Infinite jest

5 NOVEMBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

The transparent phone sounded from somewhere under the hill of bedding^[82] as Hal was on the edge of the bed with one leg up and his chin on its knee, clipping his nails into a wastebasket that sat several meters away in the middle of the room. It took four rings to find the receiver in the bedding and pull the antenna out.

‘Mmmyellow.’

‘Mr. Incredenza, this is the Enfield Raw Sewage Commission, and quite frankly we’ve had enough shit out of you.’

‘Hello Orin.’

‘How hangs it, kid.’

‘God, please no, please O., not more Separatism questions.’

‘Relax. Never crossed my mind. Social call. Shoot the breeze.’

‘Interesting you should call just now. Because I’m clipping my toenails into a wastebasket several meters away.’

‘Jesus, you know how I hate the sound of nail clippers.’

‘Except I’m shooting seventy-plus percent. The little fragments of clipping. It’s uncanny. I keep wanting to go out in the hall and get somebody in here to see it. But I don’t want to break the spell.’

‘The fragile magic-spell feel of those intervals where it feels you just can’t miss.’

‘It’s definitely one of those can’t-miss intervals. It’s just like that magical feeling on those rare days out there playing. Playing out of your head, de-Lint calls it. Loach calls it The Zone. Being in The Zone. Those days when you feel perfectly calibrated.’

‘Coordinated as God.’

‘Some groove in the shape of the air of the day guides everything down and in.’

‘When you feel like you couldn’t miss if you tried to.’

‘I’m so far away the wastebasket’s mouth looks more like a slot than a circle. And yet in they go, ka-chíng ka-ching. There went another one. Even the misses are near-misses, caroms off the rim.’

‘I’m sitting here with the leg in a whirlpool in the bathroom of a Norwegian deep-tissue therapist’s ranch-style house 1100 meters up in the Superstition mountains. Mesa-Scottsdale in flames far below. The bathroom’s redwood-panelled and overlooks a precipice. The sunlight’s the color of the bronze.’

‘But you never know when the magic will descend on you. You never know when the grooves will open up. And once the magic descends you don’t want to change even the smallest detail. You don’t know what concordance of factors and variables yields that calibrated can’t-miss feeling, and you don’t want to soil the magic by trying to figure it out, but you don’t want to change your grip, your stick, your side of the court, your angle of incidence to the sun. Your heart’s in your throat every time you change sides of the court.’

‘You start to get like a superstitious native. What’s the word propitiate the divine spell.’

T suddenly understand the gesundheit-impulse, the salt over the shoulder and apotropaic barn-signs. I’m actually frightened to switch feet right now. I’m clipping off the tiniest aerodynamically viable clippings possible, to prolong the time on this foot, in case the magic’s a function of the foot. This isn’t even the good foot.’

‘These can’t-miss intervals make superstitious natives out of us all, Hal-lie. The professional football player’s maybe the worst superstitious native of all the sports. That’s why all the high-tech padding and garish Lycra and complex play-terminology. The like self-reassuring display of high-tech. Because the bug-eyed native’s lurking just under the surface, we know. The bug-eyed spear-rattling grass-skirted primitive, feeding virgins to Pop-ogatapec and afraid of planes.’

‘The new Discursive O.E.D. says the Ahts of Vancouver used to cut virgins’ throats and pour the blood very carefully into the orifices of the embalmed bodies of their ancestors.’

‘I can hear those clippers. Quit with the clippers a second.’

‘The phone’s no longer wedged under my jaw. I can even do it one-handed, holding the phone in one hand. But it’s still the same foot.’

‘You don’t know from true bug-eyed athletic superstition till you hit the pro ranks, Hallie. When you hit the Show is when you’ll understand primitive. Winning streaks bring the native bubbling up to the surface. Jock straps unwashed game after game until they stand up by themselves in the overhead luggage compartments of planes. Bizarrely ritualized dressing, eating, peeing.’

‘Micturation.’

‘Picture a 200-kilo interior lineman insisting on sitting down to pee. Don’t even ask what wives and girlfriends have to suffer during a can’t-miss winning streak.’

‘I don’t want to hear sexual stuff.’

‘Then there are the players who write down exactly what they say to everybody before a game, so if it’s a magical can’t-miss-type game they can say exactly the same things to the same people in the same exact order before the next game.’

‘Apparently the Ahts tried to fill up ancestors’ bodies completely with virgin-blood to preserve the privacy of their own mental states. The apposite Aht dictum here being quote “The sated ghost cannot see secret things.” The Discursive O.E.D. postulates that this is one of the earlier on-record prophylactics against schizophrenia.’ ‘Hey Hallie?’

