YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT
UNDERGARMENT
On a White Flag Group Commitment to the Tough Shit But You Still Can’t Drink Group down in Braintree this past July, Don G., up at the podium, revealed publicly about how he was ashamed that he still as yet had no real solid understanding of a Higher Power. It’s suggested in the 3rd of Boston AA’s 12 Steps that you to turn your Diseased will over to the direction and love of ‘God as you understand Him.’ It’s supposed to be one of AA’s major selling points that you get to choose your own God. You get to make up your own understanding of God or a Higher Power or Whom-/Whatever. But Gately, at like ten months clean, at the TSBYSCD podium in Braintree, opines that at this juncture he’s so totally clueless and lost he’s thinking that he’d maybe rather have the White Flag Crocodiles just grab him by the lapels and just tell him what AA God to have an understanding of, and give him totally blunt and dogmatic orders about how to turn over his Diseased will to whatever this Higher Power is. He notes how he’s observed already that some Catholics and Fundamentalists now in AA had a childhood understanding of a Stern and Punishing–type God, and Gately’s heard them express incredible Gratitude that AA let them at long last let go and change over to an understanding of a Loving, Forgiving, Nurturing–type God. But at least these folks started out with some idea of Him/Her/It, whether fucked up or no. You might think it’d be easier if you Came In with 0 in the way of denominational background or preconceptions, you might think it’d be easier to sort of invent a Higher- Powerish God from scratch and then like erect an understanding, but Don Gately complains that this has not been his experience thus far. His sole experience so far is that he takes one of AA’s very rare specific suggestions and hits the knees in the A.M. and asks for Help and then hits the knees
again at bedtime and says Thank You, whether he believes he’s talking to Anything/-body or not, and he somehow gets through that day clean. This, after ten months of ear-smoking concentration and reflection, is still all he feels like he ‘understands’ about the ‘God angle.’ Publicly, in front of a very tough and hard-ass-looking AA crowd, he sort of simultaneously confesses and complains that he feels like a rat that’s learned one route in the maze to the cheese and travels that route in a ratty-type fashion and whatnot. W/ the God thing being the cheese in the metaphor. Gately still feels like he has no access to the Big spiritual Picture. He feels about the ritualistic daily Please and Thank You prayers rather like like a hitter that’s on a hitting streak and doesn’t change his jock or socks or pre-game routine for as long as he’s on the streak. W/ sobriety being the hitting streak and whatnot, he explains. The whole church basement is literally blue with smoke. Gately says he feels like this is a pretty limp and lame understanding of a Higher Power: a cheese-easement or unwashed athletic supporter. He says but when he tries to go beyond the very basic rote automatic get-me-through-this-day-please stuff, when he kneels at other times and prays or meditates or tries to achieve a Big-Picture spiritual understanding of a God as he can understand Him, he feels Nothing — not nothing but Nothing, an edgeless blankness that somehow feels worse than the sort of unconsidered atheism he Came In with. He says he doesn’t know if any of this is coming through or making any sense or if it’s all just still symptomatic of a thoroughgoingly Diseased will and quote ‘spirit.’ He finds himself telling the Tough Shit But You Still Can’t Drink audience dark doubtful thoughts he wouldn’t have fucking ever dared tell Ferocious Francis man to man. He can’t even look at F.F. in the Crocodile’s row as he says that at this point the God-understanding stuff kind of makes him want to puke, from fear. Something you can’t see or hear or touch or smell: OK.
All right. But something you can’t even feel? Because that’s what he feels when he tries to understand something to really sincerely pray to.
Nothingness. He says when he tries to pray he gets this like image in his mind’s eye of the brainwaves or whatever of his prayers going out and out, with nothing to stop them, going, going, radiating out into like space and outliving him and still going and never hitting Anything out there, much less Something with an ear. Much much less Something with an ear that could possibly give a rat’s ass. He’s both pissed off and ashamed to be
talking about this instead of how just completely good it is to just be getting through the day without ingesting a Substance, but there it is. This is what’s going on. He’s no closer to carrying out the suggestion of the 3rd Step than the day the Probie drove him over to his halfway house from Peabody Holding. The idea of this whole God thing makes him puke, still. And he is afraid.
And the same fucking thing happens again. The tough chain-smoking TSBYSCD Group all stands and applauds and the men give two-finger whistles, and people come up at the raffle-break to pump his big hand and even sometimes try and hug on him.
It seems like every time he forgets himself and publicizes how he’s fucking up in sobriety Boston AAs fall all over themselves to tell him how good it was to hear him and to for God’s sake Keep Coming, for them if not for himself, whatever the fuck that means.
The Tough Shit But You Still Can’t Drink Group seems to be over 50% bikers and biker-chicks, meaning your standard leather vests and 10-cm. boot heels, belt-buckles with little spade-shaped knives that come out of a slot in the side, tattoos that are more like murals, serious tits in cotton halters, big beards, Harleywear, wooden matches in mouth-corners and so forth. After the Our Father, as Gately and the other White Flag speakers are clustered smoking outside the door to the church basement, the sound of high-cc. hawgs being kick-started is enough to rattle your fillings. Gately can’t even start to guess what it would be like to be a sober and drug-free biker. It’s like what would be the point. He imagines these people polishing the hell out of their leather and like playing a lot of really precise pool.
This one sober biker that can’t be much older than Gately and is nearly Gately’s size — though with a really small head and a tapered jaw that makes him look kind of like a handsome mantis — as they’re massed around the door he brings a car-length chopper up alongside Gately. Says it was good to hear him. Shakes his hand in the complex way of Niggers and Harleyheads. He introduces his name as Robert F., though on the lapel of his leather vest it says BOB DEATH. A biker-chick’s got her arms around his waist from behind, as is SOP. He tells Gately it was good to hear somebody new share from the heart about his struggles with the God component. It’s weird to hear a biker use the Boston AA word share, much less component or heart.
The other White Flaggers have stopped talking and are watching the two men sort of just awkwardly stand there, the biker embraced from behind and straddling his throbbing hawg. The guy’s got on leather spats and a leather vest with no shirt, and Gately notices the guy’s got a jailhouse tatt of AA’s weird little insignia of a triangle inside a circle on one big shoulder.
Robert F./Bob Death asks Gately if by any chance he’s heard the one about the fish. Glenn K. in his fucking robe overhears, and of course he’s got to put his own oar in, and breaks in and asks them all if they’ve heard the one What did the blind man say as he passed by the Quincy Market fish- stall, and without waiting says He goes ‘Evening, Ladies.’ A couple male White Flaggers fall about, and Tamara N. slaps at the back of Glenn K.’s head’s pointy hood, but without real heat, as in like what are you going to do with this sick fuck.
Bob Death smiles coolly (South Shore bikers are required to be extremely cool in everything they do) and manipulates a wooden match with his lip and says No, not that fish-one. He has to assume a kind of bar- shout to clear the noise of his idling hawg. He leans in more toward Gately and shouts that the one he was talking about was: This wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, ‘Morning, boys, how’s the water?’ and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, ‘What the fuck is water?’ and swim away.
The young biker leans back and smiles at Gately and gives an affable shrug and blatts away, a halter top’s tits mashed against his back.
Gately’s forehead was wrinkled in emotional pain all the way up Rte. 3 home. They were in the back of Ferocious Francis’s old car. Glenn K. was trying to ask what was the difference between a bottle of 15-year-old Hennessey and a human female vagina. Crocodile Dicky N. up riding shotgun told Glenn to try to fucking remember there was ladies present.
Ferocious Francis kept moving the toothpick around in his mouth and looking at Gately in the rearview. Gately wanted to both cry and hit somebody. Glenn’s cheap pseudo-demonic robes had the faint rank oily smell of a dish towel. There was no smoking in the car: Ferocious Francis had a little oxygen tank he had to carry around and a little thin pale-blue plastic-like tube thing that lay under his nose and was taped there and sent oxygen up his nose. All he’d ever say about the tank and the tube is that
they were not his personal will but that he’d submitted to advice and now here he was, still sucking air and staying rabidly Active.
Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when you’re new and out of your skull with desperation and ready to eliminate your map and they tell you how it’ll all get better and better as you abstain and recover: they somehow omit to mention that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite of it. They leave this out, talking instead about Gratitude and Release from Compulsion. There’s serious pain in being sober, though, you find out, after time. Then now that you’re clean and don’t even much want Substances and feeling like you want to both cry and stomp somebody into goo with pain, these Boston AAs start in on telling you you’re right where you’re supposed to be and telling you to remember the pointless pain of active addiction and telling you that at least this sober pain now has a purpose. At least this pain means you’re going somewhere, they say, instead of the repetitive gerbil-wheel of addictive pain.
They neglect to tell you that after the urge to get high magically vanishes and you’ve been Substanceless for maybe six or eight months, you’ll begin to start to ‘Get In Touch’ with why it was that you used Substances in the first place. You’ll start to feel why it was you got dependent on what was, when you get right down to it, an anesthetic. ‘Getting In Touch With Your Feelings’ is another quilted-sampler-type cliché that ends up masking something ghastly deep and real, it turns out.
178 It starts to turn out that the vapider the AA cliché, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers.
Near the end of his Ennet residency, at like eight months clean and more or less free of any chemical compulsion, going to the Shattuck every A.M. and working the Steps and getting Active and pounding out meetings like a madman, Don Gately suddenly started to remember things he would just as soon not have. Remembered. Actually remembered’s probably not the best word. It was more like he started to almost reexperience things that he’d barely even been there to experience, in terms of emotionally, in the first place. A lot of it was undramatic little shit, but still somehow painful. E.g. like when he was maybe eleven, pretending to watch TV with his mother and pretending to listen to her P.M. nightly monologue, a litany of
complaint and regret whose consonants got mushier and mushier. To the extent it’s Gately’s place to diagnose anybody else as an alcoholic, his mom was pretty definitely an alcoholic. She drank Stolichnaya vodka in front of the TV. They weren’t cable-ready, for reasons of $. She drank little thin glasses with cut-up bits of carrot and pepper that she’d drop into the vodka.
Her maiden name was Gately. Don’s like organic father had been an Estonian immigrant, a wrought-iron worker, which is like sort of a welder with ambition. He’d broken Gately’s mother’s jaw and left Boston when Gately was in his mother’s stomach. Gately had no brothers or sisters. His mother was subsequently involved with a live-in lover, a former Navy M.P. who used to beat her up on a regular schedule, hitting her in the vicinities between groin and breast so that nothing showed. A skill he’d picked up as a brig guard and Shore Patrol. At about 8–10 Heinekens he used to all of a sudden throw his Readers’ Digest against the wall and get her down and beat her with measured blows, she’d go down on the floor of the apartment and he’d hit her in the hidden vicinity, timing the blows between her arms’ little waves — Gately remembered she tried to ward off the blows with a fluttered downward motion of her arms and hands, as if she were beating out flames. Gately still hasn’t ever quite gotten over to look at her in State Care in the Long-Term-Care Medicaid place. The M.P.’s tongue was in the corner of his mouth and his little-eyed face wore a look of great concentration, as if he were taking something delicate apart or putting it together. He’d be on one knee knelt over her with his look of sober problem-solving, timing his shots, the blows abrupt and darting, her writhing and trying to kind of shoo them away. The darting blows. Out of the psychic blue, very detailed memories of these fights surfaced one afternoon as he was getting ready to mow the Ennet House lawn for Pat in May Y.D.A.U., when Enfield Marine P.H.H. withheld maintenance services in reprisal for late utilities. After the little Salem decayed beach-cottage with Herman the Ceiling That Breathed, the little like tract house by Mrs.
Waite’s tract house in Beverly’s good dining room chairs had fluted legs and Gately had scratched Donad and Donold in each leg with a pin, low down. Higher up on the legs, the scratches became correctly spelled. It’s like a lot of memories of his youth sank without bubbles when he quit school and then later only in sobriety bubbled back up to where he could Get In Touch with them. His mother used to call the M.P. a bastuhd and
sometimes go oof when he landed one in the vicinity. She drank vodka with vegetables suspended in it, a habit she’d picked up from the missing Estonian, whose first name, Gately read on a torn and then fuckeduppedly Scotch-taped paper out of her jewelry box after his mother’s cirrhotic hemorrhage, was Bulat. The Medicaid Long-Term place was way the fuck out the Yirrell Beach bridge in Point Shirley across the water from the Airport. The former M.P. delivered cheese and then later worked in a chowder factory and kept weights in the Beverly house’s garage and drank Heineken beer, and logged each beer he drank carefully in a little spiral notebook he used to monitor his intake of alcohol.
His mom’s special couch for TV was nubbly red chintz, and when she shifted from seated upright to lying on her side with her arm between her head and the little protective doily on the couch’s armrest and the glass held tilting on the little space her breasts left at the cushion’s edge, it was a sign she was going under. Gately at like ten or eleven used to pretend to listen and watch TV on the floor but really be dividing his attention between how close his Mom was to unconsciousness and how much Stolichnaya was left in the bottle. She would only drink Stolichnaya, which she called her Comrade in Arms and said Nothing but the Comrade would do. After she went under for the evening and he’d carefully taken the tilted glass out of her hand, Don’d take the bottle and mix the first couple vodkas with Diet Coke and drink a couple of those until it lost its fire, then drink it straight.
This was like a routine. Then he’d put the near-empty bottle back next to her glass with its vegetables darkening in the undrunk vodka, and she’d wake up on the couch in the morning with no idea she hadn’t drank the whole thing. Gately was careful to always leave her enough for a wake-up swallow. But this gesture of leaving some, Gately’s now realized, wasn’t just filial kindness on his part: if she didn’t have the wake-up swallow she wouldn’t get off the red couch all day, and then there would be no new bottle that night.
This was at age ten or eleven, as he now recalls. Most of the furniture was wrapped in plastic. The carpet was burnt-orange shag that the landlord kept saying he was going to take up and go to wood floors. The M.P. worked nights or else most nights went out, and then she’d take the plastic off the couch.
Why the couch had little protective doilies on the arms when it usually had a plastic cover on it Gately cannot recall or explain.
For a while in Beverly they had Nimitz the kitty.
This all came burpling greasily up into memory in the space of two or three weeks in May, and now more stuff steadily like dribbles up, for Gately to Touch.
Sober, she’d called him Bimmy or Bim because that’s what she heard his little friends call him. She didn’t know the neighborhood cognomen came from an acronym for ‘Big Indestructible Moron.’ His head had been huge, as a child. Out of all proportion, though with nothing especially Estonian about it, that he could see. He’d been very sensitive about it, the head, but never told her not to call him Bim. When she was drunk and conscious she called him her Doshka or Dochka or like that. Sometimes, well in the bag himself, when he turned off the uncabled set and covered her with the afghan, easing the mostly empty Stoly bottle back onto the little TV Guide table by the bowl of darkening chopped peppers, his unconscious Mom would groan and titter and call him her Doshka and good sir knight and last and only love, and ask him not to hit her anymore.
