Infinite jest

14 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

Ms. Ruth van Cleve’s first day off new residents’ three-day House Restriction. Allowed now to hit meetings outside Enfield if accompanied by some more senior resident the Staff judges safe. Ruth van Cleve in spike heels walking alongside a psychotically depressed Kate Gompert on Prospect just south of Inman Square, Cambridge, a little after 2200h., yammering nonstop.

Ruth van Cleve is shaping up to be excruciating for Kate Gompert to be around. Ruth van Cleve hails from Braintree on the South Shore, is many kilos underweight, wears brass-colored lipstick, and has dry hair teased out in the big-hair fashion of decades past. Her face has the late-stage Ice^[284]-addict’s concave long-jawed insectile look. Her hair is a dry tangled cloud, with tiny little eyes and bones and projecting beak underneath. Joelle v.D.’d said it almost looked like Ruth van Cleve’s hair grew her head instead of the other way around. Kate Gompert’s hair is butcher-block cut and has recognizable color, at least.

Kate Gompert hasn’t slept in four nights, and her slumped progress up the Prospect sidewalk resembles the lazy tack of a boat in no rush. Ruth van Cleve talks nonstop into her right ear. It’s around 22OOh. on Saturday and the sodium streetlights keep going off and then on again with a stuttered hum, some connection in them loose somewhere. Foot-traffic is dense, and the undead and drunks who live in the streets around Inman Square also crowd the sidewalk’s edges, and if Kate G. looks at the images of passersby in the darkened shop windows they become (pedestrians and undead stem-artists) just heads that seem to float across each window unconnected to anything. As in disconnected floating heads. In doorways by shops are incomplete persons in wheelchairs with creative receptacles where limbs should be and hand-lettered invitations to help them.

An oral narrative begins to emerge. Ms. Ruth v.C. has been remanded to Ennet House by D.S.S. and Family Court after her newborn baby was discovered in a Braintree MA alley swaddled in WalMart advertising circulars whose Harvest Moon Value Specials had expired 11/01, a Sunday. Ruth van Cleve had rather unshrewdly left the hospital I.D. bracelet with its D.O.B. and her own name and Health Card # on the discarded infant’s wrist. The infant is apparently now in a South Shore hospital incubator, attached to machines and tapering off the Clonidine^[285] it received for in-utero addictions to substances Kate Gompert can only speculate about.^[286] The father of Ruth van Cleve’s child, she reports, is under the protection and care of the Norfolk County Correctional Authority, awaiting sentencing for what Ruth van Cleve describes several times as operating a pharmaceutical company without a license.

What’s remarkable to Kate Gompert is that she seems to be able to move forward without any sort of conscious moving-forward-type volitions. She puts her left foot in front of her right foot and then her right foot in front of her left foot, and she’s moving forward, her whole self, when all she’s capable of concentrating on is one foot and then the other foot. Heads glide by in the darkened windows. Some of the Latino males in the vicinity do a kind of sexual checking-out as they pass — even though underweight and dry-haired and kind of haggish, Ruth van Cleve’s manner and attire and big hair broadcast that she’s all about sexuality and sex.

A negative thing about opting for recovery in NA instead of AA is availability and location of meetings. In other words fewer NA meetings. On a Saturday night you could stand on the roof of Ennet House in Enfield and be hard-pressed to spit in any direction without hitting some AA venue nearby. Whereas the closest Saturday-P.M. NA meeting is N. Cambridge’s Clean and Serene Group, infamous for cross-talk and chair-throwing, and the thing’s Beginner’s Mtng. goes from 2000 to 2l00h. and the regular from 2100 to 2200h., purposely late, to offset the Saturday-night jones so many drug addicts suffer weekly, Saturday still being the week’s special mythic Party-Night even for persons who long ago ceased to be able to do anything but Party 24/7/365. But from Inman Square back to Ennet House is a ghastly hike — hoof up Prospect to Central Sq. and take the Red Line all the way to Park Street station and then the maddening Green Line B Train forever west on Comm. Ave. — and it’s now after 22l5h., meaning Kate Gompert has 75 minutes to get herself and this hideous, despair-producing, slutty and yammering newcomer beside her back for Curfew. Ruth van Cleve’s chatter is as listener-interest-independent as anything Kate Gom-pert’s heard since Randy Lenz got invited to ingest Substances and abuse animals elsewhere, and left, which was who knows how many days or weeks ago.

The two move in and out of cones of epileptic light from fluttering street-lamps. Kate Gompert is trying not to shudder as Ruth van Cleve asks her if she knows someplace you can pick up a good toothbrush cheap. Kate Gom-pert’s entire spiritual energy and attention are focused on first her left foot and then her right foot. One of the heads she does not see, floating in the windows with her own unrecognizable head and Ruth van Cleve’s cloud of hair, is the gaunt and spectral hollow-eyed head of Poor Tony Krause, who’s several steps behind them and matching their slightly serpentine course step for step, eyeing string purses he imagines contain more than just train-fare and NA Newcomers’ keychains.

The vaporizer chugs and seethes and makes the room’s windows weep as Jim Troeltsch inserts a pro-wrestling cartridge in the little TP’s viewer and dons his tackiest sportcoat and wet-combs his hair down smooth so it looks toupeeish and settles back on his bunk, surrounded by Seldane-bottles and two-ply facial tissue, preparing to call the action. His roommates have long since seen what was coming, and screwed.

Standing on tiptoe in Subdorm B’s curved hallway, using the handle of an inverted tennis racquet whose vinyl cover he can absently zip and unzip as he moves the handle around, Michael Pemulis is gently raising one of the panels in the drop-ceiling and shifting it on its aluminum strut, the panel, changing its lie on the strut from square-shaped to diamond-shaped, being careful not to let it fall.