‘After a burial, rural Papineau-region Québecers purportedly drill a small hole down from ground level all the way down through the lid of the coffin, to let out the soul, if it wants out.’

‘Hey Hallie? I think I’m being followed.’

‘This is the big moment. I’ve totally exhausted the left foot finally and am switching to the right foot. This’ll be the real test of the fragility of the spell.’ ‘I said I think I’m being followed.’ ‘Some men are born to lead, O.’ ‘I’m serious. And here’s the weird part.’

‘Here’s the part that explains why you’re sharing this with your estranged little brother instead of with anybody whose credulity you’d actually value.’

‘The weird part is I think I’m being followed by … by handicapped people.’

‘Two for three on the right foot, with one carom. Jury’s still out.’ ‘Quit with the clipping a second. I’m not kidding. Take the other day. I strike up a conversation with a certain Subject in line in the post office. I notice a guy in a wheelchair behind us. No big deal. Are you listening?’ ‘What are you doing going to the post office? You hate snail-mail. And you quit mailing the Moms the pseudo-form-replies two years ago, Mario says.’

‘But so the conversation goes well and hits it off, Seduction Strategies 12 and 16 are employed, which I’ll tell you about sometime at length. The point is the Subject and I walk out together hitting it off and there’s another guy in a wheelchair whittling in the shade of a shop-awning just down the street. OK. Still not necessarily any kind of deal. But now the Subject and I drive to her trailer park —’

‘Phoenix has trailer parks? Not those silverish metal trailers.’

‘So but we get out of the car, and across the park’s lot here’s yet another wheelchaired guy, trying to maneuver in the gravel and not making a very good job of it.’

‘Doesn’t Arizona have more than its share of the old and infirm?’

‘But none of these handicapped guys were old. And they were all awfully burly for guys in wheelchairs. And three in an hour’s kind of stretching it, I was thinking.’

‘I always picture you having your little trysts in more domestic suburban settings. Or else tall motels with exotically shaped beds. Do women in metal trailers even have small children?’

‘This one had very sweet little twin girls who played very quietly with blocks without supervision the whole time.’

‘Cockle-warming, O.’

‘And but so the point is I decamp the trailer like x number of hours later, and the guy’s still there, mired in gravel. And in the distance I could swear he’s got on some kind of domino-mask. And now everywhere I go the last several days there seems to be a statistically improbable number of wheel-chaired figures around, lurking, somehow just a little too nonchalantly.’

‘Very shy fans, possibly? Some club of leg-dysfunctional people all obsessed in that shy-fan-like way with one of the first North American sports figures people think of in connection with the word leg?’

‘It’s probably my imagination. A dead bird fell in my Jacuzzi.’

‘But now let me ask you a couple questions.’

‘This all wasn’t even why I originally called.’

‘But you brought up trailer parks and trailers. I need to confirm some suspicions — two points, right in there, ka-ching. Never having been in a trailer, and even the Discursive O.E.D. having pretty much of a lacuna where trailer-park trailers are concerned.’

‘And this is the one supposedly nonbats family-member I call. This is who I reach out to.’

‘It’d be whom, I think. But this trailer. This lady you met’s trailer. Confirm or deny the following. Its carpet was wall-to-wall and extremely thin, a kind of burnt yellow or orange.’

‘Yes.’

‘The living-room or like den area contained some or all of the following: a black velvet painting featuring an animal; a videophonic diorama on some sort of knickknack shelf; a needlepoint sampler with some kind of frothy biblical saw on it; at least one piece of chintz furniture with protective doilies on the arms; a Smoke-B-Gone air-filtration ashtray; the last couple years’ Reader’s Digests neatly displayed in their own special inclined magazine rack.’

‘Check on velvet painting of leopard, sampler sofa with doilies, ashtray. No Reader’s Digests. This isn’t especially funny, Hallie. The Moms comes out in you in these odd little ways sometimes.’

‘Last one. The trailer-person’s name. Jean. May. Nora. Vera. Nora-Jean or Vera-May.’

‘…’

‘That was my question.’

‘I guess I’ll have to get back to you on that.’

‘Boy, you really put the small r in romance, don’t you.’

‘But why I’m calling.’

‘It’s not clear whether the fragile can’t-miss magic’s still in force on the right foot. I’m seven for nine, but there’s a whole different feel of somehow deliberately trying to get them in.’

‘Hallie, I’ve got somebody from Moment fucking magazine out here doing a quote soft profile.’

‘You’ve got what?’

