Infinite jest

11 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

Part of Mario’s footage for the documentary they’re letting him do on this fall’s E.T.A. consists of Mario just walking around different parts of the Academy with the Bolex H64 camera strapped to his head and joined by coax cable to the foot-treadle, which he holds against his sweatered chest with one hand and operates with the other. At 2100 at night it’s cold out. The Center Courts are brightly lit, but only one court is being used, Gretchen Holt and Jolene Criess still winding up some sort of marathon challenge from the P.M. session, the hands around their grips bluish and sweaty hair frozen into electrified spikes, pausing between points to blow noses on sleeves, wearing so many layers of sweats they look barrel-bodied out there, and Mario doesn’t bother with the change in film-speed he’d need to record them through the steamed window of Schtitt’s room, where he is. The room’s noise is deafening.

Coach Schtitt’s room is 106, next to his office on the first floor of Comm.-Ad., past Dr. Rusk’s office and down a two-corner hall from the lobby.

It’s a big empty room, built for its stereo. Hardwood floor in need of sanding, a wooden chair and a cane chair, an army cot. A little low table just big enough for Schtitt’s pipe rack. A folding card table folded up and leaning against the wall. Acoustic damping-tile on all the walls and nothing decorative hanging or mounted on the walls. Acoustic tiling on the ceiling also, with a bare overhead light with a long chain mounted in a dirty ceiling fan with a short chain. The fan never rotates but sometimes emits a sound of faulty wiring. There’s a faint odor of Magic Marker in the room. There is nothing upholstered, no pillow on the cot, nothing soft to absorb or deflect the sound of the equipment stacked on the floor, the black Germanness of a top-shelf sound system, a Mario-sized speaker in each corner of the room with the cloth cover removed so each woofer’s cone is exposed and mightily throbbing. Schtitt’s room is soundproofed. The window faces the Center Courts, the transom and observatory directly overhead and mangling the shadows of the courts’ lights. The window is right over the radiator, which when the stereo is off makes odd hollow ringing clanky clunks as if someone deep underground were having at the pipes with a hammer. The cold window over the radiator is steamed and trembles slightly with Wagnerian bass.

Gerhardt Schtitt is asleep in the cane chair in the middle of the empty room, his head thrown back and arms hanging, hands treed with arteries you can see his slow pulse in. His feet are stolidly on the floor, his knees spread way out wide, the way Schtitt always has to sit, on account of his varicoceles. His mouth is partly open and a dead pipe hangs at an alarming angle from its corner. Mario records him sleeping for a little while, looking very old and white and frail, yet also obscenely fit. What’s on and making the window shiver and condensed droplets gather and run in little bullet-headed lines down the glass is a duet that keeps climbing in pitch and emotion: a German second tenor and a German soprano are either very happy or very unhappy or both. Mario’s ears are extremely sensitive. Schtitt sleeps only amid excruciatingly loud European opera. He’s shared with Mario several different tales of grim childhood experiences at a BMW-sponsored ‘Quality-Control-Orientated’ Austrian Akademie to account for his REM-peculiarities. The soprano leaves the baritone and goes up to a high D and just hangs there, either shattered or ecstatic. Schtitt doesn’t stir, not even when Mario falls twice, loudly, trying to get to the door with his hands over his ears.

The Community-Administration stairwells are narrow and no-nonsense. Red railings of cold iron whose red is one coat of primer. Steps and walls of raw-colored rough cement. The sort of sandy echo in there that makes you take stairs as fast as possible. The salve makes a sucking sound. The upper halls are empty. Low voices and lights from under the doors on the second floor. 2100 is still mandatory Study Period. There won’t be serious movement till 2200, when the girls will drift from room to room, congregating, doing whatever packs of girls in robes and furry slippers do late at night, until deLint kills all the dormitory lights at the dorms’ main breaker around 2300. Isolated movement: a door down the hall opens and shuts, the Vaught twins are heading down the hall to the bathroom at the far end, wearing only an enormous towel, one of their heads in curlers. One of the falls in Mr. Schtitt’s room had been on the burnt hip, and squunched salve from the bandage is starting to darken the corduroys at that side of the pelvis, though there is zero pain. Three tense voices behind Carol Spodek and Shoshana Abram’s door, lists of degrees and focal lengths, a study group for Mr. Ogilvie’s ‘Reflections on Refraction’ exam tomorrow. A girl’s voice from he can’t tell which room says ‘Steep hot beach sea’ twice very distinctly and then is still. Mario is leaning back against a wall in the hallway, panning idly. Felicity Zweig emerges from her door by the stairwell carrying a soap-dish and wearing a towel tied at that breast-level, as if there were breasts, moving toward Mario on her way to the head. She puts her hand out straight at his head’s camera, a kind of distant stiff-arm as she passes:

‘I’m wearing a towel.’

‘I understand,’ Mario says, using his arms to turn himself around and pointing the lens at the bare wall.

‘I’m wearing a towel.’

Brisk controlled sounds of retching from behind Diane Prins’s door. Mario gets a couple seconds of Zweig hurrying away in the towel, tiny little bird steps, looking terribly fragile.

The stairwells smell like the cement they’re made of.

Behind 310, Ingersoll and Penn’s door, is the faint rubbery squeak of somebody moving around on crutches. Someone in 311 is yelling ‘Boner check! Boner check!’ A lot of the third floor is for boys under fourteen. The hall carpet up here is ectoplasmically stained, the expanses of wall between doors hung with posters of professional players endorsing gear. Someone has drawn a goatee and fangs on an old Donnay poster of Mats Wilander, and the poster of Gilbert Treffert is defaced with anti-Canadian slurs. Otis Lord’s door has Infirmary next to his name on the door’s name-card. Penn’s room’s door’s card’s name also had Infirmary. Sounds of someone talking low to someone who’s sobbing from Beak, Whale, and Virgilio’s room, and Mario resists an impulse to knock. LaMont Chu’s door next door is completely covered with magazines’ action-shots of matches. Mario is leaning back to get footage of the door when LaMont Chu exits the bathroom at this end in a terry robe and thongs and wet hair, literally whistling ‘Dixie.’

‘Mario!’

Mario gets him bearing down, his calves hairless and muscular, hair-water dripping onto his robe’s shoulders with each step. ‘LaMont Chu!’

‘What’s happening?’

‘Nothing’s happening!’

Chu stands there just within conversation-range. He’s only slightly taller than Mario. A door down the hall opens and a head sticks out and scans and then withdraws.