In June he Got In Touch with memories that their front steps in Beverly were a pocked cement painted red even in the pocks. Their mailbox was part of a whole tract-housing complex’s honeycomb of mailboxes on a like small pole, brushed-steel and gray with a postal eagle on it. You needed a little key to get your mail out, and for a long time he thought the sign on it said ‘US MAIL,’ as in us instead of U.S. His mom’s hair had been dry blond-white with dark roots that never lengthened or went away. No one tells you when they tell you you have cirrhosis that eventually you’ll all of a sudden start choking on your own blood. This is called a cirrhotic hemorrhage. Your liver won’t process any more of your blood and it quote shunts the blood and it goes up your throat in a high-pressure jet, is what they told him, is why he’d first thought the M.P.’d come back and cut his Mom or stabbed her, when he first came in, after football, his last season, at 179age seventeen. She’d been Diagnosed for years. She’d go to Meetings for a few weeks, then drink on the couch, silent, telling him if the phone rang she wasn’t home. After a few weeks of this she’d spend a whole day weeping, beating at herself as if on fire. Then she’d go back to Meetings for
a while. Eventually her face began to swell and make her eyes piggy and her big breasts pointed at the floor and she turned the deep yellow of quality squash. This was all part of the Diagnosis. At first Gately just couldn’t go out to the Long-Term place, couldn’t see her out there. Couldn’t deal. Then after some time passed he couldn’t go because he couldn’t face her and try and explain why he hadn’t come before now. Ten-plus years have gone like that. Gately hadn’t probably consciously thought of her once for three years, before getting straight.
Right after their neighbor Mrs. Waite got found by the meter-guy dead, so he must have been nine, when his Mom was first Diagnosed, Gately had gotten the Diagnosis mixed up in his head with King Arthur. He’d ride a mop-handle horse and brandish a trashcan-lid and a batteryless plastic Light-Saber and tell the neighborhood kids he was Sir Osis of Thuliver, most fearsomely loyal and fierce of Arthur’s vessels. Since the summer now, when he mops Shattuck Shelter floors, he hears the Clopaclopaclop he used to make with his big square tongue as Sir Osis, then, riding.
And his dreams late that night, after the Braintree/Bob Death Commitment, seem to set him under a sort of sea, at terrific depths, the water all around him silent and dim and the same temperature he is.
VERY LATE OCTOBER Y.D.A.U.
Hal Incandenza had this horrible new recurring dream where he was losing his teeth, where his teeth had become like shale and splintered when he tried to chew, and fragmented and melted into grit in his mouth; in the dream he was going around squeezing a ball and spitting fragments and grit, getting more and more hungry and scared. Everything in there loosened by a great oral rot that the nightmare’s Teddy Schacht wouldn’t even look at, saying he was late for his next appointment, everyone Hal saw seeing Hal’s crumbling teeth and looking at their watch and making vague excuses, a general atmosphere of the splintering teeth being a symptom of something way more dire and distasteful that no one wanted to confront him about. He was pricing dentures when he woke. It was about an hour before dawn drills. His keys were on the floor by the bed with his College Board prep books. Mario’s great iron bed was empty and made up tight, all five pillows
neatly stacked. Mario’d been spending the last few nights over at HmH, sleeping on an air mattress in the living room in front of Tavis’s Tatsuoka receiver, listening to WYYY–109 into the wee hours, weirdly agitated about Madame Psychosis’s unannounced sabbatical from the ‘60 Minutes +/ ȹ’ midnight thing where she’d been an unvarying M-F presence for several years, it seemed like. WYYY had been evasive and unforthcoming about the whole thing. For two days some alto grad student had tried to fill in, billing herself as Miss Diagnosis, reading Horkheimer and Adorno against a background of Partridge Family slowed down to a narcotized slur. At no time had anyone of managerial pitch or timbre mentioned Madame Psychosis or what her story was or her date of expected return. Hal’d told Mario that the silence was a positive sign, that if she’d left the air for good the station would have had to say something. Hal, Coach Schtitt, and the Moms had all remarked Mario’s odd mood. Mario was usually next to 180impossible to agitate.
Now WYYY was back to running ‘Sixty Minutes More or Less’ without anybody at all at the helm. For the past several nights Mario has lain there in a sarcophagally tapered sleeping bag of GoreTex and fiberfill and listened to them run the weird static ambient musics Madame Psychosis uses for background, but now without any spoken voice as foreground; and the static, momentumless music as subject instead of environment is somehow terribly disturbing: Hal listened to a few minutes of the stuff and told his brother it sounded like somebody’s mind coming apart right before your ears.
9 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
The Enfield Tennis Academy has an accredited capacity of 148 junior players — of whom 80 are to be male — but an actual Fall Y.D.A.U. population of 95 paying and 41 scholarship students, so 136, of which 72 are female, right now, for some reason, meaning that while there’s room for twelve more (preferably full-tuition) junior players, there ought ideally to be fully sixteen more males than there are, meaning Charles Tavis and Co. are wanting to fill all twelve available spots with males — plus they
wouldn’t exactly mind, is the general scuttlebutt, if a half dozen or so of the better girls left before graduation and tried for the Show, simply because housing more than 68 girls means putting some in the male dorms, which creates tensions and licensing- and conservative-parent-problems, given that coed hall bathrooms are not a good idea what with all the adolescent glands firing all over the place.
It also means that, since there are twice as many male prorectors as female, A.M. drills have to be complexly staggered, the boys in two sets of 32, the girls in three of 24, which creates problems in terms of early-P.M. classes for the lowest-ranked C-squad girls, who drill last.
Matriculations, gender quotas, recruiting, financial aid, room- assignments, mealtimes, rankings, class v. drill schedules, prorector-hiring, accommodating changes in drill schedule consequent to a player’s movement up or down a squad. It’s all the sort of thing that’s uninteresting unless you’re the one responsible, in which case it’s cholesterol-raisingly stressful and complex. The stress of all the complexities and priorities to be triaged and then weighted against one another gets Charles Tavis out of bed in the Headmaster’s House at an ungodly hour most mornings, his sleep- swollen face twitching with permutations. He stands in leather slippers at the living-room window, looking southeast past West and Center Courts at the array of A-team players assembling stiffly in the gray glow, carrying gear with their heads down and some still asleep on their feet, the first bit of snout of the sun protruding through the city’s little skyline far beyond them, the aluminum glints of river and sea, east, Tavis’s hands working nervously around the cup of hazlenut decaf that steams upward into his face as he holds it, hair unarranged and one side hanging, high forehead up against the window’s glass so he can feel the mean chill of the dawn just outside, his lips moving slightly and without sound, the thing it’s not entirely impossible he may have fathered asleep up next to the sound system with its claws on its chest and four pillows for bradypnea-afflicted breathing that sounds like soft repetitions of the words sky or ski, making no unnecessary sound, not eager to wake it and have to interface with it and have it look up at him with a terrible calm and accepting knowledge it’s quite possible is nothing but Tavis’s imagination, so lips moving w/o sound but breath and cup’s steam spreading on the glass, and little icicles from the rainy melt of yesterday’s snow hanging from the anodized gutters just above the window
and seen by Tavis as a distant skyline upside-down. In the lightening sky the same two or three clouds seem to move back and forth like sentries. The heat comes on with a distant whoom and the glass against his forehead trembles slightly. A hiss of low static from the speaker it had fallen into sleep without turning off. The A-team’s array keeps shifting and melding as they await Schtitt. Permutations of complications.
Tavis watches the boys stretch and confer and sips from the cup with both hands, the concerns of the day assembling themselves in a sort of tree- diagram of worry. Charles Tavis knows what James Incandenza could not have cared about less: the key to the successful administration of a top-level junior tennis academy lies in cultivating a kind of reverse-Buddhism, a state of Total Worry.
So the best E.T.A. players’ special perk is they get hauled out of bed at dawn, still crusty-eyed and pale with sleep, to drill in the first shift.
Dawn drills are of course alfresco until they erect and inflate the Lung, which Hal Incandenza hopes is soon. His circulation is poor because of tobacco and/or marijuana, and even with his DUNLOP-down-both-legs sweatpants and a turtleneck and thick old white alpaca tennis jacket that had been his father’s and has to be rolled up at the sleeves, he’s sullen and chilled, Hal is, and by the time they’ve run the pre-stretch sprints up and down the E.T.A. hill four times, swinging their sticks madly in all directions and (at A. deLint’s dictate) making various half-hearted warrior-noises, Hal is both chilled and wet, and his sneakers squelch from dew as he hops in place and looks at his breath, wincing as the cold air hits the one bad tooth.
By the time they’re all stretching out, lined up in rows along the service- and baselines, flexing and bowing, genuflecting to nothing, changing postures at the sound of a whistle, by this time the sky has lightened to the color of Kaopectate. The ATHSCME fans are idle and the E.T.A.s can hear birds. Smoke from the stacks of the Sunstrand complex is weakly sunlit as it hangs in plumes, completely still, as if painted on the air. Tiny cries and a repetitive scream for help come up from someplace downhill to the east, presumably Enfield Marine. This is the one time of day the Charles doesn’t look bright blue. The pines’ birds don’t sound any happier than the players.
The grounds’ non-pines are bare and canted at circuitous hillside angles all up and down the hill when they sprint again, four more times, then on bad days another four, maybe the most hated part of the day’s conditioning.
Somebody always throws up a little; it’s like the drills’ reveille. The river at dawn is a strip of foil’s dull side. Kyle Coyle keeps saying it’s co-wo-wold.
All the lesser players are still abed. Today there’s multiple retching, from last night’s sweets. Hal’s breath hangs before his face until he moves through it. Sprints produce the sick sound of much squelching; everyone wishes the hill’s grass would die.
Twenty-four girls are drilled in groups of six on four of the Center Courts. The 32 boys (minus, rather ominously, J. J. Penn) are split by rough age into fours and take a semi-staggered eight of the East Courts. Schtitt is up in his little observational crow’s nest, a sort of apse at the end of the iron transom players call the Tower that extends west to east over the centers of all three sets of courts and terminates w/ the nest high above the Show Courts. He has a chair and an ashtray up there. Sometimes from the courts you can see him leaning over the railing, tapping the edge of the bullhorn with his weatherman’s pointer; from the West and Center Courts the rising sun behind him gives his white head a pinkish corona. When he’s seated you just see misshapen smoke-rings coming up out of the nest and moving off with the wind. The sound of the bullhorn is scarier when you can’t see him. The waffled iron stairs leading up to the transom are west of the West Courts, all the way across from the nest, so sometimes Schtitt paces back and forth along the transom with his pointer behind his back, his boots ringing out on the iron. Schtitt seems immune to all weather and always dresses the same for drills: the warm-ups and boots. When the E.T.A.s’ strokes or play’s being filmed for study, Mario Incandenza is positioned on the railing of Schtitt’s nest, leaning way out and filming down, his police lock protruding into empty air, with somebody beefy assigned to stand behind him and grip the back of the Velcro vest: it always scares hell out of Hal because you can never see Dunkel or Nwangi behind Mario and it always looks like he’s leaning way out to dive Bolex-first down onto Court 7’s net.
Except during periods of disciplinary conditioning, alfresco A.M. drills work like this. A prorector is at each relevant court with two yellow Ball- Hopper-brand baskets of used balls, plus a ball machine, which machine looks like an open footlocker with a blunt muzzle at one end pointed across the net at a quartet of boys and connected by long orange industrial cords to a three-prong outdoor outlet at the base of each light-pole. Some of the
light-poles cast long thin shadows across the courts as soon as the sun is strong enough for there to be shadows; in summertime players try to sort of huddle in the thin lines of shade. Ortho Stice keeps yawning and shivering; John Wayne wears a small cold smile. Hal hops up and down in his capacious jacket and plum turtleneck and looks at his breath and tries à la Lyle to focus very intently on the pain of his tooth without judging it as bad or good. K. D. Coyle, out of the infirmary after the weekend, opines that he doesn’t see why the better players’ reward for hard slogging to the upper rungs is dawn drills while for instance Pemulis and the Vikemeister et al. are still horizontal and sawing logs. Coyle says this every morning. Stice tells him he’s surprised at how little they’ve missed him. Coyle is from the small Tucson AZ suburb of Erythema and claims to have thin desert blood and special sensitivity to the wet chill of Boston’s dawn. The WhataBurger Jr. Invitational is a sort of double-edged Thanksgiving homecoming for Coyle, who at thirteen was lured from Tucson’s own Rancho Vista Golf and Tennis Academy by promises of self-transcendence from Schtitt.
Drills work like this. Eight different emphases on eight different courts.
Each quartet starts at a different court and rotates around. The top four traditionally start drills on the first court: backhands down the line, two boys to a side. Corbett Thorp lays down squares of electrician’s tape at the court’s corners and they are strongly encouraged to hit the balls into the little squares. Hal hits with Stice, Coyle with Wayne; Axford’s been sent down with Shaw and Struck for some reason. Second court: forehands, same deal. Stice consistently misses the square and gets a low-pH rejoinder from Tex Watson, hatless and pattern-balding at twenty-seven. Hal’s tooth hurts and his ankle is stiff and the cold balls come off his strings with a dead sound like chung. Tiny bratwursts of smoke ascend rhythmically from Schtitt’s little nest. Third court is ‘Butterflies,’ a complex VAPS deal where Hal hits a backhand down the line to Stice while Coyle forehands it to Wayne and then Wayne and Stice cross-court the balls back to Hal and Coyle, who have to switch sides without bashing into each other and hit back down the line now to Wayne and Stice, respectively. Wayne and Hal amuse themselves by making their cross-court balls collide on every fifth exchange or so — this is known around E.T.A. as ‘atom-smashing’ and is understandably hard to do — and the collided balls sprong wildly out onto the other practice courts, and Rik Dunkel is less amused than Wayne and
Hal are, so, nicely warm now and arms singing, they’re shunted quickly onto the fourth court: volleys for depth, then for angle, then lobs and overheads, which latter drill can be converted into a disciplinary Puker if a prorector’s feeding you the lobs: the overhead drill’s called ‘Tap & Whack’: Hal pedals back, terribly ankle-conscious, jumps, kicks out, nails Stice’s lob, then has to sprint up and tap the net’s tape with his Dunlop’s head as Stice lobs deep again, and Hal has to backpedal again and jump and kick and hit it, and so on. Then Hal and Coyle, both sucking wind after twenty and trying to stand up straight, feed lobs to Wayne and Stice, neither of whom is fatiguable as far as anyone can tell. You have to kick out on overheads to keep your balance in the air. Overhead, Schtitt uses an unamplified bullhorn and careful enunciation to call out for everyone to hear that Mr. revenant Hal Incandenza was letting the ball get the little much behind him on overheads, fears of the ankle maybe. Hal raises his stick in acknowledgment without looking up. To hang in past age fourteen here is to become immune to humiliation from staff. Coyle tells Hal between the lobs they send up he’d love to see Schtitt have to do twenty Tap & Whacks in a row. They’re all flushed to a shine, all chill washed off, noses running freely and heads squeaking with blood, the sun well above the sea’s dull glint and starting to melt the frozen slush from I.-Day’s snow and rain that night-custodians had swept into little wedged lines up against the lengthwise fences, which grimy wedges are now starting to melt and run. There’s still no movement in the Sunstrand stacks’ plumes. The watching prorectors stand easy with their legs apart and their arms crossed over their racquets’ faces. The same three or four booger-shaped clouds seem to pass back and forth overhead, and when they cover the sun people’s breath reappears. Stice blows on his racquet-hand and cries out thinly for the inflation of the Lung. Mr. A. F. deLint ranges behind the fence with his clipboard and whistle, blowing his nose. The girls behind him are too bundled up to be worth watching, their hair rubber-banded into little bouncing tails. Fifth court: serves to both corners of both boxes, catching each others’ serves and serving them back. First serves, second serves, slice serves, shank serves, and back-snapping American Twist serves that Stice begs off of, telling the prorector — Neil Hartigan, who’s 2 m. tall and of so few words everybody fears him by default — he’s having lower spasms from a mispositioned bed. Then Coyle — he of the weak bladder and
suspicious discharge — gets excused to go back into the eastern tree-line out of sight of the distaffs and pee, so the other three get a minute to jog over to the pavilion and stand with their hands on their hips and breathe and drink Gatorade out of little conic paper cups you can’t put down til they’re empty. The way you flush out a cottony mouth between drills is you take a mouthful of Gatorade and puff out your cheeks to make a globe of liquid that you mangle with your teeth and tongue, then lean out and spit out into the grass and take another drink for real. The sixth court is returns of serve down the line, down the center, cross-court for depth, then for placement, then for deep placement, w/ more taped squares; then chipped center- and cross-returns against a server who follows his serve to the net. The server practices half-volleys off the chips, although Wayne and Stice are so fast that they’re on top of the net by the time the return gets to them and they can volley it away at chest-height. Wayne drills with the casual economy of somebody who’s in about second gear. The urns’ dispensers’ cups can’t stand up, their bottoms are pointy and they’ll spill any liquid still in them, is why you have to empty them. Between squads Harde’s guys will sweep the pavilion of dozens of cones.