‘A human-interest thing. On me as a human. Moment doesn’t do hard sports, this lady says. They’re more people-oriented, human-interest. It’s for something called quote People Right Now, a section.’

‘Moment’s a supermarket-checkout-lane-display magazine. It’s in there with the rodneys and gum. Lateral Alice Moore reads it. It’s all over C.T.’s waiting room. They did a thing on the little blind Illinois kid Thorp thought so well of.’

‘Hal.’

T think Lateral Alice spends a lot of time in grocery-store checkout lanes, which if you think about it are almost the ideal environment for her.’

‘Hal.’

‘… Being that she can just locomote sideways right on through.’

‘Hallie, this physically imposing Moment girl’s asking all these soft-profilesque family-background questions.’

‘She wants to know about Himself?’

‘Everybody. You, the Mad Stork, the Moms. It’s gradually emerging it’s going to be some sort of memorial to the Stork as patriarch, everybody’s talents and accomplishments profiled as some sort of refracted tribute to el Storko’s careers.’

‘He always did cast a long shadow, you said.’

‘Of course and my first thought is to invite her to go piss up a string. But Moment’s been in touch with the team. The front office’s indicated a soft profile would be positive for the team. Cardinal Stadium isn’t exactly groaning under the weight of all the fannies, winning streak or no. I’ve also thought of referring her to Bain, let Bain rant at her or send her letters just trying to unparse for quotes’d take her a month.’

‘Her as in female. Not your typical Orin-type subject. A hardened, fast-lane, gum-cracking, maybe even small-childless journalist-type female, in from New Youok on the red-eye. Plus you said imposing.’

‘Not all that tough or hard, but physically imposing. Large but not un-erotic. A girl and a half in all directions.’

‘A girl to dominate the space of any trailer she lives in.’

‘Enough with the trailerisms.’

‘The strained quality is me trying to speak and pick caromed toenail-parings up off the floor at the same time.’

‘This girl’s immune to most of your standard conversational distractions.’

‘You’re afraid you’re losing your touch. An immune girl and a half.’

‘I said distraction not seduction.’

‘You kind of wisely avoid any female who you suspect could beat you up if things came down to that.’

‘She’s more imposing than like most of our starting backfield. But weirdly sexy. The linemen are gaga. The tackles keep making all these cracks about does she maybe want to see their hard profile.’

‘Let’s hope her prose is better than whoever did that human-interest thing on the blind kid last spring. Have you bounced this new fear of the handicapped off her?’

‘Listen. You of all people should know I have zero intent of forthrightly answering any stained-family-linen-type questions from anybody, much less somebody who takes shorthand. Physical charms or no.’

‘You and tennis, you and the Saints, Himself and tennis, the Moms and Quebec and Royal Victoria, the Moms and immigration, Himself and annu-lation, Himself and Lyle, Himself and distilled spirits, Himself killing himself, you and Joelle, Himself and Joelle, the Moms and C.T., you v. the Moms, E.T.A., nonexistent films, et cetera.’

‘But you can see how it’s all going to get me thinking. How to avoid being forthright about the Stork material unless I know what the really forthright answers would be.’

‘Everybody said you’d regret not coming to the funeral. But I don’t think this is what they meant.’

‘For example the Stork took himself down before C.T. moved in upstairs at HmH? or after?’

‘This is you asking me?’

‘Don’t make this appalling for me, Hal.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of even trying.’

‘…’

‘Immediately before. Two, three days before. C.T. had had what’s now deLint’s room, next to Schtitt’s, in Comm.-Ad.’ ‘And Dad knew they were …?’ ‘Very close? I don’t know, O.’ ‘You don’t know?’

‘Mario might know. Like to chew the fat with Booboo on this, O.?’ ‘Don’t make this like this Hallie.’

‘And Dad … the Mad Stork put his head in the oven?’

‘The microwave, O. The rotisserie microwave over next to the fridge, on the freezer side, on the counter, under the cabinet with the plates and bowls to the left of the fridge as you face the fridge.’

‘A microwave oven.’

‘That is a Rog and Wile, O.’

‘Nobody ever said microwave.’

‘I think it came out generally at the funeral.’

‘I keep getting your point, if you’re wondering.’

‘…’

‘So where was he found, then?’

‘20 for 28 is what, 65 %?’

‘It’s not like this is all that —’

‘The microwave was in the kitchen I already explained, O.’

‘All right.’

‘All right.’

‘So OK now, who would you say speaks most about the guy, keeps his memory alive, verbally, the most now: you, C.T., or the Moms?’

T think it’s a three-way tie.’

