toilet seemed not only scrubbed but waxed to a high shine). And it wasn’t that Avril’s graciousness was in any conventional way fake. It took a long time for Joelle even to start to put a finger on what gave her the howling fantods about Orin’s mother. The dinner itself — no turkey; some politico-familial in-joke about no turkey on Thanksgiving — was delicious without being grandiose. They didn’t even sit down to eat until 2300h. Avril drank champagne out of a little fluted glass whose level somehow never went down. Dr. Incandenza (no invitation to call him Jim, she noticed) drank at a tri-faceted tumbler of something that made the air above it shimmer slightly. Avril put everyone at ease. Orin did credible impressions of famous figures. He and little Hal made dry fun of Avril’s Canadian pronunciation of certain diphthongs. Avril and Dr. Incandenza took turns cutting up Mario’s salmon. Joelle had a weird half-vision of Avril hiking her knife up hilt-first and plunging it into Joelle’s breast. Hal Incandenza

and two other lopsidedly muscular boys from the tennis school ate like refugees and were regarded with gentle amusement. Avril dabbed her mouth in a patrician way after every bite. Joelle wore girl-clothes, her dress’s neckline very high. Hal and Orin looked vaguely alike. Avril directed every fourth comment to Joelle, to include her. Orin’s brother Mario was stunted and complexly deformed. There was a spotless doggie- dish under the table, but no dog, and no mention was ever made of a dog.

Joelle noticed Avril also directed every fourth comment to Orin, Hal, and Mario, like a cycle of even inclusion. There was New York white and Albertan champagne. Dr. Incandenza drank his drink instead of wine, and got up several times to freshen his drink in the kitchen. A massive hanging garden behind Avril’s and Hal’s captains’ chairs cut complex shadows into the UV light that made the table’s candles’ glow a weird bright blue. The director was so tall he seemed to rise forever, when he rose with his tumbler. Joelle had the queerest indefensible feeling that Avril wished her ill; she kept feeling different areas of hair stand up. Everybody Please-and- Thank-You’d in a way that was sheer Yankee WASP. After his second trip to the kitchen, Dr. Incandenza molded his twice-baked potatoes into an intricate futuristic cityscape and suddenly started to discourse animatedly on the 1946 breakup of Hollywood’s monolithic Studio system and the subsequent rise of the Method actors Brando, Dean, Clift et al., arguing for a causal connection. His voice was mid-range and mild and devoid of accent. Orin’s Moms had to be over two meters tall, way taller than Joelle’s own personal Daddy. Joelle could somehow tell Avril was the sort of female who’d been ungainly as a girl and then blossomed and but who’d only become really beautiful later in life, like thirty-five. She’d decided Dr.

Incandenza looked like an ecologically poisoned crane, she told him later.

Mrs. Incandenza put everyone at ease. Joelle imagined her with a conductor’s baton. She never did tell Jim that Orin called him The Mad or Sad Stork. The whole Thanksgiving table inclined very subtly toward Avril, very slightly and subtly, like heliotropes. Joelle found herself doing it too, the inclining. Dr. Incandenza kept shading his eyes from the UV plant-light in a gesture that resembled a salute. Avril referred to her plants as her Green Babies. At some point out of nowhere, little Hal Incandenza, maybe ten, announced that the basic unit of luminous intensity is the Candela, which he defined for no one in particular as the luminous intensity of 1/600,000 of a

square meter of a cavity at the freezing-temperature of platinum. All the table’s males wore coats and ties. The larger of Hal’s two tennis partners passed out dental stimulators, and no one made fun of him. Mario’s grin seemed both obscene and sincere. Hal, whom Joelle wasn’t crazy about, kept asking wasn’t anybody going to ask him the freezing-temperature of platinum. Joelle and Dr. Incandenza found themselves in a small conversation about Bazin, a film-theorist Himself detested, making a tormented face at the name. Joelle intrigued the optical scientist and director by explaining Bazin’s disparagement of self-conscious directorial expression as historically connected to the neo-Thomist Realism of the ‘Personalistes,’ an aesthetic school of great influence over French Catholic intellectuals circa 1930–1940 — many of Bazin’s teachers had been eminent Personalistes. Avril encouraged Joelle to describe rural Kentucky.

Orin did a long impression of late pop-astronomer Carl Sagan expressing televisual awe at the cosmos’ scale. ‘Billions and billions,’ he said. One of the tennis friends burped just awfully, and no one reacted to the sound in any way. Orin said ‘Billions and billions and billions’ in the voice of Sagan.

Avril and Hal had a brief good-natured argument about whether the term circa could modify an interval or only a specific year. Then Hal asked for several examples of something called Haplology. Joelle kept fighting urges to slap the sleek little show-offy kid upside the head so hard his bow-tie would spin. ‘The universe:’ — Orin continued long after the wit had worn thin — ‘cold, immense, incredibly universal.’ The subjects of tennis, baton- twirling, and punting never came up: organized sports were never once mentioned. Joelle noticed that nobody seemed to look directly at Dr.

Incandenza except her. A curious flabby white mammarial dome covered part of the Academy’s grounds outside the dining room’s window. Mario plunged his special fork into Dr. Incandenza’s potato-cityscape, to general applause and certain grating puns on the term deconstruction from the insufferable Hal kid. Everyone’s teeth were dazzling in the candlelight and UV. Hal wiped Mario’s snout, which seemed to run continuously. Avril invited Joelle by all means to make a Thanksgiving call home to her family in rural Kentucky if she wished. Orin said the Moms was herself originally from rural Québec. Joelle was on her seventh glass of wine. Orin’s fingering his half-Windsor kept looking more and more like a signal to somebody. Avril urged Dr. Incandenza to find a way to include Joelle in a

production, since she was both a film student and a now a heartily welcome honorary addition to the family. Mario, reaching for the salad, fell out of his chair, and was helped up by one of the tennis players amid much hilarity.

Mario’s deformities seemed wide-ranging and hard to name. Joelle decided he looked like a cross between a puppet and one of the big-headed carnivores from Spielberg’s old special-effects orgies about reptiles. Hal and Avril hashed out whether misspoke was a bona fide word. Dr.

Incandenza’s tall narrow head kept inclining toward his plate and then slowly rising back up in a way that was either meditative or tipsy.

Deformed Mario’s broad smile was so constant you could have hung things from the corners of it. In a fake Southern-belle accent that was clearly no jab at Joelle, more like a Scarlett O’Hara accent, Avril said she did declare that Albertan champagne always gave her ‘the vapors.’ Joelle noticed that pretty much everybody at the table was smiling, broadly and constantly, eyes shiny in the plants’ odd light. She was doing it herself, too, she noticed; her cheek muscles were starting to ache. Hal’s larger friend kept pausing to use his dental stimulator. Nobody else was using their dental stimulator, but everyone held one politely, as if getting ready to use it. Hal and the two friends made odd spasmic one-handed squeezing motions, periodically. No one seemed to notice. Not once in Orin’s presence did anyone mention the word tennis. He had been up half the previous night vomiting with anxiety. Now he challenged Hal to name the freezing-point of platinum. Joelle couldn’t for the life of her remember either of the names of poor old Spielberg’s old computer-enhanced celluloid dinosaur things, though her own Daddy’d personally taken her to each one. At some point Orin’s father got up to go freshen his drink and never returned.

Just before dessert — which was on fire — Orin’s Moms had asked whether they could perhaps all join hands secularly for a moment and simply be grateful for all being together. She made a special point of asking Joelle to include her hands in the hand-holding. Joelle held Orin’s hand and Hal’s smaller friend’s hand, which was so callused up it felt like some sort of rind. Dessert was Cherries Jubilee with gourmet New Brunswick ice cream. Dr. Incandenza’s absence from the table went unmentioned, almost unnoticed, it seemed. Both Hal and his nonstimulating friend pleaded for Kahlua, and Mario flapped pathetically at the tabletop in imitation. Avril made a show of gazing at Orin in mock-horror as he produced a cigar and

clipper. There was also a blancmange. The coffee was decaf with chickory.

When Joelle looked over again, Orin had put his cigar away without lighting it.

The dinner ended in a kind of explosion of goodwill.

Joelle’d felt half-crazed. She could detect nothing fake about the lady’s grace and cheer toward her, the goodwill. And at the same time felt sure in her guts’ pit that the woman could have sat there and cut out Joelle’s pancreas and thymus and minced them and prepared sweetbreads and eaten them chilled and patted her mouth without batting an eye. And unremarked by all who leaned her way.

On the way back home, in a cab whose company’s phone-number Hal had summoned from memory, Orin hung his leg over Joelle’s crossed legs and said that if anybody could have been counted on to see that the Stork needed to use Joelle somehow, it was the Moms. He asked Joelle twice how she’d liked her. Joelle’s cheek muscles ached something awful. When they got back to the brownstone co-op on that last pre-Subsidized Thanksgiving was the first historical time Joelle intentionally did lines of cocaine to keep from sleeping. Orin couldn’t ingest anything during the season even if he wanted to: B.U.’s major-sport teams Tested randomly. So Joelle was awake at 0400, cleaning back behind the refrigerator for the second time, when Orin cried out in the nightmare she’d somehow felt should have been hers.

Shaking to the confidence of his judgment of these persons, the one Marathe had believed a desperate addict was revealed as the woman in authority for the demi-maison of Ennet. The clipboarded woman was a mere subaltern. Marathe very seldom misjudged persons or their roles.

The woman in authority was negative on the telephone. ‘No, no. No,’ she said into the telephone. ‘No.’ ‘I am sorry,’ she spoke to Marathe over the telephone’s speaker without placing the hand of privacy over the speaker. ‘This won’t take a second. No she can’t, Mars. Promises don’t matter. She’s promised before. How many times. No. Mars, because it’ll end up hurting us again and just enabling her.’ The other side’s man’s voice came loudly, and the authority stopped a sobbing with the back of her wrist, then stiffened. Marathe watched expressionlessly. He had the great fatigue, a time at which English was

straining. There were dogs upon the floor. ‘I know, but no. For today, no.

Next time she calls, ask her to call me here. Yes.’ She deactivated this transmission and stared at her top of the desk for a moment. Two dogs lay on the floor between her chair and Marathe’s fauteuil, one dog of which was licking its private organs. Marathe stifled a shudder and pulled up his blanket slightly, hunching to minimalize the musculature of health of his upper torso, also. ‘Good night…,’ Marathe began. ‘Well, don’t go,’ the woman of authority ejaculated from coming out of her reverie of sadness, giving her seat the rotation to face him. She tried to smile in the professional manner of U.S.A. ‘After you waited all that time out there. I saw you sharing with Selwyn. Selwyn tends to show up whenever we’re doing group intakes.’ ‘Me, I think he suffers with mental illness.’ Marathe noticed one leg of the woman was thinner by far of her other leg. He was being driven distracted also by this habit to pretend to sniff. The false sniffs came from nowhere.

She crossed these legs. Two autos’ horns mightily blew upon the avenue far beyond the concave window of her desk. ‘This Selwyn, he advised me to stroke your animals, which I have regret but I will not.’ This woman quietly laughed and leaned forward above the crossed legs.

In addition, one of the dogs had flatulence. ‘You listed your citizenship as Swiss.’ ‘I am a residing alien addicted to smack, to scag, and to H, seeking desperately the residential treatment.’ 311 ‘But legally residing? With a Green Card? An O.I.N.S. Residency Code?’ Marathe from his sportcoat produced the documents M. DuPlessis had arranged with foresight in the long past. ‘Disabled, also. Also deformed,’ Marathe said, shrugging stoically, inclining his veil at the dark carpet.

The woman was examining his O.I.N.S. documents with the pursed mouth and face for poker of O.N.A.N. authorities in all places. One of her hands was twisted in the manner of a claw. ‘We all come in with issues, Henry,’ she said.

‘Henri. Pardon. Henri.’ Some woman just outside the door near the demi-maison’s front door, she laughed in the manner of an automatic weapon. Wet sounds were audible from beneath the rear leg of the dog with private organs, of which the head hid beneath the raised leg. The woman of authority had to support the body by placing the hands on the desk to rise and unlock and lift the door of a black metal cabinet over her TP and console of her desk. The door of old black metal lifted outward. Marathe committed to memory the model numbers of this teleputer, which was Indonesian and of cheap cost. ‘Well Henri, Ennet House, in the years I’ve been on Staff here, we’ve had aliens, resident aliens, E.S.L.’s whose English was worse than yours by a long shot.’ She stood on the thicker leg to reach into this cabinet deeply for some item. Marathe took the opportunity of her inattention to commit to his memory the office’s facts. The office’s door had a decoration of a triangle within a circle, and no bolt of death for locking, but merely a sadly cheap recess-lock in the knob. Nowhere the small nozzle of standard 10.525 GHz microwave alarming. The large windows had no small ends of wires about their frames. This left the possibility only of a magnet-contact alarm, which if so was difficult to jumper but also possible. Marathe felt himself missing his wife intensely, which always signalled his deep fatigue. Twice he sniffed.

The woman was speaking into the cabinet to him: ‘… get you to sign some releases for me so we can make copies of your O.I.N.S. proofs and get an Outtake faxed from your detox, which was in…?’ ‘The Chit Chat Farms Rehabilitation of Pennsylvania State. Last month.’ The A.F.R.’s data liaison in Montreal had promised to arrange all records

without some delay. ‘In, what, Wernersdale, something?’ Marathe cocked his veiled head ever so slightly. ‘Wernersberg of Pennsylvania.’ ‘Well we know Chit Chat, we’ve had some Chit Chat graduates come through the House. Highest… respect.’ Her head was inside the cabinet, with an arm. It appeared difficult for her to rummage inside the cabinet and keep at the same time her balance. Deciding the bay windows were the optimal office’s entry if required, Marathe looked at the woman’s attempt to balance and the old cabinet. Then he blinked slowly. In this cabinet visibly,

in twin stacks near the front of the open cabinet, were many cartridges of TP entertainment.

The woman said ‘And we’ve been Disabled-Accessible since the beginning. One of only a handful of Houses in the metro area that are fully equipped to take disabled clients, I assume they told you down at Chit Chat.’ The wall banged with the impact of boisterousness in the outside room, and somebody either laughed or was in pain. Marathe sniffed. The woman was continuing to speak: ‘… why I got to come here in the first place. Which I came in in a chair, too, originally, by the way.’ She teetered back out from the cabinet with a folder of Manila. ‘At the time I declared up and down I was too disabled to kneel and pray, to give you an idea of where I was at.’ She laughed gaily. She was attractive. ‘Me,’ Marathe responded, ‘I will attempt to pray at a moment’s order.’ Aiding the ruse of application, he and Fortier discovered, was that U.S.A. recovery from the addictions was somewhat paramilitary in nature. There were orders and the obeying of orders. The A.F.R. had reviewed cartridges of antique U.S.A. programming, which they had found through luck in the inventory of Antitoi, and had watched to learn many things. But casting his veiled face desperately upward while saying allowed that Marathe could scan along the plastic cases of cartridges’ spines. Among the small-of-font titles such as Focal Length Parameters X-XL and Drop Volley Ex. II were two cases of plain brown plastic, blank, except for — this was why his veil, it remained tilted upward for so much longer that he was concerned that this woman of authority — except for — but it was difficult of sureness, for the office’s light was the deadening fluorescence of U.S.A., and the cabinet’s mouth in the shadow of the lid and the cheesecloth veil made less his focus — except maybe for tiny round faces of embossed smiles upon the brown cases. Marathe felt suddenly the excitement of himself — M. Hugh Steeply’s wording for this had been from somewhere blue.

The authority spoke also: ‘Not to mention U.H.I.D. members, you might want to know.’ Gesturing then at the veil of Marathe neither was mentioning. The woman attempted to affix a sheet of faint toner to a board with a clip. ‘In fact we have a U.H.I.D. member in early residency right now.’ Marathe blinked twice more. He said ‘I am deformed, me.’

‘She might be able to help you adjust, identify. Be good for her, too.’ Marathe had begun locking down in RAM every detail of every moment since his entering the Ennet House demi-maison. He in another part of his brain considered whether he would report truly first to M. Fortier or to the Steeply of U.S.B.S.S., whose contact number had always the prefix of 8000, he had jested. In another part was whether to seem eager for meeting the Entertainment’s performer here now, a fellow veil. To think of what a desperate addict would have eagerness in. Marathe was throughout this thinking smiling largely at the woman, forgetting she could not witness it. ‘This is happy,’ finally he said. ‘Your facial issues —’ the person stated, leaning in over the crossed legs in her chair. ‘Are they connected to your use and abuse? Did they work with 312 you on progression and Y.E.T.s and owning consequences at Chit Chat?’ Marathe was in little hurry now to leave for returning to chez Antitoi.

He utilized his abilities to recite complex lines of covering-story on addiction while also at the time reviewed locking down the face and locations of every person at the Ennet House he had regarded. For they would come here again, the A.F.R., and maybe Services Without Specificity of Steeply and Tine, as well. He had the ability of splitting his mind’s thinking along several parallel tracks. ‘The legs — I do an overdose in Berne, which is in my home of Switzerland, while alone, and I fall down face-down while my legs, they remain how you say tangle, tangled in the chair on which occurred this injection, fix. A stupid. I lie down without conscious or to move for many days, and my legs, they — comment-on-dit? — they are sleepy, lose the circulating, suffer gangrene, become infectious.’ Marathe sniffed while stoically shrugging. ‘As well the nose and mouth, from facial squishing of lying face-down in a position without conscious for days. I die almost. All is amputated, for my life. I withdraw from the scag, smack, and H, in l’infirmière. A result of abuse of the drugs.’ ‘This is your story. This is your first step.’ Marathe shrugged. ‘My legs, my nose and oral. All as a consequence of the progression. At the Chit Chat, I admit all the things, I realize I am addicted desperately.’ Marathe was trying to decide if to find ways to make the authority woman briefly leave the office, so that Marathe might rapidly

arm-climb up to the cabinet to regard the smiling cases of cartridge closely before the cabinet’s locking. Or instead also to return on pretext to remain and hang roundly in the living room for waiting persons, to find a glimpse of who is this mentioned resident with her female U.H.I.D. veil; for this is the purpose of coming to demi-maisons M. Fortier gave. Marathe could give the fact of the cartridges to Fortier and the veiled girl to Steeply, or oppositely. The fatigue returned. But Steeply, before committing to overt action, will wish for confirmation that those in the cabinet were items of the true Entertainment, not the blank and joking F.L.Q. displays. There was truly a faint whirring noise coming from the head, he imagined. Marathe’s sidearm sat in its holster under the seat of him, hidden by the plaid-colored blanket of his lap. To easily kill the person in authority was inutile at this time of not glimpsing the girl, he had decided, plus impractical of surrounding witness. Marathe’s fauteuil could travel 45 kph on a level surface over short distance. The authority figure liked to comb at the bright hair with her claw of the deformed hand. She was telling Marathe the false addict that she found his honesty encouraging and saying to sign these forms, for releasing. As Marathe signed slowly the name of a deceased 313 Health-Benefits administrator at the Caisse de Dépôt et Placement, the woman began to ask about what lengths he believed he was willing to go to.

The whole family was lousy with secrets, she’d decided, was part of the nonturkey dinner’s sadness. From each other, themselves, itself. A big one being this pretense that overt eccentricity was the same as openness. I.e. that they were all ‘exactly as crazy as they seem’ — the punter’s phrase.

We’re all a lot more intuitive about our lovers’ families than we are about our own families, she knew. Charlotte Treat’s face glistened; her cheek’s deep scars were a more violent red than the rest. Her ribs under the wet Michelob Dry T-shirt were starting to stand out, her neck to get that skinny stemmy look of katexia. She looked like a ravaged fowl. Kate Gompert’s bed sat unmade, a copy of some yellow paperback called Feeling Good open face-down on the mattress and starting to curl. Joelle had this weird fear that Gompert, who made Joelle extremely nervous at the best of times, would come home and walk in and find Joelle cleaning with her hair in a kerchief and veil damply clinging. She used the last of the

room’s Kleenex dusting all five bedside tables, wiping in careful rings around objects she wasn’t to touch.

There was then some trickiness in the situation when the demi-maison’s woman offered the extension of a place for Marathe. Desperately addicted Henri the Swiss could sleep upon the Convertisofa in the rear office this very P.M., she said, if he was willing to endure the mess and sometimes insects of the rear office. The woman had a ripe spot of sympathique for the disableds, Marathe could see. For trickiness in the situation, no lines had been prepared by Fortier to defer this offer of the extension of the spot of treatment in the demi-maison. The woman in authority smiled that she could see in his playing with the fauteuil’s wheels the addicted struggle between desperation and denial, she said. Marathe was rapidly calculating should he falsely accept and remain here for one night to observe for himself the description of the veiled patient from U.H.I.D., against should he exit and roll like no person’s business to the nearest place of private telephoning to alert the A.F.R. at the shop that here at this demi-maison were of possibility real cartridges of the Entertainment, perhaps including a duplicatable Master or the anti-samizdat remedy cartridge of F.L.Q.’s allegation, to return to chez Antitoi and return later in squeaking force to the demi-maison and acquire both the cartridges and the veiled performer, if the U.H.I.D. patient of treatment is revealed as the disguised performer. The engineer of radio had spoken volubly of this person’s veil and screen. Or calculating also whether to telephone not Antitoi Entertainent but the 24- hour costless prefix of M./Mlle. Steeply and convey the very same information instead, finally, first, to Bureau des Sérvices sans Spécificité, placing bets on O.N.A.N. and against Fortier, casting his lots finally with one side only, conveying his restenotic wife and entertainment-hungry children down from St.-Remid’Amherst’s Convexity-ravaged wastes to live with him the rest of their lives down here among U.S.A.’s confusion of choices, demanding hidden protection from Steeply and high-income medical care for the heart- and head-difficulties of beloved Gertraude.

Or to tell this figure of medical authority to look out behind for a large spider and thereupon snap her slim neck with one hand and use the telephone console in this office to summon Fortier and an A.F.R. elite detail directly to this demi-maison. Or else to summon directly Steeply and the

white-suiting forces of O.N.A.N.. The authority made a spire of her fingers beneath her chin and gazed at Marathe’s cocked head with a face of respect and sympathy but not solicitude, also which made snapping her neck with one hand seem a sad choice for Marathe. He pretended that it was necessary to sniff. Mssrs. Fortier and Broullîme, the A.F.R. others he had known well since the days of when they stood together tensed at the crossings of many trains, beneath the sky’s moon — none of them sensed truly that Marathe has lost the belly for this type of work. That Marathe, he must fight the nausea of the stomach as he pushed the sharpened handle of the manche à balai broomstick through the Antitoi’s insides during the technical interview of the Antitoi, and later had vomited out into the alley under secrecy. One of the Office’s dogs chewed at its haunch with great ferocity, in misery. In the U.S.A. of O.N.A.N., M./Mlle. Hugh/Helen Steeply of the clandestine U.S.O.U.S./U.S.B.S.S. would hide the family of Marathe in obscure suburban locales, with papers of identity fashioned by specialists in above reproach and no suspicion; and Marathe, his familiarity with the knowledge of Québecois insurgency would be comfortably rewarded once Notre Rai Pays seceded to alone draw down the wrath of chanteur-fou Gentle’s anger. The A.F.R.’s triumph of dissemination of the lethal Entertainment would ensure Marathe’s valuable welcome by Gentle and his wife’s beloved treatments for the ventricle and lack of skull. Marathe pictured Gertraude with a helmet and hook of gold, breathing easily through expensive tubes. The variable of calculus was how long to remain and work for dissemination against when to jump to the safety of American welcome.

314Fortier’s wrath would be implacable at Marathe’s ‘perdant son coeur,’ and it may be far wiser of waiting until Québec had been evicted and the A.F.R. were fully engaged to reveal his quadrupling for O.N.A.N., Marathe.

Knocking at the Office’s door at the same time as entering came a young girl with missing teeth, radiating coldness from the exterior outside the demi-maison, leaning only her upper half of the body into the office through the doorway she had opened. ‘Clocking in, boss,’ the young girl stated in the flat nasality of Boston U.S.A.

The woman in authority smiled in return. ‘Two more to interview, Johnette, then I’m off.’

‘Pisser.’ ‘Can you let the people in from the shed when they come for Mrs.

Lopate?’ The young and inclined girl nodded her slim head. In a nostril a generic diaper-pin was transpercé, which glittered in the fluorescence of the light as she nodded. ‘And Janice says she’s screwing out of here now and any message for her before she goes.’ The authority negated with her head at this. The young girl in the door looked down upon Marathe and said ‘Hey’ or ‘Eh’ in a greeting of neutral emotions. Marathe smiled with desperation and pretended to sniff. Visible smoke’s odor came through the open door from the noisy salon beyond it. Marathe decided firmly against the snapping of any necks upon this visit, because of bodies leaning with suddenness into the office unexpectedly. The torso of the person began to withdraw as suddenly the authority looked up and stated ‘Oh and Johnette?’ The door swung more open once more as the returned upper half replied ‘Yo.’ ‘Do me a favor? Clenette H. brought some donie-cartridges down from

E.T.A. this afternoon?’ ‘Let me guess.’ ‘The natives are restless.’ The authority laughed aloud. ‘Something new.’ The torso laughed as well. ‘Did you see McDade’s watching that Korean thing again out here?’ ‘So can you just run them through after lights-out, as many as you can, check and make sure they’re appropriate?’ ‘No skin, no substances, light drinking only,’ the young girl said in the manner of reviewing the rehearsal of something learned. ‘As many as you can get through, and leave them on Janice’s desk, and I’ll have her put them out at the start of the day-shift tomorrow.’ The young girl of substitute authority made a curious circle with two of her fingers in the air of the doorway. Some kind of signal of the hand to the chief authority. Every finger of the hand of the girl wore a ring of different type. ‘The natives’ll be grateful, for once.’ ‘They’re in the cabinet with the intakes,’ the authority told her. ‘I’ll watch them during Dream Duty, as many as there’s time.’ ‘And Johnette?’

Once more the torso reextended inward.

The woman with authority said ‘And keep Emil and Wade from tormenting David K., will you please?’ Marathe smiled largely as the door closed entirely and the authority made a small motion of apologies for being interrupted. ‘I do not have these meanings donie and natives, if I may boldly ask,’ he said. ‘Nor etier.’ A laugh of friendliness. It occurred to Marathe that this was a happy person. ‘Donies are donated goods. Which we depend on more than we’d like. The residents and alums are always on the lookout. Sometimes we call the current residents the natives; we mean it as affectionate. That was 315 Johnette, she’s living staff. We’ve got two living staff, alums of the house. One’s under the weather, but Johnette’s — you’ll like Johnette.

Johnette’s a keeper. E.T.A. is letters, E-T-A.’ Marathe pretended to laugh aloud. ‘I beg a pardon, for I thought some etier in the pronunciation of my native Swiss.’ The authority smiled with understanding. ‘E.T.A.’s a private school. We usually get some residents on up there, part-time. It’s just up the hill.’ Seeing the deep intake of veil which his inhaling caused for one moment only, the authority expressed surprise of the face and said ‘But you did know Ennet’s a working house. Residents have a month to find work, normally.’ Exhaling with care, Marathe gestured faintly as in But of course.

11 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

Part of Mario’s footage for the documentary they’re letting him do on this fall’s E.T.A. consists of Mario just walking around different parts of the Academy with the Bolex H64 camera strapped to his head and joined by coax cable to the foot-treadle, which he holds against his sweatered chest with one hand and operates with the other. At 2100 at night it’s cold out.

The Center Courts are brightly lit, but only one court is being used, Gretchen Holt and Jolene Criess still winding up some sort of marathon challenge from the P.M. session, the hands around their grips bluish and sweaty hair frozen into electrified spikes, pausing between points to blow

noses on sleeves, wearing so many layers of sweats they look barrel-bodied out there, and Mario doesn’t bother with the change in film-speed he’d need to record them through the steamed window of Schtitt’s room, where he is.

The room’s noise is deafening.

Coach Schtitt’s room is 106, next to his office on the first floor of Comm.-Ad., past Dr. Rusk’s office and down a two-corner hall from the lobby.

It’s a big empty room, built for its stereo. Hardwood floor in need of sanding, a wooden chair and a cane chair, an army cot. A little low table just big enough for Schtitt’s pipe rack. A folding card table folded up and leaning against the wall. Acoustic damping-tile on all the walls and nothing decorative hanging or mounted on the walls. Acoustic tiling on the ceiling also, with a bare overhead light with a long chain mounted in a dirty ceiling fan with a short chain. The fan never rotates but sometimes emits a sound of faulty wiring. There’s a faint odor of Magic Marker in the room. There is nothing upholstered, no pillow on the cot, nothing soft to absorb or deflect the sound of the equipment stacked on the floor, the black Germanness of a top-shelf sound system, a Mario-sized speaker in each corner of the room with the cloth cover removed so each woofer’s cone is exposed and mightily throbbing. Schtitt’s room is soundproofed. The window faces the Center Courts, the transom and observatory directly overhead and mangling the shadows of the courts’ lights. The window is right over the radiator, which when the stereo is off makes odd hollow ringing clanky clunks as if someone deep underground were having at the pipes with a hammer. The cold window over the radiator is steamed and trembles slightly with Wagnerian bass. Gerhardt Schtitt is asleep in the cane chair in the middle of the empty room, his head thrown back and arms hanging, hands treed with arteries you can see his slow pulse in. His feet are stolidly on the floor, his knees spread way out wide, the way Schtitt always has to sit, on account of his varicoceles. His mouth is partly open and a dead pipe hangs at an alarming angle from its corner. Mario records him sleeping for a little while, looking very old and white and frail, yet also obscenely fit. What’s on and making the window shiver and condensed droplets gather and run in little bullet-headed lines down the glass is a duet that keeps climbing in pitch and emotion: a German second tenor and a German soprano are either very happy or very unhappy or both. Mario’s ears are extremely sensitive.

Schtitt sleeps only amid excruciatingly loud European opera. He’s shared with Mario several different tales of grim childhood experiences at a BMW- sponsored ‘Quality-Control-Orientated’ Austrian Akademie to account for his REM-peculiarities. The soprano leaves the baritone and goes up to a high D and just hangs there, either shattered or ecstatic. Schtitt doesn’t stir, not even when Mario falls twice, loudly, trying to get to the door with his hands over his ears.

The Community-Administration stairwells are narrow and no-nonsense.

Red railings of cold iron whose red is one coat of primer. Steps and walls of raw-colored rough cement. The sort of sandy echo in there that makes you take stairs as fast as possible. The salve makes a sucking sound. The upper halls are empty. Low voices and lights from under the doors on the second floor. 2100 is still mandatory Study Period. There won’t be serious movement till 2200, when the girls will drift from room to room, congregating, doing whatever packs of girls in robes and furry slippers do late at night, until deLint kills all the dormitory lights at the dorms’ main breaker around 2300. Isolated movement: a door down the hall opens and shuts, the Vaught twins are heading down the hall to the bathroom at the far end, wearing only an enormous towel, one of their heads in curlers. One of the falls in Mr. Schtitt’s room had been on the burnt hip, and squunched salve from the bandage is starting to darken the corduroys at that side of the pelvis, though there is zero pain. Three tense voices behind Carol Spodek and Shoshana Abram’s door, lists of degrees and focal lengths, a study group for Mr. Ogilvie’s ‘Reflections on Refraction’ exam tomorrow. A girl’s voice from he can’t tell which room says ‘Steep hot beach sea’ twice very distinctly and then is still. Mario is leaning back against a wall in the hallway, panning idly. Felicity Zweig emerges from her door by the stairwell carrying a soap-dish and wearing a towel tied at that breast-level, as if there were breasts, moving toward Mario on her way to the head. She puts her hand out straight at his head’s camera, a kind of distant stiff-arm as

she passes: ‘I’m wearing a towel.’ ‘I understand,’ Mario says, using his arms to turn himself around and

pointing the lens at the bare wall. ‘I’m wearing a towel.’ Brisk controlled sounds of retching from behind Diane Prins’s door.

Mario gets a couple seconds of Zweig hurrying away in the towel, tiny little bird steps, looking terribly fragile.

The stairwells smell like the cement they’re made of.

Behind 310, Ingersoll and Penn’s door, is the faint rubbery squeak of somebody moving around on crutches. Someone in 311 is yelling ‘Boner check! Boner check!’ A lot of the third floor is for boys under fourteen. The hall carpet up here is ectoplasmically stained, the expanses of wall between

doors hung with posters of professional players endorsing gear. Someone has drawn a goatee and fangs on an old Donnay poster of Mats Wilander, and the poster of Gilbert Treffert is defaced with anti-Canadian slurs. Otis Lord’s door has Infirmary next to his name on the door’s name-card. Penn’s room’s door’s card’s name also had Infirmary. Sounds of someone talking low to someone who’s sobbing from Beak, Whale, and Virgilio’s room, and Mario resists an impulse to knock. LaMont Chu’s door next door is completely covered with magazines’ action-shots of matches. Mario is leaning back to get footage of the door when LaMont Chu exits the bathroom at this end in a terry robe and thongs and wet hair, literally

whistling ‘Dixie.’ ‘Mario!’ Mario gets him bearing down, his calves hairless and muscular, hair- water dripping onto his robe’s shoulders with each step. ‘LaMont Chu!’

‘What’s happening?’ ‘Nothing’s happening!’ Chu stands there just within conversation-range. He’s only slightly taller than Mario. A door down the hall opens and a head sticks out and scans and then withdraws. ‘Well.’ Chu squares his shoulders and looks into the camera atop Mario’s head. ‘You want me to say something for posterity?’

‘Sure!’

‘What should I say?’ ‘You can say anything you want!’ Chu draws himself way up and looks penetrating. Mario checks the meter on his belt and uses the treadle to shorten the focal length and adjust the angle of the camera’s lens slightly downward, right at Chu, and there are tiny grinding adjustment-sounds from the Bolex.

Chu’s still just standing there. ‘I can’t think what to say.’ ‘That happens to me all the time.’ ‘The minute your invitation became official my mind went blank.’ ‘That can happen.’ ‘There’s just this staticky blank field in there now.’ ‘I know just what you mean.’ They stand there silent, the camera’s mechanism emitting a tiny whir.

Mario says ‘You just got out of the shower, I can tell.’

‘I was talking with good old Lyle downstairs.’ ‘Lyle’s terrific!’ ‘I was going to just whip right over into the showers, but the locker room’s got this, like, odor.’ ‘It’s always great to talk with good old Lyle.’ ‘So I came up here.’ ‘Everything you’re saying is very good.’ LaMont Chu stands there a moment looking at Mario, who’s smiling and Chu can tell wants to nod furiously, but can’t, because he needs to keep the Bolex steady. ‘What I was doing, I was filling Lyle in on the Eschaton debacle, telling him about the lack of hard info, the conflicted rumors that are going around, about how Kittenplan and some of the Big Buds are going to get blamed. About disciplinary action for the Buds.’ ‘Lyle’s just an outstanding person to go to with concerns,’ Mario says, fighting not to nod furiously. ‘Lord’s head and Penn’s leg, the Postman’s broken nose. What’s going to happen to the Incster?’ ‘You’re acting perfectly natural. This is very good.’ ‘I’m asking if you’ve heard from Hal what they’re going to do, if he’s in on the blame from Tavis. Pemulis and Kittenplan I can see, but I’m having trouble with the idea of Struck or your brother taking discipline for what happened out there. They were strictly from spectation for the whole thing.

Kittenplan’s Bud is Spodek, and she wasn’t even out there.’ ‘I’m getting all this, you’ll be glad to know.’ Chu is now looking at Mario, which for Mario is weird because he’s looking through the viewfinder, a lens-eye view, which means when Chu looks down from the lens to look at Mario it looks to Mario like he’s looking down south somewhere along Mario’s thorax. ‘Mario, I’m asking if Hal’s told you what they’re going to do to anybody.’ ‘Is this what you’re saying, or are you asking me?’ ‘Asking.’ Chu’s face looks slightly oval and convex through the lens’s fish-eye, a jutting aspect. ‘So what if I want to use this that you’re saying for the documentary I’ve been asked to make?’

‘Jesus, Mario, use whatever you want. I’m just saying I have conscience-trouble with the idea of Hal and Troeltsch. And Struck didn’t even seem like he was conscious for the debacle itself.’ ‘I should tell you I feel like we’re getting the totally real LaMont Chu here.’ ‘Mario, camera to one side, I’m standing here dripping asking you for Hal’s impressions of when Tavis called them in, as in did he give you impressions. Van Vleck at lunch said he yesterday saw Pemulis and Hal coming out of Tavis’s office with the Association urine-guy holding them both by the ear. Van Vleck said Hal’s face was the color of Kaopectate.’ Mario directs the lens at Chu’s shower-thongs so he can look over the viewfinder at Chu. ‘Are you saying this, or is this what happened?’ ‘That’s what I’m asking you, Mario, if Hal told you what happened.’ ‘I follow what you’re saying.’ ‘So you asked whether I was asking, and I’m asking you about it.’ Mario zooms in very tight: Chu’s complexion is a kind of creamy green, with not one follicle in view. ‘LaMont, I’m going to find you and tell you whatever

Hal tells me, this is so good.’

‘So then you haven’t talked to Hal?’ ‘When?’ ‘Jesus, Mario, it’s like trying to talk to a rock with you sometimes.’ ‘This is going very well!’ Someone gargling. Guglielmo Redondo’s voice going through the rosary, it sounds like, just inside his and Esteban Reynes’s door. The Clipperton Suite in East House had had a bright-yellow strip of B.P.D. plastic for over a month, he remembers. The Boys Room door a different kind of wood than the room doors. The Clipperton Suite had a glued picture of Ross Reat pretending to kiss Clipperton’s ring at the net. The roar of a toilet and a stall door’s squeak. The Academy’s plumbing is high-pressure.

It takes Mario longer to walk down a set of stairs than to walk up. Red primer stains his hand, he has to hold the railing so tight.

The special hush of lobby carpet, and smells of Benson & Hedges brand cigarettes in the reception area off the lobby. The little hall doors that are always closed and never locked. The rubber sheaths on the knobs. Benson & Hedges cost $5.60 O.N.A.N. a pack at Father & Son grocery down the hill. Lateral Alice Moore’s desk’s plaque’s DANGER: THIRD RAIL light

is unilluminated, and her word-processing setup wears its cover of frosted plastic. The blue chairs have the faint imprints of people’s bottoms. The waiting room is empty and dim. Some light from the lit courts outside.

From under double doors is lamplight, much attenuated by double doors, from the Headmaster’s office, which Mario doesn’t explore; Tavis is 316unnerved into such gregarity around Mario it’s awkward for all parties.

If you asked Mario whether he got on with his Uncle C.T. he’d say: Sure.

The Bolex’s light-meter is in the No Way range. Most of the waiting area’s available light comes from the doorless Dean of Females’s office. Meaning the Moms is: In.

Heavy shag carpet is especially treacherous for Mario when he’s top- heavy with equipment. Avril Incandenza, a fiend for light, has the whole bank of overheads going, two torchères and some desk lamps, and a B&H cigarette on fire in the big clay ashtray Mario’d made her at Rindge and Latin School. She is swivelled around in her swivel-chair, facing out the big window behind her desk, listening to someone on the phone, holding the transmitter violin-style under her chin and holding up a stapler, checking its load. Her desk has what looks like a skyline of stacks of file folders and books in neat cross-hatched stacks; nothing teeters. The open book on top facing Mario is Dowty, Wall and Peters’s seminal Introduction to Montague 317 Semantics, which has very fascinating illustrations that Mario doesn’t look at this time, trying to film the cock of the Moms’s head and the phone’s extended antenna against the cumulus of her hair from behind, capturing her back unawares.

But the sound of Mario entering even a shag-carpeted room is unmistakable, plus she can see his reflection in the window. ‘Mario!’ Her arms go up in a V, stapler open in one hand, facing the window. ‘The Moms!’ It’s a good ten meters past the seminar table and viewer and portable blackboard to the far part of the office where the desk is, and each step on the deep shag is precarious, Mario resembling a very old brittle-boned man or someone carrying a load of breakables down a slick hill. ‘Hello!’ She’s addressing his reflection in the quartered window, watching him put the treadle down carefully on the desk and struggle with

the pack on his back. ‘Not you,’ she tells the phone. She points the stapler at the image of the Bolex on the image of his head. ‘Are we On-Air?’ Mario laughs. ‘Would you like to be?’ She tells the phone she’s still here, that Mario’s come in. ‘I don’t want to intercept your call.’ ‘Don’t be absurd.’ She talks past the phone at the window. She rotates her swivel-chair to face Mario, the receiver’s antenna describing a half moon and now pointing up at the window behind her. There are two blue chairs like the reception-area chairs in front of her desk; she doesn’t indicate to Mario to sit. Mario’s most comfortable standing and leaning into the support of the police lock he’s trying to detach from his canvas plastron and lower, shucking the pack off his back at the same time. Avril looks at him like the sort of stellar mother where just looking at her kid gives her joy. She doesn’t offer to help him get the lock’s lead brace out of the pack because she knows he’d feel completely comfortable asking for her help if he needed it. It’s like she feels these two sons are the people in her life with whom so little important needs to be said that she loves it. The Bolex and support-yoke and viewfinder over his forehead and eyes give Mario an underwater look. His movements, setting and bracing his police lock, are at once graceless and deft. The lit Center Courts, now empty, are visible out the left side of Avril’s window, if you lean far forward and look. Someone has forgotten a gear bag and pile of sticks out by the net-post of Court 17.

Silences between them are totally comfortable. Mario can’t tell if the person on the phone is still talking or if Avril just hasn’t put the dead phone down. She still holds the black stapler. Its jaws are open and it looks alligatorish in her hand. ‘Is this you passing through the neighborhood poking a head in to say hello? Or am I a subject, tonight?’ ‘You can be a subject, Moms.’ He moves the big head around in a weary circle. ‘I get tired from wearing this.’

‘It gets heavy. I’ve held it.’ ‘It’s good.’ ‘I remember his making that. He took such care making that. It’s the last time I believe he enjoyed himself on something, thoroughly.’ ‘It’s terrific!’ ‘He took weeks putting everything together.’

He likes to look at her, too, leaning in and letting her know he likes looking. They are the two least embarrassable people either of them knows.

She’s rarely here this late; she has a big study at the HmH. The only thing that ever shows she’s tired is that her hair gets a sort of huge white cowlick, like a rolling ocean comber of hair, and just on one side, the side with the phone, sticking up and touching the antenna. Her hair has been pure white since Mario can first remember seeing her looking down at him through the incubator’s glass. Pictures of her own father’s hair were like that. It goes down the middle of her back against the chair and down both arms, hanging off the arms near the elbow. Its part shows her pink scalp. She keeps the hair very clean and well-combed. She has one of Mr. deLint’s big whistles around her neck. The big cowlick casts a bent shadow on the sill of the window. There’s a maple-leaf flag and a 50-star U.S.A. flag hanging limp off brass poles on either side of the window; in an extreme corner are fleur- delis pennons on tall sharp polished sticks. C.T.’s office has an O.N.A.N.

318flag and a 49-star U.S.A. flag. ‘I had quality interface dialogue with LaMont Chu upstairs. But I made the girl Felicity, the really thin one — she got upset. She said only a towel.’ ‘Felicity will be just fine. So you’re just strolling. Peripatetic footage.’ She refuses to adjust syntax, to speak in any way down to him, it’d be beneath him, though he seems not to mind when most people do it, speak down.

Nor will she ask about the burn on his pelvis unless he brings it up.

She’s careful to keep her oar out of Mario’s health stuff unless he brings things up, out of concern that it might be taken as intrusive or smothering. ‘I saw your lights. Why is the Moms here, still, I thought to myself.’ She made as if to clutch her head. ‘Don’t ask. I’ll starting whingeing.

Tomorrow’s going to be hellishly busy.’ Mario didn’t hear her say goodbye to the man as she put down the phone so the antenna now points at Mario’s chest. She’s putting out the nub of the Benson & Hedge against the rooster- comb holder he’d squeezed and karate-chopped and put down the bowl’s center, when he made it, after she’d said she wanted it to be an ashtray. ‘You give me such pleasure standing there, all outfitted for work,’ she said. ‘Aprowl.’ She ground individual sparks out in the bowl. She had the idea that her smoking around Mario made him worry, though he’d never said

anything about it one way or the other. ‘I have a breakfast engagement at 07, which means I have to do final swotting and whacking for morning classes now, so I just lurched back over here to do it instead of carrying

everything back and forth.’

‘Are you tired?’ She just smiled at him. ‘This is off.’ Pointing at his head. ‘I turned it off.’ To look at them, you’d never guess these two persons were related, one sitting and one standing canted forward. ‘Will you eat with us? I hadn’t even thought of dinner until I saw you. I 319 don’t even know what there might be for dinner. Many Wonders. Turkey cartilage. Your bag is by the radio. Will you stay again? Charles is still in conference, I believe, he said.’ ‘About the debracle with the Eschaton and the Postman’s nose?’ ‘A person from a magazine has come to do a piece of reportage on your brother. Charles is speaking to her in lieu of any of the students. You may speak to her about Orin if you like.’ ‘She’s been aprowl for Hal, Ortho said.’ Avril has a certain way of cocking her fine head at him. ‘Your poor Uncle Charles has been with Thierry and this magazine person since this

afternoon.’ ‘Have you talked to him?’ ‘I’ve been trying to buttonhole your brother. He’s not in your room. The Pemulis person was seen by Mary Esther taking their truck before Study Period. Is Hal with him, Mario?’ ‘I haven’t seen Hal since lunchtime. He said he’d had a tooth thing.’ ‘I didn’t even find out he’d been to see Zeggarelli until today.’ ‘He asked about how the burn on my pelvis is.’ ‘Which I won’t ask about unless you’d care to discuss how it’s coming along.’ ‘It’s fine. Plus Hal said he wishes I’d come back and sleep there.’ ‘I left two messages asking him to let me know how the tooth was.

Love-o, I feel bad I wasn’t there for him. Hal and his teeth.’ ‘Did C.T. tell what happened? Was he upset? Was that C.T. on the phone you were with?’ Mario can’t see why the Moms would call C.T. on the

phone when he was in there right across the hall behind his doors. When she didn’t smoke a lot of the time she held a pen in her mouth; Mario didn’t know why. Her college mug has about a hundred blue pens in it, on the desk. She likes to square herself in her chair, sitting up extra straight and grasping the chair’s arms in a commanding posture. She looks like something Mario can’t place when she does this. He keeps thinking the word typhoon. He knows she’s not trying to consciously be commanding

with him.

‘How was your own day, I want to hear.’ ‘Hey Moms?’ ‘I determined years ago that my position needs to be that I trust my children, and I’d never traffic in third-party hearsay when the lines of communication with my children are as open and judgment-free as I’m fortunate they are.’ ‘That seems like a really good position. Hey Moms?’ ‘So I have no problem waiting to hear about Eschaton, teeth, and urine from your brother, who’ll come to me the moment it’s appropriate for him

to come to me.’

‘Hey Moms?’ ‘I’m right here, Love-o.’ Tycoon is the term her commanding way of sitting suggests, grasping her chair, a pen clamped in her teeth like a businessman’s cigar. There were

other carpet-prints in the heavy shag.

‘Moms?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can I ask you a thing?’ ‘Please do.’ ‘This is off,’ again indicating the silent apparatus on his head. ‘Is this a confidential thing, then?’ ‘There isn’t any secret. My day was I was wondering about something.

In my mind.’ ‘I’m right here for you anytime day or night, Mario, as you are for me, as I am for Hal and we all are for each other.’ She gestures in a hard-to-

describe way. ‘Right here.’ ‘Moms?’ ‘I am right here with my attention completely focused on you.’

‘How can you tell if somebody’s sad?’ A quick smile. ‘You mean whether someone’s sad.’ A smile back, but still earnest: ‘That improves it a lot. Whether someone’s sad, how can you tell so you’re sure?’ Her teeth are not discolored; she gets them cleaned at the dentist all the time for the smoking, a habit she despises. Hal inherited the dental problems from Himself; Himself had horrible dental problems; half his teeth were bridges. ‘You’re not exactly insensitive when it comes to people, Love-o,’ she says. ‘What if you, like, only suspect somebody’s sad. How do you reinforce

the suspicion?’ ‘Confirm the suspicion?’ ‘In your mind.’ Some of the prints in the deep shag he can see are shoes, and some are different, almost like knuckles. His lordotic posture makes him acute and observant about things like carpet-prints. ‘How would I, for my part, confirm a suspicion of sadness in someone,

you mean?’ ‘Yes. Good. All right.’ ‘Well, the person in question may cry, sob, weep, or, in certain cultures, wail, keen, or rend his or her garments.’ Mario nods encouragingly, so the headgear clanks a little. ‘But say in a case where they don’t weep or rend. But you still have a suspicion which they’re sad.’ She uses a hand to rotate the pen in her mouth like a fine cigar. ‘He or she might alternatively sigh, mope, frown, smile halfheartedly, appear downcast, slump, look at the floor more than is appropriate.’ ‘But what if they don’t?’ ‘Well, he or she may act out by seeming distracted, losing enthusiasm for previous interests. The person may present with what appears to be laziness, lethargy, fatigue, sluggishness, a certain passive reluctance to

engage you. Torpor.’ ‘What else?’ ‘They may seem unusually subdued, quiet, literally “low.” ’ Mario leans all his weight into his police lock, which makes his head jut, his expression the sort of mangled one that expresses puzzlement, an

attempt to reason out something hard. Pemulis called it Mario’s Data- Search Face, which Mario liked. ‘What if sometime they might act even less low than normal. But still these suspicions are in your mind.’ She’s about the same height sitting as Mario upright and leaning forward. Now neither of them is quite looking at the other, both just a couple degrees off. Avril taps the pen against her front teeth. Her phone light is blinking, but there’s no ringing. The thing’s handset’s antenna still points at Mario. Her hands are not her age. She hoists the executive chair back slightly to cross her legs. ‘Would you feel comfortable telling me whether we’re discussing a

particular person?’ ‘Hey Moms?’ ‘Is there someone specific in whom you’re intuiting sadness?’ ‘Moms?’ ‘Is this about Hal? Is Hal sad and for some reason not yet able to speak about it?’ ‘I’m just saying how to be generally sure.’ ‘And you have no idea where he is or whether he left the grounds this evening sad?’ Lunch today was the exact same as lunch yesterday: pasta with tuna and garlic, and thick wheaty bread, and required salad, and milk or juice, and pears in juice in a dish. Mrs. Clark had taken a Sick Morning off because when she came in this morning Pemulis at lunch said one of the breakfast girls had said there’d been brooms on the wall in an X of brooms, out of nowhere, on the wall, when she’d come in very early to fire up the Wheatina-cauldron, and nobody knowing how the brooms were there or why or who glued them on had upset Mrs. Clarke’s nerves, who’d been with the Incandenzas since long before E.T.A., and had nerves. ‘I didn’t see Hal since lunchtime. He had an apple he cut into chunks and put peanut butter on, instead of pears in juice.’ Avril nods with vigor. ‘LaMont didn’t know either. Mr. Schtitt is asleep in his chair in his room. Hey Moms?’ Avril Incandenza can switch a Bic from one side of her mouth to the other without using her hand; she never knows she’s doing it when she’s

doing it. ‘Whether or not we’re discussing anyone in particular, then.’ Mario smiles at her. ‘Hypothetically, then, you may be picking up in someone a certain very strange type of sadness that appears as a kind of disassociation from itself,

maybe, Love-o.’ ‘I don’t know disassociation.’ ‘Well, love, but you know the idiom “not yourself” — “He’s not himself today,” for example,’ crooking and uncrooking fingers to form quotes on either side of what she says, which Mario adores. ‘There are, apparently, persons who are deeply afraid of their own emotions, particularly the painful ones. Grief, regret, sadness. Sadness especially, perhaps. Dolores describes these persons as afraid of obliteration, emotional engulfment. As if something truly and thoroughly felt would have no end or bottom. Would

become infinite and engulf them.’ ‘Engulf means obliterate.’ ‘I am saying that such persons usually have a very fragile sense of themselves as persons. As existing at all. This interpretation is “existential,”

Mario, which means vague and slightly flaky. But I think it may hold true in certain cases. My own father told stories of his own father, whose potato farm had been in St. Pamphile and very much larger than my father’s. My grandfather had had a marvelous harvest one season, and he wanted to invest money. This was in the early 1920s, when there was a great deal of money to be made on upstart companies and new American products. He apparently narrowed the field to two choices — Delaware-brand Punch, or an obscure sweet fizzy coffee substitute that sold out of pharmacy soda fountains and was rumored to contain smidgeons of cocaine, which was the subject of much controversy in those days. My father’s father chose Delaware Punch, which apparently tasted like rancid cranberry juice, and the manufacturer of which folded. And then his next two potato harvests were decimated by blight, resulting in the forced sale of his farm. Coca- Cola is now Coca-Cola. My father said his father showed very little emotion or anger or sadness about this, though. That he somehow couldn’t.

My father said his father was frozen, and could feel emotion only when he was drunk. He would apparently get drunk four times a year, weep about his life, throw my father through the living room window, and disappear for

several days, roaming the countryside of L’Islet Province, drunk and enraged.’ She’s not been looking at Mario this whole time, though Mario’s been looking at her.

She smiled. ‘My father, of course, could himself tell this story only when he was drunk. He never threw anyone through any windows. He simply sat in his chair, drinking ale and reading the newspaper, for hours, until he fell out of the chair. And then one day he fell out of the chair and didn’t get up again, and that was how your maternal grandfather passed away. I’d never have gotten to go to University had he not died when I was a girl. He believed education was a waste for girls. It was a function of his era; it wasn’t his fault. His inheritance to Charles and me paid for university.’ She’s been smiling pleasantly this whole time, emptying the butt from the ashtray into the wastebasket, wiping the bowl’s inside with a Kleenex, straightening straight piles of folders on her desk. A couple odd long crinkly paper strips of bright red hung over the side of the wastebasket, which was normally totally empty and clean.

Avril Incandenza is the sort of tall beautiful woman who wasn’t ever quite world-class, shiny-magazine-class beautiful, but who early on hit a certain pretty high point on the beauty scale and has stayed right at that point as she ages and lots of other beautiful women age too and get less beautiful. She’s 56 years old, and Mario gets pleasure out of just getting to look at her face, still. She doesn’t think she’s pretty, he knows. Orin and Hal both have parts of her prettiness in different ways. Mario likes to look at Hal and at their mother and try to see just what slendering and spacing of different features makes a woman’s face different from a man’s, in attractive people. A male face versus a face you can just tell is female. Avril thinks she’s much too tall to be pretty. She’d seemed much less tall when compared to Himself, who was seriously tall. Mario wears small special shoes, almost perfectly square, with weights at the heel and Velcro straps instead of laces, and a pair of the corduroys Orin Incandenza had worn in elementary school, which Mario still favors and wears instead of brand-new pants he’s given, and a warm crewneck sweater that’s striped like a flea. ‘My point here is that certain types of persons are terrified even to poke a big toe into genuinely felt regret or sadness, or to get angry. This means

they are afraid to live. They are imprisoned in something, I think. Frozen inside, emotionally. Why is this. No one knows, Love-o. It’s sometimes called “suppression,” ’ with the fingers out to the sides again. ‘Dolores believes it derives from childhood trauma, but I suspect not always. There may be some persons who are born imprisoned. The irony, of course, being that the very imprisonment that prohibits sadness’s expression must itself feel intensely sad and painful. For the hypothetical person in question.

There may be sad people right here at the Academy who are like this, Mario, and perhaps you’re sensitive to it. You are not exactly insensitive

when it comes to people.’ Mario scratches his lip again.

She says ‘What I’ll do’ — leaning forward to write something on a Post- It note with a different pen than the one she has in her mouth — ‘is to write down for you the terms disassociation, engulfment, and suppression, which I’ll put next to another word, repression, with an underlined unequal sign between them, because they denote entirely different things and should not be regarded as synonyms.’ Mario shifts slightly forward. ‘Sometimes I get afraid when you forget you have to talk more simply to me.’ ‘Well then I’m both sorry for that and grateful that you can tell me about it. I do forget things. Particularly when I’m tired. I forget and just get going.’ Lining the edges up and folding the little sticky note in half and then half again and dropping it into the wastebasket without having to look for where the wastebasket is. Her chair is a fine executive leather swivelling chair but it shrieks a little when she leans back or forward. Mario can tell she’s making herself not look at her watch, which is all right. ‘Hey Moms?’ ‘People, then, who are sad, but who can’t let themselves feel sad, or express it, the sadness, I’m trying rather clunkily to say, these persons may strike someone who’s sensitive as somehow just not quite right. Not quite there. Blank. Distant. Muted. Distant. Spacey was an American term we grew up with. Wooden. Deadened. Disconnected. Distant. Or they may drink alcohol or take other drugs. The drugs both blunt the real sadness and allow some skewed version of the sadness some sort of expression, like throwing someone through a living room window out into the flowerbeds she’d so very carefully repaired after the last incident.’

‘Moms, I think I get it.’ ‘Is that better, then, instead of my maundering on and on?’ She’s risen to pour herself coffee from the last black bit in the glass pot.

So her back is almost to him as she stands there at the little sideboard.

An old folded pair of U.S.A. football pants and a helmet are on top of one of the file cabinets by the flag. Her one memento of Orin, who won’t talk to them or contact them in any way. She has an old mug with a cartoon of someone in a dress small and perspectivally distant in a knee-high field of wheat or rye, that says TO A WOMAN OUTSTANDING IN HER FIELD. A blue blazer with an O.N.A.N.T.A. insignia is hung very neatly and straight on a wooden hanger from the metal tree of the coatrack in the corner. She’s always had her coffee out of the OUTSTANDING FIELD mug, even in Weston. The Moms hangs up stuff like shirts and blazers neater and more wrinkle-free than anyone alive. The mug has a hair-thin brown crack down one side, but it’s not dirty or stained, and she never gets lipstick on the rim the way other ladies over fifty years old pinken cups’ rims.

Mario was involuntarily incontinent up to his early teens. His father and later Hal had changed him for years, never once judging or wrinkling their

face or acting upset or sad.

‘But except hey Moms?’ ‘I’m still right here.’ Avril couldn’t change diapers. She’d come to him in tears, he’d been seven, and explained, and apologized. She just couldn’t handle diapers. She just couldn’t deal with them. She’d sobbed and asked him to forgive her and to assure her that he understood it didn’t mean she didn’t love him to death or find him repellent. ‘Can you be sensitive to something sad even though the person isn’t not himself?’ She especially likes to hold the coffee’s mug in both hands. ‘Pardon me?’ ‘You explained it very well. It helped a lot. Except what if it’s that they’re almost like even more themselves than normal? Than they were before? If it’s not that he’s blank or dead. If he’s himself even more than before a sad thing happened. What if that happens and you still think he’s sad, inside, somewhere?’

One thing that’s happened as she got over fifty is she gets a little red sideways line in the skin between her eyes when she doesn’t follow you.

Ms. Poutrincourt gets the same little line, and she’s twenty-eight. ‘I don’t follow you. How can someone be too much himself?’

‘I think I wanted to ask you that.’

‘Are we discussing your Uncle Charles?’ ‘Hey Moms?’ She pretends to knock her forehead at being obtuse. ‘Mario Love-o, are you sad? Are you trying to determine whether I’ve been sensing that you yourself are sad?’ Mario’s gaze keeps going from Avril to the window behind her. He can activate the Bolex’s foot-treadle with his hands, if necessary. The Center Courts’ towering lights cast an odd pall up and out into the night. The sky has a wind in it, and dark thin high clouds whose movement’s pattern has a kind of writhing weave. All this is visible out past the faint reflections of the lit room, and up, the tennis lights’ odd small lumes like criss-crossing spots. ‘Though of course the sun would leave my sky if I couldn’t assume you’d simply come and tell me you were sad. There would be no need for intuition about it.’ And plus then to the east, past all the courts, you can see some lights in houses in the Enfield Marine Complex below, and beyond that Commonwealth’s cars’ headers and store lights and the robed lit lady’s downcast-looking statue atop St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Out the right to the north over lots of different lights is the red rotating tip of the WYYY transmitter, its spin’s ring of red reflected in the visible Charles River, the Charles tumid with rain and snowmelt, illumined in patches by headlights on Memorial and the Storrow 500, the river unwinding, swollen and humped, its top a mosaic of oil rainbows and dead branches, gulls asleep or brooding, bobbing, head under wing.

The dark had a distanceless shape. The room’s ceiling might as well

have been clouds.

‘Skkkkk.’

‘Booboo?’ ‘Skk-kkk.’

‘Mario.’

‘Hal!’

‘Were you asleep there, Boo?’ ‘I don’t think I was.’ ‘Cause I don’t want to wake you up if you were.’ ‘Is it dark or is it me?’ ‘The sun won’t be up for a while, I don’t think.’ ‘So it’s dark then.’ ‘Booboo, I just had a wicked awful dream.’ ‘You were saying “Thank you Sir may I have another” several times.’

‘Sorry Boo.’

‘Numerous times.’

‘Sorry.’ ‘I think I slept right through it.’ ‘Jesus, you can hear Schacht snoring all the way across. You can feel the snores’ vibrations in your midsection.’ ‘I slept right through it. I didn’t hear you even come in.’ ‘Quite a nice surprise to come in and see the good old many-pillowed

Mario-shape in his rack again.’ ‘…’ ‘I hope you didn’t move the bag back here just because it sounded like I might have been asking you. To.’ ‘I found somebody with tapes of old Psychosis, for until the return. I need you to show me how to ask somebody I don’t know to borrow tapes, if

we’re both devoted.’

‘…’ ‘Hey Hal?’ ‘Booboo, I dreamed I was losing my teeth. I dreamed that my teeth dryrotted somehow into shale and splintered when I ate or spoke, and I was jettisoning fragments all over the place, and there was a long scene where I was pricing dentures.’ ‘All night last night people were coming up going where is Hal, have you seen Hal, what happened with CT and the urine doctor and Hal’s urine.

Moms asked me where’s Hal, and I was surprised at that because of how she makes it a big point never to check up.’

‘Then, without any sort of dream-segue, I’m sitting in a cold room, naked as a jaybird, in a flame-retardant chair, and I keep receiving bills in the mail for teeth. A mail carrier keeps knocking on the door and coming in without being invited and presenting me with various bills for teeth.’ ‘She wants you to know she trusts you at all times and you’re too trustworthy to worry about or check up on.’ ‘Only not for any teeth of mine, Boo. The bills are for somebody else’s teeth, not my teeth, and I can’t seem to get the mail carrier to acknowledge this, that they’re not for my teeth.’ ‘I promised LaMont Chu I’d tell him whatever information you told me, he was so concerned.’ ‘The bills are in little envelopes with plasticized windows that show the addressee part of the bills. I put them in my lap until the stack gets so big they start to slip off the top and fall to the floor.’ ‘LaMont and me had a whole dialogue about his concerns. I like LaMont a lot.’ ‘Booboo, do you happen to remember S. Johnson?’ ‘S. Johnson used to be the Moms’s dog. That passed away.’ ‘And you remember how he died, then.’ ‘Hey Hal, you remember a period in time back in Weston when we were little that the Moms wouldn’t go anywhere without S. Johnson? She took him with her to work, and had that unique car seat for him when she had the Volvo, before Himself had the accident in the Volvo. The seat was from the Fisher-Price Company. We went to Himself’s opening of Kinds of Light at 320 the Hayden that wouldn’t let in cigarettes or dogs and the Moms brought S. Johnson in a blind dog’s harness-collar that went all the way around his chest with the square bar on the leash thing and the Moms wore those sunglasses and looked up and to the right the whole time so it looked like she was legally blind so they’d let S.J. into the Hayden with us, because he had to be there. And how Himself just thought it was a good one on the Hayden, he said.’ ‘I keep thinking about Orin and how he stood there and lied to her about

S. Johnson’s map getting eliminated.’ ‘She was sad.’

‘I’ve been thinking compulsively about Orin ever since C.T. called us all in. When you think about Orin what do you think, Boo?’ ‘The best was remember when she had to fly and wouldn’t put him in a cagey box and they wouldn’t even let a blind dog on the plane, so she’d leave S. Johnson and leave him out tied to the Volvo and she’d make Orin put a phone out there with its antenna up during the day out by where S.

Johnson was tied to the Volvo and she’d call on the phone and let it ring next to S. Johnson because she said how S. Johnson knew her unique personal ring on the phone and would hear the ring and know that he was thought about and cared about from afar, she said?’ ‘She was unbent where that dog was concerned, I remember. She bought some kind of esoteric food for it. Remember how often she bathed it? ‘…’ ‘What was it with her and that dog, Boo?’ ‘And the day we were out rolling balls in the driveway and Orin and Marlon were there and S. Johnson was there lying there on the driveway tied to the bumper with the phone right there and it rang and rang and Orin picked it up and barked into it like a dog and hung it up and turned it off?’ ‘…’ ‘So she’d think it was S. Johnson? The joke that Orin thought was such a good one?’ ‘Jesus, Boo, I don’t remember any of that.’ ‘And he said we’d get Indian Rub-Burns down both arms if we didn’t pretend how we didn’t know what she was talking about if and when she asked us about the bark on the phone when she got home? ‘The Indian Rub-Burns I remember far too well.’ ‘We were supposed to shrug and look at her like she was minus cards from her deck, or else?’ ‘Orin lied with a really pathological intensity, growing up, is what I’ve been remembering.’ ‘He made us laugh really hard a lot of times, though. I miss him.’ ‘I don’t know whether I miss him or not.’ ‘I miss Family Trivia. Do you remember four times he let us sit in on when they played Family Trivia?’ ‘You’ve got a phenomenal memory for this stuff, Boo.’ ‘…’

‘You probably think I’m wondering why you don’t ask me about the thing with C.T. and Pemulis and the impromptu urine, after the Eschaton debacle, where the urologist took us right down to the administrative loo and was going to watch personally while we filled his cups, like watch it go in, the urine, to make sure it came from us personally.’ ‘I think I especially have a phenomenal memory for things I remember

that I liked.’

‘You can ask, if you like.’ ‘Hey Hal?’ ‘The key datum is that the O.N.A.N.T.A. guy didn’t actually extract urine samples from us. We got to hold on to our urine, as the Moms no doubt knows quite well, don’t kid yourself, from C.T.’ ‘I have a phenomenal memory for things that make me laugh is what I think it is.’ ‘That Pemulis, without self-abasement or concession of anything compromising, got the guy to give us thirty days — the Fundraiser, the WhataBurger, Thanksgiving Break, then Pemulis, Axford and I pee like racehorses into whatever-sized receptacles he wants, is the arrangement we made.’ ‘I can hear Schacht, you’re right. Also the fans.’ ‘Boo?’ ‘I like the fans’ sound at night. Do you? It’s like somebody big far away goes like: it’sOKit’sOKit’sOKit’sOK, over and over. From very far away.’ ‘Pemulis — the alleged weak-stomached clutch-artist — Pemulis showed some serious brass under pressure, standing there over that urinal.

He played the O.N.A.N.T.A. man like a fine instrument. I found myself

feeling almost proud for him.’ ‘…’ ‘You might think I’m wondering why you aren’t asking me why thirty days, why it was so important to extract thirty days from the blue-blazered guy before a G.C./M.S. scan. As in what is there to be afraid of, you might ask.’ ‘Hal, pretty much all I do is love you and be glad I have an excellent brother in every way, Hal.’ ‘Jesus, it’s just like talking to the Moms with you sometimes, Boo.’ ‘Hey Hal?’

‘Except with you I can feel you mean it.’ ‘You’re up on your elbow. You’re on your side, facing my way. I can see your shadow.’ ‘How does somebody with your kind of Panglossian constitution determine whether you’re ever being lied to, I sometimes wonder, Booboo.

Like what criteria brought to bear. Intuition, induction, reductio, what?’ ‘You always get hard to understand when you’re up on your side on your elbow like this.’ ‘Maybe it just doesn’t occur to you. Even the possibility. Maybe it’s never once struck you that something’s being fabricated, misrepresented,

skewed. Hidden.’ ‘Hey Hal?’ ‘And maybe that’s the key. Maybe then whatever’s said to you is so completely believed by you that, what, it becomes sort of true in transit.

Flies through the air toward you and reverses its spin and hits you true, however mendaciously it comes off the other person’s stick.’ ‘…’ ‘You know, for me, Boo, people seem to lie in different but definite ways, I’ve found. Maybe I can’t change the spin the way you can, and this is all I’ve been able to do, is assemble a kind of field guide to the different

kinds of ways.’ ‘…’ ‘Some people, from what I’ve seen, Boo, when they lie, they become very still and centered and their gaze very concentrated and intense. They try to dominate the person they lie to. The person to whom they’re lying.

Another type becomes fluttery and insubstantial and punctuates his lie with little self-deprecating motions and sounds, as if credulity were the same as pity. Some bury the lie in so many digressions and asides that they like try to slip the lie in there through all the extraneous data like a tiny bug through a windowscreen.’ ‘Except Orin used to end up telling the truth even when he didn’t think he was.’ ‘Would that that were a trait family-wide, Boo.’ ‘Maybe if we call him he’ll come to the WhataBurger. You can see him if you want to if you ask, maybe.’

‘Then there are what I might call your Kamikaze-style liars. These’ll tell you a surreal and fundamentally incredible lie, and then pretend a crisis of conscience and retract the original lie, and then offer you the lie they really want you to buy instead, so the real lie’ll appear as some kind of concession, a settlement with truth. That type’s mercifully easy to see

through.’ ‘The merciful type of lie.’ ‘Or then the type who sort of overelaborates on the lie, buttresses it with rococo formations of detail and amendment, and that’s how you can always tell. Pemulis was like that, I always thought, til his performance over the

urinal.’ ‘Rococo’s a pretty word.’ ‘So now I’ve established a subtype of the over-elaborator type. This is the liar who used to be an over-elaborator and but has somehow snapped to the fact that rococo elaborations give him away every time, so he changes and now lies tersely, sparely, seeming somehow bored, like what he’s saying is too obviously true to waste time on.’ ‘…’ ‘I’ve established that as a sort of subtype.’ ‘You sound like you can always tell.’ ‘Pemulis could have sold that urologist land in there, Boo. It was an incredibly high-pressure moment. I never thought he had it in him. He was nerveless and stomachless. He projected a kind of weary pragmatism the urologist found impossible to discount. His face was a brass mask. It was almost frightening. I told him I never would have believed he had that kind of performance in him.’ ‘Psychosis live on the radio used to read an Eve Arden beauty brochure all the time where Eve Arden says: “The importance of a mask is to increase your circulation,” quote.’ ‘The truth is nobody can always tell, Boo. Some types are just too good, too complex and idiosyncratic; their lies are too close to the truth’s heart for you to tell.’ ‘I can’t ever tell. You wanted to know. You’re right. It never crosses my

mind.’ ‘…’ ‘I’m the type that’d buy land, I think.’

‘You remember my hideous phobic thing about monsters, as a kid?’ ‘Boy do I ever.’ ‘Boo, I think I no longer believe in monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants or vampires or whatever. I think at seventeen now I believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there’s simply no way to tell.

The ones who give nothing away.’ ‘But then how do you know they’re monsters, then?’ ‘That’s the monstrosity right there, Boo, I’m starting to think.’ ‘Golly Ned.’ ‘That they walk among us. Teach our children. Inscrutable. Brass-faced.’

‘Can I ask you how it is being in that thing?’ ‘Thing?’ ‘You know. Don’t play dumb and embarrass me.’ ‘A wheelchair is a thing which: you prefer it or do not prefer, it is no distance. Difference. You are in the chair even if you do not prefer it. So it is better to prefer, no?’ ‘I can’t believe I’m drinking. There’s all these people in the House they’re always worried they’re going to drink. I’m in there for drugs. I’ve never had more than a beer ever in my life. I only came in here to throw up from getting mugged. Some street guy was offering to be a witness and he would not leave me alone. I didn’t even have any money. I came in here to

vomit.’

‘I know what it is you are meaning.’

‘What’s your name one more time?’ ‘I call myself Rémy.’ ‘This is a beautiful thing as Hester would say. I don’t feel horrid anymore. Ramy I feel better than I feel, felt in ever so I don’t know how long. This is like novocaine of the soul. I’m like: why was I spending all that time doing one-hitters when this is really what I call feeling better.’ ‘Us, I do not take any drugs. I drink infrequently.’ ‘Well you’re making up for lost time I have to say.’ ‘When I drink I have many drinks. This is how it is for my people.’ ‘My mom won’t even have it in the house. She said it’s what made her father drive into concrete and wipe out his entire family. Which like I’m so tired of hearing it. I came in here — what is this place?’

‘This, it is Ryle’s Inman Square Club of Jazz. My wife is dying at home in my native province.’ ‘There’s this thing in the Big Book they make us every Sunday we have to drag ourselves out of bed at the absolute crack of dawn and sit in a circle and read out of it and half the people can barely even read and it’s excruciating to listen to!’ ‘You should make your voice lower, for in the hours of no jazz they enjoy low voices, coming in for quiet.’ ‘And there’s a thing about a car salesman trying to quit drinking, it’s about the they call it the insanity of the first one, drink — he comes in a bar for a sandwich and a glass of milk — are you hungry?’ ‘Non.’ ‘What am I saying I don’t have any money. I don’t even have my purse.