Lyle hovers cross-legged just a couple mm. above the top of the towel dispenser in the unlit weight room, eyes rolled up white, lips barely moving and making no sound.

Coach Schtitt and Mario tear-ass downhill on W. Commonwealth on Schtitt’s old BMW, bound for Evangeline’s Low-Temperature Confections in Newton Center, right at the bottom of what usually gets called Heartbreak Hill, Schtitt intense-faced and leaning forward like a skier, his white scarf whipping around and whipping Mario’s face, in the sidecar, as Mario too leans way forward into their downhill flight, preparing to whoop when they bottom out.

Ms. Avril Incandenza, seeming somehow to have three or four cigarettes all going at once, secures from Information the phone and e-mail #s of a journalistic business address on East Tucson AZ’s Blasted Expanse Blvd., then begins to dial, using the stern of a blue felt pen to stab at the console’s keys.

‘AIYEE!’ cries the man, rushing at the nun, wielding a power tool.

The tough-looking nun yells ‘AIYEE!’ right back as she kicks at him expertly, her habit’s skirts whipping complexly around her. The combatants circle each other warily in the abandoned warehouse, both growling. The nun’s wimple is askew and soiled; the back of her hand, held out in a bladish martial-art fist, displays part of a faded tattoo, some wicked-clawed bird of prey. The cartridge opens like this, in violent medias res, then freezes in the middle of the nun’s leaping kick, and its title, Blood Sister: One Tough Nun, gets matte-dissolved in and bleeds lurid blood-colored light down into the performance credits rolling across the screen’s bottom. Bridget Boone and Frances L. Unwin have come in uninvited and joined Hal in V.R. 6 and are curled up against the arms of the room’s other recumbency, their feet touching at the soles, Boone eating unauthorized frozen yogurt from a cylindrical carton. Hal’s turned the rheostat down low, and the film’s title and credits make their faces glow redly. Bridget Boone extends the confection-carton over in Hal’s direction in an inviting way, and by way of declining Hal points to the lump of Kodiak in his cheek and makes a display of leaning out to spit. He appears to be studying the scrolling credits very closely.

‘So what is this?’ Fran Unwin says.

Hal looks over at her very slowly, then even more slowly raises his right arm and points around the tennis ball he’s squeezing at the monitor, where the cartridge’s 50-point title is still trickling redly over the credits and frozen scene.

Bridget ßoone gives him a look. ‘What’s up your particular butt?’

‘I’m isolating. I came in here to be by myself.’

She has this way that gets to Hal of digging the chocolate yogurt out with the spoon and then inverting the spoon, turning the spoon over, so that it always enters her mouth upside-down and her tongue gets to contact the confection immediately, without the mediation of cold spoon, and for some reason this has always gotten under Hal’s skin.

‘So then you should’ve locked the door.’

‘Except there aren’t locks on the V.R. doors,^[287] as you quite well know.’

Round-faced Frannie Unwin says ‘Sshhh.’

Then too sometimes Boone plays with the laden spoon, makes it fly around in front of her face like a child’s plane before inverting it and sticking it in. ‘Maybe this is partly because this is a public room, for everybody, that your thinking person probably wouldn’t choose to isolate in.’

Hal leans over to spit and lets the spit hang for a while before he lets it go, so it hangs there slowly distending.

Boone withdraws the clean spoon just as slowly. ‘No matter how sullen and pouty that person is over that person’s play or near-loss in full view of a whole crowd that day, I hear.’

‘Bridget, I forgot to tell you I saw that Rite Aid’s having an enormous clearance on emetics. If I were you I’d scoot right over.’

‘You are vile.’

Bernadette Longley sticks her long boxy head in the door and sees Bridget Boone and says ‘I thought I heard you in here’ and comes in uninvited with Jennie Bash in tow.

Hal whimpers.

Jennie Bash looks at the large screen. The cartridge’s theme-music is female-choral and very heavy and ironic on the descants. Bernadette Long-ley looks at Hal. ‘You know there’s a totally huge lady cruising the halls looking for you, with a notebook and a very determined expression.’

Boone banks the spoon back and forth absently. ‘He’s isolating. He won’t respond and is spitting extra repulsively to get across the point.’

Jennie Bash says ‘Haven’t you got a huge paper due for Thierry tomorrow? There was moaning coming from Struck and Shaw’s room.’

Hal packs chew down with his tongue. ‘Done.’

‘Figures,’ Bridget Boone says.

‘Done, redone, formatted, printed, proofed, collated, stapled.’

‘Proofed to within its life,’ Boone says, barrel-rolling the spoon. Hal can tell she’s done a couple one-hitters. He’s looking straight at the wall’s screen, squeezing the ball so hard his forearm keeps swelling to twice its size.

‘Plus I hear your best friend in the whole world did something really funny today,’ Longley says.

‘She means Pemulis,’ Fran Unwin tells Hal.

Bridget Boone makes dive-bomber sounds and swoops the spoon around.

‘Sounds like too good a story not to save and let my craving for it build and build until finally it’s like I have to hear it or die right on the spot.’

‘What is up his butt?’ Jennie Bash asks Fran Unwin. Fran Unwin’s a sort of hanuman-faced girl with a torso and trunk about twice as long as her legs, and a scuttly, vaguely simian style of play. Bernadette Longley wears knee-length candy-cane trousers and a sweatshirt with the fleecy inside out. All the girls are now in socks. Hal notes that girls always seem to slip out of their shoes when they assume any kind of spectatorial posture. Eight empty white sneakers now sit mute and weird at various points, slightly sunk in carpet pile. No two of the shoes face quite the same exact direction. Male players, on the other hand, tend to leave the footwear on when they come in and sit down somewhere. Girls literally embody the idea of making yourself at home. Males, when they come in somewhere and sit down, project an air of transience. Remain suited up and mobile. It’s the same whenever Hal comes in and sits down someplace where people are already gathered. He’s aware that they sense he’s somehow there only in a very technical sense, that he’s got an air of moment’s-notice readiness to leave about him. Boone extends her carton of TCBY^[288] toward Longley in an inviting way, even tilting it invitingly back and forth. Longley puffs her cheeks and blows air out with a fatigued sound. At least three different smells of cologne and skin-cream struggle for primacy in here. Bridget Boone’s free LA Gear shoes are both on their sides from the force of having been almost kicked off her feet. Hal’s spit makes a sound against the bottom of the wastebasket. Jennie Bash has bigger arms than Hal. The Viewing Room is redly dim. Bash asks Unwin what they’re watching.