‘So it’s never mentioned. Nobody talks about him. It’s taboo.’

‘But you seem to be forgetting somebody.’

‘Mario talks about him. About it.’

‘Sometimes.’

‘To what and/or who all this talking?’

‘To me, for one, I suppose.’

‘And so you do talk about it, but only to him, and only after he initiates it.’

‘Orin I lied. I haven’t even started on the right foot yet. I’ve been too afraid to change my angle of approach to the nails. The right foot’s a whole different angle of approach. I’m afraid the magic is left-foot-dependent. I’m like your superstitious lineman. Talking about it’s broken the spell. Now I’m self-conscious and afraid. I’ve been sitting here on the edge of the bed with my right knee up under my chin, poised, studying the foot, frozen with aboriginal terror. And lying about it to my own brother.’

‘Can I ask you who it was who found him? His — who found him at the oven?’

‘Found by one Harold James Incandenza, thirteen going on really old.’

‘You were who found him? Not the Moms?’

‘Listen, may I ask why this sudden interest after four years 216 days, and with two years of that not even once even calling?’

‘I’ve already said I don’t feel safe not answering Helen’s questions if I haven’t got a handle on what I’m not saying.’

‘Helen. So you did.’

‘Is why.’

‘I’m still frozen, by the way. The self-consciousness that kills the magic is getting worse and worse. This is why Pemulis and Troeltsch always seem to let a lead slip away. The standard term is Tightening Up. The clippers are poised, blades on either side of the nail. I just can’t achieve the unconsciousness to actually clip. Maybe it was cleaning up the few that missed. Suddenly the wastebasket seems small and far away. I’ve lost the magic by talking about it instead of just giving in to it. Launching the nail out toward the wastebasket now seems like an exercise in telemachry.’

‘You mean telemetry?’

‘How embarrassing. When the skills go they go.’

‘Listen

‘You know, why don’t you go ahead and ask me whatever standard ghoulish questions you want not to answer. This may be your only shot. Usually I seem not to talk about it.’

‘Was she there? The P.G.O.A.T.?’

‘Joelle hadn’t been around the grounds since you two split up. You knew about that. Himself met her at the brownstone, shooting. I’m sure you know way more about whatever it was they were trying to make. Joelle and Himself. Himself went underground too. C.T. was already doing most of the day-to-day administration. Himself was down in that little post-production closet off the lab for like a solid month. Mario’d bring food and … essentials down. Sometimes he’d eat with Lyle. I don’t think he came up to ground level for at least a month, except for just one trip out to Belmont to McLean’s for a two-day purge and detox. This was about a week after he came back. He’d flown off somewhere for three days, for what the impression I get was work-related business. Film-related. If Lyle didn’t go with him Lyle went somewhere, because he wasn’t in the weight room. I know Mario didn’t go with him and didn’t know what was up. Mario doesn’t lie. It was unclear whether he’d finished whatever he was editing. Himself I mean. He stopped living on April First, if you weren’t sure, was the day. I can tell you on April First he wasn’t back by the time P.M. matches started, because I’d been around the lab door right after lunch and he wasn’t back.’

‘He went in for another detox you say. In what, March?’

‘The Moms herself emerged and risked exterior transit and took him herself, so I gather it was urgent.’

‘He quit drinking in January, Hal. It was something Joelle was real specific about. She called even after we’d agreed not to call and told me about it even after I said I didn’t want to hear about him if she was going to still be in his things. She said he hadn’t had a drop in weeks. It was her condition for letting him put her in what he was doing. She said he said he’d do anything.’

‘Well, I don’t know what to tell you. By this time it was hard to tell whether he’d been ingesting anything or not. Apparently at a certain point it stops making a difference.’

‘Did he have film-related things with him when he flew somewhere? A film case? Equipment?’

‘O., I didn’t see him leave and didn’t see him come back. He wasn’t around by match-time, I know. Freer beat me badly and fast. It was 4 and 1, 4 and 2, something, and we were the first ones done. I came around HmH to do an emergency load of laundry before dinner. This was around 1630. I came over and came in and noticed something right away.’

‘And found him.’

‘And went to get the Moms, then changed my mind and went to get C.T., then changed my mind and went to get Lyle, but the first authority figure I ran into was Schtitt. Who was irreproachably brisk and efficient and sensible about everything and turned out to be just the authority figure to go get in the first place.’

‘I didn’t even think a microwave oven would go on unless the door was closed. What with microwaves oscillating all over, inside. I thought there was like a refrigerator-light or Read-Only-tab-like device.’

