Infinite jest

LATE OCTOBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

‘Open me anothowone of those boy and I’ll tell you the highlight of that season of my season tickets was I got to see that incwedible son of a bitch set his fiwst wecord in the flesh. It was y’bwother’s Cub Scout twoop outing you wouldn’t join because I wemember this you w’afwaid you’d lose the online time in fwont of the TP. Wemember? Well I’ll always wemember this one day, boy. It was against Sywacuse, what, eight seasons back. The little son of a bitch had a long of seventy-thwee that day and a avewage of sixty-fwigging-nine. Seventy-thwee for Chwist’s sake. Open me anothowone, boy, use the exowcise. I wecall the sky was cloudy. When he punted you spent a weal long time studying the sky. They weally hung. He had a long hang-time of eight-point-thwee seconds that day. That’s sewious hanging, boy. Me I nevewit five in my day. Chwist. The whole twoop said they never heawd anything like the sound of the son of a bitch’s seventy-thwee. Won Wichardson, you wemember Wonnie, the twoop-leadawhateva, petwoleum jelly salesman outta Bwookline, Wonnie’s a wetired pilot from the Sewvice, from a bomma-squadwon, Wonnie we’s down at t’pub that night Wonnie says he says that seventy-thwee sounded just like fucking bombs sounded, that kind of cwacking WHUMP, when they hit, to the boys in the squadwon in the planes when they let them go.’

The radio show right before Madame Psychosis’s midnight show on M.I.T.’s semi-underground WYYY is ‘Those Were the Legends That Formerly Were,’ one of those cruel tech-collegiate formats where any U.S. student who wants to can dart over from the super-collider lab or the Fourier Transforms study group for fifteen minutes and read on-air some parodic thing where he’d pretend to be his own dad apotheosizing some sort of thick-necked historic athletic figure the dad’d admired and had by implication compared with woeful distaste to the pencil-necked big-headed asthmatic little kid staring up through Coke-bottle lenses from his digital keyboard. The show’s only rule is that you have to read your thing in the voice of some really silly cartoon character. There are other, rather more exotic patricidal formats for Asian, Latin, Arab, and European students on select weekend evenings. The consensus is Asian cartoon characters have the silliest voices.

Albeit literally sophomoric, ‘Those Were the Legends …’ is a useful drama-therapy-type catharsis-op — M.I.T. students tend to carry their own special psychic scars: nerd, geek, dweeb, wonk, fag, wienie, four-eyes, spazola, limp-dick, needle-dick, dickless, dick-nose, pencil-neck; getting your violin or laptop TP or entomologist’s kill-jar broken over your large head by thick-necked kids on the playground — and the show pulls down solid FM ratings, though a lot of that’s due to reverse-inertia, a Newton’sTI-like backward shove from the rabidly popular Madame Psychosis Hour, M-F 0000h.-0100h., which it precedes.

Y.D.A.U.’s WYYY late-shift student engineer, unfond of any elevator that follows a serpentine or vascular path, eschews the M.I.T. Student Union’s elevator. He has an arrival routine where he skips the front entrances and comes in through the south side’s acoustic meatus and gets a Millennial Fizzy® out of the vending machine in the sephenoid sinus, then descends creaky back wooden stairs from the Massa Intermedia’s Reading Room down to about the Infundibular Recess, past the Tech Talk Daily CD-ROM student paper’s production floor and the sick chemical smell of the Read-Only cartridge-press’s developer, down past the epiglottal Hillel Club’s dark and star-doored HQ, past the heavier door to the tiled lattice of hallways to the squash and racquetball courts and one volleyball court and the airy corpus callosum of 24 high-ceiling tennis courts endowed by an M.I.T. alum and now so little used they don’t even know now where the nets are, down three more levels to the ghostly-clean and lithium-lit studios of FM 109-WYYY FM, broadcasting for the M.I.T. community and selected points beyond. The studio’s walls are pink and laryngeally fissured. His asthma’s better down here, the air thin and keen, the tracheal air-filters just below the flooring and the ventilators’ air the freshest in the Union.

The engineer, a work-study graduate student with bad lungs and occluded pores, settles alone at his panel in the engineer’s booth, adjusts a couple needles’ bob, and sound-checks the only paid personality on the nightly docket, the darkly revered Madame Psychosis, whose cameo shadow is just visible outside the booth’s thick glass, her screen half-obscuring the on-air studio’s bank of phones, checking cueing and transition for the Thursday edition. She is hidden from all view by a jointed triptych screen of cream chiffon that glows red and green in the lights of the phone bank and the cueing panel’s dials and frames her silhouette. Her silhouette is cleanly limned against the screen, sitting cross-legged in its in-sectile microphonic headset, smoking. The engineer always has to tighten his own headset’s cranial band down from the ‘Those Were’ engineer’s mammoth parietal breadth. He activates the intercom and offers to check Madame Psychosis’s levels. He requests sound. Anything at all. He hasn’t opened his can of pop. There is a long silence during which Madame Psychosis’s silhouette doesn’t look up from something she looks like she’s collating at her little desk.

After a while she makes some little sounds, little plosives to check for roaring sounds in exhalations, a perennial problem in low-budget FM.

She makes a long s-sound.

The student engineer takes a hit from his portable inhaler.

She says ‘He liked that sort of dreamy, dreaming music that had the rhythm of long things swinging.’

The engineer’s movements at the panel’s dials resemble someone adjusting the heater and sound system while driving.

‘The Dow that can be told is not the eternal Dow,’ she says.

The engineer, age twenty-three, has extremely bad skin.