This stuff makes you stupid but it makes you feel quite a bit improved. He wasn’t thinking of a drink and then all of a sudden he thinks of a drink. This guy.’ ‘Out of a blue place, in one flashing instant.’ ‘Exactly. But the insanity is after all this time in hospitals and losing his business and his wife because of drinking he suddenly gets it into his head that one drink won’t hurt him if he puts it in a glass of milk.’ ‘Crazy in his head.’ ‘So when this absolutely reptilian character you saved me from by sitting down, rolling over, whatever. Sor -ry. When he says can he buy me a drink the book flashes in my mind and for sort of as it felt like a joke I ordered Kahlua and milk.’ ‘Me, I come in for nights I am tired, after the music has packed away, for the quiet. I use the telephone here as well, sometimes.’ ‘I mean even before the mugging I was walking along soberly deciding how to kill myself, so it seems a little silly to worry about drinking.’ ‘You have a certain expression of resemblance of my wife.’ ‘Your wife is dying. Jesus I’m sitting here laughing and your wife is dying. I think it’s that I haven’t felt decent in so freaking long, do you know what I’m saying? I’m not talking like good, I’m not talking like pleasure, I wouldn’t want to go overboard with this thing, but at least at like zero, even, what do they call it Feeling No Pain.’

‘I know of this meaning. I am spending a day to find someone I think my friends will kill, all the time I am awaiting the chance to betray my friends, and I come here and telephone to betray them and I see this bruised person who strongly resembles my wife. I think: Rémy, it is time for many drinks.’ ‘Well I think you’re nice. I think you just about saved my life. I’ve spent like nine weeks feeling so bad I wanted to just about kill myself, both getting high and not. Dr. Garton never mentioned this. He talked plenty about shock but he never even freaking mentioned Kahlua and milk.’ ‘Katherine, I will tell you a story about feeling so bad and saving a life. I do not know you but we are drunk together now, and will you hear this story?’ ‘It’s not about Hitting Bottom ingesting any sort of Substance and trying to Surrender, is it?’ ‘My people, we do not hit the bottoms of women. I am, shall we say, Swiss. My legs, they were lost in the teenage years being struck by a train.’ ‘That must have smarted.’ ‘I would have temptation to say you have no idea. But I am sensing you

have an idea of hurting.’ ‘You have no idea.’ ‘I am in early twenty years, without the legs. Many of my friends also:

without legs.’ ‘Must have been an awful train crash.’ ‘Also my own father: dead when his Kenbeck pacemaker came within range of a misdialed number of a cellular phone far away in Trois Rivières, in a freakish occurrence of tragedy.’ ‘My dad emotionally abandoned us and moved to Portland, which is in Oregon, with his therapist.’ ‘Also in this time, my Swiss nation, we are a strong people but not strong as a nation, surrounded by strong nations. There is much hatred of our neighbors, and unfairness.’ ‘It all started when my mom found a picture of his therapist in his wallet and goes “What’s that doing in here?” ’ ‘It is, for me, who I am weak, so painful to be without legs in the early twenty years. One feels grotesque to people; one’s freedom is restricted. I have no chances now for jobs in the mines of Switzerland.’

‘The Swiss have gold mines.’ ‘As you say. And much beautiful territory, which the stronger nations at the time of losing my legs committed paper atrocities to my nation’s land.’ ‘Frucking bastards.’ ‘It is a long story to the side of this story, but my part of the Swiss nation is in my time of no legs invaded and despoiled by stronger and evil hated and neighboring nations, who claim as in the Anschluss of Hitler that they are friends and are not invading the Swiss but conferring on us gifts of

alliance.’ ‘Total dicks.’ ‘It is to the side, but for my Swiss friends and myself without legs it is a dark period of injustice and dishonor, and of terrible pain. Some of my friends roll themselves off to fight against the invasion of paper, but me, I am too painful to care enough to fight. To me, the fight seems without point: our own Swiss leaders have been subverted to pretend the invasion is alliance; we very few legless young cannot repel an invasion; we cannot even make our government admit that there is an invasion. I am weak and, in pain, see all is pointless: I do not see the meaning of choosing to fight.’ ‘You’re depressed is what you are.’ ‘I see no point and do no work and belong to nothing; I am alone. I think of death. I do nothing but frequently drink, roll around the despoiled countryside, sometimes dodging falling projectiles of invasion, thinking of death, bemoaning the depredation of the Swiss land, in great pain. But it is myself I bemoan. I have pain. I have no legs.’ ‘I’m Identifying every step of the way with you, Ramy. Oh God, what did I say?’ ‘And us, our Swiss countryside is very hilly. The fauteuil, it is hard to push up many hills, then one is braking with all the might to keep from flying out of control on the downhill.’ ‘Sometimes it’s like that walking, too.’ ‘Katherine, I am, in English, moribund. I have no legs, no Swiss honor, no leaders who will fight the truth. I am not alive, Katherine. I roll from skiing lodge to tavern, frequently drinking, alone, wishing for my death, locked inside my pain in the heart. I wish for my death but have not the courage to make actions to cause death. I twice try to roll over the side of a tall Swiss hill but cannot bring myself. I curse myself for cowardice and

inutile. I roll about, hoping to be hit by a vehicle of someone else, but at the last minute rolling out of the path of vehicles on Autoroutes, for I am unable to will my death. The more pain in my self, the more I am inside the self and cannot will my death, I think. I feel I am chained in a cage of the self, from the pain. Unable to care or choose anything outside it. Unable to see anything or feel anything outside my pain.’ ‘The billowing shaped black sailing wing. I am so totally Identifying it’s not even funny.’ ‘My story it was one day at the top of a hill I had drunkenly labored for many minutes to roll to the crest, and looking out over the downhill slope I see a small hunched woman in what I am thinking is a metal hat far below at the bottom, attempting the crossing of the Swiss Provincial Autoroute at the bottom, in the middle of the Provincial Autoroute, this woman, standing and staring in the terror at one of the hated long and shiny many-wheeled trucks of our paper invaders, bearing down upon her at high speeds in the hurry to come despoil part of the Swiss land.’ ‘Like one of those Swiss metal helmets? Is she scrambling crazily to get out of the way?’ ‘She is standing transfixed with horror of the truck — identically as I had been motionless and transfixed by horror inside me, unable to move, like one of the many moose of Switzerland transfixed by the headlights of one of the many logging-trucks of Switzerland. The sunlight is reflecting madly on her metal hat as she is shaking her head in terror and she is clutching her — pardon me, but her female bosom, as if the heart of her would explode from the terror.’ ‘And you think, Oh fuck me, just great, another horrible thing I’m going to have stand here and witness and then go feel pain over.’ ‘But the great gift of this time today at the hilltop above the Provincial Autoroute is I do not think of me. I do not know this woman or love her, but without thinking I release my brake and I am careening down the downhill, almost wipe-outing numerous places on the bumps and rocks of the hill’s slope, and as we say in Switzerland I schüssch at enough speed to reach my wife and sweep her up into the chair and roll across the Provincial Autoroute into the embanking ahead just ahead of the nose of the truck, which had not slowed.’

‘Hang me upside-down and fuck me in both ears. You pulled yourself out of a clinical depression by being a freaking hero.’ ‘We rolled and tumbled down the embanking on the Autoroute’s distant side, causing my chair to tip and injuring a stump of me, and knocking away her thick metal hat.’ ‘You saved somebody’s freaking life, Ramy. I’d give my left nut for a chance to pull myself out of the shadow of the wing that way, Ramy.’ ‘You are not seeing this. It was this frozen with the terror woman, she saved my life. For this saved my life. This moment broke my moribund chains, Katherine. In one instant and without thought I was allowed to choose something as more important than my thinking of my life. Her, she allowed this will without thinking. She with one blow broke the chains of the cage of pain at my half a body and nation. When I had crawled back to my fauteuil and placed my tipped fauteuil aright and I was again seated I realized the pain of inside no longer pained me. I became, then, adult. I was permitted leaving the pain of my own loss and pain at the top of Switzerland’s Mont Papineau.’ ‘Because suddenly you gazed at the girl without her metal hat and felt a rush of passion and fell madly in love enough to get married and roll together off into the s—’ ‘She had no skull, this woman. Later I am learning she had been among the first Swiss children of southwestern Switzerland to become born without a skull, from the toxicities in association of our enemy’s invasion on paper. Without the confinement of the metal hat the head hung from the shoulders like the half-filled balloon or empty bag, the eyes and oral cavity greatly distended from this hanging, and sounds exiting this cavity which were difficult to listen.’ ‘But still, something about her moved you to fall madly in love. Her gratitude and humility and acceptance and that kind of quiet dignity really horribly handic— birth-defected people usually have.’ ‘It was not mad. I had already chosen. The unclamping of the brakes of the fauteuil and schüssch ing to the Autoroute — this was the love. I had chosen loving her above my lost legs and this half a self.’ ‘And she looked at your missing limbs and didn’t even see them and chose you right back — result: passionate love.’

‘There was for this woman in the embanking no possible choosing.

Without the containing helmet all energies in her were committed to the shaping of the oral cavity in a shape that allowed breathing, which was a task of great enormity, for her head it had also neither muscles nor nerves.

The special hat had found itself dented in upon one side, and I had not the ability to shape my wife’s head into a shape that I could stuff the sac of her head into the hat, and I chose to carry her over my shoulders in a high- speed rolling to the nearest Swiss hôpital specializing in deformities of grave nature. It was there I learned of the other troubles.’ ‘I think I’d like a couple more Kahlua and milks.’ ‘There was the trouble of the digestive tracking. There were seizures also. There were progressive decays of circulation and vessel, which calls itself restenosis. There were the more than standard accepted amounts of eyes and cavities in many different stages of development upon different parts of the body. There were the fugue states and rages and frequency of coma. She had wandered away from a public institution of Swiss charitable care. Worst for choosing to love was the cerebro-and-spinal fluids which dribbled at all times from her distending oral cavity.’ ‘And but your passionate love for each other dried up her cerebro-spinal drool and ended the seizures and there were certain hats she looked so good in it just about drove you mad with love? Is that it?’

‘Garçon!’ ‘Is the madly-in-love part coming up?’ ‘Katherine, I had too believed there was no love without passion.

Pleasure. This was part of the pain of the no legs, this fear that for me there would be no passion. The fear of the pain is many times worse than the pain of the pain, n’est ce —?’ ‘Ramy I don’t think I’m like thinking this is a feel-better story at all.’ ‘I tried to leave the soft-head and cerebro-spinally incontinent woman, m’épouse au future, behind at the hôpital of grave nature and to wheel off into my new life of uncaged acceptance and choice. I would roll into the fraying of battle for my despoiled nation, for now I saw the point not of winning but of choosing merely to fight. But I had travelled no more than several revolutions of the fauteuil when the old despair of before choosing this no-skull creature rose up once again inside me. Within several revolutions there was no point again and no legs, and only fear of the pain

that made me not choose. Pain rolled me backwards to this woman, my wife.’ ‘You’re saying this is love? This isn’t love. I’ll know when it’s love because of the way it’ll feel. It won’t be about spinal fluid and despair believe you me, Bucko. It’ll be about your eyes meet across someplace and both your knees give out and from that second forward you know you’re not going to be alone and in hell. You’re not half the guy I started to think you might have been, Ray.’ ‘I had to face: I had chosen. My choice, this was love. I had chosen I think the way out of the chains of the cage. I needed this woman. Without her to choose over myself, there was only pain and not choosing, rolling drunkenly and making fantasies of death.’ ‘This is love? It’s like you were chained to her. It’s like if you tried to get on with your own life the pain of the clinical depression came back. It’s like the clinical depression was a shotgun nudging you down the wedding aisle. Was there a wedding aisle? Could she even get down a wedding aisle?’ ‘My wife’s wedding helmet was of the finest nickel mined and molded by friends in the nickel mines of southwest Switzerland. Each of us, we were rolled down the aisle in special conveyings. Hers with special pans and drains, for the fluids. It was the happiest day ever for me, since the train. The cleric asked did I choose this woman. There was a long time of silence. My whole very being came to a knifelike point in that instant, Katherine, my hand holding tenderly the hook of my wife.’ ‘Hook? As in hand-hook?’ ‘I have been knowing since the wedding night her death was coming.

Her restenosis of the heart, it is irreversible. Now my Gertraude, she has been in a comatose and vegetating state for almost one year. This coma has no exit, it is said. The advanced Jaarvik IX Exterior Artificial Heart is said by the public-aid cardiologists of Switzerland to be her chance for life. With it they say my wife can live for many more years in a comatose and vegetated state.’ ‘So you’re down here like pressing your case to the Jaarvik IX people at Harvard or wherever.’ ‘It is for her I betray my friends and cell, the cause of my nation, which now that victory and independence of the neighbors is possible I am

betraying it.’ ‘You’re spying and betraying Switzerland to try and keep alive somebody with a hook and spinal fluid and no skull in an irreversible coma? And I thought I was disturbed. You’re making me totally reorient my idea of disturbed, mister.’ ‘I am not telling for disturbing you, poor Katherine. I am telling of pain and saving a life, and love.’ ‘Well, Ray, far be it from far for me, but that’s not love: that’s low self- esteem and self-abuse and Settling For Less, choosing a coma over your comrades. Assuming you’re even not totally lying to get me into the hay or some fucked-up disturbed sicko shit like that.’ ‘This —’ ‘Which I’ve got to tell you, saying I remind you of her isn’t exactly the way to sweep my feet off, you know what I’m saying here?’ ‘This is what is hard to tell. To ask any person to see. It is no choice. It is not choosing Gertraude over the A.F.R., my companions. Over the causes.

Choosing Gertraude to love as my wife was necessary for the others, these other choices. Without the choice of her life there are no other choices. I tried leaving at the commencement. I got only very few revolutions of the fauteuil.’ ‘Sounds more like a gun to your head than a choice. If you can’t choose the other way, there’s no choice.’ ‘No, but this choice, Katherine: I made it. It chains me, but the chains are of my choice. The other chains: no. The others were the chains of not choosing.’ ‘Do you have a twin that just came in and sat down just to the left of you but is also like about one-third overlapping on you?’ ‘You are merely drunk. This will happened quickly if unused to alcohol.

Nausea often accompanies this. Do not be alarmed if there is visual doubling, losing balance, and nausea of the stomach.’ ‘The price of a like complete normal human digestive tract. I used to throw up every morning without drinking. Rain and shine both.’ ‘You think there is no love without the pleasure, the no-choice compelling of passion.’ ‘I appreciate the drinks and all, but I don’t think I’m going to like memorize a lecture on love from somebody who marries somebody with

cerebrofluid spewing out of their mouth, no offense intended.’ ‘As you say. My opinions are only that the love you of this country speak of yields none of the pleasure you seek in love. This whole idea of the pleasure and good feelings being what to choose. To give yourself away to. That all choice for you leads there — this pleasure of not choosing.’ ‘Don’t grudge me a little feeling good, of all people, Ray, asshole, shit-

puddle, Swisshead.’ ‘…’ ‘Is it better to throw up right away or try to wait before you throw up, Mr. Drinking Expert?’ ‘I am thinking: what if I were to claim we might leave and I could lead you only three streets from here and show you something with this promise: you would feel more good feeling and pleasure than ever before for you: you would never again feel sorrow or pity or the pain of the chains and cage of never choosing. I am thinking of this offer: you would reply to me what?’ ‘I voot make ze hreply zat I’ve heard that one before, asshole, and from… from guys with a little more to them south of the waist, if you

follow.’ ‘I do not understand.’ ‘What I’d reply is I’m a shitty lay. As in sex-partner. I’ve only ever been sexual twice, and both times it was awful, and Brad Anderson when I called and said why didn’t you call again Brad Anderson you know what he said?

He said I was a lousy lay and my snatch was sure awful big for somebody with such a little flat ass, Brad Anderson said.’

‘No. No. You are not understanding.’ ‘That’s just what I said.’ ‘You would say No Thank You, you are saying, but this is because you

would not believe my claim.’ ‘…’ ‘If my claim, it was true, you would say yes, Katherine, no?’

‘…’ ‘Yes?’

‘Now you’re not on your side anymore, Hal, I can see. When you’re on your back you don’t have a shadow.’

‘…’

‘Hey Hal?’ ‘Yes, Mario.’ ‘I’m sorry if you’re sad, Hal. You seem sad.’ ‘I smoke high-resin Bob Hope in secret by myself down in the Pump Room off the secondary maintenance tunnel. I use Visine and mint toothpaste and shower with Irish Spring to hide it from almost everyone.

Only Pemulis knows the true extent.’ ‘…’ ‘I’m not the one C.T. and the Moms want gone. I’m not the one they suspect. Pemulis publicly dosed his opponent at Port Washington. It was impossible to miss. The kid was a devout Mormon. The dose was impossible to miss. Sales of Visine bottles of pre-adolescent urine during quarterly tests have been noted, it turns out, and classed as a Pemulis

production.’ ‘Selling Visine bottles?’ ‘I’d be immune to expulsion anyway, obviously, as the Moms’s relative.

But I’m suspected of nothing other than ill-considered moral paralysis out there on I. Day. My urine and Axhandle’s urine are just to establish a context of objectivity for Pemulis’s urine. It’s Pemulis they want. I’m almost positive they’re going to give Pemulis the Shoe by the end of the term. I don’t know whether Pemulis knows this or not.’ ‘Hey Hal?’ ‘Normally they’re after steroids, endocrine synthetics, mild ’drines, when they test. The O.N.A.N.T.A. guy gave indications this one’ll be a full- spectrum scan. Gas chromatography followed by electron-bombardment, with spectrometer readings on the resultant mass-fragments. The real Mc-

Coy. The kind the Show uses.’ ‘Hey Hal?’ ‘Mike stands there and says what if hypothetically somebody was down- wind from substances and got exposed and so on. Claimed vague memories of a poppy-seed bagel. Not at all Pemulis’s normal rococo type of lie. This one had a kind of weary earnestness. The guy in the blazer said he’d go ahead and give us thirty days before a full-spectrum scan. Mike had pointed out that there was an enormous lady from Moment due to arrive and snuffle around, making it a really unfortunate time for any outside-chance

inadvertent scandals for anybody. It was like the guy needed hardly any prodding to give us time to clean out the system. O.N.A.N.T.A. doesn’t want to catch anybody, really. Good clean fun and so on and so forth.’ ‘…’ ‘The ingenious layer to the lie was that the guy thought the thirty days’ grace was for Pemulis. That it was what Pemulis needed. Pemulis could pass a urine test hanging upside down in a high wind. Guy watching or not.

He has a whole unpleasant catheterization technique you don’t want to hear about. He’s checked it. And Tenuates are apparently the Indy-type car of ’drines, he says; his own urine can be all innocent and pale with two days’ warning, as long as he stays off the Bob.’ ‘…’ ‘Booboo, the thirty days was actually for me, and Mike let me stand there with my Unit out and not say anything while he sold the urologist land and magazine subscriptions and Ginsu knives. He did it for me, and I’m not

even the one they want.’ ‘You can tell me whatever you said.’ ‘What I do in secret, Boo, Mike says no more than thirty days to get it all out for sure. Cranberry juice, Calli tea, vinegar in water. Plus or minus a couple days. The Bob Hope I smoke and hide, Boo, it’s fat-soluble. It stays in there, in the body’s fat.’ ‘Mrs. Clarke told Bridget the human brain is high in fat, Bridget said.’ ‘Mario, if I get caught. If I come up dirty-urined in front of O.N.A.N.T.A., what could C.T. do? It’s not just that I’d lose my even year in 18’s. He’d have to give me the Shoe if he’d brought O.N.A.N.T.A. into it.

And what about Himself’s memory? I’m directly related to Himself. Not to mention Orin. And meanwhile here’s this Moment lady lumbering around looking for family linen.’ ‘Troeltsch says she all she wants to do is soften Orin’s profile.’ ‘The hideous thing is how brightly it’d come out, if I flunk a urine.

E.T.A.’ll be publicly hurt. Hence Himself’s memory, hence Himself.’ ‘…’ ‘And it’d kill the Moms, Mario. It’d be a terrible kertwang on the Moms.

Not so much the Hope. The secrecy of it. That I hid it from her. That she’ll

feel I had to hide it from her.’ ‘Hey Hal?’

‘Something terrible will happen if she finds out I hid it from her.’ ‘Thirty days is one calendar month of Calli tea and juice, you’re saying.’ ‘Of tea and vinegar and total abstinence. Of no substances whatsoever.

Of abrupt and total withdrawal while I try to justify my seed at the WhataBurger and maybe get offered up to Wayne at the Fundraiser. And

then your birthday in two weeks.’ ‘Hey Hal?’ ‘Jesus and then the SAT’s in December, I’ll have to finish prepping for the Boards and then take the Boards while still in abrupt withdrawal.’ ‘You’ll get a perfect score. Everybody’s betting you get a perfect score.

I’ve heard them.’ ‘Marvelous. That’s just exactly what I need to hear.’ ‘Hey Hal?’ ‘And of course you’re hurt, Boo, that I’ve tried to hide all of it from

you.’ ‘I’m zero percent hurt, Hal.’ ‘And of course you’re wondering why I didn’t just tell you when of course you knew anyway, knew something, the times hanging upside-down in the weight room with a forehead Lyle didn’t even want to get near. You sitting there letting me say I was just really really tired and nightmare- ridden.’ ‘I feel like you always tell me the truth. You tell me when it’s right to.’ ‘Marvelous.’ ‘I feel like you’re the only one who knows when it’s right to tell. I can’t know for you, so why should I be hurt.’ ‘Be a fucking human being for once, Boo. I room with you and I hid it from you and let you worry and be hurt that I was trying to hide it.’ ‘I wasn’t hurt. I don’t want you to be sad.’ ‘You can get hurt and mad at people, Boo. News-flash at almost fucking nineteen, kid. It’s called being a person. You can get mad at somebody and it doesn’t mean they’ll go away. You don’t have to put on a Moms-act of total trust and forgiveness. One liar’s enough.’ ‘You’re scared your pee might still flunk after one calendar month.’ ‘Jesus it’s like talking to a big poster of some smily-faced guy. Are you in there?’

‘And you can’t use a Visine bottle of pee because the man will be right there looking at your penis, and Trevor and Pemulis’s penises.’ ‘. …’ ‘The sun’s thinking about coming up in the window. You can see it.’ ‘It’s been like forty hours without Bob Hope and already I’m bats inside and I can’t sleep without more of the horror-show dreams. I feel like I’m stuck halfway down a chimney.’ ‘You beat Ortho, and your toothache’s gone.’ ‘Pemulis and Axhandle say a month’ll be tit. Pemulis’s only concern is is this DMZ he got for the WhataBurger detectable. He goes to the library 321 and pores. He’s fully alert and functional. It seems different with me, Boo. I feel a hole. It’s going to be a huge hole, in a month. A way more than

Hal-sized hole.’ ‘So what do you think you should do?’ ‘And the hole’s going to get a little bigger every day until I fly apart in different directions. I’ll fly apart in midair. I’ll fly apart in the Lung, or at Tucson at 200 degrees in front of all these people who knew Himself and think I’m different. Whom I’ve lied to, and liked it. It’ll all come out

anyway, clean pee or no.’ ‘Hey Hal?’ ‘And it’ll kill her. I know it will. It will kill her dead, Booboo, I’m

afraid.’

‘Hey Hal? What are you going to do?’

‘…’ ‘Hal?’ ‘Booboo, I’m up on my elbow again. Tell me what you think I should

do.’ ‘Me tell you?’ ‘I’m just two big aprick ears right here, Boo. Listening. Because I do not know what to do.’ ‘Hal, if I tell you the truth, will you get mad and tell me be a fucking?’

‘I trust you. You’re smart, Boo.’

‘Then Hal?’ ‘Tell me what I should do.’ ‘I think you just did it. What you should do. I think you just did.’

‘…’ ‘Do you see what I mean?’

17 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

In Don Gately’s medical absence, Johnette F. had worked five straight night shifts on Dream Duty and was in the front office just after 0830 writing up the previous night in the Log, trying to think of synonyms for boredom and periodically dipping a finger in her scalding coffee to stay awake, plus listening to distant toilets flush and showers hiss and residents clunking sleepily around in the kitchen and dining room and everything like that, when somebody all of a sudden starts knocking at the House’s front door, which meant that the person was like a newcomer or stranger, since people in the Ennet House recovery community know that the front door’s unlocked at 0800 and always completely open to all but the Law as of 0801.

The residents these days all know not to answer any knocks at the door themselves.

So Johnette F. at first thought it might be some more of those kind of 322 police that wore suits and ties, come to depose more residents as witnesses on the Lenz-and-Gately-and-Canadian fuck-up and everything like that; and Johnette got out the clipboard with the names of all the residents with unresolved legal issues who needed to be put upstairs out of sight before any police were let on the premises. A couple of the residents on the list were in the dining room in full view, eating cereal and smoking.

Johnette carried the clipboard as a kind of emblem of authority as she went to the window by the front door to check out the knocking party and everything like that.

And but the kid at the door there was no way he was police or court- personnel, and Johnette opened the unlocked door and let him in, not bothering to explain that nobody had to knock. It was an upscale kid about Johnette’s own age or slightly less, coughing against the foyer’s pall of A.M. smoke, saying he wanted to speak in comparative private to someone in whatever passed here for authority, he said. This kid he had the sort of cool aluminum sheen of an upscale kid, a kid with either a weird tan or a

weird windburn on top of a tan, and just the whitest Nike hightops Johnette had ever seen, and ironed jeans, as in with like a crease down the front, and a weird woolly-white jacket with A.T.E. in red up one sleeve and in gray up the other, and slicked-back dark hair that was wet, as in showered and not oil, and had half frozen, the hair, in the early outside cold and was standing up straight and frozen in front, making his dark face look small. His ears looked inflamed from the cold. Johnette appraised him coolly, digging at her ear with a pinkie. She watched the boy’s face as David Krone came scuttling over like a crab and blinked at the boy upside-down a few times and scuttled around and up the stairs, his forehead clunking against each stair. It was pretty obvious the boy wasn’t any resident’s like homey or boyfriend come to give somebody a ride to work or like that. The way the boy looked and stood and talked and everything like that radiated high- maintenance upkeep and privilege and schools where nobody carried weapons, pretty much a whole planet of privilege away from the planet of Johnette Marie Foltz of South Chelsea and then the Right Honorable Edmund F. Heany Facility for Demonstrably Incorrigible Girls down in Brockton; and in Pat’s office, with the door only half shut, Johnette gave her face the blandly hostile expression she wore around upscale boys with no tatts and all their teeth that outside of NA wouldn’t have interest in her or might view her lack of front teeth and nose-pin as evidence of they were like better than her and like that, somehow. It emerged this kid didn’t seem like he had enough emotional juice to be interested in judging anybody or even noticing them, however. His talking had a burbly, oversalivated quality Johnette knew all too wicked well, the quality of somebody who’d just lately put down the pipe and/or bong. The kid’s hair was starting to melt in the heat of Pat’s office and drip and settle on his head like a slashed tire, causing that his face got bigger. He looked a little like what the fourth Mrs.

Foltz had called green around the gills. The boy stood there very straight with his hands behind his back and said he lived nearby and had for some time been interested in sort of an idle, largely speculative way in considering maybe dropping in on some sort of Substance Anonymous meeting and everything like that, basically as just something to do, the exact same roundabout Denial shit as persons without teeth, and said but he didn’t know where any were, any Meetings, or when, and but knew The

323 Ennet House was nearby, that dealt directly with Anonymous organizations of this sort, and was wondering whether he maybe could have — or borrow and Xerox and promptly return by either eor fax or First-Class mail, whichever they might prefer — some sort of relevant meeting schedule. He apologized for intruding and said but he didn’t know whom else to call. The sort of guy like Ewell and Day and snotty look-right- through-you-if-you-weren’t-a-fucking-covergirl Ken E. that knew how to long-divide and say whom but didn’t even know how to look up shit in the Yellow Pages.

Much later, in subsequent events’ light, Johnette F. would clearly recall the sight of the boy’s frozen hair slowly settling, and how the boy had said whom, and the sight of clear upscale odor-free saliva almost running out over his lower lip as he fought to pronounce the word without swallowing.

324

Technical interviewers under Chief of Unspecified Services R. (‘the G.’) 325 Tine really do do this, bring a portable high-watt lamp and plug it in and adjust its neck so the light shines down directly on the face of the interview’s subject, whose homburg and shade-affording eyebrows had been removed by polite but emphatic request. And it was this, the harsh light on her fully exposed post-Marxist face, more than any kind of tough noir -informed grilling from R. Tine Jr. and the other technical interviewer, that prompted M.I.T. A.B.D.-Ph.D. Molly Notkin, fresh off the N.N.Y.C. high-speed rail, seated in the Sidney Peterson–shaped directorial chair amid dropped luggage in her co-op’s darkened and lock-dickied living room, to spill her guts, roll over, eat cheese, sing like a canary, tell everything she 326believed she knew: — Molly Notkin tells the U.S.O.U.S. operatives that her understanding of the après-garde Auteur J. O. Incandenza’s lethally entertaining Infinite Jest (V or VI) is that it features Madame Psychosis as some kind of maternal instantiation of the archetypal figure Death, sitting naked, corporeally gorgeous, ravishing, hugely pregnant, her hideously deformed face either veiled or blanked out by undulating computer-generated squares of color or anamorphosized into unrecognizability as any kind of face by the camera’s apparently very strange and novel lens, sitting there nude, explaining in very simple childlike language to whomever the film’s camera represents

that Death is always female, and that the female is always maternal. I.e. that the woman who kills you is always your next life’s mother. This, which Molly Notkin said didn’t make too much sense to her either, when she heard it, was the alleged substance of the Death-cosmology Madame Psychosis was supposed to deliver in a lalating monologue to the viewer, mediated by the very special lens. She may or may not have been holding a knife during this monologue, and the film’s big technical hook (the Auteur’s films always involved some sort of technical hook) involved some very 327 unusual kind of single lens on the Bolex H32’s turret, and it was unquestionably an f/x that Madame Psychosis looked pregnant, because the real Madame Psychosis had never been visibly pregnant, Molly Notkin had 328 seen her naked, and you can always tell if a woman’s ever carried 329anything past the first trimester if you look at her naked. — Molly Notkin tells them that Madame Psychosis’s own mother had killed herself in a truly ghastly way with an ordinary kitchen garbage disposal on the evening of Thanksgiving Day in the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, four-odd months before the film’s Auteur himself had killed himself, also with a kitchen appliance, also ghastlyly, which she says though any Lincoln-Kennedy-type connections between the two suicides will have to be ferreted out by the interviewers on their own, since as far as Molly Notkin knew the two different parents didn’t even know of each other’s existence. — That the lethal cartridge’s digital Bolex H32 camera — already a Rube-Goldbergesque amalgam of various improvements and digital adaptations to the already modification-heavy classic Bolex H16 Rex 5 — a Canadian line, by the way, favored throughout his whole career by the Auteur because its turret could accept three different C-mount lenses and adapters — that Infinite Jest (V) or (VI)’s had been fitted with an extremely strange and extrusive kind of lens, and lay during filming on either the floor or like a cot or bed, the camera, with Madame Psychosis as the Death- Mother figure inclined over it, parturient and nude, talking down to it — in both senses of the word, which from a critical perspective would introduce into the film a kind of synesthetic double-entendre involving both the aural and visual perspectives of the subjective camera — explaining to the camera as audience-synecdoche that this was why mothers were so

obsessively, consumingly, drivenly, and yet somehow narcissistically loving of you, their kid: the mothers are trying frantically to make amends for a murder neither of you quite remember. — Molly Notkin tells them she could be far more helpful and forth- comingly detailed if only they’d switch that beastly lamp off or train it someplace else, which is a brass-faced falsehood and dismissed as such by R. Tine Jr., and so the light stays right on Molly Notkin’s glabrous unhappy face. — That Madame Psychosis and the film’s Auteur had not been sexually enmeshed, and for reasons beyond the fact that the Auteur’s belief in a finite world-total of available erections rendered him always either impotent or guilt-ridden. That in fact Madame Psychosis had loved and been sexually enmeshed only with the Auteur’s son, who, though Molly Notkin never encountered him personally and Madame Psychosis had taken care never to speak ill of him, was clearly as thoroughgoing a little rotter as one would find down through the whole white male canon of venery, moral cowardice, emotional chicanery, and rot. — That Madame Psychosis had been present neither at the Auteur’s suicide nor at his funeral. That she’d missed the funeral because her passport had expired. That nor had Madame Psychosis been present at the reading of the late Auteur’s will, despite the fact that she was one of the beneficiaries. That Madame Psychosis had never mentioned the fate or present disposition of the unreleased cartridge entitled either Infinite Jest (V) or Infinite Jest (VI), and had described it only from the perspective of the experience of performing in it, nude, and had never seen it, but had a hard time believing it was even entertaining, let alone lethally entertaining, and tended to believe it had represented little more than the thinly veiled cries of a man at the very terminus of his existential tether — the Auteur having apparently been extremely close to his own mother, in childhood — and had no doubt been recognized as such by the Auteur — who though not exactly the psychic sea’s steadiest keel had been in many respects an acute reader and critic of film, and would have been able to distinguish the real filmic McCoy from pathetic cries veiled as film no matter how wildly his nautical compass was spinning around, on its tether, and would in all probability have destroyed the Master Print of the failed piece of art, the same way he’d reportedly destroyed the first four or five failed attempts at

the same piece, which pieces had admittedly featured actresses of lesser mystique and allure. — That the Auteur’s funeral had purportedly taken place in the L’Islet Province of Nouveau Québec, the birth-province of the Auteur’s widow, featuring an interrment and not a cremation. — That far be it from her to tell the U.S. Office of Unspecified Services its business, but why not simply go to J.O.I.’s widow and verify directly the existence and location of the purported cartridge? —… — That it seemed pretty unlikely to her, Molly Notkin, that the Auteur’s widow had any connections to any anti-American groups, cells, or movements, no matter what the files on her indiscreet youth might suggest, since from everything Molly Notkin’s heard the woman didn’t have much interest in any agendas larger than her own individually neurotic agendas, even though she came on to Madame Psychosis all sweet and solicitous.

That Madame Psychosis had confessed to Molly Notkin that the widow struck her as very possibly Death incarnate — her constant smile the rictal smile of some kind of thanatoptic figure — and that it had struck Madame Psychosis as bizarre that it was she, Madame Psychosis, whom the Auteur kept casting as various feminine instantiations of Death when he had the real thing right under his nose, and eminently photogenic to boot, the widow-to-be, apparently a real restaurant-silencer-type beauty even in her late forties. — That the Auteur had stopped ingesting distilled spirits as Madame Psychosis’s personal condition for consenting to appear in what she knew to be her but did not know to be the J.O.I.’s final film-cartridge, and that the 330 Auteur had, apparently, incredibly, kept his side of the bargain — possibly because he’d been so deeply moved at M.P.’s consent to appear before the camera again even after her terrible accident and deformation and the little rotter of a son’s despicable abandonment of the relationship under the excuse of accusing Madame Psychosis of being sexually enmeshed with their — here Molly Notkin said that she of course had meant to say his — father, the Auteur. And that the Auteur had apparently remained alcohol-free for the whole next three-and-a-half months, from

Xmas of the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad to 1 April of the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, the date of his suicide. — That the completely secret and hidden substance-abuse problem, the one that had now landed Madame Psychosis in an elite private dependency- treatment facility so elite that not even M.P.’s closest friends knew where it was beyond knowing only that it was someplace far, very far away, that the abuse-problem could have been nothing but a consequence of the terrible guilt Madame Psychosis felt over the Auteur’s suicide, and constituted a clear unconscious compulsion to punish herself with the same sort of substance-abuse activity she had coerced the Auteur into stopping, merely substituting narcotics for Wild Turkey, which Molly Notkin could attest was some very gnarly-tasting liquor indeed. — No, that Madame Psychosis’s guilt over the Auteur’s felo de self had nothing to do with the purportedly lethal Infinite Jest (V) or (VI), which as far as Madame Psychosis had determined from the filming itself was little more than an olla podrida of depressive conceits strung together with flashy lensmanship and perspectival novelty. That, no, rather the consuming guilt had been over the condition that the Auteur suspend the ingestion of spirits, which it turned out, M.P. had claimed in deluded hindsight, had been all that was keeping the man’s tether ravelled, the ingestion, such that without it he was unable to withstand the psychic pressures that pushed him over the edge into what Madame Psychosis said she and the Auteur had sometimes referred to as quote ‘self-erasure.’ — That it did not strike her, Molly Notkin, as improbable that the special limited-edition turkey-shaped gift bottle of Wild Turkey Blended Whiskey-brand distilled spirits with the cerise velveteen gift-ribbon around its neck with the bow tucked under its wattles on the kitchen counter next to the microwave oven before which the Auteur’s body had been found so ghastlyly inclined had been placed there by the spouse’s widow-to-be — who may well have been enraged by the fact that the Auteur had never been willing to give up spirits quote ‘for her’ but had apparently been willing to give them up quote ‘for’ Madame Psychosis and her nude appearance in his final opus. — That the by all reports exceptionally attractive Madame Psychosis had suffered an irreparable facial trauma on the same Thanksgiving Day that her mother had killed herself with a kitchen-appliance, leaving her

(Madame Psychosis) hideously and improbably deformed, and that her membership in the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed’s 13- Step self-help organization was no kind of metaphor or ruse. — That the intolerable stresses leading to the Auteur’s self-erasure had probably way less to do with film or digital art — this Auteur’s anti- confluential approach to the medium having always struck Molly Notkin as being rather aloof and cerebrally technical, to say nothing of naïvely post- Marxist in its self-congratulatory combination of anamorphic fragmentation 331 and anti-Picaresque narrative stasis — or with having allegedly spawned some angelic monster of audience-gratification — anyone with a nervous system who watched much of his oeuvre could see that fun or entertainment was pretty low on the late filmmaker’s list of priorities — but rather much more likely to do with the fact that his widow-to-be was engaging in sexual enmeshments with just about everything with a Y-chromo-some, and had been for what sounded like many years, including possibly with the Auteur’s son and Madame’s craven lover, as a child, seeing as it sounded like the little rotter had enough malcathected issues with his mother to keep all of Vienna humming briskly for quite some time. — That thus — with the Promethean-guilt angle on the Auteur’s suicide cast into serious doubt — there was little question in A.B.D.-Dr. Notkin’s mind that the entire perfect-entertainment-as-Liebestod myth surrounding the purportedly lethal final cartridge was nothing more than a classic illustration of the antinomically schizoid function of the post-industrial capitalist mechanism, whose logic presented commodity as the escape- from-anxieties-of-mortality-which-escape-is-itself-psychologically-fatal, as detailed in perspicuous detail in M. Gilles Deleuze’s posthumous Incest and the Life of Death in Capitalist Entertainment, which she’d be happy to lend the figures standing up somewhere above the lamp’s white fire, one of them tapping something irritatingly against the lamp’s conic metal shade, if they’d promise to return it and not mark it up. — That — in response to respectful but pointed requests to keep the responses on some sort of factual track and spare them all the eggheaded abstractions — Madame Psychosis’s deforming trauma, in its combination of coincidence and malefic intention, had been like something right out of the Auteur’s most ghastly and unresolvable proto-incestuous disaster films,

e.g. The Night Wears a Sombrero, Dial C for Concupiscence, and The Unfortunate Case of Me. That Madame Psychosis, an only child, had been extremely and heart-warmingly close to her father, a low-pH chemist for a Kentucky reagent outfit, who’d apparently had an extremely close only- child and watching-movies-together-based relationship with his own mother and seemed to reenact the closeness with Madame Psychosis, taking her to movies on a near-daily basis, in Kentucky, and driving her all over the mid- South for various junior baton-twirling competitions while his wife, Madame Psychosis’s mother, a devoutly religious but wounded and neurasthenic woman with a fear of public spaces, stayed home on the family farm, canning preserves and seeing to the administration of the farm, etc. But that things had gotten first strange and then creepy as Madame Psychosis entered puberty, apparently; specifically the low-pH father had gotten creepy, seeming to behave as if Madame Psychosis were getting younger instead of older: taking her to increasingly child-rated films at the local Cineplex, refusing to acknowledge issues of menses or breasts, strongly discouraging dating, etc. Apparently issues were complicated by the fact that Madame Psychosis emerged from puberty as an almost freakishly beautiful young woman, especially in a part of the United States where poor nutrition and indifference to dentition and hygiene made physical beauty an extremely rare and sort of discomfiting condition, one in no way shared by Madame Psychosis’s toothless and fireplug-shaped mother, who said not a word as Madame Psychosis’s father interdicted everything from brassieres to Pap smears, addressing the nubile Madame Psychosis in progressively puerile baby-talk and continuing to use her childhood diminutive like Pookie or Putti as he attempted to dissuade her from accepting a scholarship to a Boston University whose Film and Film- Cartridge Studies Program was, he apparently maintained, full of quote Nasty Pootem Wooky Bam-Bams, unquote, whatever family-code pejorative this signified. — That — to cut to a chase which the interviewers’ hands-on-hip attitudes and replacement of the lamp’s bulb with a much higher wattage signified they’d very much like to see cut to — as is often the case, it wasn’t until Madame Psychosis got to college and gradually acquired some psychic distance and matter for emotional comparison that she even began to see how creepy her reagent-Daddy’s regression had been, and not until a

certain major-sport-star son’s autograph on a punctured football inspired more e-mailed suspicion and sarcasm than gratitude from home in KY that she began even to suspect that her lack of social life throughout puberty might have had as much to do with her Daddy’s intrusive discouragement as with her actaeonizing pubescent charms. That — pausing briefly to spell actaeonizing — the shit had hit the intergenerational psychic fan when Madame Psychosis brought the Auteur’s little rotter of a son home to the KY spread for the third time, for Thanksgiving in the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, and witnessing her Daddy’s infantilizing conduct of her and her mother’s wordless compulsive canning and cooking, not to mention the terrific tension that resulted when Madame Psychosis attempted to move some of the stuffed animals out of her room to make room for the Auteur’s son, in short experiencing her home and Daddy through the comparative filter of enmeshment with the Auteur’s son brought Madame Psychosis to the crisis that precipitates Speaking the Unspeakable; and that it had been at Thanksgiving Dinner, at midday on 24 November Y.T.M.P., when the low- pH Daddy began not only cutting up Madame Psychosis’s plate’s turkey for her but mashing it into puree between the tines of his fork, all under the raised comparative eyebrows of the Auteur’s son, that Madame Psychosis finally aired the unspoken question of why, with her now of legal age and living with a male and retired from childhood’s twirling and carving out an adult career on one and potentially two sides of the film-camera, did her own personal Daddy seem to feel she needed help to chew? Molly Notkin’s secondhand take on the emotional eruptions that ensued is not detailed, but she feels she can state w/ confidence that it’s plausibly a case of any kind of system that’s been under enormous silent pressure for some time, that when the system finally blows the accreted pressure’s such that it’s almost always a full-scale eruption. The low-pH Daddy’s enormous stress had apparently erupted, right there at the table, with his grown daughter’s white meat between his tines, in the confession that he’d been secretly, silently in love with Madame Psychosis from way, way back; that the love had been the real thing, pure, unspoken, genuflectory, timeless, impossible; that he never touched her, wouldn’t, nor ogle, less out of a horror of being the sort of mid-South father who touched and ogled than out of the purity of his doomed love for the little girl he’d escorted to the movies as proudly as any beau, daily; that the repression and disguisability of his pure love hadn’t

been all that hard when Madame Psychosis had been juvenile and sexless, but that at the onset of puberty and nubility the pressure’d become so great that he could compensate only by regressing the child mentally to an age of incontinence and pre-mashed meat, and that his awareness of how creepy his denial of her maturation must have seemed — even though neither the daughter nor mother, even now wordlessly chewing a candied yam, had remarked on it, the denial and creepiness, although the man’s beloved pointers were given to whimper and scratch at the door when the denial had gotten especially creepy (animals being way more sensitive than humans to emotional anomalies, in Molly Notkin’s experience) — had raised his internal limbic system’s pressure to near intolerable foot-kilo levels, and that he’d been hanging on for dear life for the past nigh on now a decade, but that now that he’d had to actually stand witness to the removal of Pooky and Urgle-Bear et al. from her ballerina-wallpapered room to make space for a nonrelated mature male whose physical vigor through the peephole the Daddy’d exerted every gram of trembling will he’d possessed trying not to drill the hole in the bathroom wall just above the mirror over the sink whose pipes made the wall behind the headboard of Madame Psychosis’s room’s bed sing and clunk, and through which, late at night — claiming to Mother a case of skitters from all the holiday nibbles — hunched atop the sink, every night since Madame Psychosis and the Auteur’s son had first arrived to sleep together in the unstuffed-animaled bed of a childhood through which he’d been all but tortured by the purity of his impossible love for the — — That it had been at this point that Madame Psychosis’s mother’s fork and then whole plate had clattered to the floor, and that amid the sounds of the pointers under the table fighting over that plate the mother’s own denial- system’s pressure blew, and she freaked, announcing publicly at the table that she and the Daddy had not once known each other as man and wife since Madame Psychosis had first menstruated, that she’d known something incredibly creepy was going on but had denied it, evacuated her suspicions and placed them under great pressure in the bell-jar of her own denial, because, she admits — admits is probably less accurate than something like keens or shrieks or jabbers — that her own father — an itinerant camp- meeting preacher — had molested her and her sister all through childhood, ogled and touched and worse, and that this had been why she’d married at

just sixteen, to escape, and that now it was clear to her that she’d married the exact same kind of monster, the kind who spurns his ordained mate and wants his daughter. — That she’d said maybe it was her, she, the mother, who was the monster, which if so she was tired of hiding it and appearing falsely before God and man. — That whereupon she’d reeled from her place and hurdled three pointers and run down to the Daddy’s acid-lab in the cellar, to disfigure herself with acid. — That the Daddy’d kept a world-class collection of various acids in Pyrex-brand flasks on wooden shelves down in the cellar. — That the Daddy, the rotter of a son, and finally a shock-slowed Madame Psychosis had all run down the stairs after the mother and hit the cellar just as the mother had removed the stopper of a Pyrex flask with an enormous half-eaten-away skull on the side, which along with the flaming scarlet piece of litmus paper afloat inside signified an incredibly low-pH and corrosive type of acid. — That Madame Psychosis’s name was in reality Lucille Duquette, and the Daddy’s name either Earl or Al Duquette of extreme southeast KY, way down near TN and VA. — That, despite the little rotter’s professions of self-recrimination for allowing the deformity to take place and claim that the swirling systems of guilt and horror and denial-informed forgiveness made a committed relationship with Madame Psychosis increasingly untenable, it didn’t take an expert in character-disorders and weaknesses to figure out why the fellow’d given Madame Psychosis the boot within months of the traumatic deformity, now did it. — That, right on the hysterical cusp where internalized rage can so easily shift to externalized rage, the mother had hurled the low-pH flask at the Daddy, who’d reflexively ducked; and that the rotter, one Orin, right behind, a former tennis champion with superb upper-body reflexes, had instinctively ducked also, leaving Madame Psychosis — dazed and bradykinetic from the sudden venting of so many high-pressure repressive family systems — open for a direct facial hit, resulting in the traumatic deformity. And that it had been everyone’s failure to press any charges that had liberated the mother from Southeast-KY custody and allowed her

access once again to her home’s kitchen, where, apparently despondent, she committed suicide by putting her extremities down the garbage disposal — first one arm and then, kind of miraculously if you think about it, the other 332arm.

The most distant and obscure Tuesday P.M. Meeting listed in the little 333 white Metro-Boston Recovery Options booklet the incisorless nostril- pierced girl down at The Ennet House had given him looked to be a males- only thing at 1730h. out in Natick, almost in Framingham, at something with a location on Route 27 that the M.B.R.O. booklet listed only as ‘Q.R.S.–32A.’ Hal, who had no last class period, rushed through P.M.’s, dispatching Shaw 1 and 3 by the time the regular P.M.’s were even warming up, then skipping left-leg circuits in the weight room, and was also forgoing tonight’s lemon chicken with potato rolls, all to blast out to Natick in time to check this anti-Substance-fellowship-Meeting business out. He wasn’t sure why, since it didn’t seem to be any kind of slobbering inability to abstain that was the problem — he hadn’t had so much as a mg. of a Substance of any kind since the 30-day urological condonation of last week.

The issue’s the horrific way his head’s felt, increasingly, since he abruptly 334 Abandoned All Hope. It wasn’t just nightmares and saliva. It was as if his head perched on the bedpost all night now and in the terribly early A.M. when Hal’s eyes snapped open immediately said Glad You’re UP I’ve Been Wanting To TALK To You and then didn’t let up all day, having at him like a well-revved chain-saw all day until he could finally try to fall unconscious, crawling into the rack wretched to await more bad dreams.

24/7’s of feeling wretched and bereft.

Dusk was coming earlier. Hal signed out at the portcullis and blasted down the hill and took the tow truck up Comm. Ave. to the C.C. Reservoir and then south on Hammond, the same deadening route as the E.T.A. conditioning run, except when he hit Boylston St. he turned right and struck out west. Once it cleared West Newton, Boylston St. became shunpike Rte.

9, the major west-suburb-commuter alternative to the suicidal I–90, and 9 suburb-hopped serpentine all the way west to Natick and Rte. 27.

Hal crawled through traffic on a major-flow road that had once been a cowpath. By the time he was in Wellesley Hills, the sky’s combustionish

orange had deepened to the hellish crimson of a fire’s last embers. Darkness fell with a clunk shortly after, and Hal’s spirits with it. He felt pathetic and absurd even going to check this Narcotics Anonymous Meeting thing out.

Everybody always flashed his or her brights at the tow truck because the headlamps were set so senselessly high on the truck’s grille.

The little portable disk player had been detached by either Pemulis or Axford and not returned. WYYY was a ghostly thread of jazz against a sea of static. AM had only corporate rock and reports that the Gentle administration had scheduled and then cancelled a special Spontaneous- Disseminated address to the nation on subjects unknown. NPR had a kind of roundtable on potential subjects — George Will’s laryngectomy- prosthesis sounded hideous. Hal preferred silence and traffic-sounds. He ate two of three $4.00 bran muffins he’d whipped in for at a Cleveland Circle gourmet bakery, grimacing as he swallowed because he’d forgotten a tonic to wash them down, then put in a mammoth plug of Kodiak and spat periodically into his special NASA glass, which fit neatly in the cup-holder down by the transmission, and passed the last fifteen minutes of the dull drive considering the probable etymological career of the word Anonymous, all the way he supposed from the Æolic öνγa through Thynne’s B.S. 1580s reference to ‘anonymall Chronicals’; and whether it was joined way back somewhere at the Saxonic taproot to the Olde English on-áne, which supposedly meant All as One or As One Body and became Cynewulf’s eventual standard inversion to the classic anon, maybe. Then called up on his mnemonic screen the developmental history since B.S. ’35 of the initial Substance group AA, on which there’d been such a lengthy entry in the Discursive O.E.D. that Hal hadn’t had to hit any sort of outside database to feel more or less factually prepared to drop into its spin-off NA and at least give the thing an appraising once-over. Hal can summon a kind of mental Xerox of anything he’d ever read and basically read it all over again, at will, which talent the Abandonment of Hope hasn’t (so far) compromised, the withdrawal’s effects being more like emotional/salivo-digestive.

The rock faces on either side of the truck when 27 goes through blasted hills of rock, the very fringes of the Berkshires’ penumbra, are either granite or gneiss.

Hal for a while also practices saying ‘My name’s Mike.’ ‘Mike. Hi.’ ‘Hey there, name’s Mike,’ etc., into the truck’s rearview.

By 15 minutes east of Natick it becomes obvious that the little booklet’s terse Q.R.S. designates a facility called Quabbin Recovery Systems, which is easy to find, roadside ad-signs starting to announce the place several clicks away, each sign a little different and designed to form a little like narrative of which actual arrival at Q.R.S. would be the climax. Even Hal’s late father was too young really to remember Burma-Shave signs.

Quabbin Recovery Systems is set far back from Rte. 27 on a winding groomed-gravel road flanked all the way up by classy old-time standing lanterns whose glass shades are pebbled and faceted like candy dishes and seem more for mood than illumination. Then the actual building’s driveway’s an even more winding little road that’s barely more than a tunnel through meditative pines and poor-postured Lombardy poplars. Once off the highway the whole nighttime scene out here in exurbia — Boston’s true boonies — seems ghostly and circumspect. Hal’s tires crunch cones in the road. Some sort of bird shits on his windshield. The driveway broadens gradually into a like delta and then a parking lot of mint-white gravel, and the physical Q.R.S. is right there, cubular and brooding. The building’s one of these late-model undeformed cubes of rough panel-brick and granite quoins. Illuminated moodily from below by more classy lanterns, it looks like a building-block from some child-titan’s toy-chest. Its windows are the smoky brown kind that in daylight become dark mirrors. Hal’s late father had publicly repudiated this kind of window-glass in an interview in Lens & Pane when the stuff first came out. Right now, lit from inside, the windows have a sort of bloody, polluted aspect.

A good two-thirds of the lot’s parking places say RESERVED FOR STAFF, which strikes Hal as odd. The tow truck tends to diesel and chuff after deignition, finally subsiding with a shuddering fart. It’s dead quiet except for the hiss of light traffic down on 27 past all the trees. Only TP- link workers and marathon-type commuters live in exurban Natick. It’s either way colder out here or else a front’s been coming in while Hal drove.

The lot’s piney air has the ethyl sting of winter.

Q.R.S.’s big doors and lintel are more of that reflector-shade glass.

There’s no obvious bell, but the doors are unlocked. They open in that sort of pressurized way of institutional doors. The savanna-colored lobby is broad and still and has a vague medical/dental smell. Its carpet’s a dense

low tan Dacronyl weave that evacuates sound. There’s a circular high- countered nurse’s station or reception desk, but nobody’s there.

The whole place is so quiet Hal can hear the squeak of blood in his head.

The 32A that follows Q.R.S. in the girl’s little white booklet is presumably a room number. Hal has on a non-E.T.A. jacket and carries the NASA glass he spits in. He’d have to spit even if he didn’t have chew in; the Kodiak’s almost like a cover or excuse.

There is no map or You-Are-Here-type directory on view in the lobby.

The lobby’s heat is intense and close but kind of porous; it’s in a sort of uneasy struggle with the radiant chill of all the smoked glass of the entrance. The lamps out in the lot and off along the driveway are blobs of sepia light through the glass. Inside, cove-lighting at the seams of walls and ceiling produce an indirect light that’s shadowless and seems to rise from the room’s objects themselves. It’s the same lighting and lion-colored carpeting in the first long hall Hal tries. The room numbers go up to 17 and then after Hal turns a sharp corner start at 34A. The room doors are false blond wood but look thick and private, flush in their frames. There’s also the smell of stale coffee. The walls’ color scheme is somewhere between puce and mature eggplant-skin, kind of nauseous against the sandy tan of the carpet. All buildings with any kind of health-theme to them have this thin sick sweet dental sub-odor to them. Q.R.S. also seems to have some sort of balsamy air-freshener going in the ventilation system, too, but it doesn’t quite cover the sweet medical stink or the bland sour smell of institutional food.

Hal hasn’t heard one human sound since he came in. The place’s silence has that glittery sound of total silence. His footfalls make no sound on the Dacronyl. He feels furtive and burglarish and holds the NASA glass down at his side and the NA booklet higher up and cover-out as a sort of explanatory I.D. There are computer-enhanced landscapes on the walls, little low tables with glossy pamphlets, a framed print of Picasso’s ‘Seated Harlequin,’ and nothing else that wasn’t just institutional bullshit, visual Muzak. Without any sound to his footfalls it’s like the gauntlets of doors just glide by. The quiet has a kind of menace. The whole cubular building seems to Hal to hold the tensed menace of a living thing that’s chosen to hold itself still. If you asked Hal to describe his feelings as he looked for room 32A the best he could do would be to say he wished he were

somewhere else and feeling some way besides how he felt. His mouth pours spit. The glass’s one-third full and heavy in his hand and not much fun to look at. He’s missed the glass a couple of times and marred the tan carpet with dark spit. After two 90° turns it’s clear the hallway’s run is a perfect square around the cube’s ground level. He’s seen no stairs or entrances to stairways. He empties the NASA glass rather gooily into a potted rubber tree’s dirt. Q.R.S.’s building may be one of those infamous Rubikular cubes that looks topologically undeformed but is actually impossible to negotiate on the inside. But the numbers after the third corner start at 18, and now Hal can hear either very distant or very muffled voices. He carries the NA booklet in front of him like a crucifix. He has about $50 U.S. and another $100 in eagle-, leaf-, and broom-emblemized O.N.A.N. scrip, having had no idea what sort of introductory costs might be involved. Q.R.S. didn’t purchase prime Natick acreage and the cutting-edge services of a São- Paulo-School Geometric-Minimalist architect with just altruistic goodwill, that was for sure.

Room 32A’s wood-grain door was just as emphatically shut as all the others, but the muffled voices were behind this one. The Meeting was listed in the book as starting at 1730, and it was only around 1720, and Hal thought the voices might signify some sort of pre-Meeting orientation for people who’ve come for the first time, sort of tentatively, just to scout the whole enterprise out, so he doesn’t knock.

He still has this intractable habit of making a move like he’s straightening a bow tie before he enters a strange room.

And except for the thin rubber sheaths, the doorknobs on the Quabbin Recovery Systems doors are the same as at E.T.A. — flat bars of brass toggle-bolted to the latch mechanism, so you have to push the bar down instead of turning anything to open the door.

But the Meeting is under way, apparently. It isn’t near big enough to create a mood of anonymity or casual spectation. Nine or ten adult middle- class males are in the warm room on orange plastic chairs with legs of molded steel tubing. Every one of the men has a beard, and each wears chinos and a sweater, and they all sit the same way, that Indian cross-legged style with their hands on their knees and their feet under their knees, and they all wear socks, with no footwear or winter jackets anywhere in sight.

Hal eases the door shut and sort of slinks along the wall to an empty chair,

all the time conspicuously brandishing the Meeting booklet. The chairs are placed in no discernible order, and their orange clashes nastily with the room’s own colors, walls and ceiling the color of Thousand Island dressing — a color-scheme with unplaceable but uneasy associations for Hal — and more of the lionskin Dacronyl carpet. And the warm air in 32A is stuffy with COand unpleasantly scented with the aroma of soft male middle-2 aged bodies not wearing footwear, a stale meaty cheesy smell, more nauseous even than the E.T.A. locker room after a Mrs. Clarke Tex-Mex fiesta.

The only guy in the Meeting to acknowledge Hal’s entrance is at the front of the room, a man Hal would have to call almost morbidly round, his body nearly Leith-sized and globularly round and the smaller but still large globe of a head atop it, his socks plaid and his legs not all the way crossable so it looks like he might pitch disastrously backward in his chair any minute, smiling warmly at Hal’s winter coat and NASA glass as Hal slinks and sits and slumps down low. The round man’s chair is positioned under a small white Magic Marker blackboard, and all the other chairs approximately face it, and the man holds a Magic Marker in one hand and holds what looks quite a bit like a teddy bear to his chest with the other, and wears chinos and a cable-knit Norwegian sweater the color of toast. His hair is that waxy sort of blond, and he’s got the blond eyebrows and creepy blond eyelashes and violently flushed face of a true Norwegian blond, and his little beard is an imperial so sharply waxed it looks like a truncated star.

The morbidly round blond man’s pretty clearly the leader of the Meeting, possibly a high-ranking official of Narcotics Anonymous, whom Hal could casually approach about tracts and texts to buy and study, afterward.

Another middle-aged guy up near the front is crying, and he too holds what looks like a bear.

The blond brows hike up and down as the leader says ‘I’d like to suggest we men all hold our bears tight and let our Inner Infant nonjudgmentally listen to Kevin’s Inner Infant expressing his grief and loss.’ They’re all at subtly different angles to Hal, who’s slumped low over by the wall in the second-to-last row, but it turns out after some subtle casual neck-craning that, sure enough, all these middle-class guys in at least their thirties are sitting there clutching teddy bears to their sweatered chests —

and identical teddy bears, plump and brown and splay-limbed and with a little red corduroy tongue protruding from the mouths, so the bears all look oddly throttled. The room is menacingly quiet now except for the sibilance of the heating vents and the sobbing guy Kevin, and the plip of Hal’s saliva hitting the bottom of the empty glass rather more loudly than he might have wished.

The back of the crying guy’s neck is turning redder and redder as he clutches his bear and rocks on his hams.

Hal sits with his leg crossed good-ankle-on-knee and joggles his white hightop and looks at his callused thumb and listens to the Kevin guy sob and snuffle. The guy wipes his nose with the heel of his hand just like the littler Buddies at E.T.A. Hal figures the tears and bears have something to do with giving up drugs, and that the Meeting is probably on the verge of coming around to talking explicitly about drugs and how to give up drugs for a certain period without feeling indescribably wretched and bereft, or maybe at least some data on how long one might expect the wretchedness of giving up drugs to continue before the old nervous system and salivary glands returned to normal. Even though Inner Infant sounds uncomfortably close to Dr. Doloros Rusk’s dreaded Inner Child, Hal’d be willing to bet that here it’s some sort of shorthand Narcotics Anonymous sobriquet for like ‘limbic component of the CNS’ or ‘the part of our cortex that’s not utterly wretched and bereft without the drugs that up to now have been pulling us through the day, secretly’ or some affirming, encouraging thing like that. Hal wills himself to stay objective and not form any judgments before he has serious data, hoping desperately for some sort of hopeful feeling to emerge.

The diglobular leader has made a cage of his hands and rested his hands on his teddy bear’s head and is breathing slowly and evenly, watching Kevin kindly from under the blond eyebrows, looking more than anything like some sort of Buddha-as-California-surfer-dude. The leader inhales gently and says ‘The energies I’m feeling in the group are energies of unconditional love and acceptance for Kevin’s Inner Infant.’ Nobody else says anything, and the leader doesn’t seem to need anybody to say anything.

He looks down at the cage his hands have made on the bear and keeps subtly changing the shape of the cage. The guy Kevin, whose neck is now not only beet-red but shiny with embarrassed sweat between his shirt-collar

and hair’s hem, sobs even harder at the affirmation of love and support. The round leader’s high hoarse voice had the same blandly kind didactic quality as Rusk’s, as if always speaking to a not-too-bright child.

After some more cage-play and deep breathing the leader looks up and around and nods at nothing and says ‘Maybe we could all name our feelings right now for Kevin and share how much we’re caring for him and his Inner Infant right now, in his pain.’ Various bearded cross-legged guys speak up: ‘I love you, Kevin.’

‘I’m not judging you, Kevin.’

‘Know just how you and the I.I. feel.’ ‘I’m feeling really close to you.’ ‘I’m feeling a lot of love for you right now, Kevin.’

‘You’re crying for two, guy.’ ‘Kevin Kevin Kevin Kevin Kevin.’ ‘I’m not feeling like your crying is one bit unmanly or pathetic, fella.’ It’s at this point that Hal begins truly to lose his willed objectivity and open- mindedness and to get a bad personal feeling about this Narcotics Anonymous (‘NA’) Meeting, which seems already deeply under way and isn’t one bit like he’s imagined an even remotely hopeful antidrug Meeting would be like. It seems more like some kind of cosmetic-psychology encounter thing. Not one Substance or symptom of Substance-deprivation has been mentioned so far. And none of these guys looks like they’ve ever been engaged with anything more substantial than an occasional wine cooler, if he had to guess.

Hal’s grim mood deepens as the round man up front now leans precariously over and down and opens a sort of toy-box under the blackboard by his chair and produces a cheap plastic portable CD laser- scanner and sets it on top of the toy-box, where it begins to issue a kind of low treacly ambient shopping-mall music, mostly cello, with sporadic harps and chimes. The stuff spreads through the hot little room like melted butter, and Hal sinks lower in his orange chair and looks hard at the space-and- spacecraft emblem on his NASA glass. ‘Kevin?’ the leader says over the music. ‘Kevin?’ The sobbing man’s hand lies over his face like a spider, and he doesn’t even start to look up until the leader has said several times very blandly and kindly ‘Kevin, do you feel okay about looking at the rest of the group?’

Kevin’s red neck wrinkles as he looks up at the blond leader through his fingers.

The leader’s made the cage again on his poor bear’s squashed head. ‘Can you share what you’re feeling, Kevin?’ he says. ‘Can you name it?’ Kevin’s voice is muffled by the hand he hides behind. ‘I’m feeling my Inner Infant’s abandonment and deep-deprivation issues, Harv,’ he says, drawing shuddering breaths. His mauve sweater’s shoulders tremble. ‘I’m feeling my Inner Infant standing holding the bars of his crib and looking out of the bars… bars of his crib and crying for his Mommy and Daddy to come hold him and nurture him.’ Kevin sobs twice in an apneated way. One arm holds his lap’s bear so tight Hal thinks he can see a little stuffing start to come out of its mouth around its tongue, and a stalactite of that clear thin weepy-type mucus hangs from Kevin’s nose just mm. over the throttled bear’s head. ‘And nobody’s coming!’ he sobs. ‘Nobody’s coming. I feel alone with my bear and plastic airplane-mobile and teething ring.’ Everybody’s nodding in an affirming and pained way. No two beards are exactly the same fullness and design. A couple other sobs break out across the room. Everyone’s bear stares blankly ahead.

The leader’s nod is slow and meditative. ‘And can you share your needs with the group right now, Kevin?’ ‘Please share, Kevin,’ says a slim guy over by a black filing cabinet who sits like he’s a veteran at sitting Indian-style in hard plastic chairs.

The music’s still going, going absolutely nowhere, like Philip Glass on Quaaludes. ‘The work we’re here to do,’ the leader says over the music, one hand now pressed pensively to the side of his big face, ‘is to work on our dysfunctional passivity and tendency to wait silently for our Inner Infant’s needs to be magically met. The energy I feel in the group now is that the group is supportively asking Kevin to nurture his Inner Infant by naming and sharing his needs out loud with the group. And I’m feeling how aware we all are how risky and vulnerable need-naming-out-loud must feel for Kevin right now.’ Everybody looks deadly serious. A couple guys are rubbing their bears’ bellies pregnantly. The only really Infantile thing Hal can feel inside him is the inguinal gurgle of two heavy bran muffins swallowed at high speeds w/o liquid. The string of mucus from Kevin’s nose trembles and swings.

The slender guy who’d asked Kevin please to share is now waggling the arms of his teddy bear in an infantile way. Hal feels a wave of nausea flood his mouth with fresh saliva. ‘We’re asking you to name what your Inner Infant wants right now more than anything in the world,’ the leader’s saying to Kevin. ‘To be loved and held!’ Kevin keens, sobbing harder. His lachrymucus is now a thin silver string joining his nose and the fuzzy top of his bear’s head.

The bear’s expression is seeming creepier to Hal by the second. Hal wonders what the etiquette is in NA about getting up and leaving right in the middle of somebody’s Infantile revelation of need. Meanwhile Kevin is saying that his Inner Infant inside him had always hoped that some day his Mom and Dad would be there for him, to hold him and love him. He says but right from the start they’d never been there for him, leaving him and his brother with Hispanic nannies while they devoted themselves to their jobs and various types of psychotherapy and support groups. This takes a while to say, given all the snuffles and wracked spasms. Then Kevin says but then by the time he was eight they were gone altogether, dead, smooshed by a dysfunctionally falling radio traffic helicopter on the Jamaica Way on the way to Couples Counselling.

At this Hal’s slumped head jerks up, his mouth oval with horror. He’s all of a sudden realized that this guy who’s seated at such an angle that Hal’s been able to see only the obliquest portion of his profile is in fact Kevin Bain, his brother Orin’s old E.T.A. doubles and chemical-mischief partner Marlon Bain’s older brother, Kevin Bain, of Dedham MA, who the last Hal had heard had gotten his M.B.A. at Wharton and cleaned up with a string of Simulated Reality arcades all up and down the South Shore, back during the pre-Subsidized-Time Simulated Reality craze, before InterLace viewers and digital cartridges let you do your own customized Simulating right at home 335 and the novelty wore off. The Kevin Bain whose childhood hobby was memorizing IRS capital-depreciation schedules and whose adult idea of a 336 wild time had been putting extra marshmallows in his nightly cocoa, and who wouldn’t have known a recreational drug if it walked up and poked him in the eye. Hal begins to scan for possible exits. The only door was the one he’d come in, which is in full view of most of the room. There are no windows at all.

Hal’s chilled by multiple realizations. This is no NA or anti-Substance Meeting. This is one of those men’s-issues-Men’s-Movement-type Meetings K. D. Coyle’s stepdad went to and Coyle liked to mimic and parody during drills, making his stick’s grip poke out between his legs and yelling ‘Nurture this! Honor getting in touch with this!’ Kevin Bain is wiping his nose with his poor teddy bear’s head and saying it didn’t look like his Inner Infant would ever get its wish. The gooey music’s cello sounds like some sort of cow mooing in distress, maybe at what it’s in the middle of.

Sure enough, the round man, whose hand’s left a print on his soft cheek, asks poor old Kevin Bain to honor and name his I.I.’s wounded wish anyway, to say ‘Please, Mommy and Daddy, come love and hold me,’ out loud, several times, which Kevin Bain goes ahead and does, rocking a little in his chair, his voice now with an edge of good old adult mortified embarrassment to it, along with the racking sobs. A couple of the other men in the room are wiping at their bright-white drug-free eyes with the arms of their teddy bears. Hal is painfully reminded of the rare Ziplocs of Humboldt County hydroponic marijuana that Pemulis occasionally scored via FedEx from his mercantile counterpart at the Rolling Hills Academy, the curved tawny buds so big and plump with high-Delta-9 resin the Ziplocs had looked like bags of little teddy-bear arms. The moist sounds right behind him turn out to be a mild-faced older man eating yogurt out of a plastic cup.

Hal keeps rechecking the Meeting data in the little M.B.R.O. booklet the girl had given him. He notes that the booklet has broad chocolate thumbprints on several of the pages, and that two pages are stuck firmly together with what Hal fears is an ancient dried booger, and now that the booklet’s cover is dated January in the Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland, i.e. nearly two years past, and that it’s not impossible that the blandly hostile toothless girl at The Ennet facility had kertwanged him by giving him a dated and useless M.B.R.O. guide.

Kevin Bain keeps repeating ‘Please, Mommy and Daddy, come love me and hold me’ in a kind of monotone of pathos. The gradually intensifying lisp in Please is apparently a performative invocation of the old Inner Infant. Tears and other fluids flow and roll. The warm round leader Harv’s own eyes are a moist glassy blue. The CD scanner’s cello is now into some sort of semi-jazzy pizzicato stuff that seems oxymoronic against the room’s

mood. Hal keeps catching whiffs of a hot sick-sweet civety smell that signifies somebody nearby has some athlete’s-foot issues to confront, under his socks. Plus it’s mystifying that 32A has no windows, given all the smoky-brown fenestration Hal’d seen from outside the Q.R.S. cube. The man eating yogurt’s beard is one of those small rectangular ones that’s easy to keep clear of the cup’s rim. The back and side of Kevin Bain’s hair has separated into spiky sweat-soaked strands, from the room’s heat and the Infant’s emotions.

All through his own infancy and toddlerhood, Hal had continually been held and dandled and told at high volume that he was loved, and he feels like he could have told K. Bain’s Inner Infant that getting held and told you were loved didn’t automatically seem like it rendered you emotionally whole or Substance-free. Hal finds he rather envies a man who feels he has something to explain his being fucked up, parents to blame it on. Not even Pemulis blamed his late father Mr. Pemulis, who hadn’t exactly sounded like the Fred MacMurray of U.S. fathers. But then Pemulis didn’t consider himself fucked up or unfree w/r/t Substances.

The blond and Buddhic cable-knit Harv, dandling his bear on his knee now, calmly asks Kevin Bain if it feels to his Inner Infant like Mommy and Daddy were ever going to appear cribside to meet his needs. ‘No,’ Kevin says very quietly. ‘No, it doesn’t, Harv.’ The leader is idly arranging his bear’s splayed arms in different positions, so it looks like the bear’s either waving or surrendering. ‘Do you suppose you would be able to ask someone in the group here tonight to love and hold you instead, Kevin?’ The back of Kevin Bain’s head doesn’t move. Hal’s whole digestive tract spasms at the prospect of watching two bearded adult males in sweaters and socks engage in surrogate Infant-hugging. He begins asking himself why he doesn’t just fake a hideous coughing fit and flee Q.R.S.-32A with his fist over his face.

Harv’s now waggling the bear’s arms back and forth and making his voice high and cartoon-characterish and pretending to have his bear ask Kevin Bain’s bear if it would maybe point to the man in the group Kevin Bain would most like to have hold and nurture and love him in loco parentis. Hal’s spitting quietly down the side of his glass and brooding wretchedly at the fact that he’s driven fifty supperless clicks to listen to a

globular man in plaid socks pretend his teddy bear’s speaking Latin when he looks up from the glass and is chilled to see that Kevin Bain has wiggled his Indian-style way around in his chair and is holding his bear way up by its underarms, just the way a father holds a toddler up for a public spect-op or parade, turning the throttled-looking bear this way and that, scanning the room — as Hal covers part of his face with a hand, pretending to scratch an eyebrow, praying not to be recognized — and finally manipulating the bear’s arm so the plump brown fuzzy fingerless hand of the bear’s pointing right in Hal’s direction. Hal doubles over in a coughing spasm only half- faked, running decision-trees on various ruses for flight.

Just like his younger brother Marlon Bain, Kevin Bain is a short thick person with a dark swart face. He looks sort of like an overdeveloped troll.

And he has the same capacity for constant incredible sweating that always made Marlon Bain look to Hal, both on-court and off-, like a toad hunched moist and unblinking in humid shade. Except Kevin Bain’s little glittery Bain eyes are also red and swollen with public weeping, and he’s balding back from the temples in a way that gives him a widow’s peak like nobody’s business, and doesn’t seem to recognize a post-pubescent Hal, and is pointing his bear’s blunt hand Hal realizes finally after almost swallowing his plug of Kodiak not at Hal but at the mild-faced square- bearded older guy behind him, who’s holding a spoon of vividly pink yogurt in front of his bear’s open mouth, just touching its protruding tongue’s red corduroy, pretending to be feeding the bear. Hal very casually puts the NASA glass between his legs and gets both hands under his chair- seat and hops the chair bit by bit over and out of the lines of sight and transit between Kevin Bain and the yogurt man. Harv, up front, is making a complex hand-signal to the yogurt man not to speak or move from his back- row orange chair no matter what; and then, as Kevin Bain wriggles cross- legged back around to face front again, Harv smoothly turns the hand-signal into a motion like he’s smoothing his hair. The motion then becomes sincere and ruminative as the leader breathes deeply a couple of times. The music’s settled back into its original nodding narcosis. ‘Kevin,’ Harv says, ‘since this is a group exercise in passivity and Inner- Infant needs, and since you’ve selected Jim as the member of the group you need something from, we need you to ask Jim out loud to meet your needs.