‘You seem to be forgetting the technical ingenuity of the person we’re talking about.’

‘And you were totally shocked and traumatized. He was asphyxuated, irradiated, and/or burnt.’

‘As we later reconstructed the scene, he’d used a wide-bit drill and small hacksaw to make a head-sized hole in the oven door, then when he’d gotten his head in he’d carefully packed the extra space around his neck with wadded-up aluminum foil.’

‘Sounds kind of ad hoc and jerry-rigged and haphazard.’

‘Everybody’s a critic. This wasn’t an aesthetic endeavor.’

‘…’

‘And there was a large and half-full bottle of Wild Turkey found on the counter not far away, with a large red decorative giftwrappish bow on the neck.’

‘On the bottle’s neck, you mean.’

‘That is a Rog.’

‘As in he hadn’t been sober after all.’

‘That would seem to follow, O.’

‘And he left no note or living-will-type video or communique of any kind.’

‘O, I know you know very well he didn’t. You’re now asking me stuff I know you know, besides criticizing him and making sobriety-claims when you weren’t anywhere near the scene or the funeral. Are we just about through here? I’ve got a whole long-nailed foot waiting for me here.’

‘As you reconstructed the scene, you just said.’

‘Also it just hit me I’ve got a library book I was supposed to return. I’d forgotten all about it. Kertwang.’

‘ “Reconstructed the scene” as in the scene when you found him was somehow … deconstructed?’

‘You of all people, O. You know that was the one word he hated more than —’

‘So burned, then. Just say it. He was really really badly burned.’

‘…’

‘No, wait. Asphyxuated. The packed foil was to preserve the vacuum in a space that got automatically evacuated as soon as the magnitron started oscillating and generating the microwaves.’

‘Magnitron? What do you know about magnitrons and oscillators? Aren’t you the brother of mine who has to be reminded which way to turn the ignition key in a car?’

‘Brief liaison with this one Subject who used to model at kitchen-appliance trade shows.’

‘…’

‘It was kind of a brutal brand of modelling. She’d stand there on a huge rotating Lazy Susan in a one-piece with one thigh turned in and a hand out palm-up, indicating the appliance next to her. Stood there smiling and spinning day after day. She’d stagger around half the evening trying to get her balance back.’

‘Did this subject by any chance explain to you how microwaves actually cook things?’

‘…’

‘Or have you for example, say, ever like baked a potato in a microwave oven? Did you know you have to cut the potato open before you turn the oven on? Do you know why that is?’

‘Jesus.’

‘The B.P.D.^[83] field pathologist said the build-up of internal pressures would have been almost instantaneous and equivalent in kg.s.cm. to over two sticks of TNT.’

‘Jesus Christ, Hallie.’

‘Hence the need to reconstruct the scene.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Don’t feel bad. There’s no guarantee anybody would have told you even if you’d popped in for, say, the memorial service. I for one wasn’t exactly a jabberjaw at the time. I seemed to have been evincing shock and trauma throughout the whole funeral period. What I mostly recall is a great deal of quiet talk about my psychic well-being. It got so I kind of enjoyed popping in and out of rooms just to enjoy the quiet conversations stopping in mid-clause.’

‘You must have been traumatized beyond fucking belief.’

‘Your concern is much appreciated, believe me.’

‘…’

‘Trauma seems to have been the consensus. It turns out Rusk and the Moms had begun interviewing top-flight trauma- and grief-counselors for me within hours after it happened. I was shunted directly into concentrated grief- and trauma-therapy. Four days a week for over a month, right in the April-May gearing-up-for-summer-tour period. I lost two spots on the 14’s ladder just because of all the P.M. matches I missed. I missed the Hard Court Qualies and would have missed Indianapolis if… if I hadn’t finally figured out the grief- and trauma-therapy process.’

‘But it helped. Ultimately. The grief-therapy.’

‘The therapy ended up taking place in that Professional Building right up Comm. Ave. past the Sunstrand Plaza by Lake Street, the one with bricks the color of Thousand Island dressing we all run by four days a week. Who was to know one of the continent’s top grief-men was right up the street.’

‘The Moms didn’t want the process going on too far from the old web, if need be, I’m sure.’

‘This grief-counselor insisted I call him by his first name, which I forget. A large red meaty character with eyebrows at a demonic-looking synclinal angle and very small nubbly gray teeth. And a mustache. He always had the remains of a sneeze in his mustache. I got to know that mustache very well. His face had that same blood-pressure flush C.T.’s face gets. And let’s not even go into the man’s hands.’