Blood Sister: One Tough Nun, one of Himself’s few commercial successes, wouldn’t have made near the money it made if it hadn’t come out just as InterLace was starting to purchase first-run features for its rental menus and hyping the cartridges with one-time Spontaneous Disseminations. It was the sort of sleazy-looking shocksploitation film that would have had a two-week run in multiplex theaters 8 and above and then gone right to the featureless brown boxes of magnetic-video limbo. Hal’s critical take on the film is that Himself, at certain dark points when abstract theory-issues seemed to provide an escape from the far more wrenching creative work of making humanly true or entertaining cartridges, had made films in certain commercial-type genre modes that so grotesquely exaggerated the formulaic schticks of the genres that they became ironic metacinematic parodies on the genres: ‘sub/inversions of the genres,’ cognoscenti taken in were wont to call them. The metacinematic-parody idea itself was aloof and over-clever, to Hal’s way of thinking, and he’s not comfortable with the way Himself always seemed to get seduced by the very commercial formulae he was trying to invert, especially the seductive formulae of violent payback, i.e. the cathartic bloodbath, i.e. the hero trying with every will-fiber to eschew the generic world of the stick and fist and but driven by unjust circumstance back to the violence again, to the cathartic final bloodbath the audience is brought to applaud instead of mourn. Himself’s best in this vein was The Night Wears a Sombrero, a Langesque metaWestern but also a really good Western, with chintzy homemade interior sets but breathtaking exteriors shot outside Tucson AZ, an ambivalent-but-finaliy-avenging-son story played out against dust-colored skies and big angles of flesh-colored mountain, plus with minimal splatter, shot men clutching their chests and falling deliciously sideways, all hats staying on at all times. Blood Sister: One Tough Nun was a supposedly ironic lampoon of the avenging-cleric splatter-films of the late B.S. ‘90s. Nor did Himself make any friends on either side of the Concavity, trying to shoot the thing in Canada.

Hal tries to imagine the tall slumped tremulous stork-shape of Himself inclined at an osteoporotic angle over digital editing equipment for hours on end, deleting and inserting code, arranging Blood Sister: One Tough Nun into subversive/inversion, and can’t summon one shadowy idea of what Himself might have been feeling as he patiently labored. Maybe that was the point of the thing’s metasilliness, to have nothing really felt going on.[289]

Jennie Bash has left V.R. 6’s door agape, and Idris Arslanian and Todd (‘Postal Weight’) Possalthwaite and Kent Blott all drift in and sit Indian-style in a loose hemisphere on the thick carpet between the girls’ recumbency and Hal’s recumbency, and are more or less considerately quiet. They all keep their sneakers on. Postal Weight’s nose is a massive proboscoid bandaged thing. Kent Blott wears a sportfisherman’s cap with an extremely long bill. That queer faint smell of hot dogs that seems to follow Idris Arslanian around begins to insinuate itself into the room’s colognes. He isn’t wearing the rayon handkerchief as a blindfold but does have it tied around his neck; no one asks him about it. All the littler kids are consummate spectators and are sucked immediately into Blood Sister’s unfolding narrative, and the older females seem to take some kind of psychic cue from the little boys and subside, too, and watch, until after a while Hal’s the only person in the room who isn’t 100 % absorbed.

The entertainment’s uptake is that a tough biker-chick-type girl from the mean streets of Toronto is found O.D.’d, beaten up, molested, and robbed of her leather jacket outside the portcullis of a downtown convent and is rescued, nursed, befriended, spiritually guided, and converted — ‘saved’ is the weak entendre made much of in the first act’s dialogue — by a tough-looking older nun who it turns out, she reveals (the tough older nun), had herself been hauled up out of a life of Harleys, narcotics-dealing and — addiction by an even tougher even older nun, a nun who had herself been saved by a tough ex-biker nun, and so on. The latest saved biker-chick becomes a tough and street-smart nun in the same urban order, and is known on the mean streets as Blood Sister, and wimple or not still rides her Hawg from parish to parish and still knows akido and is not to be fucked with, is the word on the streets.

The motivational crux here being that almost this whole order of nuns is staffed by nuns who’d been saved from Toronto’s mean, dead-end streets by other older tougher saved nuns. So, endless novenas later, Blood Sister eventually feels this transitive spiritual urge to go out and find a troubled adolescent female of her own, to ‘save’ and bring into the order, thereby discharging her soul’s debt to the old tough nun who’d saved her. Through processes obscure (a Toronto troubled-but-savable-adolescent-girl-directory of some sort? Bridget Boone cuts wise), Blood Sister eventually takes on a burn-scarred, deeply troubled adolescent punker-type Toronto girl who is sullen and, yes, reasonably tough, but is also vulnerable and emotionally tormented (the girl’s pink shiny burn-scarred face tends to writhe in misery whenever she thinks Blood Sister’s not looking) by the terrible depredations she’s endured as a result of her rapacious and unshakable addiction to crank cocaine, the kind you have to convert and cook up yourself, and with ether, which is highly combustible, and which people used before somebody found out baking soda and temperature-flux would do the same thing, which dates the film’s B.S. time-period even more clearly than the tough tortured punk girl’s violet stelliform coiffure.[290]