Then, blessedly, on the seventh court, physically undemanding Finesse drills. Drops, drops for angles, topspin lobs, extreme angles, drops for extreme angles, then restful microtennis, tennis inside the service lines, very soft and precise, radical angles much encouraged. Touch- and artistry-wise nobody comes close to Hal in microtennis. By this time Hal’s turtleneck is soaked through under the alpaca jacket, and exchanging it for a sweatshirt out of the gear bag is a kind of renewal. What wind there is down here is out of the south. The temperature is now probably in the low 10’s C.; the sun’s been up an hour, and you can almost see the light-pole and transom shadows rotating slowly northwest. The Sunstrand stacks’ plumes stand there cigarette-straight, not even seeming to spread at the top; the sky is going a glassy blue.
No (tennis) balls required on the final court. Wind sprints. Probably the less said about wind sprints the better. Then more Gatorade, which Hal and Coyle are breathing too hard to enjoy, as Schtitt comes slowly down from the transom. It takes a while. You can hear his steel-toed boots hit each iron step. There is something creepy about a very fit older man, to say nothing of jackboots w/ Fila warm-ups of claret-colored silk. He’s coming this way,
both hands behind his back and the pointer poking out to the side. Schtitt’s crew cut and face are nacreous as he moves east in the yellowing A.M. light. This is sort of the signal for all the quartets to gather at the Show Courts. Behind them the girls are still hitting groundstrokes in baroque combinations, much high-pitched grunting and the lifeless chung of cold hit balls. Three 14’s are made to squeegee the more extrusive melt back into the little banks of frozen leaves along the fence. At the horizon to the north a bulbous cone of picric clouds that gets taller by the hour as the Methuen– Andover border’s mammoth effectuators force northern MA’s combined oxides north against some sort of upper-air resistance, it looks like. You can see little bits of glitter from broken monitor-glass in the frozen stuff up by the fences behind 6–9, and one or two curved shards of floppy disk, and they’re a troubling sight, Penn being absent amid troubling leg-rumors, Postal-Weight with two black eyes and his nose covered with horizontal bandages that are starting to loosen and curl at the edges from sweat, and Otis P. Lord alleged to have come back from the emergency room at St.
Elizabeth’s last night with the Hitachi monitor over his head, still, its removal, with all the sharp teeth of the broken screen’s glass pointing at key parts of Lord’s throat, apparently calling for the sort of esoteric expertise you have to fly in by private medical jet, according to Axford.
They all get on the outside of three cones of Gatorade, bent or squatting, sucking wind, while Schtitt stands at a sort of Parade Rest with his weather- man’s pointer behind his back and shares overall impressions with the players on the morning’s work thus far. Certain players are singled out for special mention or humiliation. Then more wind sprints. Then a brief like strategy-clinic-thing from Corbett Thorp on how approach shots down the line aren’t always the very best tactic, and why. Thorp’s a first-rate tennis mind, but his terrible stutter makes the boys so uncomfortable they have a 181hard time listening.
The whole first shift’s on the eighth court for the final conditioning 182 drills. First are Star Drills. A dozen-plus boys on either side of the net, behind the baselines. Form a line. Go one at a time. Go: run up the side line, touch the net with your stick; then backwards to the outside corner of the service box and then forward to touch the net again; backward to the middle of the service box, forward to touch net; back to the baseline’s little jut of
centerline, up to net; service box’s other outside corner, net, baseline’s corner, net, then turn and run like hell for the corner you started from.
183 Schtitt has a stopwatch. There’s a janitorial bucket placed in the doubles alley by the finish point, for potential distress. They each do the Star Drill three times. Hal has 41 seconds and 38 and 48, which is average both for him and for any seventeen-year-old with a resting pulse rate in the high 50s.
John Wayne’s low of 33 occurs on his third Star, and he stops dead at the finish point and always just stands there, never bending or walking it off.
Stice gets a 29 and everyone gets very excited until Schtitt says he was slow starting the watch: the arthritis in a thumb. Everyone but Wayne and Stice uses the retch-bucket in a sort of pro forma way. Sixteen-year-old Petropolis Kahn, a.k.a. ‘W.M.’ for ‘Woolly Mammoth’ because he’s so hairy, gets a 60 and then a 59 and then pitches forward onto the hard surface and lies very still. Tony Nwangi tells people to walk around him.
The cardiovascular finale is Side-to-Sides, conceived by van der Meer in the B.S. ’60s and demonic in its simplicity. Again split into fours on eight courts. For the top 18’s, prorector R. Dunkel at net with an armful of balls and more in a hopper beside him, hitting fungoes, one to the forehand corner and then one to the backhand corner and then farther out to the fore- hand corner and so on. And on. Hal Incandenza is expected at least to get a racquet on each ball; for Stice and Wayne the expectations are higher. A very unpleasant drill fatigue-wise, and for Hal also ankle-wise, what with all the stopping and reversing. Hal wears two bandages over a left ankle he shaves way more often than his upper lip. Over the bandages goes an Air- Stirrup inflatable ankle brace that’s very lightweight but looks a bit like a medieval torture-implement. It was in a stop-and-reverse move much like 184 Side-to-Sides that Hal tore all the soft left-ankle tissue he then owned, at fifteen, in his ankle, at Atlanta’s Easter Bowl, in the third round, which he was losing anyway. Dunkel goes fairly easy on Hal, at least on the first two go-arounds, because of the ankle. Hal’s going to be seeded in at least the top 4 at the WhataBurger Inv. in a couple weeks, and woe to the prorector who lets Hal get hurt the way Hal let some of his Little Buddies get hurt yesterday.
What’s potentially demonic about Side-to-Sides is that the duration of the drill and pace and angle of the fungoes to be chased down from side to
side are entirely at the prorector’s discretion. Prorector Rik Dunkel, a former 16’s-doubles runner-up at Jr. Wimbledon and a decent enough guy, the son of some kind of plastic-packaging-systems tycoon on the South Shore, tied with Thorp for brightest of the prorectors (more or less by default), regarded as kind of a mystic because he refers people sometimes to Lyle and has been observed sitting at community gatherings with his eyes closed but not sleeping… but the point is a decent enough guy but not much into any kind of exchange of quarter. He seems to have received instructions to put the particular hurt on Ortho Stice this time, and by his third go-around Stice is trying to weep without breath and mewing for his 185 aunts. But anyway everybody goes through Sides-to-Sides three times.
Even Petropolis Kahn staggers through them, who after Stars had had to be sort of lugged over by Stephan Wagenknecht and Jeff Wax with his Nikes dragging behind him and his head swinging free on his neck and given kind of a swingset-shove to get started. Hal feels for Kahn, who’s not fat but is in the Schacht-type mold, very thick and solid, except also carrying extra weight in terms of leg-and-back-hair, and who always tires easily no matter how hard he conditions. Kahn makes it through but stays bent over the distress-bucket long after the third go-around, staring into it, and stays that way while everybody else removes more soaked bottom layers of clothing and accepts clean towels from a halfway-house part-time black girl with a 186towel cart, and picks up balls.
It is 0720h. and they are through with the active part of dawn drills.
Nwangi, at the edge of the hillside, is whistling the next shift over for opening sprints. Schtitt shares more overall impressions as minimum-wage aides dispense Kleenex and paper cones. Nwangi’s reedy voice carries; he’s telling the B’s he wishes to see nothing but assholes and elbows on these sprints. It’s unclear to Hal what this might connote. The A-players have formed those ragged rows behind the baseline again, and Schtitt paces back and forth. ‘Am seeing sluggish drilling, by sluggards. Not meaning insults. This is the fact. Motions are gone through. Barely minimal efforts. Cold, yes? The cold hands and nose with mucus? Thoughts on getting through, going in, hot showers, water very hot. A meal. The thoughts are drifting toward the
comfort of ending. Too cold to demand the total, yes? Master Chu, too cold for tennis at the high level, yes?’ Chu: ‘It does seem pretty cold out, sir.’ ‘Ah.’ Pacing back and forth with about-faces at every tenth step, stopwatch around his neck, pipe and pouch and pointer in his hands behind his back, nodding to himself, clearly wishing he had a third hand so he could stroke his white chin, pretending to ruminate. Every A.M. essentially the same, except when Schtitt does the females and the males get dressed down by deLint. All the older boys’ eyes are glazed with repetition. Hal’s tooth gives off little electric shivers with each inbreath, and he feels slightly unwell. When he moves his head slightly the monitor-glass bits’ glitter shifts and dances along the opposite fence in a sort of sickening way. ‘Ah.’ Turns crisply toward them, looking briefly skyward. ‘And when is hot? Too pretty hot for the total self on the court? The other hand of the spectrum? Ach. Is always something that is too. Master Incandenza who cannot quickly get behind lob’s descent so weight can move forvart into 187 overhand, please tell your thinking: it is always hot or cold, yes?’ A small smile. ‘’s been our general observation out there, sir.’ ‘So then then so, Master Chu, from California’s temperance regions?’ Chu brings down his hankie. ‘I guess we have to learn to adjust to conditions, sir, I believe is what you’re saying.’ A full sharp half-turn to face the group. ‘Is what I am not saying, young LaMont Chu, is why you cease to seem to give total effort of self since you begin with the clipping pictures of great professional figures for your adhesive tape and walls. No? Because, privileged gentlemen and boys I am saying, is always something that is too. Cold. Hot. Wet and dry. Very bright sun and you see the purple dots. Very bright hot and you have no salt.
Outside is wind, the insects which like the sweat. Inside is smell of heaters, echo, being jammed in together, tarp is overclose to baseline, not enough of room, bells inside clubs which ring the hour loudly to distract, clunk of machines vomiting sweet cola for coins. Inside roof too low for the lob. Bad lighting, so. Or outside: the bad surface. Oh no look no: crabgrass in cracks along baseline. Who could give the total, with crabgrass. Look here is low net high net. Opponent’s relatives heckle, opponent cheats, linesman in semifinal is impaired or cheats. You hurt. You have the injury. Bad knee and
back. Hurt groin area from not stretching as asked. Aches of elbow. Eyelash in eye. The throat is sore. A too pretty girl in audience, watching. Who could play like this? Big crowd overwhelming or too small to inspire.
Always something.’ His turns as he paces are crisp and used to punctuate. ‘Adjust. Adjust?
Stay the same. No? Is not stay the same? It is cold? It is wind? Cold and wind is the world. Outside, yes? On the tennis court the you the player: this is not where there is cold wind. I am saying. Different world inside. World built inside cold outside world of wind breaks the wind, shelters the player, you, if you stay the same, stay inside.’ Pacing gradually faster, the turns becoming pirouettic. The older kids stare straight ahead; some of the younger follow every move of the pointer with wide eyes. Trevor Axford is bent at the waist and moving his head slightly, trying to get the sweat dripping off his face to spell something out on the surface. Schtitt is silent for two fast about-faces, ranging before them, tapping his jaw with the pointer. ‘Not ever I think this adjusting. To what, this adjusting? This world inside is the same, always, if you stay there. This is what we are making, no? New type citizen. Not of cold and wind outside. Citizens of this sheltering second world we are working to show you every dawn, no? To make your introduction.’ The Big Buddies translate Schtitt into accessible language for the littler kids, is a big part of their assignment. ‘Borders of court for singles Mr. Rader are what.’ ‘Twenty-four by eight sir,’ sounding hoarse and thin. ‘So. Second world without cold or purple dots of bright for you is 23.8 meters, 8 I think .2 meters. Yes? In that world is joy because there is shelter of something else, of purpose past sluggardly self and complaints about uncomfort. I am speaking to not just LaMont Chu of the temperance world.
You have a chance to occur, playing. No? To make for you this second world that is always the same: there is in this world you, and in the hand a tool, there is a ball, there is opponent with his tool, and always only two of you, you and this other, inside the lines, with always a purpose to keep this world alive, yes?’ The pointer-motions through all this become too orchestral and intricate to describe. ‘This second world inside the lines.
Yes? Is this adjusting? This is not adjusting. This is not adjusting to ignore cold and wind and tired. Not ignoring “as if.” Is no cold. Is no wind. No
cold wind where you occur. No? Not “adjust to conditions.” Make this second world inside the world: here there are no conditions.’ Looks around. ‘So put a lid on it about the fucking cold,’ says deLint, with his clipboard under his arm and his strangler-sized hands in his pockets, hopping a little in place.