‘The Moms had Rusk shunt you to a top grief-pro so she wouldn’t have to feel guilty about practically sawing the hole in the microwave door herself. Among other little guilt and antiguilt operations. She always did believe Himself was doing more with Joelle than work. Poor old Himself never had eyes for anybody but the Moms.’

‘This was one tough hombré, O., this grief-counselor. He made a Rusk-session look like a day on the Adriatic. He wouldn’t let up: “How did it feel, how does it feel, how do you feel when I ask how it feels.”

‘Rusk always reminded me of a freshman fumbling with some Subject’s bra, the way she’d sort of tug and fumble at your head.’

‘The man was unsatisfiable and scary. Those eyebrows, that ham-rind face, bland little eyes. He never once turned his face away or looked away at anything but right at me. It was the most brutal six weeks of full-bore professional conversation anybody could imagine.’

‘With fucking C.T. already moving his collection of platform shoes and unconvincing hairpieces and StairMaster in upstairs at HmH already.’

‘The whole thing was nightmarish. I just could not figure out what the guy wanted. I went down and chewed through the Copley Square library’s grief section. Not disk. The actual books. I read Kübler-Ross, Hinton. I slogged through Kastenbaum and Kastenbaum. I read things like Elizabeth Harper Neeld’s Seven Choices: Taking the Steps to New Life After Losing Someone You Love,^[84]which was 352 pages of sheer goo. I went in and presented with textbook-perfect symptoms of denial, bargaining, anger, still more denial, depression. I listed my seven textbook choices and vacillated plausibly between and among them. I provided etymological data on the word acceptance all the way back to Wyclif and 14th-century langue-d’oc French. The grief-therapist was having none of it. It was like one of those final exams in nightmares where you prepare immaculately and then you get there and all the exam questions are in Hindi. I even tried telling him Himself was miserable and pancreatitic and out of his tree half the time by then anyway, that he and the Moms were basically estranged, that even work and Wild Turkey weren’t helping anymore, that he was despondent about something he was editing that turned out so bad he didn’t want it released. That the … that what happened was probably kind of a mercy, in the end.’

‘Himself didn’t suffer, then. In the microwave.’

‘The B.P.D. field pathologist who drew the chalk lines around Himself’s shoes on the floor said maybe ten seconds tops. He said the pressure buildup would have been almost instantaneous. Then he gestured at the kitchen walls. Then he threw up. The field pathologist.’

‘Jesus Christ, Hallie.’

‘But the grief-therapist was having none of it, the at-least-his-suffering’s-over angle that Kastenbaum and Kastenbaum said is basically a neon-bright sign of real acceptance. This grief-therapist hung on like a Gila monster. I even tried telling him I really didn’t feel anything.’

‘Which was a fiction.’

‘Of course it was a fiction. What could I do? I was panic-stricken. This guy was a nightmare. His face just hung there over his desk like a hypertensive moon, never turning away. With this glistening mucoidal dew in his mustache. And don’t even ask me about his hands. He was my worst nightmare. Talk about self-consciousness and fear. Here was a top-rank authority figure and I was failing to supply what he wanted. He made it manifestly clear I wasn’t delivering the goods. I’d never failed to deliver the goods before.’

‘You were our designated deliverer, Hallie, no question about it.’

‘And here but here was this authority figure with top credentials in frames over every square cm. of his walls who sat there and refused even to define what the goods here would be. Say what you will about Schtitt and deLint: they let you know what they want in no uncertain terms. Flottman, Chawaf, Prickett, Nwangi, Fentress, Lingley, Pettijohn, Ogilvie, Leith, even the Moms in her way: they tell you on the very first day of class what they want from you. But this son of a bee right here: no dice.’

‘You must have been in shock the whole time, too.’

‘O., it got worse and worse. I dropped weight. I couldn’t sleep. This was when the nightmares started. I kept dreaming of a face in the floor. I lost to Freer again, then to Coyle. I went three sets with Troeltsch. I got B’s on two different quizzes. I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. I’d become obsessed with the fear that I was somehow going to flunk grief-therapy. That this professional was going to tell Rusk and Schtitt and C.T. and the Moms that I couldn’t deliver the goods.

‘I’m sorry I couldn’t be there.’

‘The odd thing was that the more obsessed I got, the worse I played and slept, the happier everybody got. The grief-therapist complimented me on how haggard I was looking. Rusk told deLint the grief-therapist’d told the Moms that it was starting to work, that I was starting to grieve, but that it was a long process.’

‘Long and costly.’