But so Blood Sister eventually gets the girl clean, by nurturing her through Withdrawal in a locked sacristy; and the girl becomes less sullen by degrees that almost have audible clicks to them — the girl stops trying to dicky the lock of the sacramental-wine cabinet, stops farting on purpose during matins and vespers, stops going up to the Trappists who hang around the convent and asking them for the time and other sly little things to try to make them slip up and speak aloud, etc. A couple times the girl’s face writhes in emotional torment and vulnerability even when Blood Sister’s looking. The girl gets a severe and somewhat lesbianic haircut, and her roots establish themselves as softly brown. Blood Sister, revealing biceps like nobody’s business, beats the girl at arm-wrestling; they both laugh; they compare tattoos: this marks the start of a brutally drawn-out Getting-to-Know-and-Trust-You montage, a genre-convention, this montage involving Harley-rides at such speeds that the girl has to keep her hand on Blood Sister’s head to keep B.S.’s wimple from flying off, and long conversational walks filmed at wide-angle, and protracted and basically unwinnable games of charades with the Trappists, plus some quick scenes of Blood Sister finding the girl’s Marlboros and dildo-facsimile lighter in the wastebasket, of the girl doing chores unsullenly under B.S.’s grudgingly approving eye, of candle-lit scripture-study sessions with the girl’s finger under each word she reads, of the girl carefully snipping the last bits of split violet ends from her soft brown hair, of the more senior tough nuns punching Blood Sister’s shoulder approvingly as the girl’s eyes start to get that impending-conversion gleam in them, then, finally, of Blood Sister and the girl habit-shopping, the girl’s burned lantern jaw and hairless Promethean brow frozen in a sunlit montage-climax shot under a novitiate wimple’s gull-wings — all accompanied by — no kidding — ‘Getting to Know You,’ which Hal imagines the Stork justified to himself as subversively saccharine. This all takes about half an hour. Bridget Boone, of the Indianapolis archdiocese, begins to declaim briefly on Blood Sister: One Tough Nun’s ironic anti-Catholic subthesis — that the deformed addicted girl’s ‘salvation’ here seemed simply the exchange of one will-obliterating ‘habit’ for another, substituting one sort of outlandish head-decoration for another — and gets pinched by Jennie Bash and shushed by just about everyone in the room but Hal, who could pass for asleep except for the brief lists to port over the wastebasket, to spit, and in fact is experiencing some of the radical loss of concentration that attends THC-Withdrawal and is thinking about another, even more familiar J. O. Incandenza cartridge even while he watches this one with the other E.T.A.s. This other attention-object is the late Himself’s so-called ‘inversion’ of the corporate-politics genre, Low-Temperature Civics, an executive-suite soap opera filled with power plays, position-jockeyings, timid adulteries, martinis, and malignantly pretty female executives in elegant tight-fitting dress-for-successwear who eat their paunched and muddled male counterparts for political lunch. Hal knows that L-TC wasn’t an inversion or lampoon at all, but derived right from the dark B.S. ‘8os period when Himself had changed careers from government service to private entreprenurism, when a sudden infusion of patent-receipts left him feeling post-carrot anhedonic and existentially unmoored, and Himself took an entire year off to drink Wild Turkey and watch broadcast-television tycoon-operas like Lorimar’s Dynasty et al. in a remote spa off Canada’s Northwest coast, where he supposedly met and bonded with Lyle, now of the E.T.A. weight room.

What’s intriguing but unknown to everyone in V.R. 6 is the way Boone’s take on Himself’s take on the substitution-of-one-crutch-for-another interpretation of substituting Catholic devotion for chemical dependence is very close to the way many not-yet-desperate-enough newcomers to Boston AA see Boston AA as just an exchange of slavish dependence on the bottle/pipe for slavish dependence on meetings and banal shibboleths and robotic piety, an ‘Attitude of Platitude,’ and use this idea that it’s still slavish dependence as an excuse to stop trying Boston AA, and to go back to the original slavish Substance-dependence, until that dependence has finally beaten them into such a double-bound desperation that they finally come back in with their faces hanging off their skulls and beg to be told just what platitudes to shout, and how high to adjust their vacant grins.