‘Well.’ Chu squares his shoulders and looks into the camera atop Mario’s head. ‘You want me to say something for posterity?’

‘Sure!’

‘What should I say?’

‘You can say anything you want!’

Chu draws himself way up and looks penetrating. Mario checks the meter on his belt and uses the treadle to shorten the focal length and adjust the angle of the camera’s lens slightly downward, right at Chu, and there are tiny grinding adjustment-sounds from the Bolex.

Chu’s still just standing there. ‘I can’t think what to say.’

‘That happens to me all the time.’

‘The minute your invitation became official my mind went blank.’

‘That can happen.’

‘There’s just this staticky blank field in there now.’

‘I know just what you mean.’

They stand there silent, the camera’s mechanism emitting a tiny whir.

Mario says ‘You just got out of the shower, I can tell.’

‘I was talking with good old Lyle downstairs.’

‘Lyle’s terrific!’

‘I was going to just whip right over into the showers, but the locker room’s got this, like, odor.’

‘It’s always great to talk with good old Lyle.’

‘So I came up here.’

‘Everything you’re saying is very good.’

LaMont Chu stands there a moment looking at Mario, who’s smiling and Chu can tell wants to nod furiously, but can’t, because he needs to keep the Bolex steady. ‘What I was doing, I was filling Lyle in on the Eschaton debacle, telling him about the lack of hard info, the conflicted rumors that are going around, about how Kittenplan and some of the Big Buds are going to get blamed. About disciplinary action for the Buds.’

‘Lyle’s just an outstanding person to go to with concerns,’ Mario says, fighting not to nod furiously.

‘Lord’s head and Penn’s leg, the Postman’s broken nose. What’s going to happen to the Incster?’

‘You’re acting perfectly natural. This is very good.’

‘I’m asking if you’ve heard from Hal what they’re going to do, if he’s in on the blame from Tavis. Pemulis and Kittenplan I can see, but I’m having trouble with the idea of Struck or your brother taking discipline for what happened out there. They were strictly from spectation for the whole thing. Kittenplan’s Bud is Spodek, and she wasn’t even out there.’

‘I’m getting all this, you’ll be glad to know.’

Chu is now looking at Mario, which for Mario is weird because he’s looking through the viewfinder, a lens-eye view, which means when Chu looks down from the lens to look at Mario it looks to Mario like he’s looking down south somewhere along Mario’s thorax.

‘Mario, I’m asking if Hal’s told you what they’re going to do to anybody.’

‘Is this what you’re saying, or are you asking me?’

‘Asking.’

Chu’s face looks slightly oval and convex through the lens’s fish-eye, a jutting aspect. ‘So what if I want to use this that you’re saying for the documentary I’ve been asked to make?’

‘Jesus, Mario, use whatever you want. I’m just saying I have conscience-trouble with the idea of Hal and Troeltsch. And Struck didn’t even seem like he was conscious for the debacle itself.’

‘I should tell you I feel like we’re getting the totally real LaMont Chu here.’

‘Mario, camera to one side, I’m standing here dripping asking you for Hal’s impressions of when Tavis called them in, as in did he give you impressions. Van Vleck at lunch said he yesterday saw Pemulis and Hal coming out of Tavis’s office with the Association urine-guy holding them both by the ear. Van Vleck said Hal’s face was the color of Kaopectate.’

Mario directs the lens at Chu’s shower-thongs so he can look over the viewfmder at Chu. ‘Are you saying this, or is this what happened?’

‘That’s what I’m asking you, Mario, if Hal told you what happened.’

‘I follow what you’re saying.’

‘So you asked whether I was asking, and I’m asking you about it.’

Mario zooms in very tight: Chu’s complexion is a kind of creamy green, with not one follicle in view. ‘LaMont, I’m going to find you and tell you whatever Hal tells me, this is so good.’

‘So then you haven’t talked to Hal?’

‘When?’

‘Jesus, Mario, it’s like trying to talk to a rock with you sometimes.’

‘This is going very well!’

Someone gargling. Guglielmo Redondo’s voice going through the rosary, it sounds like, just inside his and Esteban Reynes’s door. The Clipperton Suite in East House had had a bright-yellow strip of B.P.D. plastic for over a month, he remembers. The Boys Room door a different kind of wood than the room doors. The Clipperton Suite had a glued picture of Ross Reat pretending to kiss Clipperton’s ring at the net. The roar of a toilet and a stall door’s squeak. The Academy’s plumbing is high-pressure. It takes Mario longer to walk down a set of stairs than to walk up. Red primer stains his hand, he has to hold the railing so tight.

The special hush of lobby carpet, and smells of Benson ôt Hedges brand cigarettes in the reception area off the lobby. The little hall doors that are always closed and never locked. The rubber sheaths on the knobs. Benson & Hedges cost $5.60 O.N.A.N. a pack at Father & Son grocery down the hill. Lateral Alice Moore’s desk’s plaque’s DANGER: THIRD RAIL light is unil-luminated, and her word-processing setup wears its cover of frosted plastic. The blue chairs have the faint imprints of people’s bottoms. The waiting room is empty and dim. Some light from the lit courts outside. From under double doors is lamplight, much attenuated by double doors, from the Headmaster’s office, which Mario doesn’t explore; Tavis is unnerved into such gregarity around Mario it’s awkward for all parties.^[316] If you asked Mario whether he got on with his Uncle C.T. he’d say: Sure. The Bolex’s light-meter is in the No Way range. Most of the waiting area’s available light comes from the doorless Dean of Females’s office. Meaning the Moms is: In.

Heavy shag carpet is especially treacherous for Mario when he’s top-heavy with equipment. Avril Incandenza, a fiend for light, has the whole bank of overheads going, two torcheres and some desk lamps, and a B&H cigarette on fire in the big clay ashtray Mario ‘d made her at Rindge and Latin School. She is swivelled around in her swivel-chair, facing out the big window behind her desk, listening to someone on the phone, holding the transmitter violin-style under her chin and holding up a stapler, checking its load. Her desk has what looks like a skyline of stacks of file folders and books in neat cross-hatched stacks; nothing teeters. The open book on top facing Mario is Dowty, Wall and Peters’s seminal Introduction to Montague Semantics,^[317]which has very fascinating illustrations that Mario doesn’t look at this time, trying to film the cock of the Moms’s head and the phone’s extended antenna against the cumulus of her hair from behind, capturing her back unawares.

But the sound of Mario entering even a shag-carpeted room is unmistakable, plus she can see his reflection in the window.