Ask him to come up and hold you and love you, since your parents aren’t ever coming. Not ever, Kevin.’ Kevin Bain makes a mortified sound and reclamps a hand over his big swart face. ‘Go for it, Kev,’ somebody over near the Bly poster calls out. ‘We affirm and support you,’ says the guy by the filing cabinet.

Hal now starts scrolling through an alphabetical list of the faraway places he’d rather be right now. He’s not even up to Addis Ababa when Kevin Bain acquiesces and begins very softly and hesitantly asking the mild-faced Jim, who’s put aside his yogurt but not the bear, to please come up and love him and hold him. By the time Hal’s envisioned himself tumbling over American Falls at the Concavity’s southwest rim in a rusty old noxious-waste-displacement drum, Kevin Bain has asked Jim eleven progressively louder times to come nurture and hold him, to no avail. The older guy just sits there, clutching his yogurt-tongued bear, his expression somewhere between mild and blank.

Hal has never actually seen projectile-weeping before. Bain’s tears are actually exiting his eyes and projecting outward several cm. before starting to fall. His facial expression is the scrunched spread one of a small child’s total woe, his neck-cords standing out and face darkening so that it looks like some sort of huge catcher’s mitt. A bright cape of mucus hangs from his upper lip, and his lower lip seems to be having some kind of epileptic fit. Hal finds the tantrum’s expression on an adult face sort of compelling.

At a certain point hysterical grief becomes facially indistinguishable from hysterical mirth, it appears. Hal imagines watching Bain weep on a white beach through binoculars from the balcony of a cool dim Aruban hotel room. ‘He’s not coming!’ Kevin Bain finally keens to the leader.

Harv the leader nods, scratching an eyebrow, and confirms that that seems to be the case. He pretends to stroke his imperial in puzzlement and asks rhetorically what might be the problem, why mild-faced Jim isn’t automatically coming when called.

Kevin Bain’s just about vivisecting his poor bear out of mortified frustration. He seems deeply into his Infant persona now, and Hal rather hopes these guys have procedures for getting Bain at least back to sixteen before he has to try to drive home. At some point a timpani has gotten

involved in the CD’s music, and a rather saucy cornet, and the music’s finally started moving a little, toward what’s either a climax or the end of the disk.

By now various men in the group have started crying out to Kevin Bain that his Inner Infant wasn’t getting its needs met, that sitting there passively asking for nurture to get up and come to him wasn’t getting the needs met, that Kevin owed it to his Inner Infant to come up with some sort of active way to meet the Infant’s needs. Somebody shouted out ‘Honor that Infant!’ Somebody else called ‘Meet those needs!’ Hal is mentally strolling down the Appian Way in bright Eurosunlight, eating a cannoli, twirling his Dunlop racquets by the throats like six-shooters, enjoying the sunshine and cranial silence and a normal salivary flow.

Pretty soon the men’s supportive exhortations have distilled into everybody in the room except Harv, Jim and Hal chanting ‘Meet Those Needs! Meet Those Needs!’ in the same male-crowd-exhortative meter as ‘Hold That Line!’ or ‘Block That Kick!’ Kevin Bain wipes his nose on his sleeve and asks humongous Harv the leader what he’s supposed to do to get his Infant’s needs met if the person he’s chosen to meet those needs won’t come.

The leader has folded his hands over his belly and sat back, by this time, smiling, cross-legged, holding his tongue. His bear sits atop the protrusion of belly with its little blunt legs straight out, the way you’ll see a bear sitting on a shelf. It seems to Hal that the Oin 32A is now getting used up2 at a ferocious clip. Not at all like the cool, sheep-scented breezes of Ascension Island in the South Atlantic. The men in the room are still chanting ‘Meet Those Needs!’ ‘What you’re saying is I need to actively go over to Jim myself and ask him to hold me,’ Kevin Bain says, grinding at his eyes with his knuckles.

The leader smiles blandly. ‘Instead of you’re saying passively trying to get Jim to come to me,’ says Kevin Bain, whose tears have largely stopped, and whose sweat has taken on the clammy shine of true fear-sweat.

Harv emerges as one of these people who can heft one eyebrow and not the other. ‘It would take real courage and love and commitment to your Inner Infant to take the risk and go actively over to somebody that might

give you what your Infant needs,’ he says quietly. The CD player has at some point shifted into an all-cello instrumental of ‘I Don’t Know (How to Love Him)’ from an old opera Lyle sometimes borrowed people’s players and listened to at night in the weight room. Lyle and Marlon Bain had been particularly tight, Hal recalls.

The trimeter of the men’s chant has reduced to a one-foot low-volume ‘Needs, Needs, Needs, Needs, Needs’ as Kevin Bain slowly and hesitantly uncrosses his legs and rises from his orange chair, turning to face Hal and the motionless guy behind him, this Jim. Bain begins to move slowly toward them with the tortured steps of a mime miming walking against a tornadic gale. Hal’s picturing himself doing a lazy backstroke in the Azores, spouting glassy water up out of his mouth in a cytological plume. He’s leaning almost out of his chair, as far as possible out of Kevin Bain’s line of transit, studying the brown suspension in the bottom of his glass. His prayer not to be recognized by a regressive Kevin Bain is the first really desperate and sincere prayer Hal can remember offering since he’d stopped wearing pajamas with feet in them. ‘Kevin?’ Harv calls softly from the front of the room. ‘Is it you moving actively toward Jim, or should it be the Infant inside you, the one with the needs?’ ‘Needs, Needs, Needs,’ the bearded men are chanting, some rhythmically raising their manicured fists in the air.

Bain’s looking back and forth between Harv and Jim, chewing his finger indecisively. ‘Is this how an Infant moves towards its needs, Kevin?’ Harv says. ‘Go for it, Kevin!’ a full-bearded man calls out.

‘Let the Infant out!’ ‘Let your Infant do the walking, Kev.’ So Hal’s most vivid full-color memory of the non-anti-Substance Meeting he drove fifty oversalivated clicks to by mistake will become that of his older brother’s doubles partner’s older brother down on all fours on a Dacronyl rug, crawling, hampered because one arm was holding his bear to his chest, so he sort of dipped and rose as he crawled on three limbs toward Hal and the needs-meeter behind him, Bain’s knees leaving twin pale tracks in the carpet and his head up on a wobbly neck and looking up and past Hal, his face unspeakable.

The ceiling was breathing. It bulged and receded. It swelled and settled.

The room was in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital’s Trauma Wing. Whenever he looked at it, the ceiling bulged and then deflated, shiny as a lung. When Don was a massive toddler his mother had put them in a little beach house just back of the dunes off a public beach in Beverly. The place was affordable because it had a big ragged hole in the roof. Origin of hole unknown. Gately’s outsized crib had been in the beach house’s little living room, right under the hole. The guy that owned the little cottages off the dunes had stapled thick clear polyurethane sheeting across the room’s ceiling. It was an attempt to deal with the hole. The polyurethane bulged and settled in the North Shore wind and seemed like some monstrous vacuole inhaling and exhaling directly over little Gately, lying there, wide- eyed. The breathing polyurethane vacuole had seemed like it developed a character and personality as winter deepened and the winds grew worse.

Gately, age like four, had regarded the vacuole as a living thing, and had named it Herman, and had been afraid of it. He couldn’t feel the right side of his upper body. He couldn’t move in any real sense of the word. The hospital room had that misty quality rooms in fevers have. Gately lay on his back. Ghostish figures materialized at the peripheries of his vision and hung around and then de-materialized. The ceiling bulged and receded. Gately’s own breath hurt his throat. His throat felt somehow raped. The blurred figure in the next bed sat up very still in bed in a sitting position and seemed to have a box on its head. Gately kept having a terrible repetitious ethnocentric dream that he was robbing the house of an Oriental and had the guy tied to a chair and was trying to blindfold him with quality mailing twine from the drawer under the Oriental’s kitchen phone. The Oriental kept being able to see around the twine and kept looking steadily at Gately and blinking inscrutably. Plus the Oriental had no nose or mouth, just a smooth expanse of lower-facial skin, and wore a silk robe and scary sandals, and had no hair on its legs.

What Gately perceived as light-cycles and events all out of normal sequence was really Gately going in and out of consciousness. Gately did not perceive this. It seemed to him more like he kept coming up for air and

then being pushed below the surface of something. Once when Gately came up for air he found that resident Tiny Ewell was seated in a chair right up next to the bed. Tiny’s little slim hand was on the bed’s crib-type railing, and his chin rested on the hand, so his face was right up close. The ceiling bulged and receded. The room’s only light was what spilled in from the nighttime hall. Nurses glided down the hall and past the door in subsonic footwear. A tall and slumped ghostish figure appeared to Gately’s left, off past the blurred seated square-head boy’s bed, slumped and fluttering, appearing to rest its tailbone on the sill of the dark window. The ceiling rounded on down and then settled back flat. Gately rolled his eyes up at Ewell. Ewell had shaved off his blunt white goatee. His hair was so completely clean and white it took a faint pink cast from the pink of his scalp below. Ewell had been discoursing to him for an unknown length of time. It was Gately’s first full night in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital’s Trauma Wing. He didn’t know what night of the week it was. His circadian rhythm was the least of the personal rhythms that had been scrambled. His right side felt encased in a kind of hot cement. Also a sick throb in what he assumed was a toe. He wondered dimly about going to the bathroom, if and when. Ewell was right in the middle of speaking. Gately couldn’t tell if Ewell was whispering. Nurses glided across the doorway’s light. Their sneakers were so noiseless the nurses seemed to be on wheels. A stolid shadow of somebody in a hat was cast obliquely across the hall’s tile floor just outside the room, as if a stolid figure were seated just outside the door, against the wall, in a hat. ‘My wife’s personal term for soul is personality. As in “There’s something incorrigibly dark in your personality, Eldred Ewell, and Dewars brings it out.” ’ The hall floor was pretty definitely white tile, with a cloudy overwaxed shine in the bright fluorescence out there. Some kind of red or pink stripe ran down the center of the hall. Gately couldn’t tell if Tiny Ewell thought he was awake or unconscious or what.

‘It was in the fall term of third grade as a child that I found myself fallen in with the bad element. They were a group of tough blue-collar Irish lads bussed in from the East Watertown projects. Runny noses, home-cut hair, frayed cuffs, quick with their fists, sports-mad, fond of sneaker-hockey on asphalt,’ Ewell said, ‘and yet, strangely, I, unable to do even one pull-up in the President’s Physical Fitness Test, quickly became the leader of the pack we all fell into. The blue-collar lads all seemed to admire me for attributes that were not clear. We formed a sort of club. Our uniform was a gray skallycap. Our clubhouse was the dugout of a Little League diamond that had fallen into disuse. Our club was called the Money-Stealers’ Club. At my suggestion we went with a descriptive name as opposed to euphemistic.

The name was mine. The Irish lads acquiesced. They viewed me as the brains of the operation. I held them in a kind of thrall. This was due in large part to my capacity for rhetoric. Even the toughest and most brutish Irish lad respects a gilded tongue. Our club was formed for the express purpose of undertaking a bunko operation. We went around to people’s homes after school, ringing the doorbell and soliciting donations for Project Hope Youth Hockey. There was no such organization. Our donation-receptacle was a Chock Full O’ Nuts can with PROJECT HOPE YOUTH HOCKEY written on a strip of masking tape wrapped around the can. The lad who made the receptacle had spelled PROJECT with a G in the first draft. I ridiculed him for the error, and the whole club pointed at him and laughed. Brutally.’ Ewell kept staring at the crude blue jailhouse square and canted cross on Gately’s forearms. ‘Our only visible credentials were kneepads and sticks we’d purloined from the P.E. stockroom. By my order, all were held carefully to conceal the PPTY W. WTTN ELEM SCH emblazoned down the side of every stick. One lad had a goalie mask on under his skallycap, the rest kneepads and carefully held sticks. The kneepads were turned inside- out for the same reason. I couldn’t even skate, and my mother absolutely forbade rough play on asphalt. I wore a necktie and combed my hair carefully after each solicitation. I was the spokesperson. The mouthpiece, the bad lads called me. They were Irish Catholics all. Watertown from east to west is Catholic, Armenian, and Mixed. The Eastside boys all but genuflected to my gift for bullshit. I was exceptionally smooth with adults. I rang doorbells and the lads arrayed themselves behind me on the porch. I spoke of disadvantaged youth and team spirit and fresh air and the meaning

of competition and alternatives to the after-school streets’ bad element. I spoke of mothers in support-hose and war-injured older brothers with elaborate prostheses cheering disadvantaged lads on to victory against far better-equipped teams. I discovered that I had a gift for it, the emotional appeal of adult rhetoric. It was the first time I felt personal power. I was unrehearsed and creative and moving. Hard-case homeowners who came to the door in sleeveless Ts holding tallboys of beer with stubble and expressions of minimal charity were often weeping openly by the time we left their porch. I was called a fine lad and a good kid and a credit to me Mum and Da. My hair was tousled so often I had to carry a mirror and comb. The coffee can became hard to carry back to the dugout, where we hid it behind a cinderblock bench-support. We’d netted over a hundred dollars by Halloween. This was a serious amount in those days.’ Tiny Ewell and the ceiling kept receding and then looming in, bulging roundly. Figures Gately didn’t know from Adam kept popping in and out of fluttery view in different corners of the room. The space between his bed and the other bed seemed to distend and then contract with a slow sort of boinging motion. Gately’s eyes kept rolling up in his head, his upper lip mustached with sweat. ‘And I was revelling in the fraud of it, the discovery of the gift,’ Ewell was saying. ‘I was flushed with adrenaline. I had tasted power, the verbal manipulation of human hearts. The lads called me the gilded blarneyman. Soon the first-order fraud wasn’t enough. I began secretly filching receipts from the club’s Chock Full O’ Nuts can.

Embezzling. I persuaded the lads it was too risky to keep the can in the open-air dugout and took personal charge of the can. I kept the can in my bedroom and persuaded my mother that it contained Christmas-connected gifts and must under no circumstances be inspected. To my underlings in the club I claimed to be rolling the coins and depositing them in a high- interest savings account I’d opened for us in the name Franklin W. Dixon.

In fact I was buying myself Pez and Milky Ways and Mad magazines and a Creeple Peeple-brand Deluxe Oven-and-Mold Set with six different colors of goo. This was in the early 1970s. At first I was discreet. Grandiose but discreet. At first the embezzlement was controlled. But the power had roused something dark in my personality, and the adrenaline drove it forward. Self-will run riot. Soon the club’s coffee can was empty by each weekend’s end. Each week’s haul went toward some uncontrolled Saturday

binge of puerile consumption. I doctored up flamboyant bank statements to show the club, in the dugout. I got more loquacious and imperious with them. None of the lads thought to question me, or the purple Magic Marker the bank statements were done in. I was not dealing with intellectual titans here, I knew. They were nothing but malice and muscle, the worst of the school’s bad element. And I ruled them. Thrall. They trusted me completely, and the rhetorical gift. In retrospect they probably could not conceive of any sane third-grader with glasses and a necktie trying to defraud them, given the inevitably brutal consequences. Any sane third- grader. But I was no longer a sane third-grader. I lived only to feed the dark thing in my personality, which told me any consequences could be forestalled by my gift and grand personal aura. ‘But then of course eventually Christmas hove into view.’ Gately tries to stop Ewell and say ‘hove?’ and finds to his horror that he can’t make any sounds come out. ‘The meaty Catholic Eastside bad-element lads now wanted to tap their nonexistent Franklin W. Dixon account to buy support- hose and sleeveless Ts for their swarthy blue-collar families. I held them off as long as I could with pedantic blather on interest penalties and fiscal years. Irish Catholic Christmas is no laughing matter, though, and for the first time their swarthy eyes began to narrow at me. Things at school grew increasingly tense. One afternoon, the largest and swarthiest of them assumed control of the can in an ugly dugout coup. It was a blow from which my authority never recovered. I began to feel a gnawing fear: my denial broke: I realized I’d gradually embezzled far more than I could ever make good. At home, I began talking up the merits of private-school curricula at the dinner table. The can’s weekly take fell off sharply as holiday expenses drained homeowners of change and patience. This bear- market in giving was attributed by some of the club’s swarthier lads to my deficiencies. The whole club began muttering in the dugout. I began to learn that one could perspire heavily even in a bitterly cold open-air dugout.

Then, on the first day of Advent, the lad now in charge of the can produced childish-looking figures and announced the whole club wanted their share of the accrued booty in the Dixon account. I bought time with vague allusions to co-signatures and a misplaced passbook. I arrived home with chattering teeth and bloodless lips and was forced by my mother to swallow fish-oil. I was consumed with puerile fear. I felt small and weak and evil

and consumed by dread of my embezzlement’s exposure. Not to mention the brutal consequences. I claimed intestinal distress and stayed home from school. The telephone began ringing in the middle of the night. I could hear my father saying “Hello? Hello? ” I did not sleep. My personality’s dark part had grown leathery wings and a beak and turned on me. There were still several days until Christmas vacation. I’d lie in bed panicked during school hours amid piles of ill-gotten Mad magazines and Creeple Peeple figures and listen to the lonely handheld bells of the Salvation Army Santas on the street below and think of synonyms for dread and doom. I began to know shame, and to know it as grandiosity’s aide-de-camp. My unspecific digestive illness wore on, and teachers sent cards and concerned notes. On some days the door-buzzer would buzz after school hours and my mother would come upstairs and say “How sweet, Eldred,” that there were swarthy and cuff-frayed but clearly good-hearted boys in gray skallycaps on the stoop asking after me and declaring that they were keenly awaiting my return to school. I began to gnaw on the bathroom’s soap in the morning to make a convincing case for staying home. My mother was alarmed at the masses of bubbles I vomited and threatened to consult a specialist. I felt myself moving closer and closer to some cliff-edge at which everything would come out. I longed to be able to lean into my mother’s arms and weep and confess all. I could not. For the shame. Three or four of the Money-Stealers’ Club’s harder cases took up afternoon positions by the nativity scene in the churchyard across from our house and stared stonily up at my bedroom window, pounding their fists in their palms. I began to understand what a Belfast Protestant must feel. But even more prospectively dreadful than pummellings from Irish Catholics was the prospect of my parents’ finding out my personality had a dark thing that had driven me to grandiose wickedness and left me there.’ Gately has no idea how Ewell feels about him making no responses, whether Ewell doesn’t like it or even notices it or what. He can breathe OK, but something in his raped throat won’t let whatever’s supposed to vibrate to speak vibrate. ‘Finally, on the day before my gastroenterologist appointment, when my mother was down the street at a speculum party, I crept downstairs from my sick bed and stole over a hundred dollars from a shoebox marked I.B.E.W.

LOCAL 517 PETTY SLUSH in the back of my father’s den’s closet. I’d

never dreamed of resorting to the shoebox before. Stealing from my own parents. To remit funds I’d stolen from dull-witted boys with whom I’d stolen them from adults I’d lied to. My feelings of fear and despicability only increased. I now felt ill for real. I lived and moved in the shadow of something dark that hovered just overhead. I vomited without aid of emetic, now, but secretly, so I could return to school; I couldn’t face the prospect of a whole Christmas vacation of swarthy sentries pounding their palms outside the house. I converted my father’s union’s bills to small change and paid off the Money-Stealers’ Club and got pummelled anyway. Apparently on general bad-element principles. I discovered the latent rage in followers, the fate of the leader who falls from the mob’s esteem. I was pummelled and given a savage wedgie and hung from a hook in my school locker, where I remained for several hours, swollen and mortified. And going home was worse; home was no refuge. For home was the scene of the third-order crime. Of theft cubed. I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned. There were night terrors. I was unable to eat, no matter how long after supper I had to stay at the table. The more worried about me my parents became, the greater my shame. I felt a shame and personal despicability no third-grader should have to feel. The holidays were not jolly. I looked back over the autumn and failed to recognize anyone named Eldred K. Ewell Jr. It no longer seemed a question of insanity or dark parts of me. I had stolen from neighbors, slum-children, and family, and bought myself sweets and toys.

Under any tenable definition of bad, I was bad. I resolved to toe the virtuous line from then on. The shame and horror was too awful: I had to remake myself. I resolved to do whatever was required to see myself as good, remade. I never knowingly committed another felony. The whole shameful interval of the Money-Stealers’ Club was moved to mental storage and buried there. Don, I’d forgotten it ever happened. Until the other night. Don, the other night, after the fracas and your display of 337 reluctant se offendendo, after your injury and the whole aftermath… Don, I dreamed the whole mad repressed third-grade interval of grandiose perfidy all over again. Vividly and completely. When I awoke, I was somehow minus my goatee and my hair was center-parted in a fashion I haven’t favored for forty years. The bed was soaked, and there was a gnawed-looking cake of McDade’s special anti-acne soap in my hand.’

Gately starts to short-term recall that he was offered I.V.-Demerol for the pain of his gunshot wound immediately on admission to the E.R. and has been offered Demerol twice by shift-Drs. who haven’t bothered to read the HISTORY OF NARCOTICS DEPENDENCY NO SCHEDULE C-IV + MEDIC. that Gately’d made Pat Montesian swear she’d make them put in italics on his file or chart or whatever, first thing. Last night’s emergency surgery was remedial, not extractive, because the big pistol’s ordnance had apparently fragmented on impacting and passed through the meters of muscle that surrounded Gately’s Humorous ball and Scalpula socket, passing through and missing bone but doing great and various damage to 338soft tissues. The E.R.’s Trauma Specialist had prescribed Toradol-IM but had warned that the pain after the surgery’s general anesthetic wore off was going to be unlike anything Gately had ever imagined. The next thing Gately knew he was upstairs in a Trauma Wing room that trembled with sunlight and a different Dr. was speculating to either Pat M. or Calvin T. that the invasive foreign body had been treated with something unclean, beforehand, possibly, because Gately’s developed a massive infection, and they’re monitoring him for something he heard as Noxzema but is really toxemia. Gately also wanted to protest that his body was 100% American, but he seemed temporarily unable to vocalize aloud. Later it was nighttime and Ewell was there, intoning. It was totally unclear what Ewell wanted from Gately or why he was choosing this particular time to share. Gately’s right shoulder was almost the same size as his head, and he had to roll his eyes up and over like a cow to see Ewell’s hand on the railing and his face floating above it. ‘And how will I administer the Ninth Step when it comes time to make amends? How can I start to make reparations? Even if I could remember the homes of the citizens we defrauded, how many could still be there, living?

The club lads have doubtless scattered into various low-rent districts and 339 dead-end careers. My father lost the I.B.E.W. account under the Weld administration and has been dead since 1993. And the revelations would kill my mother. My mother is very frail. She uses a walker, and arthritis has twisted her head nearly all the way around on her neck. My wife jealously protects my mother from all unpleasant facts regarding me. She says someone has to do it. My mother believes right this minute I’m at a nine-

month Banque-de-Genève-sponsored tax-law symposium in the Alsace. She keeps sending me knitted skiwear that doesn’t fit, from the rest home. ‘Don, this buried interval and the impost I’ve carried ever since may have informed my whole life. Why I was drawn to tax law, helping wealthy suburbanites two-step around their fair share. My marriage to a woman who looks at me as if I were a dark stain at the back of her child’s trousers. My whole descent into somewhat-heavier-than-normal drinking may have been some instinctive attempt to bury third-grade feelings of despicability,

submerge them in an amber sea. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ Ewell said.

Gately was on enough Toradol-IM to make his ears ring, plus a saline 340drip with Doryx. ‘I don’t want to remember despicabilities I can do nothing about. If this is a sample of the “More Will Be Revealed,” I hereby lodge a complaint.

Some things seem better left submerged. No?’ And everything on his right side was on fire. The pain was getting to be emergency-type pain, like scream-and-yank-your-charred-hand-off-the- stove-type pain. Parts of him kept sending up emergency flares to other parts of him, and he could neither move nor call out. ‘I’m scared,’ from what seemed somewhere overhead and rising, was the last thing Gately heard Ewell whisper as the ceiling bulged down toward them. Gately wanted to tell Tiny Ewell that he could totally fucking I.D. with Ewell’s feelings, and that if he, Tiny, could just hang in and tote that bale and put one little well-shined shoe in front of the other everything would end up all right, that the God of Ewell’s Understanding would find some way for Ewell to make things right, and then he could let the despicable feelings go instead of keeping them down with Dewars, but Gately couldn’t connect the impulse to speak with actual speech, still. He settled for trying to reach his left hand across and pat Ewell’s hand on the railing. But his own breadth was too far to reach across. And then the white ceiling came all the way down and made everything white.

He seemed to sort of sleep. He fever-dreamed of dark writhing storm clouds writhing darkly and screaming on down the beach at Beverly MA, the winds increasing over his head until Herman the polyurethane vacuole burst from the force, leaving a ragged inhaling maw that tugged at Gately’s

XXL Dr. Dentons. A blue stuffed brontosaurus was sucked upward out of the crib and disappeared into the maw, spinning. His mother was getting the shit beaten out of her by a man with a shepherd’s crook in the kitchen and couldn’t hear Gately’s frantic cries for help. He broke through the crib’s bars with his head and went to the front door and ran outside. The black clouds up the beach lowered and roiled, funnelling sand, and as Gately watched he saw a tornado’s snout emerge from the clouds and slowly lower.

It looked as if the clouds were either giving birth or taking a shit. Gately ran across the beach to the water to escape the tornado. He ran through the crazed breakers to deep warm water and submerged himself and stayed under until he ran out of breath. It was now no longer clear if he was little Bimmy or the grown man Don. He kept coming up briefly for a great sucking breath and then going back under where it was warm and still. The tornado stayed in one place on the beach, bulging and receding, screaming like a jet, its opening a breathing maw, lightning coming off the funnel- cloud like hair. He could hear the tiny tattered sounds of his mother calling his name. The tornado was right by the beach house and the whole house trembled. His mother came out the front door, wild-haired and holding a bloody Ginsu knife, calling his name. Gately tried to call for her to come into the deep water with him, but even he couldn’t hear his calls against the scream of the storm. She dropped the knife and held her head as the funnel pointed its pointy maw her way. The beach house exploded and his mother flew through the air toward the funnel’s intake, arms and legs threshing, as if swimming in wind. She vanished into the maw and was pulled spinning up into the tornado’s vortex. Shingles and boards followed her. No sign of the shepherd’s crook of the man who’d hurt her. Gately’s right lung burned horribly. He saw his mother for the last time when lightning lit up the funnel’s cone. She was whirling around and around like something in a drain, rising, seeming to swim, bluely backlit. The burst of lightning was the white of the sunlit room when he came up for air and opened his eyes.

His mother’s tiny rotating imago faded against the ceiling. What seemed like heavy breathing was him trying to scream. The skinny bed’s sheets were soaked and he needed a piss something bad. It was daytime and his right side was in no way numb, and he was immediately nostalgic for the warm-cement feeling of when it was numb. Tiny Ewell was gone. His every pulse was an assault on his right side. He didn’t think he could stand it for

even another second. He didn’t know what would happen, but he didn’t think he could stand it.

Later somebody who was either Joelle van D. or a St. E’s nurse in a U.H.I.D. veil was running a cold washcloth over his face. His face was so big it took some time to cover it all. It seemed too tender a touch on the cloth for a nurse, but then Gately heard the clink of I.V. bottles being changed or R.N.ishly messed with somewhere overhead behind him. He was unable to ask about changing the sheets or going to the bathroom.

Some time after the veiled lady left, he just gave up and let the piss go, and instead of feeling wet heat he heard the rising metallic sound of something filling up somewhere near the bed. He couldn’t move to lift the covers and see what he was hooked up to. The blinds were up, and the room was so bright-white in the sunlight everything looked bleached and boiled. The guy with either the square head or the box on his head had been taken off someplace, his bed unmade and one crib-railing down. There were no ghostish figures or figures in mist. The hallway was no brighter than the room, and Gately couldn’t see any shadows of anybody in a hat. He didn’t even know if last night had been real. The pain kept making his lids flutter.

He hadn’t cried over pain since he was four. His last thought before letting his lids stay shut against the brutal white of the room was that he’d maybe been castrated, which was how he’d always heard the term catheterized. He could smell rubbing alcohol and a kind of vitamin stink, and himself.

At some point a probably real Pat Montesian came in and got her hair in his eye when she kissed his cheek and told him if he could just hang in and concentrate on getting well everything would be fine, that everything at the House was back to normal, more or less, and essentially fine, that she was so sorry he’d had to handle a situation like that alone, without support or counsel, and that she realized full well Lenz and the Canadian thugs hadn’t given him enough time to call anybody, that he’d done the very best he could with what he’d had to work with and had nothing to feel horrid about, to let it go, that the violence hadn’t been relapse-type thrill-seeking violence but simply doing the best he could at that moment and trying to stand up for himself and for a resident of the House. Pat Montesian was dressed as usual entirely in black, but formally, as in for taking somebody to court, and her formalwear looked like a Mexican widow’s. She really had said the words thug and horrid. She said not to worry, the House was a community and it

took care of its own. She kept asking if he was sleepy. Her hair’s red was a different and less radiant red than the red of Joelle van D.’s hair. The left side of her face was very kind. Gately had very little understanding of what she was talking about. He was kind of surprised the Finest hadn’t come calling already. Pat didn’t know about the remorseless A.D.A. or the suffocated Nuck: Gately’d tried hard to share openly about the wreckage of his past, but some issues still seemed suicidal to share about. Pat said that Gately was showing tremendous humility and willingness sticking to his resolution about nothing stronger than non-narcotic painkillers, but that she hoped he’d remember that he wasn’t in charge of anything except putting himself in his Higher Power’s hands and following the dictates of his heart.

341 That codeine or maybe Percoset or maybe even Demerol wouldn’t be a relapse unless his heart of hearts that knew his motives thought it would be.

Her red hair was down and looked uncombed and mashed in on the side; she looked frazzled. Gately wanted very much to ask Pat about the legal fallout of the other night’s thug-fracas. He realized she kept asking if he was sleepy because his attempts to speak looked like yawns. His inability to still speak was like speechlessness in bad dreams, airless and hellish, horrid.

What made the whole interface with Pat M. possibly unreal was that right at the end for no reason Pat M. burst into tears, and for no reason Gately got so embarrassed he pretended to pass out, and slept again, and probably dreamed.

Almost certainly dreamed and unreal was the interval when Gately came up with a start and saw Mrs. Lopate, the objay dart from the Shed that they come and install next to the Ennet House viewer some days, sitting there in a gunmetal wheelchair, face contorted, head cocked, hair stringy, looking not at him but more like seemingly at whatever array of I.V. bottles and signifying monitors hung above and behind his big crib, so not speaking or even looking at him but still in some sense being there with him, somehow.

Even though there was no way she could have really been there, it was the first time Gately realized that the catatonic Mrs. L. had been the same lady he’d seen touching the tree in #5’s front lawn late at night, some nights, when he’d first come on Staff. That they were the same person. And that this realization was real even though the lady’s presence in the room was

not, the complexities of which made his eyes roll up in his head again as he passed back out again.

Then at some later point Joelle van Dyne was sitting in a chair just outside the railing of the bed, veiled, wearing sweatpants and a sweater that was starting to unravel, in a pink-bordered veil, not saying anything, probably looking at him, probably thinking he was unconscious with his eyes open, or delirious with Noxzema. The whole right side of himself hurt so bad each breath was like a hard decision. He wanted to cry like a small child. The girl’s silence and the blankness of her veil frightened him after a while, and he wished he could ask her to come back later.

Nobody’d offered him anything to eat, but he wasn’t hungry. There were I.V. tubes going into the backs of both hands and the crook of his left elbow.

Other tubing exited him lower down. He didn’t want to know. He kept trying to ask his heart if just codeine would be a relapse, according to the heart, but his heart was declining to comment.

Then at some point Ennet House alum and senior counselor Calvin Thrust came roaring in and pulled up a chair and straddled it backwards like a slow-tease stripper, slumping and draping his arms over the back of the chair, gesturing with an unlit rodney as he spoke. He told Gately that man he looked like shit something heavy had fell on. But he told Gately he should get a gander of the other guys, the Nucks in Polynesian-wear. Thrust and the House Manager had got there before E.M.P.H.H. Security could drag the Finest away from issuing midnight street-side citations down on Comm. Ave., he told Gately. Lenz and Green and Alfonso Parias-Carbo had dragged/carried the passed-out Gately inside and laid him on the black vinyl couch in Pat’s office, where Gately had come to and told them ixnay on the ambulanceay and to please wake him up in five more minutes, and then passed out for serious real. Parias-Carbo seemed like he’d suffered a mild intestinal hernia from dragging/carrying Gately, but he was being a man about it and had refused codeine downstairs at the E.R. and was expressing gratitude for the growth experience, and the thoraxic lump was receding nicely. Calvin Thrust’s breath smelled of smoke and old scrambled eggs.

Gately had once seen a cheap bootleg cartridge of a young Calvin Thrust having sex with a lady with only one arm on what looked like a crude homemade trapeze. The cartridge’s lighting and production values had been real low-quality, and Gately had been in and out of a Demerol-nod, but he

was 98% sure it had been the young Calvin Thrust. Calvin Thrust said how right there over Gately’s unconscious form in the office Randy Lenz had begun womaning right off how of course he, Randy Lenz, was going to somehow get blamed for Gately and the Nucks getting fucked up and why didn’t they just get it over with and give him the administrative Shoe right now without going through the sham motions of deliberating. Bruce Green had rammed Lenz up against Pat’s cabinets and shaken him like a margarita, but refused to rat out Lenz or say why irate Canadians might think a specimen as dickless as Lenz might have demapped their friend. The matter was under investigation, but Thrust confessed to a certain admiration for Green’s refusal to eat cheese. Brucie G. had suffered a broken nose in the beef and now had a terrific set of twin shiners. Calvin Thrust said both he, Calvin Thrust, and the House Manager had immediately on arrival pegged Lenz as either coked up or ’drined to the gills on some ’drine, and Thrust said he summoned every Oreida of self-control sobriety’d blessed him with and had quietly taken Lenz out of the office into the special Disabled Bedroom next door and over the sound of Burt F. Smith coughing up little pieces of lung in his sleep he said he’d real controlledly given Lenz the choice of voluntarily resigning his Ennet residency on the spot or submitting to a spot-urine and a room-search and everything like that, plus to questioning by the Finest, who were pretty doubtless even now on route with the fleet of ambulances for the Nucks. Meanwhile, Thrust said — gesturing with the gasper and occasionally leaning forward to see whether Gately was still conscious and to tell him he looked like shit, meanwhile — Gately had been lying there passed out, wedged with two full filing cabinets to keep him from rolling off the couch he was wider than, and was bleeding in a very big way, and nobody knew how to, like, affix a turnipcut to a shoulder, and the good-bodied new girl with the cloth mask was bending over the arm of the couch applying pressure to towels on Gately’s bleeding, and her partly-open robe was yielding a view that even brought Alfonso P.- C. around from his herniated fetal posture on the floor, and Thrust and the House Manager were taking turns Asking for Help to intuitively know what they ought to do with Gately, because it was well known that he was on Probie against a real serious bit, and with all due trust and respect to Don it wasn’t clear at that point from the scattered damaged Canadian forms still in different prone positions out in the street who’d done what to who in

defense of whatever or not, and the Finest tend to take a keen interest in huge guys who come into E.R.’s with spectacular gunshot wounds, and but then when Pat M. pulled up in the Aventura laying rubber a couple minutes later she’d screamed rather unserenely at Thrust for not having already rikky-ticked Don Gately over to St. E.’s on his own already. Thrust said he’d let go of Pat’s screaming like water off a duck, revealing that Pat M. had been under felony-weight domestic stress at home, he knew. He said and but so Gately was too heavy to carry unconscious for more than a few meters, even with the masked girl filling in for Parias-Carbo, and they’d just barely got Gately outside still in his wet bowling shirt and laid him briefly on the sidewalk and covered him with Pat’s black suede car-coat while Thrust maneuvered his beloved Corvette up as close to Gately as possible. The sounds of sirens on the way up Comm. Ave. mixed with the sounds of severely fucked-up Canadians returning to whatever passed with Nucks for consciousness and calling for what they called medecins, and with the crazed-squirrel sound of Lenz trying to start his rusted-out brown Duster, which had a bad solenoid. They’d heaved Gately’s dead weight in the ’Vette and Pat M. drove interference like a madwoman in her turbocharged Aventura. Pat let the masked girl ride shotgun with her because the masked girl wouldn’t quit asking her to let her come too. The House Manager stayed behind to represent Ennet House to E.M.P.H.H.

Security and the somewhat less bullshittable BPD-Finest. The sirens got steadily closer, which added to the confusion because senile and mobile- vegetable residents of both Unit #4 and the Shed had been drawn out on the frozen lawns by the freakas, and the mix of several kinds of sirens didn’t do them a bit of good, and they started flapping and shrieking and running around and adding to the medical confusion of the whole scene, which by the time him and Pat pulled out of there was a fucking millhouse and everything like that. Thrust asks rhetorically how much does Don fucking weigh, anyway, because moving the front buckets way up to where like dwarfs put them and putting Gately’s carcass across the back seat of the ’Vette had required all available hands and even Burt F.S.’s stumps, had been like trying to get something humongous through a door that’s way smaller than the humongous thing was and everything like that. Thrust occasionally tapped his gasper like he thought it was lit. The first squad cars had come fishtailing around the Warren-Comm. corner just as they all came

out of the E.M. driveway onto Warren. Pat in her car up ahead had made an arm-motion that could have been either waving coolly at the passing Finest or uncoolly clutching her head. Thrust said had he mentioned Gately’s blood? Gately’d bled all over Pat M.’s vinyl couch and filing cabinets and carpet, the little E.M. streetlet, the sidewalk, Pat M.’s black suede car-coat, pretty much everybody’s winter coats, and the beloved upholstery of Thrust’s beloved Corvette, which upholstery Thrust might add had been new, and dear. But he said not to worry about it, Thrust said: the fucking blood was the least of the problems. Gately didn’t like the sound of that at all, and started trying to blink at him in a kind of crude code, to get his attention, but Thrust either didn’t notice it or thought it was like a postoperative tic. Thrust’s hair was always combed straight back like a mobster. Thrust said at the St. E.’s E.R. how the E.R. crew had been quick and ingenious about getting Gately out of the ’Vette and onto a double- width gurney, though they did have some trouble lifting the gurney so they could get the legs with wheels set up under it so the guys in white could roll him in with more guys in white walking briskly alongside of him and leaning over him and applying pressure and barking little orders in terse code like they always do in E.R.s and everything like that, in emergencies.

Thrust says he couldn’t tell if they could tell right away it was a spectacular gunshot wound, nobody used the G-word or anything like that. Thrust had babbled something about a chain-saw while Pat nodded furiously. The chief two things Gately kept blinking rhythmically to try to find out were: did anybody end up getting killed, meaning the Nucks; and has this one certain A.D.A.-type figure that always wore a hat come in from Essex County or given any sign of getting wind of Gately’s whereabouts or involvement; and — so really three things — and will any of the Ennet House residents that were right there on the scene from start to finish look respectable enough on paper to have creditibility as like legal witnesses. Plus he wouldn’t mind knowing what the fuck Thrust was thinking of, scaring Lenz off and letting him screw off into the urban night leaving Gately maybe holding the statutory bag. Most of Calvin Thrust’s legality-experience was filmic and petty-vice. Thrust eventually describes that one of the House Manager’s key coups of quick thinking was doing a quick TP-scan and finding out which of the residents out there milling around with the catatonics on the street had up-in-the-air legal issues such that they needed to be secloistered in the

protected area of the House out of legal sight by the time the BPD’s Finest hit the scene. He says in his view it was lucky for Gately that he (Gately) was such a massive son of a bitch and had so much blood, because even so Gately’d lost huge volumes of blood all over people’s upholstery and was in shock and everything like that by the time they got him on the double-width gurney, his face cheese-colored and his lips blue and muttering all this shock-type stuff, but even so here he (Gately) was, not exactly ready for a GQ cover but still sucking air. Thrust said in the waiting room at the E.R., where they wouldn’t let a working man smoke down there either, he said then the arrogant new girl resident in the white veil had up and tried to take Thrust’s inventory for letting Randy L. resign and decamp before his part in Gately’s legal embryoglio could be nailed down, and Pat M. had been pretty unconditionally loving about it but it was obvious she wasn’t thrilled with Thrust’s tactics either and everything like that. Gately blinked furiously to signify his agreement with Joelle’s position. Calvin Thrust gestured stoically with his cigarette and said he’d told Pat M. the truth: he always told the truth, no matter how unpleasant for himself, today: he said he’d said he’d encouraged Lenz to rikky-tick out of there because otherwise he was afraid that he (Thrust) was going to eliminate Lenz’s map on the spot, out of rage. Lenz’s solenoid appeared to have been on the permanent dicky, because the rusty Duster was seen by new resident Amy J. real early the next A.M. getting towed from its wrong-side-of-the-street spot in front of #3 when Amy J. slunk back to the House all jonesy and hungover to get her Hefty bag full of evicted personal shit, Lenz apparently having abandoned his wheels and fleen off by foot during all the Finest’s confusion and static with the ambulance drivers that who could blame them didn’t want to take Canadians because of horrible paperwork for Health Card reimbursement for Nucks. The House Manager had gone so far as planting herself out in front of the House’s locked front door with her not-all-that-small arms and legs spread out, blocking the door, assertively stating at whatever Finest tried to enter that Ennet House was court-mandated Protected by the Commonwealth of MA and could only be entered with a Court Order and three working days’ mandated time for the House to file an injunction and wait for a ruling, and the Finest and even the booger-eating morons from E.M.P.H.H. Security were successfully held in bay and kept out, therefore, by her, alone, and Pat M. was considering rewarding the House Manager’s

coolness under fire by promoting her to Assistant Director next month when the present Assistant Director left to go get certified in jet-engine maintenance at East Coast Aerotech on a Mass Rehab grant.

Gately’s eyes keep rolling up in his head, only partly from pain.

Unless he actually had a lit gasper going, Calvin Thrust always has this way of being only technically wherever he was. There was always this air of imminent departure about him, like a man whose beeper was about to sound. It’s like a lit gasper was psychic ballast for him or something.

Everything he said to Gately seemed like it was going to be the last thing he said right before he looked at his watch and slapped his forehead and left.

Thrust said whatever that Nuck that the residents allege shot him shot him with was serious ordnance, because there’d been bits of Gately’s shoulder and bowling shirt all over the complex’s little street. Thrust pointed at the huge bandage and asked whether they’d talked to Gately yet about was he going to get to keep what was left of the mutilated shoulder and arm. Gately found that the only audible sound he could make sounded like a run-over kitten. Thrust mentioned that Danielle S.’d been over to Mass Rehab with Burt F.S. and had reported how they were doing miraculous things with prosfeces these days. Gately’s eyes were rolling around in his head and he was making pathetic little scared aspirated sounds as he pictured himself with a hook and parrot and patch making piratical ‘Arr Matey’ sounds from the AA podium. He felt a terrible certainty that the whole nerve-assembly network that connected the human voice-box to the human mind and let somebody ask for crucial legal and medical feedback must run through the right human shoulder. All kinds of fucking shunts and crazy interconnections with nerves, he knew. He imagined himself with one of those solar-cell electric shaver voice-box prosfeces he has to hold up to his throat (maybe with his hook), trying to Carry the Message with it from the podium, sounding like an automatic teller or ROM-audio interface. Gately wanted to know what day the next day was and whether any of Lenz’s Nucks had been demapped, and what the official capacity of the guy was in the hat who’d been sitting just outside the door to the room either last night or the night before, his hat’s shadow cast in a kind of parallelogram across the open doorway, and if the guy was still there, assuming the sight of the guy’s hatted shadow had been valid and not phantasmic, and he wondered how they went about cuffing you if one of

your arms’ shoulders was mutilated and the size of your head. If Gately took anything deeper than a half-breath, a mind-bending sheet of pain goes down his right side. He even breathed like a sick kitten, more like throbbing than breathing. Thrust said Hester Thrale had apparently disappeared sometime during the freakas and never came back. Gately could remember her running screaming off into the urban night. Thrust said her Alfa Romeo got towed the next A.M. right along with Lenz’s bum Duster, and her stuff’s been duly bagged and is on the porch and everything familiar like that.

Thrust said they found this mysteriously huge stash of high-quality Irish Luggage during the Staff’s search of Lenz’s room, and the House looks to be fixed for trash- and eviction-bags for the next fiscal year. Discharged residents’ bagged possessions stay on the porch for three days, and Gately’s trying to calculate the present date from this fact. Thrust says Emil Minty got a Full House Restriction for getting observed removing one of Hester Thrale’s undergarments from her bag on the porch, for reasons nobody much wants to speculate about. Kate Gompert and Ruth van Cleve supposedly went to hit an NA meeting in Inman Square and got supposedly mugged and separated, and then only Ruth van Cleve showed up back at the House, and Pat’s sworn out a P.C. warrant for Gompert because of the girl’s other psych and suicide issues. Gately discovers he doesn’t even all that much care whether anybody thought to call Stavros L. at the Shattuck about Gately’s day job. Thrust smoothed his hair back and said what else let’s see.

Johnette Foltz is so far covering Gately’s shifts and said to say he’s in her prayers. Chandler Foss finished out his nine months and graduated but came back the next morning and hung around for Morning Meditation, which has to be a good sign sobriety-wise for the old Chandulator. Jennifer Belbin did get indicted on the bad-check issue up in Wellfleet Circuit Court, but they’re going to let her finish out her residency at the House before anything goes to trial, which her P.D. said graduating the House is guaranteed to get her bit cut in at least half. The Asst. Director had gone up to court with Belbin on her own time. Doony Glynn’s still laid up with the diveritis thing, and can be neither coaxed nor threatened out of his fetal position in bed, and the House Manager’s trying to breastwork through the red tape at Health to get them to OK him admission to St. E.’s even though he’s got insurance fraud on his yellow sheet, part of his own past-wreckage.

A guy that had gone through the House back when Thrust did and had

stayed sober in AA for four solid years had suddenly out of nowhere slipped up and took The First Drink the same day as the Lenz freakas, and predictably ended getting totally shitfaced, and went and fell off the end of the Fort Point pier — like literally took a long walk on a short pier, apparently — and sank like a rock, and the memorial service is today, which is why Thrust is going to have to take off in a second here, he says.

The new kid Tingley’s coming out of the linen closet for up to an hour at a time and is taking solid food and Johnette’s quit lobbying to have the kid sent over to Met State. The even newer new guy now that’s come in to take Chandler Foss’s spot’s name is Dave K. and is one grim story to behold, Thrust assures him, a junior executive guy at ATHSCME Air Displacement, an upscale guy with a picket house and kids and a worried wife with tall hair, who this Dave K.’s bottom was he drank half a liter of Cuerva at some ATHSCME Interdependence Day office party and everything like that and got in some insane drunken limbo-dance challenge with a rival executive and tried to like limbo under a desk or a chair or something insanely low, and got his spine all fucked up in a limbo-lock, maybe permanently: so the newest new guy scuttles around the Ennet House living room like a crab, his scalp brushing the floor and his knees trembling with effort. Danielle S. thinks Burt F.S. might have batorial ammonia or some kind of chronic lung thing, and Geoff D.’s trying to get the other residents to sign a petition to get Burt barred from the kitchen and dining room because Burt can’t cover his mouth when he coughs, understandably. Thrust says Clenette H. and Yolanda W. are taking meals in their room and are under orders not to come down or go near any windows, because of what happened to the map of the Nuck they allegedly stomped and everything like that. Gately mews and blinks like mad. Thrust says everybody’s being real supportive of Jenny B. and encouraging her to turn the Wellfleet indictment over to her Higher Power. The Shed staff are still rolling the catatonic lady’s wheelchair over from the Shed to the House on scheduled A.M.’s, and Thrust says Johnette had to write up Minty and Diehl for putting one of those gag-arrows that are curved in the middle and look like there’s an arrow through your head over the catatonic lady’s paralyzed head yesterday and leaving her slumped by the TP like that all day. Plus Thrale’s panties; so suddenly in twelve hours Minty’s just one more offense away from getting the Shoe, which Thrust is already personally shining the tip of his very sharpest shoe, in hopes. The

biggest issue at the House Bitch and Complaint meeting was that earlier this week it turns out Clenette H. had brung in this whole humongous shitload of cartridges she said they were getting ready to throw in the dumpster up at the swank tennis school up the hill she works at, and she promoted them and hauled them down to the House, and the residents all have a wild hair because Pat says Staff has to preview the cartridges for suitability and sex before they can be put out for the residents, and the residents are all bitching that this’ll take forever and it’s just the fucking Staff hoarding the new entertainment when the House’s TP’s just about on its hands and knees in the entertainment desert starving for new entertainment. McDade bitched at the meeting that if he had to watch Nightmare on Elm Street XXII: The Senescence one more time he was going to take a brody off the House’s roof.

Plus Thrust says Bruce Green hasn’t shared word one to Staff about his feelings about anything to do with Lenz or Gately’s embryoglio; that he just sits around waiting for somebody to read his mind; that his roommates have complained that he thrashes and shouts about nuts and cigars in his sleep.

Calvin Thrust, four years sober, straddling the backwards chair, keeps inclining himself ever more forward in the posture of a man who’s at any moment going to push up off out of the chair and leave. He reports how something deep in the previously hopelessly arrogant-seeming ‘Tiny’ Ewell seems like it’s broken and melted, spiritually speaking: the guy shaved off his Kentucky Chicken beard, was heard weeping in the 5-Man head, and was observed by Johnette taking out the kitchen trash in secret even though his Chore this week was Office Windows. Thrust had discovered fine dining in sobriety, and has the beginning of chins. His hair is slicked back with odorless stuff at all times, and he has a more or less permanent sore on his upper lip. Gately for some reason keeps imagining Joelle van Dyne dressed as Madame Psychosis sitting in a plain chair in the 3-Woman room eating a peach and looking out the open window at the crucifix atop St.

Elizabeth’s Hospital’s prolix roof. The crucifix isn’t big, but it’s up so high it’s visible from most anywhere in Enfield-Brighton. Sees Joelle delicately pulling the veil out to get the peach up under it. Thrust says Charlotte Treat’s T-cell count is down. She’s needlepointing Gately some kind of GET BETTER A DAY AT A TIME ASSUMING THAT’S GOD’S WILL doily, but it’s been slow going, because Treat’s developed some kind of goopy Virus-

related eye infection that’s got her bumping into walls, and her counselor Maureen N. at the Staff Meeting wanted Pat to consider having her transferred to an HIV halfway house up in Everett that’s got some recovering addicts in there. Morris Hanley, speaking of T-cells, has baked some cream-cheese brownies for Gately as a nurturing gesture, but then the twats at the Trauma Wing’s nurses’ station, like, impounded them from Thrust when he came up, but he’d had a couple on the way over in the bloodstained ’Vette and he could assure Don that Hanley’s brownies were worth killing a loved one for and everything like that. Gately feels a sudden rush of anxiety over the issue of who’s cooking the House supper in his absence, like will they know to put corn flakes in the meat loaf, for texture.

He finds Thrust insufferable and wishes he’d just fucking go already, but has to admit he’s less conscious of the horrific pain when somebody’s there, but that that’s mostly because the drowned panic of not being able to ask questions or have any input into what somebody’s saying is so awful it sort of dwarfs the pain. Thrust puts his unlit gasper behind his ear where Gately predicts hair-tonic will render it unsmokable, looks conspiratorially around back over each shoulder, leans in so his face is visible between two bars of the bed’s side-railing, and bathes Gately’s face in old eggs and smoke as he leans in and quietly says that Gately’ll be psyched to hear that all the residents that were at the embryoglio — except Lenz and Thrale and the ones that aren’t in a legal position to step forward and like that, he says — he says they’ve most of them all come forward and filed depositions, that the BPD’s Finest, plus some rather weirder Federal guys with goofy- looking archaic crew cuts, probably involved because of the like inter- O.N.A.N. element of the Nucks — here Gately’s big heart skips and sinks — have come around and been voluntarily admitted inside, on Pat’s written OK, and they took depositions, which is like testifying on paper, and the depositions look to be basically 110% behind Don Gately and support a justifiable señorio of either self-defense or Lenz-defense. Several testimonies indicate the Nucks gave the impression of being under the influence of aggressive-type Substances. The single biggest problem right now, Thrust says Pat says, is the missing alleged Item. As in the .44 Item Gately was plugged with’s whereabouts are missing, Thrust says. The last resident to depose to seeing it was Green, who says he took it away from the Nuck the nigger girls stomped, whereupon he, Green, says he dropped it

on the lawn. Whereupon it liked vanished from legal view. Thrust says that in his legal view the Item’s the thing that makes the difference between a señorio of ironshod self-defense and one of just maybe a huge fucking beef in which Gately got mysteriously plugged at some indefinite point while rearranging a couple Canadian maps with his huge bare hands. Gately’s heart is now somewhere around his bare hairy shins, at the mention of Federal crewcuts. His attempted plea for Thrust to come out and say did he actually kill anybody did he sounds like that crushed kitten again. The pain of the terror is past standing, and it helps him surrender and quit trying, and he relaxes his legs and decides Thrust gets to not say whatever he wants, that the reality right this second is that he’s mute and powerless over Thrust.

Thrust leans in and hugs the back of the chair and says Clenette Henderson and Yolanda Willis are on Full House Restriction in their room to keep them from coming down and maybe fucking themselves over legally in a deposition. Because the Nuck with the plaid hat with the ear-flaps and the missing alleged Item had expired on the spot from a spike heel through the right eye, as he was getting the shit stomped out of him as only female niggers can stomp, and everything like that, and Yolanda Willis had very shrewdly left the shoe and spike heel right there protruding from the guy’s map with her toe-prints all over its insides — meaning presumably the shoe’s — so producing the Item was going to be in her strong legal interests too, as well, as Thrust analyzes the legal landscape. Thrust says Pat’s limped around and appealed to every single resident personally, and everybody’s submitted more or less voluntarily to a room- and property- search and everything like that, and still no large-caliber Item has turned up, though Nell Gunther’s hidden Oriental-knife collection sure made an impression. Thrust predicts it’ll be strongly in Gately’s lego-judicial interest and everything like that to ransack his brain and mind for where and with who he last saw the alleged gun. The sun was starting to go down over the West Newton hills through the double-sealed windows, now, trembling slightly, and the windowlight against the far wall was ruddled and bloody.

The heater vents kept making a sound like a distant parent gently shushing.

When it starts to get dark out is when the ceiling breathes. And everything like that.

Sometime later, at night, backlit by the light of the hall, is the figure of resident Geoffrey Day, sitting where Thrust had sat but with the chair turned around the right way and with his legs primly crossed, eating a cream-cheese brownie he reports they’re passing out free to people down at the nurses’ station. Day says Johnette F. is certainly no Don Gately in the culinary arena. She seems to enjoy some sort of collusive kickback-type relationship with the manufacturers of Spam, Day says, is his theory. It might be a whole different night. The nighttime ceiling no longer bulges convexly with Gately’s own shallow breaths, and the improved sounds he can now make have evolved from feline to more like bovine. But his right side hurts so bad he can barely hear. It’s gone from a fiery pain to cold dead deep tight pain with a queer flavor of emotional loss to it. From deep inside he can hear the pain laughing at the 90 mg. of Toradol-IM they’ve got in the I.V. drip. As with Ewell, when Gately comes up out of sleep there’s no way to tell how long Day’s been there, or quite why. Day is plowing through a long story it seems about his relationship growing up with his younger brother. Gately has a hard time imagining Day being blood-related to anybody. Day says his brother was developmentally challenged in some way. He had enormous red wet loose lips and wore eyeglasses so thick his eyes had looked like an ant’s eyes, growing up. Part of his challenge was that Day’s brother had had a crippling phobic fear of leaves, apparently. As in ordinary leaves, from trees. Day’s been sucker-punched by an emergent sober memory of how he used to emotionally abuse his little brother simply by threatening to touch him with a leaf. Day has this way of holding his cheek and jaw when he talks like cutout photos of the late J. Benny. It’s not at all evident why Day’s choosing to share this stuff with a mute and feverishly semiconscious Gately. It seems like Don G.’s gotten way more popular as somebody to talk to since he’s become effectively paralyzed and mute. The ceiling’s behaving itself, but in the room’s gray Gately could still make out a tallly insubstantial ghostish figure appearing and disappearing in the mist of his vision’s periphery. There was some creepy relationship between the figure’s postures and the passing nurses’ noiseless glide. This figure pretty definitely seemed to prefer night to day, though by this point Gately could well have been asleep again, as Day began to describe different species of hand-held leaves.

A recurring bad dream Gately’s had ever since he gave up and Came In and got straight consists simply of a tiny acne-scarred Oriental woman looking down at him. Nothing else happens; she’s just looking down at Gately. Her acne scars aren’t even all that bad. The thing is that she’s tiny.

She’s one of those tiny little anonymous Oriental women you see all over metro Boston, always seeming to be carrying multiple shopping bags. But in the recurring dream she’s looking down at him, from his perspective he’s looking up and she’s looking down, which means Gately in the dream is either (a) lying down on his back looking vulnerably up at her or (b) is himself even more incredibly tiny than the woman. Involved in the dream also in a menacing way somehow is a dog standing rigidly in the distance past the Oriental woman, motionless and rigid, in profile, standing there still and straight as a toy. The Oriental woman has no particular expression and never says anything, though her face’s scars have a certain elusive pattern to them that seems like it wants to mean something. When Gately opens his eyes again Geoffrey Day’s gone, and his hospital bed with its railings and I.V. bottles on stands has been moved way over so that it’s right up next to the bed of whoever the person in the room’s other bed is, so it’s like Gately and this unknown patient are a sexless old couple sleeping together but in separate beds, and Gately’s mouth goes oval and his eyes bug out with horror, and his effort at yelling hurts enough to wake him up, and his eyelids shoot up and rattle like old windowshades, and his hospital bed’s back where it’s always been, and a nurse is giving the anonymous guy in the other bed some sort of late-night-type shot you could tell was narcotic, and the patient, who has a very deep voice, is crying. Then somewhere later in the couple of hours before midnight’s parking-switch symphony on Washington St. outside is an unpleasantly detailed dream where the ghostish figure that’s been flickering in and out of sight around the room finally stays in one spot long enough for Gately to really check him out. In the dream it’s the figure of a very tall sunken-chested man in black-frame glasses and a sweatshirt with old stained chinos, leaning back sort of casually or else morosely slumped, resting its tailbone against the window sill’s ventilator’s whispering grille, with its long arms hanging at its sides and its ankles casually crossed so that Gately can even see the detail that the ghostly chinos aren’t long enough for its height, they’re the kind kids used to call ‘Highwaters’ in Gately’s childhood — a couple of Bimmy

Gately’s savager pals would corner some pencil-necked kid in those-type too-short trousers on the playground and go like ‘Yo little brother where’s the fucking flood?’ and then lay the kid out with a head-slap or chest-shove so the inevitable violin went skittering ass-over-teakettle across the blacktop, in its case. The creepy ghostish figure’s arm sometimes, like, vanishes and then reappears at the bridge of its nose, pushing the glasses up in a weary unconscious morose gesture, just like those kids in the Highwater pants on the playground always did in a weak morose way that always somehow made Gately himself want to shove them savagely in the chest. Gately in the dream experienced a painful adrenal flash of remorse and entertained the possibility that the figure represented one of the North Shore violin-playing kids he’d never kept his savage pals from abusing, now come in an adult state when Gately was vulnerable and mute, to exact some kind of payback. The ghostly figure shrugged its thin shoulders and said But no, it was nothing of the sort, it was just a plain old wraith, one without any sort of grudge or agenda, just a generic garden-variety wraith.

Gately sarcastically in the dream thought that Oh well then if it was just a garden-variety wraith, is all, geez what a fucking relief. The wraith-figure smiled apologetically and shrugged, shifting its tailbone on the whispering grille a bit. There was an odd quality to its movements in the dream: they were of regulation speed, the movements, but they seemed oddly segmented and deliberate, as if more effort than necessary were going into them somehow. Then Gately considered that who knew what was necessary or normal for a self-proclaimed generic wraith in a pain-and-fever dream.

Then he considered that this was the only dream he could recall where even in the dream he knew that it was a dream, much less lay there considering the fact that he was considering the up-front dream quality of the dream he was dreaming. It quickly got so multilevelled and confusing that his eyes rolled back in his head. The wraith made a weary morose gesture as if not wanting to bother to get into any sort of confusing dream-v.-real controversies. The wraith said Gately might as well stop trying to figure it out and just capitalize on its presence, the wraith’s presence in the room or dream, whatever, because Gately, if he’d bothered to notice and appreciate it, at least didn’t have to speak out loud to be able to interface with the wraith-figure; and also the wraith-figure said it was by the way requiring incredible patience and fortitude for him (the wraith) to stay in one position

long enough for Gately to really see him and interface with him, and the wraith was making no promises about how many more months he (the wraith) could keep it up, since fortitude had never seemed to have been his long suit. The city’s aggregate nighttime lights lightened the sky through the room’s window to the same dark rose shade you see when you close your eyes, adding to the dream-of-dream-type ambiguity. Gately in the dream tried the test of pretending to lose consciousness so the wraith would go away, and then somewhere during the pretense lost consciousness and really did sleep, for a bit, in the dream, because the tiny pocked Oriental woman was back and looking wordlessly down at him, plus the creepy rigid dog. And then the sedated patient in the next bed woke Gately back up, in the original dream, with some kind of narcotized gurgle or snore, and the so-called wraith-figure was still there and visible, only now it was standing on top of the railing at the side of Gately’s bed, looking down at him now from a towering railing-plus-original-tallness height, having to exaggerate his shoulders’ natural slump in order to clear the ceiling. Gately got a clear view of an impressive thatch of nostril-hair, looking up into the wraith’s nostrils, and also a clear lateral look at the wraith’s skinny ankles’ like ankle-bones bulging in brown socks below the cuffs of the Highwater chinos. As much as his shoulder, calf, toe, and whole right side were hurting, it occurred to Gately that you don’t normally think of wraiths or ghostish phantasms as being tall or short, or having bad posture, or wearing certain-colored socks. Much less having anything as specific as extrusive nostril-hair. There was a degree of, what, specificness about this figure in this dream that Gately found troubling. Much less having the unpleasant old-Oriental-woman dream inside this dream right here. He began to wish again that he could call out for assistance or to wake himself up. But now not even moos or mews would come, all he could seem to do was pant real hard, as if the air was like totally missing his vocal box, or like his vocal box was totally demapped from nerve-damage in his shoulder and now just sort of hung there all withered and dry like an old hornet nest while air rushed out Gately’s throat all around it. His throat still didn’t feel right. It was exactly the suffocated speechlessness in dreams, nightmares, Gately realized. This was both terrifying and reassuring, somehow. Evidence for the dream-element and so on and so forth. The wraith was looking down at him and nodding sympathetically. The wraith could empathize totally, it

said. The wraith said Even a garden-variety wraith could move at the speed of quanta and be anywhere anytime and hear in symphonic toto the thoughts of animate men, but it couldn’t ordinarily affect anybody or anything solid, and it could never speak right to anybody, a wraith had no out-loud voice of its own, and had to use somebody’s like internal brain- voice if it wanted to try to communicate something, which was why thoughts and insights that were coming from some wraith always just sound like your own thoughts, from inside your own head, if a wraith’s trying to interface with you. The wraith says By way of illustration consider phenomena like intuition or inspiration or hunches, or when someone for instance says ‘a little voice inside’ was telling them such-and-such on an intuitive basis. Gately can now take no more than a third of a normal breath without wanting to throw up from the pain. The wraith was pushing his glasses up and saying Besides, it took incredible discipline and fortitude and patient effort to stay stock-still in one place for long enough for an animate man actually to see and be in any way affected by a wraith, and very few wraiths had anything important enough to interface about to be willing to stand still for this kind of time, preferring ordinarily to whiz around at the invisible speed of quanta. The wraith says It doesn’t really matter whether Gately knows what the term quanta means. He says Wraiths by and large exist (putting his arms out slowly and making little quotation- mark finger-wiggles as he said exist) in a totally different Heisenbergian dimension of rate-change and time-passage. As an example, he goes on, normal animate men’s actions and motions look, to a wraith, to be occurring at about the rate a clock’s hour-hand moves, and are just about as interesting to look at. Gately was thinking for fuck’s sake what was this, now even in unpleasant fever-dreams now somebody else is going to tell him their troubles now that Gately can’t get away or dialogue back with anything about his own experience. He normally couldn’t ever get Ewell or Day to sit down for any kind of real or honest mutual sharing, and now that he’s totally mute and inert and passive all of a sudden everybody seems to view him as a sympathetic ear, or not even a sympathetic real ear, more like a wooden carving or statue of an ear. An empty confessional booth. Don G. as huge empty confessional booth. The wraith disappears and instantly reappears in a far corner of the room, waving Hi at him. It was slightly reminiscent of ‘Bewitched’ reruns from Gately’s toddlerhood. The wraith

disappears again and again just as instantly reappears, now holding one of Gately’s Ennet House basement flea-baggy Staff bedroom’s cut-out-and- Scotch-taped celebrity photos, this one an old one of U.S. Head of State Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner, on stage, wearing velour, twirling a mike, from back in the days before he went to a copper-colored toupee, when he used a strigil instead of a UV flash-booth and was just a Vegas crooner.

Again the wraith disappears and instantly reappears holding a can of Coke, with good old Coke’s distinctive interwoven red and white French curls on it but alien unfamiliar Oriental-type writing on it instead of the good old words Coca-Cola and Coke. The unfamiliar script on the Coke can is maybe the whole dream’s worst moment. The wraith walks jerkily and overdeliberately across the floor and then up a wall, occasionally disappearing and then reappearing, sort of fluttering mistily, and ends up standing upside-down on the hospital room’s drop ceiling, directly over Gately, and holds one knee to its sunken chest and starts doing what Gately would know were pirouettes if he’d ever once been exposed to ballet, pirouetting faster and faster and then so fast the wraith’s nothing but a long stalk of sweatshirt-and-Coke-can-colored light that seems to extrude from the ceiling; and then, in a moment that rivals the Coke-can moment for unpleasantness, into Gately’s personal mind, in Gately’s own brain-voice but with roaring and unwilled force, comes the term PIROUETTE, in caps, which term Gately knows for a fact he doesn’t have any idea what it means and no reason to be thinking it with roaring force, so the sensation is not only creepy but somehow violating, a sort of lexical rape. Gately begins to consider this hopefully nonrecurring dream even more unpleasant than the tiny-pocked-Oriental-woman dream, overall. Other terms and words Gately knows he doesn’t know from a divot in the sod now come crashing through his head with the same ghastly intrusive force, e.g. ACCIACCATURA and ALEMBIC, LATRODECTUS MACTANS and NEUTRAL DENSITY POINT, CHIAROSCURO and PROPRIOCEPTION and TESTUDO and ANNULATE and BRICOLAGE and CATALEPT and GERRYMANDER and SCOPOPHILIA and LAERTES — and all of a sudden it occurs to Gately the aforethought EXTRUDING, STRIGIL and LEXICAL themselves — and LORDOSIS and IMPOST and SINISTRAL and MENISCUS and CHRONAXY and POOR YORICK and LUCULUS and CERISE MONTCLAIR and then DE SICA NEO-REAL CRANE DOLLY and

CIRCUMAMBIENTFOUNDDRAMALEVIRATEMARRIAGE and then more lexical terms and words speeding up to chipmunkish and then HELIATED and then all the way up to a sound like a mosquito on speed, and Gately tries to clutch both his temples with one hand and scream, but nothing comes out. When the wraith reappears, it’s seated way up behind him where Gately has to let his eyes roll way back in his head to see him, and it turns out Gately’s heart is being medically monitored and the wraith is seated up on the heart monitor in a strange cross-legged posture with his pantcuffs pulled up so high Gately could see the actual skinny hairless above-the-sock skin of the wraith’s ankles, glowing a bit in the spilled light of the Trauma Wing hall. The Oriental can of Coke now rests on Gately’s broad flat forehead. It’s cold and smells a little funny, like low tide, the can. Now footsteps and the sound of bubblegum in the hall. An orderly shines a flashlight in and plays it over Gately and the narcotized roommate and environs, and makes marks on a clipboard while blowing a small orange bubble. It’s not like the light passes through the wraith or anything dramatic — the wraith simply disappears the instant the light hits the heart monitor and reappears the instant it moves away. Gately’s unpleasant dreams definitely don’t normally include specific gum-color and intense physical discomfort and invasions of lexical terms he doesn’t know from shinola.

Gately begins to conclude it’s not impossible that the garden-variety wraith on the heart monitor, though not conventionally real, could be a sort of epiphanyish visitation from Gately’s personally confused understanding of God, a Higher Power or something, maybe sort of like the legendary Pulsing Blue Light that AA founder Bill W. historically saw during his last detox, that turned out to be God telling him how to stay sober via starting AA and Carrying The Message. The wraith smiles sadly and says something like Don’t we both wish, young sir. Gately’s forehead wrinkling as his eyes keep rolling up makes the foreign can wobble coldly: of course there’s also the possibility that the tall slumped extremely fast wraith might represent the Sergeant at Arms, the Disease, exploiting the loose security of Gately’s fever-addled mind, getting ready to fuck with his motives and persuade him to accept Demerol just once, just one last time, for the totally legitimate medical pain. Gately lets himself wonder what it would be like, able to quantum off anyplace instantly and stand on ceilings and probably burgle like no burglar’d ever dreamed of, but not able to really affect

anything or interface with anybody, having nobody know you’re there, having people’s normal rushed daily lives look like the movements of planets and suns, having to sit patiently very still in one place for a long time even to have some poor addled son of a bitch even be willing to entertain your maybe being there. It’d be real free-seeming, but incredibly lonely, he imagines. Gately knows a thing or two about loneliness, he feels.

Does wraith mean like a ghost, as in dead? Is this a message from a Higher Power about sobriety and death? What would it be like to try and talk and have the person think it was just their own mind talking? Gately could maybe Identify, to an extent, he decides. This is the only time he’s ever been struck dumb except for a brief but nasty bout of pleuritic laryngitis he’d had when he was twenty-four and sleeping on the cold beach up in Gloucester, and he doesn’t like it a bit, the being struck dumb. It’s like some combination of invisibility and being buried alive, in terms of the feeling.

It’s like being strangled somewhere deeper inside you than your neck.