‘Roger. I began to despair. I began to foresee somehow getting left back in grief-therapy, never delivering the goods and it never ending. Having these Kafkaesque interfaces with this man day after day, week after week. It was now May. The Continental Clays I’d gotten all the way to the fourth round of the year before were coming up, and it became quietly clear that everybody felt I was at a crucial stage in the long costly grieving process and I wasn’t going to get to go with the contingent to Indianapolis unless I could figure out some last-ditch way to deliver the emotional goods to this guy. I was totally desperate, a wreck.’

‘So you schlepped on down to the weight room. You and the forehead paid a visit to good old Lyle.’

‘Lyle turned out to be the key. He was down there reading Leaves of Grass. He was going through a Whitman period, part of grieving for Himself, he said. I’d never gone to Lyle before in any kind of supplicatory capacity, but he said he took one grief-stricken look at me flailing away down there working up a gourmet sweat and said he felt so moved by my additional suffering on top of having had to be the first of Himself’s loved ones to experience the loss of Himself that he’d bend every cerebral effort. I assumed the position and let him at the old forehead and explained what had been happening and that if I couldn’t figure out some way to satisfy this grief-pro I was going to end up in a soft quiet room somewhere. Lyle’s key insight was that I’d been approaching the issue from the wrong side. I’d gone to the library and acted like a student of grief. What I needed to chew through was the section for grief-professionals themselves. I needed to prepare from the grief-pro’s own perspective. How could I know what a professional wanted unless I knew what he was professionally required to want, etc. It was simple, he said. I needed to empathize with the grief-therapist, Lyle said, if I wanted to spread a broader breast than his own. It was such a simple obversion of my normal goods-delivery-preparation system that it hadn’t once occurred to me, Lyle explained.’

‘Lyle said all that? That doesn’t sound like Lyle.’

‘But a sort of soft light broke inside me for the first time in weeks. I called a cab, still in my towel. I jumped in the cab before it had even stopped at the gate. I actually said, “The nearest library with a cutting-edge professional grief- and trauma-therapy section, and step on it.” Et cetera et cetera.’

‘The Lyle my class knew wasn’t a how-to-deliver-the-goods-to-authorities-type figure.’

‘By the time I hit the grief-therapist’s the next day I was a different man, immaculately prepared, unfazable. Everything I’d come to dread about the man — the eyebrows, the multicultural music in the waiting room, the implacable stare, the crusty mustache, the little gray teeth, even the hands — did I mention that this grief-therapist hid his hands under his desk at all times?’

‘But you got through it. You grieved to everybody’s satisfaction, you’re saying.’

‘What I did, — 1 went in there and presented with anger at the grief-therapist. I accused the grief-therapist of actually inhibiting my attempt to process my grief, by refusing to validate my absence of feelings. I told him I’d told him the truth already. I used foul language and slang. I said I didn’t give a damn if he was an abundantly credentialed authority figure or not. I called him a shithead. I asked him what the cock-shitting fuck he wanted from me. My overall demeanor was paroxysmic. I told him I’d told him that I didn’t feel anything, which was the truth. I said it seemed like he wanted me to feel toxically guilty for not feeling anything. Notice I was subtly inserting certain loaded professional-grief-therapy terms like validate, process as a transitive verb, and toxic guilt. These were library-derived.’

‘The whole difference was this time you were walking on-court oriented, with a sense of where the lines were, Schtitt would say.’

‘The grief-therapist encouraged me to go with my paroxysmic feelings, to name and honor my rage. He got more and more pleased and excited as I angrily told him I flat-out refused to feel iota-one of guilt of any kind. I said what, I was supposed to have lost even more quickly to Freer, so I could have come around HmH in time to stop Himself? It wasn’t my fault, I said. It was not my fault I found him, I shouted; I was down to black street-socks, I had legitimate emergency-grade laundry to do. By this time I was pounding myself on the breastbone with rage as I said that it just by-God was not my fault that —’

That what?’

‘That’s just what the grief-therapist said. The professional literature had a whole bold-font section on Abrupt Pauses in High-Affect Speech. The grief-therapist was now leaning way forward at the waist. His lips were wet. I was in The Zone, therapeutically speaking. I felt on top of things for the first time in a long time. I broke eye-contact with him. That I’d been hungry, I muttered.’

‘Come again?’

‘That’s just what he said, the grief-therapist. I muttered that it was nothing, just that it damn sure wasn’t my fault that I had the reaction I did when I came through the front door of HmH, before I came into the kitchen to get to the basement stairs and found Himself with his head in what was left of the microwave. When I first came in and was still in the foyer trying to get my shoes off without putting the dirty laundry-bag down on the white carpet and hopping around and couldn’t be expected to have any idea what had happened. I said nobody can choose or have any control over their first unconscious thoughts or reactions when they come into a house. I said it wasn’t my fault that my first unconscious thought turned out to be —’

‘Jesus, kid, what?’