‘Attractive paraplegic female seeks same; object:’

The windowless laryngeal studio is terribly bright. Nothing casts a shadow. Recessed-lit fluorescence with a dual-spectrum lithiumized corona, developed two buildings over and awaiting O.N.A.N. patent. The chilly shadowless light of surgical theaters, convenience stores at 0400. The pink wrinkled walls sometimes look more gynecological than anything else.

‘Like most marriages, theirs was the evolved product of concordance and compromise.’

The engineer shivers in the bright chill and lights a gasper of his own and tells Madame Psychosis through the intercom that the whole range of levels is fine. Madame Psychosis is the only WYYY personality who brings in her own headset and jacks, plus a triptych screen. Over the screen’s left section are four clocks set for different Zones, plus a numberless disk someone hung for a joke, to designate the annularized Great Concavity’s No-Time. The E.S.T. clock’s trackable hand carves off the last few seconds from the five minutes of dead air Madame Psychosis’s contract stipulates gets to precede her show. You can see her silhouette putting out the cigarette very methodically. She cues tonight’s synthesized bumper and theme music; the engineer flicks a lever and pumps the music up the coaxial medulla and through the amps and boosters packed into the crawlspaces above the high false ceiling of the corpus callosum’s idle tennis courts and up and out the aerial that protrudes from the gray and bulbous surface of the Union’s roof. Institutional design has come a ways from I. M. Pei. M.I.T.’s near-new Student Union, off the corner of Ames and Memorial Dr.,^[60] East Cambridge, is one enormous cerebral cortex of reinforced concrete and polymer compounds. Madame Psychosis is smoking again, listening, head cocked. Her tall screen will leak smoke for her show’s whole hour. The student engineer is counting down from five on an outstretched hand he can’t see how she sees. And as pinkie meets palm, she says what she’s said for three years of midnights, an opening bit that Mario Incandenza, the least cynical person in the history of Enfield MA, across the river, listening faithfully, finds, for all its black cynicism, terribly compelling:

Her silhouette leans and says ‘And Lo, for the Earth was empty of form, and void.

‘And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep.

‘And We said: ‘Look at that fucker Dance.’

A toneless male voice is then cued in to say It’s Sixty Minutes More Or Less With Madame Psychosis On YYY-109, Largest Whole Prime On The FM Band. The different sounds are encoded and pumped by the student engineer up through the building’s corpus and out the roof’s aerial. This aerial, low-watt, has been rigged by the station’s EM-wienies to tilt and spin, not unlike a centrifugal theme-park-type ride, spraying the signal in all directions. Since the B.S. 1966 Hundt Act, the low-watt fringes of the FM band are the only part of the Wireless Spectrum still licensed for public broadcast. The deep-water green of FM tuners all over the campus’s labs and dorms and barnacled clots of grad apartments align themselves slowly toward the spatter’s center, moving toward the dial’s right, a little creepily, like plants toward light they can’t even see. Ratings are minor-league by the pre-InterLace broadcast standards of yore, but they are rock-solid consistent. Audience demand for Madame Psychosis has been, from the very start, inelastic. The aerial, inclined at about the angle of a 3-km. cannon, spins in a blurred ellipse — its rotary base is elliptical because that’s the only shape the EM-wienies could rig a mold for. Obstructed on all sides by the tall buildings of East Cambridge and Commercial Drive and serious Downtown, though, only a couple thin pie-slices of signal escape M.I.T. proper, e.g. through the P.E.-Dept. gap of barely used lacrosse and soccer fields between the Philology and Low-Temp Physics complexes on Mem. Dr. and then across the florid-purple nighttime breadth of the historic Charles River, then through the heavy flow of traffic on Storrow Dr. on the Chuck’s other side, so that by the time the signal laps at upper Brighton and Enfield you need almost surveillance-grade antennation to filter it in out of the EM-miasma of cellular and interconsole phone transmissions and TPs’ EM-auras that crowd the FM fringes from every side. Unless, that is, your tuner is lucky enough to be located at the apex of a tall and more or less denuded hill, in Enfield, in which case you find yourself right in YYY’s centrifugal line of fire.

Madame Psychosis eschews chatty openings and contextual filler. Her hour is compact and no-nonsense.

After the music fades, her shadow holds collated sheets up and riffles them slightly so the sound of paper is broadcast. ‘Obesity,’ she says. ‘Obesity with hypogonadism. Also morbid obesity. Nodular leprosy with leonine fades.’ The engineer can see her silhouette lift a cup as she pauses, which reminds him of the Millennial Fizzy in his bookbag.

She says ‘The acromegalic and hyperkeratosistic. The enuretic, this year of all years. The spasmodically torticollic.’