‘Mario!’ Her arms go up in a V, stapler open in one hand, facing the window.

‘The Moms!’ It’s a good ten meters past the seminar table and viewer and portable blackboard to the far part of the office where the desk is, and each step on the deep shag is precarious, Mario resembling a very old brittle-boned man or someone carrying a load of breakables down a slick hill.

‘Hel/o/’ She’s addressing his reflection in the quartered window, watching him put the treadle down carefully on the desk and struggle with the pack on his back. ‘Not you,’ she tells the phone. She points the stapler at the image of the Bolex on the image of his head. ‘Are we On-Air?’

Mario laughs. ‘Would you like to be?’

She tells the phone she’s still here, that Mario’s come in.

‘I don’t want to intercept your call.’

‘Don’t be absurd.’ She talks past the phone at the window. She rotates her swivel-chair to face Mario, the receiver’s antenna describing a half moon and now pointing up at the window behind her. There are two blue chairs like the reception-area chairs in front of her desk; she doesn’t indicate to Mario to sit. Mario’s most comfortable standing and leaning into the support of the police lock he’s trying to detach from his canvas plastron and lower, shucking the pack off his back at the same time. Avril looks at him like the sort of stellar mother where just looking at her kid gives her joy. She doesn’t offer to help him get the lock’s lead brace out of the pack because she knows he’d feel completely comfortable asking for her help if he needed it. It’s like she feels these two sons are the people in her life with whom so little important needs to be said that she loves it. The Bolex and support-yoke and viewfinder over his forehead and eyes give Mario an underwater look. His movements, setting and bracing his police lock, are at once graceless and deft. The lit Center Courts, now empty, are visible out the left side of Avril’s window, if you lean far forward and look. Someone has forgotten a gear bag and pile of sticks out by the net-post of Court 17.

Silences between them are totally comfortable. Mario can’t tell if the person on the phone is still talking or if Avril just hasn’t put the dead phone down. She still holds the black stapler. Its jaws are open and it looks alli-gatorish in her hand.

‘Is this you passing through the neighborhood poking a head in to say hello? Or am I a subject, tonight?’

‘You can be a subject, Moms.’ He moves the big head around in a weary circle. ‘I get tired from wearing this.’

‘It gets heavy. I’ve held it.’

‘It’s good.’

‘I remember his making that. He took such care making that. It’s the last time I believe he enjoyed himself on something, thoroughly.’

‘It’s terrific!’

‘He took weeks putting everything together.’

He likes to look at her, too, leaning in and letting her know he likes looking. They are the two least embarrassable people either of them knows. She’s rarely here this late; she has a big study at the HmH. The only thing that ever shows she’s tired is that her hair gets a sort of huge white cowlick, like a rolling ocean comber of hair, and just on one side, the side with the phone, sticking up and touching the antenna. Her hair has been pure white since Mario can first remember seeing her looking down at him through the incubator’s glass. Pictures of her own father’s hair were like that. It goes down the middle of her back against the chair and down both arms, hanging off the arms near the elbow. Its part shows her pink scalp. She keeps the hair very clean and well-combed. She has one of Mr. deLint’s big whistles around her neck. The big cowlick casts a bent shadow on the sill of the window. There’s a maple-leaf flag and a 50-star U.S.A. flag hanging limp off brass poles on either side of the window; in an extreme corner are fleur-de-lis pennons on tall sharp polished sticks. C.T.’s office has an O.N.A.N. flag and a 49-star U.S.A. flag.[318]

‘I had quality interface dialogue with LaMont Chu upstairs. But I made the girl Felicity, the really thin one — she got upset. She said only a towel.’

‘Felicity will be just fine. So you’re just strolling. Peripatetic footage.’ She refuses to adjust syntax, to speak in any way down to him, it’d be beneath him, though he seems not to mind when most people do it, speak down.

Nor will she ask about the burn on his pelvis unless he brings it up. She’s careful to keep her oar out of Mario’s health stuff unless he brings things up, out of concern that it might be taken as intrusive or smothering.

‘I saw your lights. Why is the Moms here, still, I thought to myself.’

She made as if to clutch her head. ‘Don’t ask. I’ll starting whingeing. Tomorrow’s going to be hellishly busy.’ Mario didn’t hear her say goodbye to the man as she put down the phone so the antenna now points at Mario’s chest. She’s putting out the nub of the Benson & Hedge against the rooster-comb holder he’d squeezed and karate-chopped and put down the bowl’s center, when he made it, after she’d said she wanted it to be an ashtray. ‘You give me such pleasure standing there, all outfitted for work,’ she said. ‘Aprowl.’ She ground individual sparks out in the bowl. She had the idea that her smoking around Mario made him worry, though he’d never said anything about it one way or the other. ‘I have a breakfast engagement at 07, which means I have to do final swotting and whacking for morning classes now, so I just lurched back over here to do it instead of carrying everything back and forth.’

‘Are you tired?’

She just smiled at him.

‘This is off.’ Pointing at his head. ‘I turned it off.’

To look at them, you’d never guess these two persons were related, one sitting and one standing canted forward.

‘Will you eat with us? I hadn’t even thought of dinner until I saw you. I don’t even know what there might be for dinner. Many Wonders.^[319] Turkey cartilage. Your bag is by the radio. Will you stay again? Charles is still in conference, I believe, he said.’

‘About the debracle with the Eschaton and the Postman’s nose?’

‘A person from a magazine has come to do a piece of reportage on your brother. Charles is speaking to her in lieu of any of the students. You may speak to her about Orin if you like.’

‘She’s been aprowl for Hal, Ortho said.’

Avril has a certain way of cocking her fine head at him.

‘Your poor Uncle Charles has been with Thierry and this magazine person since this afternoon.’

‘Have you talked to him?’

‘I’ve been trying to buttonhole your brother. He’s not in your room. The Pemulis person was seen by Mary Esther taking their truck before Study Period. Is Hal with him, Mario?’

‘I haven’t seen Hal since lunchtime. He said he’d had a tooth thing.’

‘I didn’t even find out he’d been to see Zeggarelli until today.’

‘He asked about how the burn on my pelvis is.’

‘Which I won’t ask about unless you’d care to discuss how it’s coming along.’

‘It’s fine. Plus Hal said he wishes I’d come back and sleep there.’

‘I left two messages asking him to let me know how the tooth was. Love-o, I feel bad I wasn’t there for him. Hal and his teeth.’