Gately imagines himself with a piratical hook, unable to speak on Commitments because he can only gurgle and pant, doomed to an AA life of ashtrays and urns. The wraith reaches down and removes the can of un- American tonic from Gately’s forehead and assures Gately he can more than Identify with an animate man’s feelings of communicative impotence and mute strangulation. Gately’s thoughts become agitated as he tries to yell mentally that he never said a fucking thing about impotence. He’s got a way clearer and more direct view of the wraith’s extreme nostril-hair situation than he’d prefer to. The wraith hefts the can absently and says age twenty- eight seems old enough for Gately to remember U.S. broadcast television’s old network situation comedies of the B.S. ’80s and ’90s, probably. Gately has to smile at the wraith’s cluelessness: Gately’s after all a fucking drug addict, and a drug addict’s second most meaningful relationship is always with his domestic entertainment unit, TV/VCR or HDTP. A drug addict’s maybe the only human species whose own personal vision has a Vertical Hold, for Christ’s sake, he thinks. And Gately, even in recovery, can still summon great verbatim chunks not only of drug-addicted adolescence’s ‘Seinfeld’ and ‘Ren and Stimpy’ and ‘Oo Is ’E When ’E’s at ’Ome’ and ‘Exposed Northerners’ but also the syndicated ‘Bewitched’ and ‘Hazel’ and ubiquitous ‘M*A*S*H’ he grew to monstrous childhood size in front of, and especially the hometown ensemble-casted ‘Cheers!,’ both the late-

network version with the stacked brunette and the syndicated older ones with the titless blond, which Gately even after the switch over to InterLace and HDTP dissemination felt like he had a special personal relationship with ‘Cheers!,’ not only because everybody on the show always had a cold foamer in hand, just like in real life, but because Gately’s big childhood claim to recognition had been his eerie resemblance to the huge neckless simian-browed accountant Nom who more or less seemed to live at the bar, and was unkind but not cruel, and drank foamer after foamer without once hitting anybody’s Mom or pitching over sideways and passing out in vomit somebody else had to clean up, and who’d looked — right down to the massive square head and Neanderthal brow and paddle-sized thumbs — eerily like the child D. W. (‘Bim’) Gately, hulking and neckless and shy, riding his broom handle, Sir Osis of Thuliver. And the wraith on the heart monitor looks pensively down at Gately from upside-down and asks does Gately remember the myriad thespian extras on for example his beloved ‘Cheers!,’ not the center-stage Sam and Carla and Nom, but the nameless patrons always at tables, filling out the bar’s crowd, concessions to realism, always relegated to back- and foreground; and always having utterly silent conversations: their faces would animate and mouths move realistically, but without sound; only the name-stars at the bar itself could audibilize. The wraith says these fractional actors, human scenery, could be seen (but not heard) in most pieces of filmed entertainment. And Gately remembers them, the extras in all public scenes, especially like bar and restaurant scenes, or rather remembers how he doesn’t quite remember them, how it never struck his addled mind as in fact surreal that their mouths moved but nothing emerged, and what a miserable fucking bottom-rung job that must be for an actor, to be sort of human furniture, figurants the wraith says they’re called, these surreally mute background presences whose presence really revealed that the camera, like any eye, has a perceptual corner, a triage of who’s important enough to be seen and heard v. just seen. A term from ballet, originally, figurant, the wraith explains. The wraith pushes his glasses up in the vaguely snivelling way of a kid that’s just got slapped around on the playground and says he personally spent the vast bulk of his own former animate life as pretty much a figurant, furniture at the periphery of the very eyes closest to him, it turned out, and that it’s one heck of a crummy way to try to live. Gately, whose increasing self-pity leaves little

room or patience for anybody else’s self-pity, tries to lift his left hand and wiggle his pinkie to indicate the world’s smallest viola playing the theme from The Sorrow and the Pity, but even moving his left arm makes him almost faint. And either the wraith is saying or Gately is realizing that you can’t appreciate the dramatic pathos of a figurant until you realize how completely trapped and encaged he is in his mute peripheral status, because like say for example if one of ‘Cheers!’ ’s bar’s figurants suddenly decided he couldn’t take it any more and stood up and started shouting and gesturing around wildly in a bid for attention and nonperipheral status on the show, Gately realizes, all that would happen is that one of the audibilizing ‘name’ stars of the show would bolt over from stage-center and apply restraints or the Heineken Maneuver or CPR, figuring the silent gesturing figurant was choking on a beer-nut or something, and that then the whole rest of that episode of ‘Cheers!’ would be about jokes about the name star’s life-saving heroics, or else his fuck-up in applying the Heineken Maneuver to somebody who wasn’t choking on a nut. No way for a figurant to win. No possible voice or focus for the encaged figurant. Gately speculates briefly about the suicide statistics for bottom-rung actors. The wraith disappears and then reappears in the chair by the bed’s railing, leaning forward with its chin on its hands on the railing in what Gately’s coming to regard as the classic tell-your-troubles-to-the-trauma-patient-that- can’t-interrupt-or-getaway position. The wraith says that he himself, the wraith, when animate, had dabbled in filmed entertainments, as in making them, cartridges, for Gately’s info to either believe or not, and but in the entertainments the wraith himself made, he says he goddamn bloody well made sure that either the whole entertainment was silent or else if it wasn’t silent that you could bloody well hear every single performer’s voice, no matter how far out on the cinematographic or narrative periphery they were; and that it wasn’t just the self-conscious overlapping dialogue of a poseur like Schwulst or Altman, i.e. it wasn’t just the crafted imitation of aural chaos: it was real life’s real egalitarian babble of figurantless crowds, of the 342 animate world’s real agora, the babble of crowds every member of which was the central and articulate protagonist of his own entertainment. It occurs to Gately he’s never had any sort of dream where somebody says anything like vast bulk, much less agora, which Gately interprets as a kind

of expensive sweater. Which was why, the wraith is continuing, the complete unfiguranted egalitarian aural realism was why party-line entertainment-critics always complained that the wraith’s entertainments’ public-area scenes were always incredibly dull and self-conscious and irritating, that they could never hear the really meaningful central narrative conversations for all the unfiltered babble of the peripheral crowd, which they assumed the babble(/babel) was some self-conscious viewer-hostile heavy-art directorial pose, instead of radical realism. The wraith’s grim smile almost disappears before it appears. Gately’s slight tight smile back is the way you can always tell he’s not really listening. He’s remembering that he used to pretend to himself that the unviolent and sarcastic accountant Nom on ‘Cheers!’ was Gately’s own organic father, straining to hold young Bimmy on his lap and letting him draw finger-pictures in the condensation- rings on the bartop, and when he was pissed off at Gately’s mother being sarcastic and witty instead of getting her down and administering horribly careful U.S.-Navy-brig-type beatings that hurt like hell but would never bruise or show. The can of foreign Coke has left a ring on his forehead that’s colder than the feverish skin around it, and Gately tries to concentrate on the cold of the ring instead of the dead cold total ache on his whole right side — DEXTRAL — or the sober memory of his mother Mrs. Gately’s ex- significant other, the little-eyed former M.P. in khaki skivvies hunched drunk over his notebook’s record of his Heinekens for the day, his tongue in the corner of his mouth and his eyes scrunched as he tries to see a unitary enough notebook to write in, Gately’s mother on the floor trying to crawl off toward the lockable bathroom quietly enough so the M.P. wouldn’t notice her again.

The wraith says Just to give Gately an idea, he, the wraith, in order to appear as visible and interface with him, Gately, he, the wraith, has been sitting, still as a root, in the chair by Gately’s bedside for the wraith- equivalent of three weeks, which Gately can’t even imagine. It occurs to Gately that none of the people that’ve dropped by to tell him their troubles has bothered to say how many days he’s even been in the Trauma Wing now, or what day it’s going to be when the sun comes up, and so Gately has no idea how long he’s gone now without an AA meeting. Gately wishes his sponsor Ferocious Francis G. would hobble by instead of Ennet Staff that want to talk about prosfeces and residents who come just to share

remembered wreckage with somebody they don’t even think can even hear them, sort of the way a little kid confides to a dog. He doesn’t let himself even contemplate why no Finest or federally crew-cut guys have visited yet, if he’s been in here a while, if they’ve been all over the House like hamsters on wheat already, as Thrust had said. The seated shadow of somebody in a hat is still there out there in the hall, though if the whole interlude was a dream it isn’t and has never been there, Gately realizes, squinting a little to try to make sure the shadow is the shadow of a hat and not a fire- extinguisher box on the hall wall or something. The wraith excuses himself and disappears but then reappears two slow blinks later, back in the same position. ‘That was worth an Excuse Me?’ Gately thinks at the wraith dryly, almost laughing. The sheet of pain from the near-laugh send his eyes way up back up in his head. The chassis of the heart monitor doesn’t look broad enough to support even a wraith’s ass. The heart monitor’s the silent kind.

It’s got the moving white line with big speed bumps moving across it for Gately’s pulse, but it doesn’t make the sterile beeping that old hospital- drama monitors did. Patients in hospital-dramas were frequently unconscious figurants, Gately reflects. The wraith says he’d just paid a small quantumish call to the old spotless Brighton two-decker of one Ferocious Francis Gehaney, and from the way the old Crocodile’s shaving and putting on a clean white T-shirt, the wraith says, he predicts F.F. will be visiting the Trauma Wing soon to offer Gately unconditional empathy and fellowship and acerbic Crocodilian counsel. Unless this was just Gately himself thinking this up to keep a stiff upper attitude, Gately thinks. The wraith pushes his glasses up sadly. You never think of a wraith looking sad or unsad, but this dream-wraith displays the whole affective range. Gately can hear the horns and raised voices and U-turn squeals way down below on Wash. that indicate it’s around 0000h., the switching hour. He wonders what something as brief as a car-horn-honk sounds like to a figurant that has to sit still for three weeks to be seen. Wraith, not figurant, Gately meant, he corrects himself. He’s lying here correcting his thoughts like he was talking. He wonders if his brain-voice talks fast enough for the wraith not to have to like tap its foot and look at its watch between words. Are they words if they’re only in your head, though? The wraith blows its nose in a hankie that’s visibly seen better epochs and says he, the wraith, when alive in the world of animate men, had seen his own personal youngest offspring,

a son, the one most like him, the one most marvelous and frightening to him, becoming a figurant, toward the end. His end, not the son’s end, the wraith clarifies. Gately wonders if it offends the wraith when he sometimes refers to it mentally as it. The wraith opens and examines the used hankie just like an alive person can never help but do and says No horror on earth or elsewhere could equal watching your own off-spring open his mouth and have nothing come out. The wraith says it mars the memory of the end of his animate life, this son’s retreat to the periphery of life’s frame. The wraith confesses that he had, at one time, blamed the boy’s mother for his silence. But what good does that kind of thing do, he said, making a blurred motion that might have been shrugging. Gately remembers the former Navy M.P. telling Gately’s mother why it was her fault he lost his job at the chowder plant. ‘Resentment Is The #1 Offender’ is another Boston AA cliché Gately’d started to believe. That blame’s a shell-game. Not that he wouldn’t mind a private couple of minutes alone in a doorless room with Randy Lenz, once he was up and capable again, though.

The wraith reappears slumped back in the chair with his weight on his tailbone and his legs crossed in that Erdedyish upscale way. He says Just imagine the horror of spending your whole itinerant lonely Southwest and West Coast boyhood trying unsuccessfully to convince your father that you even existed, to do something well enough to be heard and seen but not so well that you became just a screen for his own (the Dad’s) projections of his own failure and self-loathing, failing ever to be really seen, gesturing wildly through the distilled haze, so that in adulthood you still carried the moist flabby weight of your failure ever to make him hear you really speak, carried it on through the animate years on your increasingly slumped shoulders — only to find, near the end, that your very own child had himself become blank, inbent, silent, frightening, mute. I.e. that his son had become what he (the wraith) had feared as a child he (the wraith) was.

Gately’s eyes roll up in his head. The boy, who did everything well and with a natural unslumped grace the wraith himself had always lacked, and whom the wraith had been so terribly eager to see and hear and let him (the son) know he was seen and heard, the son had become a steadily more and more hidden boy, toward the wraith’s life’s end; and no one else in the wraith and boy’s nuclear family would see or acknowledge this, the fact that the graceful and marvelous boy was disappearing right before their eyes.

They looked but did not see his invisibility. And they listened but did not hear the wraith’s warning. Gately has that slight tight absent smile again.

The wraith says the nuclear family had believed he (the wraith) was unstable and was confusing the boy with his own (the wraith’s) boyhood self, or with the wraith’s father’s father, the blank wooden man who according to family mythology had ‘driven’ the wraith’s father to ‘the bottle’ and unrealized potential and an early cerebral hemorrhage. Toward the end, he’d begun privately to fear that his son was experimenting with Substances. The wraith keeps having to push its glasses up. The wraith says almost bitterly that when he’d stand up and wave his arms for them all to attend to the fact that his youngest and most promising son was disappearing, they’d thought all his agitation meant was that he had gone bats from Wild Turkey–intake and needed to try to get sober, again, one more time.

This gets Gately’s attention. Here at last could be some sort of point to the unpleasantness and confusion of the dream. ‘You tried to get sober?’ he thinks, rolling his eyes over to the wraith. ‘More than once, you tried? Was 343 it White-Knuckle? Did you ever Surrender and Come In?’ The wraith feels along his long jaw and says he spent the whole sober last ninety days of his animate life working tirelessly to contrive a medium via which he and the muted son could simply converse. To concoct something the gifted boy couldn’t simply master and move on from to a new plateau. Something the boy would love enough to induce him to open his mouth and come out — even if it was only to ask for more. Games hadn’t done it, professionals hadn’t done it, impersonation of professionals hadn’t done it. His last resort: entertainment. Make something so bloody compelling it would reverse thrust on a young self’s fall into the womb of solipsism, anhedonia, death in life. A magically entertaining toy to dangle at the infant still somewhere alive in the boy, to make its eyes light and toothless mouth open unconsciously, to laugh. To bring him ‘out of himself,’ as they say. The womb could be used both ways. A way to say I AM SO VERY, VERY SORRY and have it heard. A life-long dream. The scholars and Foundations and disseminators never saw that his most serious wish was: to entertain.

Gately’s not too agonized and feverish not to recognize gross self-pity when he hears it, wraith or no. As in the slogan ‘Poor Me, Poor Me, Pour Me A Drink.’ With all due respect, pretty hard to believe this wraith could stay sober, if he needed to get sober, with the combination of abstraction and tragically-misunderstood-me attitude he’s betraying, in the dream.

He’d been sober as a Mennonite quilter for 89 days, at the very tail-end of his life, the wraith avers, now back up on the silent heart monitor, though Boston AA had a humorless evangelical rabidity about it that had kept his attendance at meetings spotty. And he never could stand the vapid clichés and disdain for abstraction. Not to mention the cigarette smoke. The atmosphere of the meeting rooms had been like a poker game in hell, had been his impression. The wraith stops and says he bets Gately’s struggling to hide his curiosity about whether the wraith succeeded in coming up with a figurantless entertainment so thoroughly engaging it’d make even an in- bent figurant of a boy laugh and cry out for more.

Father-figure-wise, Gately’s tried his best these last few sober months to fend off uninvited memories of his own grim conversations and interchanges with the M.P.

The wraith on the monitor now bends sharply at the waist, way over forward so his face is upside-down only cm. from Gately’s face — the wraith’s face is only about half the size of Gately’s face, and has no odor — and responds vehemently that No! No! Any conversation or interchange is better than none at all, to trust him on this, that the worst kind of gut- wrenching intergenerational interface is better than withdrawal or hiddenness on either side. The wraith apparently can’t tell the difference between Gately just thinking to himself and Gately using his brain-voice to sort of think at the wraith. His shoulder suddenly sends up a flare of pain so sickening Gately’s afraid he might shit the bed. The wraith gasps and almost falls off the monitor as if he can totally empathize with the dextral flare. Gately wonders if the wraith has to endure the same pain as Gately in order to hear his brain-voice and have a conversation with him. Even in a dream, that’d be a higher price than anybody’s ever paid to interface with D. W. Gately. Maybe the pain’s supposed to lend credibility to some Diseased argument for Demerol the wraith’s going to make. Gately feels somehow too self-conscious or stupid to ask the wraith if it’s here on behalf of the Higher Power or maybe the Disease, so instead of thinking at the

wraith he simply concentrates on pretending to wonder to himself why the wraith is spending probably months of aggregate wraith-time flitting around a hospital room and making pirouetted demonstrations with crooner-photos and foreign tonic-cans on the ceiling of some drug addict he doesn’t know from a rock instead of just quantuming over to wherever this alleged youngest son is and holding very still for wraith-months and trying to have an interface with the fucking son. Though maybe thinking he was seeing his late organic dad as a ghost or wraith would drive the youngest son bats, though, might be the thing. The son didn’t exactly sound like the steadiest hand on the old mental joystick as it was, from what the wraith’s shared. Of course this was assuming the mute figurant son even existed, this was assuming this wasn’t all some roundabout way of the Disease starting to talk Gately into succumbing to a shot of Demerol. He tries to concentrate on all this instead of remembering what Demerol’s warm rush of utter well- being felt like, remembering the comfortable sound of the clunk of his chin against his chest. Or instead of remembering any of his own interchanges with his mother’s live-in retired M.P. One of the highest prices of sobriety was not being able to keep from remembering things you didn’t want to remember, see for instance Ewell and the fraudulent-grandiosity thing from his wienieish childhood. The ex-M.P. had referred to small children and toddlers as ‘rug-rats.’ It was not a term of gruff affection. The M.P. had made the toddler Don Gately return empty Heineken bottles to the neighborhood packy and then haul-ass on back with the bottle-deposits, timing him with a U.S.N.-issue chronometer. He never laid a hand on Gately personally, that Don could recall. But he’d still been afraid of the M.P. The M.P.’d beaten his mother up on an almost daily basis. The most hazardous time for Gately’s mother was between eight Heinekens and ten Heinekens. When the M.P. threw her on the floor and knelt down very intently over her, picking his spots and hitting her very intently, he’d looked like a lobsterman pulling at his outboard’s rope. The M.P. was slightly shorter than Mrs. Gately but was broad and very muscular, and proud of his muscles, going shirtless whenever possible. Or in like sleeveless khaki military T’s. He had bars and weights and benches, and had taught the child Don Gately the fundamentals of free-weight training, with special emphasis on control and form as opposed to just sloppily lifting as much weight as possible. The weights were old and greasy and their poundage pre-metric.

The M.P. was very precise and controlled in his approach to things, in a way Gately has some-how come to associate with all blond-haired men. When Gately, at age ten, began to be able to bench-press more weight than the M.P., the M.P. had not taken it in a good spirit and began refusing to spot him on his sets. The M.P. entered his own weights and repetitions carefully in a little notebook, pausing to do this after each set. He always licked the point of the pencil before he wrote, a habit Gately still finds repellent. In a different little notebook, the M.P. noted the date and time of each Heineken he consumed. He was the sort of person who equated incredibly careful record-keeping with control. In other words he was by nature a turd- counter. Gately had realized this at a very young age, and that it was bullshit and maybe crazy. The M.P. was very possibly crazy. The circumstances of his leaving the Navy were like: shadowy. When Gately involuntarily remembers the M.P. now he also remembers — and wonders why, and feels bad — that he never once asked his mother about the M.P. and why the fuck was he even there and did she actually love him, and why did she love him when he flang her down and beat her up on a more or less daily basis for fucking years on end. The intensifying rose-colors behind Gately’s closed lids are from the hospital room lightening as the light outside the window gets licoricey and pre-dawn. Gately lies below the unoccupied heart-monitor snoring so hard the railings on either side of his bed shiver and rattle. When the M.P. was sleeping or out of the house, Don Gately and Mrs. Gately never once talked about him. His memory is clear on this. It wasn’t just that they never discussed him, or the notebooks or weights or chronometer or his beating up Mrs. Gately. The M.P.’s name was never even mentioned. The M.P. worked nights a lot — driving a cheese- and-egg delivery truck for Cheese King Inc. until he was terminated for embezzling wheels of Stilton and fencing them, then for a time on a mostly automated canning line, pulling a lever that sent New England chowder out of hundreds of spigots into hundreds of lidless cans with an indescribable plopping sound — and the Gately home was like a different world when the M.P. was working or out: it was like the very idea of the M.P. walked out the door with him, leaving Don and his mother not just behind but alone, together, at night, she on the couch and he on the floor, both gradually losing consciousness in front of broadcast TV’s final seasons. Gately tries especially hard now not to explore why it never occurred to him to step in

and pull the M.P. off his mother, even after he could bench-press more than the M.P. The precise daily beatings had always seemed in some strangely emphatic way not his business. He rarely even felt anything, he remembers, watching him hit her. The M.P. was totally unshy about hitting her in front of Gately. It was like everybody unspokenly agreed the whole thing was none of Bimmy’s beeswax. When he was a toddler he’d flee the room and cry about it, he seems to recall. By a certain age, though, all he’d do is raise the volume on the television, not even bothering to look over at the beating, watching ‘Cheers!’ Sometimes he’d leave the room and go into the garage and lift weights, but when he left the room it was never like he was fleeing the room. When he’d been small he’d sometimes hear the springs and sounds from their bedroom sometimes in the A.M. and worry that the M.P. was beating her up on their bed, but at a certain point without anybody taking him aside and explaining anything to him he realized that the sounds then didn’t mean she was getting hurt. The similarity of her hurt sounds in the kitchen and living room and her sex-sounds through the asbestos fiberboard bedroom wall troubles Gately, though, when he remembers now, and is one reason why he fends off remembering, when awake.

Shirtless in the summer — and pale, with a blond man’s dislike for the sun — the M.P. would sit in the little kitchen, at the kitchen table, feet flat on the wood-grain tiling, with a patriotic-themed bandanna wrapped around his head, recording Heinekens in his little notebook. A previous tenant had thrown something heavy through the kitchen window once, and the window’s screen was fucked up and not quite flush, and houseflies came and went more or less at will. Gately, when small, would be in there in the kitchen with the M.P. sometimes; the tile was better for his little cars’ suspensions than nubbly carpet. What Gately remembers, in pain, bubbling just under the lid of sleep, is the special and precise way the M.P. would handle the flies that came into the kitchen. He used no swatter or rolled cone of Herald. He had fast hands, the M.P., thick and white and fast. He’d whack them as they lit on the kitchen table. The flies. But in a controlled way. Not hard enough to kill them. He was very controlled and intent about it. He’d whack them just hard enough to disable them. Then he’d pick them up real precisely and remove either a wing or like a leg, something important to the fly. He’d take the wing or leg over to the beige kitchen waste-basket and very deliberately hike the lid with the foot-pedal and

deposit the tiny wing or leg in the wastebasket, bending at the waist. The memory is unbidden and very clear. The M.P.’d wash his hands at the kitchen sink, using green generic dishwashing liquid. The maimed fly itself he’d ignore and allow to scuttle in crazed circles on the table until it got stuck in a sticky spot or fell off the edge onto the kitchen floor. The conversation with the M.P. that Gately reexperiences in minutely dreamed detail was the M.P., at about five Heinekens, explaining that maiming a fly was way more effective than killing a fly, for flies. A fly was stuck in a sticky spot of dried Heineken and agitating its wing as the M.P. explained that a well-maimed fly produced tiny little fly-screams of pain and fear.

Human beings couldn’t hear a maimed fly’s screams, but you could bet your fat little rug-rat ass other flies could, and the screams of their maimed colleagues helped keep them away. By the time the M.P. would put his head on his big pale arms and grab a little shut-eye among the Heineken bottles on the sun-heated table there’d often be several flies trapped in goo or scuttling in circles on the table, some-times giving odd little hops, trying to fly with one wing or no wings. Possibly in Denial, these flies, as to their like condition. The ones that fell to the floor Gately would hunch directly over on hands and knees, getting one big red ear down just as close to the fly as possible, listening, his big pink forehead wrinkled. What makes Gately most uncomfortable now as he starts to try to wake up in the lemonlight of true hospital morning is that he can’t remember putting the maimed flies out of their misery, ever, after the M.P. passed out, can’t mentally see himself stepping on them or wrapping them in paper towels and flushing them down the toilet or something, but he feels like he must have; it seems somehow real vital to be able to remember his doing something more than just hunkering blankly down amid his Transformer- cars and trying to see if he could hear tiny agonized screams, listening very intently. But he can’t for the life of him remember doing more than trying to hear, and the sheer cerebral stress of trying to force a more noble memory should have awakened him, on top of the dextral hurt; but he doesn’t come all the way awake in the big crib until the memory’s realistic dream bleeds into a nasty fictional dream where he’s wearing Lenz’s worsted topcoat and leaning very precisely and carefully over the prone figure of the Hawaiian- dressed Nuck whose head he’s whacked repeatedly against the hood’s windshield, he’s supporting his inclined weight on his good left hand

against the warm throbbing hood, bent in real close to the maimed head, his ear to the bleeding face, listening very intently. The head opens its red mouth.

The wet start Gately finally wakes with jars his shoulder and side and sends a yellow sheet of pain over him that makes him almost scream into the window’s light. For about a year once at age twenty in Malden he’d slept most nights in a home-built loft in the dorm of a certain graduate R.N.-nursing program in Malden, with a ragingly addicted R.N.-nursing student, in the loft, which you needed a five-rung ladder to get up into this loft and the thing was only a couple of feet under the ceiling, and every A.M. Gately’d awake out of some bad dream and sit up with a jolt and thwack his head against the ceiling, until after some time there was a permanent concavity in the ceiling and a flattish spot in the curve of the top of his forehead he can still feel, lying here blinking and holding his head with his good left hand. For a second, blinking and red with A.M. fever, he thinks he sees Ferocious Francis G. in the bedside chair, chin freshly shaved and dotted with bits of Kleenex, posture stolid, his old man’s saggy little tits rising slowly under a clean white T-, smiling grimly around blue tubes and an unlit cigar between his teeth and saying ‘Well kid at least you’re still on this side of the fuckin’ sod, I guess there’s something to be said for that there. And are you as yet sober, then?’ the Crocodile says coolly, disappearing and then not reappearing after several blinks.

The forms and sound in the room is really only three White Flaggers Gately’s never known or connected with that well, but are apparently here stopping in on their way to work, to show empathy and support, Bud O. and Glenn K. and Jack J. Glenn K. in daytime wears the gray jumpsuit and complex utility-belt of a refrigeration technician. ‘And who’s the fellow in the hat outside?’ he’s asking.

Gately grunts in a frantic way that suggests the phonemë u. ‘Tall, well-dressed, grumpy, cocky-looking, piggy-eyed, wearing a hat.

Civil-Service-looking. Black socks and brown shoes,’ Glenn K. says, pointing out toward the door where there’s sometimes been the ominous

shadow of a hat.

Gately’s teeth taste long-unbrushed. ‘Looking settled in for a stay, surrounded with sports pages and the takeout foods of many cultures, Laddie,’ says Bud O., who the story from

before Gately’s time goes once hit his wife so hard in the blackout that made him Come In he broke her nose and bent it over flat against her face, which he asked her never to have repaired, as a daily visual reminder of the depths drink sunk him to, so Mrs. O. had gone around with her nose bent over flat against her left cheek — Bud O.’d tagged her with a left cross — until U.H.I.D. referred her to Al-Anon, which eventually nurtured and supported Mrs. O. into eventually telling Bud O. to take a flying fuck to the moon and getting her nose realigned back out front and leaving him for a male Al-Anon in Birkenstock sandals. Gately’s bowels have gone watery with dread: he has all-too-clear memories of a certain remorseless Revere A.D.A.’s brown shoes, piggy eyes, Stetson w/ feather, and penchant for Third World takeout. He keeps grunting pathetically.

Unsure how to be supportive, for a while the Flaggers try to cheer Gately up by telling him CPR jokes. ‘CPR’ is their term for Al-Anon, which is known to Boston AAs as the ‘Church of Perpetual Revenge.’ ‘What’s an Al-Anon Relapse?’ asks Glenn K. ‘It is a twinge of compassion,’ says Jack J., who has a kind of a facial tic. ‘But what is an Al-Anon Salute?’ Jack J. asks back.

The three all pause, and then Jack J. puts the back of his hand to his brow and flutters his lashes martyrishly at the drop-ceiling. They all three of them laugh. They have no clue that if Gately actually laughs he’ll tear his shoulder’s sutures. One side of Jack J.’s face goes in and out of a tortured grimace that doesn’t affect the other side of his face one bit, something that’s always given Gately the fantods. Bud O. is waggling his finger disapprovingly at Glenn K., to signify an Al-Anon Handshake. Glenn K. gives a lengthy impression of an Al-Anon mom watching her alcoholic kid marching in some parade and getting more and more outraged at how everybody’s out of step except her kid. Gately closes his eyes and moves his chest up and down a few times in a dumbshow of polite laughter, so they’ll think they’ve cheered him up and screw. The little thoracic movements make his dextral regions make him want to bite the side of his hand in pain. It’s like a big wooden spoon keeps pushing him just under the surface of sleep and then spooning him up for something huge to taste him, again and again.

19 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

After Rémy Marathe and Ossowiecke, and Balbalis also, they all reported back negatively for all signs of this veiled performer, M. Fortier and Marathe threw into an effect this finally most drastic of the operations for the locating of the Master Entertainment. This was to acquire members of the immediate family of the auteur, perhaps in public.

Marathe was charged with this operation’s details, for M. Broullîme was now thrust into technical trouble-killing on the furthering field-tests of viewer willingness; for one of the newly acquired test-subjects — this was an eccentrically dressed and extremely irritating without-home man of the streets in a white wig appropriated with large bags filled of foreign cookware and extremely small-in-size ladies’ undergarments — was discovered to have been being severing and pushing beneath the room of storage’s closed door the severed digits of the second of the newly acquired test-subjects — this was a mis-dressed and severely weakened or addicted man dressed in the clothing of a gauche woman, carrying multiple purses of suspicious nature — rather than his own digits, marring the statistics of Brullîme’s field-experiment to such the extent that M. Fortier was forced to consider whether to allow Brullîme to conduct a lethal technical interview of the wigged substituter of digits for reasons of anger only. Substantially, a technical interview of more importance was to be conducted in the city Phoenix far across the U.S. to the south, a city’s name Fortier had amusement from, and departed before incoming weather to attend Mlle.

Luria P—— in this conducting, leaving the trusted Rémy Marathe to charge details of the preliminary acquisition.

Marathe, who had made his decision and call, did what he could. A direct assault upon the Academy of Tennis itself was impossible. A.F.R.s fear nothing in this hemisphere except tall and steep hillsides. Their attack must not be direct. Thus the preliminary was to acquire and replace the tennis children of Québec, known by the A.F.R. to be even then en route to U.S.A. soil for gala competition with the tennis children of this Academy.

Marathe selected young Balbalis, the one still with both the legs — albeit paralyzed and stickishly withered, them — to lead the A.F.R. field-detail which must intercept the provincial players. Marathe, he stayed at the

Cambridge shop of the Antitois, withdrawing frequently to the jazz nights nearby of Ryle’s restaurant. Balbalis drove the modified van of Dodge north into the increasingly heavy snowstorm. They bypassed the Pongo checkpoint at Methuen MA. They would place a large mirror in the deserted road and delude the tennis bus that it must leave the road to avoid impact; its own headlights would delude it. An old F.L.Q. trick. Two teams in the van’s back assembled the mirror’s components. Balbalis would not allow to stop for this assembly; the snowfall was worse in the Convexity because of the fans to the south. What used to be Montpelier in Vermont lay between E.W.D. grids but took bad fallout from the region of Champlain and was unoccupied and ghostly white with snow. Balbalis permitted at Montpelier a brief stop for final assembly and for those who were incontinent to change their bags. Balbalis pressed hard to the former place of St. Johnsbury, where the mirror was installed across the southbound lanes of the U.S. Interstate #91. Balbalis did not complain that there were no tracks in the snow of the road to be followed. He never complained. They arrived well early just south of the checkpoint at which Provincial Autoroute #55 became the Interstate #91. There was a brief period of the tension when it appeared that the night-vision attachment for the binoculars had been misplaced. Balbalis remained cool and it was located. The plan was to intercept the travelling team of players and allow A.F.R.s to arrive at the place in their stead.

Marathe promised to conceive an excellent ruse to explain the wheelchairs and adult beards of the false players. There was no smoking in the van while they waited for the children tennis players of their country to appear at the checkpoint. The bus was forced to remain at the checkpoint for several minutes. The bus was large and chartered and appeared warm within. Above its windshield its lit rectangle of destination displayed the English word for charter. If the bus survived the swerve from the highway’s mirror and was operational after the crash of swerving, Balbalis would drive this bus. There was one brief argument over who would be required to drive the van, for Balbalis refused to leave the van behind them even if the bus was operational. If the bus was not operational, no more than six junior children as survivors could be accommodated in the van. The rest would be allowed to die for leur rai pays. Balbalis, he showed no preference one or the other way.

Gately dreamed he was with Ennet House resident Joelle van Dyne in a Southern motel whose restaurant’s authoritarian sign said simply EAT, in the U.S. South, in high summer, brutally hot, the foliage outside the room’s broken windowscreen a parched khaki, the air glassy with heat, the ceiling fan rotating at a second-hand’s rate, the room’s bed a lavish four-poster, tall and squishy, the bedspread nubbly, Gately supine with his side on fire while newcomer Joelle v.D. raises her veil slightly to lick the sweat off his lids and temples, whispering so the veil flutters around and fans him, promising him a P.M. of near-terminal pleasures, undressing at the foot of the old tall bed, slowly, her loose light clothes moist with sweat and falling easily to the bare floor, and an incredible female body, an inhuman body, the sort of body Gately’s only ever seen with a staple in its navel, a body like something you’d win in a raffle; and a fifth post forms on the four-poster, so to speak, which erect post’s long-dormant height obscures the nude newcomer’s figure; and then when she moves around out of the pulsing shadow to lean in close and press her inhuman body’s face right up intimately close to his, she removes the veil, and on top of this body to die for is the unveiled historical likeness of fucking Winston Churchill, complete with cigar and jowls and bulldog scowl, and the ghastliness of the shock makes the rest of Gately’s body go rigid, the pain of which wakes him with a jolted attempt to sit up that itself causes such a blast of pain that he half passes back out again and lies there with rolling eyes and a round mouth.

Gately’s also powerless over memories of the older-type lady that had been their neighbor when he and his mother shared bed and board with the M.P. A Mrs. Waite. There was no Mr. Waite. The smeared window of the little empty garage the M.P. kept his weights in was right next to the spiny neglected garden Mrs. Waite kept in the narrow strip between the two houses. Mrs. Waite’s house had been shall we say indifferently maintained.

Mrs. Waite’s house had made the Gately house look like the Taj. There was something wrong about Mrs. Waite. None of the parents said what it was, but none of the kids were allowed to play in her yard or ring her bell on Halloween. Gately never got clear on what was supposed to be wrong about her, but the little poor neighborhood’s psyche throbbed with something dire about Mrs. Waite. Older kids drove across her lawn and shouted shit that Gately never quite made out, at night. The littler kids thought they had it:

they were pretty sure Mrs. Waite was a witch. Yes, she did look a little witchy, but who over like fifty didn’t? But the big thing was she kept jars of stuff she’d jarred herself in her little garage, brown-green viscous nameless vegetoid stuff in mayonnaise jars stacked on steel shelves and rusty-lidded and bearded with dust. The littler kids snuck in and broke some of the jars and stole one and ran away in mortal terror to break it elsewhere and then run again. They dared each other to ride their bikes in tiny diagonals across the edge of her lawn. They told each other stories of seeing Mrs. Waite in a pointy hat roasting missing kids whose pictures were on milk-cartons and pouring the juice into jars. Some of the bigger littler kids even tried that inevitable gag of putting a paper bag full of dog shit on her stoop and lighting it. It was somehow a further indictment of Mrs. Waite that she never complained. She rarely left her house. Mrs. Gately would never say what was wrong about Mrs. Waite but absolutely forbade Don to fuck with her in any way. Like Mrs. Gately was in any position to enforce any, like, forbiddings. Gately never fucked with Mrs. Waite’s stored jars or rode across her lawn, and never much joined in on the witch-stories, which who needed witches to fear and despise when you had the good old M.P. right there at the kitchen table. But he was still scared of her. When he’d once seen her gnarly-eyed face up against the smeared garage window one P.M. when he had left the M.P. to beating Mrs. Gately and gone out to lift weights he screamed and almost dropped the bench-press bar on his Adam’s apple. But over the long haul of a low-stimulation North Shore childhood, he’d gradually developed a slight relationship with Mrs. Waite. He’d never all that much liked her; it wasn’t like she was this lovable but misunderstood old lady; it’s not like he ran to her dilapitated house to confide in her, or bond. But he went over once or twice, maybe, under circumstances he’d forgot, and had sat in her kitchen, interfaced a little. She was lucid, Mrs. Waite, and apparently continent, and there was no pointy hat anywhere in sight, but her house smelled bad, and Mrs. Waite herself had swollen veiny ankles and little white bits of that dried paste at the corners of her mouth and about a million newspapers stacked and mildewing all over the kitchen, and the old lady basically radiated whatever mixture of unpleasantness and vulnerability it was that made you want to be cruel to people. Gately was never cruel to her, but it’s not like he loved her or anything. When Gately went over there the couple times it was mostly

when the M.P. was canning chowder and his mother had passed out in vomit she expected somebody else to clean up, and he probably wanted to act out his kid’s anger by doing something Mrs. G.’d pathetically tried to forbid. He didn’t eat much of whatever Mrs. Waite offered. She never offered him viscous material from a jar. His memories of whatever they discussed are unspecific. She hung herself, eventually, Mrs. Waite — as in eliminated her own map — and because it was fall and cool she wasn’t found for maybe weeks after. It wasn’t Gately who found her. A meter- reader guy found her several weeks after Gately’s eighth or ninth birthday.

Gately’s birthday was the same week as several other kids’s in the neighborhood, by some chance. Usually Gately’d have his party over with some of the other kids that were having their birthdays with a party. Hats and Twister, X-Men videos, cake on Chinette plates, etc. Mrs. Gately was together enough to come a couple times. In retrospect, the other kids’ parents let Gately have birthdays with them because they’d felt sorry for him, he’s involuntarily realized. But at some sober neighbors’ party, part of which was for his own eighth or ninth birthday, he remembers how Mrs.

Waite had left her house and come rung the sober neighbor’s bell and had brought a birthday cake. For the birthday. A neighborly gesture. Gately’d spilled the beans on the annual mass party at a kitchen-table interface with her. The cake was uneven and slightly tilted to one side, but it was dark chocolate and decorated with four cursive names and had clearly been made with care. Mrs. Waite had spared Gately the humiliation of putting just his name on the cake as if the cake was especially for him. But it was. Mrs.

Waite had saved up for a long time to afford to make the cake, Gately knew.

He knew she smoked like a chimney and had given up cigarettes for weeks to save up for something; she wouldn’t tell him what; she’d tried to make her scary eyes twinkle when she wouldn’t tell; but he’d seen the mayonnaise jar full of quarters on a pile of papers and had wrestled with himself over promoting it, and won. But there were only like nine candles on the cake when the party’s Mom brought it in, and a couple of the kids having birthdays were like twelve, was the private tip-off on who the cake was really for. The party’s Mom had taken the cake at the door and said Thank You but had neglected to invite Mrs. Waite in. Gately was in a position during Twister in the garage to see Mrs. Waite walking back home across the street, slowly but very straightly and dignified and upright. A lot

of the kids went to the garage door to look: Mrs. Waite had rarely been seen outside her house before, and never off her property. The sober Mom brought the cake in the garage and said it was a Touching Gesture from Mrs. Waite across the street; but she wouldn’t let anybody eat the cake or even come close enough to it to blow out the nine candles. The candles didn’t all match. The candles burned down far enough so that there was a smell of burnt frosting before they went out. The cake sat tilted by itself in a corner of the clean garage. Gately didn’t defy the sober Mom or any of the kids and eat a piece of the cake; he didn’t even go near it. He didn’t join in the delicious whispery arguments about what kind of medical waste or roasted-kid renderings were in the cake, but he didn’t stand up and argue with the other kids about the fact of the poisoning, either. Before the party climaxed and the other kids that had got presents opened their presents, the sober Mom had taken the cake into the kitchen when she thought nobody was watching and threw it out in the wastebasket. Gately remembers the cake must have landed upside-down, because the unfrosted side was facing up in the waste-basket when he snuck in and had a look at the cake. Mrs.

Waite had disappeared back inside her house way before the Mom threw the cake away. There’s no way she could have seen the Mom take the uneaten cake back inside the house. A couple days later Gately had promoted a couple packs of Benson & Hedges 100s from a Store 24 and put them in Mrs. Waite’s mailbox, where junk mail and utility bills were already piling up. He sometimes rang the bell but never saw her. Her bell had been a buzzer instead of a bell, he remembers. She got found by a frustrated meter- reader some indefinite number of weeks after that. The circumstances of her death and discovery became more dark myth for the littler kids. Gately wasn’t so into self-torture as to think the cake getting not eaten and getting thrown out was in any way connected with Mrs. Waite hanging herself.

Everybody had their own private troubles, Mrs. Gately had explained to him, and even at that age he could see her point. It’s not like he’d like mourned Mrs. Waite, or missed her, or even thought about her even once for many years after that.

Which is what makes it somehow worse that his next, even more unpleasant Joelle van Dyne pain-and-fever dream takes place in what is, unmistakably and unavoidably, Mrs. Waite’s kitchen, in great detail, right down to the ceiling’s light-fixture full of dried bugs, the brimming ashtrays,

the bar-graph of stacked Globe s, the maddening arrhythmic drip of the kitchen sink and the bad smell — a mixture of mildew and putrid fruit.

Gately is in the ladder-back kitchen chair he used to sit in, the one with one rung broken, and Mrs. Waite is in her chair opposite, seated on the thing he thought then was a weird pink doughnut instead of a hemorrhoid pillow, except in the dream Gately’s feet reach all the way to rest on the floor’s dank tile, and Mrs. Waite is played by veiled U.H.I.D. House resident Joelle van D., except without her veil, and what’s more without any clothes, as in starkers, gorgeous, with that same incredible body as in the other one except here this time with the face not of a jowly British P.M. but of a total female angel, not sexy so much as angelic, like all the world’s light had gotten together and arranged itself into the shape of a face. Or something. It looks like somebody, Joelle’s face, but Gately can’t for the life of him place who, and it’s not just the distraction of the inhumanly gorgeous naked bod below, because the dream is not like a sex-dream. Because in this dream, Mrs.

Waite, who is Joelle, is Death. As in the figure of Death, Death incarnate.

Nobody comes right out and says so; it’s just understood: Gately’s sitting here in this depressing kitchen interfacing with Death. Death is explaining that Death happens over and over, you have many lives, and at the end of each one (meaning life) is a woman who kills you and releases you into the next life. Gately can’t quite make out if it’s like a monologue or if he’s asking questions and she’s responding in a Q/A deal. Death says that this certain woman that kills you is always your next life’s mother. This is how it works: didn’t he know? In the dream everybody in the world seems to know this except Gately, like he’d missed that day in school when they covered it, and so Death’s having to sit here naked and angelic and explain it to him, very patiently, more or less like Remedial Reading at Beverly H.S. Death says the woman who either knowingly or involuntarily kills you is always someone you love, and she’s always your next life’s mother. This is why Moms are so obsessively loving, why they try so hard no matter what private troubles or issues or addictions they have of their own, why they seem to value your welfare above their own, and why there’s always a slight, like, twinge of selfishness about their obssessive mother-love: they’re trying to make amends for a murder neither of you quite remember, except maybe in dreams. As Death’s explanation of Death goes on Gately understands really important vague stuff more and more, but the more he

understands the sadder he gets, and the sadder he gets the more unfocused and wobbly be- comes his vision of the Death’s Joelle sitting nude on the pink plastic ring, until near the end it’s as if he’s seeing her through a kind of cloud of light, a milky filter that’s the same as the wobbly blur through which a baby sees a parental face bending over its crib, and he begins to cry in a way that hurts his chest, and asks Death to set him free and be his mother, and Joelle either shakes or nods her lovely unfocused head and says: Wait.

20 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT GAUDEAMUS IGITUR

I was in a zoo. There were no animals or cages, but it was still a zoo. It was close to a nightmare and it woke me before 0500h. Mario was still asleep, gently lit by the window’s view of tiny lights down the hill. He lay very still and soundless as always, his poor hands folded on his chest, as if awaiting a lily. I put in a plug of Kodiak. His four pillows brought Mario’s chin to his chest when he slept. I was still producing excess saliva, and my one pillow was moist in a way I didn’t want to turn on a light and investigate. I didn’t feel good at all. A sort of nausea of the head. The feeling seemed worst first thing in the morning. I’d felt for almost a week as if I needed to cry for some reason but the tears were somehow stopping just millimeters behind my eyes and staying there. And so on.

I got up and went past the foot of Mario’s bed to the window to stand on one foot. Sometime during the night heavy snow had begun to fall. I had been ordered by deLint and Barry Loach to stand on the left foot for fifteen minutes a day as therapy for the ankle. The countless little adjustments necessary to balance on one foot worked muscles and ligaments in the ankle that were therapeutically unreachable any other way. I always felt sort of dickish, standing on one foot in the dark with nothing to do.

The snow on the ground had a purple cast to it, but the falling and whirling snow was virgin white. Yachting-cap white. I stood on my left foot 344 for maybe five minutes tops. The Boards and A.P.s were three weeks

345 from tomorrow at 0800 in the C.B.S. auditorium at B.U. I could hear a night-custodial crew rolling a mop-bucket somewhere on another floor.

This was to be the first A.M. without dawn drills since Interdependence Day, and everybody was invited to sleep in until breakfast. There were to be no classes all weekend.

I’d awakened too early yesterday, too. I’d kept seeing Kevin Bain crawling my way in my sleep.

I straightened up my bed and put the pillow’s wet side down and put on clean sweatpants and some socks that didn’t smell foul.

The closest Mario comes to snoring is a thin sound he makes at the back of his throat. The sound is as if he’s drawing out the word key over and over. It’s not an unpleasant sound. I estimated a good 50 cm. of snow on the ground, and it was really coming down. In the purple half-light the West Courts’ nets were half-buried. Their top halves shuddered in a terrible wind.

All over the subdormitory I could hear doors rattling slightly in their frames, as they did only in a bad wind. The wind gave the snowfall a swirling diagonal aspect. Snow was hitting the exterior of the window with a sandy sound. The basic view outside the window was that of a briskly shaken paperweight — the kind with the Xmas diorama and shakeable snow. The grounds’ trees, fences and buildings looked toylike and miniaturized somehow. In fact it was hard to distinguish new snow falling from extant snow simply whirling around in the wind. It only then occurred to me to wonder whether and where we would play today’s exhibition meet.

The Lung wasn’t yet up, but the sixteen courts under the Lung wouldn’t have accommodated more than an A-only meet anyway. A kind of cold hope flared in me because I realized this could be cancellation-weather. The backlash of this hope was an even worse feeling than before: I couldn’t remember ever actively hoping not to have to play before. I couldn’t remember feeling strongly one way or the other about playing for quite a long time, in fact.

Mario and I had begun to make a practice of keeping the phone console’s power on at night but turning off the ringer. The console’s digital recorder had a light that pulsed once for each incoming message. The double flash of the recorder’s light set up an interesting interference pattern with the red battery-light on the ceiling’s smoke detector, the two lights

flashing in synch on every seventh phone-flash and then moving slowly apart in a visual Doppler. A formula for the temporal relation between two unsyncopated flashes would translate spatially into the algebraic formula for an ellipse, I could see. Pemulis had poured a terrific volume of practical pre-Boards math into my head for two weeks, taking his own time and not asking for anything in return, being almost suspiciously generous about it.

Then, since the Wayne debacle, the little tutorials had ceased and Pemulis himself had been very scarce, twice missing meals and several times taking the truck for long periods without checking with any of the rest of us about our truck-needs. I didn’t even try to factor in the rapid single flash of the phone’s power-unit display on the side of the TP; this would make it some sort calculus thing, and even Pemulis had conceded that I was not hardwired for anything past algebra and conic sections.

Every November, between I. Day and the WhataBurger Invitational in Tucson AZ, the Academy holds a semipublic exhibition meet for the ‘benefit’ of E.T.A.’s patrons and alumni and friends in the Boston area. The exhibition is followed by a semiformal cocktail party and dance in the dining hall, where players are required to appear showered and semiformal and available for social intercourse with patrons. Some of them all but check our teeth. Last year Heath Pearson had appeared for the gala in a red vest and bellboy’s cap and furry tail, carrying a little organ and inviting patrons to grind the organ while he capered around chattering. C.T. was unamused. The whole Fundraiser is a Charles Tavis innovation. C.T. is far better at public relations and pump-priming than was Himself. The exhibition and gala are possibly the climax of C.T.’s whole administrative year. He’d determined that mid-November was the best time for a fundraiser, with the weather not yet bad and the tax-year drawing to a close but the U.S. holiday season, with its own draining system of demands on goodwill, not yet under way. For the past three fiscal years, the Fundraiser’s proceeds have all but paid for the spring’s Southeast tour and the European terre-batu- fest of June–July.

The exhibition meet involved both genders’ A and B teams and was always against some foreign junior squad, to give the whole Fundraising affair a patriotic kicker. The gentle fiction was that the meet was just one stop for the foreign squad on a whole vague general U.S. tour, but in truth C.T. usually flew the foreigners in special, and at some expense. We had in

the past done battle with teams from Wales, Belize, the Sudan, and Mozambique. Cynics might point to an absence of tennis juggernauts among the opponents. Last year’s Mozambique thing was a particular turkey-shoot, 70–2, and there’d been an ugly xeno-racist mood among some of the spectators and patrons, a couple of whom cheerily compared the meet to Mussolini’s tanks rolling over Ethiopian spearchuckers. Y.D.A.U.’s opponents were to be the Québec Jr. Davis and Jr. Wightman Cup teams, 346 and their arrival from M.I.A.-D’Orval was keenly anticipated by Struck and Freer, who claimed that the Québecois Jr. Wightman girls were normally sequestered and saw very few coed venues and would be available for broadening intercultural relations of all kinds.

It was improbable that anything was going to be landing on time at Logan in this kind of snow, though.

The wind also produced a desolate moaning in all the ventilation ducts.

Mario said ‘key’ and sometimes ‘ski,’ drawing them out. It occurred to me that without some one-hitters to be able to look forward to smoking alone in the tunnel I was waking up every day feeling as though there was nothing in the day to anticipate or lend anything any meaning. I stood on one foot for a couple more minutes, spitting into a coffee can I’d left on the floor near the phone from the night before. The implied question, then, would be whether the Bob Hope had somehow become not just the high-point of the day but its actual meaning. That would be pretty appalling. The Penn 4 that was my hand-strengthening ball for November was on the sill against the window.

I’d neither carried nor squeezed my ball for several days. No one seemed to have noticed.

Mario cedes me full control over the phone’s ringer and answering machine, since he has trouble holding the receiver and the only messages he ever gets are In-House ones from the Moms. I enjoyed leaving different outgoing messages on the machine. But I refused ever to back the messages with music or digitally altered bits of entertainment. None of the E.T.A. phones was video-capable — another C.T. decision. Under C.T. the Academy’s manual of honor codes, rules, and procedures had almost tripled in length. Probably our room’s best message ever was Ortho Stice doing his deadly C.T.-impression, taking 80 seconds to list possible reasons why Mario and I couldn’t answer the phone and outlining our probable reactions

to all possible caller-emotions provoked my our unavailability. But at 80 seconds the thing wore thin after a while. Our outgoing this week was something like ‘This is the disembodied voice of Hal Incandenza, whose body is not now able…,’ and so on, and then the standard invitation to leave a message. It was honesty and abstinence week, after all, and this seemed a more truthful message to leave than the pedestrian ‘This is Hal Incandenza…,’ since the caller would pretty obviously be hearing a digital recording of me rather than me. This observation owed a debt to Pemulis, who for years and with several different roommates has retained the same recursive message — ‘This is Mike Pemulis’s answering machine’s answering machine; Mike Pemulis’s answering machine regrets being unavailable to take a first-order message for Mike Pemulis, but if you’ll leave a second-order message at the sound of the clapping hand, Mike Pemulis’s answering machine will…,’ and so on, which has worn so thin that very few of Pemulis’s friends or customers can abide waiting through the tired thing to leave a message, which Pemulis finds congenial, since no really relevant caller would be fool enough to leave his name on any machine of Pemulis’s anyway.

Plus it was also creepy that, when the face’s effulgence becomes the boiled white of the Trauma Wing ceiling as he comes up with a start up for air, the apparently real nondream Joelle van D. is leaning over the bed’s crib-railing, wetting Gately’s big forehead and horror-rounded lips with a cool cloth, wearing sweatpants and a sort of loose brocaded hulpil whose lavender almost matches the selvage on her clean veil. The hulpil’s neckline is too high for there to be much cleavage-action as she leans over him, which Gately regards as probably kind of a mercy. The two brownies Joelle’s got in her other hand (and her nails are bitten down to the ragged quick, just like Gately’s) she says she liberated from the nurses’ station and brought down for him, since Morris H. meant them for him and they’re by all just rights his. But she can see he’s in no shape to swallow, she says. She smells like peaches and cotton, and there’s a sweet evil whiff of the discount Canadian gaspers so many of the residents smoke, and underneath 347those smells Gately can detect that she’s got on a bit of perfume.

To amuse him she says ‘And Lo’ several times. Gately makes his chest go up and down rapidly to signify amusement. He declines either to moo or

mew at her, out of embarrassment. Her veil this morning has a springy light-purple around the border, and the hair framing the veil seems a darker red, duskier, than when she’d first come into the House and refused meat.

Gately hadn’t been much into WYYY or Madame Psychosis, but he’d sometimes run into people who were — Organics men, mostly, opium and brown heroin, terrible mulled wine — and he feels on top of the febrile pain and the creepiness of the amphetaminic-wraith- and Winston-Churchill- face-Joelle-and angelic-maternal-Death-Joelle-dreams an odd vividness in himself at being swabbed and maybe even generally admired by someone who’s an underground local intellectual-dash-art-type celebrity. He doesn’t know how to explain it, like as if the fact that she’s a public personage makes him feel somehow physically actuated, like more there -feeling, conscious of the way he’s holding his face, hesitant to make his barnyard sounds, even breathing through his nose so she won’t smell his unbrushed teeth. He feels self-conscious with her, Joelle can tell, but what’s admirable is he has no idea how heroic or even romantic he looks, unshaven and intubated, huge and helpless, wounded in service to somebody who did not deserve service, half out of his tree from pain and refusing narcotics. The last and pretty much only man Joelle ever let herself admire in a romantic way had left and wouldn’t even face up to why, instead erecting for himself a pathetic jealous fantasy about Joelle and his own poor father, whose only interest in Joelle had been first aesthetic and then anti-aesthetic.

Joelle doesn’t know that newly sober people are awfully vulnerable to the delusion that people with more sober time than them are romantic and heroic, instead of clueless and terrified and just muddling through day-by- day like everybody else in AA is (except maybe the fucking Crocodiles).

Joelle says she can’t stay long this time: all nonworking residents have to report for the House’s A.M. daily-meditation meeting, as Gately knows only too well. He isn’t sure what she means by ‘this time.’ She describes the newest male resident’s weird limbo-injury posture, and the way Johnette Foltz has to cut up this Dave guy’s supper and drop it into his open mouth bit by bit like a bird with a chick. Lifting her face to the ceiling makes the linen veil conform to the features of the face below, mouth open wide in imitation of a chick. The crewneckish hulpil makes her hair’s loose curls look dark and her wrists and hands look pale. Her hands’s skin is taut and freckled and treed with veins. His bed’s metal bars keep Gately’s rolling

eyes from seeing anything much south of her thorax until Joelle finishes with the washcloth and retreats to the edge of the other bed, which at some point has become empty and the crying guy’s chart removed, and its crib- railings folded down, and she sits on the edge of the bed and crosses her legs, supporting one huarache’s heel on the railing’s joint, revealing she’s got on white socks under flesh-colored huaraches and ancient baggy old birch-colored sweatpants with B.U.M. down one leg, which Gately’s pretty sure he’s seen at the Sunday A.M. Big Book meeting on Ken Erdedy, and belong to Erdedy, and he feels a flash of something unpleasant that she’d be wearing the upscale kid’s pants. The A.M. light outside has gone from sunny yellow-white to now a kind of old-dime gray, with what looks like serious wind.

Joelle eats the cream-cheese brownies Gately can’t eat and works at pulling a kind of big notebookish thing out of her broad cloth purse. She 348 talks about last night’s St. Columbkill’s Meeting, where they’d all gone unsupervised because Johnette F. had to stay and keep an eye on Glynn who was sick and on Henderson and Willis, who were under legal quarantine upstairs. Gately racks his RAM for which fucking night St. Columbkill’s is.

Joelle says how last night’s was St. Collie’s once-a-month format where instead of a Commitment they had that round-robin discussion where somebody in the hall spoke for five minutes and then picked the next speaker out of the hall’s crowd. There’d been a Kentuckian there, which Gately might recall she was from Kentucky? A Kentucky newcomer there, Wayne something, a real damaged-looking boy who hailed from the good old Blue Grass State but of late resided in a disconnected drainage pipe off a watershed facility down in the Allston Spur, he’d said. This guy, she said, said he was nineteen or thereabout, looked 40-some+, had clothes that looked to be decomposing on him even as he stood at the podium, had a ripe odor of drainage about him that produced hankies as far back as the fourth row, which he explained the odor by admitting his residential drainage pipe was in fact ‘mostly’ disconnected, like as in little-used.

Joelle’s voice is nothing like the hollow resonant radio-voice and she uses her hands a lot to talk, trying to recreate the whole thing for Gately. Trying to give him a little bit of a meeting, Gately realizes, with a slight tight smile

of disbelief that he can’t dredge up a mental meeting schedule so he’ll know what day this is.

Some of the St. Columbkillers were saying it was the longest single blackout they’d ever heard of. This Wayne fellow’d said he had no idea when, why or how he’d ended up so far up north as metro Boston ten years after his last memory. Most compelling, visually, Wayne had had a deep diagonal furrow in his face, extending from right eyebrow to left lip-corner — Joelle traces the length and angle with a ragged-nailed finger across her veil — splaying his nose and upper lip and rendering him so violently cross-eyed he seemed to address both corners of the front row at the same time. This old Wayne boy’d sketched how the facial dent — what Wayne had called ‘the Flaw,’ pointing at it like people might need help seeing what he was talking about — derived from his very own personal hard-drinking alcoholic & chicken-farmer Daddy, in the grip of the post-binge Horrors and seeing subjective pests in a big way, one day, up and hitting Wayne at age nine smack in the face with a hatchet one time when Wayne couldn’t tell him where a certain Ball jar of distilled spirits had been hidden the day before, against the possibility of the Horrors. It had been just him and his Daddy and his Maw — ‘ “that was feeble” ’ — and 7.7 acres of chicken farm, Wayne had said. Wayne said the Flaw had just about healed up fine with fresh air and plenty of exercise when his Daddy, trying one Monday P.M. to get outside a late lunch of mush and syrup, up and clutched his skull, turned red and then blue and then purple, and died. Little Wayne had reportedly wiped the face clean of mush, dragged the dead body under the farmhouse porch, wrapped it in Purina Chicken-Chow sacks, and told his feeble Maw his Daddy had gone off to lay up drunk. The diagonal-dented kid had apparently then gone off to school as usual, done some discreet w.o.m. advertising, and had brought home with him a different set of boys each day for almost a week, charging them a fiveski a head to crawl under the porch and eyeball a bona fried dead man. Late Friday P.M., he recollected, he’d set off with hard currency to the billiard establishment 349 where the niggers that sold distilled Ball jars to his late Daddy was at, getting set to ‘ “lay up drunk as a cock on jimson.” ’ The next thing this Wayne boy says he knows, he wakes up in the partially disconnected NNE

pipe, one millennial decade older and with some ‘ “right nasty” ’ medical issues the timer’s bell prevents him from sharing in detail.

And this old Wayne boy had up and pointed to Joelle to come speak next. ‘Almost as if he knew. As if he gut-intuited some sort of kinship, affinity of origin.’ Gately grunted softly to himself. He figured guys with ten-year blackouts who live in pipes probably didn’t have to much to go on besides your gut-type intuitions. He knew he needed to be reminded that this strange girl was only about three weeks clean and still leaching Substances out of her tissues and still utterly clueless, but he felt like he resented it whenever he got reminded. Joelle had the big flat book in her lap and was looking down at her thumb and flexing it, watching it flex. What was disconcerting was that when her head was down the veil hung loose at the same vertical angle as when her head was up, only now it was perfectly smooth and untextured, a smooth white screen with nothing behind it. A loudspeaker down the hall gave those xylophone dings that meant God knows what all the time.

When Joelle’s head came back up, the reassuring little hills and valleys of veiled features reappeared behind the screen. ‘I’m going to have to take off here in a second,’ she said. ‘I could come on back after, if you want. I can bring anything you think you’d like.’ Gately hiked an eyebrow at her, to get her to smile. ‘Hopefully since your fever went down they said they’ll decide you’re out of the woods and take that out, finally,’ Joelle said, looking at Gately’s mouth. ‘It’s got to hurt, and Pat said you’ll feel better when you can start

quote sharing what you’re feeling.’ Gately hiked both eyebrows. ‘And you can tell me what you’d like brought. Who you’d want to have come. Whom.’ Moving his left arm north along his chest and throat to get the left hand up to feel at his mouth made the whole right side sing with pain. A skin- warmed plastic tube led in from the right side and was taped to his right cheek and went into his mouth and went down his throat past where his fingers could feel at the back of his mouth. He hadn’t been able to feel it in his mouth or going down the back of his throat to he didn’t want to know where, or even the tape on his cheek. He’d had like this like tube in his

throat the whole time and hadn’t even known it. It had been in there so long by the time he came up for air he’d gotten like unconsciously used to it and hadn’t even known it was there. Maybe it was a feeding tube. The tube was probably why he could only mew and grunt. He probably didn’t have permanent voice damage. Thank God. He made his thoughts capitalized and Thanked God several times. He pictured himself at a lavish Commitment podium, like at an AA convention, off-handedly saying something that got an enormous laugh.

Either Joelle had some sort of problem with her thumb or she’d just got really interested in watching the thumb flex and twiddle. She was saying ‘It’s strange, not knowing it’s coming, then standing up there to speak.

Folks you don’t know. Things I don’t realize I think til I say them. On the show I was used to knowing quite well what I thought before I spoke. This isn’t like that.’ She seemed to be addressing herself to the thumb. ‘I took a page from your manual and shared my complaint about the “But For the Grace of God,” and you were right, they just laughed. But I also… I hadn’t realized til I found myself telling them that I’d stopped seeing the “One Day at a Time” and “Keep It in the Day” as trite clichés. Patronizing.’ Gately noticed she still talks about Recovery-issues in a stiff proper intellectualish way she doesn’t talk about other stuff with. Her way of still keeping it all at arm’s length a little. A mental thumb to pretend to look at while she talks. It was all right; Gately’s own way of keeping it at arm’s length at the start had involved an actual arm. He pictured her laughing as he tells her that, the veil billowing mightily in and out. He smiled around the tube, which Joelle saw as encouragement. She said ‘And why Pat in counselling keeps telling me just to build a wall around each individual 24-hour period and not look over or back. And not to count days. Even when you get a chip for 14 days or 30 days, not to add them up. In counselling I’d just smile and nod. Being polite. But standing up there last night, I didn’t even share it aloud, but I realized suddenly that this was why I’d never been able to stay off the stuff for more than a couple weeks. I’d always break down, go back. Freebase.’ She looks up at him. ‘I ’based, you know. You knew that. You all see the

Intake forms.’ Gately smiles.

She said ‘This was why I couldn’t get off and stay off. Just as the cliché warns. I literally wasn’t keeping it in the day. I was adding the clean days

up in my head.’ She cocked her head at him. ‘Did you ever hear of this fellow Evel Knievel? This motorcycle-jumper?’ Gately nods slightly, being careful of a tube he now feels. This is why his throat had had that raped feeling in it. The tube. He actually has an old cutout action picture of the historical Evel Knievel, from an old Life magazine, in a white leather Elvisish suit, in the air, aloft, haloed in spotlights, upright on a bike, a row of well-waxed trucks below. ‘At St. Collie only the Crocodiles’d heard of him. My own Daddy’d followed him, cut out pictures, as a boy.’ Gately can tell she’s smiling under there. ‘But what I used to do, I’d throw away the pipe and shake my fist at the sky and say As God is my fucking witness NEVER AGAIN, as of this minute right here I QUIT FOR ALL TIME.’ She also has this habit of absently patting the top of her head when she talks, where little barrettes and spongy clamps hold the veil in place. ‘And I’d bunker up all white- knuckled and stay straight. And count the days. I was proud of each day I stayed off. Each day seemed evidence of something, and I counted them.

I’d add them up. Line them up end to end. You know?’ Gately knows very well but doesn’t nod, lets her do this on just her own steam. She says ‘And soon it would get… improbable. As if each day was a car Knievel had to clear. One car, two cars. By the time I’d get up to say like maybe about 14 cars, it would begin to seem like this staggering number. Jumping over 14 cars. And the rest of the year, looking ahead, hundreds and hundreds of cars, me in the air trying to clear them.’ She left her head alone and cocked it. ‘Who could do it? How did I ever think anyone could do it that way?’ Gately remembered some evil fucking personal detoxes. Broke in Malden. Bent with pleurisy in Salem. MCI/Billerica during a four-day lockdown that caught him short. He remembered Kicking the Bird for weeks on the floor of a Revere Holding cell, courtesy of the good old Revere A.D.A. Locked down tight, a bucket for a toilet, the Holding cell hot but a terrible icy draft down near the floor. Cold Turkey. Abrupt Withdrawal. The Bird. Being incapable of doing it and yet having to do it, locked in. A Revere Holding cage for 92 days. Feeling the edge of every second that went by. Taking it a second at a time. Drawing the time in around him real tight. Withdrawing. Any one second: he remembered: the thought of feeling like he’d be feeling this second for 60 more of these seconds — he couldn’t deal. He could not fucking deal. He had to build a

wall around each second just to take it. The whole first two weeks of it are telescoped in his memory down into like one second — less: the space between two heartbeats. A breath and a second, the pause and gather between each cramp. An endless Now stretching its gull-wings out on either side of his heartbeat. And he’d never before or since felt so excruciatingly alive. Living in the Present between pulses. What the White Flaggers talk about: living completely In The Moment. A whole day at a crack seemed like tit, when he Came In. For he had Abided With The Bird.

But this inter-beat Present, this sense of endless Now — it had vanished in Revere Holding along with the heaves and chills. He’d returned to himself, moved to sit on the bunk’s edge, and ceased to Abide because he no longer had to.

His right side is past standing, but the hurt is nothing like the Bird’s hurt was. He wonders, sometimes, if that’s what Ferocious Francis and the rest want him to walk toward: Abiding again between heartbeats; tries to imagine what kind of impossible leap it would take to live that way all the time, by choice, straight: in the second, the Now, walled and contained between slow heartbeats. Ferocious Francis’s own sponsor, the nearly dead guy they wheel to White Flag and call Sarge, says it all the time: It’s a gift, the Now: it’s AA’s real gift: it’s no accident they call it The Present. ‘And yet it wasn’t til that poor new pipe-fellow from home pointed at me and hauled me up there and I said it that I realized,’ Joelle said. ‘I don’t have to do it that way. I get to choose how to do it, and they’ll help me stick to the choice. I don’t think I’d realized before that I could — I can really do this. I can do this for one endless day. I can. Don.’ The look he was giving her was meant to like validate her breakthrough and say yes yes she could, she could as long as she continued to choose to.

She was looking right at him, Gately could tell. But he’d also gotten a personal prickly chill all over from his own thinking. He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear of the A.D.A., whoever was out there in a hat eating Third World fast food; the fear of getting convicted of Nuckslaughter, of V.I.P.-suffocation; of a lifetime on the edge of his bunk in M.C.I. Walpole, remembering. It’s too much to think

about. To Abide there. But none of it’s as of now real. What’s real is the tube and Noxzema and pain. And this could be done just like the Old Cold Bird. He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over.

What’s unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise. He hadn’t quite gotten this before now, how it wasn’t just the matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed. If Gately got out of this, he decided, he was going to take the Knievel picture off his wall and mount it and give it to Joelle, and they’d laugh, and she’d call him Don or The Bimster, etc.

Gately rolls his eyes way over to the right to see Joelle again, who she’s using both pale hands to get the big book open on her sweatpants’ lap. Gray windowlight shines on clear plastic sheets like little laminates inside the thing. ‘… idea to haul this out last night and was looking at it. I wanted to show you my own personal Daddy,’ she says. She’s holding the photo album out at him, wide open, like a kindergarten teacher at storytime.

Gately makes a production of squinting. Joelle comes over and rests the big album on the top of Gately’s crib-railing, peering down over the top and pointing at a snapshot in its little square sleeve. ‘Right there’s my Daddy.’ In front of a low white porch-railing, a generic lean old guy with lines around his nose from squinting into sunlight and the composed smile of somebody that’s been told to smile. A skinny dog at his side, half in profile. Gately’s more interested in how the shadow of whoever took the photo is canted into the shot’s foreground, darkening half the dog. ‘And that’s one of the dogs, a pointer that got hit right after that by a UPS truck out to 104,’ she says. ‘Where no animal with a lick of sense would think it had business being. My Daddy never names dogs. That one’s just called the one that got hit by the UPS truck.’ Her voice is different again.

Gately tries to Abide in seeing what she’s pointing at. Most of the rest of the page’s pictures are of farm-type animals behind wooden fences, looking the way things look that can’t smile, that don’t know a camera’s looking.

Joelle said her personal Daddy was a low-pH chemist, but her late mother’s own Daddy had left them a farm, and Joelle’s Daddy moved them out there and jick-jacked around with farming, mostly as an excuse to keep lots of pets and stick experimental low-pH stuff in the soil.

At some point in here an all-business nurse comes in and fucks with the I.V. bottles, then hunkers down and changes the catheter-receptacle under the bed, and for a second Gately likes to die of embarrassment. Joelle seems not even to be pretending not to notice. ‘And this right here’s a bull we used to call Mr. Man.’ Her slim thumb moves from shot to shot. The sunlight in Kentucky looks bright-yellower than NNE’s. The trees are a meaner green and have got weird mossy shit hanging from them. ‘And this right here’s a mule called Chet that could jump the fence and used to get at everybody’s flowers out along Route 45 til Daddy had to put him down. This is a cow. This right here’s Chet’s mama. It’s a mare. I don’t recollect any kind of name except “Chet’s Mama.” Daddy’d let her out to neighbors that really did farm, to sort of make up for folks’ flowers.’ Gately nods studiously at each photo, trying to Abide. He hasn’t thought about the wraith or the wraith-dream once since he woke up from the dream where Joelle was Mrs. Waite as a maternal Death-figure. Next life’s Chet’s Mama. He opens his eyes wide to clear his head. Joelle’s head is down, looking down at the open album from overhead. Her veil hangs loose and blank again, so close he could reach his left hand up and lift it if he wanted.

The open book she’s moving her hand around in gives Gately an idea he can’t believe he’s only having now. Except he worries because he isn’t left- handed. Which is to say SINISTRAL. Joelle’s got her thumb by a weird old sepia shot of the ass and hunched back of some guy scrabbling up the slope of a roof. ‘Uncle Lum,’ she says, ‘Mr. Riney, Lum Riney, my Daddy’s partner over to the shop, that breathed some kind of fume at the shop when I was little, and got strange, and now he’ll always try and climb up on top of shit, if you let him.’ He winces at the pain of moving his left arm to put a hand on her wrist to get her attention. Her wrist is thin across the top but oddly deep, thick-

seeming. Gately gets her to look at him and takes the hand off her wrist and uses it to mime writing awkwardly in the air, his eyes rolling a bit from the pain of it. This is his idea. He points at her and then out the window and circles his hand back to her. He refuses to grunt or moo to emphasize anything. His forefinger is twice the size of her thumb as he again mimes holding an implement and writing on the air. He makes such a big slow obvious show of it because he can’t see her eyes to be sure she gets what he’s after.

If a halfway-attractive female so much as smiles at Don Gately as they pass on the crowded street, Don Gately, like pretty much all heterosexual drug addicts, has within a couple blocks mentally wooed, shacked up with, married and had kids by that female, all in the future, all in his head, mentally dandling a young Gately on his mutton-joint knee while this mental Mrs. G. bustles in an apron she sometimes at night provocatively wears with nothing underneath. By the time he gets where he’s going, the drug addict has either mentally divorced the female and is in a bitter custody battle for the kids or is mentally happily still hooked up with her in his sunset years, sitting together amid big-headed grandkids on a special porch swing modified for Gately’s mass, her legs in support-hose and orthopedic shoes still damn fine, barely having to speak to converse, calling each other ‘Mother’ and ‘Papa,’ knowing they’ll kick within weeks of each other because neither could possibly live without the other, is how bonded they’ve got through the years.

The projective mental union of Gately and Joelle (‘M.P.’) van Dyne keeps foundering on the vision of Gately knee-dandling a kid in a huge blue- or pink-bordered veil, however. Or tenderly removing the spongy clamps of Joelle’s veil in moonlight on their honeymoon in Atlantic City and discovering just like one eye in the middle of her forehead or a horrific 350 Churchill-face or something. So the addictive mental long-range fantasy gets shaky, but he still can’t help envisioning the old X, with Joelle well- veiled and crying out And Lo! in that empty compelling way at the moment of orchasm — the closest Gately’d ever come to Xing a celebrity was the ragingly addicted nursing-student with the head-banging loft, who’d borne an incredible resemblance to the young Dean Martin. Having Joelle share personal historical snapshots with Gately leads his mind right over the

second’s wall to envision Joelle, hopelessly smitten with the heroic Don G., volunteering to bonk the guy in the hat outside the room over the head and sneak Gately and his tube and catheter out of St. E.’s in a laundry cart or whatever, saving him from the BPD Finest or Federal crew cuts or whatever direr legal retribution the guy in the hat might represent, or else selflessly offering to give him her veil and a big dress and let him hold the catheter under the muumuu and sashay right out while she huddles under the covers in impersonation of Gately, romantically endangering her recovery and radio career and legal freedom, all out of a Liebestod -type consuming love for Gately.

This last fantasy makes him ashamed, it’s so cowardly. And even contemplating a romantic thing with a clueless newcomer is shameful. In 351 Boston AA, newcomer-seducing is called 13th-Stepping and is regarded as the province of true bottom-feeders. It’s predation. Newcomers come in so whacked out, clueless and scared, their nervous systems still on the outside of their bodies and throbbing from detox, and so desperate to escape their own interior, to lay responsibility for themselves at the feet of something as seductive and consuming as their former friend the Substance.

To avoid the mirror AA hauls out in front of them. To avoid acknowledging their old dear friend the Substance’s betrayal, and grieving it. Plus let’s not even mention the mirror-and-vulnerability issues of a newcomer that has to wear a U.H.I.D veil. One of Boston AA’s stronger suggestions is that newcomers avoid all romantic relationships for at least a year. So somebody with some sober time predating and trying to seduce a newcomer is almost tantamount to rape, is the Boston consensus. Not that it isn’t done. But the ones that do it never have the kind of sobriety anybody else respects or wants for themselves. A 13th-Stepper is still running from the mirror himself.

Not to mention that a Staffer seducing a new resident he’s supposed to be there to help would be dicking over Pat Montesian and Ennet House on a grand scale.

Gately sees it’s probably no accident that his vividest Joelle-fantasies are coincident with flight-from-Finest-and-legal-responsibility fantasies. That his head’s real fantasy is this newcomer helping him avoid, escape, and run, joining him later in like Kentucky on a modified porch swing. He’s still

pretty new himself: wanting somebody else to take care of his mess, somebody else to keep him out of his various cages. It’s the same delusion as the basic addictive-Substance-delusion, basically. His eyes roll up in his head at disgust with himself, and stay there.

I went down the hall to take out the tobacco and brush my teeth and rinse out the Spiru-Tein can, which had gotten an unpleasant crust along the sides. The subdorm halls were curved and had no corners as such, but you can see at most three doors and the jamb of the fourth from any point in the hall before the curve extrudes into your line of sight. I wondered briefly whether it was true that small children believed their parents could see them even around corners and curves.

The high wind’s moan and doors’ rattle were worse in the uncarpeted hall. I could hear faint sounds of early-morning weeping in certain rooms beyond my line of sight. Lots of the top players start the A.M. with a quick fit of crying, then are basically hale and well-wrapped for the rest of the day.