The student engineer, a pre-doctoral transuranial metallurgist working off massive G.S.L. debt, locks the levels and fills out the left side of his time sheet and ascends with his bookbag through a treillage of interneural stairways with Semitic ideograms and developer-smell and past snack bar and billiard hall and modem-banks and extensive Student Counseling offices around the rostral lamina, all the little-used many-staired neuroform way up to the artery-red fire door of the Union’s rooftop, leaving Madame Psychosis, as is S.O.P., alone with her show and screen in the shadowless chill. She’s mostly alone in there when she’s on-air. Every so often there’s a guest, but the guest will usually get introduced and then not say anything. The monologues seem both free-associative and intricately structured, not unlike nightmares. There’s no telling what’ll be up on a given night. If there’s one even remotely consistent theme it’s maybe film and film-cartridges. Early and (mostly Italian) neorealist and (mostly German) expressionist celluloid film. Never New Wave. Thumbs-up on Peterson/Broughton and Dali/ Buñuel and — down on Deren/Hammid. Passionate about Antonioni’s slower stuff and some Russian guy named Tarkovsky. Sometimes Ozu and Bresson. Odd affection for the hoary dramaturgy of one Sir Herbert Tree. Bizarre Kaelesque admiration for goremeisters Peckinpah, De Palma, Tarantino. Positively poisonous on the subject of Fellini’s 8 1/2. Exceptionally conversant w/r/t avant-garde celluloid and avant- and après-garde digital cartridges, antíconfluential cinema,^[61]Brutalism, Found Drama, etc. Also highly literate on U.S. sports, football in particular, which fact the student engineer finds dissonant. Madame takes one phone call per show, at random. Mostly she solos. The show kind of flies itself. She could do it in her sleep, behind the screen. Sometimes she seems very sad. The engineer likes to monitor the broadcast from a height, the Union’s rooftop, summer sun and winter wind. The more correct term for an asthmatic’s inhaler is ‘nebulizer.’ The engineer’s graduate research specialty is the carbonated translíthium particles created and destroyed billions of times a second in the core of a cold-fusion ring. Most of the lithioids can’t be smashed or studied and exist mostly to explain gaps and incongruities in annulation equations. Once last year, Madame Psychosis had the student engineer write out the home-lab process for turning uranium oxide powder into good old fissionable U-235. Then she read it on the air between a Baraka poem and a critique of the Steeler defense’s double-slot secondary. It’s something a bright high-schooler could cook and took less than three minutes to read on-air and didn’t involve one classified procedure or one piece of hardware not gettable from any decent chemical-supply outlet in Boston, but there was no small unpleasantness about it from the M.I.T. administration, which it’s well-known M.I.T. is in bed with Defense. The hot-fuel recipe was the one bit of verbal intercourse the engineer’s had with Madame Psychosis that didn’t involve straight levels and cues.

The Union’s soft latex-polymer roof is cerebrally domed and a cloudy pia-mater pink except in spots where it’s eroded down to pasty gray, and everywhere textured, the bulging rooftop, with sulci and bulbous convolutions. From the air it looks wrinkled; from the roof’s fire door it’s an almost nauseous system of serpentine trenches, like water-slides in hell. The Union itself, the late A.Y. (‘V.F.’) Rickey’s summum opus, is a great hollow brain-frame, an endowed memorial to the North American seat of Very High Tech, and is not as ghastly as out-of-towners suppose it must be, though the vitreally inflated balloon-eyes, deorbited and hung by twined blue cords from the second floor’s optic chiasmae to flank the wheelchair-accessible front ramp, take a bit of getting used to, and some like the engineer never do get comfortable with them and use the less garish auditory side-doors; and the abundant sulcus-fissures and gyrus-bulges of the slick latex roof make rain-drainage complex and footing chancy at best, so there’s not a whole lot of recreational strolling up here, although a kind of safety-balcony of skull-colored polybutylene resin, which curves around the midbrain from the inferior frontal sulcus to the parietooccipital sulcus — a halo-ish ring at the level of like eaves, demanded by the Cambridge Fire Dept. over the heated pro-mimetic protests of topological Rickeyites over in the Architecture Dept. (which the M.I.T. administration, trying to placate Rickeyites and C.F.D. Fire Marshal both, had had the pre-molded resin injected with dyes to render it the distinctively icky brown-shot off-white of living skull, so that the balcony resembles at once corporeal bone and numinous aura) — which balcony means that even the worst latex slip-and-slide off the steeply curved cerebrum’s edge would mean a fall of only a few meters to the broad butylene platform, from which a venous-blue emergency ladder can be detached and lowered to extend down past the superior temporal gyrus and Pons and abducent to hook up with the polyurethane basilar-stem artery and allow a safe shimmy down to the good old oblongata just outside the rubberized meatus at ground zero.

Topside in the bitter river wind, wearing a khaki parka with a fake fur fringe, the student engineer makes his way and settles into the first intra-parietal sulcus that catches his fancy, makes a kind of nest in the soft trench — the convoluted latex is filled with those little non-FHC Styrofoam peanuts everything industrially soft is filled with, and the pia-mater surface gives rather like one of those old bean bag-chairs of more innocent times — settles in and back with his Millennial Fizzy and inhaler and cigarette and pocket-size Heathkit digital FM-band receiver under a high-CO night sky that makes the stars’ points look extra sharp. The Boston P.M. is 10 °C. The postcentral sulcus he sits in is just outside the circumference of the YYY aerial’s high-speed spin, so five m. overhead its tip’s aircraft-light describes a blurred oval, vascularly hued. His FM receiver’s power cells, tested daily against the Low-Temp Lab’s mercuric resistors, are fresh, the wooferless tuner’s sound tinny and crisp, so that Madame sounds like a faithful but radically miniaturized copy of her studio self.

‘Those with saddle-noses. Those with atrophic limbs. And yes chemists and pure-math majors also those with atrophic necks. Scleredema adultorum. Them that seep, the serodermatotic. Come one come all, this circular says. The hydrocephalic. The tabescent and chachetic and anorexic. The Brag’s-Diseased, in their heavy red rinds of flesh. The dermally wine-stained or carbuncular or steatocryptotic or God forbid all three. Marin-Amat Syndrome, you say? Come on down. The psoriatic. The exzematically shunned. And the scrofulodermic. Bell-shaped steatopygiacs, in your special slacks. Afflictees of Pityriasis Rosea. It says here Come all ye hateful. Blessed are the poor in body, for they.’