Schtitt is looking around. Like most Germans outside popular entertainment, he gets quieter when he wants to impress or menace. (There are very few shrill Germans, actually.) ‘If it is hard,’ he says softly, hard to hear because of the rising wind, ‘difficult, for you to move between the two worlds, from cold hot wind and sun to this inside place inside the lines where is always the same,’ he says, seeming now to study the weatherman’s pointer he holds down and out with both hands, ‘it can be arranged for you gentlemen not to leave, ever here, this world inside the lines of court. You know. Can stay here until there is citizenship. Right here.’ The pointer is pointed at the spots they’re standing at breathing and blotting their faces and blowing their noses. ‘Can today put up Testar Lung, for world’s shelter.
Sleep bags. Meals brought to you. Never across the lines. Never leave the court. Study here. A bucket for hygienic needs. At Gymnasium Kaiserslautern where I am privileged boy who whining about cold wind, we live inside tennis court for months, to learn to live inside. Very lucky days when they bring us meals. Not possible to cross a line for months of living.’ Left-hander Brian van Vleck picks a bad moment to break wind.
Schtitt shrugs, half-turning away from them to look off somewhere. ‘Or else leave here into large external world where is cold and pain without purpose or tool, eyelash in eye and pretty girl — not worry anymore about how to occur.’ Looks around. ‘No one is a prisoner here. Who would like to escape into large world? Master Sweeny?’ Little eyes down. ‘Mr. Coyle, with always too co-wold to give total?’ Coyle studies the vasculature on the inside of his elbow with deep interest as he shakes his head. John Wayne is joggling his head around like a Raggedy-Andy-head, stretching out the neck hardware. John Wayne is notoriously tight and can’t touch anything below the knee with straight legs during stretches. ‘Mr. Peter Beak with always the weeping to home on the telephone?’
The twelve-year-old says Not Me Sir several times.
Hal very subtly shoots in a small plug of Kodiak. Aubrey deLint has his arms crossed over the clipboard and is looking around beadily like a crow.
Hal Incandenza has an almost obsessive dislike for deLint, whom he tells Mario he sometimes cannot quite believe is even real, and tries to get to the side of, to see whether deLint has a true z coordinate or is just a cutout or projection. The kids of the next shift are walking downhill and sprinting back up and walking down, warrior-whooping without conviction. The other male prorectors are drinking cones of Gatorade, clustered in the little pavilion, feet up on patio-chairs, Dunkel’s and Watson’s eyes closed. Neil Hartigan, in his traditional Tahitian shirt and Gaugin-motif sweater, has to stay sitting down to fit under the Gatorade awning. ‘Simple,’ Schtitt shrugs, so that the upraised pointer seems to stab at the sky. ‘Hit,’ he suggests. ‘Move. Travel lightly. Occur. Be here. Not in bed or shower or over baconschteam, in the mind. Be here in total. Is nothing else.
Learn. Try. Drink your green juice. Perform the Butterfly exercises on all eight of these courts, please, to warm down. Mr. deLint, please to bring them back down, make sure of stretching the groins. Gentlemen: hit tennis balls. Fire at your will. Use a head. You are not arms. Arm in the real tennis is like wheels of vehicles. Not engine. Legs: not either. Where is where you apply for citizenship in second world Mr. consciousness of ankle Incandenza, our revenant?’ Hal can lean out and spit in a way that isn’t insolent. ‘Head, sir.’ ‘Excuse?’ ‘The human head, sir, if I got your thrust. Where I’m going to occur as a player. The game’s two heads’ one world. One world, sir.’ Schtitt sweeps the pointer in an ironic morendo arc and laughs aloud: ‘Play.’
Part of Don Gately’s live-in Staff job is that he hurtles here and there on selected Ennet House errands. He cooks the communal supper on week- 188 days, which means he does the House’s weekly shopping, which means that at least a couple times a week he gets to take Pat Montesian’s black 1964 Ford Aventura and drive to the Purity Supreme Market. The Aventura is an antique variant of the Mustang, the sort of car you usually only see waxed and static in car shows with somebody in a bikini pointing at it. Pat’s
is functional and mint-reconditioned — her shadowy husband with something like ten years sober being big into cars — with such a wicked nice multilayer paint job that its black has the bottomless quality of water at night. It has two different alarm systems and a red metal bar you’re supposed to lock across the steering wheel when you get out. The engine sounds more like a jet engine than a piston engine, plus there’s a scoop poking periscopically from the hood, and for Gately the vehicle’s so terrifically tight and sleek it’s like being strapped into a missile and launched at the site of a domestic errand. He can barely fit in the driver’s seat. The steering wheel is about the size of an old video-arcade game’s steering wheel, and the thin canted six-speed shift is encased in a red leather baglet that smells strongly of leather. The height of the car’s roof compromises Gately’s driving-posture, and his right ham like exceeds the seat and squeezes against the gearshift so that shifting pinches his hip. He does not care. Some of the profoundest spiritual feelings of his sobriety so far are for this car. He’d drive this car if the driver’s seat was just a sharp pointy spike, he told Johnette Foltz. Johnette Foltz is the other live-in Staffer, though between ultra-rabid Commitment-activity in NA and a somehow damaged NA fiancé she spends a lot of time pushing around places in a wicker wheelchair, she’s around Ennet House less and less now, and there are rumblings about a possible replacement, which Gately and the heterosexual male residents pray daily will be the leggy alumna and part- time counselor Danielle Steenbok, who’s rumored also to attend Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, which engages everyone’s imagination to the max.
It’s a mark of serious regard and questionable judgment that Director Pat M. lets Don Gately drive her priceless Aventura, even just to like the Metro Food Bank or Purity Supreme, because Gately lost his license more or less permanently back in the Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster for getting pinched on a DUI in Peabody on a license that had already been suspended for a previous DUI in Lowell. This was not the only Loss Don Gately incurred as his chemical careers moved toward their life-reversing climax. Once every couple months now, still, he has to put on his brown dress slacks and slightly irregular green sportcoat from Brighton Budget Large ’N Tall Menswear and take the commuter rail up to selected District Court venues on the North Shore and meet with his various P.D.s and P.O.s
and caseworkers and sometimes appear briefly up in front of Judges and Review Boards to review the progress of his sobriety and reparations. When he first came to Ennet House last year, Gately had Bad-Check and Forgery issues, he had a Malicious Destruction of Property issue, plus two D&Ds and a bullshit Public Urination out of Tewksbury. He had a Break-and-Enter from a silent-alarmed Peabody mansion where he and a colleague got pinched before anything could get promoted. He had a Possession With 189 Intent from 38 50-mg. tablets of Demerol in a Pez container which he’d shoved down into the crack of the Peabody Finest’s cruiser’s back seat, but which got found anyway on the routine post-transport cruiser-search all cops perform when the arrestee’s pupils are unresponsive both to light and to head-slaps.
There was, too, of course, a certain darker issue, vis-à-vis a certain up- scale Brookline home whose late owner had been eulogized at terrifying length and headline-size in both the Globe and Herald. After eight months of indescribable psychic cringing, waiting for the legal footwear to drop on the Nuck-VIP issue — toward the end of his drug-use Gately’d gotten sloppy and crazy and stuck idiotically with a method of straight meter- shunting that he’d learned up at MCI-Billerica and was pretty sure now constituted a signature Gately M.O., since the older guy that’d taught it to him in the Billerica metal-shop had subsequently got out and gone to Utah and died of a morphine overdose (and like who on earth hopes to get reliable morphine in fucking Utah?) over two years ago — after eight months of cringing and nail-biting, the last couple months of the torment in Ennet House — even though the House’s D.S.A.S.-license put it legally off- limits to all constabulary without Pat Montesian’s physical presence and notarized permission — after he was down to the cuticles on all ten digits, Gately had very discreetly approached a certain Percodan-devoted court stenographer an old girlfriend had once dealt to, and had the guy make equally discreet inquiries, and found that the potential Murder–2 190 investigation of the botched burglary had been taken over — pace the loud howls of a certain remorseless Revere A.D.A. — by something federal the addled stenographer called ‘Non-Specific Services Bureau,’ whereupon the case vanished from any sort of investigative scene the stenographer could make inquiries about, though quiet rumor had it that current
suspicions were being directed at certain shadowy Nucko-political bodies all the way up in Quebec, far north of the Enfield MA where Gately had been cringing his way to nightly AA meetings with his fingers in his mouth.
Most of the cases Gately had had pending his P.D. had gotten Closed 191 Without Finding, contingent on Gately’s entering long-term treatment and maintaining chemical abstinence and submitting to random urinalyses and making biweekly reparation payments out of the pathetic paychecks he earned cleaning shit and sperm under Stavros Lobokulas and now also cooking and live-in-Staffing at Ennet House. The only issue not resolved on a Blue-File deferral was the business of driving with a DUI-suspended license. In the Commonwealth of MA, this issue carries a mandatory 90-day bit, as in like the penalty’s written right into the statute; and the case’s P.D. has been up-front with Gately about it’s only a matter of the time of the wheels’ slow judicial grind before some judge Red-Files the issue and the case and Gately has to do the bit at someplace MCI-Minimum like Concord or Deer Island. Gately isn’t too hinked about 90 inside. At twenty-four he’d done 17 months at Billerica for assaulting two bouncers in a nightclub — it was more like he’d beaten the second bouncer bloody with the unconscious body of the first — and he knew quite well he could get by in a Commonwealth lockdown. He was too big to fuck or fuck with and not interested in fucking with anyone else: he did his time stand-up and gave nobody any provoking cause; and when the first couple hard guys had come after him for his canteen cigarettes he’d laughed it off with ferocious jolliness, and when they came back a second time Gately beat them half to death in the corridor behind the weight room where he could be sure plenty of other guys could hear it, and after that one incident was out of the way he could simply get by and not get fucked with. Gately now was hinked only about the prospect of getting just one or two AA meetings a week in jail — the only meetings sober inmates get are when an area Group comes in on an Institutional Commitment, which Gately’s been on — when Demerol and Talwin and good old weed are almost easier to get in jail than in the outside world. Gately cringed now only at the thought of the Sergeant at Arms, the distinguished-looking shepherd guy. Going back to ingesting Substances had become his biggest fear. Even Gately can tell this is a major psychic turn-around. He tells the newer residents right up front that AA’s somehow
gotten him by the mental curlies: he’ll now go to literally Any Lengths to stay clean.
He’ll tell them right out that he’d first come to Ennet House only to keep out of jail, and hadn’t had much interest or hope about actually staying clean for any length of time; and he’d been up-front with Pat Montesian about this during his application interview. The grim honesty about his disinterest and hopelessness was one reason Pat even let such a clearly bad- news specimen into the House on nothing but a lukewarm referral from a P.O. up at the 5th District office in Peabody. Pat told Gately that grim honesty and hopelessness were the only things you need to start recovering from Substance-addiction, but that without these qualities you were totally up the creek. Desperation helped also, she said. Gately scratched at her dog’s stomach and said he wasn’t sure if he was desperate about anything except wanting to somehow stop getting in trouble for things he usually afterward couldn’t even remember he did them. The dog trembled and shuddered and its eyes rolled up as Gately, who hadn’t been told about Pat’s thing about wanting her dogs petted, rubbed its scabby stomach. Pat had 192said like well that was enough, that desire for the shitstorm to end.
Gately said her dog sure did like having its stomach rubbed, and Pat explained that the dog was epileptic, and said that just a desire to stop blacking out was more than enough to start with. She pulled some Commonwealth Substance-Abuse study in a black plastic binder off a long black plastic bookshelf filled with black plastic binders. It turned out Pat Montesian liked the color black a lot. She was dressed — really kind of overdressed, for a halfway house — in black leather pants and a black shirt of silk or something silky. Outside the bay window a Green Line train was laboring up the first Enfield hill in the late-summer rain. The downhill view from the bay window over Pat’s black lacquer or enamelish desk was like the only spectacular thing about Ennet House, which was otherwise a wicked awful dump. Pat made a sound against the binder with a Svelte nail- extension and said that in this state study right here, conducted in the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, over 60% of the inmates serving Life sentences in hellish MCI-Walpole and not disputing that they’d done what they’d done to get in there nevertheless had no memory of having done it, whatever got them in there. For Life. None. Gately had to have her run it by
him a couple times before he isolated her point. They’d been in blackouts.
Pat said a blackout was where you continued to function — sometimes disastrously — but weren’t aware later of what you did. It’s like your mind wasn’t in possession of your body, and it was usually brought on by alcohol but could also be brought on by chronic use of other Substances, synthetic narcotics among them. Gately said he couldn’t recall ever having a real blackout, and Pat M. got it but didn’t laugh. The dog was heaving and quivering with its legs spronged out to all points of the compass and kind of spasming, and Gately didn’t know whether to quit rubbing on it. To be honest he didn’t know what epilepsy was but suspected Pat was not referring to the woman’s leg-shaver thing his totally alcoholic past girlfriend Pamela Hoffman-Jeep used to scream in the bathroom when she used. Everything mental for Gately was kind of befogged and prone to misprision for well into his first year clean.
Pat Montesian was both pretty and not. She was in maybe her late thirties. She’d supposedly been this young and pretty and wealthy socialite out on the Cape until her husband had divorced her for being a nearly full- blown alcoholic, which seemed like abandonment and didn’t improve her subsequent drinking one jot. She’d been in and out of rehabs and halfway places in her twenties, but then it wasn’t until she’d almost died from a stroke during the D.T.s one A.M. that she’d been able to Surrender and Come In with the requisite hopeless desperation, etc. Gately didn’t wince when he heard about Pat’s stroke because his mom hadn’t had D.T.s or a classic stroke, but rather a cirrhotic hemorrhage that made her choke and deprived her brain of oxygen and had irreparably vegetabilized her brain.
The two cases were totally, like, apart in his mind. Pat M. was never in any way a mother-figure for Gately. Pat liked to smile and say, when residents pissed and moaned about their own addictions’ Losses during the weekly House Community Meeting, she’d nod and smile and say that for her, the stroke had been far and away the best thing that’s ever happened to her because it enabled her to finally Surrender. She’d come to Ennet House in an electric wheelchair at thirty-two and been unable to communicate except 193 via like Morse-Code blinks or something for the first six months, but had even without use of her arms demonstrated a willingness to try and eat a rock when the founding Guy Who Didn’t Even Use His First Name told
her to, using her torso and neck to like chop downwardly at the rock and chipping both incisors (you can still see the caps at the corners), and had gotten sober, and remarried a different and older South Shore like trillionaire with what sounded like psychotic kids, and but regained an unexpected amount of function, and had been working at the House ever since. The right side of her face was still pulled way over in this sort of rictus, and her speech took Gately some getting used to — it sounded like she was still loaded all the time, a kind of overenunciated slurring. The half of her face that wasn’t rictusized was very pretty, and she had very long pretty red hair, and a sexually credible body even though her right arm had 194 atrophied into a kind of semi-claw and the right hand was strapped into this black plastic brace to keep its nail-extensioned fingers from curling into her palm; and Pat walked with a dignified but godawful lurch, dragging a terribly thin right leg in black leather pants behind her like something hanging on to her that she was trying to get away from.