The walls of the subdorms’ hallways are dinner-mint blue. The walls of the rooms themselves are cream. All the woodwork is dark and varnished, as is the guilloche that runs below all E.T.A. ceilings; and the dominant odor in the hallways is always a mixture of varnish and tincture of benzoin.

Someone had left a window open by the sinks in the boys’ room, and a hump of snow lay on the sill, and on the floor beneath the window by the sink on the end, whose hot-water pipe shrieks, was a parabolic dusting of snow, already melting at the apex. I turned on the lights and the exhaust fan kicked on with them; for some reason I could barely stand its sound. When I put my head out the window the wind came from nowhere and everywhere, the snow swirling in funnels and eddies, and there were little grains of ice in the snow. It was brutally cold. Across the East Courts, the paths were obscured, and the pine’s branches were near horizontal under their snow’s weight. Schtitt’s transom and observation tower looked menacing; it was still dark and snow-free on the lee side facing Comm.-Ad.

The sight of distant ATHSCME fans displacing great volumes of snowy air northward is one of the better winter views from our hilltop, but visibility was now too poor to make out the fans, and the liquid hiss of the snow was too total to make out whether the fans were even on. The Headmaster’s

House wasn’t much more than a humped shape off by the north tree-line, but I could picture poor C.T. at the living room window in leather slippers and Scotch-plaid robe, seeming to pace even when standing still, raising and lowering the antenna of the phone in his hand, with several calls out already to Logan, M.I.A.-Dorval, WeatherNet-9000’s recorded update, heavy-browed figures in Québec’s O.N.A.N.T.A. office, C.T.’s forehead a wash-board and lips moving soundless as he brainstormed his way toward a state of Total Worry.

I brought my head back in when I could no longer feel my face. I made my little ablutions. I hadn’t had to go to the bathroom in a serious way in three days.

The digital display up next to the ceiling’s intercom read 11–18- EST0456.

When the whap-whap of the bathroom door subsided I heard a quiet voice with an odd tone farther up around the curve of the hallway. It turned out that good old Ortho Stice was sitting in a bedroom-chair in front of a hall window. He was facing the window. The window was closed, and he had his forehead up against the glass, either talking or chanting to himself very quietly. The whole lower part of the window was fogged with his breath. I came up behind him, listening. The back of his head was that shark-belly gray-white of crew cuts so short the scalp shows through. I was more or less right behind his chair. I couldn’t tell whether he was talking to himself or chanting something. He didn’t turn around even when I rattled my toothbrush in the NASA glass. He had on his classic Darknesswear: black sweatshirt, black sweatpants on which he’d had a red and gray E.T.A. silkscreened down both legs. His feet were bare on the cold floor. I was standing right beside the chair, and he still didn’t look up. ‘Who’s that now?’ he said, staring straight ahead through the window.

‘Hi Orth.’ ‘Hal. You’re up kind of early.’ I rattled my toothbrush a little to indicate a shrug. ‘You know. Up and

about.’

‘What’s the matter?’ ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘Your voice. Shoot, are you crying? What’s the matter?’ My voice had been neutral and a bit puzzled. ‘I’m not crying, Orth.’

‘Well then.’ Stice breathed onto the window. He reached up without moving his head and scratched the back of his crew cut. ‘Up and around.

We going to play some furriners out there today or what?’ For the past ten days I’d always felt worst in the early A.M., before dawn. There’s something elementally horrific about waking before dawn.

The window was unobscured above The Darkness’s breath-line. The snow wasn’t swirling or pummelling the window as much on the building’s east side, but the lee side’s absence of wind showed just how hard new snow was coming down. It was like a white curtain endlessly descending. The sky was lightening here on the east side, a paler gray-white, not unlike Stice’s crew-cut. I realized that from his position he could see only condensed breath on the window, no reflections. I made a few grotesque, distended, pop-eyed faces at him behind his back. They made me feel worse.

I rattled the brush. ‘Well, if we do, it’s not going to be out there. It’s drifting about up to the tape on the west nets. They’ll have to try to get us indoors somewhere.’

Stice breathed. ‘There’s no indoor place’s got thirty-six courts, Inc.

Winchester Club’s got twelve is maybe the most. Fucking Mount Auburn’s only got eight.’ ‘They’ll have to move us around to different sites. It’s a pain in the ass, but Schtitt’s done it before. I think the real variable’ll be whether the Québec kids got into Logan last night before whenever it was this hit.’ ‘Logan’ll be shut down you’re saying.’ ‘But I think we’d have heard if they got in last night. Freer and Struck were keeping tabs on an F.A.A. link ever since supper, Mario said.’ ‘Boys are looking to get X’d by some slow-witted hairy-legged foreign girls or what ?’ ‘My guess is they’re stuck up at Dorval. I’ll bet C.T. is on the case even now. Get some sort of announcement at breakfast, probably.’ This was a clear opening for The Darkness to do a quick C.T. impression, wondering aloud over the phone to the Québecois coach whether he, C.T., should press for them to charter ground transport from Montreal or else rather urge them not to risk travel through the Concavity in a storm in such a generous but disappointed gesture the Québecois would think busing the 400 clicks to Boston in a blizzard was his own generous idea, C.T. wholly open, opening all different psych-strategies to the coach’s inspection, with the frantic ruffling sound of the coach’s French-English dictionary loud in the phone’s background. But Stice just sat there with his forehead against the glass. His bare feet were tapping some sort of rhythm on the floor. The hallway was freezing, and his toes had a faint blue tinge.

He blew air out of his lips in a tight sigh, making his fat cheeks flap a little; we called this his horse-sound. ‘Were you talking to yourself out here, or chanting, or what?’ A silence ensued. ‘Heard this one joke,’ Stice said finally.

‘Let’s hear it.’ ‘You want to hear it?’ ‘I could use a quality laugh right now, Dark,’ I said. ‘You too?’ Another silence ensued. Two different people were weeping at different pitches behind closed doors. A toilet flushed on the second floor. One of the weepers was nearly skirling, an inhuman keening sound. There was no way

to tell which E.T.A. male it was, which door back down past the walls’ curve.

The Darkness scratched the back of his head again without moving his head. His hands looked almost luminous against the black sleeves. ‘There’s these three statisticians gone duck hunting,’ he said. He paused.

‘They’re like statisticians by trade.’ ‘I’m with you so far.’ ‘And they gone off hunting duck, and they’re hunkered down in the muck of a duck blind, for hunting, in waders and hats and all, your top-of- the-line Winchester double-aughts, so on. And they’re quacking into one of them kazoos duck hunters always quack into.’ ‘Duck-calls,’ I said. ‘There you go.’ Stice tried to nod against the window. ‘Well and here comes this one duck come flying on by overhead.’ ‘Their quarry. The object of their being out there.’ ‘Damn straight, their raisin-debt and what have you, and they’re getting set to blast the son of a whore into feathers and goo,’ Stice said. ‘And the first statistician, he brings up his Winnie and lets go, and the recoil goes and knocks him back on his ass kersplat in the muck, and but he’s missed the duck, just low, they saw. And so the second statistician he up and fires then, and back he goes too on his ass too, these Winnies got a fucker of a recoil on them, and back on his ass the second one goes, from firing, and they see

his shot goes just high.’ ‘Misses the duck as well.’ ‘Misses her just high. At which and then the third statistician commences to whooping and jumping up and down to beat the band, hollering “We got him, boys, we done got him!’ ’’ Someone was crying out in a bad dream and someone else was yelling for quiet. I wasn’t even pretending to laugh. Stice didn’t seem to expect me to. He shrugged without moving his head. His forehead had not once left the cold glass.

I stood next to him in silence and held my NASA glass with the toothbrush and looked out over the top of Stice’s head through the window’s upper half. The snowfall was intense and looked silky. The East Courts’ pavilion’s green canvas roof bowed ominously down, its white GATORADE logo obscured. A figure was out there, not under the shelter of

the pavilion but sitting in the bleachers behind the east Show Courts, leaning back with his elbows on one level and bottom on the next and feet stretched out below, not moving, wearing what seemed to be puffy and bright enough to be a coat, but getting buried by snow, just sitting there. It was impossible to tell the person’s age or sex. Church spires off in Brookline were darkening as the sky lightened behind them. The beginning of dawn looked like moonlight through the snow. Several people were at their vehicles’ windshields with scrapers down along Commonwealth Avenue. Their images were tiny and dark and fluttered; the Avenue’s line of buried parked cars looked like igloo after igloo, some sort of Eskimo tract- housing thing. It had never before snowed like this in mid-November. A snow-covered B train labored uphill like a white slug. It seemed clear that the T would be suspending routes before long. The snow and cold sunrise gave everything a confected quality. The portcullis between the driveway and the parking lot was half up, probably to keep it from being frozen closed. I couldn’t see who was in the portcullis’s security booth. The attendants always came and went, most of them from the Ennet House place, trying to ‘recover.’ The flagpole’s two flags were frozen and stuck right out straight, turning stiffly from side to side in the wind, like someone in a neck-brace, instead of flapping. The E.T.A. physical-post mailbox just inside the portcullis had a mo-hawk of snow. The whole scene had an indescribable pathos to it. Stice’s fogged breath kept me from seeing anything closer than the mailbox and East Courts. The light was starting to diffract into colors at the perimeter of Stice’s breath-fog on the window. ‘Schacht heard that joke down at the Cranial place from some B.U. fellow with just terrible facial pain, he said,’ Stice said. ‘I’m going to go ahead and ask the question, D-man.’ ‘It’s a statistics joke. You got to know your medials means and modes.’ ‘I get the joke, Orth. The question is how come you’ve got your forehead all up against the window like that when your breath’s keeping you from seeing anything. What are you trying to look at? And isn’t your forehead getting kind of cold?’ Stice didn’t nod. He made his horse-sound again. He had always had the face of a fat man on a fit man’s lean body. I hadn’t noticed before that he had an odd little teardrop of extra flesh low down on his right jowl, like a

bit of skin with mole-aspirations. He said ‘The forehead stopped feeling cold a couple hours back, when I lost all my feeling in it.’ ‘You’ve been sitting here with bare feet and your forehead against the

glass for a couple hours?’ ‘More like four, I think.’ I could hear a night-custodial crew laughing and clanking a bucket right below us. Only one was laughing. It was Kenkle and Brandt. ‘My next question’s pretty obvious, then, Orth.’ He gave another awkward shrug that didn’t involve his head. ‘Well. It’s sort of embarrassing, here, Inc,’ he said. He paused. ‘It’s stuck is what it is.’ ‘Your forehead’s stuck to the window?’ ‘Best as I can recollect I wake up, it’s just after 0100, fuckin Coyle’s having them discharges again and there’s no sleeping through that, boy.’ ‘I shudder to think, Orth.’ ‘And Coyle ’course just doesn’t even hit the light just hauls out a fresh sheet from the stack under his bunk and goes right back to sawing logs. And I’m wide awake by this point in time, though, and then I couldn’t get back

under.’ ‘Couldn’t get back to sleep.’ ‘Something’s real wrong, I can tell,’ The Darkness said. ‘Pre-Fundraiser nerves? The WhataBurger coming up? You feel yourself starting to climb plateaux, starting to play the way you came here hoping one day to play, and part of you doesn’t believe it, it feels wrong. I went through this. Believe me, I can und—’ Stice automatically tried to shake his head and then gave a small cry of pain. ‘Not that. None of that. Long fucking story. I’m not even sure I’d want anybody to believe it. Forget that part. The point’s I’m up there — I’m lying there real sweaty and hot and jittered. I jump on down and got a chair and brang it out here to set where it’s cool.’ ‘And where you don’t have to lie there and contemplate Coyle’s sheet slowly ripening under his bunk,’ I said, shuddering a little. ‘And it’s just starting to snow, then, out. It’s about maybe like 0100. I thought how I’d just set and watch the snow a little and settle on down and then go grab some sack down in the V.R.’ He scratched at the reddening back of his scalp again.

‘And as you watched, you rested your head pensively against the glass for just a second.’ ‘And that was all she wrote. Forgot the forehead was sweated up.

Whammo. Kertwanged my own self. Just like remember when Rader and them got Ingersoll to touch his tongue on that net-post last New Year’s?

Stuck here fucking tight as that tongue, Hal. Hell of a lot more total stuck area, too, than Ingersoll. He only did lose that smidgeon off the tip. Inc, I tried to pull her off her about 0230, and there was this fucking… sound.

This sound and a feeling like the skin’ll give before the bind will, sure.

Frozen stuck. And this here’s more skin than I care to say goodbye to, buddy-ruff.’ He was speaking just above a whisper. ‘Jesus, and you’ve just been sitting here all this time.’ ‘Well shit I was embarrassed. And it never got quite bad enough to yell out. I kept thinking if it gets a little worse I’ll go on and yell out. And then along about 03 I quit feeling the forehead altogether.’ ‘You’ve just been sitting here waiting for someone to happen along.

Chanting quietly to keep up your courage.’ ‘I was just praying like hell it wouldn’t be Pemulis. God only knows what that son of a whore’d’ve thunk of to do to me here all helpless and immobilated. And Troeltsch is sawing logs just inside that door there, with his fucking mike and cable and ambitions. I’ve been praying he don’t wake up. And let’s don’t even mention that son of a bitch Freer.’ I looked at the door. ‘But that’s Axhandle’s single. What would Troeltsch be doing sleeping in Axhandle’s room?’ Ortho shrugged. ‘Trust that I’ve had plenty of time to listen and identify different folks’ snores, Inc.’ I looked from Stice to Axford’s door and back. ‘So you’ve just been sitting here listening to sleep-noises and watching your breath expand and freeze on the window?’ I said. Imagining it seemed somehow unendurable: me just sitting there, stuck, well before sunrise, alone, too embarrassed to call out, my own exhalations fouling the window and denying me even a view to divert attention from the horror. I stood there horrified, admiring The Darkness’s ballsy calm. ‘There was a kind of real bad half-hour when my upper lip up and got stuck too, in the breath, when the breath froze. But I breathed the sucker loose. I breathed real hot and fast. Goddamn near hyper-v’d. I was scared if

I passed out I’d slump on forward and the whole face’d get stuck. Goddamn forehead’s bad enough.’ I put my toothbrush and NASA glass down on the cantilevered vent- module. Rooms’ vents were recessed, hallway-vents protrusive. E.T.A.’s annular heating system produced a lubricated hum I had stopped really hearing years ago. The Headmaster’s House still had oil heat; it always sounded like a maniac was hammering at the pipes far below. ‘Dark, prepare yourself mentally,’ I said. ‘I’m going to help pull you loose.’ Stice didn’t seem to hear this. He seemed oddly preoccupied for a man occlusively sealed to a frozen window. He was feeling at the back of his head with real vigor, which is what he did when he was preoccupied. ‘You believe in shit, Hal?’ ‘Shit?’ ‘I don’t know. Little-kid shit. Telekiniption. Ghosts. Parabnormal shit.’ ‘Just going to get around behind you and yank and we’ll pop you right off,’ I said. ‘Somebody did come by before,’ he said. ‘There was somebody standing back there about maybe an hour back. But he just stood there.

Then he went away. Or… it.’ A full-body shiver. ‘It’ll be like that last little bit of ankle-tape. We’ll pull you back so hard and fast you won’t feel a thing.’ ‘I’m getting these real unpleasant memories of that piece of Ingersoll’s tongue on Nine’s net-post that stayed there til spring.’ ‘This is no saliva-and-subzero-metal situation, Dark. This is some freakish occlusive seal. Glass doesn’t conduct heat like metal conducts heat.’ ‘There ain’t too fucking much heat involved in this window right here, buddy-ruff.’ ‘And I’m not sure what you mean, paranormal. I believed in vampires when I was small. Himself allegedly used to see his father’s ghost on stairways sometimes, but then again toward the end he used to see black- widow spiders in his hair, too, and claimed I wasn’t speaking sometimes when I was sitting right there speaking to him. So we kind of wrote it all off. Orth, I guess I don’t know what to think about paranormal shit.’

‘Then plus I think something bit me. On the back of the head here, some bug that knew I was helpless and couldn’t see.’ Stice dug again at the red area behind his ear. There was a kind of weltish bump there. It wasn’t in a vampire-related area of the neck. ‘And good old Mario says he’s seen paranormal figures, and he’s not kidding, and Mario doesn’t lie,’ I said. ‘So belief-wise I don’t know what to think. Subhadronic particles behave ghostishly. I think I withhold all prejudgment on the whole thing.’ ‘Well all right then. It was good it was you come by then.’ ‘The big thing’s going to be to stiffen the old neck, Dark, to avoid whiplash. We’ll pull you off there like a cork from a bottle of Moët.’ ‘Pull my sorry ass off here, Inc, and I’ll take and show you some parab- normal shit that’ll shake your personal tree but good,’ Stice said, bracing. ‘’n’t said nothing to nobody but Lyle about it, and I’m sick of the secretness of it. You won’t pre-formulize any judgments, Inc, I know.’ ‘You’re going to be fine,’ I said. I got right behind Stice and bent slightly and got an arm around his chest. His wooden chair creaked as I braced my knee against it. Stice began breathing fast and hard. His parotitic jowls flapped a little as he breathed. Our cheeks were almost pressed together. I told him I was going to pull on the count of Three. I actually pulled on Two, so he couldn’t brace himself. I pulled back as hard as I could, and after a stutter of resistance Stice pulled back with me.

There was a horrible sound. The skin of his forehead distended as we yanked his head back. It stretched and distended until a sort of shelf of stretched forehead-flesh half a meter long extended from his head to the window. The sound was like some sort of elastic from hell. The dermis of Stice’s forehead was still stuck fast, but the abundant loose flesh of Stice’s bulldog face had risen and gathered to stretch and connect his head to the window. And for a second I saw what might be considered Stice’s real face, his features as they would be if not encased in loose jowly prairie flesh: as every mm. of spare flesh was pulled up to his forehead and stretched, I got a glimpse of Stice as he would appear after a radical face-lift: a narrow, fine- featured, and slightly rodential face, aflame with some sort of revelation, looked out at the window from beneath the pink visor of stretched spare skin.

All this took place in less than second. For just an instant we both stayed there, straining backward, listening to the little Rice-Krispie sound of his skin’s collagen-bundles stretching and popping. His chair was leaning way back on its two rear legs. Then Stice shrieked in pain: ‘Jesus God put it back!’ The little second face’s blue eyes protruded like cartoon eyes. The fine little thin-lipped second mouth was a round coin of pain and fear. ‘Put it back put it back put it back!’ Stice yelled.

I couldn’t just let go, though, for fear that the elastic stretch would snap Stice forward into the window and send his face through the glass. I eased him forward, watching the chair’s front legs descend slowly to the floor; and the tension of the forehead’s skin decreased, and Stice’s full fleshy round face reappeared over the small second face, and covered it, and we eased him forward until nothing but a few centimeters of decollagenated forehead-skin hanging and sagging at about eyelash-level remained as

evidence of the horrific stretch.

‘Jesus God,’ Stice panted.

‘You are really and truly stuck, Orth.’ ‘Fuck me skating did that ever hurt.’ I tried to rotate a kink out of my shoulder. ‘We’re going to have to thaw it off, Dark.’ ‘You’re not getting close to this forehead with a saw, bud. I’ll set right- cheer till spring first, see if I don’t.’ Then Jim Troeltsch’s towering A.M.-cowlick and then face and fist emerged through Axford’s doorway just over Stice’s hunched shoulder.

Stice had been right. Being in somebody else’s room even after Lights Out was an infraction; staying there overnight was too far out even to mention in the regulations. ‘Reports of screaming have reached us here in the Eyewitness News-Center,’ Troeltsch said into his fist. ‘The fuck out of here, Troeltsch,’ Stice said. ‘Thaw, Ortho. Warm water. Heat the window. Hot water. Dissolve the adhesion. Heating pad. Hot pack from Loach’s office or something.’ ‘Loach’s door can’t be dickied,’ Stice said. ‘Don’t wake him up on Fundraiser day yet.’ Troeltsch extended the fist. ‘Reports of high-pitched screams have led this reporter to an unfolding scene of dramatic crisis, and we’re going to attempt to get a word with the youngster at the center of all the commotion.’

‘Tell him to pipe down and get back with that hand or so help me Jesus, Hal.’ ‘The Darkness accidentally put his forehead against the window here when it was wet and it froze and he’s been out here stuck all night,’ I told Troeltsch, ignoring the big fist he held to my face. I squeezed Stice’s shoulder. ‘I’ll go get Brandt to rig something warm.’ It was as if some tacit agreement had been reached not even to bring up Troeltsch’s being in Axford’s room or where Axford was. It was hard to know which would be more disturbing, Axford’s not being in his room all night or Axford being in there behind the ajar door, meaning Troeltsch and Axford had both spent the night in one small single with exactly one bed.

The universe seemed to have aligned itself so that even acknowledging it would violate some tacit law. Troeltsch seemed oblivious to any appearance of impropriety or unthinkable possibilities. It was hard to imagine he’d be this obnoxious if he felt he had something to be discreet about. He was standing on tiptoe to see over the window’s breath-line, one hand cupped over his ear as if to hold a headset. He whistled softly. ‘Plus in addition now reports of mind-boggling snowfall are coming in to the News-Center.’ I grabbed my toothbrush and NASA glass from the vent’s protrusion; 352 since the Betel Caper, only the worst kind of naïf leaves his toothbrush unattended around E.T.A. ‘Keep an eye on Stice and my NASA glass right there, Jim, if you would.’ ‘Any comment on the mixture of pain, cold, embarrassment, and weather-related feelings you must be feeling, Mr. Stice is it?’ ‘Don’t leave me immobilated with Troeltsch, man, Hal. He’s going to make me talk to his hand.’ ‘A weather-related drama unfolding around the original plight of an embarrassed man trapped by his own forehead,’ Troeltsch was saying into his fist, facing his own reflection in the window, trying with the other big hand to quash the cowlick, as I trotted and slid to a stop in my socks just past the door to the stairwell.

Kenkle and Brandt were ageless in the special desiccated way janitors are ageless, somewhere between thirty-five and sixty. They were inseparable and essentially unemployable. Boredom had years ago led us to Lateral Alice Moore’s minimally crypto-protected employee files, and

Brandt’s file had listed his S.-B. I.Q. as Submoronic-to-Moronic. He was bald and somehow at once overweight and wiry. Both right and left temples carried red jagged surgical scars of unknown origin. His affective range consisted of different intensities of grin. He lived with Kenkle in an attic apartment in Roxbury Crossing overlooking Madison Park High School’s locked and cordoned playground, famed site of unsolved ritual mutilations in the Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken. His major attraction for Kenkle seemed to consist in the fact that he neither walked away nor interrupted when Kenkle was speaking. Even in the stairwell I could hear Kenkle discoursing on their Thanksgiving plans and directing Brandt’s mop-work.

Kenkle was technically black, as in Negroid, though he was more the burnt- sienna color of a spoiled pumpkin. But his hair was a black person’s hair, and he wore it in thick dreadlocks that looked like a crown of wet cigars.

An academic diamond in the very rough Roxbury Crossing, he’d received his doctorate in low-temperature physics from U.Mass. at twenty-one and taken a prestigious sinecure at the U.S. Office of Naval Research, then at twenty-three had been court-martialed out of the O.N.R. for offenses that changed each time you asked him. Some event between twenty-one and twenty-three seemed to have broken him at several strategic points, and he’d retreated from Bethesda back to the front stoop of his old Roxbury Crossing apartment building, where he read Ba’hai texts whose jackets he covered with intricately folded newspaper, and spat spectacular parabolas of quivering phlegm into New Dudley Street. He was dark-freckled and carbuncular and afflicted with excess phlegm. He was an incredible spitter, and alleged his missing incisors had been removed ‘for facilitating the expec-toratory process.’ We all suspected he was either hypomanic or ’drine-addicted or both. His expression was very serious at all times. He discoursed nonstop to poor Brandt, using spit as a sort of conjunction between clauses. He spoke loudly because they both wore earplugs of expanding foam — people’s nightmare-cries gave them the fantods. Their custodial technique consisted of Kenkle spitting with pinpoint accuracy onto whatever surface Brandt was to clean next and Brandt trotting like a fine hunting dog from glob to glob, listening and grinning, laughing when appropriate. They were moving away from me down the hall toward the second floor’s east window, Brandt making great shining arcs with his

doll’s-head mop, Kenkle pulling the gunmetal bucket and lobbing signifying phlegm over Brandt’s bent back. ‘And then the Yuletide season, Brandt my friend Brandt — Christmas — Christmas morning — What is the essence of Christmas morning but the childish co-eval of venereal interface, for a child? — A present, Brandt — Something you have not earned and which formerly was out of your possession is now in your po-ssession — Can you sit there and try to say there is no symbolic rela-tion between unwrapping a Christmas present and undressing a young lady?’ Brandt bobbed and mopped, uncertain whether to laugh.

Himself had met Kenkle and Brandt on the T (Kenkle and Brandt apparently rode the T at night, recreationally), trying somehow to make it 353 up to Enfield from the Back Bay via the Orange Line, and somewhat the worse for wear. Kenkle and Brandt not only got Himself onto the right color train and kept him propped up between them all the way up the eternity of Comm. Ave., they’d seen him safely down the T-stop’s steep iron stairs and across traffic and up the hill’s serpentine driveway to the portcullis, and had been invited in at 0200 by Himself to continue whatever low-temperature discussion he and Kenkle had been having as Brandt carried Himself up the hill in a fireman’s carry (Kenkle recalls that night’s discussion being about the human nose as an erectile organ, but the only really sure bet is that it was one-sided); and the duo had ended up being cast as black-veiled Noh- style attendants in Himself’s Zero-Gravity Tea Ceremony, and had been menially employed at E.T.A. ever since, though always on the graveyard shift, since Mr. Harde loathed Kenkle with a passion.

Kenkle hawked and hit a small strip of dust at the crease of baseboard and floor that the mop’s arc had missed. ‘For I am a missionary man, Brandt, is what I am — Brandt — as in give me the straight-forward venereal in-terface of missionary congress or give me nihil and zilch — You know what I am saying? — Give me your best thoughts on alter-native positions, Brandt — Brandt — For me, for my part at least, I say nix and nihil on the rear-entry or you might hear it termed Dog- or Canine-Style in- terface so favored in huts, blue car-tridges, Tan-tric etchings — Brandt, it’s animal-istic — Why? — Why you say? — Brandt, it is an ess-entially

hunched way to have interface — She hunches, you hunch over her — Inordinate ly too much hunching, to my own way of —’ It was Brandt who heard me as I came up behind them in socks, trying to keep to the drier patches. I almost slipped twice. It was still coming down hard outside the east window. ‘Otto Brandt here!’ Brandt called to me, extending a hand, though I was still several meters away.

Kenkle’s dreadlocks protruded from under a plaid hat. He turned with Brandt and raised his hand Indianishly in greeting. ‘Good prince Hal. Up and dressed in dawn’s ear-a-ly.’ ‘Let me introduce myself,’ Brandt said. I shook his hand. ‘In his socks and toothbrush. E.T.A.’s athe-ling, Brandt, whom I will wager rar-e-ly hunches.’ ‘The Darkness needs you guys upstairs ASAP,’ I said, trying to dry a sock against a pant-leg. ‘Dark’s face is stuck to the window and he’s in terrible pain and we couldn’t pull it off and it’s going to take hot water, but not too hot.’ I indicated the bucket at Kenkle’s feet. I noticed Kenkle’s shoes didn’t match. ‘What may we ask is so amusing, then?’ Kenkle asked. ‘Name’s Brandt and pleased to meet you,’ Brandt said, out with the hand again. He dropped the mop where Kenkle pointed. ‘Troeltsch is with him now, but he’s in a bad way,’ I said, shaking Brandt’s hand. ‘We are in route,’ Kenkle said, ‘but why the hilarity?’ ‘What hilarity?’ Kenkle looked from me to Brandt to me. ‘What hilarity he says. Your face is a hilarity-face. It’s working hilariously. At first it merely looked a - mused. Now it is open-ly cach -inated. You are almost doubled over. You can barely get your words out. You’re all but slapping your knee. That hilarity, good Prince atheling Hal. I thought all you players were compadre- mundos in civilian life.’ Brandt beamed as he backed down the hall. Kenkle pushed his plaid cap back to scratch at some sort of eruption at the hairline. I drew myself up to full height and consciously composed my face into something deadly- somber. ‘How about now?’

Brandt had the custodial closet unlocked. There was the sound of a metal bucket being filled at the closet’s industrial tap.

Kenkle brought his cap back forward and narrowed his eyes at me. He came up close. His eyelashes were clotted with small crisp yellow flakes.

There were Struck-like facial cysts in various stages of development.

Kenkle’s breath always smelled vaguely of egg salad. He felt at his mouth speculatively for a moment and said ‘Somewheres now between amused and cach-inated. Mirth-ful, perhaps. The crinkled eyes. The dimples of mirth. The exposed gums. We can bounce this off Brandt’s best thinking as well, if —’ From directly overhead came a ceiling-rattling ‘GYAAAAAAA’ from Stice. I was feeling at my face. Some doors opened along the hall, heads protruding. Brandt had a full metal bucket and was trying to run to the stairwell, the weight of the bucket canting his shoulder and steaming water sloshing onto the clean floor. He stopped with his hand on the stairwell door and looked back over his shoulder at us, reluctant to proceed without Kenkle. ‘I elect to go with mirthful,’ Kenkle said, giving my shoulder a little squeeze as he stepped past. I heard him saying different things to the heads in the doorways all the way down the hall. ‘Jesus,’ I said. Socks or no, I went forward into the really wet mopped area and tried to make out my face’s expression in the east window. It was now too light, though, outside, off all the snow. I looked sketchy and faint to myself, tentative and ghostly against all that blazing white.

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF WEATHER-DELAYED MEETING BETWEEN: (1) MR. RODNEY TINE SR., CHIEF OF UNSPECIFIED SERVICES & WHITE HOUSE ADVISER ON INTERDEPENDENT RELATIONS; (2) MS. MAUREEN HOOLEY, VICE-PRESIDENT FOR CHILDREN’S ENTERTAINMENT, INTERLACE TELENTERTAINMENT, INC.; (3) MR. CARL E. (‘BUSTER’) YEE, DIRECTOR OF MARKETING AND PRODUCT-PERCEPTION, GLAD FLACCID RECEPTACLE CORPORATION; (4) MR. R. TINE JR., DEPUTY REGIONAL COORDINATOR, U.S. OFFICE OF UNSPECIFIED SERVICES; AND (5)

MR. P. TOM VEALS, VINEY AND VEALS ADVERTISING, UNLTD.

8TH FLOOR STATE HOUSE ANNEX BOSTON MA, U.S.A 20 NOVEMBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

MR. TINE SR.: Tom. Buster. Mo.

MR. VEALS: R. the G.

MR. YEE: Rod.

MR. TINE SR.: Guys.

MR. TINE JR.: Afternoon, Chief!

MR. TINE SR.: Mmmph.

Ms. HOOLEY: Glad you could finally get in, Rod. May I say we’re all extremely excited, on our end.

MR. TINE SR.: Never seen snow like this. Any of you ever seen snow remotely approaching anything like this?

MR. VEALS: [Sneezes.] Fucking town.

MR. YEE: Like an extra dimension out there. Less an element than its own dimension.

SOMEONE: [Shoe makes a squelching noise under the table.] MR. YEE: With its own rules, laws. Awe-inspiring. Fearsome.

MR. VEALS: Cold. Wet. Deep. Slippery. More like.

MR. TINE JR.: [Tapping the edge of a ruler against the tabletop.] Their limo in from Logan did a 180 on Storrow. Mr. Yee was just telling — MR. TINE SR.: [Tapping a telescoping weatherman’s pointer against the edge of the tabletop.] So what’s the poop. The skinny. What are we talking.

Ms. HOOLEY: Spot ready for previewing. We need your go. I’m in from Phoenix via New New York.

MR. YEE: I’m in from Ohio. Choppered up from NNY with Mo here.

Ms. HOOLEY: Spot’s master’s in the post-production lab down at V&V. All ready except for some final bugs with the matteing.

MR. VEALS: Maureen says we need you and Buster’s green light to disseminate.

Ms. HOOLEY: You and the titular sponsor here green-light it, we can have disseminatable product by the end of the weekend.

MR. VEALS: [Sneezes.] Assuming this fucking snow doesn’t shut down our power.

MR. TINE SR.: [Motioning with weatherman’s pointer to U.S.O. stenographer to transcribe verbatim.] Seen it yet, Buster?

MR. YEE: Negative, Rod. Just in with these folks here. Kennedy completely socked in. Mo had to charter a chopper. I’m sitting here cherry.

MR. TINE JR.: [Tapping edge of ruler on tabletop.] How’d you fare getting up here, Sir, if I may?

MR. TINE SR.: Mountain comes to Mohammed, eh Tom?

MR. VEALS: How come I only came two clicks down here and I’m the one with a fucking cold?

MR. TINE JR.: I’ve been here in Boston as well.

MR. VEALS: [Checking connections on Infernatron 210-Y Digital Player and Viewer System.] So shall we?

MR. TINE SR.: OK, for the record. Mo. Demographic target?

Ms. HOOLEY: Ages six to ten, with marginally reduced efficacy four to six and ten to thirteen. Let’s say target’s four to twelve, white, native English-speaking, median income and above, capacity on Kruger Abstraction Scale three or above. [Refers to notes.] Advertable attention-span of sixteen seconds with a geometric fall-off commencing at thirteen seconds.

MR. TINE SR.: Spot-length?

Ms. HOOLEY: Thirty seconds with a traumatic graphic at fourteen

seconds.

MR. VEALS: [Hawks phlegm.] MR. YEE: Proposed insertion-vehicle, Mo?

Ms. HOOLEY: The ‘Mr. Bouncety-Bounce Show,’ spontaneous dissemination at 1600 M to F. 1500 Central and Mountain.

Cream of the crop. 82 Share on spontaneous receptions for the slot.

MR. YEE: Any data on what percentage of total viewing in the slot is Spontaneous versus Recorded cartridge?

Ms. HOOLEY: We had 47% plus or minus two as of Year of the Yushityu 2007. That’s the last year the data’s firmed up for.

MR. TINE SR.: So say 40% of total viewing for the spot.

MR. YEE: Give or take. Impressive.

MR. TINE SR.: So check, check, check. We got rough costs?

MR. YEE: Production just over half a meg. Post-production — MR. VEALS: Bupkus. 150K before matteing.

MR. YEE: I might add that Tom’s pro-bonoing his part of the production. MR. VEALS: So you all ready to eyeball this or what?

Ms. HOOLEY: Since ‘Mr. B-B’ ’s contracted as a no-public-service- spot vehicle, dissemination charge’ll come out around 180K per slot.

MR. YEE: Which we’re still of the position this seems a bit steep.

MR. TINE JR.: The upcoming year’s Glad’s year, Buster. You wanted the year. You want the Year of Glad to be the year half the nation stopped doing anything but staring bug-eyed at some sinister cartridge while little whorls went around in their eyes until they died of starvation in the middle of their own exc—?

MR. TINE SR.: Shut up, Rodney. And quit with the ruler-tapping.

Buster I’m sure knows the incredible good will that’s even now accruing from their proud sponsorship of probably the most important public-service spots ever conceived, given the potential threat here.

MR. VEALS: [Sneezes twice in abrupt succession.] [Comment unintelligible.] MR. TINE SR.: [Taps telescoping weatherman’s pointer on edge of tabletop.] Righto then. The spot itself, then. The spokesfigure icon thing. Still the singing Kleenex?

MR. YEE: The what-was-it, Frankie the No-Thankee Hankie, warning kids to say No Thankee to unlabelled or suspicious

cartridges?

Ms. HOOLEY: [Clears throat.] Tom?

MR. TINE JR.: [Taps ruler on edge of tabletop.] MR. VEALS: [Hawks.] No. Had to shit-can the dancing Kleenex after the response groups’ test data were analyzed. Various

problems. The phrase ‘No Thankee’ itself perceived as archaic.

Uncool. Crotchety-adult. Too New England or something.

Summoned images of a leathery-faced old guy in overalls. Took attention away from what they’re supposed to say No Thanks to. Plus phrase-recognition data was way under minimum slogan-parameters.

Ms. HOOLEY: Problems with the icon itself.

MR. VEALS: [Blowing nose one nostril at a time.] Kids hated Frankie the Hankie. We’re talking levels past ambivalence.

Associated the hankie with snot, basically. The word booger kept coming up. The singing didn’t help.

Ms. HOOLEY: Which is why in this case thank God for response-

group testing.

MR. YEE: This business’ll make you old.

MR. VEALS: Had to go back and completely reboot at square one.

MR. YEE: Does anyone else smell a peculiar citrusy floral odor?

Ms. HOOLEY: Tom’s boys’ve been at it twenty-four/seven. We’re extremely excited at the result.

MR. VEALS: It’s previewable but rough. Not really quite there yet.

The first Phil’s digitals had a bug.

MR. TINE JR.: Phil?

MR. VEALS: A small bug, but nasty. Dregs of a turbovirus in the graphic encoder. Phil’s head kept detaching and floating off to the upper right. Not a good effect at all, given the message we want to send.

MR. YEE: Like orange blossoms, but with a kind of sick sweetness.

Ms. HOOLEY: Oh dear.

MR. VEALS: [Sneezes.] And debugging put us behind on some of the fonts, so you’re going to have to use some imagination here.

Has this 210 unit been downloaded for schematic matteing?

MR. TINE JR.: Excuse me. Phil?

MR. VEALS: Introducing Fully Functional Phil, the prancing ass.

Ms. HOOLEY: More like a mule, a burro. A burro.

MR. TINE JR.: [Tapping like mad.] An ass?

Ms. HOOLEY: Horse-characters were copyrighted by ChildSearch.

Their ‘Patch the Pony Who Says Nay to Strangers’ spots.

MR. TINE JR.: A prancing ass?

Ms. HOOLEY: The perception of naïveté and clumsiness about a mule-icon provoked a kind of empathy in the response groups.

Phil’s not coming off as an authority-figure-joy-killer type.

More like a peer. So the cartridge he warns against gets none of the forbidden-fruit-type boost of being warned against by an authority figure.

MR. VEALS: Plus the kid market’s a frigging horror show. Near every species was copyrighted. Garfield. McGruff the freaking crime dog. Toucan Sam. The O.N.A.N. bird of prey. Let’s not even get into the bears or bunnies. It was basically either an ass or a cockroach. Never again the kid’s market as God is my witness. [Sneezes.] Ms. HOOLEY: Once we went with the burro, Tom opted to accentuate the clumsy-incompetence factor. To almost ironize the icon. Buck teeth, crossed eyes — MR. VEALS: Extravagantly crossed. Like he’s just been whacked with a sock full of nickels. Eye-response was through the roof.

Ms. HOOLEY: Ears that won’t stay upright. Legs keep getting all rubbery and tangled when he tries to prance.

MR. VEALS: But prance he does.

MR. YEE: But surely it doesn’t present itself as an ass. Surely it doesn’t prance out and say, ‘Take it from me, an ass.’ MR. VEALS: A fully functional ass.

Ms. HOOLEY: Tom’s rather ingeniously played up the functionality angle. The energy and verve versus passivity angle. He’s never just Phil. He’s Fully Functional Phil. He’s a blur of kid-type activity — school, playing, teleputer-interfacing, prancing.

Tom’s got him storyboarded for a number of thirty-second activity-packed little adventures. He’s a goof, an iconic child, but he’s active. He stands for the attraction of capacity, agency, choice. As versus the spot’s animated adult who we see in a recliner ostensibly watching the Canadian cartridge, little spirals going around and around in his eyes as his body sort of melts and his head starts growing and distending until the

passive watching adult’s image is just a huge five-o’clock- shadowed head in the recliner, his eyeballs huge and whirling.

MR. TINE JR.: [Taps his ruler against the edge of the tabletop.] MR. VEALS: Let’s just roll the thing for them, Mo.

MR. TINE SR.: I’ve got to say I foresee trouble selling a certain Commander in Chief on a prancing ass as an improvement over a singing Kleenex.

Ms. HOOLEY: Phil’s message is that not every entertainment cartridge out there is necessarily a good old safe pre-approved InterLace TelEntertainment product. He says word’s reached him during his fun-filled fully functional daily activities of a certain very wicked and sneaky cartridge that even has a little smiling face on the case and when you first start watching it looks like it promises to be more fun to watch than anything you’ve ever wished on a star or blown out a birthday-cake candle for. In a thought-bubble that becomes visible when Phil’s ears flop down again — MR. VEALS: [Sneezes.] Not yet matted in all the way — MR. TINE SR.: You know how he is about Kleenex.

Ms. HOOLEY: — will be an image of an iconic cartridge case with a friendly smile and pudgy little harmless Pillsbury Doughboy arms and legs.

MR. YEE: [Loosening his collar.] Not the actual copyrighted Pillsbury iconic-limb animation-codes, though.

MR. VEALS: Relax. More like a reference. An allusion to plumpness, cuteness. Pudgy and harmless-looking limbs, is the thing.

MR. TINE JR.: [Tapping edge of tabletop with ruler.] MR. TINE SR.: [Pointing at tapping ruler with weatherman’s pointer.] You’re close to losing that hand, bucko.

Ms. HOOLEY: [Referring to notes.] Then Phil looks up and pops the thought-bubble with a needle and says But it’s a liar, this smiling cartridge is, a wicked thing, lying, like the stranger who leans out of his car and offers you a ride home to your Mommy and Daddy but really wants to grab you and put his sweaty hand over your mouth and lock you in the car and take you far away

with him to where you’ll never see your Mommy, Daddy, or Mr. Bouncety-Bounce ever again.

MR. VEALS: Which and here’s the traumatic graphic at fourteen, a dark-bordered new thought-bubble over Phil in which now the cartridge’s limbs are like a dockworker’s, it’s a swart leering cartridge with yellow fangs and long nails in a plaid cap and overalls driving off with an animated kid splayed all screaming and horrified against the car’s rear window, spirals starting to roll in the kid’s eyes. Wait’ll you see it.

Ms. HOOLEY: It’s so scary it’s positively riveting.

MR. VEALS: [Sneezes twice.] Stuff of fucking nightmares.

MR. YEE: Urgle. Urgle urgle. Splarg. Kaa. [Falls from chair.]

MR. TINE JR.: Holy mackerel.

MR. TINE SR.: Buster? Buster?

Ms. HOOLEY: Mr. Yee’s epileptic. Severe. Untreatable. Happened twice on the chopper in. Stress or embarrassment brings it on.

He’ll be back up in a minute. Just act natural when he comes back up.

MR. YEE: [Heels drumming on terrazzo State House Annex floor

tile.] Ack. Kaa.

MR. TINE SR.: Jesus.

MR. TINE JR.: [Tapping ruler on tabletop’s edge.] Jesus W. Christ.

MR. TINE SR.: [Rising, indicating tapping ruler with extended weatherman’s pointer.] All right, God damn it. Give me that

thing. Give it here.

MR. TINE JR.: But Chief — MR. TINE SR.: You heard me God damn it. You know it drives me bats. You’ll get it back when we’re done. Drives me up the wall. Always has. What is it with you and that ruler.

Ms. HOOLEY: Be up and back in the game in a jiff. He won’t remember the fit. Just don’t mention it. The embarrassment of mentioning it’ll set it off again. That’s why twice on the

chopper. I learned the hard way.

MR. YEE: Splar. Kak.

MR. VEALS: [Hawking.] For Christ’s sake.

Ms. HOOLEY: [Referring to notes.] As the cartridge in the car in the thought-bubble drives the splayed kid away, Phil prances a bit and warns that we don’t even know for sure what the cartridge to watch out for is even about. He warns that the police only know that it’s something that looks like you’d really want to watch it. He says all we know is it looks really entertaining. But that it really just wants to take away your functionality. He says we know it’s… Canadian.

MR. VEALS: That’s why the plaid cap in the traumatic graphic.

Response data indicates a plaid cap with earflaps signifies the Big C to over 70% of the spot’s target. The overalls drive the association home.

Ms. HOOLEY: At nineteen seconds, Fully Functional Phil then dances his Warning Dance, a Native-American-cum- Breakdance-type dance we’re hoping will catch on among younger dancers. His rhetorical thrust is to play it functional and safe and make sure and check with Mommy and/or Daddy before watching any entertainment you haven’t seen before. I.e. to accept no Spontaneous Dissemination and play no post- delivered entertainment without checking with an authority figure.

MR. TINE JR.: But as a peer. More like, ‘I’m thinking this is what I better do, if I want to stay fully functional.’ MR. YEE: [Back upright in chair.] Somebody’s mentioned the floppy-ear and plastic-buck-teeth product tie-ins.

MR. TINE JR.: Jesus Mr. Yee, are you sure you’re OK?

Ms. HOOLEY: Ixnay on the entionmay.

MR. YEE: [Sweat-soaked, looking around.] What did he mean? He

didn’t mean…?

MR. TINE SR.: God damn it, Rodney.

MR. YEE: Urg. Splarg. [Falls from chair.] Ms. HOOLEY: [Clears throat.] And finally, direly — can I say

direly?

MR. VEALS: This is at 25.35 seconds.

Ms. HOOLEY: Emphatically warns that if Mommy and/or Daddy have been observed sitting in one position in front of the

home’s viewer for an unusually long period of time — MR. VEALS: — Without speaking. Without responding to stimuli.

Ms. HOOLEY: — or acting in any way unusual or distracted or creepy or spooky with respect to an entertainment on the viewer — MR. VEALS: We cut spooky on the last pass.

MR. YEE: Sklah. Nnngg.

Ms. HOOLEY: — that the fully functional kid’ll never attempt to rouse them himself, and Fully Functional Phil leans way in in a kind of fisheye-lens close-up and says ‘No-ho-ho-ho way’ would he ever be so dumb as to even for a second plunk himself passively down and have a look at what it is his parents are so silently, creepily engrossed by, but to vacate the premises and prance as fast as he can to get a policeman, who’ll know just how to cut the premises’ power and help Mum and Dad.

MR. VEALS: His trademark expression is ‘No-ho-ho-ho way.’ He works it in whenever possible.

MR. TINE JR.: His equivalent to the Kleenex’s ‘No-Thankee.’ MR. TINE SR.: We’re ready to view, I think.

MR. YEE: [Back in seat, necktie now wrapped all the way around neck like aviator’s scarf.] Still hashing out the tie-ins with

Hasbro et al.

MR. VEALS: We’re all cued and ready.

MR. TINE SR.: Let’s have a look at the sucker.

Ms. HOOLEY: Since Tom’s too modest to say so, I should say that Tom’s already storyboarded an extremely exciting adolescent- targeted version of Fully Functional Phil, for music-video and soft-core disseminations, where Phil engages in a great deal more ironic self-parody, and in this version his trademark expression becomes ‘It’s your ass, ace.’ MR. TINE JR.: So let’s have a look at the bastard.

MR. TINE SR.: Kid, your job here from here on out is to pipe down, now do you —?

MR. YEE: I’ve been asked to say for transcription how pleased the Glad Flaccid Receptacle Corporation is, during this potentially grave interval, to be a proud —

MR. VEALS: [At the Infernatron 210 Viewer.] Hit those lights over behind you, kid.

MR. TINE JR.: This’ll make it difficult for the transcriber to transcribe, can I say.

MR. YEE: This spot doesn’t happen to in any way optically pulse

or strobe, does it?

MR. VEALS: Are we all set?

MR. TINE SR.: So lights already.

Gately’s memories of ‘Cheers!’ ’s Nom now are clearer and vivider than any memory of the wraith-dream or the whirling wraith who said death was just everything outside you getting really slow. The implication that there might at any given time in any room be whole swarms of wraiths flitting around the hospital on errands that couldn’t affect anybody living, all way too fast to see and dropping by to watch Gately’s chest rise and fall at the rate of the sun, none of this has sunk in enough to give him the howlers, not in the wake of Joelle’s visit and the fantasies of romance and rescue, and the consequent shame. There’s now a sandy sound of gritty sleetish stuff wind- driven against the room’s window, the hiss of the heater, sounds of gunfire and brass bands from cartridge viewers on in other rooms. The room’s other bed’s still empty and tightly made. The intercom gives that triple ding every few minutes; he wonders if they just do it to bug people. The fact that he couldn’t even finish Ethan From in 10th-grade English and hasn’t got clue one about where ghostwords like SINISTRAL or LIEBESTOD mean or come from, much less OMMATOPHORIC, is just starting to percolate up to awareness when there’s a cold hand on his good shoulder and he opens his eyes. Not to mention ghostwords, which is a real and esoteric word. He’s been floating just under sleep’s lid again. Joelle van D.’s gone. The hand is the nurse that had changed the catheter-bag. She looks hassled and unserene, and one cheekbone sticks out farther than the other, and her little slot of a mouth’s got little vertical wrinkles all around it from being held tight all the time, not unlike the basically-late Mrs. G.’s tight little mouth. ‘The visitor said you’d requested this, because of the tube.’ It’s a little stenographic notebook and Bic. ‘Are you left-handed?’ The nurse means sinistral. She’s penguin-shaped and smells of cheap soap. The notebook is STENOGRAPHIC because its pages turn over at the top instead of to the

side. Gately shakes his head gingerly and opens his left hand for the stuff. It makes him feel good all over again that Joelle had understood what he’d meant. She hadn’t just come to tell her troubles to somebody that couldn’t make human judgment-noises. Shaking his head slowly lets him see past the nurse’s white hip. Ferocious Francis is sitting in the chair that the wraith and Ewell and Calvin Thrust had all sat in, his skinny legs uncrossed, gnarled and crew-cutted and clear-eyed behind his glasses and totally relaxed, holding his portable O-tank, his chest rising and falling at about2 the rate a phone rings, watching the nurse waddle tensely out. Gately can see a clean white T- under the open buttons of Ferocious Francis’s flannel shirt. Coughing is F.F.’s way of saying hello. ‘Still sucking air I see,’ Ferocious Francis says when the fit’s passed, making sure the little blue tubes are still taped under his nose.

Gately struggles with one hand to flip the notebook open and write ‘YO!’ in block caps. Except there’s nothing to really hold the notebook up against and write; he has to sort of balance it flat on one thigh, so he can’t see what he’s writing, and writing with his left hand makes him feel like a stroke-victim must feel, and what he holds up at his sponsor looks more like . ‘Figured God needed a little help the other night did you?’ Francis says, leaning way out to the side to get a red bandanna hankie out of a back pocket. ‘What I heard.’ Gately tries to shrug, can’t, smiles weakly. His right shoulder is so thickly bandaged it looks like a turbanned head. The old man probes a nostril and then examines the hankie with interest, just like the dream- wraith did. His fingers are swollen and misshapen and his nails are long and square and the color of old turtleshell. ‘Poor sick bastard going around cutting up people’s pets, cut up the wrong people’s pets. This is the way I heard it.’ Gately wants to tell Ferocious Francis how he’s discovered how no one second of even unnarcotized post-trauma-infection-pain is unendurable.

That he can Abide if he must. He wants to share his experience with his Crocodile sponsor. And plus, now that somebody he trusts himself to need is here, Gately wants to weep about the pain and tell how bad the pain of it is, how he doesn’t think he can stand it one more second.

‘You saw yourself as in charge. Thought you’d step in. Protect your fellowman from his consequences. Which poor sick green Ennet House fuck was it?’ Gately struggles to try and get his knee up so he can see to write ‘LENZ.

WHITE WIG. ALWAYS NORTH. ALWAYS ON PHONE.’ Again it looks cuneiform though, illegible. Ferocious Francis blows out a nostril and replaces the little tube. The tank in his lap makes no sound. It has a little valve but no dial or needles. ‘You stepped in against six armed Hawaiians, I hear. Marshall Plan.

Captain Courageous. God’s personal Shane.’ F.F. likes to send air through his nose’s tubes in a mirthless burst, a kind of anti-laugh. His nose is large and cucumber-shaped and wide-pored, and pretty much its whole circulatory system is visible. ‘Glenny Kubitz calls me and describes the thing blow by blowjob. Says I should see the other guys. Says about breaking a Hawaiian’s nose, shoving the bits up into the brain. The old chop-and-stiff-arm he says. Big Don G.’s a Satanically tough motherfuck: this was his assessment. Said the way he heard it you could fight like you was born in a barfight. I tell Glenny I say I’m sure you’ll be proud to hear him say it.’ Gately was trying with maddening sinistral care to write out ‘HURT?

DEAD ANY? FINIST? WHO HAT IN HALL?,’ more like drawing than writing, when without warning one of the day-shift Trauma M.D.s sweeps in, radiating brisk health and painless cheer. Gately remembers dealing with this one M.D. some days ago in a kind of gray post-surgical fog. This M.D. is Indian or Pakistani and is glossily dark but with a sort of weirdly classically white-type face you could easily imagine profiling on a coin, plus teeth you could read by the gleam of. Gately hates him. ‘So I am here with you again in this room!’ The M.D. sings, kind of, when he talks. The name in gold piping on his white coat has a D and a K and a shitload of vowels. Gately almost had to reach up and swat this M.D. after surgery to keep him from hooking up a Demerol drip. That was between let’s say four and eight days ago. It’s probably But for the Grace that his Crocodilian sponsor Ferocious Francis G.’s sitting here watching blandly when the Pakistani M.D. sweeps in this time.

Plus they all have this flourishy M.D. way of sweeping Gately’s chart up off their hip and holding it up to read it. The Pakistani purses his lips and

puffs them out absently and sucks off his pen a little. ‘Grade-two toxemia. Synovial inflammation. The pain of the trauma is very much worse today, yes?’ the M.D. says to the chart. He looks up, the teeth emerge. ‘Synovial inflammation: nasty nasty. The pain of synovial inflammation is compared in the medical literature to renal calculus and ec- topic labor.’ Partly it’s the darkness of the classic face around them that makes the teeth seem so high-watt. The smile widens steadily without seeming to run out of new teeth to expose. ‘And so you are now ready to let us provide the level of analgesia the trauma warrants instead of Toradol, simple headache ibuprofen, which these medications are boys doing a large man’s duty here, yes? There has been reconsidering in light of the level?

Yes?’ Gately is inscribing an enormous vowel in the notebook with incredible care. ‘I make you aware of synthetic anipyretic analgesics which are no 354 higher than Category C-III for dependence.’ Gately imagines the M.D. smiling incandescently as he wields a shepherd’s crook. The guy has that odd clipped singsong way of talking of skinny guys in loincloths on mountains in films. Gately superimposes a big skull and crossbones over the glossy face, mentally. He holds up a palsied page-high A and brandishes it at the M.D. and then brings the notebook back down and swiftly up again, spells it out, figuring Ferocious Francis will step in and set this ad-man for the Disease straight once and for all, so Gately’ll never have to face this kind of Pakistani temptation again with maybe nobody supportive here next time. C-III his ass. Fucking Talwin’s C-III, too. ‘Oramorph SR for an instance. Very safe, very much relief. Fast relief.’ This is just morphine sulfate with a fancy corporate name, Gately knows. This raghead doesn’t know who he’s dealing with, or what he’s. ‘Now I must tell tell, I would make the personal first choice of titrated hydromorphone hydrochloride, in this case —’ Christ, this is Dilaudid. Blues. Fackelmann’s Mount Doom. Kite’s steep- angled decline, as well. Death on a Ritz. The Blue Bayou. Gene Fackelmann’s killer, by and large. And also Gately pictures good old Nooch, tall skinny Vinnie Nucci, from the beach at Salem, who favored Dilaudid and spent over a year without ever taking the belt off his wing,

dropping through Osco skylights at night on a rope with the belt all tight and ready just over his elbow already, Nucci never eating and getting skinnier and skinnier until he seemed to be just two cheekbones raised to a great silent height, even the whites of his eyes finally turning the blue of the bayou; and Fackelmann’s eliminated map after the insane scam on Sorkin and a disastrous two nights of Dilaudid, when Sorkin’d — ‘— though I say yes, this in truth is a C-II medication, and I wish to respect all wishes and concerns,’ the M.D. half-sings, inclined at the waist now by Gately’s railings, looking closely at the shoulder’s dressing but not seeming at all disposed to even touch it, his hands behind his back. His ass is more or less right in Ferocious Francis’s face, who’s just sitting there.

The M.D. doesn’t even seem to be aware 34-year-sober Ferocious Francis is there. And Francis isn’t making a peep.

It also occurs to Gately that esoteric is another ghostword he’s got no rights to throw around, mentally. ‘For I am Moslem, and abstain also, by religious law, from all abusive compounds as well,’ the M.D. says. ‘Yet if I have suffered trauma, or the dentist of my teeth proposes to perform a painful process, I submit as a Moslem to the imperative of my pain and will accept relief, knowing no established religion’s God wills needless suffering for His children.’ Gately has made two shaky smaller A’s together on the next sheet and is stabbing emphatically at the sheet with his Bic. He wishes if the M.D. wouldn’t shut up he’d at least move, so Gately could shoot a desperate Please-Jump-In-Here look at Ferocious Francis. The drug-question has nothing to do with established Gods.

The M.D.’s bobbing a little as he leans, his face coming in and then receding. ‘This is a Grade-II trauma we are looking at in this room. Allow me to explain that the discomfort of right now will only intensify as the synovial nerves begin to reanimate. The laws of trauma dictate that the pain will intensify as healing begins to commence. I am a professional at my job, 355 sir, as well as a Moslem. Hydrocodone bitartrate — C-III. Levorphanol 356 357 tartrate — C-III. Oxymorphone hydrochloride — admittedly, yes, C- II, but more than indicated in this degree of needless suffering.’ Gately can hear Ferocious Francis blowing his nose again behind the M.D. Gately’s mouth floods with spittle at the memory of the sick-sweet

antiseptic taste of hydrochloride that rises to the tongue with an injection of Demerol, the taste Kite and the lesbian burglars and even Equus (‘I’ll Stick Anything in Any Part of My Body’) Reese all gagged at but that poor old Nooch and Gene Fackelmann and Gately himself had loved, came to love like a mother’s warm hand. Gately’s eyes wobble and his tongue protrudes from a shiny mouth-corner as he draws a crude syringe and arm and belt and then tries to draw a skull-and-bones over the whole shaky ensemble, but the skull looks more like a plain old smiley-face. He holds it out to the foreigner anyway. The dextral pain’s so bad he wants to throw up, throat- tube or no.

The M.D. studies the palsied drawing, nodding the exact way Gately used to nod at Alfonso Parias-Carbo the totally ununderstandable Cuban.

358 ‘Oxycodone-nalaxone compound, with a short half-life but only a C-III grading of abuse.’ There’s no way the guy could be like intentionally making his voice this wheedly-sounding; it’s got to be Gately’s own Disease. The Spider. Gately envisions his brain struggling in a silk cocoon.

He keeps summoning to mind the little detox-story Ferocious Francis tells 359 from the Commitment podium, how they gave him Librium to help with the discomfort of Withdrawal, and how Francis says he just threw the Librium hard over his left shoulder, for luck, and has had very good luck ever since. ‘Likewise as well the time-tested pentazocine lactate, which I can offer with assurances as a Moslem trauma-professional standing here in this room in person with you at your bed’s side.’ Pentazocine lactate is Talwin, Gately’s #2 trusted standard when he was Out There, which 120 mg. on an empty gut was like floating in oil the exact 360 same temperature as your body, just like Percocet except without the maddening back-of-the-eyeball itch that always wrecked a Percocet high for him. ‘Surrender your courageous fear of dependence and let us do our profession, young sir,’ the Pakistani sums up, standing right up next to the bed, the left side, his professional lab-coat hiding F.F., hands behind his back, the dull glint of the metal corner of Gately’s chart just visible between his legs, immaculate of posture, smiling cheerily down, the whites of his eyes as ungodly white as his teeth. The memory of Talwin makes parts of

his body Gately didn’t know could drool drool. He knows what’s coming next, Gately does. And if the Pakistani goes ahead and offers Demerol again Gately won’t resist. And who the fuck’ll be able to blame him, after all.

Why should he have to resist? He’d received a bona fide Grade-Whatever dextral synovial trauma. Shot with a professionally modified .44 Item. He’s post-trauma, in terrible pain, and everyone heard the guy say it: it was going to get worse, the pain. This was a trauma-pro in a white coat here making reassurances of legitimate fucking use. Gehaney heard him; what the fuck did the Flaggers want from him? This wasn’t hardly like slipping over to Unit #7 with a syringe and a bottle of Visine. This was a stop-term measure, a short-gap-type measure, the probable intervention of a compassionate unjudging God. A quick Rx-squirt of Demerol — probably at the outside two, three days of a Demerol drip, maybe even one where they’d hook the drip to a rubber bulb he could hold and self-administer the Demerol only As Needed. Maybe it was the Disease itself telling him to be scared a medically necessary squirt would pull all his old triggers again, put him back in the cage. Gately pictures himself trying to shunt through a magnetic-contact burglar alarm with a hand and a hook. But surely if Ferocious Francis thought a medically advised short-term squirt suspect, at all, the old reptilian bastard would say something, do his fucking job as a Crocodile and sponsor, instead of just sitting there playing with his nostril’s little noninvasive tube. ‘Look kid, I’m gonna screw and let you settle this bullshit and come back up later,’ comes Francis’s voice, subdued and neutral, signifying nothing, and then the rasp of the chair’s legs and the system of grunts that always accompanies F.F.’s getting up from a chair. His white crew cut rises like a slow moon over the Pakistani’s shoulder, which the M.D.’s only sign of acknowledgment of Francis is to sort of tuck his chin down into his shoulder like a violinist, addressing Gately’s sponsor for the first time: ‘Then perhaps you would please, Mr. Gately Senior, if you please help us help your concerned and brave boy here but a boy I believe whose cavalier attitude underestimates the level of coming discomfort which is sadly unnecessary altogether if he will let us help him, sir,’ the Pakistani sings over his shoulder to Ferocious Francis, as if they were the room’s only adults. He’s assuming Ferocious Francis is Gately’s organic Dad.

Gately knows a Crocodile never bothers to correct anybody’s misimpression. He’s halfway to the door, moving with maddening slow care like always, as if walking on ice, twisted and seeming to limp off both legs and heartbreakingly assless in the baggy seat-shiny wide-waled old man’s corduroys he always wears, the back of his red neck complexly creased as he moves off away, lifting one hand in a gesture of acknowledgment and dismissal of the M.D.’s request: ‘Not my business to say one way or the other. Kid’s gonna do what he decides he needs to do for himself. He’s the one that’s feeling it. He’s the only one can decide.’ He either pauses or slows down even further at the open door, looking back at Gately but not meeting his wide eyes. ‘You keep your pecker up, kid, and I’ll bring some of the son of a bitches by to look in again later.’ He slips in ‘Might want to Ask For Some Help, deciding.’ The last of this comes from the white hall as the Pakistani’s glossy head comes back in close with now a tight strained-patience smile, and Gately can hear him inhaling to get ready to say that of course in Grade-II traumas of this severe type the treatment of preferred indication is the admittedly C-II and highly abusable but unsurpassed for effectiveness and tightly controlled administration of one 50-mg. tab in a diluting saline drip q. 3–4 hours of mep— Gately’s good left hand skins a knuckle shooting out between the bars of the bedside crib-railing and plunging under the M.D.’s lab-coat and fastening onto the guy’s balls and bearing down. The Pakistani pharmacologist screams like a woman. It isn’t rage or the will to harm so much as just no other ideas for keeping the bastard from offering something Gately knows that he’s powerless at this moment to refuse. The sudden exertion sends a blue-green sheet of pain over Gately that makes his eyes roll up as he bears down on the balls, but not enough to crush. The Pakistani curtsies deeply and bends forward, crumpling around Gately’s hand, showing all 112 teeth as he screams higher and higher until he hits a jagged high note like a big opera lady in a Viking helmet so shattering it makes the crib-railings and windowglass shiver and woke Don Gately up with a start, his left arm through the railing and twisted with the force of his attempt to sit up so that the pain now made him hit almost the same high note as the dream’s foreign M.D. The sky outside the window was gorgeous, Dilaudid- colored; the room was full of serious A.M. light; no sleet on the window.

The ceiling throbbed a little but did not breathe. The one visitor-chair was back over by the wall. He looked down. Either the stenographer’s notebook and pen had got knocked off his bed or the dream had made up that part, too. The next bed was still empty and made up tight. It came to him all of a sudden why they called them hospital corners. But the railing Joelle van D. had folded down to sit on the bunk in the fucking Erdedy kid’s sweats was still folded down, and the other railing was still up. So there was some like evidence of the one part, that she’d been really there, showing him the pictures. Gately brought his skinned hand gingerly back inside the railing and felt to make sure there really was a big invasive tube going into his mouth, and there was. He could roll his eyes way up and see his heart monitor going silently nuts. Sweat was coming off every part of him, and for the first time in the Trauma Wing he felt like he needed to take a shit, and he had no idea what arrangements there were for taking a shit but suspected they weren’t going to be appetizing at all. Second. Second. He tried to Abide. No single second was past enduring. The intercom was giving triple dings. There really were sounds of other rooms’ TPs, and of a meal cart being rolled down the hall, and the metally smell of food for the edible patients. He couldn’t see anything like a hat-shadow in the hall, but it could have been all the sunlight.

The dream’s vividness had been either fever or Disease, but either way it had fucking seriously rattled his cage. He heard the singsong voice promising about increasing discomfort. His shoulder beat like a big heart, and the pain was sickeninger than ever. No single second was past standing.

Memories of good old Demerol rose up, clamoring to be Entertained. The thing in Boston AA is they try to teach you to accept occasional cravings, the sudden thoughts of the Substance; they tell you that sudden Substance- cravings will rise unbidden in a true addict’s mind like bubbles in a toddler’s bath. It’s a lifelong Disease: you can’t keep the thoughts from popping in there. The thing they try to teach you is just to Let Them Go, the thoughts. Let them come as they will, but do not Entertain them. No need to invite a Substance-thought or -memory in, offer it a tonic and your favorite chair, and chat with it about old times. The thing about Demerol wasn’t just the womb-warm buzz of a serious narcotic. It was more like the, what, the aesthetics of the buzz. Gately’d always found Demerol with a slight Talwin kicker such a smooth and orderly buzz. A somehow deliciously symmetrical

buzz: the mind floats easy in the exact center of a brain that floats cushioned in a warm skull that itself sits perfectly centered on a cushion of soft air some neckless distance above the shoulders, and inside all is a somnolent hum. Chest rises and falls on its own, far away. The easy squeak of your head’s blood is like bedsprings in the friendly distance. The sun itself seems to be smiling. And when you nod off, you sleep like a man of wax, and awaken in the same last position you remember falling asleep in.

And pain of all sorts becomes a theory, a news-item in the distant colder climes way below the warm air you hum on, and what you feel is mostly gratitude at your abstract distance from anything that doesn’t sit inside concentric circles and love what’s happening.

Gately takes advantage of the fact that he’s already facing ceilingward to seriously Ask For Help with the obsession. He thinks hard about anything else at all. Heading out w/ old Gary Carty in the pre-dawn reek of low tide off Beverly to bring up lobster traps. The M.P. and the flies. His mother sleeping slack-mouthed on a chintz divan. Cleaning the very grossest corner of the Shattuck Shelter. The billow of the veiled girl’s veil. The traps’ little cages of cross-hatched bars, the lobsters’ eyes’ stalks always poking through the squares so the eyes looked out at open sea. Or the bumper stickers on the M.P.’s old Ford — SEEEEE YAAAAAAA!! and DON’T TAILGATE ME OR I’LL FLICK A BOOGER ON YOUR WINDSHIELD! and MIA: FORGOTTEN and I HAVEN’T HAD SEX IN SO LONG I FORGET WHO GETS TIED UP! The fish asking about what’s water. The sharp-nosed round-cheeked dead-eyed nurse with a weird Germanish accent that would sell Gately little sampler bottles of Sanofi-Winthrop Demerol syrup, 80 mg./bottle, vilely banana-flavored, then would lie back slack and dead-eyed while Gately X’d her, barely breathing, in an airless Ipswich apartment whose weird brown windowshades filled the place with light the color of weak tea. Named Egede or Egette, she eventually started telling Gately she couldn’t come close to coming unless he burned her with a cigarette, which marked the first time Gately seriously tried to quit smoking.

Now a black outside-linebacker of a St. E.’s nurse rumbles in and checks his drips and writes on his chart and points the artillery of her tits down at him to ask how he’s doing, and calls him ‘Baby,’ which nobody minds from enormous black nurses. Gately points at his lower abdomen in the area of

his colon and tries to make a broad explosive gesture with just one arm, slightly less mortified than if it had been a human-size white nurse, at least.

Gately happened onto Demerol at age twenty-three when intra-ocular itching finally forced him to abandon Percocets and explore new vistas.

Demerol was more expensive mg. for mg. than most synthetic narcs, but it was also easier to get, being the treatment of medical choice for mind- bending post-operative pain. Gately can’t for the life of him remember who or just where in Salem he was first introduced to what the boys on the North Shore called Pebbles and Bams-Bams, 50 and 100 mg. Demerol tablets, respectively very tiny and tiny, chalky white scored discs with on one side and Sanofi-Winthrop Co.’s very-soon-beloved trademark, a kind of on the other, that rakish just puncturing the square envelope of itchy-eyed North-Shore life. And remembering even the feels like Entertaining the obsession. He knows it was not long after Nooch’s funeral, because he’d been alone and crewless at whatever moment whoever handed him two 50 mg. tablets way too tiny for his big-fingered hands, in lieu of whatever else it was he’d wanted, laughing when Gately said What the fuck and They look like Bufferin for ants or some shit, saying: Trust Me.

It must have been his twenty-third summer Out There, because he remembers being shirtless and driving down 93 when he ran out of everything else and pulled off into the JFK Library lot to take them, so small and tasteless he had to check his open mouth in the rearview to make sure he’d gotten them down. And he remembers not wearing a shirt because he’d gotten to study his big bare hairless chest for a long time. And from that somnolent P.M. in the JFK lot on he’d been a faithful attendant at the goddess Demerol’s temple, right to the very finish.

Gately remembers crewing — for good bits of both the Percocet and Demerol eras — with two other North Shore narcotics addicts, who Gately’d grown up with one and had broke digits for Whitey Sorkin the migrainous bookie with the other. They weren’t burglars, either of them, these guys: Fackelmann and Kite. Fackelmann had a background in creative-type checks, plus access to equipment for manufacturing I.D., and Kite’s background was he’d been a computer-wienie at Salem State before he got the Shoe for hacking the phone bills of certain guys deep in trouble over 900 sex-lines into the S.S. Administration’s WATS account, and they became naturals at crewing together, F. and K., and had their own

unambitious but elegant scam going that Gately was ever only marginally in on. What Fackelmann and Kite’d do, they’d rig up an identity and credit record sufficient to rent them a luxury furnished apt., then they’d rent a lot of upscale-type appliances from like Rent-A-Center or Rent 2 Own down in Boston, then they’d sell the luxury appliances and furnishings off to one of a couple dependable fences, then they’d bring in their own air mattresses and sleeping bags and canvas chairs and little legit-bought TP and viewer and speakers and camp out in the empty luxury apartment, getting very high on the rented goods’ net proceeds, until they got their second Overdue Notice on the rent; then they’d rig up another identity and move on and do it all over. Gately took his turn being the one to bathe and shave and answer a luxury-apt.-rental ad in borrowed Yuppiewear and meet the property management people and sweep them off their Banfis with his I.D. and credit rating, and forge some name on the lease; and he usually crashed and got high in the apts. with Fackelmann and Kite, though he, Gately, had had his own digit-breaking and then later burglary career, and his own fences, and tended more and more to cop his own scrips and his own Percocets and then later Demerol.

Lying there, working on Abiding and not-Entertaining, Gately remembers how good old doomed Gene Fackelmann — that for a narcotics addict had had a truly raging libido — used to like to bring different girls home to whatever apt. they were scamming at the time, and how Fax’d open the door and look around in pretend-astonishment at the empty and carpetless luxury apt. and shout ‘We been fuckin robbed!’ For Fackelmann and Kite, the rap on Gately was that he was a great and (for a narcotics addict, which places limits on rational trusting) stand-up guy, and a ferociously good friend and crewmate, but they just didn’t for their lives see why Gately chose to be a narcotics man, why these were his Substances of his choice, because he was a great and cheerful stand-up jolly-type guy off the nod, but when he was Pebbled or narculated in any way he’d become this totally taciturn withdrawn dead-like person, they always said, like a totally different Gately, sitting for hours real low in his canvas chair, practically lying in this chair whose canvas bulged and legs bowed out, speaking barely at all, and then only the necessariest word or two, and then without ever seeming to open his mouth. He made whoever he got high with feel lonely. He got real, like, interior. Pamela Hoffman-

Jeep’s term was ‘Other-Directed.’ And it was worse when he shot anything up. You’d have to almost pry his chin off his chest. Kite used to say it was like Gately shot cement instead of narcotics.

McDade and Diehl come in around 1100h. from visiting Doony Glynn down somewheres in the Gastroenterology Dept. and try to give Gately’s left hand archaic old unhip high fives as a goof and say the Bowel guys’ve 361 got Glynn on a megadrip of a Levsin -codeine diverticulitis compound, and the Doon seemed to have undergone a kind of spiritual experience vis- à-vis this compound, and was giving them ebubblient high fives and saying the Bowel M.D.s were saying that there was a chance the condition might be inoperable and chronic and that D.G.’d have to be on the compound for life, with a rubber bulb for Self-Administration, and the formerly fetal Doon was sitting up in a lotus position and seemed to be a very happy camper indeed. Gately makes pathetic sounds around his oral tube as McDade and Diehl start to interrupt each other apologizing for how it’s looking like they might not be able to stand up and legally depose for Gately like they’d be ready to do in a fucking hatbeat if it weren’t for various legal issues they’re still under the clouds of that their P.D. and P.O. respectively say that walking voluntarily into Norfolk District Court in Enfield would be tittymount to like judicio-penal suicide, they’re told.