The pulsing aircraft-alert light of the aerial is magenta, a sharp and much closer star, now, with his fingers laced behind his head, reclined and gazing upward, listening, the centrifugal whirl’s speed making its tip’s light trail color across the eyes. The light’s oval a bloody halo over the very barest of all possible heads. Madame Psychosis has done U.H.I.D. stuff before, once or twice. He is listening to her read four levels below the Oblangated Recess that becomes the heating shaft’s nubbin of spine, ad-lib-style reading from one of the PR-circulars of the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed, an agnostic-style 12-step support-group deal for what it calls the ‘aesthetically challenged.’^[62] She sometimes reads circulars and catalogues and PR-type things, though not regularly. Some things take several successive shows to get through. Ratings stay solid; listeners hang in. The engineer’s pretty sure he’d hang in even if he weren’t paid to. He does like to settle into a sulcus and smoke slowly and exhale up past the blurred red ellipse of the aerial, monitoring. Madame’s themes are at once unpredictable and somehow rhythmic, more like probability-waves for subhadronics than anything else.^[63] The student engineer has never once seen Madame Psychosis enter or leave WYYY; she probably takes the elevator. It’s 22 October in the O.N.A.N.ite year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.

Like most marriages, Avril and the late James Incandenza’s was an evolved product of concordance and compromise, and the scholastic curriculum at E.T.A. is the product of negotiated compromises between Avril’s academic hard-assery and James’s and Schtitt’s keen sense of athletic pragmatics. It is because of Avril — who quit M.I.T. entirely and went down to half-time at Brandeis and even turned down an extremely plummy-type stipended fellowship at Radcliffe’s Bunting Institute that first year to design and assume the helm of E.T.A.’s curriculum — that the Enfield Tennis Academy is the only athletic-focus-type school in North America that still adheres to the trivium and quadrivium of the hard-ass classical L.A.S. tradition,^[64] and thus one of the very few extant sports academies that makes a real stab at being a genuine pre-college school and not just an Iron Curtainish jock-factory. But Schtitt never let Incandenza forget what the place was supposed to be about, and so Avril’s flinty mens-sana pedagogy wasn’t diluted so much as ad-valoremized, pragmatically focused toward the corpore-potis-type goals kids were coming up the hill to give their childhoods for. Some E.T.A. twists Avril’d allowed into the classic L.A.S. path are e.g. that the seven subjects of the T and Q are mixed and not divided into Quadrivial Upper-class v. Trivial Ephebic; that E.T.A. geometry classes pretty much ignore the study of closed figures (excepting rectangles) to concentrate (also except for Thorp’s Trigonometry of Cubes, which is elective and mostly aesthetic) for two increasingly brutal semesters on the involution and expansion of bare angles; that the quadrivial requirement of astronomy has at E.T.A. become a two-term elementary optics survey, since vision issues are obviously more germane to the Game, and since all the hardware required for everything from aphotic to apochromatic lens work were and are right there in the lab off the Comm.-Ad. tunnel. Music’s been pretty much bagged. Plus the trivi-umoid fetish for classical oratory has by now at E.T.A. been converted to a wide range of history and studio courses in various types of entertainment, mostly recorded film — again, way too much of Incandenza’s lavish equipment lying around not to exploit, plus the legally willed and endowed-for-perpetuity presence on the academic payroll of Mrs. Pricket, Mr. Ogilvie, Mr. Disney R. Leith, and Ms. Soma Richardson-Levy-O’Byrne-Chawaf, the late founder/director’s loyal sound engineer, Best Boy, production assistant, and third-favorite actress, respectively.

Plus also the six-term Entertainment Requirement because students hoping to prepare for careers as professional athletes are by intension training also to be entertainers, albeit of a deep and special sort, was Incandenza’s line, one of the few philosophical points he had to pretty much ram down the throats of both Avril and Schtitt, who was pushing hard for some mix of theology and the very grim ethics of Kant.

Mario Incandenza has sat in on a back-row stool for every session of an E.T.A. Entertainment Dept. offering ever since he was finally three years ago December asked to disenroll from the Winter Hill Special School in Cam-bridgeport for cheerfully declining even to try to learn to really read, explaining he’d way rather listen and watch. And he is a fanatical listener/ observer. He treats the lavish Tatsuoka fringe-FM-band tuner in the living room of the Headmaster’s House like kids of three generations past, listening the way other kids watch TP, opting for mono and sitting right up close to one of the speakers with his head cocked dog-like, listening, staring into that special pocket of near-middle distance reserved for the serious listener. He really does have to sit right up close to listen to ‘Sixty Minutes +/— …’ when he’s over at the HmH^[65] with C.T. and sometimes Hal at his mother’s late suppers, because Avril has some auditory thing about broadcast sound and gets the howling fantods from any voice that does not exit a living corporeal head, and though Avril’s made it clear that Mario’s free at any time to activate and align the Tatsuoka’s ghostly-green tuner to whatever he wishes, he keeps the volume so low that he has to be lowered onto a low coffee table and lean in and almost put his ear up against the woofer’s tremble and concentrate closely to hear YYY’s signal over the conversation in the dining room, which tends to get sort of manically high-pitched toward the end of supper. Avril never actually asks Mario to keep it down; he does it out of unspoken consideration for her thing about sound. Another of her unspoken but stressful things involves issues of enclosure, and the HmH has no interior doors between rooms, and not even much in the way of walls, and the living and dining rooms are separated only by a vast multileveled tangle of house-plants in pots and on little stools of different heights and arrayed under hanging UV lamps of an intensity that tends to give the diners strange little patterns of tan that differ according to where someone usually sits at the table. Hal sometimes complains privately to Mario that he gets more than enough UV during the day thank you very much. The plants are incredibly lush and hale and sometimes threaten to block off the whole easement from dining to living room, and the rope-handled Brazilian machete C.T. had mounted on the wall by the tremulous china-case has stopped really being a joke. The Moms calls the houseplants her Green Babies, and she has a rather spectacular thumb, plant-wise, for a Canadian.