Some Substance-dependent persons, though, have already been so broken by the time they first Come In that they don’t care about stuff like substitution or banality, they’ll give their left nut to trade their original dependence in for robotic platitudes and pep-rally cheer. They’re the ones with the gun to their head, the ones who stick and Hang. It remains to be determined whether Joelle van Dyne, whose first appearance in a James O. Incan-denza project occurred in this very Low-Temperature Civics, is one of these people who’ve come into AA/NA shattered enough to stick, but she’s starting to I.D. more and more with the Commitment speakers she hears who did come in shattered enough to know it’s get straight or die. A click and a half straight downhill from E.T.A., Joelle is hitting the Reality Is For People That Can’t Handle Drugs Group, a meeting of the NA-splinter Cocaine Anonymous,^[291] mostly because the meeting’s in the St. Elizabeth’s Hospital Grand Rounds Auditorium, just a couple floors down from where Don Gately, whom she just got done visiting and mopping the massive unconscious forehead of, is lying in the Trauma Wing in a truly bad way. CA meetings have a long preamble and endless little Xeroxed formalities they read aloud at the start, is one reason Joelle avoids CA, but the opening stuff is done by the time she gets down and comes in and gets some burnt urn-bottom coffee and finds an available seat. The only empty seats are in the meeting’s back row — ‘Denial Aisle,’ the back rows are usually called — and Joelle is surrounded by catexic newcomers crossing and uncrossing their legs every few seconds and sniffing compulsively and looking like they’re wearing everything they own. Plus there’s the row of standing men — there’s a certain hard-faced type of male in Boston fellowships who refuses ever to sit for meetings — standing behind the back row, legs set wide and arms crossed and talking to each other out the sides of their mouths, and she can tell the standing men are looking at her bare knees over her shoulder, making little comments about the knees and the veil. She thinks with fearful sentiment^[292] of Don Gately, a tube down his throat, torn by fever and guilt and shoulder-pain, offered Demerol by well-meaning but clueless M.D.s, in and out of delirium, torn, convinced that certain men with hats wished him ill, looking at his room’s semi-private ceiling like it would eat him if he dropped his guard. The big blackboard up on the stage says the Reality Is For People That Can’t Handle Drugs Group welcomes tonight’s Commitment speakers, the Freeway Access Group from Mattapan, which is deep in the colored part of Boston where Cocaine Anonymous tends to be most heavily concentrated. The speaker just starting in at the podium when Joelle sits down is a tall yellowish colored man with a weightlifter’s build and frightening eyes, sloe and a kind of tannin-brown. He’s been in CA seven months, he says. He eschews the normal CA drugologue’s macho war-stories and gets right to his Bottom, his jumping-off place. Joelle can tell he’s trying to tell the truth and not just posturing and performing the way so many CAs seem like they do. His story’s full of colored idioms and those annoying little colored hand-motions and gestures, but to Joelle it doesn’t seem like she cares that much anymore. She can Identify. The truth has a kind of irresistible unconscious attraction at meetings, no matter what the color or fellowship. Even Denial Aisle and the standing men are absorbed by the colored man’s story. The colored man says his thing is he’d had a wife and a little baby daughter at home in Mattapan’s Perry Hill Projects, and another baby on the way. He’d managed to hang on to his menial riveter’s-assistant job at Universal Bleacher right up the street from here in Enfield because his addiction to crank cocaine wasn’t everyday; he smoked on your binge-type basis, mostly weekends. Hellacious, psychopathic, bank-account-emptying binges, though. Like getting strapped to a Raytheon missile and you don’t stop till that missile stops, Jim. He says his wife had got temp work cleaning houses, but when she worked they had to put their little girl in a day-care that just about ate her day’s pay. So his paycheck was like their total float, and his weekend binges with the glass pipe caused them no end of Financial Insecurity, which he mispronounces. Which brings him to his last binge, the Bottom, which, predictably, occurred on a payday. This check just had to go for groceries and rent. They were two months back, and there was not jack-shit in the house in the way of to eat. At a smoke-break at Universal Bleacher he’d made sure and bought just one single vial, for just a tensky, for a Sunday-night treat after a weekend of abstinence and groceries and quality time with his pregnant wife and little daughter. The wife and little daughter were to meet him after work right off the bus stop at Brighton Best Savings, right under the big clock, to ‘help’ him deposit the paycheck right then and there. He’d let his wife stipulate the meeting at the bank because he knew in a self-disgusted way even then that there was this hazard of paycheck-type incidents from binges he’d pulled in the past, and their Financial Insecurity was now whatever word’s past the word deep shit, and he knew goddamn well he could not afford to fuck up this time.

He says that’s how he used to think of it to himself: fucking up.

He didn’t even make it to the bus after clocking out, he said. Two other Holmeses^[293] in Riveting had three vials each, which vials they had, like, brandished at him, and he’d kicked in his one vial because two-and-a-third vials v. one thin-ass Sunday-night vial was only a fucking fool way out of touch with the whole seize-the-opportunity concept could pass that shit up. In short it was the familiar insanity of money in the pocket and no defense against the urge, and the thought of his woman holding his little girl in her little knit cap and mittens standing under the big clock in cold March dusk didn’t so much get pushed aside as somehow shrink to a tiny locket-size picture in the center of a part of him he and the Holmeses had set out busily to kill, with the pipe.

He says he never made the bus. They passed a bottle of rye around the old Ford Mystique one of the Holmeses profiled, and fired up, right in the car, and after he once fired up with $ in his pocket the fat woman with the little helmet with horns on it done already like fucking sang, Jim.[294]

The man’s hands grip the sides of the podium and he rests his weight on his elbow-locked arms in a way that conveys both abjection and pluck. He invites the CAs to let’s just draw the curtain of charity over the rest of the night’s scene, which after the check-cashing stop got hazy with missile-exhaust anyhow; but so he finally did get home to Mattapan the next morning, Saturday morning, sick and green-yellow and on that mean post-crank slide, dying for more and willing to kill for more and yet so mortified and ashamed of having done fucked up (again) that just going up the elevator to their apartment was maybe the bravest thing he’d ever done, up to that point, he felt.

It was like 0600 in the A.M. and they weren’t there. There was nobody home, and in the sort of way where the place’s emptiness pulsed and breathed. An envelope was slid under the door from the B.H.A.,^[295] not the salmon color of an Eviction Notice but a green Last Warning re rent. And he went into the kitchen and opened up the fridge, hating himself for hoping there was a beer. In the fridge was a jar of grape jelly near-empty and a half a can of biscuit mix, and that, plus a sour empty-fridge odor, was all, Jim. A little plastic jar of labelless Food-Bank peanut butter so empty its insides had knife-scrapes on the sides and a little clotted box of salt was all there was in the whole rest of the kitchen.

But what sent his face clear down off his skull and broke him in two, though, was he said when he saw the Pam-shiny empty biscuit pan on top of the stove and the plastic rind of the peanut butter’s safety-seal wrap on top of the wastebasket’s tall pile. The little locket-picture in the back of his head swelled and became a sharp-focused scene of his wife and little girl and little unborn child eating what he now could see they must have eaten, last night and this morning, while he was out ingesting their groceries and rent. This was his cliff-edge, his personal intersection of choice, standing there loose-faced in the kitchen, running his finger around a shiny pan with not one little crumb of biscuit left in it. He sat down on the kitchen tile with his scary eyes shut tight but still seeing his little girl’s face. They’d ate some charity peanut butter on biscuits washed down with tapwater and a grimace.