During his residency, she’d gone personally with Gately on most of his bigger court-dates, driving him up to the North Shore in the killer Aventura with its Handicapped plates — she because of the neurological right-leg thing literally had a lead foot, and drove all the time like a maniac, and Gately had usually almost wet himself on Rte. 1 — and she’d throw all Ennet House’s substantial respect and clout behind him with Judges and Boards, until every issue that could be resolved without finding was Blue- Filed. Gately still couldn’t figure out why all the personal extra attention and help. It was like he’d been Pat M.’s biggest favorite among the residents last year. She did have favorites and nonfavorites; it was probably unavoidable. Annie Parrot and the counselors and House Manager always had their particular favorites, too, so it all tended to work out square.
About four months into his Ennet House residency, the agonizing desire to ingest synthetic narcotics had been mysteriously magically removed from Don Gately, just like the House Staff and the Crocodiles at the White Flag Group had said it would if he pounded out the nightly meetings and stayed minimally open and willing to persistently ask some extremely vague Higher Power to remove it. The desire. They said to get creakily down on his mammoth knees in the A.M. every day and ask God As He Understood Him to remove the agonizing desire, and to hit the old knees again at night
before sack and thank this God-ish figure for the Substanceless day just ended, if he got through it. They suggested he keep his shoes and keys under the bed to help him remember to get on his knees. The only times Gately had ever been on his knees before were to throw up or mate, or shunt a low-on-the-wall alarm, or if somebody got lucky during a beef and landed one near Gately’s groin. He didn’t have any God- or J.C.- background, and the knee-stuff seemed like the limpest kind of dickless pap, and he felt like a true hypocrite just going through the knee-motions that he went through faithfully every A.M. and P.M., without fail, motivated by a desire to get loaded so horrible that he often found himself humbly praying for his head to just finally explode already and get it over with. Pat had said it didn’t matter at this point what he thought or believed or even said. All that mattered was what he did. If he did the right things, and kept doing them for long enough, what Gately thought and believed would magically change. Even what he said. She’d seen it happen again and again, and to some awfully unlikely candidates for change. She said it had happened to her. The left side of her face was very alive and kind. And Gately’s counselor, an ex-coke and -phone-bunko guy whose left ear had been one of his Losses, had hit Gately early on with the infamous Boston AA cake analogy. The grizzled Filipino had met with the resident Don G. once a week, driving Gately around Brighton-Allston in aimless circles in a customized Subaru 4×4 just like the ones Gately used to hotwire and promote to use for burgling. Eugenio Martinez had this eccentric thing where he maintained he could only be in touch with his own Higher Power when he was driving. Down near E.W.D.’s barge-docks off the Allston Spur one night he invited Gately to think of Boston AA as a box of Betty Crocker Cake Mix. Gately had smacked himself in the forehead at yet another limp oblique Gene M. analogy, which Gene had already bludgeoned him with several insectile tropes for thinking about the Disease.
The counselor had let him vent spleen for a while, smoking as he crawled along behind land-barges lined up to unload. He told Gately to just imagine for a second that he’s holding a box of Betty Crocker Cake Mix, which represented Boston AA. The box came with directions on the side any eight-year-old could read. Gately said he was waiting for the mention of some kind of damn insect inside the cake mix. Gene M. said all Gately had to do was for fuck’s sake give himself a break and relax and for once shut
up and just follow the directions on the side of the fucking box. It didn’t matter one fuckola whether Gately like believed a cake would result, or whether he understood the like fucking baking-chemistry of how a cake would result: if he just followed the motherfucking directions, and had sense enough to get help from slightly more experienced bakers to keep from fucking the directions up if he got confused somehow, but basically the point was if he just followed the childish directions, a cake would result.
He’d have his cake. The only thing Gately knew about cake was that the frosting was the best part, and he personally found Eugenio Martinez a smug and self-righteous prick — plus he’d always distrusted both Orientals and spics, and Gene M. managed to seem like both — but he didn’t screw out of the House or quite do anything they could Discharge him for, and he went to meetings nightly and told the more or less truth, and he did the shoe-under-bed knee thing every A.M./P.M. 24/7, and he took the suggestion to join a Group and get rabidly Active and clean up ashtrays and go out speaking on Commitments. He had nothing in the way of a like God- concept, and at that point maybe even less than nothing in terms of interest in the whole thing; he treated prayer like setting an oven-temp according to a box’s direction. Thinking of it as talking to the ceiling was somehow preferable to imagining talking to Nothing. And he found it embarrassing to get down on his knees in his underwear, and like the other guys in the room he always pretended his sneakers were like way under the bed and he had to stay down there a while to find them and get them out, when he prayed, but he did it, and beseeched the ceiling and thanked the ceiling, and after maybe five months Gately was riding the Greenie at 0430 to go clean human turds out of the Shattuck shower and all of a sudden realized that quite a few days had gone by since he’d even thought about Demerol or Talwin or even weed. Not just merely getting through those last few days — Substances hadn’t even occurred to him. I.e. the Desire and Compulsion had been Removed. More weeks went by, a blur of Commitments and meetings and gasper-smoke and clichés, and he still didn’t feel anything like his old need to get high. He was, in a way, Free. It was the first time he’d been out of this kind of mental cage since he was maybe ten. He couldn’t believe it. He wasn’t Grateful so much as kind of suspicious about it, the Removal. How could some kind of Higher Power he didn’t even believe in magically let him out of the cage when Gately had been a total hypocrite in even asking
something he didn’t believe in to let him out of a cage he had like zero hope of ever being let out of? When he could only get himself on his knees for the prayers in the first place by pretending to look for his shoes? He couldn’t for the goddamn life of him understand how this thing worked, this thing that was working. It drove him bats. At about seven months, at the little Sunday Beginners’ Mtg., he actually cracked one of the Provident’s 195fake-wood tabletops beating his big square head against it.
White Flagger (‘Ferocious’) Francis Gehaney, one of the most ancient and gnarled of the Crocodiles, had a white crew cut and skallycap and suspenders over the flannel shirt that encased his gut, and an enormous cucumber-shaped red schnoz you could actually see whole arteries in the skin of, and brown stumpy teeth and emphysema and a portable little oxygen-tank thing whose blue tube was held under the schnoz with white tape, and the very clear bright eye-whites that went along with the extremely low resting pulse-rate of a guy with geologic amounts of sober AA time. Ferocious Francis G., whose mouth was never without a toothpick and who had on his right forearm a faded martini-glass-and-naked-lady tattoo of Korean-War-vintage, who’d gotten sober under the Nixon administration and who communicated in the obscene but antiquated 196 epigrams the Crocs all used — F.F. had taken Gately out for eye-rattling amounts of coffee, after the incident with the table and the head. He’d listened with the slight boredom of detached Identification to Gately’s complaint that there was no way something he didn’t understand enough to even start to believe in was seriously going to be interested in helping save his ass, even if He/She/It did in some sense exist. Gately still doesn’t quite know why it helped, but somehow it helped when Ferocious Francis suggested that maybe anything minor-league enough for Don Gately to understand probably wasn’t going to be major-league enough to save Gately’s addled ass from the well-dressed Sergeant at Arms, now, was it?
That was months ago. Gately usually no longer much cares whether he understands or not. He does the knee-and-ceiling thing twice a day, and cleans shit, and listens to dreams, and stays Active, and tells the truth to the Ennet House residents, and tries to help a couple of them if they approach him wanting help. And when Ferocious Francis G. and the White Flaggers presented him, on the September Sunday that marked his first year sober,
with a faultlessly baked and heavily frosted one-candle cake, Don Gately had cried in front of nonrelatives for the first time in his life. He now denies that he actually did cry, saying something about candle-fumes in his eye.
But he did.
Gately is an unlikely choice for Ennet House chef, having fed for most of the last twelve years on sub-shop subs and corporate snack foods consumed amid some sort of motion. He is 188 cm. and 128 kg. and had never once eaten broccoli or a pear until last year. Chef-wise, he offers up an exceptionless routine of: boiled hot dogs; dense damp meat loaf with little pieces of American cheese and half a box of cornflakes on top, for texture; Cream of Chicken soup over spirochete-shaped noodles; ominously dark, leathery Shake ’N Bake chicken legs; queasily underdone hamburgs; 197and hamburg-sauce spaghetti whose pasta he boils for almost an hour.
None but the most street-hardened Ennet residents would ever hazard an open crack about the food, which appears nightly at the long dinner table still in the broad steaming pans it was cooked in, with Gately’s big face hovering lunarly above it, flushed and beaded under the floppy chef’s hat Annie Parrot had given him as a dark joke he hadn’t got, his eyes full of anxiety and hopes for everyone’s full enjoyment, basically looking like a nervous bride serving her first conjugal dish, except this bride’s hands are the same size as the House’s dinner plates and have jailhouse tatts on them, and this bride seems to need no oven-mitts as he sets down massive pans on the towels that have to be laid down to keep the plastic tabletop from searing. Any sort of culinary comments are always extremely oblique.
Randy Lenz up at the northeast corner likes to raise his can of tonic and say that Don’s food is the kind of food that helps you really appreciate whatever you’re drinking along with it. Geoffrey Day talks about what a refreshing change it is to leave a dinner table not feeling bloated. Wade McDade, a young hard-core flask-alkie from Ashland KY, and Doony Glynn, who’s still woozy and infirm from some horrendous Workers Comp. scam gone awry last year, and is constantly sickly and who’s probably going to get Discharged soon for losing his menial job at Brighton Fence & Wire and not even pretending to look for another one — the two have this bit they do on spaghetti night where McDade comes into the living room right before chow and goes ‘Some of that extra-fine spay-ghetti tonight, Doonster,’ and
Doony Glynn goes ‘Ooo, will it be all lovely and soft?’ and McDade goes ‘Leave your teeth at home, boy’ in the voice of a Kentucky sheriff, leading Glynn to the table by the hand as if Glynn were a damaged child. They take care to do the bit while Gately’s still in the kitchen tossing salad and worrying about course-presentation. Though Tiny Ewell never fails to thank Gately for the meal, and April Cortelyu is lavish in her praises, and Burt F.
Smith always rolls his eyes with pleasure and makes yummy-noises whenever he can get a fork to his mouth.
PRE-DAWN, 1 MAY — Y.D.A.U.
OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON AZ U.S.A., STILL
‘Do you remember hearing,’ U.S.O.U.S.’s Hugh Steeply said, ‘in your own country, in the late I think B.S. ’70s, of an experimental program, a biomedical experiment, involving the idea of electro-implantations in the human brain?’ Steeply, at the shelf’s lip, turned to look. Marathe merely looked back at him. Steeply said: ‘No? Some sort of radical advance.
Stereo-taxy. Epilepsy-treatment. They proposed to implant tiny little hair- thin electrodes in the brain. Some leading Canadian neurologist — Elder, Elders, something — at the time had hit on evidence that certain tiny little stimulations in certain brain-areas could prevent a seizure. As in an epileptic seizure. They implant electrodes — hair-thin, just a few millivolts
or —’
‘Briggs electrodes.’ ‘Beg pardon?’ Marathe coughed slightly. ‘Also the type used in pacemakers of the heart.’ Steeply felt his lip. ‘I’m thinking I’m recalling a tentative Bio-entry saying your father had had a pacemaker.’ Marathe touched his own face absently. ‘The plutonium-239 pack of power. The Briggs electrode. The Kenbeck DC circuit. I am recalling terms and instructions. Avoid all microwaving ovens and many transmitters.
Cremation for burial forbidden — this is because of plutonium-239.’ ‘So but you know of this old program with epileptics? Experiments they thought could avoid ablative surgery for severe epilepsy?’
Marathe said nothing and made what might be seen as slightly shaking the head.
Steeply turned back to face the east with his hands clasped before his back, wishing to speak of it one way or another way, Marathe could tell. ‘I can’t remember if I read about it or heard a lecture or what. The implantation was a pretty inexact science. It was all experimental. A whole lot of electrodes had to be implanted in an incredibly small area in the temporal lobe to hope to find the nerve-terminals that involved epileptic seizures, and it was trial and error, stimulating each electrode and checking the reaction.’ ‘Temporal lobes of the brain,’ Marathe said. ‘What happened was that Olders and the Canadian neuroscientists happened to find, during all the trial and error, that firing certain electrodes in certain parts of the lobes gave the brain intense feelings of pleasure.’ Steeply looked back over his shoulder at Marathe. ‘I mean we’re talking about intense pleasure, Rémy. I’m remembering Olders called these little strips of stimulatable pleasure-tissue p-terminals.’ ‘ “P” wishing to mean “the pleasure.” ’ ‘And that their location seemed maddeningly inexact and unpredictable, even within brains of the same species — a p-terminal’d turn out to be right up next to some other neuron whose stimulation would cause pain, or hunger, or God knows what.’ ‘The human brain is very dense; it is the truth.’ ‘The whole point is they weren’t doing it on humans yet. It was regarded as radically experimental. They used animals and animal-lobes. But soon the pleasure-stimulation phenomenon was its own separate radical experiment, while the second-string neuro-team stuck with the epileptic animals. Older — or Elder, some Anglo-Canadian name — headed the team to map these what he called quote “Rivers of Reward,” the p-terminals in the lobes.’ Marathe idly felt at the little pills of cotton in his windbreaker’s cotton pockets, pleasantly nodding. ‘An experimental program of Canada, you stated.’ ‘I even remember. The Brandon Psychiatric Center.’ Marathe pretended to cough in the recognition of this. ‘This is a mental hospital. The far north of Manitoba. Forbidding wastelands. The center of
nothing.’ ‘Because they were theorizing that these quote “rivers” or terminals were also the brain’s receptors for things like beta-endorphins, L-dopa, Q- dopa, serotonin, all the various neurotransmitters of pleasure.’ ‘The Department of Euphoria, so to speak, within the human brain.’ There was no hint or suggestion yet of dawn or light. ‘But not humans yet,’ Steeply said. ‘Older’s earliest subject were rats, and the results were apparently sobering. The Nu— the Canadians found that if they rigged an auto-stimulation lever, the rat would press the lever to stimulate his p-terminal over and over, thousands of times an hour, over and over, ignoring food and female rats in heat, completely fixated on the lever’s stimulation, day and night, stopping only when the rat finally died of dehydration or simple fatigue.’ Marathe said ‘Not of the pleasure itself, however.’ ‘I think dehydration. I’m fuzzy on just what the rat died of.’ Marathe shrugged. ‘But the envy of all experimental rats everywhere, this rat, I think.’ ‘Then likewise implantations and levers for cats, dogs, swine, monkeys, primates, even a dolphin.’ ‘Up the evolving scale, p-terminals for each. Each died?’ ‘Eventually,’ Steeply said, ‘or else they had to be lobotomized. Because I remember even if the pleasure-electrode was removed, the stimulation- lever removed, the subject’d run around pressing anything that could be pressed or flipped, trying to get one more jolt.’ ‘The dolphin, probably it swam about and did this, I think.’ ‘You seem amused by this, Rémy. This was totally a Canadian show, this little neuroelectric adventure.’ ‘I am amused while you make a way toward your point so slowly.’ ‘Because then eventually Elder and company of course wanted to try human subjects, to see whether the human lobe had p-terminals and so on; and because of the sobering consequences for the subject-animals in the program they couldn’t legally use prisoners or patients, they had to try to
secure volunteers.’ ‘Because of a risk,’ Marathe said. ‘The whole thing was apparently a nightmare of Canadian legalities and statutes.’