‘The leukodermatic. The xanthodantic. The maxillofacially swollen. Those with distorted orbits of all kinds. Get out from under the sun’s cove-lighting is what this says. Come in from the spectral rain.’ Madame Psy-chosis’s broadcast accent is not Boston. There are r’s, for one thing, and there is no cultured Cambridge stutter. It’s the accent of someone who’s spent time either losing a southern lilt or cultivating one. It’s not flat and twangy like Stice’s, and it’s not a drawl like the people at Gainesville’s academy. Her voice itself is sparely modulated and strangely empty, as if she were speaking from inside a small box. It’s not bored or laconic or ironic or tongue-in-cheek. ‘The basilisk-breathed and pyorrheic.’ It’s reflective but not judgmental, somehow. Her voice seems low-depth familiar to Mario the way certain childhood smells will strike you as familiar and oddly sad. ‘All ye peronic or teratoidal. The phrenologically malformed. The sup-puratively lesioned. The endocrinologically malodorous of whatever ilk. Run don’t walk on down. The acervulus-nosed. The radically — ectomied. The morbidly diaphoretic with a hankie in every pocket. The chronically granulomatous. The ones it says here the ones the cruel call Two-Baggers — one bag for your head, one bag for the observer’s head in case your bag falls off. The hated and dateless and shunned, who keep to the shadows. Those who undress only in front of their pets. The quote aesthetically challenged. Leave your lazarettes and oubliettes, I’m reading this right here, your closets and cellars and TP Tableaux, find Nurturing and Support and the Inner Resources to face your own unblinking sight, is what this goes on to say, a bit overheatedly maybe. Is it our place to say. It says here Hugs Not Ughs. It says Come don the veil of the type and token. Come learn to love what’s hidden inside. To hold and cherish. The almost unbelievably thick-ankled. The kyphotic and lordotic. The irremediably cellulitic. It says Progress Not Perfection. It says Never Perfection. The fatally pulchritudinous: Welcome. The Actaeonizing, side by side with the Medusoid. The papuled, the macu-lar, the albinic. Medusas and odalisques both: Come find common ground. All meeting rooms windowless. That’s in ital: all meeting rooms window-less.’ Plus the music she’s cued for this inflectionless reading is weirdly compelling. You can never predict what it will be, but over time some kind of pattern emerges, a trend or rhythm. Tonight’s background fits, somehow, as she reads. There’s not any real forwardness to it. You don’t sense it’s straining to get anywhere. The thing it makes you see as she reads is something heavy swinging slowly at the end of a long rope. It’s minor-key enough to be eerie against the empty lilt of the voice and the clinks of tines and china as Mario’s relations eat turkey salad and steamed crosiers and drink lager and milk and vin blanc from Hull over behind the plants bathed in purple light. Mario can see the back of the Moms’s head high above the table, and then over to the left Hal’s bigger right arm, and then Hal’s profile when he lowers it to eat. There’s a ball by his plate. The E.T.A. players seem to need to eat six or seven times a day. Hal and Mario had walked over for 2100 supper at HmH after Hal had read something for Mr. Leith’s class and then disappeared for about half an hour while Mario stood supported by his police lock and waited for him. Mario rubs his nose with the heel of his hand. Madame Psychosis has an unironic but generally gloomy outlook on the universe in general. One of the reasons Mario’s obsessed with her show is that he’s somehow sure Madame Psychosis cannot herself sense the compelling beauty and light she projects over the air, somehow. He has visions of interfacing with her and telling her she’d feel a lot better if she listened to her own show, he bets. Madame Psychosis is one of only two people Mario would love to talk to but would be scared to try. The word periodic pops into his head.

‘Hey Hal?’ he calls across the plants.

Like for months in the spring semester of Y.D.P.A.H. she referred to her own program as ‘Madame’s Downer-Lit Hour’ and read depressing book after depressing book — Good Morning, Midnight and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Giovanni’s Room and Under the Volcano, plus a truly ghastly Bret Ellis period during Lent — in a monotone, really slowly, night after night. Mario sits on the low little van der Rohe-knockoff coffee table with bowed legs (the table) with his head cocked right up next the speaker and his claws in his lap. His toes tend to point inward when he sits. The background music is both predictable and, within that predictability, surprising: it’s periodic. It suggests expansion without really expanding. It leads up to the exact kind of inevitability it denies. It is heavily digital, but with something of a choral bouquet. But unhuman. Mario thinks of the word haunting, like in ‘a haunting echo of thus-and-such.’ Madame Psy-chosis’s cued music — which the student engineer never chooses or even sees her bring in — is always terribly obscure^[66] but often just as queerly powerful and compelling as her voice and show itself, the M.I.T. community feels. It tends to give you the feeling there’s an in-joke that you and she alone are in on. Very few devoted WYYY listeners sleep well M-F. Mario has horizontal breathing-trouble sometimes, but other than that he sleeps like a babe. Avril Incandenza still sticks with the old L’Islet-region practice of taking just tea and nibbles at U.S. suppertime and waiting to eat seriously until right before bed. Cultured Canadians tend to think vertical digestion makes the mind unkeen. Some of Orin and Mario and Hal’s earliest memories are of nodding off at the dining-room table and being gently carried by a very tall man to bed. This was in a different house. Madame Psychosis’s cued musics stir very early memories of Mario’s father. Avril is more than willing to take some good-natured guff about her inability to eat before like 223Oh. Prandial music holds little charm or associations for Hal, who like most of the kids on double daily drills makes fists around his utensils and eats like a wild dog.

‘Nor are excluded the utterly noseless, nor the hideously wall- and crosseyed, nor either the ergotic of St. Anthony, the leprous, the varicelliformally eruptive or even the sarcoma’d of Kaposi.’