‘ “That something smelled delicious!” I screamed. The force of my shriek almost sent the grief-therapist over backwards in his leather chair. A couple credentials fell off the wall. I bent over in my own nonleather chair as if for a crash-landing. I put a hand to each temple and rocked back in forth in the chair, weeping. It came out between sobs and screams. That it’d been four hours plus since lunchtime and I’d worked hard and played hard and I was starved. That the saliva had started the minute I came through the door. That golly something smells delicious was my first reaction!’

‘But you forgave yourself.’

‘I absolved myself with seven minutes left in the session right there in full approving view of the grief-therapist. He was ecstatic. By the end I swear his side of the desk was half a meter off the floor, at my grief-therapist-textbook breakdown into genuine affect and trauma and guilt and textbook earsplit-ting grief, then absolution.’

‘Christ on a jet-ski, Hallie.’

‘…’

‘But you got through it. You really did grieve, and you can tell me what it was like, so I can say something generic but convincing about loss and grief for Helen for Moment.’

‘But I’d omitted that somehow the single most nightmarishly compelling thing about this top grief-therapist was that his hands were never visible. The dreadfulness of the whole six weeks somehow coalesced around the issue of the guy’s hands. His hands never emerged from underneath his desk. It was as if his arms terminated at the elbow. Besides mustache-material-analysis, I also spent large blocks of each hour trying to imagine the configurations and activities of those hands under there.’

‘Hallie, let me just ask and then I’ll never bring it back up again. You implied before that what was especially traumatic was that Himself’s head had popped like an uncut spud.’

‘Then on what turned out to be the last day of the therapy, the last day before the A squads were picked for Indianapolis, after I’d finally delivered the goods and my traumatic grief was professionally pronounced uncovered and countenanced and processed, when I put on my sweatshirt and got set to take my leave, and came up to the desk and put out my hand in a trembly grateful way he couldn’t possibly have refused, and he stood and brought out the hand and shook my hand, I finally understood.’

‘His hands were disfigured or something.’

‘His hands were no bigger than a four-year-old girl’s. It was surreal. This massive authoritative figure, with a huge red meaty face and thick walrus mustache and dewlaps and a neck that spilled over the rim of his shirt-collar, and his hands were tiny and pink and hairless and butt-soft, delicate as shells. The hands were the capper. I barely made it out of the office before it started.’

‘The cathartic post-traumatic-like-reexperience hysteria. You reeled out of there.’

‘I barely made it to the men’s room down the hall. I was laughing so hysterically I was afraid all the periodontists and C.P.A.s on either side of the men’s room would hear. I sat in a stall with my hands over my mouth, stamping my feet and beating my head against first one side of the stall and then the other in hysterical mirth. If you could have seen those hands.’

‘But you got through it all, and you can thumbnail-sketch the overall feeling for me.’

‘What I feel is myself gathering my resources for the right foot, finally. That magic feeling’s back. I’m not lining up the vectors for the wastebasket or anything. I’m not even thinking. I’m trusting the feeling. It’s like that celluloid moment when Luke removes his high-tech targeting helmet.’

‘What helmet?’

‘You know, of course, that human nails are the vestiges of talons and horns. That they’re atavistic, like coccyges and hair. That they develop in-utero long before the cerebral cortex.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘That at some point in the first trimester we lose our gills but are now still now little more than a bladdery sac of spinal fluid and a rudimentary tail and hair-follicles and little microchips of vestigial talon and horn.’

Ts this to make me feel bad? Did this fuck you up, me probing for details after all this time? Did it reactivate the grief?’

‘Just one more confirmation. The trailer’s interior. There was some object or contiguous trio of objects with the following color scheme: brown, lavender, and either mint-green or jonquil-yellow.’

‘I can call back when you’re more yourself. The leg’s starting to prune a bit from the whirlpool anyway.’

Til be right here. I’ve got a whole foot to yield to the magic with. I’m not going to alter the smallest particular. I’m just about ready to bear down on the clippers. It’s going to feel right, I know.’

‘A throw. Like an afghan throw, on the chintz sofa. The yellow was more fluorescent than jonquil.’

‘And the word is asphyxiated. Kick some egg-shaped balls for all of us, O. The next sound you hear will be unpleasant,’ Hal said, holding the phone down right next to the foot, his expression terrifically intense.