Marathe pursed the lips: ‘I have doubts in my mind: Ottawa could easily have asked your then CIA for, what is the term, “Persons of Expendability” from Southeast Asia or Negroes, the subjects expended for your inspiring 198U.S.A.’s MK-Ultra.’ Steeply elected ignoring this, rummaging in the purse. ‘But what apparently happened was that somehow word of the p-terminal discovery and experiments had gotten out up in Manitoba — some low-level worker at Brandon had broken security and leaked word.’ ‘Very little else to do in northern Manitoba besides leaking and gossiping.’ ‘… And suddenly the neuro-team at Brandon pull in to work one day and find human volunteers lining up literally around the block outside the place, able-bodied and I should remember to recall mostly young Canadians, lining up and literally trampling each other in their desire to sign up as volunteers for p-terminal-electrode implantation and stimulation.’ ‘In full knowledge of the rat’s and dolphin’s death, from pressing the lever.’ Marathe’s father had always assigned it to Rémy, his youngest, to go first inside some public restaurant or shop to check for the presence of a microwave or GC-type of transmitter. Of special concerns were stores with instruments for thwarting a shoplifter, the shrieking instruments at doors.
Steeply said ‘And of course this eagerness for implantation put a whole new disturbing spin on the study of human pleasure and behavior, and a whole new Brandon Hospital team was hastily assembled to study the psych-profiles of all these people willing to trample one another to undergo invasive brain surgery and foreign-object implantation —’ ‘To become some crazed rats.’ ‘— All just for the chance at this kind of pleasure, and the M.M.P.I.s and Millon’s and Approception tests on all these hordes of prospective volunteers — the hordes were told it was part of the screening — the scores came out fascinatingly, chillingly average, normal.’ ‘In other words not any deviants.’ ‘Nonabnormal along every axis they could see. Just regular young people — Canadian young people.’ ‘Volunteering for fatal addiction to the electrical pleasure.’
‘But Rémy, apparently the purest, most refined pleasure imaginable. The neural distillate of, say, orgasm, religious enlightenment, ecstatic drugs, shiatsu, a crackling fire on a winter night — the sum of all possible pleasures refined into pure current and deliverable at the flip of a hand-held lever. Thousands of times an hour, at will.’ Marathe gave him a bland look.
Steeply examined a cuticle. ‘By free choice, of course.’ Marathe assumed an expression that lampooned a dullard’s hard thought. ‘Thus, but how long before these leaks and rumors of p-terminals reach the Ottawa of government and public weal, for Canada’s government reacts with horror at the prospect of this.’ ‘Oh, and not just Ottawa,’ Steeply said. ‘You can see the implications if a technology like Elder’s really became available. I know Ottawa informed Turner, Bush, Casey, whoever it was at the time, and everyone at Langley
bit their knuckle in horror.’ ‘The CIA chewed a hand?’ ‘Because surely you can see the implications for any industrialized, market-driven, high-discretionary-spending society.’ ‘But it would be illegalized,’ Marathe said, noting to remember the various routines of movements Steeply made for keeping warm. ‘Stop with the babe-in-woods charade,’ Steeply said. ‘There was still the prospect of an underground market exponentially more pernicious than narcotics or LSD. The electrode-and-lever technology looked expensive at the time, but it was easy to foresee enormous widespread demand bringing it down to where electrodes’d be no more exotic than syringes.’ ‘But yes, but surgery, this would be a different matter to implant.’ ‘Plenty of surgeons were already willing to perform illegal procedures.
Abortions. Electric penile implants.’ ‘The MK-Ultra surgeries.’ Steeply laughed without mirth. ‘Or off-the-record amputations for daring young train-cultists, no?’ Marathe blew just one nostril of his nose. This was the Québecois way: one of the nostrils at a time. Marathe’s father’s generation, they had used to bend and blow the one nostril out into the gutter in the street.
Steeply said ‘Picture millions of average nonabnormal North Americans, all implanted with Briggs electrodes, all with electronic access to their own
personal p-terminals, never leaving home, thumbing their personal stimulation levers over and over.’ ‘Lying upon their divans. Ignoring females in rutting. Having rivers of reward without earning reward.’ ‘Bug-eyed, drooling, moaning, trembling, incontinent, dehydrated. Not working, not consuming, not interacting or taking part in community life.
Finally pitching forward from sheer —’ Marathe said ‘Giving away their souls and lives for p-terminal stimulation, you are saying.’ ‘You can maybe see the analogy,’ Steeply said, over the shoulders to smile in a wry way. ‘In Canada, my friend, this was.’ Marathe made a very slight version of his rotary motion of impatience: ‘From the A.D. 1970s of time. This never has come to be. There would have been no development of the Happy Patch…’
‘We both went in. Both our nations.’ ‘In secret.’ ‘Ottawa first cutting the Brandon program’s funding, which Turner or Casey or whoever howled at — our old CIA wanted the procedure developed and perfected, then Classified — military use or something.’ Marathe said ‘But the civilian guardians of the weal of the public felt differently.’ ‘I think I’m remembering Carter was President. Both our combined nations made it a Security priority, shutting it down. Our old N.S.A., your old C7 with the R.C.M.P.s.’ ‘Bright red jackets and hats with wide brims. In the 1970s still on horses.’ Steeply held his mouth of the purse half up to the faint lights of Tucson, peering for something. ‘I recall they went in directly. As in guns drawn.
Boomed the doors. Dismantled the labs. Mercy-killed dolphins and goats.
Olders disappeared somewhere.’ Marathe’s slow circular gesture. ‘Your point finally is Canadians also, we would choose dying for this, the total pleasure of a passive goat.’ Steeply turned, fiddling with an emery board. ‘But you don’t see a more specific analogy with the Entertainment?’ Marathe tongued the inside of his cheek. ‘You are saying the Entertainment, a somehow optical stimulation of the p-terminals? A way to
bypass Briggs electrodes for orgasm-and-massage pleasures?’ The dry rasp of the emerying a nail. ‘All I’m saying is analogy. A precedent in your own nation.’ ‘Us, our nation is the Québec nation. Manitoba is —’ ‘I’m saying that if he could get past the blind desire for harm against the U.S., your M. Fortier might be induced to see just what it is he’s proposing to let out of the cage.’ His training was such that he could emery without watching the procedure. For Steeply’s most effective interviewing tactic was this long looking down into the face without emotion of any kind. For Marathe felt more uncomfortable not knowing whether Steeply believed a thing than if Steeply’s emotion of face showed he did not believe.
Then tonight, at the prospect of boiled hot dogs, the two newest residents had pulled the typically standard new-resident princess-and-pea special-food-issue thing: the new-today girl Amy J. that just sits there on the vinyl couch shaking like an aspen and having people bring her coffee and light her gaspers and with just short of a like HELPLESS VICTIM: PLEASE CODDLE sign hung around her neck now claiming Red Dye #4 gives her ‘cluster migraines’ (Gately gives this girl like a week tops before 199 she’s a vapor trail back to the Xanax ; she has that look), and the weirdly-familiar-but-Southernish-sounding girl Joelle van D. with the past- believing bod and the linen face announcing she was a vegetarian and would ‘rather eat a bug’ than even get downwind of a boiled frank. And but in an incredible move Pat M. has asked Gately, at like 1800h., to blast down to the Purity Supreme down in Allston and pick up some eggs and peppers so the two new delicate-tummied newcomers can make themselves quiche or whatever. To Gately’s way of thinking, this looks like catering to just the sort of classic addict’s claim of special uniqueness that it’s supposed to be Pat’s job to help break down. The Joelle v.D. girl seems to have like inordinate immediate weight and pet-status with Pat, who’s already making noises about exempting the girl from the menial-job requirement, and wants Gately to look for some kind of weird Big Red Soda Water tonic for the girl, who’s apparently still dehydrated. It’s sure a long way from making somebody chew feldspar. Gately has long since quit trying to figure Pat Montesian out.
It’s a weird-weather evening, both thundering and spitting snow. Gately had finally become able to distinguish genuine thunder from the Enfield sounds of ATHSCME fans and E.W.D. catapults, this after nine months of wearing a Goodwill rain-slicker every morning on the 0430 Green Line.
One of the possible weak spots in Gately’s AA recovery-program of rigorous personal honesty is that once he’s jammed himself into a black-as- water Aventura and watched the spoiler throb as he turns over the carnivorous engine, etc., he often finds himself taking a little bit less of a direct route to a given Ennet-errand-site than he probably could. If he had to come right down to the heart of the issue he likes to cruise around town in Pat’s car. He’s able to minimize the suspicious time any particular bit of extra cruising adds to his errands by basically driving like a lunatic: ignoring lights, cutting people off, scoffing at One-Ways, veering wildly in and out, making pedestrians drop things and lunge curbward, leaning on a horn that sounds more like an air-raid siren. You’d think this would be judicially insane, in terms of not having a license and facing a no-license jail-bit anyway, but the fact is that this sort of on-the-way-to-the-E.R.-with- a-passenger-in-labor driving doesn’t usually raise so much as an eyebrow among Boston’s Finest, since they have more than enough other stuff to attend to, in these troubled times, and since everybody else in metro Boston drives exactly the same sociopathic way, including the Finest themselves, so that the only real risk Gately’s running is to his own sense of rigorous personal honesty. One cliché he’s found especially serviceable w/r/t the Aventura issue is that Recovery is about Progress Not Perfection. He likes to make a stately left onto Commonwealth and wait to get out of view of the House’s bay window and then produce what he imagines is a Rebel Yell and open her up down the serpentine tree-lined boulevard of the Ave. as it slithers through bleak parts of Brighton and Allston and past Boston U. and toward the big triangular CITGO neon sign and the Back Bay. He passes The Unexamined Life club, where he no longer goes, at 1800h. already throbbing with voices and bass under its ceaseless neon bottle, and then the great gray numbered towers of the Brighton Projects, where he definitely no longer goes. Scenery starts to blur and distend at 70 kph. Comm. Ave. splits Enfield-Brighton-Allston from the downscale north edge of Brookline on the right. He passes the meat-colored facades of anonymous Brookline tenements, Father & Son Market, a dumpster-nest, Burger Kings,
Blanchard’s Liquors, an InterLace outlet, a land-barge alongside another dumpster-nest, corner bars and clubs — Play It Again Sam’s, Harper’s Ferry, Bunratty’s, Rathskeller, Father’s First I and II — a CVS, two InterLace outlets right next to each other, the ELLIS THE RIM MAN sign, the Marty’s Liquors that they rebuilt like ants the week after it burned down. He passes the hideous Riley’s Roast Beef where the Allston Group gathers to pound coffee before Commitments. The giant distant CITGO sign’s like a triangular star to steer by. He’s doing 75 k down a straightaway, keeping abreast of an Inbound Green Line train ramming downhill on the slightly raised track that splits Comm.’s lanes into two and two. He likes to match a Green train at 75 k all the way down Commonwealth’s integral ς and see how close he can cut beating it across the tracks at the Brighton Ave. split. It’s a vestige. He’d admit it’s like a dark vestige of his old low- self-esteem suicidal-thrill behaviors. He doesn’t have a license, it’s not his car, it’s a priceless art-object car, it’s his boss’s car, who he owes his life to and sort of maybe loves, he’s on a vegetable-run for shattered husks of newcomers just out of detox whose eyes are rolling around in their heads.
Has anybody mentioned Gately’s head is square? It’s almost perfectly square, massive and boxy and mysticetously blunt: the head of somebody who looks like he likes to lower his head and charge. He used to let people open and close elevator doors on his head, break things across his head. The ‘Indestructible’ in his childhood cognomen referred to the head. His left ear looks a bit like a prizefighter’s left ear. The head’s nearly flat on top, so that his hair, long in back but with short Prince Valiant bangs in front, looks sort of like a carpet remnant someone’s tossed on the head and let slide slightly 200 back but stay. Nobody that lives in these guano-spotted old brown 201 buildings along Comm. with bars on the low floors’ windows ever goes inside, it seems like. Even in thunder and little asterisks of snow, all kinds of olive Spanish and puke-white Irish are on every corner, bullshitting and trying to look like they’re just out there waiting for something important and drinking out of tallboys wrapped tight in brown bags. A strange nod to discretion, the bags, wrapped so tight the outline of the cans can’t be missed. A Shore boy, Gately’d never used a paper bag around streetcorner cans: it’s like a city thing. The Aventura can do 80 kph in third gear. The engine never strains or whines, just eventually starts to sound hostile, is
how you to know to hurt your hip and shift. The Aventura’s instrument panel looks more like the instrument panel of military aircraft. Something’s always blinking and Indicating; one of the blinking lights is supposed to tell you when to shift; Pat has told him to ignore the panel. He loves to make the driver’s-side window go down and rest his left elbow on the jamb like a cabbie.
He’s caught behind a bus whose big square ass is in both lanes and he can’t get around it in time to beat the train across the split, though, and the train crosses in front of the bus with a blast of its farty-sounding horn and what Gately sees as a kind of swagger to its jiggle on the street-level track.
He can see people bouncing around inside the train, holding on to straps and bars. Below the split on Comm. it’s Boston U., Kenmore and Fenway, Berklee School of Music. The CITGO sign’s still off in the distance ahead.
You have to go a shocking long way to actually get to the big sign, which everybody says is hollow and you can get up inside there and stick your head out in a pulsing neon sea but nobody’s ever personally been up in there.
Arm out like a hack’s arm, Gately blasts through B.U. country. As in backpack and personal-stereo and designer-fatigues country. Soft-faced boys with backpacks and high hard hair and seamless foreheads. Totally lineless untroubled foreheads like cream cheese or ironed sheets. All the storefronts here are for clothes or TP cartridges or posters. Gately’s had lines in his big forehead since he was about twelve. It’s here he especially likes making people throw their packages in the air and dive for the curb.
B.U. girls who look like they’ve eaten nothing but dairy products their whole lives. Girls who do step-aerobics. Girls with good combed long clean hair. Nonaddicted girls. The weird hopelessness at the heart of lust. Gately hasn’t had sex in almost two years. At the end of the Demerol he physically couldn’t. Then in Boston AA they tell you not to, not in your first year clean, if you want to be sure to Hang In. But they like omit to tell you that after that year’s gone by you’re going to have forgotten how to even talk to a girl except about Surrender and Denial and what it used to be like Out There in the cage. Gately’s never had sex sober yet, or danced, or held somebody’s hand except to say the Our Father in a big circle. He’s gone back to having wet dreams at age twenty-nine.