‘Did C.T. tell what happened? Was he upset? Was that C.T. on the phone you were with?’ Mario can’t see why the Moms would call C.T. on the phone when he was in there right across the hall behind his doors. When she didn’t smoke a lot of the time she held a pen in her mouth; Mario didn’t know why. Her college mug has about a hundred blue pens in it, on the desk. She likes to square herself in her chair, sitting up extra straight and grasping the chair’s arms in a commanding posture. She looks like something Mario can’t place when she does this. He keeps thinking the word typhoon. He knows she’s not trying to consciously be commanding with him.

‘How was your own day, I want to hear.’

‘Hey Moms?’

‘I determined years ago that my position needs to be that I trust my children, and I’d never traffic in third-party hearsay when the lines of communication with my children are as open and judgment-free as I’m fortunate they are.’

‘That seems like a really good position. Hey Moms?’

‘So I have no problem waiting to hear about Eschaton, teeth, and urine from your brother, who’ll come to me the moment it’s appropriate for him to come to me.’

‘Hey Moms?’

‘I’m right here, Love-o.’

Tycoon is the term her commanding way of sitting suggests, grasping her chair, a pen clamped in her teeth like a businessman’s cigar. There were other carpet-prints in the heavy shag.

‘Moms?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can I ask you a thing?’

‘Please do.’

‘This is off,’ again indicating the silent apparatus on his head.

‘Is this a confidential thing, then?’

‘There isn’t any secret. My day was I was wondering about something. In my mind.’

‘I’m right here for you anytime day or night, Mario, as you are for me, as I am for Hal and we all are for each other.’ She gestures in a hard-to-describe way. ‘Right here.’

‘Moms?’

‘I am right here with my attention completely focused on you.’

‘How can you tell if somebody’s sad?’

A quick smile. ‘You mean whether someone’s sad.’

A smile back, but still earnest: ‘That improves it a lot. Whether someone’s sad, how can you tell so you’re sure?’

Her teeth are not discolored; she gets them cleaned at the dentist all the time for the smoking, a habit she despises. Hal inherited the dental problems from Himself; Himself had horrible dental problems; half his teeth were bridges.

‘You’re not exactly insensitive when it comes to people, Love-o,’ she says.

‘What if you, like, only suspect somebody’s sad. How do you reinforce the suspicion?’

‘Confirm the suspicion?’

‘In your mind.’ Some of the prints in the deep shag he can see are shoes, and some are different, almost like knuckles. His lordotic posture makes him acute and observant about things like carpet-prints.

‘How would I, for my part, confirm a suspicion of sadness in someone, you mean?’

‘Yes. Good. All right.’

‘Well, the person in question may cry, sob, weep, or, in certain cultures, wail, keen, or rend his or her garments.’

Mario nods encouragingly, so the headgear clanks a little. ‘But say in a case where they don’t weep or rend. But you still have a suspicion which they’re sad.’

She uses a hand to rotate the pen in her mouth like a fine cigar. ‘He or she might alternatively sigh, mope, frown, smile halfheartedly, appear downcast, slump, look at the floor more than is appropriate.’

‘But what if they don’t?’

‘Well, he or she may act out by seeming distracted, losing enthusiasm for previous interests. The person may present with what appears to be laziness, lethargy, fatigue, sluggishness, a certain passive reluctance to engage you. Torpor.’

‘What else?’

‘They may seem unusually subdued, quiet, literally “low.”

Mario leans all his weight into his police lock, which makes his head jut, his expression the sort of mangled one that expresses puzzlement, an attempt to reason out something hard. Pemulis called it Mario’s Data-Search Face, which Mario liked.

‘What if sometime they might act even less low than normal. But still these suspicions are in your mind.’

She’s about the same height sitting as Mario upright and leaning forward. Now neither of them is quite looking at the other, both just a couple degrees off. Avril taps the pen against her front teeth. Her phone light is blinking, but there’s no ringing. The thing’s handset’s antenna still points at Mario. Her hands are not her age. She hoists the executive chair back slightly to cross her legs.

‘Would you feel comfortable telling me whether we’re discussing a particular person?’

‘Hey Moms?’

‘Is there someone specific in whom you’re intuiting sadness?’

‘Moms?’

‘Is this about Hal? Is Hal sad and for some reason not yet able to speak about it?’

‘I’’m just saying how to be generally sure.’

‘And you have no idea where he is or whether he left the grounds this evening sad?’

Lunch today was the exact same as lunch yesterday: pasta with tuna and garlic, and thick wheaty bread, and required salad, and milk or juice, and pears in juice in a dish. Mrs. Clark had taken a Sick Morning off because when she came in this morning Pemulis at lunch said one of the breakfast girls had said there’d been brooms on the wall in an X of brooms, out of nowhere, on the wall, when she’d come in very early to fire up the Wheatina-cauldron, and nobody knowing how the brooms were there or why or who glued them on had upset Mrs. Clarke’s nerves, who’d been with the Incandenzas since long before E.T.A., and had nerves.

‘I didn’t see Hal since lunchtime. He had an apple he cut into chunks and put peanut butter on, instead of pears in juice.’

Avril nods with vigor.

‘LaMont didn’t know either. Mr. Schtitt is asleep in his chair in his room. Hey Moms?’

Avril Incandenza can switch a Bic from one side of her mouth to the other without using her hand; she never knows she’s doing it when she’s doing it. ‘Whether or not we’re discussing anyone in particular, then.’

Mario smiles at her.

‘Hypothetically, then, you may be picking up in someone a certain very strange type of sadness that appears as a kind of disassociation from itself, maybe, Love-o.’

‘I don’t know disassociation.’

‘Well, love, but you know the idiom “not yourself” — “He’s not himself today,” for example,’ crooking and uncrooking fingers to form quotes on either side of what she says, which Mario adores. ‘There are, apparently, persons who are deeply afraid of their own emotions, particularly the painful ones. Grief, regret, sadness. Sadness especially, perhaps. Dolores describes these persons as afraid of obliteration, emotional engulfment. As if something truly and thoroughly felt would have no end or bottom. Would become infinite and engulf them.’

‘Engulf means obliterate.’