Diehl looks at McDade and then says there’s also disparaging news about the .44 Item, that by everybody’s reconstruction of events it’s more than likely Lenz might have promoted the Item up off the lawn when he legged it off the E.M.P.H.H. complex just ahead of the Finest. Because it’s fucking vanished, and nobody’d have rat-holed it and not given it up knowing what’s at stake for the good old G-Man in the deal. Gately makes a whole new kind of noise.

McDade says the more upbeat news is that Lenz has been possibly spotted, that Ken E. and Burt F. Smith had seen what looked like either R.

Lenz or C. Romero after a wasting illness on their way back from wheeling Burt F.S. to a meeting in Kenmore Square, mostly from the side of the back they’d seen him, wearing a back-split tux and sombrero w/ balls, and apparently officially relapsed, back Out There, drunk as a maroon, so totally legless when they saw him he was doing a drunk’s old hurricane-walk, fighting his way from parking meter to parking meter and clinging to each

parking meter. Wade McDade here thinks to insert that the confirmed scuttlebutt is that E.M.P.H.H. is getting ready to rent out Unit #3 to a long- term mental-health agency caring for people with incapacitating agoraphobia, and that everybody at the House is speculating on what a constantly crowded and cabin-feverish place that’s going to be, what with the terribleness of the predicted winter coming up. Diehl says his nasal sinus can always tell when it’s going to snow, and his sinus is starting to predict at least flurries for maybe as early as tonight. They never think to tell Gately what day it is. That Gately can’t communicate even this most basic of requests makes him want to scream. McDade, in what’s either an intimate aside or a knife-twist at a Staffer who’s in no position to enforce anything, confides that he and Emil Minty are arranging with Parias-Carbo — who works for an Ennet House alum at All-Bright Printing down near the Jackson-Mann School — for engraved-looking formal invitations for the agoraphobic folks in Unit #3 to all just come on out and over to Ennet House for a crowded noisy outdoor Welcome-to-the-E.M.P.H.H.- Neighborhood bash. And now Gately knows for sure it was McDade and Minty that put the HELP WANTED sign up under the window of the lady in Unit #4 that shouts for Help. The general level of tension in the room increases. Gavin Diehl clears his throat and says everybody says to say Gately’s like wicked missed back at the House and everybody said to say ‘ ’s up?’ and that they hope the G-Man’s up and back kicking residential ass very soon; and McDade produces an unsigned Get Well card from his pocket and puts it carefully through the railing’s bars, where it lies next to Gately’s arm and begins to open up from being folded and shoved in a pocket. It’s clear the thing was shoplifted.

It’s probably the pathetic unsigned folded hot card, but Gately’s suddenly stricken by the heat of the waves of self-pity and resentment he feels about not only the card but about the prospect of these booger- chewing clowns not standing up to eyewitness for his se offendendo after he just tried to do his sober job on one of their behalf and is now lying here in a level of increasing dextral discomfort these limp punks couldn’t imagine if they tried, getting ready to have to say no to grinning Pakistanis about his Disease’s drug of choice with an invasive tube down his mouth and no notebook after he asked for one, and needing to shit and to know the day and no big black nurse in view, and unable to move — it suddenly seems

awful starry-eyed to be willing to look on the course of events as evidence of the protection and care of a Higher Power — it’s a bit hard to see why a quote Loving God would have him go through the sausage-grinder of getting straight just to lie here in total discomfort and have to say no to medically advised Substances and get ready to go to jail just because Pat M. doesn’t have the brass to make these selfish bottom-feeding dipshits stand up and do the right thing for once. The resentment and fear make cords stand out on Gately’s purple neck, and he looks ferocious but not at all jolly. — Because what if God is really the cruel and vengeful figurant Boston AA swears up and down He isn’t, and He gets you straight just so you can feel all the more keenly every bevel and edge of the special punishments He’s got lined up for you? — Because why the fuck say no to a whole rubber bulbful of Demerol’s somnolent hum, if these are the quote rewards of sobriety and rabidly-active work in AA? The resentment, fear and self-pity are almost narcotizing. Way beyond anything he’d felt when hapless Canadians punched or shot him. This was a sudden total bitter impotent Job-type rage that always sends any sober addict falling back and up inside himself, like vapor up a chimney. Diehl and McDade were backing away from him. As well they fucking might. Gately’s big head felt hot and cold, and his pulse-line on the overhead monitor started to look like the Rockies.

The residents, between Gately and the door, wide-eyed, now suddenly parted to let someone pass. At first all Gately could see between them was the kidney-shaped plastic bedpan and a cylindrical syringe-snouted ketchup-bottlish thing with FLEET down the side in cheery green. It took this equipment a second to signify. Then he saw the nurse that came forward bearing the stuff, and his raging heart fell out of him with a thud.

Diehl and McDade made hearty-farewell noises and melted out the door with the vague alacrity of seasoned drug-addicts. The nurse was no slot- mouthed penguin or booming mammy. This nurse looked like something out of a racy-nursewear catalogue, like somebody that had to detour blocks out of her way to avoid construction sites at lunchtime. Gately’s projected image of his and this gorgeous nurse’s union unfolded and became instantly grotesque: him prone and ass-up on the porch swing, she white-haired and angelic and bearing something away in a kidney-shaped pan to the towering pile behind the retirement-cottage. Everything angry in him evaporated as he got ready to just fucking die of mortification. The nurse stood there and

twirled the bedpan on one finger and flexed the long Fleet cylinder a couple times and made an arc of clear fluid come out the tip and hang in the windowlight, like a gunslinger twirling his six-shooter around to casually show off, smiling in a way that simply snapped Gately’s spine. He began to mentally recite the Serenity Prayer. When he moved he could smell his own sour smell. Not to mention the time and pain involved in rolling onto his left side and exposing his ass and pulling his knees to his chest with one arm — ‘Hug those knees like they were your Sweetie, is what we say,’ she said, putting a terribly soft cool hand on Gately’s ass — without jostling the catheter or I.V.s, or the thick taped tube that went down his mouth to God knows where.

I was going to go back up to see about Stice’s defenestration, to check on Mario and change my socks and examine my expression in the mirror for unintentional hilarity, to listen to Orin’s phone-messages and then the protracted-death aria from Tosca once or twice. There is no music for free- floating misery like Tosca.

I was moving down the damp hall when it hit. I don’t know where it came from. It was some variant of the telescopically self-conscious panic that can be so devastating during a match. I’d never felt quite this way off- court before. It wasn’t wholly unpleasant. Unexplained panic sharpens the senses almost past enduring. Lyle had taught us this. You perceive things very intensely. Lyle’s counsel had been to turn the perception and attention on the fear itself, but he’d shown us how to do this only on-court, in play.

Everything came at too many frames per second. Everything had too many aspects. But it wasn’t disorienting. The intensity wasn’t unmanageable. It was just intense and vivid. It wasn’t like being high, but it was still very: lucid. The world seemed suddenly almost edible, there for the ingesting.

The thin skin of light over the baseboards’ varnish. The cream of the ceiling’s acoustic tile. The deerskin-brown longitudinal grain in the rooms’ doors’ darker wood. The dull brass gleam of the knobs. It was without the abstract, cognitive quality of Bob or Star. The turn-signal red of the stairwell’s lit EXIT sign. Sleepy T. P. Peterson came out of the bathroom in a dazzling plaid robe, his face and feet salmon-colored from the showers’ heat, and vanished across the hall into his room without seeing me wobbling, leaning against the cool mint wall of the hallway.

But the panic was there too, endocrinal, paralyzing, and with an overcognitive, bad-trip-like element that I didn’t recognize from the very visceral on-court attacks of fear. Something like a shadow flanked the vividness and lucidity of the world. The concentration of attention did something to it. What didn’t seem fresh and unfamiliar seemed suddenly old as stone. It all happened in the space of a few seconds. The familiarity of Academy routine took on a crushing cumulative aspect. The total number of times I’d schlepped up the rough cement steps of the stairwell, seen my faint red reflection in the paint of the fire door, walked the 56 steps down the hall to our room, opened the door and eased it gently back flush in the jamb to keep from waking Mario. I reexperienced the years’ total number of steps, movements, the breaths and pulses involved. Then the number of times I would have to repeat the same processes, day after day, in all kinds of light, until I graduated and moved away and then began the same exhausting process of exit and return in some dormitory at some tennis- power university somewhere. Maybe the worst part of the cognitions involved the incredible volume of food I was going to have to consume over the rest of my life. Meal after meal, plus snacks. Day after day after day. Experiencing this food in toto. Just the thought of the meat alone. One megagram? Two megagrams? I experienced, vividly, the image of a broad cool well-lit room piled floor to ceiling with nothing but the lightly breaded chicken fillets I was going to consume over the next sixty years. The number of fowl vivisected for a lifetime’s meat. The amount of hydrochloric acid and bilirubin and glucose and glycogen and gloconol produced and absorbed and produced in my body. And another, dimmer room, filled with the rising mass of the excrement I’d produce, the room’s double-locked steel door gradually bowing outward with the mounting pressure…. I had to put my hand out against the wall and stand there hunched until the worst of it passed. I watched the floor dry. Its dull shine brightened behind me in the snowlight from the east window. The wall’s baby blue was complexly filigreed with bumps and clots of paint. An unmopped glob of Kenkle’s spit sat by the corner of V.R.5’s door’s jamb, quivering slightly as the door rattled in its frame. There were scuffles and thumps from upstairs. It was still snowing like hell.

I lay on my back on the carpet of Viewing Room 5, still on the second floor, fighting the sense that I’d either never been here before or had spent

lifetimes just here. The entire room was panelled in a cool yellow shimmering material called Kevlon. The viewer took up half the south wall and was dead and gray-green. The carpet’s green was close to this color, too. The instructional and motivational cartridges were in a large glass bookcase whose central shelves were long and whose top and bottom shelving tapered down to almost nothing. Ovoid would convey the case’s shape. I had the NASA glass with my toothbrush in it balanced on my chest. It rose whenever I inhaled. I’d had the NASA glass since I was a little boy, and its decal of white-helmeted figures waving authoritatively through the windows of a prototype shuttle was faded and incomplete.

After a time, Sleepy T.P. Peterson put his wet-combed head in the door and said LaMont Chu wanted to know whether what was happening outside qualified as a blizzard. It took over a minute of my not saying anything for him to go away. The ceiling panels were grotesquely detailed. They seemed to come after you like some invasive E.T.A. patron backing you up against the wall at a party. The ankle throbbed dully in the snowstorm’s low pressure. I relaxed my throat and simply let the excess saliva run postnasally back and down. The Moms’s mother had been ethnic Québecois, her father Anglo-Canadian. The term used in the Yale Journal of Alcohol Studies for this man was binge-drinker. All my grandparents were deceased. Himself’s middle name had been Orin, his father’s own father’s name. The V.R.’s entertainment cartridges were arrayed on wall-length shelves of translucent polyethylene. Their individual cases were all either clear plastic or glossy black plastic. My full name is Harold James Incandenza, and I am 183.6 cm. tall in stocking feet. Himself designed the Academy’s indirect lighting, which is ingenious and close to full-spectrum.

V.R.5 contained a large couch, four reclining chairs, a midsized recumbency, six green corduroy spectation-pillows stacked in a corner, three end tables, and a coffee table of mylar with inlaid coasters. The overhead lighting in every E.T.A. room came from a small carbon-graphite spotlight directed upward at a complexly alloyed reflecting plate above it.

No rheostat was required; a small joystick controlled the brightness by altering the little spot’s angle of incidence to the plate. Himself’s films were arranged on the third shelf of the entertainment-case. The Moms’s full name is Avril Mondragon Tavis Incandenza, Ed.D., Ph.D. She is 197 cm. tall in flats and still came up only to Himself’s ear when he straightened and stood

erect. For almost a month in the weight room, Lyle had been saying that the most advanced level of Vaipassana or ‘Insight’ meditation consisted in sitting in fully awakened contemplation of one’s own death. I had held Big Buddy sessions in V.R.5 throughout the month of September. The Moms had grown up without a middle name. The etymology of the term blizzard is essentially unknown. The full-spectrum lighting system had been a labor of love from Himself to the Moms, who’d agreed to leave Brandeis and head up the Academy’s academics and had an ethnic Canadian’s horror of fluorescent light; but by the time the system had been installed and de- bugged, the gestalt of the Moms’s lumiphobia had extended to all overhead lighting, and she never used her office’s spot-and-plate system.

Petropolis Kahn put his large shaggy head in and asked what was all this brooha upstairs, the thumps and cryings-out. He asked whether I was going to breakfast. The scuttlebutt on breakfast was sausage-analog and OJ with palpable pulp, he said. I closed my eyes and recalled that I’d known Petropolis Kahn for three years and three months. Kahn went away. I could feel his head’s withdrawal from the doorway: a very slight suction in the room’s air. I needed to fart but had not so far farted. The atomic weight of carbon is 12.01 and change. A small and carefully monitored game of Eschaton slated for the mid-A.M., with (according to rumor) Pemulis himself as game-master, was certain to be snowed out. It had begun to occur to me, driving back from Natick on Tuesday, that if it came down to a choice between continuing to play competitive tennis and continuing to be able to get high, it would be a nearly impossible choice to make. The distant way in which this fact appalled me itself appalled me. The founder of the sub-14’s’ Tunnel Club had been Heath Pearson as a very little boy. The rumor that Pemulis himself would don the beanie for the next Eschaton came from Kent Blott; Pemulis had been avoiding me ever since I returned from Natick on Tuesday — as if he sensed something. The woman behind the register at the Shell station last night had recoiled as I approached to present my card before pumping, as if she too had seen something in my expression I hadn’t known was there. The North American Collegiate Dictionary claimed that any ‘very heavy’ snowstorm with ‘high winds’ qualified as a blizzard. Himself, for two years before his death, had had this delusion of silence when I spoke: I believed I was speaking and he believed I was not speaking. Mario averred that Himself had never accused him of

not speaking. I tried to recall whether I had ever brought the subject up with the Moms. The Moms was at pains to be completely approachable on all subjects except Himself and what had been going on between her and Himself as Himself withdrew more and more. She never forbade questions about it; she just got so pained and blurry-faced that you felt cruel asking her anything. I considered whether Pemulis’s cessation of the math-tutorials was perhaps an oblique affirmation, a kind of You Are Ready. Pemulis often communicated in a kind of esoteric code. It was true that I had kept mostly to myself in the room since Tuesday. The condensed O.E.D., in a rare bit of florid imprecision, defined blizzard as ‘A furious blast of frost-wind and blinding snow in which man and beast frequently perish,’ claiming the word was either a neologism or a corruption of the French blesser, coined in English by a reporter for Iowa’s Northern Vindicator in B.S. 1864. Orin alleged in Y.T.M.P. that when he took the Moms’s car in the morning he sometimes observed the smeared prints of nude human feet on the inside of the windshield. V.R.5’s heating duct’s grille gave off a sterile hiss. All up and down the hall were sounds of the Academy coming to life, making competitive ablutions, venting anxiety and complaints at the possible blizzard outside — wanting to play. There was heavy foot-traffic in the third-floor hall above me. Orin was going through a period where he was attracted only to young mothers of small children. A hunched way: she hunches; you hunch. John Wayne had had a violent allergic reaction to a decongestant and had commandeered the WETA microphone and publicly embarrassed himself on Troeltsch’s Tuesday broadcast, apparently, and had been taken to St. Elizabeth’s overnight for observation, but had recovered quickly enough to come home and then finish ahead even of Stice in Wednesday’s conditioning run. I missed the entire thing and was filled in by Mario on my return from Natick — Wayne had apparently said unkind things about various E.T.A. staff and administration, none of which anyone who knew Wayne and all he stood for had taken seriously. Relief that he was OK had dominated everyone’s accounts of the whole incident; the Moms herself had apparently stayed by Wayne’s side late into the night at St. E.’s, which Booboo felt was estimable and just like the Moms. Simply imagining the total number of times my chest will rise and fall and rise. If you want prescriptive specificity you go to a hard-ass: Sitney and Schneewind’s Dictionary of Environmental Sciences required 12 cm./hour

of continuous snowfall, minimum winds of 60 kph., and visibility of less than 500 meters; and only if these conditions obtained for more than three hours was it a blizzard; less than three hours was ‘C-IV Squall.’ The dedication and sustained energy that go into true perspicacity and expertise were exhausting even to think about.

It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately — the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person.

Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into.

Flight from exactly what? These rooms blandly filled with excrement and meat? To what purpose? This was why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions why and to what grow real beaks and claws. It was kind, in a way. Modern German is better equipped for combining gerundives and prepositions than is its mongrel cousin. The original sense of addiction involved being bound over, dedicated, either legally or spiritually. To devote one’s life, plunge in. I had researched this. Stice had asked whether I believed in ghosts. It’s always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions whether his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned. Stice had promised something boggling to look at. That is, whether Hamlet might be only feigning feigning. I kept thinking of the Film and Cartridge Studies professor’s final soliloquy in Himself’s unfinished Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms that Utilize Every Centimeter of Available Space with Mind-Boggling Efficiency, the sour parody of academia that the Moms had taken as an odd personal slap. I kept thinking I really should go up and check on The Darkness. There seemed to be so many implications even to thinking about sitting up and standing up and exiting V.R.5 and taking a certain variable-according-to-stride-length number of steps to the stairwell door, on and on, that just the thought of getting up made me glad I was lying on the floor.

I was on the floor. I felt the Nile-green carpet with the back of each hand. I was completely horizontal. I was comfortable lying perfectly still and staring at the ceiling. I was enjoying being one horizontal object in a room filled with horizontality. Charles Tavis is probably not related to the Moms by actual blood. Her extremely tall French-Canadian mother died when the Moms was eight. Her father left their potato farm on ‘business’ a few months later and was gone for several weeks. He did this sort of thing with some frequency. A binge-drinker. Eventually there would be a telephone call from some distant province or U.S. state, and one of the hired men would go off to bail him out. From this disappearance, though, he returned with a new bride the Moms had known nothing about, an American widow named Elizabeth Tavis, who in the stilted Vermont wedding photo seems almost certainly to have been a dwarf — the huge square head, the relative length of the trunk compared to the legs, the sunken nasal bridge and protruding eyes, the stunted phocomelic arms around squire Mondragon’s right thigh, one khaki-colored cheek pressed affectionately against his belt-buckle. C.T. was the infant son she’d brought to the new union, his father a ne’er-do-well killed in a freak accident playing competitive darts in a Brattleboro tavern just as they were trying to adjust the obstetric stirrups for the achondroplastic Mrs. Tavis’s labor and delivery. Her smile in the wedding photo is homodontic. According to Orin, though, C.T. and the Moms claim Mrs. T. was not a true homodont the way — for instance — Mario is a true homodont. Every single one of Mario’s teeth is a second bicuspid. So it was all rather up in the air. The account of the disappearance, darts-accident, and dental incongruity comes from Orin, who claimed to have decocted it all out of an extended one-sided conversation he had with a distraught C.T. in the waiting room of Brigham and Women’s OB/GYN while the Moms was prematurely delivering Mario.

Orin had been seven years old; Himself had been in the delivery room, where apparently Mario’s birth was quite a touch-andgo thing. The fact that Orin was our one and only source for data shrouded the whole thing in further ambiguity, as far as I was concerned. Pinpoint accuracy had never been Orin’s forte. The wedding photo was available for inspection, of course, and confirmed Mrs. Tavis as huge-headed and wildly short. Neither Mario nor I had ever approached the Moms on the issue, possibly out of fear of reopening psychic wounds from a childhood that had always

sounded unhappy. All I knew for sure was that I had never approached her about it.

For their part, the Moms and C.T. have never represented themselves as anything other than unrelated but extremely close.

The attack of panic and prophylactic focus’s last spasm now suddenly almost overwhelmed me with the intense horizontality that was all around me in the Viewing Room — the ceiling, floor, carpet, table-tops, the chairs’ seats and the shelves at their backs’ tops. And much more — the shimmering horizontal lines in the Kevlon wall-fabric, the very long top of the viewer, the top and bottom borders of the door, the spectation pillows, the viewer’s bottom, the squat black cartridge-drive’s top and bottom and the little push-down controls that protruded like stunted tongues. The seemingly endless horizontality of the couch’s and chairs’ and recumbency’s seats, the wall of shelves’ every line, the varied horizontal shelving of the ovoid case, two of every cartridge-case’s four sides, on and on. I lay in my tight little sarcophagus of space. The horizontality piled up all around me. I was the meat in the room’s sandwich. I felt awakened to a basic dimension I’d neglected during years of upright movement, of standing and running and stopping and jumping, of walking endlessly upright from one side of the court to the other. I had understood myself for years as basically vertical, an odd forked stalk of stuff and blood. I felt denser now; I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal. I was impossible to knock down.

Gately’s cognomen growing up and moving through public grades had been Bim or Bimmy, or The Bimulator, etc., from the acronymic B.I.M., ‘Big Indestructible Moron.’ This was on Boston’s North Shore, mostly Beverly and Salem. His head had been huge, even as a kid. By the time he hit puberty at twelve the head seemed a yard wide. A regulation football helmet was like a beanie on him. His coaches had to order special helmets.

Gately was worth the cost. Every coach past 6th grade told him he was a lock for a Division 1 college team if he bore down and kept his eye on the prize. Memories of half a dozen different neckless, buzz-cut, and pre- infarcted coaches all condense around a raspy emphasis on bearing down and predictions of a limitless future for Don G., Bimmy G., right up until he dropped out in high school’s junior year.

Gately went both ways — fullback on offense, outside linebacker on D.

He was big enough for the line, but his speed would have been wasted there. Already carrying 230 pounds and bench-pressing well over that, Gately clocked a 4.4 40 in 7th grade, and the legend is that the Beverly Middle School coach ran even faster than that into the locker room to jack off over the stopwatch. And his biggest asset was his outsized head.

Gately’s. The head was indestructible. When they needed yards, they’d shift to isolate Gately on one defender and get him the ball and he’d lower his head and charge, eyes on the turf. The top of his special helmet was like a train’s cowcatcher coming at you. Defenders, pads, helmets, and cleats bounced off the head, often in different directions. And the head was fearless. It was like it had no nerve endings or pain receptors or whatever.

Gately amused teammates by letting them open and close elevator doors on the head. He let people break things over the head — lunchboxes, cafeteria trays, bespectacled wienies’ violin cases, lacrosse sticks. By age thirteen he never had to buy beers: he’d bet some kid a six he could take a shot with this or that object to the head. His left ear is permanently kind of gnarled from elevator-door impacts, and Gately favors a kind of long-sided Prince Valiantish bowl-cut to help cover the misshapen ear. One cheekbone still has a dented violet cast from 10th grade when a North Reading kid at a party bet him a twelve-pack on a shot with a sock full of nickels and then clocked him under the eye with it instead of the skull. It took Beverly’s whole offensive line to pull Gately off what was left of the kid. The juvenile line on Gately was that he was totally jolly and laid-back and easygoing up to a certain point but that if you crossed that point with him you better be able to beat a 4.4 40.

He was always kind of a boys’ boy. He had a jolly ferocity about him that scared girls. And he had no idea how to deal with girls except to try and impress them by letting them watch somebody do something to his head.

He was never what you’d call a ladies’ man. At parties he was always at the center of the crowd that drank instead of dancing.

It was surprising, maybe, given Gately’s size and domestic situation, that he wasn’t a bully. He wasn’t kindly or heroic or a defender of the weak; it’s not like he stepped kindly in to protect wienies and misfits from the predations of those kids that were bullies. He just had no interest in brutalizing the weak. It’s still not clear to him if this was to his credit or not.

Things might have been different if the M.P. had ever knocked Gately around instead of focusing all his attention on the progressively weaker Mrs. G.

He smoked his first duBois at age nine, a hard little needle-thin joint bought off jr.-high niggers and smoked with three other grade-school football players in a vacant summer cottage one had the key to, watching broadcast-televised niggers run amok in a flaming L.A. CA after some Finest got home-movied crewing on a nigger in the worst way. Then his first real drunk a few months later, after he and the players’d hooked up with an Orkin man that liked to get kids all blunt on screwdrivers and that wore brownshirts and jackboots in his off-hours and lectured them about Zog and The Turner Diaries while they’d drink the OJ and vodka he’d bought them and look at him blandly and roll their eyes at each other. Soon none of the football players Gately hung with were interested in much of anything except trying to get high and holding air-guitar and pissing contests and talking theoretically about Xing big-haired North Shore girls, and trying to think up things to break over Gately’s head. They all had like domestic situations too. Gately was the only one of them truly dedicated to football, and that was probably just because he’d been told over and over that he had real talent and limitless futures. He was classified Attention- Deficit and Special-Ed. from grade school on, with particular Deficits in ‘Language Arts,’ but that was at least partly because Mrs. G. could barely read and Gately wasn’t interested in making her feel worse. And but there was no Deficit in his attention to ball, or to cold foamers or screwdrivers or high-resin desBois, or especially to applied pharmacology, not once he’d 362 done his first Quaalude at age thirteen.

Just as Gately’s whole recall of his screwdriver-and-sinsemilla beginnings tends to telescope into one memory of pissing orange juice into the Atlantic (he and the blunt cruel Beverly players and bullies he partied with drinking whole quarts of throat-warming OJ at a shot and standing ankle-deep in grit on a North Shore shore, facing east and sending long arcs of legal-pad-yellow piss into onrushing breakers that came in and creamed around their feet, the foam warm and yellow-shot with their piss — like spitting into the wind — Gately at the podium had started saying it turns out he was pissing on himself right from the start, with alcohol), in just the

same way, the whole couple years before he discovered oral narcotics, the whole period 13–15 when he was a devotee of Quaaludes and Hefenreffer- brand beer collapses and gathers itself under what he still recalls as ‘The Attack of the Killer Sidewalks.’ Quaaludes and Hefenreffer also marked Gately’s entree into a whole new rather more sinister and less athletic social 363 set at B.M.S., one member of which was Trent Kite, a dyed-in-wool laptop-carrying wienie, chinless and with a nose like a tapir, and pretty much the last fanatical Grateful Dead fan under age forty on the U.S. East Coast, whose place of honor in the sinister Beverly Middle School drug-set was due entirely to his gift for transforming the kitchen of any vacationing parents’ house into a rudimentary pharmaceutical laboratory, using like BBQ-sauce bottles as Erlenmeyer Flasks and microwave ovens to cyclize OH and carbon into three-ring compounds, synthesizing methylenedioxy 364 psychedelics from nutmeg and sassafras oil, ether from charcoal-starter, designer meth from Tryptophan and L-Histidine, sometimes using only a gas-top range and parental Farberware, able even to decoct usable concentrations of tetrahydrofruan from PVC Pipe Cleaner — which at that time best of British luck ordering tetrahydrofruan from any chemical company in the 48 contigs/6 provinces without getting paid an immediate visit by D.E.A. guys in three-piece suits and reflecting shades — and then using the tetrahydrofruan and ethanol and any protein-binding catalyst to turn plain old Sominex into something just one HC molecule away from3 good old biphasic methaqualone, a.k.a. the intrepid Quaalude. Kite had called his Quaalude-isotopes ‘QuoVadis,’ and they were a great favorite for 13–15-year-old Bimmy G. and the slouched sharp-haired sinister set he dropped Ludes and QuoVadises with, washing them down with Hefenreffers, resulting in a kind of mnemonic brown-out where the entire two-year interval — the same interval during which the ex-M.P. found somebody else, a Newburyport divorcée who apparently put up a more sporting fight than Mrs. G., and decamped in his sticker-covered Ford with his seaman’s bag and pea-coat — the whole period’s become in Gately’s sober memory just the vague era of The Attack of the Killer Sidewalks.

Quaaludes and 16-oz. Hefenreffers awakened Gately and his new droogs to the usually-dormant-but-apparently-ever-lurking ill will of innocent- seeming public sidewalks everywhere. You didn’t have to be brainy Trent

Kite to figure out the equation (Quaaludes) + (not even that many beers) = getting whapped by the nearest sidewalk — as in you’re walking innocently along down a sidewalk and out of nowhere the sidewalk comes rushing up to meet you: WHAP. Happened time after fucking time. It made the whole crew resent having to walk anywhere on QuoVadises because of not having driver’s licenses yet, which gives you some idea of the sum-total I.Q. brought to bear on the problem of the Attacks. A tiny permanent cast in his left eye and what looks like a chin-dimple are Gately’s legacy from the period before moving up to Percocets, which one advantage of the move deeper into oral narcs was that Percocets + Hefenreffers didn’t allow you even enough upright mobility to make you vulnerable to sidewalks’ ever- lurking ill will.

It was amazing that none of this stuff seemed much to hurt Gately’s performance playing ball, but then he was as devoted to football as he was to oral CNS-depressants. At least for a while. He had disciplined personal rules back then. He absorbed Substances only at night, after practice. Not so much as a fractional foamer between 0900h. and 1800h. during the seasons of practice and play, and he settled for just a single duBois on Thursday evenings before actual games. During football season he ruled himself with an iron hand until the sun set, then threw himself on the mercy of sidewalks and the somnolent hum. He used class to catch up on REM-sleep. By freshman year he was starting on the Beverly-Salem H.S. Minutemen Varsity and was on academic probation. Most of the sinister set he’d hung with were expelled for truancy or trafficking or worse by sophomore year.

Gately kept hanging in and on til seventeen.

But Quaaludes and QuoVadis and Percocets are lethal in terms of homework, especially washed down with Hefenreffer, and extra-especially if you’re academically ambivalent and A.D.D.-classified and already using every particle of your self-discipline protecting football from the Substances. And — unhappily — high school is totally unlike higher education in terms of major-sport coaches’ influence over instructors, athletes-and-grades-wise. Kite got Gately through math and Special Ed. science, and the French teacher was getting her strabysmic eyeballs fucked out by the Minutemen’s tanned lounge-lizard of an Offensive Coordinator on the behalf of Gately and a semi-retarded tight end. But English just fucking killed him, Gately. All four of the English teachers the Athletic

Dept. tried Gately on had this sieg-heil idea that it was somehow cruel to pass a kid that couldn’t do the work. And the Athletic Dept. pointing out to them that Gately had an especially challenging domestic situation and that flunking Gately and rendering him ineligible for ball would eliminate his one reason even to stay on in school — these were to no, like, aveil. English was his sink-or-swim situation, what he then termed his ‘Water Lou.’ Term papers he could more or less swing; the football coach had wienies on retainer. But the in-class themes and tests killed Gately, who simply didn’t have enough will left over after sunset to choose like the crushingly dull Ethan From over QuoVadis and Hefenreffer. Plus by this time three different schools’ authorities had him convinced he was basically dumb, anyway. But mostly it was the Substances. This one particular B.-S.H.S.- Athletic-Dept.-hired wienie of an English tutor spent a sophomore-year March’s worth of evenings in Gately’s company, and by Easter the kid weighed 95 pounds and had a nose-ring and hand-tremors and was placed by his frantic, functional parents in a juvenile-intervention rehab, where the wienie’s whole first week of Withdrawal was spent in a corner reciting Howl in high-volume Chaucerian English. Gately flunked Sophomore Comp. in May and lost the fall’s eligibility and withdrew from school for a year to preserve his junior season. And but then, without the only other thing he’d been devoted to, the psychic emergency-brake was off, and Gately’s sixteenth year is still mostly a gray blank, except for his mother’s new red chintz TV-watching couch, and also the acquaintance of an accommodating Rite-Aid pharmacist’s assistant with disfiguring eczema and serious gambling debts. Plus memories of terrible rear-ocular itching and of a basic diet of convenience-store crud, plus the vegetables from his mother’s vodka glass, while she slept. When he finally returned for his sophomore year of class and junior year of ball at seventeen and 284 lbs., Gately was enervated, flabby, apparently narcoleptic, and on a need- schedule so inflexible that he needed 15 mg. of good old oxycodone hydrochloride out of his pocket’s Tylenol bottle every three hours to keep the shakes off. He was like a huge confused kitten out on the field — the coach made him go in for P.E.T. Scans, fearing M.S. or Lou Gehrig’s — and even the Classic Comics version of Ethan From was now beyond his abilities; and good old Kite was gone by that last September of Unsubsidized Time, admitted early on a full ride in Comp. Science by

Salem State U., meaning Gately was now on his own in remedial math and chem. On offense, Gately lost his starting spot in the third game to a big clear-eyed freshman the coach said showed nearly limitless potential. Then Mrs. Gately suffered her cirrhotic hemorrhage and cerebral-blood thing in late October, just before the midterms Gately was getting ready to fail.

Bored-eyed guys in white cotton blew blue bubbles and loaded her in the back of a leisurely sirenless ambulance and took her first to the hospital and 365 then to a Medicaid L.T.I. out across the Yirrell Beach span in Pt. Shirley.

The backs of Gately’s eyes were too itchy for him to even be able to stand out on the red pocked stoop’s steps and see to wave adios. The first gasper he ever smoked was that day, a 100 out of a half-finished pack of his mother’s generics, that she left. He didn’t even ever go back to B.-S.H.S. to clean out his lockers. He never played organized ball again.

I may have been dozing. Some more heads came and awaited response and left. I may have dozed. It occurred to me that I didn’t have to eat if I was not hungry. This presented itself as almost a revelation. I hadn’t been hungry in over a week. I could remember when I was always hungry, constantly hungry.

Then at some point Pemulis’s head appeared in the doorway, his strange twin-towered A.M. cowlick bobbing as he looked back over each shoulder out into the hall. His right eye was either twitchy or swollen from sleep;

something was wrong with it. ‘Mmyellow,’ he said.

I pretended to shade my eyes. ‘Howdy there stranger.’ It is not Pemulis’s way to apologize or explain or worry that you might think ill of him. In this he reminded me of Mario. This almost regal lack of insecurity is hard to put together with his crippling neurasthenia on-court. ‘’s up?’ he said, not moving from the doorway.

I could see my asking him where he’d been all week leading to so many different possible responses and further questions that the prospect was almost overwhelming, so enervating I could barely get out that I’d just been

lying here on the floor. ‘Lying here is all,’ I told him. ‘So I just got told,’ he said. ‘The Petropulator mentioned hysterics.’

It was almost impossible to shrug lying supine on thick shag. ‘See for yourself,’ I said.

Pemulis came all the way in. He became the only thing in the room that understood itself as basically vertical. He didn’t look very good; his color wasn’t good. He had not shaved, and a dozen little black bristles jutted from the ball of his chin. He gave the impression of chewing gum even though he

was not chewing gum.

He said ‘Thinking?’

‘The opposite. Thought-prophylaxis.’ ‘Feeling a little punk?’ ‘Can’t complain.’ I rolled my eyes up at him.

He made a sharp glottal stop. He moved toward the periphery of my vision and fit himself into the seam of two walls behind me; I heard him sliding down to assume the back-supported squat he sometimes liked.

The Petropulator was Petropolis Kahn. I was thinking of the final film- lecture in Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms … and then of C.T.’s misadventure at Himself’s funeral. The Moms had had Himself interred in her family’s traditional plot in L’Islet Province. I heard a whoop and two crashes directly overhead. My rib cage contracted and expanded. ‘Incster?’ Pemulis said after a time.

A noteworthy thing turned out to be that the mound of earth on a freshly-filled grave seems airy and risen and plump, like dough.

‘Hal?’ Pemulis said. ‘Javol.’ ‘We’ve got some really important interfacing to do, brother.’ I didn’t say anything. There were too many potential responses, both witty ones and earnest ones. I could hear Pemulis’s cowlicks brush each wall as he looked to either side, and the slight sound of a small zipper being played with. ‘I’m thinking we could go someplace discreet and really interface.’ ‘I’m a highly tuned horizontal antenna tuned in to you lying right here.’ ‘I was meaning could we go somewheres.’ ‘So this urgency all of a sudden?’ I was trying to make my intonation Jewish-motherish, that melodic dip-rise-dip. ‘All week: not a call, not a card. Now I should hear this about urgency?’ ‘Seen your Mums around lately?’

‘Haven’t seen her all week. Doubtless she’s over helping C.T. arrange a weather-venue.’ I paused. ‘I haven’t seen him all week either, come to think,’ I said. ‘The Eschaton’s a no-go,’ Pemulis said. ‘The map’s a mess out there.’ ‘We’re going to get an announcement about the Québec kids very soon, I can feel it,’ I said. ‘I’m that highly tuned in this position.’ ‘What say let’s skip the sausage-analog and whip down to Steak ’N Sundae and eat.’ There was an extended pause as I ran a response-tree. Pemulis was zipping and unzipping something with a short zipper. I couldn’t decide. I finally had to choose almost at random. ‘I’m trying to cut down on patronizing places with “’N” in their name.’ ‘Listen.’ I heard his knees creak as he leaned in toward the top of my head. ‘About the tu-savez-quoi —’ ‘The Eeday Emmay Eezay. The synthetic bacchanal. That’s definitely off, Mike. Talk about the map being a mess.’ ‘That’s part of what we need to interface about, if you’d get off your literally your ass here.’ I spent a minute watching the NASA glass fall and rise. ‘Don’t even

start, M.M.’ ‘What start?’ ‘We’re on hiatus, remember? We’re living like Shi’ite Moslems for the thirty days you miraculously blarneyed the guy into giving us.’ ‘Blarney wasn’t why we got it, Inc, is the thing.’ ‘And now, what, twenty days to go. We’re going to produce urine like a

mullah’s babe, we agreed.’ ‘This isn’t —’ Pemulis started.

I farted, but it didn’t produce a noise. I was bored. I couldn’t remember a time when Pemulis had bored me. ‘And I do not need you launching temptation-rhetoric my way,’ I said.

Keith Freer appeared in the doorway, leaning against the jamb with his bare arms crossed. He was still wearing the weird unitard he slept in, which made him look like someone who tore phone books in half at a sideshow. ‘Does somebody have an explanation why there’s human flesh on the hall window upstairs?’ he said. ‘We’re convers ing here,’ Pemulis told him.

I half sat up. ‘Flesh?’ Freer looked down at me. ‘This is nothing to laugh at I don’t think Hal.

There’s I swear to fucking God a human strip of forehead-flesh upstairs on the hall window, and what looks like two eyebrows, and bits of nose. And now Tall Paul says down in the lobby Stice was seen coming out of the infirmary wearing something out of Zorro.’ Pemulis was completely vertical, standing again; I could hear his knees as he rose. ‘It’s like a tête-à-tête in here, brother. We’re in here bunkered, mano a—’ ‘Stice got stuck to the window,’ I explained, lying all the way back down. ‘Kenkle and Brandt were going to detach him with warm water from a janitorial bucket.’ Pemulis said ‘How do you get stuck to a window?’ ‘Well from the looks it looks like they detached half his face from his head,’ Freer said, feeling at his own forehead and shuddering a little.

Kieran McKenna’s little porcine snout appeared in a gap under Freer’s arm. He still wore his stupid full-head gauze wrap for his supposed bruised skull. ‘Did you guys get to see The Darkness? Gopnik said he looks like a piece of cheese pizza where somebody tore the cheese off. Gopnik said Troeltsch is charging two bucks a look.’ He ran off toward the stairwell without waiting for a reply, his pocket jingling madly. Freer looked at Pemulis and opened his mouth, then apparently reconsidered and followed off down the hall. We could hear a couple of sarcastic whistles at Freer’s unitard.

Pemulis reappeared at the top of my vision; his right eye was definitely twitching. ‘This is what I meant about going someplace discreet. When have I ever urgently asked you to dialogue before, Inc?’ ‘Certainly not within the last few days, Mike, that’s for sure.’ There was an extended pause. I raised my hands over my face and looked at their shapes against the indirect lights.

Pemulis finally said ‘Well, I’m going to go make sure I eat before I have to see Stice without a fucking forehead.’ ‘Have an analog for me,’ I said. ‘Let me know if there’s word on the meet. I’ll eat if I’m going to have to play.’ Pemulis licked his palm and tried to get his cowlicks to behave. From my vantage he was high overhead and upside-down. ‘So are you going to

get up and go up and get dressed and stand on one foot with that opera thing on at some point? Because I could eat and then come up. We can tell Mario we need to mano-à-tête.’ Now I was making a cage of my hands and watching the light through its shape as I rotated it. ‘Will you do me a favor? Get Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms That Utilize Every Centimeter of Available Space with Mind-Boggling Efficiency out for me. It’s about a dozen cartridges in from the right on the third shelf down in the entertainment-case. Cue it up to about 2300, 2350 maybe? The last five minutes or so.’ ‘The third shelf down,’ I said as he scanned, tapping a foot. ‘They’ve got all Himself’s stuff together on the third shelf.’ He scanned. ‘Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators? Fun with Teeth?

Annular Fusion Is Our Fiend? I haven’t even heard of half your Dad’s shit that’s here.’ ‘It’s Friend, not Fiend. Either it’s mislabeled or the label’s peeling. And they’re supposed to be alphabetized. It ought to be right next to Flux in a Box.’ ‘And me using the poor guy’s lab,’ Pemulis said. He loaded the player and turned on the viewer, his knees popping again as he squatted to set the cue to 2350. The huge screen hummed in a low pitch that ascended as it began to warm up, the screen taking on a milky blue aspect like the eye of a dead bird. Pemulis’s feet were bare and I looked at the calluses on his heels.

He tossed the cartridge’s case carelessly on a couch or chair behind me and looked down. ‘What the fuck’s Fun with Teeth supposed to be about?’ I tried to shrug against the friction of the carpet. ‘Pretty much what it says it’s about.’ The funeral had been held on 5 or 6 April in St. Adalbert, a small town built around spud-storage facilities fewer than five clicks west of the Great Concavity. We’d all had to fly up by way of Newfoundland because of the volume of waste-displacement launches that spring. And commercial airlines hadn’t yet had data on high-altitude Dioxin levels over the Concavity. Cloud-cover prevented our seeing much of the New Brunswick coast, which I’m told was a mercy. What happened at the funeral service itself was simply that a circling gull scored a direct white hit on the shoulder of C.T.’s blue blazer, and that when he opened his mouth in shock at the direct hit, a large blue-bodied fly flew right into his mouth and was

hard to extract. Several persons laughed. It was no huge or dramatic thing.

The Moms probably laughed hardest of anyone.

The TP’s tracker chugged and clicked, and the viewer bloomed. Pemulis had been wearing parachute pants and a tam-o’-shanter and lensless spectacles, but no shoes. The cartridge started close to what I’d wanted to review, the protagonist’s climactic lecture. Paul Anthony Heaven, all 50 kilos of him, gripping the lectern with both hands so you could see that he was missing his thumbs, the sad dyed strands combed over his bald spot visible because he had his head down, reading the lecture in the deadening academic monotone that Himself so loved. The monotone was the reason why Himself used Paul Anthony Heaven, a nonprofessional, by trade a data-entry drone for Ocean Spray, in anything that required a deadening institutional presence — Paul Anthony Heaven had also played the threatening supervisor in Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat, the Massachusetts State Commissioner for Beach and Water Safety in Safe Boating Is No Accident, and a Parkinsonian corporate auditor in Low- Temperature Civics. ‘Thus the Flood’s real consequence is revealed to be desiccation, generations of hydrophobia on a pandemic scale,’ the protagonist was reading aloud. Peterson’s The Cage was running on a large screen behind the lectern. A number of shots of undergraduates with their heads on their desks, reading their mail, making origami animals, picking at their faces with blank intensity, established that the climactic lecture wasn’t coming off as all that climactic to the audience within the film. ‘We thus become, in the absence of death as teleologic end, ourselves desiccated, deprived of some essential fluid, aridly cerebral, abstract, conceptual, little more than hallucinations of God,’ the academic read in a deadly drone, his eyes never leaving his lectern’s text. The art-cartridge critics and scholars who point to the frequent presence of audiences inside Himself’s films, and argue that the fact that the audiences are always either dumb and unappreciative or the victims of some grisly entertainment-mishap betrays more than a little hostility on the part of an ‘auteur’ pegged as technically gifted but narratively dull and plotless and static and not entertaining enough — these academics’ arguments seem sound as far as they go, but they do not explain the incredible pathos of Paul Anthony Heaven reading his lecture to a crowd of dead-eyed kids picking at themselves and drawing vacant

airplane- and genitaliadoodles on their college-rule note-pads, reading 366 stupefyingly turgid-sounding shit — ‘For while clinamen and tessera strive to revive or revise the dead ancestor, and while kenosis and daemonization act to repress consciousness and memory of the dead ancestor, it is, finally, artistic askesis which represents the contest proper, the battle-to-the-death with the loved dead’ — in a monotone as narcotizing as a voice from the grave — and yet all the time weeping, Paul Anthony Heaven, as an upward hall full of kids all scan their mail, the film-teacher not sobbing or wiping his nose on his tweed sleeve but silently weeping, very steadily, so that tears run down Heaven’s gaunt face and gather on his underslung chin and fall from view, glistening slightly, below the lectern’s frame of sight. Then this too began to seem familiar.

He hadn’t in the beginning burgled, Gately, as a full-time drug addict, though he did sometimes promote small valuables from the apartments of the strung-out nurses he X’d and copped samples from. After the bailout from school, Gately worked full-time for a time for a North Shore bookmaker, a guy that also owned several titty clubs down Rte. 1 in Saugus, Whitey Sorkin, that had sort of casually befriended him when Gately was still playing high-profile ball. His professional association with Whitey Sorkin continued part-time even after Gately discovered his real B&E vocation, though he tended more and more toward less taxing nonviolent crime.

But from age like eighteen to twenty-three, Gately and the prenominate Gene Fackelmann — a towering, slope-shouldered, wide-hipped, prematurely potbellied, oddly priapistic, and congenitally high-strung Dilaudid addict with a walrusy mustache that seemed to have a nervous life of its own — these two served as like Whitey Sorkin’s operatives in the field, taking bets and phoning them in to Saugus, delivering winnings, and collecting debts. It was never clear to Gately why Whitey Sorkin was called Whitey, because he spent a huge amount of time under ultraviolet lamps as part of an esoteric cluster-headache-treatment regimen and so was the constant shiny color of a sort of like dark soap, with almost the same color and coin-of-the-realm classic profile as the cheery young Pakistani M.D. who’d told Gately at Our Lady of Solace Hospital in Beverly how Teddibly Soddy he was that Mrs. G.’s cirrhosis and cirrhotic stroke had left her at

roughly the neurologic level of a Brussels sprout and then given him public- transportation directions to the Point Shirley L.T.I.

Eugene (‘Fax’) Fackelmann, who’d dropped out of the Lynn MA educational system at like ten, had met Whitey Sorkin through the same eczematic, gamble-happy pharmacist’s assistant Gately had first met Sorkin through. Gately was now no longer called Bimmy or Doshka. He was Don now, nicknameless. Sometimes Donny. Sorkin referred to Gately and Fackelmann as his Twin Towers. They were more or less Sorkin’s paid muscle. Except not in any sort of way important crime figures’ paid muscle is portrayed in popular entertainment. They didn’t stand impassively flanking Sorkin at crime-figure meetings or light his cigar or call him ‘Boss’ or anything. They weren’t his bodyguards. In fact they weren’t physically around him that much; they usually dealt with Sorkin and his 367Saugus office and secretary via beepers and cellular phones.

And while they did collect debts for Sorkin, including bad debts (especially Gately), it’s not like Gately went around breaking debtors’ kneecaps. Even the threat of coercive violence was pretty rare. Partly, Gately and Fackelmann’s sheer size was enough to keep delinquencies from getting out of hand. And partly it was that everybody involved usually knew each other — Sorkin, his bettors and debtors, Gately and Fackelmann, other drug addicts (who sometimes bet, or more often dealt with Gately and Fackelmann for guys that did), even the North Shore Finest’s Vice guys, many of whom also sometimes bet with Sorkin because he gave the Finest special civil-servant reductions on vigorish. It was all like this community.

Usually Gately’s job on bad debts or delinquent vig was to go around to the debtor at whatever bar the guy watched satellite sports at and just inform him that the debt was threatening to get out of hand — making the debt itself seem like the delinquent party — and that Whitey was concerned about it, and work out some arrangement or payment-plan with the guy.

Then the young Gately’d go into the bar’s head and cell-phone Sorkin and get his OK on whatever arrangement they’d worked out. Gately was laid- back and affable and never had a hard word for anybody, hardly. Nor did Whitey Sorkin: a lot of his bettors were old and steady customers, and lines of credit went with the territory. Most of the rare debt-trouble that called for size and coercion involved guys with a gambling problem, kind of pathetic

furtive guys addicted to the rush of the bet, who got themselves in a hole and then tried suicidally to bet their way out of the hole, and who’d bet with several bookies at once, and who’d lie and agree to payment-arrangements they had no intention of sticking to, suicidally betting they could keep all their debts in the air until they could square themselves with the major long- shot score they were always sure was around the corner. These types were painful, because usually Gately knew the debtors and they’d exploit his knowing them and beg and weep and tug at both Gately’s and Whitey Sorkin’s heartstrings with tales of loved ones and wasting illnesses. They’d sit there and look into Gately’s eyes and lie and believe their own lies, and Gately would have to call in the debtors’ lies and sob-stories and get Sorkin’s explicit decision on if to believe them and what to do. These types were Gately’s first exposure to the concept of real addiction and what it can turn someone into; he hadn’t yet connected the concept to drugs really, except coke-heads and hardcore needle-jockeys, who at that point all seemed to him just as furtive and pathetic as the gambling-addicts, in their own way. These sob-story-, one-more-chance-types were also the types that put Whitey Sorkin through hell in terms of emotionally, causing Whitey cluster headaches and terrible cranio-facial neuralgia, and at a certain point Sorkin used to start adding (to the delinquent skeet, the vig, and the interest) 368 extra charges for his own required intake of Cafergot spansules and UV light and visits to Enfield MA’s National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation.

The use of Gately and Fackelmann’s rump-roast-sized fists in actual hands- on coercion got called for only when a compulsive debtor’s lies and hole got serious enough that Sorkin became willing to forgo the guy’s patronage in the future. At this sort of point, Whitey Sorkin’s business-objective became to somehow induce the addicted debtor to cover his debts to Sorkin before the debtor covered his debts to any of the other books he was into, which meant for Sorkin that he had to vividly demonstrate to the debtor that Sorkin’s was the least pleasant hole to be in and the most important one to get out of. Enter the Twin Towers. The violence was to be tightly controlled and gradually progressive in like stages. The first round of incentivizing hose-work — a light beating, maybe a broken digit or two — usually fell to Gene Fackelmann, not only because he was the naturally crueler of the Twin Towers and rather liked putting a digit in a car door, but also because

he had a controlled restraint Gately lacked: Sorkin found that once Gately got started in physically on somebody it was like something ferocious and uncontrolled on a slope inside the big kid got dislodged and started to roll on its own, and sometimes Gately wouldn’t be able to stop himself before the debtor was reduced to a condition where he wasn’t even going to be able to raise his head, much less funds, at which point not only did Sorkin have to write off the debt but the big kid Donny’d get so guilty and remorseful he’d triple his drug-intake and be no use to fucking nobody for a week. Sorkin learned how to use his Towers to maximize their strengths.

Fackelmann got the first-round light work for coercive collections, but Gately was better than Fax at negotiating arrangements with guys so it never had to come to violence. And there were certain harder cases, cases that laid Sorkin out in bed with cranio-facial stress for days at a time because they were hard-case addicts that were either so far gone or so deep in so many holes that Fackelmann’s light cruelty didn’t resolve the situation. At an extreme point with some of these cases Sorkin got to a point where he was willing to forgo not only the debtor’s future patronage but also the remittance due; at a certain point the goal was to minimize future other hard cases by making it clear that W. Sorkin was one book you couldn’t just flagrantly stay in the hole with and lie to for month after month without having your map seriously fucking reconfigured. Here again, in this-type case Gately’s internal out-of-control slope of ferocity was 369superior to Fackelmann’s easy but ultimately shallow sadism.

W. Sorkin, like most psychosomatic-level neurotics, was spiteful to his enemies and overgenerous to his friends. Gately and Fackelmann each received 5% vig on the 10% vigorish Sorkin took on every bet, and Sorkin made over $200,000 worth of book all over the North Shore on a week’s pro ball alone, which for most diplomaless young Americans 1,000+ per pre-millennial week would have been a very handsome living, but for the Twin Towers’ rigid physical scheduling of narcotics needs was not even 60% enough, weekly. Gately and Fackelmann moonlighted, and for a while separately — Fackelmann’s sideline with I.D.s and creative personal checking, Gately working freelance Security for large card games and small drug-deliveries — but even before they were a real crew they copped as a unit, as in together, plus once in a moon with poor old V. Nucci, for whom

Gately also occasionally held the rope on late-night Osco-and-Rite-Aid- skylight missions, his entree to formal burglary proper. The fact that Gately was devoted to Percocets and Bam-Bams and Fackelmann to Dilaudid allowed them a high level of trust with each other’s stashes. Gately would do Blues, which had to be injected, only when no oral narcs were to be got and he was face to face with early Withdrawal. Gately feared and despised needles and was terrified of the Virus, which in those days was laying out needle-jockeys left and right. Fackelmann would cook up for Gately and tie him off and let Gately watch closely as he took the plastic wrap off a mint- new syringe and needle-cartridge Fackelmann could get with a fake 370 Medicaid Iletin I.D. for diabetes mellitus. The worst thing about Dilaudid for Gately was that the hydromorphone’s transit across the blood- brain barrier created a terrible five-second mnemonic hallucination where he was a gargantuan toddler in an XXL Fisher-Price crib in a sandy field under a storm-cloudy sky that bulged and receded like a big gray lung.

Fackelmann would loosen the belt and stand back and watch Gately’s eyes roll up as he broke a malarial sweat and stared up at the delusion’s respiritic sky while his huge hands throttled the air in front him just like a toddler shakes at the bars of his crib. Then after five or so seconds the Dilaudid would cross over and kick, and the sky stopped breathing and turned blue.

A Dilaudid nod made Gately mute and sodden for three hours.

Besides the maddening itch behind the eyes, Fackelmann didn’t like oral narcotics because he said they gave him terrible sugar-cravings that his huge soft slumped weight wouldn’t tolerate indulging. Not exactly the swiftest ship in Her Majesty’s fleet in terms of like upstairs, Fackelmann was resistant to Gately’s pointing out that Dilaudid also gave the Faxman terrible sugar-cravings, as did actually just about everything. The plain truth was that Fackelmann just really liked Dilaudid.

Then good old Trent Kite got the administrative Shoe from Salem State, who informed him he’d never study in the industry again, and Gately brought Kite into the crew, and Kite threw together some old-time QuoVadis for a small crew-warming party, and Fackelmann introduced Kite to pharmaceutical-grade Dilaudid, and Kite found a new friend for life, he said; and Kite and Fackelmann swiftly fell into the I.D.-, credit-history-and- furnished-luxury-apartment-scam, in which by this time Gately involved

himself pretty much only as a hobby, preferring bold nighttime merchandise-promotion to fraud, which fraud tended to involve meeting the people you stole from, which Gately found slimy and kind of awkward.

Gately lay in the Trauma Ward in terrific infected pain, trying to Abide between cravings for relief by remembering a blinding white afternoon just after Xmas, when Fackelmann and Kite were off disposing of some of a furnished apartment’s furnishings and Gately was killing time in the apartment laminating some false MA drivers licenses rush-ordered by rich 371 Philips Andover Academy kids for what turned out to be the last New Year’s Eve of Unsubsidized Time. He’d been standing at an ironing board in the by now pretty much unfurnished apartment, ironing laminates onto the fake licenses, watching good old Boston U. play Clemson in the Ken-L- Ration-Magnavox-Kemper-Insurance Forsythia Bowl on a cumbersome first-generation InterLace HDV hanging on the bare wall, the high-def viewer always now the last luxury furnishing to be fenced. The winter daylight through the penthouse windows was dazzling and fell across the viewer’s big flat screen and made the players look bleached and ghostly.

Through the windows off in the distance was the Atlantic O., gray and dull with salt. The B.U. punter was a hometown Boston kid the announcers kept inserting was a walk-on and an inspirational story that had never played a major sport until college and now was already one of the finest punt- specialists in N.C.A.A. history, and had the potential to be a lock for a pretty much limitless pro ball career if he bore down and kept his eye on the carrot. The B.U. punter was two years younger than Don Gately. Gately’s big digits could barely fit around the iron’s EZ-grip handle, and stooping over the ironing board made the small of his back ache, and he hadn’t eaten anything except deep-fried stuff out of shiny plastic packaging for like a week, and the stink of the plastic laminates under the iron stunk wicked bad, and his big square face sagged lower and lower as he stared at the punter’s ghostly digital image until he found himself starting to cry like a babe. It came out of emotional nowheres all of a sudden, and he found himself blubbering at the loss of organized ball, his one gift and other love, his own stupidity and lack of discipline, that blasted cocksucking Ethan From, his Mom’s Sir Osis and vegetabilization and his failure after four years ever yet to visit, feeling suddenly lower than bottom-feeder-shit,

standing over hot laminates and Polaroid squares and little stick-on D.M.V. letters for rich blond male boys, in the blazing winter light, blubbering amid fraudulent stink and tear-steam. It was two days later he got pinched for assaulting one bouncer with the unconscious body of another bouncer, in Danvers MA, and three months after that that he went to Billerica Minimum.

Entrepôt-bound, twitchy-eyed and checking both sides behind him as he comes, rounding the curve of Subdormitory B’s hall with his stick and little solid frustum-shaped stool, Michael Pemulis sees at least eight panels of the drop-ceiling have somehow fallen out of their aluminum struts and are on the floor — some broken in that incomplete, hingey way stuff with fabric- content gets broken — including the relevant panel. No old sneaker is in evidence on the floor as he clears the panels to plant the stool, his incredibly potent Bentley-Phelps penlight in his teeth, looking up into the darkness of the struts’ lattice.

Given the Faxter’s historical proclavity for fraudulent scams, it was amazing to Gately that he didn’t ever know how Fackelmann had been fraudulently getting over on Whitey Sorkin in all kinds of little ways almost from the start, and didn’t even find it out until the not at all small scam with Eighties Bill and Sixties Bob, which took place during the three months Gately was out on bail Sorkin had generously put up. By this time Gately had fallen in with two lesbian pharmaceutical-cocaine addicts he’d met at the gym doing upside-down sit-ups from the chin-up bar (the lesbians, not Gately, who was strictly from bench, curl, and squat). These vigorous girls ran a rather intriguing house-cleaning-and-key-copying-and-burglary operation in Peabody and Wakefield, and Gately had begun working heavy- merchandise-lifting and 4×4-vehicle-promotion for them, serious full-time burglary, as his taste for even the threat of violence diminished on account of remorse at the bouncer-damage he’d inflicted in that Danvers bar after just seven Hefenreffers and an innocent comment about the B.-S.H.S.’s Minutemen’s inferiority to the Danvers H.S. Roughriders; and Gately left more and more of Sorkin’s transfer-and-collection work to Fackelmann, who by this time had gotten back into oral narcotics out of Virus-fears and stopped resisting the sugar-cravings he associated with oral narcs and gotten

so fat and soft his shirtfront looked like an accordion when he sat down to eat Peanut M&M’s and nod, and now also to a bad-news new guy Sorkin had lately befriended and put to work, a fuchsia-haired Harvard Square punk-type kid with a build like a stump and round black unblinking eyes, an old-fashioned street-junk needle-jockey that went by the moniker Bobby C or just ‘C,’ and liked to hurt people, the only I.V.-heroin addict Gately’d come across that actually preferred violence, with no lips at all and purple hair in three great towering spikes and little bare patches in the hair on his forearms — from constantly testing the edge on his boot-knife — and a leather jacket with way more zippers than anybody could ever need, and a pre-electric earring that hung way down and was a roaring skull in gold- plate flames.

Gene Fackelmann had, it turns out, for years been getting fraudulently over on Whitey Sorkin’s bookmaking operation in all sorts of little ways that Gately and Kite (according to Kite) hadn’t known about. Usually it was something like Fax taking long-shot action from marginal bettors not well known to Sorkin and not phoning the action in to Sorkin’s secretary, and 372 then, when the long-shot lost, collecting the skeet plus vig from the bettor and rat-holing it all for himself. It had seemed to Gately after he found out about it a suicidal-type risk, since if any of these long-shots ever actually won Fackelmann would be responsible for giving the bettor his winnings from ‘Whitey’ — meaning it would be Sorkin that would hear the complaint if Fackelmann didn’t come up with the $ on his own and get it to the bettor — and the whole crew’s pharmacological expenses meant they always existed on the absolutest margins of liquidity, at least that’s what Gately and Kite (according to Kite) had always thought. It wasn’t until Fackelmann’s map had been presumably eliminated for keeps and Kite had returned from his long highatus and Gately and Kite were getting the late Fackelmann’s stuff together to divvy up valuables and dump the rest and Gately found, taped to the underside of Fackelmann’s porn-cartridge storage case, over $22,000 in mint-crisp O.N.A.N. currency, not until then that Gately realized that Fackelmann had through iron will kept unspent an emergency reserve skeet-payment stake for just such a worst-case possibility. Gately split this found Fackelmann-$ with Trent Kite, then but went and turned his half of it in to Sorkin, claiming it was all they’d found.

It wasn’t that he forked his half over to Sorkin out of any kind of fear — Sorkin would have regretfully had the C kid and his Nuck/fag crew demap him, Gately, too, along with Fackelmann, if he’d thought Gately had been part of Fax’s scam — but out of guilt over having been clueless about his own fellow Twin Tower screwing Sorkin after Sorkin had been so neurasthenically over-generous to them both, and because Fackelmann’s betrayal had ended up so hurting Sorkin and causing him so much psychosomatic grief that he’d spent a whole week in bed in Saugus in the dark with Lone Ranger–type sleep shades on, drinking VO and Cafergot and clutching his traumatized cranium and face, feeling betrayed and abandoned, he’d said, his whole faith in the human creature shaken, he’d wept to Gately over the cellular phone, after it all came out. Ultimately, Gately gave Sorkin his half of Fackelmann’s secret $ mostly to try and cheer Sorkin up. Let him know somebody cared. He also did it for Fackelmann’s memory, which he was mourning Fax’s gruesome death even at the same time he cursed him for a liar and rat-punk. It was a time of moral confusion for Don G., and his half of the post-mortem $ seemed like the best he could do in terms of like a gesture. He didn’t rat out that Kite had a whole other half, which Kite spent his half of the $ on Grateful Dead bootlegs and a portable semiconductor-refrigeration unit for his D.E.C.

2100’s motherboard that upped his processing capacity to 32 mb2 of RAM, roughly the same as an InterLace Disseminator-substation or an NNE Bell cellular SWITCHnet; though it wasn’t two months before he’d pawned the D.E.C. and put it in his arm, and had become such a steeply-downhill-type Dilaudid-addict that when he signed on as Gately’s new trusted associate for B&Es after Gately got out of Billerica the once-mighty Kite wasn’t even able to dicky an alarm or shunt a meter, and Gately found himself the brains of the team, which it was a mark of his own high-angle decline that this fact didn’t make him more nervous.

The R.N. that’d flushed his colon while Gately wept with shame is now back in the room with an M.D. Gately hasn’t seen before. He lies there pinwheel-eyed from pain and efforts to Abide via memory. One eye has some sort of blurry sleep-goop film in it that won’t blink or rub away. The room is filled with mournful gunmetal winter-P.M. light. The M.D. and gorgeous R.N. are doing something to the room’s other bed, attaching something metally complex from out of a big case not unlike a good-table-

silverware case, with molded purple velvet insides for metal rods and two half-circles of steel. The intercom dings. The M.D.’s got a beeper at his belt, an object with still more unhealthy associations. Gately hasn’t exactly been asleep. The heat of his post-op fever makes his face feel tight, like standing too close to a fire. His right side’s settled down to a sick ache like a kicked groin. Fackelmann’s favorite phrase had been ‘That’s a goddamned lie!’ He’d used it in response to just about everything. His mustache always looked like it was getting ready to crawl off his lip. Gately’s always despised facial hair. The former naval M.P. had had a great big yellow-gray mustache he waxed into two sharp protruding steer-horns. The M.P. was vain about his mustache and spent giant amounts of time clipping and grooming and waxing it. When the M.P. passed out, Gately used to come quietly up and gently push the stiff waxed sides of the mustache into crazy canted angles. Sorkin’s new third field-operative C’d claimed to collect ears and to have a collection of ears. Bobby C with his lightless eyes and flat lipless head, like a reptile. The M.D. was one of those apprentice Residential M.D.s that looked about twelve, scrubbed and groomed to a dull pink shine. He radiated the bustling cheer they teach M.D.s how to radiate at you. He had a child’s haircut, complete with spit-curl, and his thin neck swam in the collar of his white M.D.-coat, and his coat’s pens’ pocket- protector and the owlish glasses he kept pushing up, together with the little neck, gave Gately the sudden insight that most M.D.s and A.D.A.s and P.D./P.O.s and shrinks, the fearsomest authority figures in a drug addict’s life, that these guys came from the pencil-necked ranks of the same weak- chinned wienie kids that drug addicts used to despise and revile and bully, as kids. The R.N. was so attractive in the gray light and goop-blur it was almost grotesque. Her tits were such that she had a little cleft of cleavage showing even over her R.N.’s uniform, which was not like a low-neckline thing. The milky cleavage that suggests tits like two smooth scoops of vanilla ice cream that your healthy-type girls all have probably got. Gately’s forced to confront the fact that he’s never once been with a really healthy girl, and not with even so much as a girl of any kind in sobriety. And then when she reaches way up to unscrew a bolt in some kind of steelish plate on the wall over the empty bed the like hemline of her uniform retreats up north so that the white stockings’ rich violinish curves at the top of the insides of her legs in the white LISLE are visible in backlit silhouette, and

an EMBRASURE of sad windowlight shines through her legs. The raw healthy sexuality of the whole thing just about makes Gately sick with longing and self-pity, and he wants to avert his head. The young M.D. is also staring at the lissome stretch and retreating hem, not even pretending to help with the bolt, missing as he goes to push up the glasses so that he stabs himself in the forehead. The M.D. and R.N. exchange several pieces of real technical medical language. The M.D. drops his clipboard twice. The R.N. either doesn’t notice any of the sexual tension in the room because she’s spent her whole life as the eye of a storm of sexual tension, or else she just pretends not to notice. Gately’s almost positive the M.D.’s jacked off before to the thought of this R.N., and he feels sick that he totally empathizes with the M.D. It’d be CIRCUMAMBIENT sexual tension, would be the ghostword. Gately’d never even let an unhealthy strung-out-type female go into the head for at least an hour after he’d taken a dump in there, out of embarrassment, and now this sickening circumambient creature had with her own Fleet syringe and soft hands summoned a loose pathetic dump from the anus of Bimmy Gately, which anus she had thus seen close up, producing a dump.

It doesn’t even register on Gately that it’s spitting a little goopy sleet outside until he’s made himself avert his head from the window and R.N.

The ceiling’s throbbing a little, like a dog when it’s hot. The R.N. had told him, from behind, her name was Cathy or Kathy, but Gately wants to think of her as just the R.N. He can smell himself, a smell like sandwich-meat left in the sun, and feel greasy sweat purling all over his scalp, and his unshaved chin against his throat, and the tube taped into his mouth is tacky with the scum of sleep. The thin pillow is hot and he has no way to flip it over to the cool side of the pillow. It’s like his shoulder’s grown its own testicles and every time his heart beats some very small guy kicked him in them, the testicles. The M.D. sees Gately’s open eyes and tells the nurse the gunshot patient is semiconscious again and is he Q’d for any kind of P.M. med. The sleetfall is slight; it sounds like somebody’s throwing little fistfuls of sand at the window from real far away. The deadly R.N., helping the M.D. clamp some kind of weird steel back-braceish thing with what looks like a metal halo they’d put together from parts out of the big case, clamping the thing to the head of the bed and to little steel plates under the bed’s heart monitor — it looks sort of like the upper part of an electric chair, he thinks — the

R.N. looks down in mid-stretch and says Hi Mr. Gately and says Mr. Gately is allergic and doesn’t get any meds except antipyretics and Toradol in a drip Dr. Pressburger do you Mr. Gately you poor brave allergic thing. Her voice is like you can just imagine what she’d sound like getting X’d and really liking it. Gately’s repelled at himself for having taken a dump in front of this kind of R.N. The M.D.’s name had sounded just like ‘Pressburger’ or ‘Prissburger,’ and Gately’s now sure the poor yutz’d taken daily ass- kickings from sinister future drug addicts, as a kid. The M.D.’s perspiring in the ambient sexuality of the R.N. He says (the M.D. does) So what’s he intubated for if he’s conscious and self-ventilating and on a drip. This is while the M.D.’s trying to screw the metal halo itself to the top of the back- braceish thing with bolt-head screws, one knee up on the bed and stretching so part of the red soft upper part of his ass is showing over his belt, not being able to get the thing screwed on, shaking the metal halo like it’s its stubborn fault, and even lying there Gately can tell the guy’s turning the bolt-head screws the wrong way. The R.N. comes over and puts a cool soft hand on Gately’s forehead in a way that makes the forehead want to die with shame. What Gately can get from what she says to Dr. Pressburger is that there’d been concern that Gately might have got a fragment of whatever projectile he got invaded with in, through, or near his lower- something Trachea, since there’d been trauma to his Something-with-six- syllables-that-started-with-Sterno, she said the radiology results were indefinite but suspicious, and somebody called Pendleton had wanted a 16 373 mm. siphuncular nebulizer dispensing 4 ml. of 20% Mucomyst q. 2 h. on the off-chance of hemorrhage or mucoidal flux, like just in case. The parts of this Gately can follow he doesn’t care for one bit. He doesn’t want to know his body even fucking has something with six syllables in it. The horrifying R.N. wipes Gately’s face off as best she can with her hand and says she’ll try to fit him in for a sponge bath before she goes off-shift at 1600h., at which Gately goes rigid with dread. The R.N.’s hand smells of Kiss My Face–brand Organic Hand and Body Lotion, which Pat Montesian also uses. She tells the poor M.D. to let her have a try at the cranial brace, those things are always a bear to screw in. Her shoes are those subaudible nurses’ shoes that make no sound, so it seems like she glides away from Gately’s bed instead of walks away. Her legs aren’t visible until she gets a

certain ways away. The M.D.’s own shoes have a wet squeak to the left one.

The M.D. looks like he hasn’t slept well in about a year. There’s a faint vibe of prescription ’drines about the guy, on Gately’s view. He paces squeakily at the foot of the bed watching the R.N. turn the screws the right way and pushes his owlish glasses up and says that Clifford Pendleton, scratch golfer or no, is a post-traumatic maroon, that nebulized Mucomyst is for (and here his voice makes it clear he’s reciting from memory, like to show off) abnormal, viscid, or inspissated post-traumatic mucus, not potential hemorrhaging or edema, and that 16 mm. siphuncular intubation itself had been specifically discreditated as an intratracheal-edema prophylaxis in the second-to-latest issue of Morbid Trauma Quarterly as so diametrically invasive that it was more apt to exacerbate than to alleviate hemoptysis, according to somebody he calls ‘Laird’ or ‘Layered.’ Gately’s listening in with the uncomprehending close attention of like a child whose parents are discussing something adultly complex about child-care in its presence. The condescension with which Prissburger inserts that hemoptysis means something called ‘pertussive hemorrhage,’ like Kathy the R.N. wasn’t enough of a pro not to have to insert little technical explanations for, makes Gately sad for the guy — it’s obvious the guy pathetically thinks this kind of limp condescending shit will impress her. Gately’s got to admit he would have tried to impress her, too, though, if she hadn’t met him by holding a kidney-shaped pan under his working anus. The R.N.’s finishing packing up the parts of the brace thing the M.D. couldn’t seem to attach, meanwhile.

She was saying the M.D. seemed awful well-up on methodology for something called a 2R, as they left, and Gately could tell the M.D. couldn’t tell she was being a little sarcastic. The M.D. was struggling to try to carry the thing’s case, which Gately judges weighs at most 30 kg. It occurs to him head-on for the first time that the real reason Stavros L. hired shelter- cleaning guys out of halfway houses was that he could get away with paying them like bupkis, and that he (Don G.) must surely on some level have known this all along but been in some kind of Denial about confronting it head-on that he was getting fucked over by Stavros the shoe- freak, and that the word embrasure had been surely another invasive-wraith ghostword, and then now also that nobody seems to exactly be falling all over themself to bring the paper and pen it had sure seemed like Joelle van D. had understood Gately’s mimed request for, and that thus maybe Joelle’s

visit and show-and-tell with the snapshots had been just as much a febrile hallucination as the figuranted wraith, and that it has stopped spitting sleet but the clouds out there still look like they mean serious business out there over Brighton-Allston, and that if Joelle v.D.’s intimate visit with the photo album was a hallucination that at least meant it was also a hallucination she was wearing fucking college-kid Ken Erdedy’s sweatpants, and that the low-angled sadness of the cloudy P.M. light meant it had to be pretty near 1600h. EST so that maybe There By The Grace he could avoid maybe getting an uncontrolled woodie getting sponged naked by the horrifyingly attractive K/Cathy and but still could get sponged by her linebacker of a replacement, because the sour meaty smell of himself was grim, only maybe miss the woodie-hazard and get sponged by the big hairy-moled 1600–2400h. nurse in support-hose to who Gately’s anus was a stranger.

Plus that 1600h. EST was Spontaneous-Dissemination time for Mr.

Bouncety-Bounce, the mentally ill kiddy-show host Gately’s always loved and used to try his best with Kite and poor old Fackelmann to be home and largely alert for, and that nobody’s once offered to click on the HD viewer that hangs next to a myopic fake-Turner fog-and-boat print on the wall opposite Gately’s and the former kid’s beds, and that he had no remote with which to either activate the TP at 1600 or ask somebody else to activate it.