Their apartment was six floors up in Perry Hill’s Bldg. 5. The window didn’t open but could be broke through with a running start.

He didn’t kill himself, though, he says. He just got up and walked out. He didn’t leave his wife a note. Not nothing. He went and walked the whole four clicks to Shattuck Shelter in Jamaica Plain. He felt like for sure they’d of been better off without him, he said. But he said he didn’t know why but he didn’t kill himself. But he didn’t. He figures there was some God-involvement, sitting there on the floor. He just decided to go to Shattuck and Surrender and get straight and never ever have his little girl’s grimacing face in his hung-over head ever again, James.

And Shattuck Shelter — by coincidence — that usually had a waiting list every March until it got warm, they’d just kicked out some sorry-ass specimen for defecating in the shower, and they took him, the speaker. He asked for a CA Meeting right away. And a Shattuck Staff guy called somebody Afro-American with a lot of clean recovered time, and the speaker got taken to his first CA Meeting. That was 224 days ago tonight. That night, when the colored CA Crocodile dropped him off back at the Shattuck — after he’d wept in front of other colored men at his first meeting and told men he didn’t know from shit about the big clock and glass pipe and paycheck and the biscuits and his little girl’s face — and after he come back to the Shattuck and got buzzed through and the buzzer sounded for supper, it turned out — by coincidence — that the Saturday-night Shattuck supper was coffee and peanut butter sandwiches. It was the end of the week and the Shelter’s donated food had run out, they only had PB on cheap-ass white bread and Sunny Square instant coffee, the cheap shit that doesn’t even quite dissolve all the way.

He’s got your autodidactic orator’s way with emotional dramatic pauses that don’t seem affected. Joelle makes another line down the Styrofoam coffee cup with her fingernail and chooses consciously to believe it isn’t affected, the story’s emotive drama. Her eyes feel sandy from forgetting to blink. This always happens when you don’t expect it, when it’s a meeting you have to drag yourself to and are all but sure will suck. The speaker’s face has lost its color, shape, everything distinctive. Something has taken the tight ratchet in Joelle’s belly and turned it three turns to the good. It’s the first time she’s felt sure she wants to keep straight no matter what it means facing. No matter if Don Gately takes Demerol or goes to jail or rejects her if she can’t show him the face. It’s the first time in a long time — tonight, 11/14—Joelle’s even considered possibly showing somebody the face.

After the pause the speaker says all the other sorry motherfuckers in the Shattuck Shelter in there started in to bitching about what was this shit, peanut butter sandwiches for fucking supper. The speaker says how whatever he silently thanked for just that particular sandwich he held and chewed, washing it down with gritty Sunny Square coffee, that thing became his Higher Power. He’s now seven-plus months clean. Universal Bleacher let him go, but he’s got steady work at Logan, pushing a third-shift mop, and a Holmes on his crew’s also in the Program — by coincidence. His pregnant wife, it turned out, had gone to a Unwed Mothers Shelter with Shantel, that night. She was still in there. D.S.S. still wouldn’t let him appeal his wife’s Restraining Order and see Shantel, but he got to talk to his little girl on the phone just last month. And he’s now straight, from Giving Up and joining the Freeway Access Group and getting Active and taking the voluntary suggestions of the Fellowship of Cocaine Anonymous. His wife was due to have her baby around Xmas. He said he didn’t know what was going to happen to him or his family. But he says he has received certain promises from his new family — the Freeway Access Group of Cocaine Anonymous — and so he had certain hope-type emotions about the future, inside. He didn’t so much conclude or make obligatory reference to Gratitude or any of that usual shit as grip the lectern and shrug and say he’d started feeling just last month that the choice he made on the kitchen floor was the right choice, personally speaking.