‘I am saying that such persons usually have a very fragile sense of themselves as persons. As existing at all. This interpretation is “existential,” Mario, which means vague and slightly flaky. But I think it may hold true in certain cases. My own father told stories of his own father, whose potato farm had been in St. Pamphile and very much larger than my father’s. My grandfather had had a marvelous harvest one season, and he wanted to invest money. This was in the early 1920s, when there was a great deal of money to be made on upstart companies and new American products. He apparently narrowed the field to two choices — Delaware-brand Punch, or an obscure sweet fizzy coffee substitute that sold out of pharmacy soda fountains and was rumored to contain smidgeons of cocaine, which was the subject of much controversy in those days. My father’s father chose Delaware Punch, which apparently tasted like rancid cranberry juice, and the manufacturer of which folded. And then his next two potato harvests were decimated by blight, resulting in the forced sale of his farm. Coca-Cola is now Coca-Cola. My father said his father showed very little emotion or anger or sadness about this, though. That he somehow couldn’t. My father said his father was frozen, and could feel emotion only when he was drunk. He would apparently get drunk four times a year, weep about his life, throw my father through the living room window, and disappear for several days, roaming the countryside of L’Islet Province, drunk and enraged.’

She’s not been looking at Mario this whole time, though Mario’s been looking at her.

She smiled. ‘My father, of course, could himself tell this story only when be was drunk. He never threw anyone through any windows. He simply sat in his chair, drinking ale and reading the newspaper, for hours, until he fell out of the chair. And then one day he fell out of the chair and didn’t get up again, and that was how your maternal grandfather passed away. I’d never have gotten to go to University had he not died when I was a girl. He believed education was a waste for girls. It was a function of his era; it wasn’t his fault. His inheritance to Charles and me paid for university,’

She’s been smiling pleasantly this whole time, emptying the butt from the ashtray into the wastebasket, wiping the bowl’s inside with a Kleenex, straightening straight piles of folders on her desk. A couple odd long crinkly paper strips of bright red hung over the side of the wastebasket, which was normally totally empty and clean.

Avril Incandenza is the sort of tall beautiful woman who wasn’t ever quite world-class, shiny-magazine-class beautiful, but who early on hit a certain pretty high point on the beauty scale and has stayed right at that point as she ages and lots of other beautiful women age too and get less beautiful. She’s 56 years old, and Mario gets pleasure out of just getting to look at her face, still. She doesn’t think she’s pretty, he knows. Orin and Hal both have parts of her prettiness in different ways. Mario likes to look at Hal and at their mother and try to see just what slendering and spacing of different features makes a woman’s face different from a man’s, in attractive people. A male face versus a face you can just tell is female. Avril thinks she’s much too tall to be pretty. She’d seemed much less tall when compared to Himself, who was seriously tall. Mario wears small special shoes, almost perfectly square, with weights at the heel and Velcro straps instead of laces, and a pair of the corduroys Orin Incandenza had worn in elementary school, which Mario still favors and wears instead of brand-new pants he’s given, and a warm crewneck sweater that’s striped like a flea.

‘My point here is that certain types of persons are terrified even to poke a big toe into genuinely felt regret or sadness, or to get angry. This means they are afraid to live. They are imprisoned in something, I think. Frozen inside, emotionally. Why is this. No one knows, Love-o. It’s sometimes called “suppression,” ‘ with the fingers out to the sides again. ‘Dolores believes it derives from childhood trauma, but I suspect not always. There may be some persons who are born imprisoned. The irony, of course, being that the very imprisonment that prohibits sadness’s expression must itself feel intensely sad and painful. For the hypothetical person in question. There may be sad people right here at the Academy who are like this, Mario, and perhaps you’re sensitive to it. You are not exactly insensitive when it comes to people.’

Mario scratches his lip again.

She says ‘What I’ll do’ — leaning forward to write something on a Post-It note with a different pen than the one she has in her mouth — ‘is to write down for you the terms disassociation, engulfment, and suppression, which I’ll put next to another word, repression, with an underlined unequal sign between them, because they denote entirely different things and should not be regarded as synonyms.’

Mario shifts slightly forward. ‘Sometimes I get afraid when you forget you have to talk more simply to me.’

‘Well then I’m both sorry for that and grateful that you can tell me about it. I do forget things. Particularly when I’m tired. I forget and just get going.’ Lining the edges up and folding the little sticky note in half and then half again and dropping it into the waste basket without having to look for where the wastebasket is. Her chair is a fine executive leather swivelling chair but it shrieks a little when she leans back or forward. Mario can tell she’s making herself not look at her watch, which is all right.

‘Hey Moms?’

‘People, then, who are sad, but who can’t let themselves feel sad, or express it, the sadness, I’m trying rather clunkily to say, these persons may strike someone who’s sensitive as somehow just not quite right. Not quite there. Blank. Distant. Muted. Distant. Spacey was an American term we grew up with. Wooden. Deadened. Disconnected. Distant. Or they may drink alcohol or take other drugs. The drugs both blunt the real sadness and allow some skewed version of the sadness some sort of expression, like throwing someone through a living room window out into the flowerbeds she’d so very carefully repaired after the last incident.’

‘Moms, I think I get it.’

‘Is that better, then, instead of my maundering on and on?’

She’s risen to pour herself coffee from the last black bit in the glass pot. So her back is almost to him as she stands there at the little sideboard. An old folded pair of U.S.A. football pants and a helmet are on top of one of the file cabinets by the flag. Her one memento of Orin, who won’t talk to them or contact them in any way. She has an old mug with a cartoon of someone in a dress small and perspectivally distant in a knee-high field of wheat or rye, that says TO A WOMAN OUTSTANDING IN HER FIELD. A blue blazer with an O.N.A.N.T.A. insignia is hung very neatly and straight on a wooden hanger from the metal tree of the coatrack in the corner. She’s always had her coffee out of the OUTSTANDING FIELD mug, even in Weston. The Moms hangs up stuff like shirts and blazers neater and more wrinkle-free than anyone alive. The mug has a hair-thin brown crack down one side, but it’s not dirty or stained, and she never gets lipstick on the rim the way other ladies over fifty years old pinken cups’ rims.

Mario was involuntarily incontinent up to his early teens. His father and later Hal had changed him for years, never once judging or wrinkling their face or acting upset or sad.

‘But except hey Moms?’

‘I’m still right here.’

Avril couldn’t change diapers. She’d come to him in tears, he’d been seven, and explained, and apologized. She just couldn’t handle diapers. She just couldn’t deal with them. She’d sobbed and asked him to forgive her and to assure her that he understood it didn’t mean she didn’t love him to death or find him repellent.

‘Can you be sensitive to something sad even though the person isn’t not himself?’

She especially likes to hold the coffee’s mug in both hands. ‘Pardon me?’

‘You explained it very well. It helped a lot. Except what if it’s that they’re almost like even more themselves than normal? Than they were before? If it’s not that he’s blank or dead. If he’s himself even more than before a sad thing happened. What if that happens and you still think he’s sad, inside, somewhere?’