Hal and Mario probably eat/listen late over at the HmH twice a week. Avril likes to see them outside the awkward formality of her position at E.T.A. C.T.’s the same at home and office. Both Avril and Tavis’s bedrooms are on the second floor, as a matter of fact right next to each other. The only other room up there is Avril’s personal study, with a big color Xerox of M. Hamilton as Oz’s West Witch on the door and custom fiber-wiring for a tri-modem TP console. A stairway runs from her study down the backside of HmH, north, down to a tributary-tunnel leading to the main tunnel to Comm.-Ad., so Avril can commute over to E.T.A. below ground. The HmH tunnel connects with the main at a point between the Pump Room and Comm.-Ad., meaning Avril never like hunches idly past the Pump Room, which fact Hal obviously endorses. Late suppers at HmH for Hal are limited by deLint to twice a week tops because they get him excused from dawn drills, which also means late-night mischief possibilities. Sometimes they bring Canada’s John (‘No Relation’) Wayne over with them, whom Mrs. I. likes and speaks to animatedly even though he rarely says anything the whole time he’s there and also eats like a wild dog, sometimes neglecting utensils altogether. Avril also likes it when Axford comes; Axford has a hard time eating, and she likes to exhort him to eat. Very rarely anymore does Hal bring Pemulis or Jim Struck, to whom Avril is so faultlessly, brittlely polite that the dining room’s tension raises hair.

Whenever Avril parts ficus leaves to check, Mario’s still hunched pigeon-toed and cocked in the same RCA-Victorish posture, with the little horizontal forehead-crease that means he’s either listening or thinking hard.

‘The multiple amputee. The prosthetically malmatched. The snaggle-toothed, wattled, weak-chinned, and walrus-cheeked. The palate-clefted. The really large-pored. The excessively but not necessarily lycanthropically hirsute. The pin-headed. The convulsively Tourettic. The Parkinsonianly tremulous. The stunted and gnarled. The teratoid of overall visage. The twisted and hunched and humped and halitotic. The in any way asymmetrical. The rodential- and saurian- and equine-looking.’

‘Hey Hal?’

The tri-nostriled. The invaginate of mouth and eye. Those with those dark loose bags under their eyes that hang halfway down their faces. Those with Cushing’s Disease. Those who look like they have Down Syndrome even though they don’t have Down Syndrome. You decide. You be the judge. It says You are welcome regardless of severity. Severity is in the eye of the sufferer, it says. Pain is pain. Crow’s feet. Birthmark. Rhinoplasty that didn’t take. Mole. Overbite. A bad-hair year.’

The WYYY student engineer in his sulcus contemplates the moon, which looks sort of like a full moon that somebody’s bashed in a little bit with a hammer. Madame Psychosis asks rhetorically whether the circular’s left anyone out. The engineer finishes his Fizzy and makes ready to descend again for the hour’s close, his skin turned toward the terrible cerebral chill off the Charles, which is windy and blue. Sometimes Madame Psychosis takes one random call to start ‘60 +/—.’ Tonight the one caller she ends by taking has a cultured stutter and invites M.P. and the YYY community to consider the fact that the moon, which of course as any sot knows revolves around the earth, does not itself revolve. Is this true? He says it is. That it just stays there, hidden and disclosed by our round shadow’s rhythms, but never revolving. That it never turns its face away.

The little Heathkit can’t receive signals inside the Cerebrum’s subdural stairwells, during descent, but the student engineer can anticipate she’ll make no direct reply. Her sign-off is more dead air. She almost reminds the engineer of certain types in high school whom everyone adored because you sensed it made no difference to them whether you adored them. It had sure made a difference to the engineer, though, who hadn’t been invited to even one graduation party, with his inhaler and skin.

The dessert Avril serves when Hal’s over is Mrs. Clarke’s infamous high-protein-gelatin squares, available in bright red or bright green, sort of like Jell-O on steroids. Mario’s wild for them. C.T. clears the table and loads the dishwasher, since he didn’t cook, and Hal gets into his coat at like OlOlh. Mario’s still listening to the WYYY nightly sign-off, which takes a while because they not only list the station’s kilowattage specs but go through proofs for the formulae by which the specs are derived. C.T. always drops at least one plate out in the kitchen and then bellows. Avril always brings some hell-Jell-O squares in to Mario and adopts a mock-dry tone and tells Hal it’s been reasonably nice to see him outside les bâtiments sanctifies. The whole thing to Hal sometimes gets ritualistic and almost hallucinatory, the postprandial farewell routine. Hal stands under the big framed poster of Metropolis and whumps his gloves together casually and tells Mario there’s no reason for him to leave too; Hal’s going to blast down the hill for a bit. Avril and Mario always smile and Avril asks casually what his plans are.

Hal always whumps his gloves together and smiles up at her and says ‘Make trouble.’

And Avril always puts on a sort of mock-stern expression and says ‘Do not, under any circumstances, have fun,’ which Mario still always finds clutch-your-stomach funny, every time, week after week.

Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House is the sixth of seven exterior Units on the grounds of an Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital complex that, from the height of an ATHSCME 2100 industrial displacement fan or Enfield Tennis Academy’s hilltop, resembles seven moons orbiting a dead planet. The hospital building itself, a VA facility of iron-colored brick and steep slate roofs, is closed and cordoned, bright pine boards nailed across every possible access and aperture, with really stern government signs about trespassing. Enfield Marine was built during either WWII or Korea, when there were ample casualties and much convalescence. About the only people who use the Enfield Marine complex in a VA-related way now seem to be wild-eyed old Vietnam veterans in fatigue jackets de-sleeved to make vests, or else drastically old Korea vets who are now senile or terminally alcoholic or both.