Entertainment-wise, things take a rapid turn for the splattery once the tough girl Blood Sister seemed to have saved is found bluely dead in her novitiate’s cot, her habit’s interior pockets stuffed with all kinds of substances and paraphernalia and her arm a veritable forest of syringes. Tight shot of B.S., face working purply, staring down at the ex-ex-punker. Suspecting foul play instead of spiritual recidivism, Blood Sister, disregarding first the Other-Cheek pieties and then the impassioned pleas and then the direct orders of the Vice-Mother Superior — who happens now to be the tough nun who’d saved Blood Sister, way back — begins reverting to her former Toronto-mean-street pre-salvation tough-biker-chick ways: de-mufflering her Harley Hawg, hauling an age-faded stud-covered leather bike-jacket out of storage and squeezing it over her pectoral-swollen habit, unbandaging her most lurid tattoos, shaking down former altar boys for information, flipping off motorists who get in her bike’s way, meeting old street-contacts in dim saloons and tossing back jiggers with even the most cirrhotic of them, beating, bludgeoning, akido-ing, disarming thugs of power tools, avenging the desalvation and demapping of her young charge, determined to prove that the girl’s death was no accident or backslide, that Blood Sister had not failed with the soul she’d chosen to save to discharge her own soul’s debt to the tough old Vice-Mother Superior who’d saved her, Blood Sister, so far back. Several thuggish stuntmen and countless liters of potassium thiocyanate^[296] later, the truth does out: the novitiate girl had been murdered by the Mother Superior, the order’s top and toughest nun. This M.S. is the nun who’d saved the Vice-M.S. who’d saved Blood Sister, meaning, ironically, that the evidence Blood Sister needs to prove that her salvation-debt really was discharged is also evidence inimical to the legal interests of the tough nun to whom Blood Sister’s own saviour is obligated, so Blood Sister gets increasingly tortured and ill-tempered as evidence of the Mother Superior’s guilt accretes. In one scene she says fuck. In another she swings a censer like a mace and brains an old verger who’s one of the Mother Superior’s stooges, knocking his toothless head clean off. Then, in Act III, a veritable orgy of retribution follows the full emergence of the sordid truth: it seems that the tough old Vice-Mother Superior, viz. the nun who’d saved Blood Sister, had in fact not been saved, truly, after all — had in fact, during 20+ years of exemplary novena-saying and wafer-baking, been suffering a kind of hidden degenerative recidivist soul-rot, and had resumed, the Více-M.S., at about the time Blood Sister had donned the habit of full nunhood, had not only resumed Substance-dependence but had started actually dealing in serious weights of whatever at the time was most profitable (which after 20+ years had changed from Marseillese heroin to Colombian freebaseable-grade Bing Crosby) to support her own hidden habit, covertly operating a high-volume retail operation out of the order’s Community Outreach Rescue Mission’s little-used confessionals. This nun’s superior, the top tough Mother Superior nun, stumbling onto the drug-operation after the now-demapped verger informed her that a suspicious number of limousines were discharging gold-chained and not very penitent-looking persons into the order’s Community Outreach Rescue Mission, and disastrously unable to summon the pious humility to accept the fact that she’d failed, it seemed, at truly and forever saving the ex-dealer whose salvation the Mother Superior required to discharge the debt to the now-retired octogenarian nun who’d saved her — this Mother Superior herself is the one who murdered Blood Sister’s ex-punk novitiate, to silence the girl. What emerges is that Blood Sister’s addicted punk-girl’s Substance-copping venue, when she was Out There pre-salvation, had been nothing other than the Vice-Mother Superior’s infamous Community Outreach Rescue Mission. In other words, the nun who’d saved Blood Sister but had herself been secretly unsaved had been the tough girl’s Bing-dealer, is why the tough non-Catholic girl’d been so mysteriously adept at the Confiteor. The order’s Mother Superior had figured that it was only a matter of time before the girl’s conversion and salvation reached the sort of spiritual pitch where her guarded silence broke and she told Blood Sister the seamy truth about the nun she (Blood Sister) thought had saved her (Blood Sister). So she (the Mother Superior) had eliminated the girl’s map — ostensibly, she (the Mother Superior) told her lieutenant, the Vice-Mother Superior, to save her (the Vice-Mother Superior) from exposure and excommunication and maybe worse, if the girl weren’t silenced.[297]

This narratively prolix and tangled stuff all gets explicated at near-Kabuki volume during an appalling free-for-all in the office of the Mother Superior who hadn’t saved the Vice-M.S. who’d saved Blood Sister, with the two senior nuns — who’d been tough and unsaved back in the Ontarian days when men were men and so were drug-addicted bike-chicks — teaming up and kicking Blood Sister’s ass, the fight-scene a blur of swirling habite-ments and serious martial arts against the spot-lit backdrop of the wall’s huge decorative mahogany crucifix, with Blood Sister giving a good account of herself but still getting her wimple beat in and finally, after several whirling kicks to the forehead, starting to bid adieu to her corporeal map and commend herself to the arms of God; until the unsaved recidivist Vice-Mother Superior nun who’d saved Blood Sister, wiping blood from her eyes after a head-butt and seeing the Mother Superior about to decapitate Blood Sister with the souvenir Champlain-era tomahawk the Huron nun who’d been saved by the original founder of the Toronto tough-girl-saving order had used to decapitate Jesuit missionaries before she (the tough Huron nun) had been saved, seeing the tomahawk raised with both arms before the normally pious-eyed old Mother Superior’s face — a face now rendered indescribable in aspect by the absence of humility and the passion for truth-silencing that add up to pure and radical evil — seeing now the upraised hatchet and demonized face of the M.S., the unsaved Vice-nun has a moment of epiphanic anti-recidivist spiritual clarity, and averts Blood Sister’s demapping by leaping across the office and cold-cocking the Mother Superior with a large decorative mahogany Christian object so symbolically obvious it needn’t even be named, the object’s symbolic unsubtlety making both Hal and Bridget Boone cringe. Now Blood Sister has the Champlain-era hatchet, and the unsaved nun who’d saved her has an unnamed object whose mahogany’s no match for a hatchet, and they stand facing each other over the prone Mother Superior’s puddle of skirts, chests heaving, and the Vice-M.S. has a writhing expression under her askew wimple like Go ahead, make the circle of recidivist retribution against the nun you thought had saved you but ultimately couldn’t even save herself complete, complete the lapsarian circuit or whatever. They stare at each other for countless frames, the office wall behind them cruciformly pale where the unnamed object’d hung. Then Blood Sister shrugs in resignation and drops the tomahawk, and turns and with an ironic little obeisance walks out the Mother Superior’s office door and through the little sacristy and over the altar and down the little convent nave (bike boots echoing on the tile, emphasizing the silence) and out the big doors whose tympanum overhead is carved with a sword and a ploughshare and a syringe and a soup-ladle and the motto CON-TRARIA SUNT COMPLEMENTA, the heaviness of which makes Hal cringe so severely it’s Boone who has to supply the translation Kent Blott asks for.^[298] On-screen, we’re still following the tough nun (or ex-nun). The fact that the hatchet she resignedly dropped fetched the prone Mother Superior a pretty healthy knock is presented as clearly accidental… because she (Blood Sister) is still walking away from the convent, moving emphatically and in a gradually deepening focus. Limping toughly eastward into the twittering Toronto dawn. The cartridge’s closing sequence shows her astride her Hawg on Toronto’s meanest street. About to lapse? Backslide back into her tough pre-saved ways? It’s unclear in a way that’s supposed to be rich: her expression is agnostic at best, but the huge sign of a discount Harley-muffler outlet juts just at the horizon she’s roaring toward. The closing credits are the odd lime-green of bugs on a windshield.