One thing that’s happened as she got over fifty is she gets a little red sideways line in the skin between her eyes when she doesn’t follow you. Ms. Poutrincourt gets the same little line, and she’s twenty-eight. T don’t follow you. How can someone be too much himself?’

‘I think I wanted to ask you that.’

‘Are we discussing your Uncle Charles?’

‘Hey Moms?’

She pretends to knock her forehead at being obtuse. ‘Mario Love-o, are you sad? Are you trying to determine whether I’ve been sensing that you yourself are sad?’

Mario’s gaze keeps going from Avril to the window behind her. He can activate the Bolex’s foot-treadle with his hands, if necessary. The Center Courts’ towering lights cast an odd pall up and out into the night. The sky has a wind in it, and dark thin high clouds whose movement’s pattern has a kind of writhing weave. All this is visible out past the faint reflections of the lit room, and up, the tennis lights’ odd small lumes like criss-crossing spots.

‘Though of course the sun would leave my sky if I couldn’t assume you’d simply come and tell me you were sad. There would be no need for intuition about it.’

And plus then to the east, past all the courts, you can see some lights in houses in the Enfield Marine Complex below, and beyond that Commonwealth’s cars’ headers and store lights and the robed lit lady’s downcast-looking statue atop St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Out the right to the north over lots of different lights is the red rotating tip of the WYYY transmitter, its spin’s ring of red reflected in the visible Charles River, the Charles tumid with rain and snowmelt, illumined in patches by headlights on Memorial and the Storrow 500, the river unwinding, swollen and humped, its top a mosaic of oil rainbows and dead branches, gulls asleep or brooding, bobbing, head under wing.

The dark had a distanceless shape. The room’s ceiling might as well have been clouds.

‘Skkkkk.’

‘Booboo?’

‘Skk-kkk.’

‘Mario.’

‘Hal!’

‘Were you asleep there, Boo?’

‘I don’t think I was.’

‘Cause I don’t want to wake you up if you were.’

‘Is it dark or is it me?’

‘The sun won’t be up for a while, I don’t think.’

‘So it’s dark then.’

‘Booboo, I just had a wicked awful dream.’

‘You were saying “Thank you Sir may I have another” several times.’

‘Sorry Boo.’

‘Numerous times.’

‘Sorry.’

‘I think I slept right through it.’

‘Jesus, you can hear Schacht snoring all the way across. You can feel the snores’ vibrations in your midsection.’

‘I slept right through it. I didn’t hear you even come in.’

‘Quite a nice surprise to come in and see the good old many-pillowed Mario-shape in his rack again.’

‘…’

‘I hope you didn’t move the bag back here just because it sounded like I might have been asking you. To.’

‘I found somebody with tapes of old Psychosis, for until the return. I need you to show me how to ask somebody I don’t know to borrow tapes, if we’re both devoted.’

‘…’

‘Hey Hal?’

‘Booboo, I dreamed I was losing my teeth. I dreamed that my teeth dry-rotted somehow into shale and splintered when I ate or spoke, and I was jettisoning fragments all over the place, and there was a long scene where I was pricing dentures.’

‘All night last night people were coming up going where is Hal, have you seen Hal, what happened with CT and the urine doctor and Hal’s urine. Moms asked me where’s Hal, and I was surprised at that because of how she makes it a big point never to check up.’

‘Then, without any sort of dream-segue, I’m sitting in a cold room, naked as a jaybird, in a flame-retardant chair, and I keep receiving bills in the mail for teeth. A mail carrier keeps knocking on the door and coming in without being invited and presenting me with various bills for teeth.’

‘She wants you to know she trusts you at all times and you’re too trustworthy to worry about or check up on.’

‘Only not for any teeth of mine, Boo. The bills are for somebody else’s teeth, not my teeth, and I can’t seem to get the mail carrier to acknowledge this, that they’re not for my teeth.’

‘I promised LaMont Chu I’d tell him whatever information you told me, he was so concerned.’

‘The bills are in little envelopes with plasticized windows that show the addressee part of the bills. I put them in my lap until the stack gets so big they start to slip off the top and fall to the floor.’

‘LaMont and me had a whole dialogue about his concerns. I like LaMont a lot.’

‘Booboo, do you happen to remember S. Johnson?’

‘S. Johnson used to be the Moms’s dog. That passed away.’

‘And you remember how he died, then.’

‘Hey Hal, you remember a period in time back in Weston when we were little that the Moms wouldn’t go anywhere without S. Johnson? She took him with her to work, and had that unique car seat for him when she had the Volvo, before Himself had the accident in the Volvo. The seat was from the Fisher-Price Company. We went to Himself’s opening of Kinds of Light at the Hayden^[320] that wouldn’t let in cigarettes or dogs and the Moms brought S. Johnson in a blind dog’s harness-collar that went all the way around his chest with the square bar on the leash thing and the Moms wore those sunglasses and looked up and to the right the whole time so it looked like she was legally blind so they’d let S.J. into the Hayden with us, because he had to be there. And how Himself just thought it was a good one on the Hayden, he said.’

‘I keep thinking about Orin and how he stood there and lied to her about S. Johnson’s map getting eliminated.’

‘She was sad.’

‘I’ve been thinking compulsively about Orin ever since C.T. called us all in. When you think about Orin what do you think, Boo?’

‘The best was remember when she had to fly and wouldn’t put him in a cagey box and they wouldn’t even let a blind dog on the plane, so she’d leave S. Johnson and leave him out tied to the Volvo and she’d make Orin put a phone out there with its antenna up during the day out by where S. Johnson was tied to the Volvo and she’d call on the phone and let it ring next to S. Johnson because she said how S. Johnson knew her unique personal ring on the phone and would hear the ring and know that he was thought about and cared about from afar, she said?’

‘She was unbent where that dog was concerned, I remember. She bought some kind of esoteric food for it. Remember how often she bathed it?

‘…’

‘What was it with her and that dog, Boo?’

‘And the day we were out rolling balls in the driveway and Orin and Marlon were there and S. Johnson was there lying there on the driveway tied to the bumper with the phone right there and it rang and rang and Orin picked it up and barked into it like a dog and hung it up and turned it off?’

‘…’

‘So she’d think it was S. Johnson? The joke that Orin thought was such a good one?’

‘Jesus, Boo, I don’t remember any of that.’

‘And he said we’d get Indian Rub-Burns down both arms if we didn’t pretend how we didn’t know what she was talking about if and when she asked us about the bark on the phone when she got home?