The hospital building itself stripped of equipment and copper wire, defunct, Enfield Marine stays solvent by maintaining several smaller buildings on the complex’s grounds — buildings the size of like prosperous homes, which used to house VA doctors and support staff — and leasing them to different state-related health agencies and services. Each building has a Unit-number that increases with the Unit’s distance from the defunct hospital and with its proximity, along a rutted cement roadlet that extends back from the hospital’s parking lot, to a steep ravine that overlooks a particularly unpleasant part of Brighton MA’s Commonwealth Avenue and its Green Line train tracks.

Unit #l, right by the lot in the hospital’s afternoon shadow, is leased by some agency that seems to employ only guys who wear turtlenecks; the place counsels wild-eyed Vietnam vets for certain very-delayed stress disorders, and dispenses various pacifying medications. Unit#2, right next door, is a methadone clinic overseen by the same MA Division of Substance Abuse Services that licenses Ennet House. Customers for the services of Units #1 and #2 arrive around sunup and form long lines. The customers for Unit #l tend to congregate in like-minded groups of three or four and gesture a lot and look wild-eyed and generally pissed-off in some broad geopolitical way. The customers for the methadone clinic tend to arrive looking even angrier, as a rule, and their early-morning eyes tend to bulge and flutter like the eyes of the choked, but they do not congregate, rather stand or lean along #2’s long walkway’s railing, arms crossed, alone, brooding, solo acts, standoffish — 50 or 60 people all managing to form a line on a narrow walkway waiting for the same small building to unlock its narrow front door and yet still managing to appear alone and stand-offish is a strange sight, and if Don Gately had ever once seen a ballet he would, as an Ennet House resident, from his sunup smoking station on the fire escape outside the Five-Man bedroom upstairs, have seen the movements and postures necessary to maintain this isolation-in-union as balletic.

The other big difference between Units#1 and #2 is that the customers of #2 leave the building deeply changed, their eyes not only back in their heads but peaceful, if a bit glazed, but anyway in general just way better put-together than when they arrived, while #l’s wild-eyed patrons tend to exit #l looking even more stressed and historically aggrieved than when they went in.

When Don Gately was in the very early part of his Ennet House residency he almost got discharged for teaming up with a bad-news methedrine addict from New Bedford and sneaking out after curfew across the E.M.P.H.H. complex in the middle of the night to attach a big sign on the narrow front door of Unit #2’s methadone clinic. The sign said CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE BY ORDER COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS. The first staffer at the methadone clinic doesn’t get there to open up until O8OOh., and yet it’s been mentioned how #2’s customers always begin to show up with twisting hands and bulging eyes at like dawn, to wait; and Gately and the speed freak from New Bedford had never seen anything like the psychic crises and near-riot among these semi-ex-junkies — pallid blade-slender chain-smoking homosexuals and bearded bruiser-types in leather berets, women with mohawks and multiple sticks of gum in, upscale trust-fund-fritterers with shiny cars and computerized jewelry who’d arrived, as they’d been doing like hyper-conditioned rats for years, many of them, arrived at sunup with their eyes protruding and with Kleenexes at their noses and scratching their arms and standing on first one foot and then the other, doing basically everything but truly congregating, wild for chemical relief, ready to stand in the cold exhaling steam for hours for that relief, who’d arrived with the sun and now seemed to be informed that the Commonwealth of MA was suddenly going to withdraw the prospect of that relief, until (and this is what really seemed to drive them right over the edge, out there in the lot) until Further Notice. Apeshit has rarely enjoyed so literal a denotation. At the sound of the first windowpane breaking and the sight of a blown-out old whore trying to hit a leather-vested biker with an old pre-metric GRASS GROWS BY INCHES BUT IT DIES BY FEET sign from #2’s clinic’s pathetic front lawn, the methedrine addict began laughing so hard that she dropped the binoculars from the Ennet House upstairs fire escape where they were watching, at like 0630h., and the binoculars fell and hit the roof of one of the Ennet House counselors’ cars right below in the little roadlet, with a ringing clunk, just as he was pulling in, the counselor, his name was Calvin Thrust and he was four years sober and a former NYC porn actor who’d gone through the House himself and now took absolutely zero in terms of shit from any of the residents, and his pride and joy was his customized ‘Vette, and the binoculars made rather a nasty dent, and plus they were the House Manager’s amateur-ornithology binoculars and had been borrowed out of the back office without explicit permission, and the long fall and impact didn’t do them a bit of good, to say the least, and Gately and the methedrine addict got pinched and put on Full House Restriction and very nearly kicked out. The addict from New Bedford picked up the aminating needle a couple weeks after that anyway and was discovered by a night staffer simultaneously playing air-guitar and polishing the lids of all the donated canned goods in the House pantry way after lights out, stark naked and sheened with meth-sweat, and after the formality of a Urine she was given the old administrative boot — over a quarter of incoming Ennet House residents get discharged for a dirty Urine within their first thirty days, and it’s the same at all other Boston halfway houses — and the girl ended up back in New Bedford, and then within like three hours of hitting the streets got picked up by New Bedford’s Finest on an old default warrant and sent to Framingham Women’s for a 1-to-2 bit, and got found one morning in her bunk with a kitchen-rigged shiv protruding from her privates and another in her neck and a thoroughly eliminated personal map, and Gately’s individual counselor Gene M. brought Gately the news and invited him to see the methedrine addict’s demise as a clear case of There But For the Grace of God Goeth D. W. Gately.

Unit #3, across the roadlet from #2, is unoccupied but getting reconditioned for lease; it’s not boarded up, and the Enfield Marine maintenance guys go in there a couple days a week with tools and power cords and make a godawful racket. Pat Montesian hasn’t yet been able to find out what sort of group misfortune +3 will be devoted to servicing.