Gately’s found he can get away with smoking in the Aventura if he opens the passenger window too and makes sure no ashes go anywhere. The cross-wind through the open car is brutal. He smokes menthols. He’d switched to menthols at four months clean because he couldn’t stand them and the only people he knew that smoked them were Niggers and he’d figured that if menthols were the only gaspers he let himself smoke he’d be more likely to quit. And now he can’t stand anything but menthols, which Calvin T. says are even worse for you because they got little bits of asbestosy shit in the filter and whatnot. But Gately had been living in the little male live-in Staffer’s room down in the basement by the audio pay phone and tonic machines for like two months before it turned out the Health guy came and inspected and said all the big pipes up at the room’s ceiling were insulated in ancient asbestos that was coming apart and asbestosizing the room, and Gately had to move all his shit and the furniture out into the open basement and guys in white suits with oxygen tanks went in and stripped everything off the pipes and went over the room with what smells like it was a flamethrower. Then hauled the decayed asbestos down to E.W.D. in a welded drum with a skull on it. So Gately figures menthol gaspers are probably the least of his lung-worries at this point.
202 You can get on the Storrow 500 off Comm. Ave. below Kenmore via this long twiny overpass-shadowed road that cuts across the Fens. Basically the Storrow 500 is an urban express route that runs along the bright-blue Chuck all the way along Cambridge’s spine. The Charles is vivid even under gloomy thundering skies. Gately has decided to buy the newcomers’ omelette stuff at Bread & Circus in Inman Square, Cambridge. It will explain delay, and will be a subtle nonverbal stab at unique dietary requests in general. Bread & Circus is a socially hyperresponsible overpriced grocery full of Cambridge Green Party granola-crunchers, and everything’s like micro-biotic and fertilized only with organic genuine llama-shit, etc.
The Aventura’s low driver’s seat and huge windshield afford your thinking man maybe a little more view of the sky than he’d like. The sky is low and gray and loose and seems to hang. There’s something baggy about the sky.
It’s impossible to tell whether snow is still actually falling or whether just a little snow that’s already fallen is blowing around. To get to Inman Square you veer over three lines to get off the Storrow 500 on Prospect St.’s Ramp
of Death and slalom between the sinkholes and go right, north, and take Prospect through Central Square and all the way north through heavy ethnicity up almost into Somerville.
Inman Square, too, is someplace Gately rarely goes anymore, because it’s in Cambridge’s Little Lisbon, heavily Portuguese, which means also Brazilians in the antiquated bellbottoms and flare-collared leisure suits they’ve never let go of, and where there are disco-ized Brazilians can cocaine and narcotics ever be far away. The district’s Brazilians are another solid rationale for driving at excessive rates of speed, for Gately. Plus Gately’s solidly pro-American, and north of Central Square’s clot and snarl Prospect St.’s a copless straight shot through eerily alien lands: billboards in Spanish, plaster madonnas in fenced front yards, intricately latticed grape arbors looking seized and clutched at, now, by networks of finger-thick bare woody vines; ads for lottery tickets in what isn’t quite Spanish, all the houses gray, more bright plastic madonnas in nunnish getups on peeling front porches, stores and bodegas and low-suspension cars triple-parked, an all-out full-cast crèche-type scene hung from a second-floor balcony, clotheslines hanging between houses, gray houses in rows squished right up next to each other in long rows with tiny toy-strewn yards, and tall, the houses, like being squished in from either side distends them. A couple Canadian and Nuck-owned stores mashed in here and there, between the propinquous Spanish three-deckers, looking subjugated and exiled and etc.
The street shitty with litter and holes. Indifferent drainage. Big-assed girls stuffed like stuffed sausage into cigarette jeans in always trios in the twilight with that weird blond-brown hair Portuguese girls dye their hair to.
A store in good old English advertising Chickens Fresh Killed Daily. Ryle’s Jazz Club’s upscale pub-type bar, guys in tweed caps and briar pipes in mouths at angles taking all day on a pint of warm stout. Gately’s always thought dark beer tasted like cork. An intriguing single-decker medical- looking bldg. with a sort of tympanum over the smoked-glass door with an ad that says COMPLETE DESTRUCTION OF CONFIDENTIAL RECORDS that Gately’s always wanted to poke the old head in and have a look at what on earth they might be up to in there. Little Portuguese markets with food in there you can’t even tell what species it’s from. Once at a Portuguese take-out at Inman Square’s east end a coke-whore tried to get Gately to eat something that had tentacles. He had a sub instead. Gately
now simply blows through Inman, heading for B&C over on the upscale northwest side nearer to Harvard, every light suddenly green and kind, the Aventura’s ten-cylinder backwash raising an odd little tornado of discarded ad-leaflets and glassine bags and corporate-snack bags and a syringe’s husk and filterless gasper-butts and general crud and a flattened Millennial Fizzy cup, like from a stand, which whirls in his exhaust, the tornado of waste does, moving behind him as the last pearly curve of the sun through baggy clouds is eaten by the countless Sancta Something and then whitewashed WASP church roofs’ finials farther west, nearer Harvard, at 60 k but sustained in its whirl by the strong west breeze as the last of the sun goes and a blue-black shadow quietly fills the canyon of Prospect, whose streetlights don’t work for the same municipal reasons the street is in such crummy repair; and one piece of the debris Gately’s raised and set spinning behind him, a thick flattened M.F. cup, caught by a sudden gust as it falls, twirling, is caught at some aerodyne’s angle and blown spinning all the way 203 to the storefront of one ‘Antitoi Entertainent’ on the street’s east side, and hits, its waxed bottom making a clunk, hits the glass pane in the locked front shop door with a sound for all the world like the rap of a knuckle, so that in a minute a burly bearded thoroughly Canadian figure in one of those Canadianly inevitable checked-flannel shirts appears out of the dim light in the shop’s back room and wipes its mouth on first one sleeve then the other and opens up the front door with a loud hinge-squeak and looks around a bit, viz. for who knocked, looking not overly pleased at being interrupted at what his sleeves betray as a foreign supper, and also, below that harried expression, looking edgy and emotionally pale, which might explain the X of small-arms ammo-belts across his checked chest and the rather absurdly large .44 revolver tucked and straining in the waistband of his jeans. Lucien Antitoi’s equally burly partner and brother Bertraund — currently still back there in the little back room where they sleep on cots with serious weaponry underneath and listen to CQBC radio and scheme and smoke killer U.S.A. hydroponic dope and cut and mount glass and sew flags and cook over sterno in L.L. Bean upscale survivalist cookware, he’s back there eating Habitant soupe aux pois and bread with Bread & Circus molasses and some sort of oblong blue-veined patties of a meat your thinking American wouldn’t even want to try to identify — Bertraund’s forever laughing in
Québecois and telling Lucien he looks forward with humorous anticipation to the day Lucien forgets to check the big Colt’s safety before he jams it into the waistband of his pants and goes lumbering around the shop in his hobnail boots making every reflective and blown-glass item in the place tinkle and clink. The unautomatic revolver, it is a souvenir of affiliation.
Once or twice doing work of affiliation with the Separatist/Anti-O.N.A.N.
F.L.Q., they are for the most part a not very terrifying insurgent cell, the Antitois, more or less loners, self-contained, a monomitotic cell, eccentric and borderline-incompetent, protected gently by their late regional patron M. Guillaume DuPlessis of the Gaspé Peninsula, spurned by F.L.Q. after DuPlessis’s assassination and also ridiculed by the more malignant anti- O.N.A.N. cells. Betraund Antitoi is in charge, the brains of the outfit, pretty much by default, since Lucien Antitoi is one of the very few natives of Notre Rai Pays ever who cannot understand French, just never caught on, and so has very limited veto-powers, even when it comes to such harebrained Bertraund-schemes as hanging a sword-stemmed fleur-de-lis flag from the nose of a U.S.A. Civic War hero’s Boylston St. statue when it would simply be cut down by bored O.N.A.N.ite chiens-courants gendarmes the next morning, or taping bricks to the return-postage-paid solicitation cards of Sans-Christe Gentle’s C.U.S.P. party, or fashioning Astroturf doormats with a likeness of Sans-Christe Gentle on them and distributing them gratis to home-supply outlets throughout their insurgency- grid — puerile and on the whole rather sad little gestures that M. DuPlessis would have interdicted with a merry laugh and a friendly hand on Bertraund’s bowling ball of a shoulder. But M. DuPlessis had been martyred, an assassination only O.N.A.N. would be stupid enough to believe Command would be stupid enough to believe was merely an unfortunate burglary-and-mucus mishap. And Bertraund Antitoi, after DuPlessis’s death and F.L.Q.’s rejection left to his own conceptual devices for the first time since their all-terrain vehicle was packed with quality Van Buskirk of Montreal exotic reflective glasswares and glass-blowing hardware and broom and ordnance and survivalist cookware and hip postcards and black-lather gag soap and cheesy old low-demand InterLace 3rd-Grid cartridges and hand-buzzers and fraudulent but seductive X-ray spectacles and they were sent through the remains of Provincial Autoroute 55/ U.S.A. 91 in protective garb they’d shed and buried just south of the
Convexity’s Bellow’s Falls VT O.N.A.N.ite checkpoint, sent as a kind of primitive two-celled organism to establish a respectable front and abet more malignant cells and to insurge and terrorize in small sad anti-experialist ways, now Bertraund has shown a previously DuPlessis-restrained flair for stupid wastes of time, including this branching out into harmful pharmaceuticals as an attack on the fiber of New New England’s youth — as if the U.S.A. youth were not already more than fiberless enough, in Lucien’s mute opinion. Bertraund had actually been credulous enough with a wrinkled long-haired person of advanced years in a paisley Nehru jacket also of great age and a puzzling cap with a skeleton playing at the violin emblazoned upon it, on the front, wearing also the most stupid-appearing small round wire spectacles with salmon-colored lenses, and also continually forming the letter of V with fingers of his hand and directing this letter of V at Bertraund and Lucien — Bertraund felt the gesture was a subtle affirmation of solidarity with patriotic Struggle everywhere and stood for Victoire, but Lucien suspected a U.S.A. obscenity laughingly flashed at persons who would not comprehend its insult, just as one of Lucien’s sadistic ecole-spéciale tutors back in Ste.-Anne-des-Monts had spent weeks in Second Form teaching Lucien to say ‘Va chier, putain!’ which he (the tutor) claimed meant ‘Look Maman I can speak French and thus finally express my love and devotion to you’ — Bertraund had been starry-eyed enough to agree to barter the person an antique blue lava-lamp and a lavender-tinged apothecary’s mirror for eighteen unexceptional-looking and old lozenges the long-haired old person had claimed in a jumble of West- Swiss-accented French were 650 mg. of a trop-formidable harmful pharmaceutical no longer available and guaranteed to make one’s most hair- raising psychedelic experience look like a day on the massage-tables of a Basel hot-springs resort, throwing in as well a kitchen-can waste bag filled with crusty old mossy boot-and-leg Read-Only cartridges, sans any labels, that appeared to have been stored in a person’s rear yard and then run through a gaseous dryer of clothes, as if Lucien did not have already more than plenty of crusty old cartridges which Bertraund removed from Inter- Lace dumpsters or was cheated in barters for and brought back to the shop for Lucien’s job to view and label and organize the cartridges for storing and were never bought except the occasional cartridge in Portuguese, or pornographical. And the aged person had flopped off in his cap and sandals
with a lamp and an apothecary’s mirror to which Lucien had been personally much attached, particularly to the lavender mirror, flashing this covert obscenity of V and with smiles urging the brothers to write their name and address on the palm of their hands with the drenching-sweat- proof ink before they dropped any of the so-called ‘tu-sais-quoi,’ if they were going to be the persons who ingested these lozenges.
The front door squeaks loudly of the hinge and Lucien recloses it and drives the bolt home: squeak. The upper hinge squeaks no matter the oil, as the shop drives Lucien crazy by becoming again dusty each time the door is opened to the street’s grit, and from the dust of the alley with so many dumpsters behind the back room which Bertraund refuses not to open the iron service door of, to spit. The squeak functions in the place of a customer-bell, however. The front knock of the closed door clearly is once again big-bottomed Brazilian children playing at unamusing pranks. He does not pull the window shade, but he does grab the stout trusty homemade broom he sweeps the shop all day with and stands there, chewing anxiously the nail of a thumb, looking out. Lucien Antitoi enjoys standing at the door’s glass pane and looking blankly out at the light snow of dust bright against the blue-shadowed twilight eating the American street outside. The door continues to squeak faintly even after he’s driven home the bolt. He can stand here happily for hours, leaning on the sturdy broom he’d carved from a snow-snapped limb as a boy during the Gaspé’s terrible blizzards of Québec of A.D. 1993 and bound broom-corn onto and sharpened the tip of, as a sort of domestic weapon, even then, before O.N.A.N.ite experialist impost made any sort of struggle or sacrifice remotely necessary, as a silent boy, keenly interested in weapons and ammunitions of all the different sorts. Which along with the size thing helped with the teasing. He could and does stand here for hours, complexly backlit, transparently reflected, looking at alien traffic and commerce. He has that rare spinal appreciation for beauty in the ordinary that nature seems to bestow on those who have no native words for what they see. ‘Squeak.’ The visual bulk of the shoproom of Antitoi Entertainent is devoted to glass: they have set curved and planar mirrors at studied angles whereby each part of the room is reflected in every other part, which flusters and disorients customers and keeps haggling to a minimum. In a sort of narrow fashioned corridor behind one gauntlet of angled glass is their stock of gags, notions,
204ironic postcards, and unironic sentimental greeting cards as well.