‘The Indian Rub-Burns I remember far too well.’

‘We were supposed to shrug and look at her like she was minus cards from her deck, or else?’

‘Orin lied with a really pathological intensity, growing up, is what I’ve been remembering.’

‘He made us laugh really hard a lot of times, though. I miss him.’

‘I don’t know whether I miss him or not.’

‘I miss Family Trivia. Do you remember four times he let us sit in on when they played Family Trivia?’

‘You’ve got a phenomenal memory for this stuff, Boo.’

‘…’

‘You probably think I’m wondering why you don’t ask me about the thing with C.T. and Pemulis and the impromptu urine, after the Eschaton debacle, where the urologist took us right down to the administrative loo and was going to watch personally while we filled his cups, like watch it go in, the urine, to make sure it came from us personally.’

‘I think I especially have a phenomenal memory for things I remember that I liked.’

‘You can ask, if you like.’

‘Hey Hal?’

‘The key datum is that the O.N.A.N.T.A. guy didn’t actually extract urine samples from us. We got to hold on to our urine, as the Moms no doubt knows quite well, don’t kid yourself, from C.T.’

‘I have a phenomenal memory for things that make me laugh is what I think it is.’

‘That Pemulis, without self-abasement or concession of anything compromising, got the guy to give us thirty days — the Fundraiser, the What-aBurger, Thanksgiving Break, then Pemulis, Axford and I pee like racehorses into whatever-sized receptacles he wants, is the arrangement we made.’

‘I can hear Schacht, you’re right. Also the fans.’

‘Boo?’

T like the fans’ sound at night. Do you? It’s like somebody big far away goes like: it’sOKit’sOKit’sOKit’sOK, over and over. From very far away.’

‘Pemulis — the alleged weak-stomached clutch-artist — Pemulis showed some serious brass under pressure, standing there over that urinal. He played the O.N.A.N.T.A. man like a fine instrument. I found myself feeling almost proud for him.’

‘…’

‘You might think I’m wondering why you aren’t asking me why thirty days, why it was so important to extract thirty days from the blue-blazered guy before a G.C./M.S. scan. As in what is there to be afraid of, you might ask.’

‘Hal, pretty much all I do is love you and be glad I have an excellent brother in every way, Hal.’

‘Jesus, it’s just like talking to the Moms with you sometimes, Boo.’

‘Hey Hal?’

‘Except with you I can feel you mean it.’

‘You’re up on your elbow. You’re on your side, facing my way. I can see your shadow.’

‘How does somebody with your kind of Panglossian constitution determine whether you’re ever being lied to, I sometimes wonder, Booboo. Like what criteria brought to bear. Intuition, induction, reductio, what?’

‘You always get hard to understand when you’re up on your side on your elbow like this.’

‘Maybe it just doesn’t occur to you. Even the possibility. Maybe it’s never once struck you that something’s being fabricated, misrepresented, skewed. Hidden.’

‘Hey Hal?’

‘And maybe that’s the key. Maybe then whatever’s said to you is so completely believed by you that, what, it becomes sort of true in transit. Flies through the air toward you and reverses its spin and hits you true, however mendaciously it comes off the other person’s stick.’

‘…’

‘You know, for me, Boo, people seem to lie in different but definite ways, I’ve found. Maybe I can’t change the spin the way you can, and this is all I’ve been able to do, is assemble a kind of field guide to the different kinds of ways.’

‘…’

‘Some people, from what I’ve seen, Boo, when they lie, they become very still and centered and their gaze very concentrated and intense. They try to dominate the person they lie to. The person to whom they’re lying. Another type becomes fluttery and insubstantial and punctuates his lie with little self-deprecating motions and sounds, as if credulity were the same as pity. Some bury the lie in so many digressions and asides that they like try to slip the lie in there through all the extraneous data like a tiny bug through a win-dowscreen.’

‘Except Orin used to end up telling the truth even when he didn’t think he was.’

‘Would that that were a trait family-wide, Boo.’

‘Maybe if we call him he’ll come to the WhataBurger. You can see him if you want to if you ask, maybe.’

‘Then there are what I might call your Kamikaze-style liars. These’ll tell you a surreal and fundamentally incredible lie, and then pretend a crisis of conscience and retract the original lie, and then offer you the lie they really want you to buy instead, so the real lie’ll appear as some kind of concession, a settlement with truth. That type’s mercifully easy to see through.’

‘The merciful type of lie.’

‘Or then the type who sort of overelaborates on the lie, buttresses it with rococo formations of detail and amendment, and that’s how you can always tell. Pemulis was like that, I always thought, til his performance over the urinal.’

‘Rococo’s a pretty word.’

‘So now I’ve established a subtype of the over-elaborator type. This is the liar who used to be an over-elaborator and but has somehow snapped to the fact that rococo elaborations give him away every time, so he changes and now lies tersely, sparely, seeming somehow bored, like what he’s saying is too obviously true to waste time on.’

‘…’

‘I’ve established that as a sort of subtype.’ ‘You sound like you can always tell.’

‘Pemulis could have sold that urologist land in there, Boo. It was an incredibly high-pressure moment. I never thought he had it in him. He was nerveless and stomachless. He projected a kind of weary pragmatism the urologist found impossible to discount. His face was a brass mask. It was almost frightening. I told him I never would have believed he had that kind of performance in him.’

‘Psychosis live on the radio used to read an Eve Arden beauty brochure all the time where Eve Arden says: “The importance of a mask is to increase your circulation,” quote.’

‘The truth is nobody can always tell, Boo. Some types are just too good, too complex and idiosyncratic; their lies are too close to the truth’s heart for you to tell.’

‘I can’t ever tell. You wanted to know. You’re right. It never crosses my mind.’

‘…’

‘I’m the type that’d buy land, I think.’

‘You remember my hideous phobic thing about monsters, as a kid?’

‘Boy do I ever.’

‘Boo, I think I no longer believe in monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants or vampires or whatever. I think at seventeen now I believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there’s simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing away.’

‘But then how do you know they’re monsters, then?’

‘That’s the monstrosity right there, Boo, I’m starting to think.’

‘Golly Ned.’

‘That they walk among us. Teach our children. Inscrutable. Brass-faced.’

‘Can I ask you how it is being in that thing?’

Thing?’

‘You know. Don’t play dumb and embarrass me.’

‘A wheelchair is a thing which: you prefer it or do not prefer, it is no distance. Difference. You are in the chair even if you do not prefer it. So it is better to prefer, no?’