Unit #4, more or less equidistant from both the hospital parking lot and the steep ravine, is a repository for Alzheimer’s patients with VA pensions. #4’s residents wear jammies 24/7, the diapers underneath giving them a lumpy and toddlerish aspect. The patients are frequently visible at #4’s windows, in jammies, splayed and open-mouthed, sometimes shrieking, sometimes just mutely open-mouthed, splayed against the windows. They give everybody at Ennet House the howling fantods. One ancient retired Air Force nurse does nothing but scream ‘Help!’ for hours at a time from a second-story window. Since the Ennet House residents are drilled in a Boston-AA recovery program that places great emphasis on ‘Asking For Help,’ the retired shrieking Air Force nurse is the object of a certain grim amusement, sometimes. Not six weeks ago, a huge stolen HELP WANTED sign was found attached to #4’s siding right below the retired shrieking nurse’s window, and #4’s director was less than amused, and demanded that Pat Montesian determine and punish the Ennet House residents responsible, and Pat had delegated the investigation to Don Gately, and though Gately had a pretty good idea who the perps were he didn’t have the heart to really press and kick ass over something so much like what he’d done himself, when new and cynical, and so the whole thing pretty much blew over.

Unit #5, kittycorner across the little street from Ennet House, is for cata-tonics and various vegetablish, fetal-positioned mental patients subcontracted to a Commonwealth outreach agency by overcrowded LTIs. Unit #5 is referred to, for reasons Gately’s never been able to pinpoint, as The Shed.^[67] It is, understandably, a pretty quiet place. But in nice weather, when its more portable inmates are carried out and placed in the front lawn to take the air, standing there propped-up and staring, they present a tableau it took Gately some time to get used to. A couple newer residents got discharged late in Gately’s treatment for tossing firecrackers into the crowd of catatonics on the lawn to see if they could get them to jump around or display affect. On warm nights, one long-limbed bespectacled lady who seems more autistic than catatonic tends to wander out of The Shed wrapped in a bedsheet and lay her hands on the thin shiny bark of a silver maple in #5’s lawn, stands there touching the tree until she’s missed at bedcheck and retrieved; and since Gately graduated treatment and took the offer of a live-in Staffer’s job at Ennet House he sometimes wakes up in his Staff cellar bedroom down by the pay phone and tonic machine and looks out the sooty ground-level window by his bed and watches the catatonic touching the tree in her sheet and glasses, illuminated by Comm. Ave.’s neon or the weird sodium light that spills down from the snooty tennis prep school overhead on its hill, he’ll watch her standing there and feel an odd chilled empathy he tries not to associate with watching his mother pass out on some piece of living-room chintz.

Unit #6, right up against the ravine on the end of the rutted road’s east side, is Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, three stories of whitewashed New England brick with the brick showing in patches through the whitewash, a mansard roof that sheds green shingles, a scabrous fire escape at each upper window and a back door no resident is allowed to use and a front office around on the south side with huge protruding bay windows that yield a view of ravine-weeds and the unpleasant stretch of Commonwealth Ave. The front office is the director’s office, and its bay windows, the House’s single attractive feature, are kept spotless by whatever residents get Front Office Windows for their weekly Chore. The mansard’s lower slope encloses attics on both the male and female sides of the House. The attics are accessed from trapdoors in the ceiling of the second floor and are filled to the beams with trash bags and trunks, the unclaimed possessions of residents who’ve up and vanished sometime during their term. The shrubbery all around Ennet House’s first story looks explosive, ballooning in certain unpruned parts, and there are candy-wrappers and Styrofoam cups trapped throughout the shrubs’ green levels, and gaudy homemade curtains billow from the second story’s female side’s bedroom windows, which are open what seems like all year round.

Unit #7 is on the west side of the street’s end, sunk in hill-shadow and teetering right on the edge of the eroding ravine that leads down to the Avenue. #7 is in bad shape, boarded up and unmaintained and deeply slumped at the red roof’s middle as if shrugging its shoulders at some pointless indignity. For an Ennet House resident, entering Unit #7 (which can easily be entered through the detachable pine board over an old kitchen window) is cause for immediate administrative discharge, since Unit #7 is infamous for being the place where Ennet House residents who want to secretly relapse with Substances sneak in and absorb Substances and apply Visine and Clorets and then try to get back across the street in time for 2330 curfew without getting pinched.

Behind Unit #7 begins far and away the biggest hill in Enfield MA. The hillside is fenced, off-limits, densely wooded and without sanctioned path. Because a legit route involves walking north all the way up the rutted road through the parking lot, past the hospital, down the steep curved driveway to Warren Street and all the way back south down Warren to Commonwealth, almost half of all Ennet House residents negotiate #7’s back fence and climb the hillside each morning, short-cutting their way to minimum-wage temp jobs at like the Provident Nursing Home or Shuco-Mist Medical Pressure Systems, etc., over the hill up Comm., or custodial and kitchen jobs at the rich tennis school for blond gleaming tennis kids on what used to be the hilltop. Don Gately’s been told that the school’s maze of tennis courts lies now on what used to be the hill’s hilltop before the Academy’s burly cigar-chomping tennis-court contractors shaved the curved top off and rolled the new top flat, the whole long loud process sending all sorts of damaging avalanche-type debris rolling down and all over Enfield Marine’s Unit #7, something over which you can sure bet the Enfield Marine VA administration litigated, years back; and but Gately doesn’t know that E.T.A.’s balding of the hill is why #7 can still stand empty and unrepaired: Enfield Tennis Academy still has to pay full rent, every month, on what it almost buried.