It’s hard to tell whether Boone and Bash’s applause is sarcastic. There’s that post-entertainment flurry of changed positions and stretched limbs and critical sallies. Out of nowhere Hal remembers: Smothergill. Possalthwaite says he and the Id-man brought Blott in to speak to Hal about something disturbing they encountered during their disciplinary shit-detail in the tunnels that P.M. Hal holds up a hand for the kids to hang on, flipping through cartridge cases to see whether Low-Temperature Civics is up here. All the cases are clearly labelled.

The apparition receded, the red of its coat shrinking against the swinging view of Prospect St. and pavement and dumpsters and looming storefronts, Ruth van Cleve on its lurid tail and receding also, screaming bits of urban argot that became less faint than swallowed. Kate Gompert held her hurt head and heard it roar. Ruth van Cleve’s pursuit was slowed by her arms, which were waving around as she screamed; and the apparition was swinging their purses to clear a path on the sidewalk before it. Kate Gompert could see pedestrians leaping out into the street way up ahead to avoid getting clocked. The whole visual scene seemed tinged in violet.

A voice under a storefront awning right nearby somewhere said: ‘Seen it!’

Kate Gompert leaned over again and held the part of her head that surrounded her eye. The eye was palpably swelling shut, and her whole vision was queerly violet. A sound in her head like a drawbridge being drawn up, implacable trundle and squeaks. Hot watery spit was flooding her mouth, and she kept swallowing against nausea.

‘Seen it? Bet your ever-living goddamn life I seen it!’ A kind of gargoyle seemed to detach itself from a storefront hardware display and moved in, its motions oddly jerky, as in a film missing frames. ‘Seen the whole thing!’ it said, then repeated it. ‘I’m a witness!’ it said.

Kate Gompert put her other arm out against the lightpost and hauled herself mostly upright, looking at it.

‘Witnessed the whole godfdamn thing,’ it said. In the eye that wasn’t swelling shut the thing resolved violetly into a bearded man in an army coat and a sleeveless army coat over that coat, spittle in his beard. One eye had a system of exploded arteries in it. He shook like an old machine. There was a smell involved. The old man got right up close, looming in, so that pedestrians had to curve out around both of them together. Kate Gompert could feel her pulse in her eye.

‘Witness! Eyewitness! The whole thing!’ But he was looking someplace else, like more around at people passing. ‘Seen it? I’m him!’ Not clear who he was shouting at. It wasn’t her, and the passersby were paying that studious, urban kind of no-attention as they broke and melted around them at the lightpost and then reformed. Kate Gompert had the idea that supporting herself against the lightpost would keep her from throwing up. Concussion is really another word for a bruised brain. She tried not to think about it, that the impact had maybe sent one part of her brain slamming against her skull, and now that part was purply swelling, mashed up against the inside of her skull. The lightpost she held herself up with was what had hit her. ‘Fellow? I’m your fellow. Witness? Saw it all!’ And the old fellow was holding a trembling palm up just under Kate Gompert’s face, as if he wanted it thrown up into. The palm was violet, with splotches of some sort of possible fungal decay, and with dark branching lines where the pink palm-lines of people who don’t live in dumpsters usually are, and Kate Gompert studied the palm abstractly, and the weather-bleached GIGABUCKS^[299] ticket on the pavement below it. The ticket seemed to recede into a violet mist and then move back up. Pedestrians barely glanced at them and then looked studiously elsewhere: a drunk-looking pale girl and a street bum showing her something in his hand. ‘Witnessed the whole thing being committed,’ the man remarked to a passerby with a cellular on his belt. Kate Gompert couldn’t summon the juice to tell him to go screw. That’s the way it was said down here in the real city, Go Screw, with a deft little thumb-gesture. She couldn’t even say Go Away, though the smell involved in the man made it worse, the nausea. It seemed terribly important not to vomit. She could feel her pulse in the eye the pole had hit. As if the strain of vomiting could aggravate the spongy purpling of the part of her brain the pole had bruised. The thought made her want to vomit in this horrid palm that wouldn’t stay still. She tried to reason. If the man had witnessed the whole thing then how could he think she’d have change to put in his hand. Ruth van Cleve had been listing some of her baby’s jailed father’s wittier aliases when Kate Gompert had felt a hand strike her back and close around the strap of her purse. Ruth van Cleve had cried out as the apparition of just about the most unattractive woman Kate Gompert had ever seen crashed forward between them, knocking them apart. Ruth van Cleve’s vinyl purse’s strap gave right away, but Kate Gompert’s thin but densely macramé’d strap held around her shoulder and she was pulled wrenchingly forward by the womanly apparition’s momentum as it tried to sprint up Prospect St., and the red hag-like figure was yanked wrenchingly back as the quality Filene’s all-cotton French-braidedly macramé’d purse-strap held, and Kate Gompert had got a whiff of something danker than the dankest municipal sewage and a glimpse of what looked like a five-day facial growth on the hag’s face as street-tough Ruth van Cleve got a grip on her/his/its red leather coat, proclaiming the thief a son of a mafun ho. Kate Gompert was staggering forward, trying to get her arm out of the strap’s loop. They all three moved forward together this way. The apparition spun itself violently around, trying to shake off Ruth van Cleve, and her/its spin with her purse took the strap-attached Kate Gompert (who didn’t weigh very much) out around in a wide circle (she’d had a flashback of reminiscence back to Crack-the-Whip at the Wellesley Hills Skating Club’s rink’s ‘Wee Blades’ Toddler Skating Hour, as a child), gaining speed; and then a rust-pocked curbside lightpost rotated toward her, also gaining speed, and the sound was somewhere between a bonk and a clang, and the sky and the sidewalk switched places, and a violet sun exploded outward, and the whole street turned violet and swung like a clanging bell; and then she was alone and purseless and watching the two recede, both seeming to be shrieking for help.