That without some kind of notebook and pencil he couldn’t communicate even the basicest question or like concept to anybody — it was like he was a vegetated hemorrhagic-stroke-victim. Without a pencil and notebook he couldn’t even seem to get across a request for a notebook and pencil; it was like he was trapped inside his huge chattering head. Unless, his head then points out, Joelle van Dyne’s visit had been real and her understanding of the pen-and-notebook gesture had been real, and but somebody out there in the hallway with a hat or at the Hospital President’s office or at the nurses’ station with his innerdicted M.-Hanley-brownies had also innerdicted the request for writing supplies, at the Finest’s request, so he couldn’t get his story straight with anybody before they came for him, that it was like a pre- interrogation softening-up thing, they were leaving him trapped in himself, a figurant, mute and unmoving and blank like the House’s catatonic lady slumped moist and pale in her chair or the Advanced Basics Group’s adopted girl’s vegetable-kingdom sister, or the whole catatonic gang over at E.M.P.H.H.’s #5 Shed, silent and dead-faced even when touching a tree or

propped up amid exploding front-lawn firecrackers. Or the wraith’s nonexistent kid. It’s got to be past 1600h., light-wise, unless it’s the lowering clouds. There’s roughly 0% or less visibility now outside the sleet- crusted window. The room’s windowlight is darkening to that Kaopectate shade that has always marked the just-pre-sunset time of day that Gately (like most drug addicts) has always most dreaded, and had always either lowered his helmet and charged extra-murderous at somebody to block it out (the late-day dread) or else dropped QuoVadis or oral narcotics or turned on Mr. Bouncety-Bounce extra loud or busied himself in his silly chef’s hat in the Ennet House kitchen or made sure he was at a Meeting sitting way up close in nose-pore range, to block it out (the late-day dread), the gray-light late-afternoon dread, always worse in winter, the dread, in winter’s watered-down light — just like the secret dread he’s always felt whenever everybody happened to ever leave the room and left him alone in a room, a terrible stomach-sinking dread that probably dates all the way back to being alone in his XXL Dentons and crib below Herman the Ceiling That Breathed.

It occurs to Gately that right now’s just like when he was a toddler and his Mom and her companion were both passed out or worse: no matter how frightened or scared he might become he now again cannot get anybody to come or to hear or even know about it; the discredited tube to prevent vicious or inspired bleeding in his suspicious Trachea has left him completely Alone, worse off than a toddler that could at least bellow and yowl, rattling the bars of its playpen in terror that nobody tall was in any shape to hear him. Plus this dreadful time of weak gray late-day light is the time, was the time when the sad and nerdily dressed wraith appeared yesterday. Assuming that was yesterday. Assuming it was a real wraith. But the wraith, with its chinky Coke and theories of post-mortem speed, had been able to interface with Gately without aid of speech or gesture or Bic, was why even out of his mind Gately had had to admit to himself it must have been a delusion, a fever-dream. But he has to admit he’d kind of liked it. The dialogue. The give-and-take. The way the wraith could seem to get inside him. The way he said Gately’s best thoughts were really communiqués from the patient and Abiding dead. Gately wonders if his organic father the ironworker is not now maybe dead and dropping in and standing very still from time to time for a communiqué. He felt slightly better. The room’s ceiling was not breathing. It lay flat as a stucco sheet, rippling only slightly with the petroleum-fumes of fever and Gately’s own smell. Then bubbling up out of nowhere again he suddenly confronts deep- focus memories of Gene Fackelmann’s final demise and Gately and Pamela Hoffman-Jeep’s involvement in Fackelmann’s demise.

Gately, for several months before he did his State assault-bit, was disastrously involved with one Pamela Hoffman-Jeep, his first girl ever with a hyphen, a sort of upscale but directionless and not very healthy and pale and incredibly passive Danvers girl that worked in Purchasing for a hospital-supply co. in Swampscott and was pretty definitely an alcoholic and drank bright drinks with umbrellas in Rte. 1 clubs in the late P.M. until she swooned and passed out with a loud clunk. That’s what she called it — ‘swooned.’ The swooning and passing out with a loud clunk as her head hit the table was more or less a nightly thing, and Pamela Hoffman-Jeep fell 374 automatically in love with any man she termed ‘chivalrous’ enough to carry her out to the parking lot and drive her home without raping her,

which rape of an unconscious head-lolling girl she termed ‘Taking Advantage.’ Gately got introduced to her by Fackelmann, who one time as he came up through a sports bar called the Pourhouse’s parking lot to dialogue with a Sorkin-debtor Gately saw Fackelmann staggering along carrying this unconscious girl to his ride, one big hand quite a bit farther up her prom-looking taffeta gown than it really needed to be to carry her, and Fackelmann told Gately if Don’d give this gash a ride home he’d stay and do the collection, which Gately’s heart wasn’t in collections anymore and he jumped at the trade, as long as Fackelmann could promise him she could hold her various fluids in the 4×4 he was driving. So it was Fackelmann who told him, as he put the tiny and limp but still continent body in his arms in the parking lot of the Pourhouse, to watch his personal six, Gately, and be sure and violate her a little, because this gash here was like one of those South Sea–culture gashes in that if Gately took her home and she woke up nonviolated she’d be Gately’s for life. But Gately obviously had no intention of raping an unconscious person, much less even putting his hand up the gown of a girl that might lose her fluids any second, and this locked him into the involvement. Pamela Hoffman-Jeep called Gately her ‘Night-Errand’ and fell passively in love with his refusal to Take Advantage. Gene Fackelmann, she confided, was not the gentleman Gately was.

What helped make the involvement disastrous was that Pamela Hoffman-Jeep was always either so leglessly drunk or so passively hungover all the time that any sort of sex any time at all with her would have classified as Taking Advantage.

This girl was the single passivest person Gately ever met. He never once saw P.H.-J. actually get from one spot to another under her own power. She needed somebody chivalrous to pick her up and carry her and lay her back down 24/7/365, it seemed like. She was a sort of sexual papoose. She spent most of her life passed out and sleeping. She was a beautiful sleeper, kittenish and serene, never drooling. She made passivity and unconsciousness look kind of beautiful. Fackelmann called her Death’s Poster-Child. Even at work, at the hospital supply co., Gately imagined her horizontal, curled fetal on something soft, with all the hot slack facial intensity of a sleeping baby. He imagined her bosses and coworkers all tiptoeing around Purchasing whispering to each other to not wake her up.

She never once rode in the actual front seat of any vehicle he drove her home in. But she also never threw up or pissed herself or even complained, just smiled and yawned an infant’s little milky yawn and snuggled deeper into whatever Gately had swaddled her in. Gately started doing that thing about yelling they’d been robbed when he carried her into whatever stripped luxury apt. they were crewing in. P.H.-J. wasn’t what you’d call great-looking, but she was incredibly sexy, Gately felt, because she always managed to look like you’d just X’d her into a state of total unmuscled swoon, lying there unconscious. Trent Kite told Fackelmann he thought Gately was out of his fucking mind. Fax observed that Kite himself was not exactly a W. T. Sherman with the ladies, even with coke-whores and strung- out nursing students and dipsoid lounge-hags whose painted faces swung loose from their heads. Fackelmann claimed to have started a Log just to keep track of Kite’s attempted pickup lines — surefire lines like e.g. ‘You’re the second most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, the first most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen being former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher,’ and ‘If you came home with me I’m unusually confident that I could achieve an erection,’ and said that if Kite wasn’t still cherry at twenty-three and a half it was proof of some kind of divine-type grace.

Sometimes Gately would come out of a Demerol-nod and look at pale passive Pamela lying there sleeping beautifully and undergo a time-lapse clairvoyant thing where he could almost visibly watch her losing her looks through her twenties and her face starting to slide over off her skull onto the pillow she held like a stuffed toy, becoming a lounge-hag right before his eyes. The vision aroused more compassion than horror, which Gately never even considered might qualify him as a decent person.

Gately’s two favorite things about Pamela Hoffman-Jeep were: the way she would come out of her stupor and hold her cheek and laugh hysterically each time Gately carried her across the threshold of some stripped apartment and bellow that they’d been ripped off; and the way she always wore the long white linen gloves and bare-shoulder taffeta that made her seem like some upscale North Shore debutante who’s had like one too many dippers of country-club punch and is just begging to be Taken Advantage of by some low-rent guy with a tattoo — she’d make a sort of languid very- slow-motion bullwhip-gesture with her hand in the long white glove as she

lay wherever Gately had deposited her and simper out with an upscale inflection ‘Don Honey, bring Mommy a highball’ (she called a drink a highball), which it turned out was a deadly impression of her own Mom, who it turned out this lady made Gately’s own Mom look like Carry Nation by comparison, lush-wise: the only four times Gately ever met Mrs. H.-J. were all at E.R.s and sanitaria.

Gately lies there pop-eyed with guilt and anxiety in the hiss and click of resumed sleet, in the twilit St. E.’s room, next to the glittering back-brace- and-skull-halo thing clamped exoskeletally to the empty next bed and gleaming dully at selected welds, Gately trying to Abide, remembering. It had been Pamela Hoffman-Jeep that finally clued Gately in on the little ways Gene Fackelmann had been historically getting over on Whitey Sorkin, and alerted him to the suicidal creek Fackelmann had got himself into with a certain mistaken-bet scam that had blown up right in his map.

Even Gately had been able to tell something was the matter: for the last two weeks Fackelmann had been squatting sweatily in a corner of the stripped living room, right outside the little luxury bedroom Gately and Pamela were lying in, out there squatting over his Sterno cooker and incredible twin hills of sky-blue Dilaudid and many-hued M&M’s, not much speaking or responding or moving or even seeming to cop a nod, just sitting there hunched and plump and glistening like some sort of cornered toad, his mustache flailing around on his lip. Things would have had to be bad indeed for Gately ever to try to get coherent data out of P.H.-J. Apparently the deal was that one of the bettors that bet with Sorkin through Fackelmann was a guy Gately and Fackelmann know only as Eighties Bill, an impeccably groomed guy that wore red suspenders under snazzy Zegna- brand menswear and tortoiseshell specs and Docksiders, an old-fashioned corporate take-overer and asset-plunderer, maybe fifty, with an Exchange Place office and a souvenir FREE MILKEN bumper sticker on his Beamer — it was a night of many highballs and much papoosing, and Gately had to keep flicking the top of P.H.-J.’s skull to keep her conscious long enough to free-associate her way through the details — who was on his fourth marriage to his third aerobics instructor, and who liked to bet only on Ivy League college hoops, but who when he did so — bet — bet amounts so huge that Fackelmann always had to get Sorkin’s pre-approval on the bet and then call Eighties Bill back, and so on.

But so — according to Pamela Hoffman-Jeep — this Eighties Bill, who’s a Yale alum and usually unabashedly sentimental about what Pamela H.-J. laughingly says Fackelmann called his ‘almo meter’ — well, on this particular time it seems like a little impeccably groomed birdie has whispered in Eighties Bill’s hairy ear, because this one time Eighties Bill wants to put $125K down on Brown U. against Yale U., i.e. betting against his almometer, only he wants (–2) points instead of the even spread Sorkin and the rest of the Boston books are taking off the Atlantic City line for a spread. And Fackelmann has to cell-phone down to Saugus to bounce this off Sorkin, except Sorkin’s down in the city in Enfield at the National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation office getting his weekly UV-bombardment and Cafergot refill from Dr. Robert (‘Sixties Bob’) Monroe — the septuagenarian pink-sunglasses-and-Nehru-jacket-wearing N.C.-F.P.F. ergotic-vascular-headache-treatment specialized, a guy who in yore-days interned at Sandoz and was one of T. Leary’s original circle of mayonnaise- jar acid-droppers at T. Leary’s now-legendary house in West Newton MA, and is now (60s B.) an intimate acquaintance of Kite, because Sixties Bob is an even bigger Grateful Dead fanatic maybe even than Kite, and sometimes got together with Kite and several other Dead devotees (most of who now had canes and Otanks) and traded historical-souvenir-type tiger’s eyes and2 paisley doublets and tie-dyes and lava lamps and bandannas and plasma spheres and variegated black-light posters of involuted geometric designs, and argued about which Dead shows and bootlegs of Dead shows were the greatest of all time in different regards, and just basically had a hell of a time. 60s B., an inveterate collector and haggling trader of shit, sometimes took Kite along on little expeditions of eclectic and seedy shops for Dead- related paraphernalia, sometimes even informally fencing stuff for Kite (and so indirectly Gately), covering Kite with $ when Kite’s rigid need-schedule didn’t permit a more formal and time-consuming fence, Sixties Bob then trading the merchandise around various seedy locales for 60s-related shit nobody else’d even usually want. A couple times Gately had to actually finger an ice cube out of a highball and slip it under the shoulderless neckline of P.H.-J.’s prom gown to try and keep her on some kind of track.

Like most incredibly passive people, the girl had a terrible time ever separating details from what was really important to a story, is why she

rarely ever got asked anything. But so the point is that the person that took Fackelmann’s call about Eighties Bill’s mammoth Yale-Brown bet wasn’t in fact Sorkin but rather Sorkin’s secretary, one Gwendine O’Shay, the howitzer-breasted old Green-Cardless former I.R.A.-moll who’d gotten hit on the head with a truncheon by a godless Belfast Bobbie once too often back on the Old Sod, and whose skull now was (in Fackelmann’s own terminology) soft as puppy-shit in the rain, but who had just the seedy sort of distracted-grandmotherly air that makes her perfect for clapping her red- knuckled old hands to her cheeks and squealing as she claimed Mass Lottery lottery winnings whenever Whitey Sorkin and his MA-Statehouse bagmen-cronies arrange to have a Sorkinite buy a mysteriously winning Mass Lottery ticket from one of the countless convenience stores Sorkin & cronies own through dummy corporations all up and down the North Shore, and who, because she could not only give what Sorkin claimed was the only adequate cervical massage west of the Berne Hot Alp Springs Center but also could both word-process a shocking 110 wpm and wield a shillelagh like nobody’s business — plus had been W. Sorkin’s dear late I.R.A.-moll Mum’s Scrabble-pal back in Belfast, on the Old Sod — served as Whitey’s chief administrative aide, manning the cellular phones when Sorkin was out or indisposed.

And so but P.H.-J.’s point, which Gately has to just about crack her scalp open flicking out of her: Gwendine O’Shay, familiar with Eighties Bill and his Y.U. Bulldog sentimentality, plus cranially soft as a fucking grape, O’Shay took Fackelmann’s call wrong, thought Fackelmann said Eighties Bill wanted 125K with (–2) points on Yale instead of (–2) on Brown, put Fackelmann on Hold and made him listen to Irish Muzak while she put in a call to a Yale Athletic Dept. mole out of Sorkin’s Read-Protected database’s MOLE file and learned that the Yale U. Bulldogs’ star power forward had been diagnosed with an extremely rare neurologic disorder called Post- 375 Coital Vestibulitis in which for several hours after intercourse the power forward tended to suffer such a terrible vertiginous loss of proprioception that he literally couldn’t tell his ass from his elbow, much less make an authoritative move to the bucket. Plus then O’Shay’s second call, to Sorkin’s Brown U. athletic mole (a locker-room attendant everybody thinks is deaf), reveals that several of Brown U.’s most sirenish and school-spirited

hetero coeds had been recruited, auditioned, briefed, rehearsed (i.e. ‘debriefed,’ giggles Pamela Hoffman-Jeep, whose giggles involve the sort of ticklish shoulder-writhing undulations of a much younger girl getting tickled by an authority figure and pretending not to like it), and stationed at strategic points — I–95 rest-stops, in the spare-tire compartment at the rear of the Bulldogs’ chartered bus, in the evergreen shrubbery outside the teams’ special entrance to the Pizzitola Athl. Center in Providence, in concave recesses along the Pizzitola tunnels between special entrance and Visitors’ locker room, even in a specially enlarged and sensually-appointed locker next to the power forward’s locker in the VLR, all prepared — like the Brown cheerleaders and Pep Squad, who’ve been induced to do the game pantyless, electrolysized and splits-prone to help lend a pyrotechnic glandular atmosphere to the power forward’s whole playing-environment — prepared to make the penultimate sacrifice for squad, school, and influential members of the Brown Alumni Bruins Boosters Assoc. So that Gwendine O’Shay then switches back to Fackelmann and OKs the mammoth bet and point-spread, as like who wouldn’t, with that kind of mole-reported fix in the works. Except of course she’s taken the wager backwards, i.e. O’Shay thinks Eighties Bill’s now got 125K on Yale coming within two points, while Eighties Bill — who it turns out’s cast himself as White Knight in bidding for majority control of Providence’s Federated Funnel and Cone Corp., O.N.A.N.’s leading manufacturer of conoid receptacles, with F.F.&C. CEO’d by a prominent Brown alumnus so rabid a Bruins-booster he actually wears a snarling hollow bear-head to conference games, whose ass Eighties Bill is going about kissing like nobody’s beeswax, P.H.-J. inserts, hinting it was Eighties Bill who’d tipped the Bruins staff off about the power forward’s Achilles’ vas deferens — E.B. quite reasonably believes he’s now got Brown within a deuce for 125 el grande’s.

The wrench in the ointment that nobody in Providence has counted on is the picket-and-knuckleduster-wielding appearance of Brown University’s entire Dworkinite Female Objectification Prevention And Protest Phalanx outside the Pizzitola Athl. Center’s main gates right at game-time, two FOPPPs per motorcycle, who blow through the filigreed gates like they were so much wet Kleenex and storm the arena, plus a division of Brown’s pluckier undergraduate N.O.W.s who execute a pincer-movement down

from the cheap seats up top during the first time-out, at the precise moment the Brown cheerleaders’ first pyramid-maneuver ends in a mid-air split that causes the Pizzitola’s scoreboard’s scorekeeper to reel backward against his controls and blow out both HOME’s and VISITORS’ zeroes, on the board, just as the FOPPPs’ unmuffled Hawgs come blatting malevolently down through the ground-level tunnels and out onto the playing floor; and in the ensuing melee not only are cheerleaders, Pep Squad, and comely Brown U. sirens all either laid out with picket-signs wielded like shillelaghs or thrown kicking and shrieking over the burly shoulders of militant FOPPPs and carried off on roaring Hawgs, leaving the Yale power forward’s delicate nervous system intact if overheated; but two Brown U. Bruin starters, a center and a shooting guard — both too wrung-out and dazed by a grueling week of comely-siren-auditioning and -rehearsing to have sense enough to run like hell once the melee spills out onto the Pizzitola hardwood — are felled, by a FOPPP knuckleduster and a disoriented referee with a martial- arts background, respectively; and so when the floor is finally cleared and stretchers borne off and the game resumes, Yale U. cleans Brown U.’s clock by upwards of 20.

Then so Fackelmann calls up Eighties Bill and arranges to pick up the skeet, which is $137,500 with the vig, which E.B. gives him in large- denomination pre-O.N.A.N. scrip in a GO BROWN BRUINS gym-bag he’d brought to the game to sit next to the ursine-headed CEO with and now has less than no use for, but so Fackelmann receives the skeet downtown and blasts up cheesy Route 1 to Saugus to deliver the skeet and pick up his vig on the vig ($625 U.S.) right away, needing to cop Blues in what’s starting to be the worst way, etc. Plus Fackelmann’s figuring on maybe a small bonus or at least some emotional validation from Sorkin for bringing in such a mammoth and promptly-remitted wager. But, when he gets to the Rte. 1 titty bar at the rear of which Sorkin has his administrative offices behind an unmarked fire door and all wallpapered in stuff that looks like ersatz wood panelling, Gwendine O’Shay wordlessly points behind her station at Sorkin’s personal office door with a terse gesture Fackelmann doesn’t think fits with the up-beatness of the occasion at all. The door’s got a big poster of R. Limbaugh on it, from before the assassination. Sorkin’s in there working spreadsheets with his special monitor-screen-light-filtering goggles on. The goggles’ lenses on their long protruding barrels look like lobsters’

eyes on stalks. Gately and Fackelmann and Bobby C never spoke to Sorkin until spoken to, not out of henchmanish obsequity but because they could never tell what Sorkin’s cranio-facial vascular condition was or if he could tolerate sound until they verifiably heard him tolerating his own. (Sound.) So G. Fackelmann waits wordlessly to hand over Eighties Bill’s skeet, standing there tall and soft and palely sweating, the overall shape and color of a peeled boiled egg. When Sorkin hikes an eyebrow at the GO BRUINS bag and says the knee-slapping hilarity of the joke escapes him, Fackelmann’s mustache positively takes off all over his upper lip, and he prepares to say what he always says when he’s flummoxed, that whatever’s being said is with all due respect a goddamn lie. Sorkin saves his data and pushes his desk chair back so he can reach all the way down to the fireproof drawer. The goggles are often used in data-processing sweatshops and list for a deuce. Sorkin grunts as he hauls out a huge old Mass Lottery box for Quik-Pick cards and heaves it onto the desk, where it bulges obscenely, filled with 112.5K U.S. — there’s 112.5 fucking K in there, all in ones, 125K minus vig, what Sorkin via O’Shay believes to be Eighties Bill’s winnings, all in small bills, because Sorkin’s pissed off and can’t resist making a little like gesture. Fackelmann doesn’t say anything. His mustache goes limp as his mental machinery starts revving. Sorkin, massaging his temples, staring up at Fackelmann with his goggles like a crab in a tank, says he supposes he can’t blame Fax or O’Shay, that he’d have OK’d the bet himself, what with the neurologic tip on the Yale forward they had. Who could have foreseen thuggish Feminazis screwing up the ointment. He utters a bit of Gaelic that Fackelmann doesn’t know but assumes to be fatalistical. He peels six C-notes and an O.N.A.N.ite 25-spot off a wad the size of an artillery shell and pushes them across the metal desk at Fackelmann, his vig on the vig. He says What the fuck (Sorkin does), this Eighties Bill kid’s irrational sentimentalism for Yale will sooner or later catch up with him. Veteran books tend to be statistically philosophical and patient. Fackelmann doesn’t even bother to wonder why Sorkin refers to Eighties Bill as ‘kid’ when they’re both about the same age. But a high-watt bulb is slowly beginning to incandesce over Fackelmann’s moist head. As in the Faxter starts to conceptualize the overall concept of what must of happened. He still hasn’t said anything, Pamela Hoffman-Jeep emphasizes.

Sorkin looks Fackelmann over and asks if he’s gained some asymmetrical-

type weight, there. Fackelmann’s left tit does look noticeably bigger than his right, under his sport-coat, because of the legal envelope with 137 1000s and one 500 in it, the skeet from an Eighties Bill who thought he’d lost. Just like Sorkin thought E.B.’d won. The slight high whine in the room that Sorkin thinks is his Infernatron disk-drive is really the whine of Fackelmann’s high-speed mentation. His mustache roils like a cracked whip as he works his own internal mental spreadsheet. 250K in one lumpy sum 376 represented like 375 sky-blue grams of hydromorphone hydrochloride or like 37,500 10-mg. soluble tablets of the shit, available from a certain rapacious but discreet Chinatown opiate-dealer who’d only deal synthetic narcs in 100-gram weights — which all translated, assuming Kite could be persuaded to pack up his D.E.C. 2100 and move far far away with Fackelmann to help him set up a street-distribution matrix in some urban market far far away, into close to like let’s see carry the one like 1.9 million in street-value, which sum meant that Fackelmann and to a lesser jr.-partner extent Kite could have their chins on their chests for the rest of their days without ever having to strip another apt., forge another passport, break another thumb. All if Fackelmann just kept his map shut about O’Shay’s confabulation of Yale/ Brown//Brown/Yale, mumbled something about an I.V.-adulterant causing a sudden and temporary gigantism in one tit, and blasted out of there straight down Rte. 1 to this one Dr. Wo and Associates, Hung Toy’s Cold Tea Emporium, Chinatown.

By this time Pamela Hoffman-Jeep had succumbed to the highballs and her own swaddled warmth and was irreversibly swooned, ice or fillip or no, twitching synaptically and murmuring to somebody named Monty that he was certainly no kind of gentleman in her book. But Gately could chart the rest of Fackelmann’s shit-creek’s course for himself. When approached by Fackelmann with a GO BROWN gym-bag of Dr. Wo’s finest wholesale Dilaudid and invited to decamp with him and set up a distrib-matrix for their own drug-empire far far away, Kite would have staggered back in horror at Fackelmann’s obviously not knowing that the bettor Eighties Bill was in fact none other than the son of Sixties Bob, viz. Whitey Sorkin’s personal migrainologist, who Sorkin trusted and confided in as only a massive I.V.-dose of Cafergot can make you trust and confide, and whom Sorkin would undoubtedly tell all about the guy’s own son’s huge win on

Yale, and who wasn’t like Ward-and-Wally close with his son, Sixties Bob wasn’t, but naturally kept distant paternal tabs on him, and would certainly have known that E.B.’d in fact bet Brown in an attempt to cozy up to the conic CEO, and so would know that there’d been some kind of mix-up; and also that (Kite’d still be staggering back in horror as all this added up) plus, even if Sorkin somehow didn’t get told of Eighties Bill’s loss and Fackelmann’s scam from Sixties Bill, the fact was that Sorkin’s newest savagest U.S. muscle, Bobby (‘C’) C, old-fashioned smack-addict, copped regular old organic Burmese heroin from this Dr. Wo on a regular basis, and was sure to hear about 300+ grams of wholesale Dilaudid bought by a Fackelmann known to be C’s co-employee off Sorkin… and thus that Fackelmann, who when he came to Kite with the proposition was already in possession of a Brown-Booster bag full of 37,500 10-mg. Dilaudids and minus Sorkin’s 250K— plus with as Gately later knew only 22K in suicidal-scam-backfire-insurance capital — was already dead: Fackelmann was a Dead Man, Kite would have said, staggering back with horror at Fax’s idiocy; Kite’d have said he could smell Fackelmann already biodegrading from here. Dead as a fucking post, he’d have told Fackelmann, already worrying about being seen sitting there with him in whatever titty bar they were in when Fax hit Kite with the proposal. And Gately, watching P.H.-J. sleep, could not only imagine but Identify fully with how Fackelmann, on hearing Kite say he could smell him dead and why, with how Fackelmann, instead of taking his bagful of Blues and gluing on a goatee and immediately fleeing to climes that’d never even fucking heard of metro Boston’s North Shore — that the Faxter’d done what any drug addict in possession of his Substance would do when faced with fatal news and attendant terror: Facklemann’d made a fucking beeline for their luxury-stripped home and familiar safe-feeling hearth and had plopped down and immediately fired up the Sterno cooker and cooked up and tied off and shot up and nailed his chin to his chest and kept it there with staggering quantities of Dilaudid, trying to mentally blot out the reality of the fact that he was going to get demapped if he didn’t take some kind of decisive remedial action at once. Because, Gately realized even then, this was your drug addict’s basic way of dealing with problems, was using the good old Substance to blot out the problem. Also probably medicating his terror by stuffing himself with Peanut M&M’s, which would explain all the

wrappers littering the floor of the corner he hadn’t moved from. That thus this is why Fackelmann has been squatting moist and silent in a corner of the living room right outside this very bedroom here for days; this was why the apparent contradiction of the staggering amount of Substance Fackelmann had in the gym-bag next to him together with the cornered-toad look of a man in the great fear one associates with Withdrawal. Charting and thinking, drumming his fingers absently on P.H.-J.’s unconscious skull, Gately realized he could more than empathize with Fackelmann’s flight into Dilaudid and M&M’s, but he now realizes that that was the first time it really ever dawned on him in force that a drug addict was at root a craven and pathetic creature: a thing that basically hides.

The most sexual thing Gately ever did with Pamela Hoffman-Jeep was he liked to unwrap her cocoon of blankets and climb in with her and spoon in real tight, fitting his bulk up close against all her soft concave places, and then go to sleep with his face in her nape. It bothered Gately that he could empathize with Fackelmann’s desire to hide and blot out, but in the retrospect of memory now it bothers him more that he didn’t lie there up next to the comatose girl being bothered for more than a few minutes before he felt the familiar desire that blots out all bother, and that that night he had unwrapped the cocoon of bedding and arisen so automatically in service of this desire. And feels the worst of all that he’d lumbered out of the bedroom in just jeans and belt out to the gloaming living room where Fackelmann was hunched moist and smeary-mouthed in the corner next to a mountain of 10 mg. Dilaudids and his mixing bowl of distilled water and works-kit and Sterno unit, that Gately had lumbered so automatically out to Fackelmann under the pretense — to himself, too, the pretense, was the worst thing — the pretense that he was just going to check on poor old Fackelmann, to maybe try and convince him to take some kind of action, go penitent to Sorkin or flee the clime instead of just hiding there in the corner with his mind in neutral and his chin on his chest and a stalactite of chocolated drool from his lower lip lengthening. Because he knew that the first thing Fackelmann would do when Gately left P.H.-J. and lumbered out to the defurnished living room would be to fumble in his GoreTex works-kit for a new factory-wrapped syringe and invite Gately to hunker on down and get right with the planet. I.e. ingest some of this mountain of Dilaudid, to keep Fackelmann company. Which to Gately’s shame he did, had done, and no

part of the reality of Fackelmann’s creek and the need for action had even been brought up, so intent were they on the Blues’ somnolent hum, blotting everything out, while Pamela Hoffman-Jeep lay wrapped tight in the other room dreaming of damsels and towers — Gately did, he remembers vividly, he let Fackelmann fix them both up but good, and told himself he was doing it to keep Fackelmann company, like sitting up with a sick friend, and (maybe worst) believed it was true.

Little entr’actes of feverish dreams punctuate memories and being conscious, like. He dreams he’s riding due north on a bus the same color as its own exhaust, passing again and again the same gutted cottages and expanse of heaving sea, weeping. The dream goes on and on, without any kind of resolution or arrival, and he weeps and sweats as he lies there, stuck in it. Gately comes sharply around when he feels the little rough tongue on his forehead — not unlike Nimitz the M.P.’s little pet kitten’s hesitant tongue, when the M.P. had still had the kitten, before the mysterious period when the kitten disappeared and the garbage disposal wouldn’t run right for days and the M.P. sat hungover with his notebook at the kitchen table with his blond head in his hands, just sat there for several days, and Gately’s Mom went around pale as hell and wouldn’t go near the kitchen sink for days, and rushed to the bathroom when Gately finally asked what was the deal with the garbage disposal and where was Nimitz. When Gately gets his eyelids unstuck, though, the tongue is not even close to being Nimitz’s. The wraith is back, right by the bed, dressed like before and blurred at the edges in the hat-shadowed spill of hallway-light, and except now with him is another, younger, way more physically fit wraith in kind of faggy biking shorts and a U.S. tank top who’s leaning way over Gately’s railing and… fucking licking Gately’s forehead with a rough little tongue, and as Gately reflexively strikes out at the guy’s map — no man put his tongue on D. W.

Gately and lived — he has just enough time to realize the wraith’s breath has no warmth to it, or smell, before both wraiths vanish and a blue forked bolt of pain from his sudden striking-out sends him back against his hot pillow with an arched spine and a tube-impeded scream, his eyes rolling back into the dove-colored light of whatever isn’t quite sleep.

His fever is way worse, and his little snatches of dreams have a dismantled cubist aspect he associates in memory with childhood flu. He dreams he looks in a mirror and sees nothing and keeps trying to clean the

mirror with his sleeve. One dream consists only of the color blue, too vivid, like the blue of a pool. An unpleasant smell keeps coming up his throat.

He’s both in a bag and holding a bag. Visitors flit in and out, but never Ferocious Francis or Joelle van D. He dreams there’s people in his room but he’s not one of them. He dreams he’s with a very sad kid and they’re in a graveyard digging some dead guy’s head up and it’s really important, like Continental-Emergency important, and Gately’s the best digger but he’s wicked hungry, like irresistibly hungry, and he’s eating with both hands out of huge economy-size bags of corporate snacks so he can’t really dig, while it gets later and later and the sad kid is trying to scream at Gately that the important thing was buried in the guy’s head and to divert the Continental Emergency to start digging the guy’s head up before it’s too late, but the kid moves his mouth but nothing comes out, and Joelle van D. appears with wings and no underwear and asks if they knew him, the dead guy with the head, and Gately starts talking about knowing him even though deep down he feels panic because he’s got no idea who they’re talking about, while the sad kid holds something terrible up by the hair and makes the face of somebody shouting in panic: Too Late.

She’d come out of the St. E.’s doors and turned right for the quick walk back up to Ennet and a grotesquely huge woman whose hose bulged with stubble and whose face and head were four times larger than the largest woman Joelle had ever seen had grabbed her arm at the elbow and said she was sorry to be the one to tell her but that unbeknownst to her she was in almost mind-boggling danger.

It took rather a while for Joelle to look her up and down. ‘This is supposed to be news?’

So and but that night’s next A.M.’d found Gately and Fackelmann still there in Fackelmann’s little corner, belts around their arms, arms and noses red from scratching, still at it, the ingestion, on a hell of a tear, cooking up and getting off and eating M&M’s when they could find their mouths with their hands, moving like men deep under water, heads wobbling on strengthless necks, the empty room’s ceiling sky-blue and bulging and under it hanging on the wall overhead to their right the apartment’s upscale TP’s viewer on a recursive slo-mo loop of some creepy thing Fackelmann

liked that was just serial shots of flames from brass lighters, kitchen- matches, pilot lights, birthday candles, votive candles, pillar candles, birch shavings, Bunsen burners, etc., that Fackelmann had got from Kite, who just before dawn had come out dressed and declined to get high with them and coughed nervously and announced he had to leave for a few days or more for a ‘totally key’ and unmissable software trade-show in a different area code, not knowing Gately now knew he knew Fackelmann already to be dead, w/ Kite then trying to leave discreetly with every piece of hardware he owned in his arms, including the nonportable D.E.C., trailing cables. Then a bit later, as the A.M. light intensified yellowly and made both Gately and Fackelmann curse the fact that the curtains had been stripped and pawned, as they continued to hunch and cook and shoot, at maybe 0830h. Pamela Hoffman-Jeep was up and vomiting briskly and applying mousse against the workaday day, calling Gately Honey and her Night Errand and asking if she’d done anything last night she’d have to explain to anybody today — kind of an A.M. routine in their relationship — 377 applying blush and drinking her standard anti-hangover breakfast and watching Gately and Fackel-mann’s chins fall and rise at slightly different underwater rates. The smell of her perfume and high-retsin mints hung in the bare room long after she’d bid them both Ciao Bello. As the A.M. sun got higher and intolerable, instead of taking action and nailing a blanket or something over the window they opted instead to obliterate the reality of the eye-scalding light and began truly bingeing on Blues, flirting with an O.

D. They scaled Fackelmann’s Mt. Dilaudid at a terrible clip. Fackelmann was by nature a binger. Gately was typically more like a maintenance user.

He rarely went on a classic-type binge, which meant plunking down in one place with an enormous stash and getting loaded over and over again for long periods without moving. But when he did start a binge he might as well have been strapped to the snout of a missile for all the control he had over length or momentum. Fackelmann was having at the mountain of 10- mg. Blues like there was no tomorrow. Every time Gately even started to bring up the issue of how Faxter had come by such a huge blue haul of the Substance — trying maybe to invite Fackelmann to confront the reality of his trouble by describing it, like — Fackelmann would cut him off with a soft ‘That’s a goddamn lie.’ This was pretty much all Fackelmann would

ever say, when loaded, even in response to things like questions. You have to picture all the binge’s verbal exchanges as occurring like very slowly, oddly distended, as if the time were honey: ‘Serious fucking stash you managed to come by somehow right here, Fa

—’ ‘That’s a goddamn lie.’ ‘Man. Man. I just hope Gwendine or C’s got the phone today out there, man. Instead of Whitey. No business getting done out of here today I don’t

thi—’

‘’s a goddamn lie.’

‘That’s for sure, Fax.’

‘’s a goddamn lie.’

‘Fax. The Faxter. Count Faxula.’ ‘Goddamn lie.’ After a while in all the distension it got to be like a joke. Gately would haul his big head upright and try to allege the roundness of the planet, the three-dimensionality of the phenomenal world, the blackness of all black

dogs — ‘’s a goddamn lie.’ They found it increasingly funny. After every exchange like this they laughed and laughed. Each exhalation of laughter seemed to take several minutes. The ceiling and the window’s light receded. Fackelmann wet his pants; this was even funnier. They watched the pool of urine spread out against the hardwood floor, changing shape, growing curved arms, exploring the fine oak floor. The rises and valleys and little seams. It might of gotten later and then early A.M. again. The entertainment cartridge’s myriad small flames were reflected in the spreading puddle, so that soon Gately could watch without taking his chin off his chest.

When the phone rang it was just a fact. The ringing was like an environment, not a signal. The fact of its ringing got more and more abstract. Whatever a ringing phone might signify was like totally overwhelmed by the overwhelming fact of its ringing. Gately pointed this out to Fackelmann. Fackelmann vehemently denied it.

At some point Gately tried to stand and was rudely assaulted by the

floor, and wet his own pants.

The phone rang and rang.

At another point they got interested in rolling different colors of Peanut M&M’s into the puddles of urine and watching the colored dye corrode and leave a vampire-white football of M&M in a nimbus of bright dye.

The intercom’s buzzer to the luxury apartment complex’s glass doors downstairs sounded, overwhelming both of them with the fact of its sound.

It buzzed and buzzed. They discussed wishing it would stop the way you discuss wishing it would stop raining.

It became the ICBM of binges. The Substance seemed inexhaustible; Mt. Dilaudid changed shapes but never really much shrank that they could see. It was the first and only time ever that Gately I.V.’d narcotics so many times in one arm that he ran out of arm-vein and had to switch to the other arm. Fackelmann was no longer coordinated enough to help him tie off and boot. Fackelmann kept making a string of chocolaty drool appear and distend almost down to the floor. The acidity of their urine was corroding the apt.’s hardwood floor’s finish in an observable way. The puddle had grown many arms like a Hindu god. Gately couldn’t quite tell if the urine had explored its way almost back to their feet or if they were already sitting in urine. Fackelmann would see how close to the surface of the pond of their mixed piss he could get the tip of the string of spit before he sucked it back up and in. The little game had an intoxicating aura of danger to it. The insight that most people like play-danger but don’t like real-life danger hit Gately like an epiphany. It took him gallons of viscous time to try and articulate the insight to Fackelmann so that Fackelmann could give it the

imprimatur of a denial.

Eventually the buzzer stopped.

The phrase ‘More tattoos than teeth’ also kept going through Gately’s head as it bobbed (the head), even though he had no idea where the phrase came from or who it was supposed to refer to. He hadn’t been to Billerica Minimum yet; he was on bail that Whitey Sorkin had bonded.

The taste of the M&M’s couldn’t cut the weirdly sweet medical taste of hydromorphone in Gately’s mouth. He watched an old stovetop-burner’s crown of blue flame shimmer in the shine of the urine.

During a ruddled sunset-light period Fackelmann had had a small convulsion and a bowel movement in his pants and Gately hadn’t had the coordination to go to Fackelmann’s side during the seizure, to help and just be there. He had the nightmarish feeling that there was something crucial he

had to do but had forgot what it was. 10-mg. injections of the Blue Bayou kept the feeling at bay for shorter and shorter periods. He’d never heard of somebody having a convulsion from an O.D., and Fackelmann had indeed seemed to bounce to his version of back.

The sun outside the big windows seemed to go up and down like a yo- yo.

They ran out of the distilled water Fackelmann had in the mixing bowl, and Fackelmann took a cotton and sopped up candy-dyed urine off the floor and cooked up with urine. Gately appeared to himself to be repulsed by this.

But there was no question of trying to get to the stripped kitchen for the distilled-water bottle. Gately was tying off his right arm with his teeth, now,

his left was so useless.

Fackelmann smelled very bad.

Gately nodded out into a dream where he was on a Beverly-Needham bus whose sides said PARAGON BUS LINES: THE GRAY LINE. In his stuporous recall over four years later in St. E.’s he realizes that this bus is the bus from the dream that wouldn’t end and wouldn’t go anywhere, but has the sickening realization that the connection between the two buses is itself a dream, or is in a dream, and it’s now that his fever returns to new heights and his line on the heart monitor gets a funny little hitch like a serration at the 1st and 3rd nodes, which makes an amber light flash at the nurse’s station down the hall.

When the buzzer sounded again they were watching the flames-film late at night. Now poor old Pamela Hoffman-Jeep’s voice came to them through the intercom. The intercom and apt.-complex-front-doors-unlocker button were all the way across the living room by the apartment door. The ceiling bulged and receded. Fackelmann had made his hand into the shape of a claw and was studying the claw in the light of the TP’s flames. Mt. Dilaudid was badly caved in on one side; a disastrous avalanche into Lake Urine was a possibility. P.H.-J. sounded drunk as a Nuck. She said to let her in. She said she knew they were in there. She used party as a verb several times.

Fackelmann was whispering that it was a lie. Gately remembers he actually had to prod himself in the bladder to feel if he had to go to the bathroom.

His Unit felt small and icy cold against his leg in the wet jeans. The ammoniac smell of urine and the breathing ceiling and drunk distant female voice… Gately reached in the dark for the bars of his playpen, grasped

them with pudgy fists, hauled himself to his feet. His rising was more like the floor lowering. He wobbled like a toddler. The apt. floor below him feinted right, left, circling for an opening to attack. The luxury windows hung with starlight. Fackelmann had made his claw come alive into a spider and was letting the spider climb slowly down his chest-area. The starlight was smeary; there were no distinct stars. Everything out of the line of fire of the cartridge-viewer was dark as a pocket. The buzzer sounded angry and the voice pathetic. Gately put his foot out in the direction of the buzzer. He heard Fackelmann telling his hand’s claw’s spider it was witnessing the birth of an empire. Then when Gately put his foot down there was nothing there. The floor dodged his foot and rushed up at him. He caught a glimpse of bulged ceiling and then the floor caught him in the temple. His ears belled. The impact of the floor against him shook the whole room. A box of laminates teetered and fell and fanned clear laminates all over the wet floor.

The viewer fell off the wall and cast ruddled flames on the ceiling. The floor jammed itself against Gately, pressing in tight, and he grayed out with his scrunched face toward Fackelmann and the windows beyond, with Fackelmann holding the spider out in mid-air at him for his inspection.

‘Oh for Christ’s sake then. ‘I was in two scenes. What else is in there I do not know. In the first scene I’m going through a revolving door. You know, around in this glass revolving door, and going around out as I go in is somebody I know but apparently haven’t seen for a long time, because the recognition calls for a shocked look, and the person sees me and gives an equally shocked look — we’re supposedly formerly very close and now haven’t seen each other in the longest time, and the meeting is random chance. And instead of going in I keep going around in the door to follow the person out, which person is also still revolving in the door to follow me in, and we whirl in the door like

that for several whirls.’ ‘Q.’ ‘The actor was male. He wasn’t one of Jim’s regulars. But the character

I recognize in the door is epicene.’ ‘Q.’ ‘Hermaphroditic. Androgynous. It wasn’t obvious that the character was supposed to be a male character. I assume you can Identify.

‘The other had the camera bolted down inside a stroller or bassinet. I wore an incredible white floor-length gown of some sort of flowing material and leaned in over the camera in the crib and simply apologized.’ ‘Q.’ ‘Apologized. As in my lines were various apologies. “I’m so sorry. I’m so terribly sorry. I am so, so sorry. Please know how very, very, very sorry I am.” For a real long time. I doubt he used it all, I strongly doubt he used it all, but there were at least twenty minutes of permutations of “I’m sorry.” ’

‘Q.’

‘Not exactly. Not exactly veiled.’ ‘Q.’ ‘The point of view was from the crib, yes. A crib’s-eye view. But that’s not what I mean by driving the scene. The camera was fitted with a lens with something Jim called I think an auto-wobble. Ocular wobble, something like that. A ball-and-socket joint behind the mount that made the lens wobble a little bit. It made a weird little tiny whirring noise, I

recollect.’ ‘Q.’ ‘The mount’s the barrel. The mount’s what the elements of the lens are arranged in. This crib-lens’s mount projected out way farther than a conventional lens, but it wasn’t near as big around as a catadioptric lens. It looked more like an eye-stalk or a night-vision scope than a lens. Long and skinny and projecting, with this slight wobble. I don’t know much about lenses beyond basic concepts like length and speed. Lenses were Jim’s forte. This can’t be much of a surprise. He always had a whole case full. He paid more attention to the lenses and lights than to the camera. His other son carried them in a special case. Leith was cameras, the son was lenses.

Lenses Jim said were what he had to bring to the whole enterprise. Of filmmaking. Of himself. He made all his own.’ ‘Q.’ ‘Well I’ve never been around them. But I know there’s something wobbled and weird about their vision, supposedly. I think the newer-born they are, the more the wobble. Plus I think a milky blur. Neonatal nystagmus. I don’t know where I heard that term. I don’t remember. It could have been Jim. It could have been the son. What I know about infants personally you could — it may have been an astigmatic lens. I don’t think

there’s much doubt the lens was supposed to reproduce an infantile visual field. That’s what you could feel was driving the scene. My face wasn’t important. You never got the sense it was meant to be captured realistically

by this lens.’

‘Q.’

‘I never saw it. I’ve got no idea.’ ‘Q.’ ‘They were buried with him. The Masters of everything unreleased. At

least that was in his will.’ ‘Q.’ ‘It had nothing to do with killing himself. Less than nothing to do with

it.’ ‘Q.’ ‘No I never saw his fucking will. He told me. He told me things. ‘He’d stopped being drunk all the time. That killed him. He couldn’t

take it but he’d made a promise.’ ‘Q.’ ‘I don’t know that he ever even got a finished Master. That’s your story.

There wasn’t anything unendurable or enslaving in either of my scenes.

Nothing like these actual-perfection rumors. These are academic rumors.

He talked about making something quote too perfect. But as a joke. He had a thing about entertainment, being criticized about entertainment v. nonentertainment and stasis. He used to refer to the Work itself as “entertainments.” He always meant it ironically. Even in jokes he never talked about an anti-version or antidote for God’s sake. He’d never carry it

that far. A joke.’ ‘…’ ‘When he talked about this thing as a quote perfect entertainment, terminally compelling — it was always ironic — he was having a sly little jab at me. I used to go around saying the veil was to disguise lethal perfection, that I was too lethally beautiful for people to stand. It was a kind of joke I’d gotten from one of his entertainments, the Medusa-Odalisk thing. That even in U.H.I.D. I hid by hiddenness, in denial about the deformity itself. So Jim took a failed piece and told me it was too perfect to release — it’d paralyze people. It was entirely clear that it was an ironic joke. To me.’

‘Q.’

‘Jim’s humor was a dry humor.’ ‘Q.’ ‘If it got made and nobody’s seen it, the Master, it’s in there with him.

Buried. That’s just a guess. But I bet you.’

‘…’

‘Call it an educated bet.’

‘Q.’

‘…’ ‘Q , Q, Q.’ ‘ That’s the part of the joke he didn’t know. Where he’s buried is itself buried, now. It’s in your annulation-zone. It’s not even your territory. And now if you want the thing — he’d enjoy the joke very much, I think. Oh shit yes very much.’

By a rather creepy coincidence, it turned out that, up in our room, Kyle Dempsy Coyle and Mario were also watching one of Himself’s old efforts.

Mario had gotten his pants on and was using his special tool to zip and button. Coyle looked oddly traumatized. He was sitting on the edge of my bed, his eyes wide and his whole body with the slight tremble of something hanging from the tip of a pipette. Mario greeted me by name. Snow continued to whirl and eddy outside the window. The position of the sun was impossible to gauge. The net-posts were now buried almost up to their scorecard attachments. The wind was piling snow up in drifts against all Academy right angles and then pummelling the drifts into unusual shapes.

The window’s whole view had the gray grainy quality of a poor photo. The sky looked diseased. Mario worked his tool with great patience. It often took him several tries to catch and engage the tool’s jaws on the tongue of his zipper. Coyle, still wearing his apnea-mouthguard, stared at our room’s little viewer. The cartridge was Himself’s Accomplice!, a short melodrama with Cosgrove Watt and a boy no one had ever seen before or since. ‘You woke up early,’ Mario said, smiling up from his fly. His bed was made up drum-tight.

I smiled. ‘Turns out I wasn’t the only one.’ ‘You look sad.’

I raised my hand with the NASA glass at Coyle. ‘An unexpected

pleasure, K.D.C.’ ‘Thtithe fickn meth,’ Coyle said.

I put the glass and toothbrush on my dresser and straightened its doily. I picked some clothing up and began separating it by smell into wearable and unwearable. ‘Kyle says Jim Troeltsch tore some of Ortho’s face off trying to pull him off a window his face got glued to,’ Mario said. ‘And then Jim Troeltsch and Mr. Kenkle tried to put toilet tissue on the ripped parts, the way Tall Paul sometimes puts little bits of Kleenex on a shaving cut, but Ortho’s face was a lot worse than a shaving cut, and they used a whole roll, and now Ortho’s face is covered with toilet tissue, and the tissue’s stuck now, and Ortho can’t get it off, and at breakfast Mr. deLint was yelling at Ortho for letting them put toilet tissue on it, and Ortho ran to his and Kyle’s room and locked the door, and Kyle doesn’t have his key since the accident with the whirlpool.’ I helped Mario on with his police lock’s vest and affixed the Velcro nice and tight. Mario’s chest is so fragile-feeling that I could feel his heartbeat’s tremble through the vest and sweatshirt.

Coyle removed the apnea-guard. Strings of white nighttime oral material appeared between his mouth and the guard as he extracted it. He looked to Mario. ‘Tell him the worst part.’ I was watching Coyle very closely to see what he planned to do with the sickening mouthpiece he held. ‘Hey Hal, your phone has messages, and Mike Pemulis came by and asked if you were up and about.’ ‘You haven’t told him the worst part of it,’ Coyle said. ‘Don’t even think about putting that thing down anywhere my bed, Kyle, please.’ ‘I’m holding it away from everything, don’t worry.’ Mario used his tool to zip up the long curved zipper of his backpack. ‘Kyle said there was a problem with a discharge again —’ ‘So I heard,’ I said. ‘— and Kyle says he woke up and Ortho was missing, and Ortho’s bed was missing as well, so he turned on the light —’

Coyle gestured with the appliance: ‘And lo and fucking-capital-B behold.’ ‘— yes and lo,’ Mario said, ‘Ortho’s bed is up near the ceiling of their room. The frame has some way got lifted up and bolted to the ceiling sometime during the night without Kyle hearing it or waking up.’ ‘Until the discharge, that is,’ I said. ‘This is it,’ said Coyle. ‘The tin cans and accusations I’m moving his stuff around are one thing. I’m going to Lateral Alice for a switch like Troeltsch did. This is the straw.’ Mario said ‘And his bed’s up on the ceiling now, still, and if it falls it’s going to go right through the floor and fall in Graham and Petropolis’s room.’ ‘He’s in there right now all mummified in toilet paper, sulking, with his bed hanging overhead, with the door locked, so I can’t even get my apnea- guard-cleaning supplies,’ Coyle said.

I’d heard nothing about Troeltsch apparently switching room- assignments with Trevor Axford. A gigantic wedge of snow slid down a steep part of the roof over our window and fell past the window and hit the ground below with a huge whump. For some reason the fact that something as major as a midterm room-switch could have taken place without my knowing anything about it filled me with dread. There were a few glitters of a possible incipient panic-attack again.

Mario’s bedside table had a tube of salve for his pelvis’s burn, unevenly squeezed. Mario was looking at my face. ‘Is it you’re sad about not getting to play if the Québec players are canceled?’ ‘And then to crown off the whole night he ends up with his face glued to a window,’ Coyle said disgustedly. ‘Frozen,’ I corrected him. ‘Except but now listen to Stice’s explanation.’ ‘Let me guess,’ I said. ‘For the bed hovering.’ Mario looked at Coyle. ‘You said bolted.’ ‘I said presumably bolted is what I said. I said the only rationale that’s

possible is bolts.’

‘Let me guess,’ I said. ‘Let him guess,’ Mario told Coyle. ‘The Darkness thinks ghosts.’ Coyle stood and came toward us. His two eyes were not set quite level in his face. ‘Stice’s explanation that he swore

me to discretion but that was before the bed on the ceiling was he thinks he’s been somehow selected or chosen to get haunted or possessed by some kind of beneficiary or guardian ghost that resides in and/or manifests in ordinary physical objects, that wants to teach The Darkness how to not underestimate ordinary objects and raise his game to like a supernatural level, to help his game.’ One eye was subtly lower than the other, and set at

a different angle. ‘Or hurt somebody else’s,’ I said. ‘Stice is mentally buckling,’ Coyle said, still moving in. I was careful to stay just out of morning-breath range. ‘He keeps staring at things with his temple-veins flexing, trying to exert will on them. He bet me 20 beans he could stand on his desk chair and lift it up at the same time, and then he wouldn’t let me cancel the bet when I got embarrassed for him after half an hour, standing up there flexing his temples.’ I was also keeping a careful eye on the oral appliance. ‘Did you guys hear sausage-analog and fresh-squeezed for breakfast?’ Mario asked again if I were sad.

Coyle said ‘I was down there. Stice’s map was taking the edge off appetites all over the room. Then deLint started in yelling at him.’ He was looking at me oddly. ‘I don’t see what’s so funny about it, man.’ Mario fell backward onto his bed and wriggled into his backpack’s straps with practiced ease.

Coyle said ‘I don’t know if I should go to Schtitt, or Rusk, or what. Or Lateral Alice. What if they haul him off somewhere, and it’s my fault?’ ‘There’s no denying The Dark’s raised his game this fall though.’ ‘There are machine messages on the machine, Hal, too,’ Mario said as I held his hands carefully and pulled him upright. ‘What if it’s the mental buckling that’s raised his game?’ Coyle said. ‘Does it still count as buckling?’ Cosgrove Watt had been one of the very few professional actors Himself ever used. Himself often liked to use rank amateurs; he wanted them simply to read their lines with an amateur’s wooden self-consciousness off cue cards Mario or Disney Leith would hold up well to the side of wherever the character was supposed to be looking. Up until the last phase of his career, Himself had apparently thought the stilted, wooden quality of nonprofessionals helped to strip away the pernicious illusion of realism and

to remind the audience that they were in reality watching actors acting and not people behaving. Like the Parisian-French Bresson he so admired, Himself had no interest in suckering the audience with illusory realism, he said. The apparent irony of the fact that it required non actors to achieve this stilted artificial I’m-only-acting-here quality was one of very few things about Himself’s early projects that truly interested academic critics. But the real truth was that the early Himself hadn’t wanted skilled or believable acting to get in the way of the abstract ideas and technical innovations in the cartridges, and this had always seemed to me more like Brecht than like Bresson. Conceptual and technical ingenuity didn’t much interest entertainment-film audiences, though, and one way of looking at Himself’s abandonment of anticonfluentialism is that in his last several projects he’d been so desperate to make something that ordinary U.S. audiences might 378 find entertaining and diverting and conducive to self-forgetting that he had had professionals and amateurs alike emoting wildly all over the place.

Getting emotion out of either actors or audiences had never struck me as one of Himself’s strengths, though I could remember arguments during which Mario had claimed I didn’t see a lot of what was right there.

Cosgrove Watt was a pro, but he wasn’t very good, and before Himself discovered him, Watt’s career consisted mostly of regional-market commercials on broadcast television. His widest commercial exposure was as the Dancing Gland in a series of spots for a chain of East Coast endocrinology clinics. He’d worn a bulbous white costume, white toupee, and either a ball-and-chain or white tap-shoes, depending on whether he was portraying the Before-Gland or the After-Gland. Himself during one of these commercials had shouted Eureka at our HD Sony and travelled personally all the way to Glen Riddle, Pennsylvania, where Watt lived with his mother and her cats, to recruit him. He used Cosgrove Watt in almost every project for eighteen months. Watt for a time was to Himself as DeNiro was to Scorsese, McLachlin to Lynch, Allen to Allen. And up until Watt’s temporal-lobe problem made his social presence unbearable, Himself had actually put Watt, mother, and cats up in a contiguous suite of what later became prorectors’ rooms off the main E.T.A. tunnel, the Moms acquiescing in this but instructing Orin, Mario, and me never ever to remain in a room alone with Watt.

Accomplice! was one of Watt’s later roles. It is a sad and simple cartridge, and so short that the TP retracked to the film’s beginning in almost no time. Himself’s film opens as a beautifully sad young bus-station male prostitute, fragile and epicene and so blond even his eyebrows and lashes are blond, is approached in the Greyhound coffee shop by a flabby, dissipated-looking old specimen with gray teeth and circumflex eyebrows and obvious temporal-lobe difficulties. Cosgrove Watt plays the depraved older man, who takes the boy home to his lush but somehow scuzzy co-op apartment, in fact the place Himself had rented for O. and the P.G.O.A.T. and had decorated in various gradations of scuz for the interiors of almost all his late projects.

The sad and beautiful Aryan-looking boy agrees to seduction by the dissipated old specimen, but only on the condition that the man wear protection. The boy, who is inarticulate, nevertheless makes this stipulation extremely clear. Safe Sex or No Sex, he stipulates, holding up a familiar foil packet. The hideous old specimen — now in a smoking jacket and ascot of apricot-colored silk, and smoking through a long white FDR-style filter — is offended, thinks the young male prostitute has sized him up as such a depraved and dissipated old specimen that he might well have It, the Human Immuno Virus, he thinks. His thoughts are rendered via animated thought-bubbles, which Himself at that late-middle stage hoped the audience would find at once self-consciously nonillusory and wildly entertaining. Watt’s old specimen is grinning grayly in what he thinks is a pleasant way as he obligingly takes the foil packet and removes his ascot with what he believes to be a sensual flourish… but inside his thought- bubble he’s having temporal-lobe spasms of sadistic rage at the sad blond boy for appearing to size him up as a health risk. The obvious health risk here is referred to, both orally and in the thought-bubble, merely as It. For example: ‘Little bastard thinks I’m so dissipated-looking that I’ve been at this sort of thing so long that I’m likely to have It, does he,’ the old specimen thinks, his thought-bubble going all jagged with rage.

So the flabby old specimen’s now, at only six minutes into the cartridge, Track 510, he’s now taking the sad beautiful boy, in the standard (extravagantly hunched) homosexual way, on the canopied bed of his tacky boudoir: the young male prostitute’s dutifully assumed the hunched, homo- submissive position because the old ponce has showed him he’s wearing the

condom. The young prostitute, who’s shown (hunched) only from the left side during the act itself, seems beautiful in a fragile, skinny-flanked, visible-ribs way, while the old specimen has the slack ass and pointy little breasts of a man made grotesque by years of dissipation. The intercourse scene is done under bright lamps, without any sort of soft focus or light-jazz background score to lighten the atmosphere of clinical detachment.

What the sad blond submissive boy doesn’t know is that the dissipated old specimen had secretly palmed an old-fashioned one-sharp-sided razor blade when he’d gone into his burgundy-tiled bathroom to gargle with cinnamon mouthwash and dab Calvin Klein–brand Pheromonic Musk on his flabby pulse-points, and as he hunches animalistically over the boy, he’s holding the business end of the blade right up next to the sad boy’s anus as he takes his pleasure, so that the blade’s sharp side slices into both condom and erect phallus on each outthrust, the hideous old specimen unmindful of the blood and whatever pain’s involved in the phallic slicing as, still hunched and thrusting, he peels the slit condom off like the skin of a sausage. The young male prostitute, hunched submissively, feels the condom-peel and then the blood and starts struggling like a condemned man, trying to get the condomless bleeding flabby old specimen out and off of him. But the boy’s thin and delicate, and the old man has no trouble holding him down with his soft slack flabby weight until he’s grimaced and grunted and taken his pleasure to its end. It’s apparently an explicit- homosexual-sex-scene convention that whoever takes the submissive hunched position keeps his face turned away from the camera while the dominant partner’s phallus is inside him, and Himself honors this convention, though a self-conscious footnote subtitled along the bottom of the screen rather irritatingly points out that the scene is honoring a convention. The prostitute turns his agonized face around to the camera only after the depraved older homosexual has removed his bloody and deflating post-pleasure phallus, brings his blond-browed face around to his left to face the audience in a mute howl as he collapses onto his delicate chest with his arms out on the satin sheets and his violated bum hiked high in the air, revealing now at the crease of his bum and upper hamstring a vivid purple splotch, more vivid than any bruise and with eight spidery tentacles radiating from it that are, the older man’s horrified thought-bubble reveals, the unmistakable eight-legged-vivid-contusion-blotch sign of

Kaposi’s Sarcoma, that most universal symptom of It, and the boy is sobbing that the depraved old homosexual has made him — the prostitute — a murderer, the boy’s racking sobs making the hiked bum waggle in front of the old specimen’s horrified face as the boy sobs into the chartreuse satin and shrieks ‘Murderer! Murderer!’ over and over, so that almost a third of Accomplice!’s total length is devoted to the racked repetition of this word — way, way longer than is needed for the audience to absorb the twist and all its possible implications and meanings. This was just the sort of issue Mario and I argued about. As I see it, even though the cartridge’s end has both characters emoting out of every pore, Accomplice!’s essential project remains abstract and self-reflexive; we end up feeling and thinking not about the characters but about the cartridge itself. By the time the final repetitive image darkens to a silhouette and the credits roll against it and the old man’s face stops spasming in horror and the boy shuts up, the cartridge’s real tension becomes the question: Did Himself subject us to 500 seconds of the repeated cry ‘Murderer!’ for some reason, i.e. is the puzzlement and then boredom and then impatience and then excruciation and then near-rage aroused in the film’s audience by the static repetitive 1final Ȟ3 of the film aroused for some theoretical-aesthetic end, or is Himself simply an amazingly shitty editor of his own stuff?

It was only after Himself’s death that critics and theorists started to treat this question as potentially important. A woman at U. Cal–Irvine had earned tenure with an essay arguing that the reason-versus-no-reason debate about what was unentertaining in Himself’s work illuminated the central conundra of millennial après-garde film, most of which, in the teleputer age of home-only entertainment, involved the question why so much aesthetically ambitious film was so boring and why so much shitty reductive commercial entertainment was so much fun. The essay was turgid to the point of being unreadable, besides using reference as a verb and 379pluralizing conundrum as conundra.

From my horizontal position on the bedroom floor I could use the TP’s remote to do everything but actually remove and insert cartridges into the drive’s dock. The room’s window was now a translucent clot of snow and steam. InterLace’s Spontaneous Disseminations for New New England were all about weather. With our subscription system, E.T.A. got numerous

large-market Spontaneous tracks. Each track took a slightly different angle on the weather. Each track had a slightly different focus. Remote reports from Boston’s North and South shores, Providence, New Haven, and Hartford-Springfield served to establish a consensus that a terrific amount of snow had fallen and was continuing to fall and blow around and pile up.

Cars were shown abandoned at hasty angles, and we got to see the universal white VW-Bug-shape of snow-buried cars. Black-helmeted gangs of adolescents on snowmobiles were shown prowling New Haven’s streets, clearly up to no good. Pedestrians were shown bent over and floundering; remote-report journalists were shown trying to flounder over to them to get their thoughts and reflections. One floundering reporter in Quincy on the South Shore abruptly disappeared from view except for a hand with a microphone protruding bravely from some sort of sinkhole of snow; the bent backs of technicians were then shown floundering away from the remote camera to his aid. People with snow blowers stood in their own little blizzards. A pedestrian was filmed doing a spectacular pratfall. Cars at all angles in streets were shown with their tires spinning, shuddering in stasis.

One track kept cutting back to a man endlessly trying to brush off a windshield that immediately whitened again behind each brushstroke. A bus sat with its snout in a monster-sized drift. ATHSCME fans atop the wall north of Ticonderoga NNY were shown making horizontal cyclones of snow in the air. Rouged somber women in InterLace studios concurred that this was the worst blizzard to hit the region since B.S. 1998 and the second- worst since B.S. 1993. A man in a wheelchair was shown staring stonily at a two-meter drift across the ramp outside the State House. Satellite maps of east-central O.N.A.N. showed a white formation that was spiralled and shaggy and seemed to have what looked like claws. It was not a Nor’easter.

A hot moist ridge from the Gulf of Mexico and an Arctic cold front had collided over the Concavity. The storm’s satellite photo was superimposed on schemata of the ’98 ass-kicker and shown to be just about identical. An unwelcome old acquaintance was back, a striking woman with black bangs and vivid lipstick said, smiling somberly. Another track iterated: this was not a Nor’easter. It might have been better to say ‘smiling mirthlessly.’ The flat glazed eyes of the man brushing impotently at his windshield seemed to represent an important visual image; different tracks kept returning to his face. He refused to acknowledge journalists or requests for thoughts. His

was the creepy businesslike face of someone carefully picking up glass in the road after an accident in which his decapitated wife’s been impaled on the steering wheel. Another track’s anchor was a beautiful black woman with purple lipstick and what looked like a very tall crew cut. Reports of snow came in from all directions. After a while I stopped keeping track of the number of times the word snow was repeated. All synonyms for snowstorm were rapidly exhausted. Helmetless thrill-seekers on snowmobiles were doing doughnuts in Copley Square downtown. Homeless men hunched nearly drift-covered in doorways, readying snorkels of rolled- up newspaper. Jim Troeltsch, now apparently a resident of B-204, had liked to do a pretty funny impression of an InterLace anchorwoman having an orgasm. One of the thrill-seekers’ snowmobiles spun out of control and plunged into a drift, and the remote camera stayed on the drift for several moments, but nothing emerged. Connecticut’s National Guard Reserve had been ordered to assemble but had not assembled because travel in Connecticut was impossible. Three men in uniforms and gray helmets chased two men in white helmets, all on snowmobiles, for reasons an on- site journalist described as not yet emergent. Remote-site journalists used such words as emergent, individual, alleged, utilize, and developing. But all this impersonal diction was preceded by the anchorperson’s first name, as if the report were part of an intimate conversation. An InterLace delivery-boy was shown delivering recorded cartridges on a snowmobile and was described as plucky. Otis P. Lord had undergone a procedure for the removal of the Hitachi monitor on Thursday, LaMont Chu had said. I had never once ridden a snowmobile, skied, or skated: E.T.A. discouraged them.

DeLint described winter sports as practically getting down on one knee and begging for an injury. The snowmobiles on the viewer all made sounds like little chain-saws that were extra pugnacious to compensate for being so little. There was a poignant shot of a stuck plow in Northampton. ‘Individuals who are not with emergency reasons to travel’ (sic) were being officially discouraged from travelling by a state trooper in a hat with a chinstrap. A Brockton man in a Lands’ End parka took a fall too burlesque to have been unstaged.

I could barely recall the ’98 blizzard. The Academy had been open for only a few months. I remember the edges of the shaved hilltop were still square and steep and striped in sedimentary layers, final construction

delayed by some nasty piece of litigation from the VA hospital below. The storm came barrelling in southeast from Canada in March. Dwight Flechette and Orin and the other players had had to be led to the Lung roped together, single file, Schtitt in the lead carrying a highway flare. A couple photos hung in C.T.’s waiting room. The last boy along the rope disappeared into a forlorn gray whirl. The Lung’s new bubble had had to be taken down and fixed when snow-weight stove it in on one side. The T stopped running. I remember some of the younger players had cried and sworn up and down that the blizzard wasn’t their fault. For days snow churned steadily out of a graphite sky. Himself had sat in a spindle-backed chair, at the same living- room window C.T. now uses for advanced worry, and aimed a series of nondigital cameras at the mounting snow. After years in which his consuming obsession was the establishment of E.T.A., Orin said, Himself had started in with the film-obsession almost immediately after the Academy was up and running. Orin has said the Moms had assumed the film thing was a passing obsession. Himself had seemed interested mostly 380 in the lenses and rasters at first, and in the consequences of their modification. He sat in that chair throughout the whole storm, sipping brandy from a one-handed snifter, his long legs not quite covered by a plaid blanket. His legs had seemed to me almost endlessly long back then. He always seemed to be right on the edge of coming down with something. His record up until then indicated that he remained obsessed with something until he became successful at it, then transferred his obsession to something else. From military optics to annular optics to entrepreneurial optics to tennis-pedagogy to film. In the chair during the blizzard he’d had beside him several different types of camera and a large leather case. The inside of the case was striated with lenses down both sides. He used to let Mario and me put different lenses in our eyes and squint to hold them, imitating Schtitt.

One way of looking at the film-obsession’s endurance is that Himself was never really successful or accomplished at filmmaking. This was something else on which Mario and I had agreed to disagree.

It took almost a year to complete the move from Weston to E.T.A. The Moms had attachments in Weston and she drew things out. I was pretty small. I lay flat on my back on our room’s carpet and tried to recall details

of our home in Weston, twidgeling the TP’s remote with my thumb. I do not have Mario’s head for remembered detail. One dissemination-track simply panned the metro-Boston sky and horizons from atop the Hancock tower.

On the FM band, WYYY was apparently doing its weather-report via mimesis, broadcasting raw static while the student staff doubtless did bongs in celebration of the storm and then went up sliding around the Union’s cerebral rooftop. The Hancock camera’s pan included the sinciput of the M.I.T. Union, its roof’s convolutions filling with snow ahead of the rest of it, creepy filigrees of white against the roof’s deep gray.

Our subdorm room’s only carpet was an oversized corruption of the carpet page from the Lindisfarne Gospels in which you had to look very closely to make out the tiny pornographic scenes in the Byzantine weave surrounding the cross. I’d acquired the carpet years ago during a period of intense interest in Byzantine pornography inspired by what I’d seen as a titillating reference in the O.E.D. I too had moved serially between obsessions, as a child. I adjusted my angle on the carpet. I was trying to align myself along some sort of grain in the world I could barely feel, since Pemulis and I stopped. Meaning the grain, not the world. I realized I could not distinguish my own visual memories of the Weston house from my memories of hearing Mario’s detailed reports of his memories. I remember a late-Victorian three-level on a low quiet street of elms, hyperfertilized lawns, tall homes with oval windows and screen porches. One of the street’s homes had a pineapple finial. Only the street itself was low; the lots were humped up high and the houses so tall the broad street seemed nevertheless constricted, a sort of affluence-flanked defile. It seemed always to be summer or spring. I could remember the Moms’s voice high overhead at a screen-porch door, calling us in as dusk drifted down and leaded fanlights began to light up at homes’ doors in some sort of linear sync. Either our driveway or another driveway flanked with whitewashed stones the shapes of beads or drops. The Moms’s intricate garden in a backyard enclosed by a fencework of trees. Himself on the screen porch, stirring a gin and tonic with his finger. The Moms’s dog S. Johnson, not yet neutered, confined by psychosis in a sort of large fenced pen abutting the garage, running around and around the pen when thunder sounded. The smell of Noxzema: Himself behind Orin in the upstairs bathroom, towering over and down, teaching Orin to shave against the grain, upward. I remember S. Johnson leaping up

on his hind legs and sort of playing the fence with his paws as Mario approached the pen: the rattling chain-link’s pitch. The circle of earth worn bare by S.J.’s orbit in the pen when thunder sounded or planes crossed overhead. Himself sat low in chairs and could cross his legs and still have both feet flat on the floor. He’d hold his chin in his hand while he looked at you. My memories of Weston seemed like tableaux. They seemed more like snapshots than films. A weird isolated memory of summertime gnats knitting the air above the shaggy animal-head of a neighbor’s topiary hedge.

Our own round shrubs trimmed flat as tabletops by the Moms. More horizontals. The chatter of hedge-clippers, their power-cords bright orange.

I had to swallow spit with almost every breath. I remembered climbing with a dawdler’s heavy tread the cement steps up from the street to a gambrel- roofed late-Victorian whose narrow height from the steps gave it the distended look of thick liquid hanging: gingerbread eaves, undulate shingles of weathered red, zinc gutters the Moms’s graduate students came and kept clean. A blue star in the front window and the words BLOCK MOTHER, which had always suggested either a rectangular woman or some type of football-crowd cheer. The inside cool and dim and a smell of Lemon Pledge. I had no visual memories of my mother without white hair; all that varied was the length. A touch-tone phone, with a cord running into the wall, on a horizontal surface in a recessed alcove near the front door. Cork floors and pre-mounted shelving of woody-smelling wood. The chilling 381 framed print of Lang directing Metropolis in 1924. A hulking black chest with strap-hinges of brass. A few of Himself’s old heavy tennis trophies as bookends on the mounted shelving. An étagère filled with old- fashioned magnetic videos in bright adverting boxes, a cluster of blue-and- white delfts on the étagère’s top shelf that had dwindled as one figurine after another got knocked off by Mario, stumbling or shoved. The blue- white chairs with the protective plastic that made your legs sweat. A divan done in some sort of burlapesque Iranian wool dyed to the color of sand mixed with ash — this may have been a neighbor’s divan. Some cigarette burns in the fabric of the divan’s arms. Books, videotapes, kitchen’s cans — all alphabetized. Everything painfully clean. Several spindle-backed captain’s chairs in contrasting fruit-woods. A surreal memory of a steamed lavatory mirror with a knife sticking out of the pane. A massive stereo

television console of whose gray-green eye I was afraid when the television was off. Some of the memories have to be confabulated or dreamed — the Moms would never have had a divan with burns in it.

A picture window east, the direction of Boston, with claret-colored figures and a blue sun all suspended in a web of lead. The candy-colored summer sunrise through that window as I watched television in the A.M.

The tall thin quiet man, Himself, with his razor-burn and bent glasses and chinos too short, whose neck was slender and shoulders sloped, who slumped in candied east-window sunlight with his tailbone supported by windowsills, meekly stirring a glass of something with his finger while the Moms stood there telling him she’d long-since abandoned any reasonable hope that he could hear what she was telling him — this silent figure, of whom I still remember mostly endless legs and the smell of Noxzema shave-cream, seems, still, impossible to reconcile with the sensibility of something like Accomplice! It was impossible to imagine Himself conceiving of sodomy and razors, no matter how theoretically. I lay there and could almost remember Orin telling me something almost moving that Himself had once told him. Something to do with Accomplice! The memory hung somewhere just out of conscious reach, and its tip-of-the-tongue inaccessibility felt too much like the preface to another attack. I accepted it: I could not remember.