Flanking another are shelf after shelf of used and bootleg InterLace and independent and even homemade digital entertainment cartridges, in no discernible order, since Bertraund handles acquisition and Lucien’s in charge of inventory and order. Nevertheless, once he’s viewed it even once, he can identify any used cartridge in stock and will point it out to the rare customer with the sharpened whitewood tip of his homemade broom. Some of the cartridges do not even have labels, they’re so obscure or illicit. To keep up with Bertraund, Lucien must watch new acquisitions on the small cheap viewer beside the manual cash register as he sweeps the shop with the imposing broom he has loved and kept sharpened and polished and floor-fuzz-free since adolescence, and which he sometimes imagines he is conversing with, very quietly, telling it to va chier putain in tones surprisingly gentle and kind for such a large terrorist. The viewer’s screen has something wrong with its Definition and there is a wobble that makes all cartridge performers on the left section of it appear to have Tourette’s syndrome. The pornographical cartridges he finds nonsensical and views them in Fast Forward to get them over with as quickly as possible. So but he knows all but the most recent acquisitions’ colors and visual plots, but some still have no labels. He still has not gotten to see and shelve many of the massive assortment Bertraund lugged home and out of the all-terrain vehicle in Saturday’s chilling rain, several old exercise and film cartridges a small Back Bay TelEntertainment outlet was discarding as outdated. Also there were one or two Bertraund claimed he had picked up literally on the street downtown from the site of the flag-draped Shaw statue from untended commercial displays that stupidly contained detachable cartridges anyone could detach and lug home in the rain. The displays’ cartridges he had immediately viewed, for though they were unlabelled save for a commercialed slogan in tiny raised letters of IL NE FAUT PLUS QU’ON PURSUIVE LE BONHEUR — which to Lucien Antitoi signified zilch — each was stamped also with a circle and arc that resembled a disembodied smile, which made Lucien himself smile and pop them in right away, to find to his disappointment and impatience with Bertraund that they were blank, without even HD static, just as the old rude person’s bartered tapes he had removed from the waste bag of their storage for viewing had proved, blank
205 beyond static, to the satisfaction of Lucien’s disgust. Through the door’s window, passing headlights illumine a disabled person in a wheelchair laboring along the rutted walk outside the Portuguese grocery opposite Antitoi Entertainent’s storefront. Lucien forgets he was eating bread with upscale molasses and soupe aux pois; he forgets he is eating the moment the food’s taste leaves his mouth. His mind is usually as clean and transparent as anything in the shop. He sweeps a little, absently, in front of the pane, watching his face’s reflection bob against the blackening night outside. Light snowfall almost is bouncing back and forth between sides of Prospect’s canyon. The broom’s bristles say ‘Hush, hush.’ The tin-and- static sound of CQBC has been silenced, he can hear Bertraund moving about rattling some pans and dropping one, and Lucien works his sharp- pointed broom against the chipped Portuguese tile of the nonwood floor. He is a gifted domestic, the best 125-kilo domestic ever to wear a beard and suspenders of small-arms ordnance. The shop, crammed to the acoustic-tile ceiling and dustless, resembles a junkyard for anal retentives. He bobs and sweeps, and bobbing shafts of mirror-light gleam and dance, backed by night, in the locked door’s pane. The figure in the wheelchair still labors at his wheels, but appears, queerly, still to be where he was before, in front of the Portuguese grocery. Moving closer to the pane, so that his face’s transparent image fills the glass and he can now see clearly beyond it, Lucien sees that what it is is it’s a different figure in a different wheelchair from the one before, this new figure’s face also downcasted and queerly masked, laboring around the sidewalk’s jagged holes; and that not too far behind this seated figure is yet another figure in a wheelchair, coming this way; and as Lucien Antitoi twists his head and presses his hairy cheek to the glass of the squeaking door — except but now how can a door’s upper hinge loudly squeak when the door is tightly closed and the bolt driven home with the solid snick of a .44 bullet slipping home in a revolver’s chamber? — looking due southeast up Prospect, Lucien can see the variegated glints of passing low-chassis headlights off a whole long single- file column of polished metal wheels stolidly turning, being turned by swarthy hands in fingerless wheelchair-gloves. ‘Squeak.’ ‘Squeak.’ Lucien has been hearing squeaks for several minutes from what he had naïvely like the babe assumed was the door’s upper hinge. This hinge does truly squeak.
206 But Lucien now hears whole systems of squeaks, slow and soft but not stealthy squeaks, the squeaks of weighted wheelchairs moving slow, implacable, calm and businesslike and yet menacing, moving with the indifference of things at the very top of the food-chain; and, now, turning, heart loud in his head, can now see, in the carefully placed display mirrors’ angles, spikes of light off rotary metal rotating at a height about waist-level to a huge standing man w/ broom clutched to barrel chest, there are great quiet numbers of persons in wheelchairs moving in the room with him, in the shoproom, moving calmly into position behind waist-high glass counters full of wacky notions. The street outside is flanked on both sidewalks by defiles of wheelchaired, blanket-lapped persons whose faces are obscured by what look like large and snow-dotted leaves, and the shades of the Portuguese grocery have been drawn and a ROPAS sign hung by a circumflex of twine in the pane of the front door. Wheelchair Assassins.
Lucien has been taught the glyph of a profiled wheelchair with an enormous bone-crossed skull below. It is the worst possible scenario; it is worse than O.N.A.N.ite gendarmes by far: A.F.R. Whimpering to his broom, Lucien disengages the mammoth Colt from his pants and finds that a length of black thread from the denim panel that surrounds his zipper has gotten looped around the barrel’s sight-blade and comes ripping out with a long high squeak from the pants with the convulsive force of his drawing the weapon, so that his pants split open alongside the zipper and the force of his mammoth Canadian gut extends the tear all up and down the front so that the snap unsnaps and the jeans burst open and fall immediately to his ankles, puddling around his hobnail boots, revealing red union-suit underwear beneath and forcing Lucien to take tiny undignified shuffling steps frantically toward the back room as he tries with the thread-snagged Colt to cover every piece of fragmented waist-high motion the mirror’s shards of light reveal in the shoproom while scuttling as fast as the fallen jeans allow toward the back room to alert, nonverbally, using the sort of demon-eyed tongue-protruded neck-corded tortured rigid bug-eyed face a small child makes when he is playing Le Monstre, to alert Bertraund that They have come, not Bostonian gendarmes or white-suited O.N.A.N.ite chiens but They, Them, Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, A.F.R.s, the ones who come always in the twilight, implacably squeaking, and cannot be
reasoned with or bargained with, feel no pity or remorse, or fear (except a rumored fear of steep hills), and now they’re all in here all over the shoproom like faceless rats, the devil’s own hamsters, moving with placid squeaks just beyond view of the shop’s mirrored peripheries, regally serene; and Lucien, with the big broom in one hand and the thread-webbed Colt in the other, tries to cover his little-stepped flight with a thunderous shot that goes high and shatters an angled full-length planar door-mirror, spraying anodized glass and replacing the reflection of a blanket-lapped A.F.R. wearing a plastic fleur-de-lis-with-sword-stem mask on his face with a jagged stelliform hole, with glittered shards and glass-dust in the air all over the place and the unperturbable squeaks — ‘squeak squeak squeak squeak,’ it is awful — sounding right through clatter and tinkle and frantic hobnailed bootfalls, and through the flying glass, aiming every which way behind him, Lucien bursts almost falling through the curtains, bug-eyed and corded and webbed in thread, to alert Bertraund facially that the shot had signified A.F.R.s and to break out the sub-cot weaponry and prepare to bunker for encirclement, only to horrifically see the shop’s rear service door standing agape in a gritty breeze and Bertraund still at the card table they use for their supper — used — with pea soup and troubling meat-patty still on his ration-tray, sitting, squinting piratically straight ahead, with a railroad spike in his eye. The spike, its tip is both domed and squared, also rusty, and it protrudes from the socket of his brother’s former blue right eye. There are maybe about six or nine A.F.R. here in the drafty back room, silent as ever, seated with motionless wheels, flannel blankets obscuring an absence of the legs, also of course flannel-shirted, masked in synthetic-blend heraldic-flag irises with flaming transperçant stems at the chin and slits for eyes and round utter holes for mouths — all except for one particular of the A.F.R., in an unpretentious sportcoat and tie and the worst mask of all, a plain yellow polyresin circle with an obscenely simple smily-face in thin black lines, who is speculatively dipping a baguette’s heel in Bertraund’s metal soup-cup and popping the bread into his mask’s mouth’s cheery hole with an elegantly cerise-gloved hand. Lucien, staring goggle-eyed at the only brother he’s ever had, is standing very still, face still unwittingly teratoid, the broom at an angle in his hand, the Colt dangling at his side, and the long black zipper-thread he’s pulled from his zipper caught somehow now and wrapped around his thumb and hung trailing on the spotless floor with slack
between gun and thumb, his pants woppsed around his red woolen ankles, when he hears a quick efficient squeak and feels from behind a tremendous wallop on the backs of his knees that drives him down to his knees on the floor, the .44 bucking as it discharges by reflex into the wood-pattern Portuguese tile, so that he’s down in a supplicant’s posture on his red knees, encircled by fauteuils des rollents, still holding his broom but now down near the broom-corn’s wire binding; his face is now of equal height to the yellow empty smiling chewing face of the A.F.R. as this leader — everything about him radiates pitiless and remorseless command — rotates a right wheel to bring himself about and with three squeakless rotations has his hideous blank black smile within cm. of Lucien Antitoi’s face. The A.F.R. bids him ‘’n soir, ’sieur,’ which means nothing to Lucien Antitoi, whose chin has caved and lips are quivering, though his eyes are not what you would call jacklighted or terrified eyes. Lucien’s brother’s pierced and rigid profile is visible over the leader’s left shoulder. The man still has some soup-sopped bread in his glove’s left hand. ‘Malheureusement, ton collégue est décédé. Il faisait une excellente soupe aux pois.’ He looks amused. ‘Non? Ou c’était toi, faisait-elle?’ The leader leans forward in the graceful way people who always sit can lean, revealing wiry hair and a small and strangely banal bald-spot, and gently removes the hot revolver from Lucien’s hand. He engages the safety without having to look at the revolver. Spanish-language music is thinly audible from somewhere up above the alley. The A.F.R. looks warmly into Lucien’s eyes for a moment, then with a professionally vicious backhanded motion pegs the gun at Bertraund’s profiled head, striking Bertraund in the side of the head; and Bertraund rocks away and then toward and forward and slides forward-left off the rickety camping-chair and with a ghastly and moist thump comes to rest chairless but upright, his left hip on the floor, the eye’s sturdy railroad spike’s thick tip caught on the edge of the card table and tilted up as the table tilts downward and cookery slides nautically off and onto the tile as the weight of Bertraund’s large upper body is somehow held by the spike and tilted table. His brother’s face is now turned away from Lucien, and his overall posture is of some person crumpled with hilarity or regret, maybe beer — a man overcome. Lucien, who never has apprehended what the safety-switch is or where, thinks it a small miracle that the Colt .44 with its tail of thread does not discharge again as it wangs
off Bertraund’s temple and hits the slick tile and slides from sight under a cot. Somewhere in the tall house next door a toilet flushes, and the back room’s pipes sing. The black thread has remained snagged on the Colt’s sight-blade and in the middle caught somewhere on Bertraund’s ear; the other remains also attached to Lucien by a persistent hangnail on his well- gnawed right thumb, so that a black filament still connects the knelt Lucien to his hidden revolver, with a surreal angled turn at the ear of his overcome frère.
The happy-masked A.F.R. leader, politely ignoring the fact that Lucien’s sphincter has failed them all in the small room, after complimenting them both on the craftsmanship of some of the front’s blown-glass notions, pulls his velvet gloves tighter and tells Lucien that it has fallen to him, Lucien, to direct their attention without delay to an entertainment item they have come here to acquire. And require, this Copy-Capable item. They are here on business, ne pas plaisanter, this is not the social call. They will acquire this thing and then iront paître. They have no wish to disturb anyone’s repast, but the A.F.R. fears that it is fearfully urgent and key, this Master item they now require without delay or dissembly from Lucien — entend-il?
The vigor with which Lucien shakes his head at the leader’s meaningless sounds can’t help but be misinterpreted, probably.
Does this shop have the 585-rpm-drive TP somewhere about here, for running Masters?
Same vigorous negative-looking denial of comprehension.
Can a mask’s drawn smile widen?
From the front of the shop come whole symphonies of squeaks and low trilled r’s and the sounds of a densely packed area being swiftly dismantled and searched. A few legless thick-armed men climb the shelves by hand and hang up near the drop-ceiling by special climbing equipment and suction- cups fitted to their stumps, brown arms busy in the upper shelving, dismantling and searching upside-down like obscene industrious bugs. The outline of Lucien’s quivering mouth is being traced by a mammoth-torso’d A.F.R. in a Jesuitical collar who holds Lucien’s own trusty broom inverted and leans in his chair to caress Lucien’s full Gaspé-provincial lips (the lips are quivering) with the handle’s wicked tip, which is sharply white, whittled free of the sienna glaze of broomstick-varnish that patinas the rest of the big stick’s length. Lucien’s lips are quivering not so much from fear —
although there is certainly fear — but not from fear so much as in an 207 attempt to form words. Words that are not and can never be words are sought by Lucien here through what he guesses to be the maxillofacial movements of speech, and there is a childlike pathos to the movements that perhaps the rigid-grinned A.F.R. leader can sense, perhaps that is why his sigh is sincere, his complaint sincere when he complains that what will follow will be inutile, Lucien’s failure to assist will be inutile, there will be no point serviced, there are several dozen highly trained and motivated wheelchaired personnel here who will find whatever they seek and more, anyhow, perhaps it is sincere, the Gallic shrug and fatigue of the voice through the leader’s mask-hole, as Lucien’s leonine head is tilted back by a hand in his hair and his mouth opened wide by callused fingers that appear overhead and around the sides of his head from behind and jack his writhing mouth open so wide that the tendons in his jaws tear audibly and Lucien’s first sounds are reduced from howls to a natal gargle as the pale wicked tip of the broom he loves is inserted, the wood piney-tasting then white tasteless pain as the broom is shoved in and abruptly down by the big and collared A.F.R., thrust farther in rhythmically in strokes that accompany each syllable in the wearily repeated ‘In-U-Tile’ of the technical interviewer, down into Lucien’s wide throat and lower, small natal cries escaping around the brown-glazed shaft, the strangled impeded sounds of absolute aphonia, the landed-fish gasps that accompany speechlessness in a dream, the cleric-collared A.F.R. driving the broom home now to half its length, up on his stumps to get downward leverage as the fibers that protect the esophagal terminus resist and then give with a crunching pop and splat of red that bathes Lucien’s teeth and tongue and makes of itself in the air a spout, and his gargled sounds now sound drowned; and behind fluttering lids the aphrasiac half-cellular insurgent who loves only to sweep and dance in a clean pane sees snow on the round hills of his native Gaspé, pretty curls of smoke from chimneys, his mother’s linen apron, her kind red face above his crib, homemade skates and cider-steam, Chic-Choc lakes seen stretching away from the Cap-Chat hillside they skied down to Mass, the red face’s noises he knows from the tone are tender, beyond crib and rimed window Gaspésie lake after lake after lake lit up by the near-Arctic sun and stretching out in the southeastern distance like chips of broken glass thrown
to scatter across the white Chic-Choc country, gleaming, and the river Ste.- Anne a ribbon of light, unspeakably pure; and as the culcate handle navigates the inguinal canal and sigmoid with a queer deep full hot tickle and with a grunt and shove completes its passage and forms an obscene erectile bulge in the back of his red sopped johns, bursting then through the wool and puncturing tile and floor at a police-lock’s canted angle to hold him upright on his knees, completely skewered, and as the attentions of the A.F.R.s in the little room are turned from him to the shelves and trunks of the Antitois’ sad insurgents’ lives, and Lucien finally dies, rather a while after he’s quit shuddering like a clubbed muskie and seemed to them to die, as he finally sheds his body’s suit, Lucien finds his gut and throat again and newly whole, clean and unimpeded, and is free, catapulted home over fans and the Convexity’s glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world’s well-known tongues.