Off down the Weston street a church with an announcement-board in the grass out front — white plastic letters on a slotted black surface — and at least once Mario and I stood watching a goatish man change the letters and thus the announcement. One of the first occasions where I remember reading something involved the announcement-board announcing:

LIFE IS LIKE TENNIS THOSE WHO SERVE BEST USUALLY WIN

with the letters all spaced far out like that. A big fresh-cement-colored church, liberal with glass, denomination not recalled, but built in what was, in the B.S. 80’s probably, modern — a parabolic poured-concrete shape billowed and peaked like a cresting wave. A suggestion in it of some paranormal wind somewhere that could make concrete billow and pop like a tucking sail.

Our own subdorm room now has three of those old Weston captain’s chairs whose backs dent your spine if you don’t fit it carefully between two spindles. We have an unused wicker basket for laundry on which are stacked some corduroy spectation-pillows. Floor plans for Hagia Sophia and S. Simeon at Qal’at Si’man on the wall over my bed, the really prurient part of Consummation of the Levirates over the chairs, also from the old interest in Byzantinalia. Something about the stiff and dismantled quality of maniera greca porn: people broken into pieces and trying to join, etc. At the foot of Mario’s bed a surplus-store trunk for his own film equipment and a canvas director’s chair where he’s always laid out his police lock, lead weights, and vest for the night. A fiberboard stand for the compact TP and viewer, and a stenographer’s chair for using the TP to type. Five total chairs in a room where no one ever sits in a chair. As in all the subdorm rooms and hallways, a guilloche ran around our walls half a meter from the ceiling.

New E.T.A.s always drove themselves bats counting their room’s guilloche’s interwoven circles. Our room had 811 and truncated bits of -12 and -13, two left halves stuck like open parentheses up in the southwest corner. Between the ages of eleven and thirteen I’d had a plaster knock-off of a lewd Constantine frieze, the emperor with a hyperemic organ and an impure expression, hung by two hooks from the guilloche’s lower border.

Now I couldn’t for the life of me recall what I’d done with the frieze, or which Byzantine seraglio the original had decorated. There had been a time when data like these were instantly available.

The Weston living room had had an early version of Himself’s full- spectrum cove lighting and at one end an elevated fieldstone fireplace with a big copper hood that made a wonderful ear-splitting drum-head for wooden spoons, with memories of some foreign adult I didn’t recognize grinding at her temples and pleading Do Stop. The Moms’s jungle of Green Babies had spread out into the room from another corner, the plants’ pots on stands of various heights, hanging in nests of twine suspended from clamps, arrayed at eye-height from projecting trellises of white-painted iron, all in the otherworldly glow of a white-hooded tube of ultraviolet light hung with thin chains from the ceiling. Mario can recall violet-lit laces of ferns and the wet meaty gloss of rubber-tree leaves.

And a coffee table of green-shot black marble, too heavy to move, on whose corner Mario knocked out a tooth after what Orin swore up and

down was an accidental shove.

Mrs. Clarke’s varicotic calves at the stove. The way her mouth overhead would disappear when the Moms reorganized something in the kitchen. My eating mold and the Moms’s being very upset that I’d eaten it — this memory was of Orin’s telling the story; I had no childhood memory of eating fungus.

My trusty NASA glass still rested on my chest, rising when my rib cage rose. When I looked down my own length, the glass’s round mouth was a narrow slot. This was because of my optical perspective. There was a concise term for optical perspective that I again could not quite make resolve.

What made it hard really to recall our old house’s living room was that so many of its appointments were now in the living room of the Headmaster’s House, the same and yet altered, and by more than rearrangement. The onyx coffee table Mario had fallen against (specular is what refers to optical perspective; it came to me after I stopped trying to recall it) now supported compact disks and tennis magazines and a cello- shaped vase of dried eucalyptus, and the red-steel stand for the family Xmas tree, when in season. The table had been a wedding gift from Himself’s mother, who died of emphysema shortly before Mario’s surprise birth. Orin reports she’d looked like an embalmed poodle, all neck-tendons and tight white curls and eyes that were all pupil. The Moms’s birth-mother had died in Québec of an infarction when she — the Moms — was eight, her father during her sophomore year at McGill under circumstances none of us knew.

The hydrant-sized Mrs. Tavis was still alive and somewhere in Alberta, the original L’Islet potato farm now part of the Great Concavity and forever lost.

Orin and Bain et al. at Family Trivia during that terrible first year’s blizzard, Orin imitating the Moms’s high breathy ‘My son ate this! God, please!,’ never tiring of it.

Orin had liked also to recreate for us the spooky kyphotic hunch of Himself’s mother, in her wheelchair, beckoning him closer with a claw, the way she seemed always caved in over and around her chest as if she’d been speared there. An air of deep dehydration had hung about her, he said, as if she osmosized moisture from whoever came near. She spent her last few years living in the Marlboro St. brownstone they’d had before Mario and I

were born, tended by a gerontologic nurse Orin said always wore the expression of every post-office mug shot you’ve ever seen. When the nurse was off, a small silver bell was apparently hung from an arm of the old lady’s wheelchair, to be rung when she could not breathe. A cheery silver tinkle announcing asphyxiation upstairs. Mrs. Clarke would still pale whenever Mario asked about her.

It’s become easier to see the climacteric changes in the Moms’s own body since she began confining herself more and more to the Headmaster’s House. This occurred after Himself’s funeral, but in stages — the gradual withdrawal and reluctance to leave the grounds, and the signs of aging. It is hard to notice what you see every day. None of the physical changes has been dramatic — her nerved-up dancer’s legs becoming hard, stringy, a shrinking of the hips and a girdly thickening at the waist. Her face settles a little lower on her skull than it did four years ago, with a slight bunching under the chin and an emerging potential for something pruny happening around her mouth, in time, I thought I could see.

The word that best connoted why the glass’s mouth looked slotty was probably foreshortened.

The Q.R.S. Infantilist would no doubt join the old grief-therapist in asking how watching one’s Moms begin to age makes you feel inside.

Questions like these become almost koans: you have to lie when the truth is Nothing At All, since this appears as a textbook lie under the therapeutic model. The brutal questions are the ones that force you to lie.

Either our old kitchen or a neighbor’s kitchen panelled with walnut and hung with copper pâté-molds and herbal sprigs. An unidentified woman — not Avril or Mrs. Clarke — standing in that kitchen in snug cherry slacks, loafers over bare feet, waggling a mixing spoon, laughing at something, a long-tailed comet of flour on her cheek.

It occurred to me then with some force that I didn’t want to play this afternoon, even if some sort of indoor exhibition-meet came off. Not even neutral, I realized. I would on the whole have preferred not to play. What Schtitt might have to say to that, v. what Lyle would say. I was unable to stay with the thought long enough to imagine Himself’s response to my refusal to play, if any.

But this was the man who made Accomplice!, whose sensibility informed the hetero-hardcore Möbius Strips and the sado-periodontal Fun

with Teeth and several other projects that were just thoroughgoingly nasty and sick.

Then it occurred to me that I could walk outside and contrive to take a spill, or squeeze out the window on the rear staircase of HmH and fall several meters to the steep embankment below, being sure to land on the bad ankle and hurt it, so I’d not have to play. That I could carefully plan out a fall from the courts’ observation transom or the spectators’ gallery of whatever club C.T. and the Moms sent us to to help raise funds, and fall so carefully badly I’d take out all the ankle’s ligaments and never play again.

Never have to, never get to. I could be the faultless victim of a freak accident and be knocked from the game while still on the ascendant.

Becoming the object of compassionate sorrow rather than disappointed sorrow.

I couldn’t stay with this fantastic line of thought long enough to parse out whose disappointment I was willing to cripple myself to avoid (or forgo).

And then out of nowhere it returned to me, the moving thing Himself had said to Orin. This was concerning ‘adult’ films, which from what I’ve seen are too downright sad to be truly nasty, or even really entertainment, though the adjective adult is kind of a misnomer.

Orin had told me that once he and Smothergill, Flechette, and I think Penn’s older brother had gotten hold of a magnetic video of some old hardcore X-film — The Green Door or Deep Throat, one of those old chestnuts of cellulite and jism. There were excited plans to convene in V.R.3 and watch the thing in secret after Lights Out. The Viewing Rooms at that point had broadcast televisions and magnetic VCR-devices, instructional magvids from Galloway and Braden, etc. Orin and co. were all around fifteen at the time, bombed by their own glands — they were pop- eyed at the prospect of genuine porn. There were rules about videos’ suitability for viewing in the Honor Code, but Himself was not noted for his discipline, and Schtitt didn’t yet have deLint — the first generation of E.T.A.s did pretty much as they pleased off-court, as long as they were discreet.

Nevertheless, word about this ‘adult’ film got around, and somebody — probably Mary Esther Thode’s sister Ruth, then a senior and insufferable — ratted the boys’ viewing-plans out to Schtitt, who took the matter to

Himself. Orin said he was the only one Himself called into the Headmaster’s office, which in that era had only one door, which Himself asked Orin to close. Orin recalled seeing none of the unease that always accompanied Himself’s attempts at stern discipline. Instead Himself invited Orin to sit and gave him a lemon soda and stood facing him, leaning back slightly so that the front edge of his desk supported him at the tailbone.

Himself took his glasses off and massaged his closed eyes delicately — almost treasuringly, his old eyeballs — in the way Orin knew signified that Himself was ruminative and sad. One or two soft interrogatives brought the whole affair out in the open. You could never lie to Himself; somehow you just never had the heart. Whereas Orin made almost an Olympic sport of lying to the Moms. Anyway, Orin quickly confessed to everything.

What Himself said then moved him, Orin told me. Himself told Orin he wasn’t going to forbid them to watch the thing if they really wanted to. But just please to keep it discreet, just Bain and Smothergill and Orin’s immediate circle, nobody younger, and nobody whose parents might hear about it, and for God’s sake don’t let your mother get wind. But that Orin was old enough to make his own entertainment-decisions, and if he decided he wanted to watch the thing…. And so on.

But Himself said that if Orin wanted his personal, fatherly as opposed to headmasterly, take on it, then he, Orin’s father — though he wouldn’t forbid it — would rather Orin didn’t watch a hard-porn film yet. He said this with such reticent earnestness there was no way Orin couldn’t ask him how come. Himself felt his jaw and pushed his glasses up several times and shrugged and finally said he supposed he was afraid of the film giving Orin the wrong idea about having sex. He said he’d personally prefer that Orin wait until he’d found someone he loved enough to want to have sex with and had had sex with this person, that he’d wait until he’d experienced for himself what a profound and really quite moving thing sex could be, before he watched a film where sex was presented as nothing more than organs going in and out of other organs, emotionless, terribly lonely. He said he supposed he was afraid that something like The Green Door would give Orin an impoverished, lonely idea of sexuality.

What poor old O. claimed to have found so moving was Himself’s assumption that O. was still cherry. What moved me to feel sorry for Orin was that it seemed pretty obvious that that had nothing to do with what

Himself was trying to talk about. It was the most open I’d ever heard of Himself being with anybody, and it seemed terribly sad to me, somehow, that he’d wasted it on Orin. I’d never once had a conversation nearly that open or intimate with Himself. My most intimate memory of Himself was the scratchiness of his jaw and the smell of his neck when I fell asleep at supper and he carried me upstairs to bed. His neck was thin but had a good meaty warm smell; I now for some reason associate it with the odor of Coach Schtitt’s pipe.

I tried briefly to picture Ortho Stice hoisting his bunk up and bolting it to the ceiling without waking Coyle. Our room’s door remained ajar from Mario’s exit with Coyle to find someone with a master key. Yardguard and Wagenknecht’s heads popped in briefly and urged me to come have a look at The Darkness’s ruined map and withdrew when they got no response.

The second floor was pretty quiet; most of them were still dawdling at breakfast, awaiting some announcement on the weather and Québecois squads. Snow hit the windows with a gritty sound. The angle of the wind had made a kind of whistle out of one corner of the subdorm building, and the whistling came and went.

Then I heard John Wayne’s stride in the hall outside, light and even and easy on floors, the stride of a guy with stellar calf-development. I heard his low sigh. Then, though the door was too far behind me to see, for a moment or two I could somehow tell for sure that John Wayne’s head was inside the open door. I could feel it clearly, almost painfully. He was looking down at me lying there on the Lindisfarne carpet. There was none of the gathering tension of a person deciding whether or not to speak. I could feel my throat’s equipment move when I swallowed. John Wayne and I never had much to say to one another. There wasn’t even hostility between us. He ate dinner with us at HmH every so often because he and the Moms were tight.

The Moms made little attempt to disguise her attachment to Wayne. Now his breathing behind me was light and very even. No waste, complete 382utilization of each breath.

Of us three, it was Mario who had spent the most time with Himself, sometimes travelling with him for location-work. I had no idea what they spoke about together, or how openly. None of us had ever pressed Mario to say much about it. It occurred to me to wonder why this was so.

I decided to get up but then did not in fact get up. Orin was convinced that Himself was a virgin when he met the Moms in his late thirties. I find this pretty hard to believe. Orin will also grant that there’s no doubt Himself was faithful to the Moms right up to the end, that his attachment to Orin’s fiancée was not sexual. I had a sudden and lucid vision of the Moms and John Wayne locked in a sexual embrace of some kind. John Wayne had been involved with the Moms sexually since roughly the second month after his arrival. They were both expatriates. I hadn’t yet been able to identify a strong feeling one way or the other about the liaison, nor about Wayne himself, except for admiring his talent and total focus. I did not know whether Mario knew of the liaison, to say nothing of poor C.T.

It was impossible for me to imagine Himself and the Moms being explicitly sexual together. I bet most children have this difficulty where their parents are concerned. Sex between the Moms and C.T. I imagined as both frenetic and weary, with a kind of doomed timeless Faulknerian feel to it. I imagined the Moms’s eyes open and staring blankly at the ceiling the whole time. I imagined C.T. never once shutting up, talking around and around whatever was taking place between them. My coccyx had gone numb from the pressure of the floor through the thin carpet. Bain, graduate students, grammatical colleagues, Japanese fight-choreographers, the hairy- shouldered Ken N. Johnson, the Islamic M.D. Himself had found so especially torturing — these encounters were imaginable but somehow generic, mostly a matter of athleticism and flexibility, different configurations of limbs, the mood one more of cooperation than complicity or passion. I tended to imagine the Moms staring expressionlessly at ceilings throughout. The complicit passion would have come after, probably, with her need to be sure the encounter was hidden. Peterson- allusions notwithstanding, I wondered about some hazy connection between this passion for hiddenness and the fact that Himself had made so many films titled Cage, and that the amateur player he became so attached to was the veiled girl, Orin’s love. I wondered whether it was possible to lie supine and throw up without aspirating vomit or choking. The plumed spout of a whale. The tableau of John Wayne and my mother in my imagination was not very erotic. The image was complete and sharply focused but seemed stilted, as if composed. She reclines against four pillows, at an angle between seated and supine, staring upward, motionless and pale. Wayne,

slim and brown-limbed, smoothly muscled, also completely motionless, lies over her, his untanned bottom in the air, his blank narrow face between her breasts, his eyes unblinking and his thin tongue outthrust like a stunned lizard’s. They stay just like that.

She wasn’t dumb — she figured it was likely that they’d let her loose just to see where she’d go.

She went home. She went to the House. She got one of the last trains before they closed the T, probably. It took forever to get from Comm. Ave. down to Enfield Marine in her clogs and skirt in the snow, and melt soaked the veil and made it adhere to the features below. She’d been close to removing the veil to get away from the outside-linebacker of a federal lady anyway. She looked now just like a linen-pale version of what she really looked like. But there was no one about in the snow. She figured if she could speak with Pat M. Pat M. might be prevailed upon to put her in quarantine with Clenette and Yolanda, not let in no law. She could tell Pat about the wheelchairs, try to convince her to dismantle the ramp. The visibility was so bad she didn’t see it til she cleared the Shed, the Middlesex County Sheriff’s car, fiercely snow-tired, lights going bluely, parked idling in the roadlet outside the ramp, wipers on Occasional, a uniform at the wheel absently feeling his face.

He says ‘I’m Mikey, alcoholic and addict and a sick fuck, you know what I’m saying?’ And they laugh and shout out ‘You definitely are’ as he stands there rocking the podium slightly, blurred a bit through the linen, smearing one side of his face with a laborer’s hand as he tries to think what to say. It’s another of these round-robin-speaker deals, each speaker picking the next from the smoky lunchtime crowd, jogging up to the fiberboard podium trying to think what to say, and how, for the five minutes each is allotted.

The chairperson at the table up by the podium has a clock and a novelty- shop gong. ‘Well,’ he says, “well so I seen some of the old Mikey come back out yesterday, you know what I’m saying? Fucking scared me to see it. What it was, I was going to take my kid down to the lanes and bowl a couple. With my kid. Who he just got the cast off. So I’m all happy and whatnot, got the

day off, see the kid. Quality sober time with the kid. So on and so forth. So I’m all on the happy wagon and like that, about seeing the kid, you know what I’m saying? So, what, so I call up my cunt of a sister. He’s living back with them, with Ma and my sister, so I’m calling up my sister to see can I come get the kid at such-and-such time and whatnot. Because you know how the judge said I got to get one of them’s fucking consent to even see my kid. You know what I’m saying? Because of the restraining order on the old Mikey, from before. I got to get their permission. And I, what, accept that, I say OK, so I’m calling up all accepting and on the happy wagon for my sister to consent, and she out of the goodness of her heart she makes me wait while she says she’s got to check it with Ma. And they consent, finally.

And I, what, accept that, you know what I’m saying? And I say I was going to be there at such-and-such time and whatnot, and my sister says ain’t I even going to say thank you? Like with the attitude, you know what I’m saying? And I say ’t the fuck, what, you want a fucking medal for letting me see my own kid? And the cunt hangs up on me. Oh. Fucking oh. Ever since the judge with the order, it’s with the attitude over there, the cunt and Ma both. So after she just hangs up on me a little of the old Mikey I think starts to come out and I go over there and yes all right I got to be honest I do I park on the grass of their fucking lawn, and I go up and go up and I see her and I’m like Fuck you you cunt, and Ma’s in the hall behind her in the door, I go Fucking hang up on me why don’t you, you should go for some fucking counselling you know what I’m saying? And they don’t neither one of them like that verbal comment too much, right? The cunt almost starts laughing and goes, like, I’m telling her to go for counseling?’ Crowd-laughter. ‘I mean I ain’t exactly coming over there with long-term sobriety, right?

And I accept that. But the cunt’s got the hook on the door and she’s going Who the fuck are you to be telling me to go for fucking counselling after the sick fucking little like stunt you and that bimbo pulled on that kid who only just now even got the cast off? Oh, and no sign of the fucking kid anywhere. Just her and Ma through the screen door, all over the place with the attitude. And now they tell me to get the fuck off their porch, No they tell me, as in like Permission Denied, consent to see my own kid fucking refused. And the cunt still in her fucking bathrobe after noon, and Ma behind her half in the bag already and hanging on to the fucking wall. You

know what I’m saying? My serenity’s like: See yaa! And I say up boat- ayouse’s asses, I’m here for my goddamn kid. And now my sister says she’s going for the phone, and Ma’s saying The fuck, get the fuck out, Mikey.

And plus did I mention no sign of the kid, and I ain’t to even like touch the screen door, not without consent. And I’m wanting to fucking kill somebody here, you know what I’m saying? And my sister’s getting the antenna out on the phone, and so I go OK I’m fucking leaving, but I like grab my balls at the both of them and go Eat me the boatayouse, you know what I’m saying? Cause now it’s the old Mikey back, and now I got with the attitude now, also. I’m wanting to light my cunt of a sister up so bad I can’t hardly see to get the truck off the lawn and leave. But and so and but so I’m driving back home, and I’m so mad I all of a sudden try and pray.

And I try and pray, driving along and whatnot, and it comes to me I see irregarding of their fucked-up attitude I still need to go back and apologize irregardless, for grabbing my balls at them, cause that’s old fucking behavior. I see for my own sobriety’s sake I need to go back and try and say I’m sorry. The thought of it just about makes me puke, you know what I’m — but I go back and pull the truck up out front on the street and pray and go back up on the porch, and I fucking apologize, and I go to my sister Please can I at least see the kid to see the cast off, and the cunt goes Fuck you, get the fuck out, we don’t accept your fucking apology. And no sign of Ma, and the fucking kid there’s no sign of him, so I got to accept her word and don’t even know for sure if the cast is even off. But why I needed to share I think is it scared me. I scared me, you know what I’m saying? I was at the counsellor’s after and I told him I go I got to get some kind of hold on this fucking temper or I’m going to end up right back in front of the fucking judge for lighting somebody up again, you know what I’m saying? And God fucking forbid it should be somebody that’s in my family, because I been that route once too many times already. And I go like Am I nuts, Dr., or what? Do I got a like death-wish or what? You know what I’m saying?

The cast just only now finally comes off and I’m wanting to light up the fucking cunt that’s got to consent I should get closer than a hundred m.’s to the kid? Is it like I’m trying to set myself up for a drink or what exactly is it with this spring-loaded temper, if I’m sober? The temper and judge is why I fucking got sober in the first place. So what the fuck is this? Well fuck me.

I’m just grateful I got some of that out. It’s been up in my head, renting

space, you know what I’m saying? I see Vinnie’s getting ready to fucking gong me. I want to hear from Tommy E. back there against the wall. Yo Tommy! What are you, spanking the hog back there or what? But I’m just glad to be here. I just wanted to get some of that shit out.’

The man’s pants’ crease was gone at the knee and his Cardin topcoat looked slept in. ‘It was good of you to grant me an easement.’ Pat M. tried to recross her legs and shrugged. ‘You said you weren’t here professionally.’ ‘Good of you to believe me.’ The Assistant District Attorney for Suffolk County’s 4th Circuit up on the near North Shore’s hat was a good dress Stetson with a feather in the band. He held it up in his lap by the brim and slowly rotated it by moving his fingers along the brim. He’d re-crossed his legs twice. ‘We met you and Mars at the Marblehead Regatta for the McDonald’s House thing for children, not this summer but either the sum —’ ‘I know who you are.’ Pat’s husband wasn’t a celebrity but knew a lot of local celebrities, from the mint-reconditioned-sports-car upscale network around Boston. ‘Well it’s good of you. I’m here about one of your residents.’ ‘But not professionally,’ Pat said. It wasn’t a question or verification.

She was cool steel when it came to protecting the residents and House.

Then back home in her own home she was a shattered husk of a wreck. ‘Frankly I’m not sure why I am here. You’re just down the hill from the hospital. I’ve been up at Saint Elizabeth’s off and on for three days. Perhaps I need to simply air this. The 5th District boys — the P.D.s — speak well of the place. Your House here. Perhaps I need simply to share this, to work up the nerve. My sponsor’s no help. He’s simply said do it if you want to have any hope of things getting better.’ Anything less than a combination thoroughgoing professional and AA- longtimer would have at least hiked an eyebrow at one of the most powerful and remorseless constables in three counties saying sponsor.

383‘It’s Phob-Comp-Anon,’ the A.D.A. said. ‘I went through Choices last winter and have been working a program of recovery in Phob-Comp- Anon a day at a time to the best of my ability ever since then.’

‘I see.’ ‘It’s Tooty,’ the A.D.A. said. He did a pause with his eyes closed and then smiled, still with his eyes closed. ‘It is, rather, me, and my enmeshment-issues with Tooty’s… condition.’ Phob-Comp-Anon was a decade-old 12-Step splinter from Al-Anon, for codependency-issues surrounding loved ones who were cripplingly phobic or compulsive, or both. ‘It’s a long story and not a particularly interesting one, I’m sure,’ the A.D.A. said. ‘Suffice to say that Tooty’s been in torment over some oral- dental-hygienic-violation issues that have their roots we’re discovering in some issues from a childhood whose dysfunctionality we — well, which she’d been in denial about for quite some time. It doesn’t matter what. My program’s my own. The hiding the car keys, the cutting off her credit with different dentists, the checking the wastebaskets for new brush-wrappers five times an hour — my unmanageability’s my own, and I’m doing what I can, day by day, to let go and detach with love.’

‘I think I understand.’

‘I’m working Nine, now.’ Pat said ‘The Ninth Step.’ The A.D.A. reversed the hat’s rotation by moving his fingers in the opposite direction along the brim. ‘I’m trying to make direct amends to whosoever my Fourth- and Eighth- Step work’s revealed I’ve harmed, except in cases where to do so would injure them or others.’ A tiny spiritual slip from Pat in the form of a patronizing smile. ‘I have a nodding acquaintance with Nine myself.’ The A.D.A. was barely there, his eyes fixed and dilated. The remorselessly ingathered eyebrow-angle Pat had always seen in his photos was completely reversed. The brows now formed a little peaked roof of pathos. ‘One of your residents,’ he said. ‘A Mr. Gately, Court-Remanded out of the 5th Circuit, Peabody I believe. Or Staff counselor, alumni, some status.’ Pat made a kind of exaggerated innocent trying-to-place-the-name-type face.

The A.D.A. said ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m aware of your constraints. I want nothing from you on him. It’s him I’ve been up at Saint Elizabeth’s to see.’

Pat allowed herself one slightly flared nostril at this news.

The A.D.A. leaned forward, hat rotating between his calves, elbows on knees in the odd defecatory posture men used to try to communicate earnestness in their sharing. ‘I’m told — I owe the — Mr. Gately — an amend. I need to make an amend to Mr. Gately.’ He looked up. ‘You too — this remains within these walls, as if it were my anonymity. All right?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘It doesn’t matter what for. I blamed the — I’ve harbored a resentment, against this Gately, concerning an incident I’d considered responsible for making Tooty’s phobia reflare. It doesn’t matter. The specifics, or his culpability or exposure to prosecution in the incident — I’ve come to believe these don’t matter. I’ve harbored this resentment. The kid’s picture’s been up on my Priority-board with the pictures of far more objectively important threats to the public weal. I’ve been biding my time, waiting to get him. This latest incident — no, don’t say it, you needn’t say a thing — seemed like just the opening. My last chance went federal and then fizzled.’ Pat allowed herself a very slightly puzzled forehead.

The man waved the hat. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ve hated, hated this man.

You know that Enfield’s Suffolk County. This incident with the Canadian assault, the alleged firearm, the witnesses who can’t depose because of their own exposure…. My sponsor, my entire Group — they say if I act on the resentment I’m doomed. I’ll get no relief. It won’t help Tooty. Tooty’s lips will still be white pulp from the peroxide, her enamel in tatters from the constant irrational brushing and brushing and brushing and —’ he clamped his fine clean hand over his mouth and produced a high-pitched noise that frankly gave Pat the howlers, his right eyelid twitching.

He took several breaths. ‘I need to let it go. I’ve come to believe that.

Not just the prosecution — that’s the easy part. I’ve already tossed the file, though whatever civil liability the — Mr. Gately might face is another matter, not my concern. It’s so damnably ironic. The man’s going to two- step out of at the very least a probation-violation and prosecution on all his old highly convictable charges because I have to pitch the case, for the sake of my own recovery, I, who wanted nothing so much as to see this man locked down in a cell with some psychopathic cellmate for the rest of his natural life, who shook my fist at the ceiling and vowed —’ and again the noise, this time muffled by the fine hat and so less well-muffled, his shoes

pounding a little on the carpet in rage so that Pat’s dogs raised their heads and looked quizzically at him, and the epileptic one had a very small loud- noise seizure. ‘I hear you saying this is very hard but you’ve decided what you need to do.’ ‘Worse,’ the A.D.A. said, blotting his brow with an unfolded handkerchief. ‘I have to make an amend, my sponsor’s said. If I want the growth that promises real relief. I have to make direct amends, put out my hand and say that I’m sorry and ask the man’s forgiveness for my own failure to forgive. This is the only way I’ll be able to forgive him. And I can’t detach with love from Tooty’s phobic compulsion until I’ve forgiven the b— the man I’ve blamed in my heart.’ Pat looked him in the eye. ‘Of course I can’t say I’ve tossed the Canadian case’s file, I needn’t go that far they say. That would expose me to conflict of interest — the irony — and could hurt Tooty, if my position’s threatened. I’ve been told I can simply let him simmer on that until time passes and nothing moves forward.’ He raised his own eyes. ‘Which means you cannot tell anyone either. Declining to prosecute for personal spiritual reasons — the office — it would be hard for others to understand. This is why I’ve come to you in explicit confidence.’ ‘I hear your request and I’ll honor it.’ ‘But listen. I can’t do it. Cannot. I’ve sat outside that hospital room saying the Serenity Prayer over and over and praying for willingness and thinking of my own spiritual interests and believing this amend is my Higher Power’s will for my own growth and I haven’t been able to go in. I go and sit paralyzed outside the room for several hours and drive home and pry Tooty away from the sink. It can’t go on. I have to look that rotten — no, evil, I’m convinced in my heart, that son of a bitch is evil and deserves to be removed from the community. I have to walk in there and extend my hand and tell him I’ve wished him ill and blamed him and ask for forgiveness — him —if you knew what sick, twisted, sadistically evil and sick thing he did to us, to her — and ask him for forgiveness. Whether he forgives or not is not the issue. It’s my own side of the street I need to

clean.’ ‘It sounds very, very hard,’ Pat said.

The fine hat was almost spinning between the man’s calves, the pantcuffs of which had been pulled up in the defecatory forward lean to reveal socks that weren’t, it seemed, both quite the same texture of wool.

The mismatched socks spoke to Pat’s heart more than anything else. ‘I don’t even know why I came here,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t simply leave again and drive home. Yesterday she’d been at her tongue with one of those old NoCoat LinguaScraper appliances until it bled. I can’t go home and look on that again without having cleaned house.’

‘I hear you.’

‘And you were just down the hill.’ ‘I understand.’ ‘I don’t expect help or counsel. I already believe I have to do it. I’ve accepted the injunction to do it. I believe I have no choice. But I can’t do it.

I haven’t been able to do it.’ ‘Willing, maybe.’ ‘Haven’t yet been willing. Yet. I wish to emphasize yet.’

20 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT IMMEDIATELY PRE-FUNDRAISER-EXHIBITION-FÊTE GAUDEAMUS IGITUR

Usually, part of the experience of having the place you live in throw a gala is watching different people arrive for the festivities — the Warshavers, the Gartons and Peltasons and Prines, the Chins, the Middlebrooks and Gelbs, an incidental Lowell, the Buckmans in their claret-colored Volvo driven by their silent grown son who you never see except when he’s driving Kirk and Binnie Buckman someplace. Dr. Hickle and his creepy niece. The Chawafs and Heavens. The Reehagens. The palsied and megawealthy Mrs. Warshaver with her pair of designer canes.

The Donagan brothers from Svelte Nail. But usually we never get to see them arriving, the friends and patrons of E.T.A., for the Fundraising exhibition and gala. Usually while they’re arriving and getting greeted by Tavis we’re all down in the lockers, dressing and stretching, getting ready to exhibit. Getting shaved and taped by Loach, etc.

It must usually be an unusual occasion for the guests, too, because for the first few hours they’re there to watch us play — they’re all audience — then at some point with the last couple matches winding down the guys in white jackets with trays start appearing in Comm.-Ad., and the gala starts, and then it’s the guests who become the participants and performers.

Dressing and stretching, wrapping grips with Gauze-Tex or filling a pouch with fuller’s earth (Coyle, Freer, Stice, Traub) or sawdust (Wagenknecht, Chu), getting taped, those in puberty getting shaved and taped. A ritual. Even the conversation, usually, such as it is, has a timeless ceremonial aspect. John Wayne hunched as always on the bench before his locker with his towel like a hood over his head, running a coin back and forth over the backs of his fingers. Shaw pinching the flesh between his thumb and first finger, acupressure for a headache. Everyone had gone into their like autopilot ritual. Possalthwaite’s sneakers were pigeon-toed under a stall door. Kahn was trying to spin a tennis ball on his finger like a basketball. At the sink, Eliot Kornspan was blowing out his sinuses with hot water; no one else was anywhere near the sink. A certain number of hysterical pre-competition rumors about the Québec Jr. Team and the severity of the weather circulated and were refuted and shifted antigens and returned. You could hear the high-register end of the wind even down here.

The Csikszentmihalyi kid was doing a kind of piaffer in place, his knees hitting his chest, stretching his hip-flexors out. Troeltsch sat up against his locker near Wayne, wearing a disconnected headset and broadcasting his own match in advance. There were fart-accusations and -denials. Rader snapped a towel at Wagenknecht, who liked to stand for long periods of time bent at the waist with his head against his knees. Arslanian sat very still in a corner, blindfolded in what was either an ascot or a very fey necktie, his head cocked in the attitude of the blind. It was unclear whether B squads would even get to play; no one was sure how many courts the M.I.T. Union had inside. Rumors flew this way and that. Michael Pemulis was nowhere to be seen since early this A.M., at which time Anton Doucette said he’d seen Pemulis quote ‘lurking’ out by the West House dumpsters looking quote ‘anxiously depressed.’ Then a small but univocal cheer went up from some of the players when Otis P. Lord appeared at the door, his cadaverous dad escorting him, O.P.L. out of post-op and pale but looking his old self, with just a thin little choker-

width bandage of gauze around his neck from the monitor’s removal and an odd ellipse of dry red skin around his mouth and nostrils. He came in and shook a few hands and used the stall next to Postal Weight and left; he wasn’t playing today.

J. L. Struck was applying an astringent to areas of his jaw.

An hysterical rumor that the Québec players had been spotted coming down a ramp out of a charter-bus in the main lot and were by all appearances not the Québec J.D.C. and -W.C. squads but some sort of Special-Olympicish Québec adult wheelchair -tennis contingent — this rumor flew wildly around the locker room and then died out when a couple of the sub-14’s who burned nervous energy by scampering around checking rumors scampered out and up the stairs to check the rumor and failed to return.

Across the wall on the Female side we could easily hear Thode and Donni Stott invoking Camilla, goddess of speed and light step. Thode had had an hysterical tantrum after breakfast because Poutrincourt hadn’t showed for the Females’ pre-match Staff thing and looked to be AWOL.

Loach et al. had outfitted Ted Schacht with a complex knee-brace with jointed aluminum struts down both sides and a coin-sized hole in the elastic over the kneecap for dermal ventilation, and Schacht was lumbering around between the stalls and the locker with his arms straight out and his weight on his heels pretending to walk like Frankenstein. Several people talked to themselves at their lockers. Barry Loach was down on one knee shaving Hal’s left ankle for tape. A couple of us remarked how Hal wasn’t eating the usual customary Snickers bar or AminoPal. Hal had his hands on Loach’s shoulders as the tape went on. A match-wrap is two horizontal layers just above the malleolus knob-thing, then straight down and four times around the tarsus just in front of the joint, so there’s a big gap for flexion of the joint, but a compacting and supportive wrap. Then Loach puts a liner-sock and a wick-sock over the tape, then slides on the little inflatable AirCast deal and pumps it to the right pressure, checking with a little gauge, and Velcros it just tight enough for support plus max-flexion. Hal was on the bench with his hands on Loach’s shoulders through the whole little routine. Everybody’s had his hands on Loach’s shoulders at one time or another. Hal’s shave and wrap take four minutes. Schacht’s knee and Fran Unwin’s hamstring thing each take over ten. Wayne’s quarter looked like it

was dancing on his knuckles. Because of the towel over his head all you could see was a very thin oval section of his face, like an almond on its end.

Wayne got to have a small disk-player in his locker, and Joni Mitchell was playing, which nobody ever minded because he kept it very low. Stice was blowing a purple bubble. Freer was trying to touch his toes. Traub and Whale, also on the wrap-bench, later said Hal was being weird. Like they said asking Loach if the pre-match locker room ever gave him a weird feeling, occluded, electric, as if all this had been done and said so many times before it made you feel it was recorded, they all in here existed basically as Fourier Transforms of postures and little routines, locked down and stored and call-uppable for rebroadcast at specified times. What Traub heard as Fourier Transforms Whale heard as Furrier Transforms. But also, as a consequence, erasable, Hal had said. By whom? Hal before a match usually had a wide-eyed ingenuish anxiety of someone who’d never been in a situation even remotely like this before. His face today had assumed various expressions ranging from distended hilarity to scrunched grimace, expressions that seemed unconnected to anything that was going on. The word was that Tavis and Schtitt had chartered three buses to take the squads to an indoor venue Mrs. Inc had had alumnus Corbett Th-Thorp call in mammoth favors to arrange — several mostly unused courts somewhere in the deep-brain tissue of the M.I.T. Student Union — and that the whole gala would be moved over to the Student Union, and that the Québec team and most of the guests were being contacted by cellular about the cancellation of the previous cancellation and the change in venue, and that those guests who didn’t hear about the change would ride in the buses with the players and staff, some of them in formal- and evening-wear, probably, the guests.

Traub also says he also heard Hal use the word moribund, but Whale couldn’t confirm. Schacht entered a stall and drove the latch home with a certain purposeful sound that produced that momentary gunslinger-enters- saloon-type hush throughout the locker room. Nobody in the vicinity could say they heard Barry Loach respond one way or another to any of the strange moody things Hal was saying as Loach locked down the ankle for high-level play. Wagenknecht apparently really did fart.

The consensus among E.T.A.s is that Head Trainer Barry Loach resembles a wingless fly—blunt and scuttly, etc. One E.T.A. tradition consists of Big Buddies recounting to new or very young Little Buddies the

saga of Loach and how he ended up as an elite Head Trainer even though he doesn’t have an official degree in Training or whatever from Boston College, which is where he’d gone to school. In outline form, the saga goes that Loach grew up as the youngest child of an enormous Catholic family, the parents of which were staunch Catholics of the old school of extremely staunch Catholicism, and that Mrs. Loach (as in the mom)’s life’s most fervent wish was that one of her countless children would enter the R.C. clergy, but that the eldest Loach boy had done a two-year U.S.N. bit and had gotten de-mapped early on in the Brazilian O.N.A.N./U.N. joint action of Y.T.M.P.; and that within weeks of the wake the next oldest Loach boy had died of ciquatoxic food-poisoning eating tainted blackfin grouper; and the next oldest Loach, Therese, through a series of adolescent misadventures had ended up in Atlantic City NJ as one of the women in sequined leotards and high heels who carries a large posterboard card with the Round # on it around the ring between rounds of professional fights, so that hopes for Therese becoming a Carmelite dimmed considerably; and on down the line, one Loach falling helplessly in love and marrying right out of high school, another burning only to play the cymbals with a first-rate philharmonic (now crashing away with the Houston P.O.). And so on, until there was just one other Loach child and then Barry Loach, who was the youngest and also totally under Mrs. L.’s thumb, emotionally; and that young Barry had breathed a huge sigh of relief when his older brother — always a pious and contemplative and big-hearted kid, brimming over with abstract love and an innate faith in the indwelling goodness of all men’s souls — began to show evidence of a true spiritual calling to a life of service in the R.C. clergy, and ultimately entered Jesuit seminary, removing an enormous weight from his younger brother’s psyche because young Barry — ever since he first slapped a Band-Aid on an X-Men figure — felt his true calling was not to the priesthood but to the liniment-and-adhesive ministry of professional athletic training. Who, finally, can say the whys and whences of each man’s true vocation? And then so Barry was a Training major or whatever at B.C., and by all accounts proceeding satisfactorily toward a degree, when his older brother, quite far along toward getting ordained or frocked or whatever as a licensed Jesuit, suffered at age twenty-five a sudden and dire spiritual decline in which his basic faith in the innate indwelling goodness of men like spontaneously

combusted and disappeared — and for no apparent or dramatic reason; it just seemed as if the brother had suddenly contracted a black misanthropic spiritual outlook the way some twenty-five-year-old men contract Sanger- Brown’s ataxia or M.S., a kind of degenerative Lou Gehrig’s Disease of the spirit — and his interest in serving man and God-in-man and nurturing the indwelling Christ in people through Jesuitical pursuits underwent an understandable nosedive, and he began to do nothing but sit in his dormitory room at St. John’s Seminary — right near Enfield Tennis Academy, coincidentally, on Foster Street in Brighton off Comm. Ave., right by the Archdiocese H.Q. or whatever — sitting there trying to pitch playing-cards into a wastebasket in the middle of the floor, not going to classes or vespers or reading his Hours, and talking frankly about giving up the vocation altogether, which all had Mrs. Loach just about prostrate with disappointment, and had young Barry suddenly re-weighted with dread and anxiety, because if his brother bailed out of the clergy it would be nearly irresistibly incumbent on Barry, the very last Loach, to give up his true vocation of splints and flexion and enter seminary himself, to keep his staunch and beloved Mom from dying of disappointment. And so a series of personal interviews with the spiritually necrotic brother took place, Barry having to station himself on the other side of the playing-cards’ wastebasket so as even to get the older brother’s attention, trying to talk the brother down from the misanthropic spiritual ledge he was on. The spiritually ill brother was fairly cynical about Barry Loach’s reasons for trying to talk him down, seeing as how both men knew that Barry’s own career-dreams were on the line here as well; though the brother smiled sardonically and said he’d come to expect little better than self-interested #1-looking-out from human beings anyway, since his practicum work out among the human flocks in some of Boston’s nastier downtown venues — the impossibility of conditions-changing, the ingratitude of the low-life homeless addicted and mentally ill flocks he served, and the utter lack of compassion and basic help from the citizenry at large in all Jesuitical endeavors — had killed whatever spark of inspired faith he’d had in the higher possibilities and perfectibility of man; so he opined what should he expect but that his own little brother, no less than the coldest commuter passing the outstretched hands of the homeless and needy at Park Street Station, should be all-too-humanly concerned with nothing but the care and

feeding of Numero Uno. Since a basic absence of empathy and compassion and taking-the-risk-to-reach-out seemed to him now an ineluctable part of the human character. Barry Loach was understandably way out his depth on the theological turf of like Apologia and the redeemability of man — though he was able to relieve a slight hitch in the brother’s toss that was stressing his card-throwing arm’s flexor carpi ulnaris muscle and so to up the brother’s card-in-wastebasket percentage significantly — but he was not only desperate to preserve his mother’s dream and his own indirectly athletic ambitions at the same time, he was actually rather a spiritually upbeat guy who just didn’t buy the brother’s sudden despair at the apparent absence of compassion and warmth in God’s supposed self-mimetic and divine creation, and he managed to engage the brother in some rather heated and high-level debates on spirituality and the soul’s potential, not that much unlike Alyosha and Ivan’s conversations in the good old Brothers K., though probably not nearly as erudite and literary, and nothing from the older brother even approaching the carcinogenic acerbity of Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor scenario.

In outline, it eventually boiled down to this: a desperate Barry Loach — 384 with Mrs. L. now on 25 mg. of daily Ativan and just about camped out in front of the candle-lighting apse of the Loach’s parish church — Loach challenges his brother to let him prove somehow — risking his own time, Barry’s, and maybe safety somehow — that the basic human character wasn’t as unempathetic and necrotic as the brother’s present depressed condition was leading him to think. After a few suggestions and rejections of bets too way-out even for Barry Loach’s desperation, the brothers finally settle on a, like, experimental challenge. The spiritually despondent brother basically challenges Barry Loach to not shower or change clothes for a while and make himself look homeless and disreputable and louse-ridden and clearly in need of basic human charity, and to stand out in front of the Park Street T-station on the edge of the Boston Common, right alongside the rest of the downtown community’s lumpen dregs, who all usually stood there outside the T-station stemming change, and for Barry Loach to hold out his unclean hand and instead of stemming change simply ask passersby to touch him. Just to touch him. Viz. extend some basic human warmth and contact. And this Barry does. And does. Days go by. His own spiritually

upbeat constitution starts taking blows to the solar plexus. It’s not clear whether the verminousness of his appearance had that much to do with it; it just turned out that standing there outside the station doors and holding out his hand and asking people to touch him ensured that just about the last thing any passerby in his right mind would want to do was touch him. It’s possible that the respectable citizenry with their bookbags and cellulars and dogs with little red sweater-vests thought that sticking one’s hand way out and crying ‘Touch me, just touch me, please’ was some kind of new stem- type argot for ‘Lay some change on me,’ because Barry Loach found himself hauling in a rather impressive daily total of $ — significantly more than he was earning at his work-study job wrapping ankles and sterilizing dental prostheses for Boston College lacrosse players. Citizens found his pitch apparently just touching enough to give him $; but B. Loach’s brother — who often stood there in collarless mufti up against the plastic jamb of the T-station’s exit, slouched and smirking and idly shuffling a deck of cards in his hands — was always quick to point out the spastic delicacy with which the patrons dropped change or $ into Barry Loach’s hand, these kind of bullwhip-motions or jagged in-and-outs like they were trying to get something hot off a burner, never touching him, and they rarely broke stride or even made eye-contact as they tossed alms B.L.’s way, much less ever getting their hand anywhere close to contact with B.L.’s disreputable hand.

The brother not unreasonably nixed the accidental contact of one commuter who’d stumbled as he tried to toss a quarter and then let Barry break his fall, not to mention the bipolarly ill bag-lady who got Barry Loach in a headlock and tried to bite his ear off near the end of the third week of the Challenge. Barry L. refused to concede defeat and misanthropy, and the Challenge dragged on week after week, and the older brother got bored eventually and stopped coming and went back to his room and waited for the St. John’s Seminary administration to give him his walking papers, and Barry Loach had to take Incompletes in the semester’s Training courses, and got canned from his work-study job for not showing up, and he went through weeks and then months of personal spiritual crisis as passerby after passerby interpreted his appeal for contact as a request for cash and substituted abstract loose change for genuine fleshly contact; and some of the T-station’s other disreputable stem-artists became intrigued by Barry’s pitch — to say nothing of his net receipts — and started themselves to take

up the cry of ‘Touch me, please, please, someone!,’ which of course further compromised Barry Loach’s chances of getting some citizen to interpret his request literally and lay hands on him in a compassionate and human way; and Loach’s own soul began to sprout little fungal patches of necrotic rot, and his upbeat view of the so-called normal and respectable human race began to undergo dark revision; and when the other scuzzy and shunned stem-artists of the downtown district treated him as a compadre and spoke to him in a collegial way and offered him warming drinks from brown- bagged bottles he felt too disillusioned and coldly alone to be able to refuse, and thus started to fall in with the absolute silt at the very bottom of the metro Boston socioeconomic duck-pond. And then what happened with the spiritually infirm older brother and whither he fared and what happened with his vocation never gets resolved in the E.T.A. Loach-story, because now the focus becomes all Loach and how he was close to forgetting — after all these months of revulsion from citizens and his getting any kind of nurturing or empathic treatment only from homeless and addicted stem- artists — what a shower or washing machine or a ligamental manipulation even were, much less career-ambitions or a basically upbeat view of indwelling human goodness, and in fact Barry Loach was dangerously close to disappearing forever into the fringes and dregs of metro Boston street life and spending his whole adult life homeless and louse-ridden and stemming in the Boston Common and drinking out of brown paper bags, when along toward the end of the ninth month of the Challenge, his appeal — and actually also the appeals of the other dozen or so cynical stem-artists right alongside Loach, all begging for one touch of a human hand and holding their hands out — when all these appeals were taken literally and responded to with a warm handshake — which only the more severely intoxicated stemmers didn’t recoil from the profferer of, plus Loach — by E.T.A.’s own Mario Incandenza, who’d been sent dashing out from the Back Bay co-op where his father was filming something that involved actors dressed up as God and the Devil playing poker with Tarot cards for the soul of Cosgrove Watt, using subway tokens as the ante, and Mario’d been sent dashing out to get another roll of tokens from the nearest station, which because of a dumpsterfire near the entrance to the Arlington St. station turned out to be Park Street, and Mario, being alone and only fourteen and largely clueless about anti-stem defensive strategies outside T-stations, had had no one

worldly or adult along with him there to explain to him why the request of men with outstretched hands for a simple handshake or High Five shouldn’t automatically be honored and granted, and Mario had extended his clawlike hand and touched and heartily shaken Loach’s own fuliginous hand, which led through a convoluted but kind of heartwarming and faith-reaffirming series of circumstances to B. Loach, even w/o an official B.A., being given an Asst. Trainer’s job at E.T.A., a job he was promoted from just months later when the then-Head Trainer suffered the terrible accident that resulted in all locks being taken off E.T.A. saunas’ doors and the saunas’ maximum temperature being hard-wired down to no more than 50°C.

The inverted glass was the size of a cage or small jail cell, but it was still recognizably a bathroom-type tumbler, as if for gargling or post-brushing swishing, only huge and upside-down, on the floor, with him inside. The tumbler was like a prop or display; it was the sort of thing that would have to be made special. Its glass was green and its bottom over his head was pebbled and the light inside was the watery dancing green of extreme ocean depths.

There was a kind of louvered screen or vent high on one side of the glass, but no air was coming out. In. The air inside the huge glass was pretty clearly limited, as well, because there was already COsteam on the2 sides. The glass was too thick to break or to kick his way out, and it felt like he might have possibly broken the leg’s foot already trying.

There were some green and distorted faces through the glass’s side’s steam. The face at eye-level belonged to the latest Subject, the dexterous and adoring Swiss hand-model. She stood looking at him, her arms crossed, smoking, exhaling greenly through her nose, then looked down to confer with another face, seeming to float at about waist-level, that belonged to the shy and handicapped fan who O.’d realized had shared the Subject’s Swiss accent.

The Subject behind the glass would meet Orin’s eye steadily but did not acknowledge him or anything he shouted. When Orin had tried to kick his way out was when he’d recognized that the Subject was looking at his eyes rather than into them as previously. There were now smeared footprints on the glass.

Every few seconds Orin wiped the steam of his breath away from the thick glass to see what the faces were doing.

His foot really was hurt, and the remains of whatever had made him fall asleep so hard really were making him sick to his stomach, and in sum this experience was pretty clearly not one of his bad dreams, but Orin, #71, was in deep denial about its not being a dream. It was like the minute he’d come to and found himself inside a huge inverted tumbler he’d opted to figure: dream. The stilted amplified voice that came periodically through the small screen or vent above him, demanding to know Where Is The Master Buried, was surreal and bizarre and inexplicable enough to Orin to make him grateful: it was the sort of surreal disorienting nightmarish incomprehensible but vehement demand that often gets made in really bad dreams. Plus the bizarre anxiety of not being able to get the adoring Subject to acknowledge anything he said through the glass. When the speaker’s screen slid back, Orin looked away from the glass’s faces and up, figuring that they were going to do something even more surreal and vehement that would really nail down the undeniable dream-status of the whole experience.

Mlle. Luria P———, who disdained the subtler aspects of technical interviews and had lobbied simply to be given a pair of rubber gloves and two or three minutes alone with the Subject’s testicles (and who was not really Swiss), had predicted accurately what the Subject’s response would be when the speaker’s screen was withdrawn and the sewer roaches began pouring blackly and shinily through, and as the Subject splayed itself against the tumbler’s glass and pressed its face so flat against the absurd glass’s side that the face changed from green to stark white, and, much muffled, shrieked at them ‘Do it to her! Do it to her! ,’ Luria P——— inclined her head and rolled her eyes at the A.F.R. leader, whom she had long regarded as something of a ham.

Human beings came and went. An R.N. felt his forehead and yanked her hand back with a yelp. Somebody down the hall was jabbering and weeping. At one point Chandler F., the recently graduated nonstick- cookware salesman, seemed to be there in the classic resident-confiteor position, his chin on his hands on the bedside crib-railing. The room’s light was a glowing gray. The Ennet House House Manager was there, fingering

the place her missing eyebrow’d been, trying to explain something about how Pat M. hadn’t come because she and Mr. M.’d had to kick Pat’s little girl out of the house for using something synthetic again, and was in a too shaky place spiritually to even leave home. Gately felt physically hotter than he’d ever felt. It felt like a sun in his head. The crib-type railings got tapered on top and writhed a little, like flames. He imagined himself on the House’s aluminum platter with an apple in his mouth, his skin glazed and crispy. The M.D. that looked age twelve appeared with others wreathed in 385 mist and said Up it to 30 q 2 and Let’s Try Doris, that the poor son of a bitch was burning down. He wasn’t talking to Gately. The M.D. was not addressing Don Gately. Gately’s only conscious concern was Asking For Help to refuse Demerol. He kept trying to say addict. He remembered being young on the playground and telling Maura Duffy to look down her shirt and spell attic. Somebody else said Ice Bath. Gately felt something rough and cool on his face. A voice that sounded like his own brain-voice with an echo said to never try and pull a weight that exceeds you. Gately figured he might die. It wasn’t calm and peaceful like alleged. It was more like trying to pull something heavier than you. He heard the late Gene Fackelmann saying to get a load of this. He was the object of much bedside industry. A brisk clink of I.V. bottles overhead. Slosh of bags. None of the overhead voices talking to him. His input unrequired. Part of him hoped they were putting Demerol in his I.V without him knowing. He gurgled and mooed, saying addict. Which was the truth, that he was, he knew. The Crocodile that liked to wear Hanes, Lenny, that at the podium liked to say ‘The truth will you set you free, but not until it’s done with you.’ The voice down the hall was weeping like its heart would break. He imagined the A.D.A. with his hat off earnestly praying Gately would live so he could send him to M.D.C.-Walpole. The harsh sound he heard up close was the tape around his unshaved mouth getting ripped off him so quick he hardly felt it. He tried to avoid projecting how his shoulder would feel if they started pounding on his chest like they pound on dying people’s chests. The intercom calmly dinged. He heard conversing people in the hall passing the open door and stopping for a second to look in, but still conversing. It occurred to him if he died everybody would still exist and go home and eat and X their wife and go to sleep. A conversing voice at the door laughed

and told somebody else it was getting harder these days to tell the homosexuals from the people who beat up homosexuals. It was impossible to imagine a world without himself in it. He remembered two of his Beverly High teammates beating up a so-called homosexual kid while Gately walked away, wanting no part of either side. Disgusted by both sides of the conflict. He imagined having to become a homosexual in Walpole. He imagined going to one meeting a week and having a shepherd’s crook and parrot and playing cribbage for a cigarette a point and lying on his side in his bunk in his cell facing the wall, jacking off to the memory of tits. He saw the A.D.A. with his head bowed and his hat against his chest.

Somebody overhead asked somebody else if they were ready, and somebody commented on the size of Gately’s head and gripped Gately’s head, and then he felt an upward movement deep inside that was so personal and horrible he woke up. Only one of his eyes would open because the floor’s impact had shut the other one up plump and tight as a sausage.

His whole front side of him was cold from lying on the wet floor.

Fackelmann around somewhere behind him was mumbling something that consisted totally of g’s.

His open eye could see the luxury apt. window. It was dawn outside, a glowing gray, and birds had plenty to say out in the bare trees; and at the big window was a face and a windmill of arms. Gately tried to adjust the vertical hold on his vision. Pamela Hoffman-Jeep was at the window. Their apt. was on the second floor of the luxury complex. She was up in a tree right outside the window, standing on a branch, looking in, either gesturing wildly or trying to keep her balance. Gately felt a rush of concern about her falling out of the tree and was preparing to ask the floor to maybe please relax its hold a second and let him go when P.H.-J.’s face suddenly fell and exited the bottom of the window and was replaced by the face of Bobby (‘C’) C. Bobby C raised a slow two-finger salute to his temple in an impassively mocking Hello as he scanned the evidence of serious bingeing in the room, through the window. Eyeballing Mt. Dilaudid with special attention, nodding down to somebody down under the tree. He edged forward on the branch until he was right up flush with the window and pushed up on its frame with one hand, trying to open the locked window.

The rising sun behind him cast a shadow of his head against the wet floor.

Gately called out to Fackelmann and tried to roll and sit up. His bones felt

full of busted glass. Bobby C held up a six-pack of Hefenreffer and waggled it suggestively, like wanting in. Gately had just managed to sit partly up when C’s fist in its fingerless glove came through the window, spraying double-pane glass. The fallen TP screen continued to show shots of small flames, Gately could see. C’s arm came through and groped for the latch and raised the window. Fackelmann was bleating like a sheep but not moving; a syringe he hadn’t bothered with removing hung from the inside of his elbow. Gately saw Bobby C had glass in his purple hair and a vintage Taurus-PT 9 mm. jammed into his spike-studded belt. Gately sat there dumbly as C clambered on in and kind of tiptoed through the various puddles and rolled Fackelmann’s head back to check his pupils. C clucked his tongue and let Fackelmann’s head fall back against the wall, Fax still softly bleating. He turned smartly on his boot’s heel and started across toward the apartment door, and Gately sat there looking at him. When he got to where Gately was sitting on the floor with his wet legs curved parenthesized out in front of him like some sort of huge pre-verbal rug-rat C stopped as if to say something he’d just remembered, looking down at Gately, his smile wide and warm, and Gately noticed he had a black front tooth just as C caught him over the ear with the Taurus-PT and put him back down. The floor got the back of Gately’s head worse than the gun-butt did. His ears belled. It wasn’t stars he saw. Then Bobby C kicked Gately in the balls, S.O.P. to keep your man down, and Gately drew his knees up and turned his head and was sick out onto the floor. He heard the apartment door opening and the leisurely sound of C’s boots going down the stairs to the complex’s door. Between spasms, Gately urged Fackelmann to go for the window as rickety-tick as he could. Fackelmann was slumped back against the wall; he was looking at his legs and saying he couldn’t feel his legs, that he was numb from the scalp on down and climbing.

C returned shortly, and at the head of a whole entourage-type group of people Gately didn’t like the looks of at all. There were DesMonts and Pointgravè, Canadian Harvard Square small-time thug-types Gately knew slightly, small-time freelancers, too Canadianly dumb for anything but the brutalest work. Gately was unglad to see them. They wore overalls and nonmatching flannel shirts. The poor eczematic pharmacist’s-assistant guy was behind them, carrying a black Dr.-bag. Gately was on his back pedalling his legs in the air, which is what anybody that’s played organized

ball knows is what you do for a brody to the groin. The pharmacist’s assistant stopped behind C and stood there looking at his own Weejuns.

Three big unfamiliar girls entered in red leather coats and badly laddered hose. Then poor old Pamela Hoffman-Jeep, her taffeta torn and stained and her face gray with shock, got borne in through the door by two Oriental punks in shiny leather jackets. They had their hands under her ass and carried her as if seated, one leg out and a white stick of bone protruding from her shin, which her shin was a serious mess. Gately saw all this upside-down, pedalling his legs until he could get up. One of the big girls carried an old-type Graphix bong and a Glad Cinch-Sak kitchen-can bag.

Either Pointgravè or DesMonts — Gately could never remember which of them was who — carried a case of bonded liquor. C asked generally if it was Party Time. The room brightened as the sun climbed. The room was filling up. Another of the girls made negative comments about the urine on the floor. Fackelmann in the corner began saying it was all a goddamned lie.

C pretended to answer himself in a falsetto and said Yes indeedyweedy it was Party Time. Now a very bland groomed collegeish guy in a Wembley tie entered with a TaTung Corp. box and put it down by where the pharmacist’s assistant was still standing, and the bland guy rehung the teleplayer on the wall and ejected the TP’s small-flame cartridge, dropping it on the wet floor. The two Oriental toughs carried Pamela Hoffman-Jeep over to a far corner of the living room, and she screamed when they dropped her onto a box of counterfeit little Commonwealth of MA peel-off seals. They were small, the Orientals, and they were looking down at him, but neither had bad skin. A small grim woman with a tight gray bun and sensible shoes entered last and shut the apt. door behind her. Gately rolled slowly to his knees and stood up, still bent a bit at the waist, not moving, one eye still swollen shut. He could hear Fackelmann trying to stand. P.H.-J. stopped shrieking and blacked out and slumped down until her chin was on her chest and her ass half off the box. The room smelled like Dilaudid and urine and Gately’s vomit and Fackelmann’s bowel movement and the red leather girls’s fine leather coats. C came on over and reached up and put his arm around Gately’s shoulders and stood with him like that while two of the tough girls in their coats passed around bottles of bourbon from the case.

Gately could focus best when he squinted. The A.M. sun hung in the window, up and past the tree, yellowing. The bottles were the black-labelled

boxy bottles that signified Jack Daniels. A churchbell off in the Square struck seven or eight. Gately had had a bad experience with Jack Daniels at age fourteen. The bland groomed corporate guy had inserted a different TP cartridge and now was getting a portable CD player out of the TaTung box while the pharmacist’s assistant watched him. Fackelmann said whatever it was was a total goddamn lie. Pointgravè or DesMonts took the bottle C had taken from the tough girls and handed to Gately. The sunlight on the floor through the window was spidered with shadows of branches. Everybody in the room’s shadows were moving around on the west wall. C also held a bottle. Soon just about everybody had their own individual bottle of Jack.

Gately heard Fackelmann asking somebody to open his for him he was numb to the ceiling and climbing and he couldn’t feel his hands. The small grim librarianish woman went to Fackelmann, removing her purse from her shoulder. Gately was figuring out what he was going to say on the Faxter’s behalf when Whitey Sorkin arrived. Until then he figured it was C’s party and just not to unnecessarily rile C. It seemed to take a long time to formulate mental thoughts. Pamela Hoffman-Jeep’s shin looked like ground chuck. C lifted his square bottle and asked for general permission to like propose a toast. P.H.-J.’s lips were blue with shock. Gately felt bad that he felt so little romantic concern now that she’d fallen out of the tree. He spent no time wondering if she’d ratted them out, if she’d brought Bobby C to them or vice-versy. At least one of the girls in the red leather coats had an awful big Adam’s apple for a girl. C roughly turned Gately’s shoulders toward Fackelmann in the corner and toasted to old friends and new friends and what looked like a serious fucking-A score for Gene Gene the Fax Machine, given the size of this Dilaudid-pile and all the evidence of some serious fucking partying they could see, and smell. Everyone drank from their bottle. The grim-faced little woman had to help Fackelmann find his mouth with the mouth of his bottle. All three of the big women displayed Adam’s apples when they tilted way back to chug. The polite swallow of Jack almost made Gately heave. C’s Item in his belt pressed against Gately’s thigh and so did some of the belt’s spikes. DesMonts and Pointgravè both had S&W Items in shoulder-holsters. The Oriental punks didn’t display any arms but had a look about them like they didn’t ever even shower unarmed; safe bet they at least had little weird sharp chinky things you threw at people, Gately figured. Several of C’s group chugged their

whole bottle. One of the big girls hurled her bottle at the west wall, but it didn’t break. Why is it you feel it in your gut and not your nuts per se, when you get brodied? Gately was turning and looking wherever C’s arm was turning him. The contorted face on the rehung viewer from the corporate guy’s cartridge was Whitey Sorkin’s, a portrait Sorkin had let some neuralgic painter do of him having a cluster-headache out at the National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation in the city, for a series for an ad for aspirin.

The cartridge seemed like just a continuous still of the painting, so that it looked like Sorkin on the wall was sort of presiding over the gathering in a mute pained way. The librarianish little woman was threading a sewing needle with thread, her mouth real tight. The pharmacist’s assistant was getting little skin-flakes all over the black bag as he hunkered down over the bag removing several syringes from the bag and filling them out of a 2500-IU ampule and handing them up to be passed around. The N.C.-F.P.F. painting had a red fist pulling a handful of brain out of the top of Sorkin’s skull while Sorkin’s face looked out of the viewer with the classic migraine- sufferer’s look of super-intense thought, almost more meditative than hurt- looking. One Oriental kid was squatting chinkishly in the corner drinking Jack and the other was sweeping up spilled laminates off the floor, using a flap from the TaTung box for a dustpan. Chinks could do some serious sweeping, Gately reflected. Another of the girls threw her bottle at the wall.

It was when C didn’t even have Gately facing them that it dawned on Gately the girls in coats and slatternly hose were fags dressed up as girls, like as in transvestals. Bobby C was beaming. The first bit of real personal- ass fear Gately felt was when he realized these people looked like mostly members of Bobby C’s personal set, that they weren’t the people Sorkin would dispatch if he was sending his own people and coming himself, soon, that Sorkin’s painting on the wall was symbolic of Sorkin wasn’t coming, that Sorkin had given Bobby C free rain on this piece of painful business.

The pharmacist’s assistant removed two pre-filled syringes from the bag, unwrapping their crinkly plastic. C told Gately quietly how Whitey said to say he knew Donnie wasn’t part of Fackelmann’s score to fuck Sorkin and Eighties Bill. That he didn’t need to do anything except kick back and enjoy the party and let Fackelmann face his own music and to not let any like 19th-century notions of defending the weak and pathetic drag Gately into this. C said he was sorry about the bit of the beating, he had to make sure

Gately didn’t try and get Fackelmann out the window while he was down unlocking the door. That he hoped Gately wouldn’t hold it against him ’cause he wished him no particular ill and wanted no beef, later. This was all said very quietly and intensively while the two fags in wigs that had tried to break bottles were sitting on a box filling the Graphix’s huge party- bowl with grass from the Glad bag, which contained grass. DesMontes sat in a director’s chair. Everybody else was drinking out of their square bottle, standing around the sunny room in the awkward postures of way more people than seats. Their arms were pale and hairless. The two Oriental toughs were tying each other off. The draft through the fist-hole in the window made Gately shiver. The other fag was making like comments about Gately’s physique. Gately asked C quietly if he and Fackelmann couldn’t get cleaned up real quick and they could all go see Sorkin together and Whitey and Gene could reason together and work out an accord.

Fackelmann found his voice and asked loudly if anybody wanted to hike on over here to Mt. Dilaudid and get fucking fucked up. Gately winced. Bobby C smiled at Fackelmann and said it looked like Fax had had about enough.

But at the same time the psoriatic assistant came to Fackelmann and checked his pupils with a penlight and then shot him up with a pre-filled, using an artery in his neck. The back of Fackelmann’s head hit the wall several times, his face flushing violently in the standard clinical reaction to 386 Narcan. The pharmacist then came C and Gately’s way. The portable CD player started in with poor old Linda McCartney as C held Gately and the asst. pharmacist tied him off with an M.D.’s rubber strap. Gately stood there slightly hunched. Fackelmann was making sounds like a long- submerged man coming up for air. C told Gately to fasten his seatbelt.

Urine had turned part of the apt.’s luxury-hardwood floor’s finish soft and white, like soap-scum. The CD playing was one C’d played all the fucking time in the car when Gately had been with him in a car: somebody had taken an old disk of McCartney and the Wings — as in the historical Beatles’s McCartney — taken and run it through a Kurtzweil remixer and removed every track on the songs except the tracks of poor old Mrs. Linda McCartney singing backup and playing tambourine. When the fags called the grass ‘Bob’ it was confusing because they also called C ‘Bob.’ Poor old Mrs. Linda McCartney just fucking could not sing, and having her shaky

off-key little voice flushed from the cover of the whole slick multitrack corporate sound and pumped up to solo was to Gately unspeakably depressing — her voice sounding so lost, trying to hide and bury itself inside the pro backups’ voices; Gately imagined Mrs. Linda McCartney — in his Staff room’s wall’s picture a kind of craggy-faced blonde — imagined her standing there lost in the sea of her husband’s pro noise, feeling low esteem and whispering off-key, not knowing quite when to shake her tambourine: C’s depressing CD was past cruel, it was somehow sadistic- seeming, like drilling a peephole in the wall of a handicapped bathroom.

Two of the transvestals were doing the Swim to the awful tape in the swept center of the floor; the other had one of Fackelmann’s arms while the bland guy in the Wembley tie gripped Fackelmann’s other arm and was slapping Fackelmann lightly as the Dilaudid fought the Narcan. They’d seated Fackelmann in his corner in Gately’s special Demerol-chair. Gately’s balls throbbed with his pulse. The pharmacist’s assistant’s face was right up in Gately’s. His cheeks and chin were a mess of silvery scaly flakes, and an oily sweat on his forehead caught the window’s sunlight as he gave Gately a tight smile. ‘I’m pretty much straight already, C-man, after that nut-shot,’ Gately said, ‘if you don’t want to waste the Narcan.’ ‘Oh this isn’t no Narcan,’ C said softly, holding Gately’s arm. ‘Hadly,’ said the assistant, uncapping the syringe.

C said ‘Hold on to your hat.’ He poked the assistant’s shoulder. ‘Tell him.’ 387 ‘It’s pharm-grade Sunshine,’ the assistant said, tapping for a good vein. ‘Hold on to your heart,’ C said, watching the needle go in. The pharmacist slid it in expertly, horizontal and flush to the skin. Gately had never done Sunshine. Next to ungettable outside a Canadian hospital. He watched his own blood ruddle the serum as the pharmacist extended his thumb to ease the plunger back. The pharmacist’s assistant could really boot. C’s tongue was in the corner of his mouth as he watched. The corporate guy had Fackelmann’s arms held tight and a transvestal who’d gotten in behind the chair held his head by the chin and hair as the gray lady knelt before him with her threaded needle. Gately couldn’t keep himself

from watching the stuff go in him. There was no pain. He wondered for a second if it was a hot shot: it seemed like a whole lot of trouble to go to just to get him off. The pharmacist’s thumbnail was ingrown. There were a couple eczema-flakes on Gately’s arm where the guy was inclined over it.

You get to like the sight of your own blood after a while. The pharmacist had him half booted when Fackelmann started screaming. The scream’s pitch got higher as it drew out. When Gately could look away from the stuff going in, he saw the librarian-type lady was sewing Fackelmann’s eyelids open to the skin above his eyebrows. As in they were sewing poor old Count Faxula’s eyes open. A kid on the playground had used to turn his lids inside out at girls like they were doing now to the poor old Faxter. Gately gave a reflexive jerk toward him, and C hugged him tight with one arm. ‘Ea sy,’ C said very softly.

The taste of the hydrochloride in the Sunshine was the same, delicious, the taste of the smell of every Dr.’s office everywhere. He’d never done Talwin-PX. Impossible to get scrips for, the PX, a Canadian blend; U.S.

388 Talwin’s got .5 mg. of naloxone mixed in, to cut the buzz, is why Gately only did NX on top of Bam-Bams. He understood they’d given Fackelmann the anti-narc so he’d feel the needle as they sewed his eyes open. Cruel is spelled with a u , he remembered. The two Orientals left the room at C’s direction. Linda McC. sounded borderline-psychotic. The little gray lady worked fast. The eye that was already sewed open bulged obscenely.

Everybody in the room except C and the corporate guy and grim lady started shooting dope. Two of the fags had their eyes shut and their faces at the ceiling as if they couldn’t take watching what they were doing to their arm. The pharmacist was tying off the passed-out Pamela Hoffman-Jeep, which seemed like insult+injury. There was every different kind of style and skill-level of injection and boot going on. Fackelmann’s face was still a scream-face. The corporate-tool type was dropping fluid from a pipette into Fackelmann’s sewed-open eye while the lady rethreaded the needle. It was just seeming to Gately he’d seen the fluid-in-eye thing in a cartridge or movie the M.P.’d liked when he was a Bim playing ball on the chintz in the sea when the Sunshine crossed the barrier and came on.

You could see why the U.S. made them cut the buzz. The air in the room got overclear, a glycerine shine, colors brightening terribly. If colors

themselves could catch fire. The word on the C-II Talwin-PX was it was intense but short-acting, and pricey. No word on its interaction with massive residual amounts of I.V.-Dilaudid. Gately tried to figure while he still could.

If they were going to eliminate his map with an O.D. they’d have used something cheap. And if the librarian was going to sew his eyes open.

Gately was trying to think. Too they wouldn’t have got him. Him. Got him off.

The very air of the room bulged. It ballooned. Fackelmann’s screams about lies rose and fell, hard to hear against the arterial roar of the Sun.

McC. was trying to muffle a cough. Gately couldn’t feel his legs. He could feel C’s arm around him taking more and more of his weight. C’s arms’s muscles rising and hardening: he could feel this. His legs were, like: opting out. Attack of floors and sidewalks. Kite used to sing a ditty called ‘32 Uses For Sterno Me Lad.’ C was starting to let him down easy. Strong squat hard kid. Most heroin-men you can knock down with a Boo. C: there was a gentleness about C, for a kid with the eyes of a lizard. He was letting him down real easy. C was going to protect Bimmy Don from the bad floor’s assault. The supported swoon spun Gately around, C moving around him like a dancer to slow the fall. Gately got a rotary view of the whole room in almost untakable focus. Pointgravè was vomiting chunkily. Two of the fags were sliding down the wall they had their backs to. Their red coats were aflame. The passing window exploded with light. Or else it was DesMontes that was vomiting and Pointgravè was taking the TP’s viewer off the wall and stretching its fibroid wire over toward Fackelmann against the wall.

One of Fax’s eyes was as open as his mouth, disclosing way more eye than you ever want to see on somebody. He was no longer struggling. He stared piratically straight ahead. The librarian was starting on his other eye. The bland man had a rose in his lapel and he’d put on glasses with metal lenses and was blind-high and missing Fax’s eye with the dropper half the time, saying something to Pointgravè. A transvestal had P.H.-J.’s torn hem hiked up and a spiderish hand on her flesh-colored thigh. P.H.-J.’s face was gray and blue. The floor came up slowly. Bobby C’s squat face looked almost pretty, tragic, half lit by the window, tucked up under Gately’s spinning shoulder. Gately felt less high than disembodied. It was obscenely pleasant.

His head left his shoulders. Gene and Linda were both screaming. The cartridge with the held-open eyes and dropper had been the one about ultra-

violence and sadism. A favorite of Kite. Gately thinks sadism is pronounced ‘saddism.’ The last rotating sight was the chinks coming back through the door, holding big shiny squares of the room. As the floor wafted up and C’s grip finally gave, the last thing Gately saw was an Oriental bearing down with the held square and he looked into the square and saw clearly a reflection of his own big square pale head with its eyes closing as the floor finally pounced. And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.