‘I can’t believe I’m drinking. There’s all these people in the House they’re always worried they’re going to drink. I’m in there for drugs. I’ve never had more than a beer ever in my life. I only came in here to throw up from getting mugged. Some street guy was offering to be a witness and he would not leave me alone. I didn’t even have any money. I came in here to vomit.’

‘I know what it is you are meaning.’

‘What’s your name one more time?’

‘I call myself Rémy.’

‘This is a beautiful thing as Hester would say. I don’t feel horrid anymore. Ramy I feel better than I feel, felt in ever so I don’t know how long. This is like novocaine of the soul. I’m like: why was I spending all that time doing one-hitters when this is really what / call feeling better.’

‘Us, I do not take any drugs. I drink infrequently.’

‘Well you’re making up for lost time I have to say.’

‘When I drink I have many drinks. This is how it is for my people.’

‘My mom won’t even have it in the house. She said it’s what made her father drive into concrete and wipe out his entire family. Which like I’m so tired of hearing it. I came in here — what is this place?’

‘This, it is Ryle’s Inman Square Club of Jazz. My wife is dying at home in my native province.’

‘There’s this thing in the Big Book they make us every Sunday we have to drag ourselves out of bed at the absolute crack of dawn and sit in a circle and read out of it and half the people can barely even read and it’s excruciating to listen to!’

‘You should make your voice lower, for in the hours of no jazz they enjoy low voices, coming in for quiet.’

‘And there’s a thing about a car salesman trying to quit drinking, it’s about the they call it the insanity of the first one, drink — he comes in a bar for a sandwich and a glass of milk — are you hungry?’

‘Non.’

‘What am I saying I don’t have any money. I don’t even have my purse. This stuff makes you stupid but it makes you feel quite a bit improved. He wasn’t thinking of a drink and then all of a sudden he thinks of a drink. This guy-’

‘Out of a blue place, in one flashing instant.’

‘Exactly. But the insanity is after all this time in hospitals and losing his business and his wife because of drinking he suddenly gets it into his head that one drink won’t hurt him if he puts it in a glass of milk.’¹

‘Crazy in his head.’

‘So when this absolutely reptilian character you saved me from by sitting down, rolling over, whatever. Sor-ry. When he says can he buy me a drink the book flashes in my mind and for sort of as it felt like a joke I ordered Kahlua and milk.’

‘Me, I come in for nights I am tired, after the music has packed away, for the quiet. I use the telephone here as well, sometimes.’

‘I mean even before the mugging I was walking along soberly deciding how to kill myself, so it seems a little silly to worry about drinking.’

‘You have a certain expression of resemblance of my wife.’

‘Your wife is dying. Jesus I’m sitting here laughing and your wife is dying. I think it’s that I haven’t felt decent in so freaking long, do you know what I’m saying? I’m not talking like good, I’m not talking like pleasure, I wouldn’t want to go overboard with this thing, but at least at like zero, even, what do they call it Feeling No Pain.’

‘I know of this meaning. I am spending a day to find someone I think my friends will kill, all the time I am awaiting the chance to betray my friends, and I come here and telephone to betray them and I see this bruised person who strongly resembles my wife. I think: Rémy, it is time for many drinks.’

‘Well / think you’re nice. I think you just about saved my life. I’ve spent like nine weeks feeling so bad I wanted to just about kill myself, both getting high and not. Dr. Garton never mentioned this. He talked plenty about shock but he never even freaking mentioned Kahlua and milk.’

‘Katherine, I will tell you a story about feeling so bad and saving a life. I do not know you but we are drunk together now, and will you hear this story?’

‘It’s not about Hitting Bottom ingesting any sort of Substance and trying to Surrender, is it?’

‘My people, we do not hit the bottoms of women. I am, shall we say, Swiss. My legs, they were lost in the teenage years being struck by a train.’

‘That must have smarted.’

‘I would have temptation to say you have no idea. But I am sensing you have an idea of hurting.’

‘You have no idea.’

‘I am in early twenty years, without the legs. Many of my friends also: without legs.’

‘Must have been an awful train crash.’

‘Also my own father: dead when his Kenbeck pacemaker came within range of a misdialed number of a cellular phone far away in Trois Rivieres, in a freakish occurrence of tragedy.’

‘My dad emotionally abandoned us and moved to Portland, which is in Oregon, with his therapist.’

‘Also in this time, my Swiss nation, we are a strong people but not strong as a nation, surrounded by strong nations. There is much hatred of our neighbors, and unfairness.’

‘It all started when my mom found a picture of his therapist in his wallet and goes “What’s that doing in here?” ‘

‘It is, for me, who I am weak, so painful to be without legs in the early twenty years. One feels grotesque to people; one’s freedom is restricted. I have no chances now for jobs in the mines of Switzerland.’

‘The Swiss have gold mines.’

‘As you say. And much beautiful territory, which the stronger nations at the time of losing my legs committed paper atrocities to my nation’s land.’

Trucking bastards.’

‘It is a long story to the side of this story, but my part of the Swiss nation is in my time of no legs invaded and despoiled by stronger and evil hated and neighboring nations, who claim as in the Anschluss of Hitler that they are friends and are not invading the Swiss but conferring on us gifts of alliance.’

‘Total dicks.’

‘It is to the side, but for my Swiss friends and myself without legs it is a dark period of injustice and dishonor, and of terrible pain. Some of my friends roll themselves off to fight against the invasion of paper, but me, I am too painful to care enough to fight. To me, the fight seems without point: our own Swiss leaders have been subverted to pretend the invasion is alliance; we very few legless young cannot repel an invasion; we cannot even make our government admit that there is an invasion. I am weak and, in pain, see all is pointless: I do not see the meaning of choosing to fight.’

‘You’re depressed is what you are.’

‘I see no point and do no work and belong to nothing; I am alone. I think of death. I do nothing but frequently drink, roll around the despoiled countryside, sometimes dodging falling projectiles of invasion, thinking of death, bemoaning the depredation of the Swiss land, in great pain. But it is myself I bemoan. I have pain. I have no legs.’

‘I’m Identifying every step of the way with you, Ramy. Oh God, what did I say?’

‘And us, our Swiss countryside is very hilly. The fauteuil, it is hard to push up many hills, then one is braking with all the might to keep from flying out of control on the downhill.’

‘Sometimes it’s like that walking, too.’

‘Katherine, I am, in English, moribund. I have no legs, no Swiss honor, no leaders who will fight the truth. I am not alive, Katherine. I roll from skiing lodge to tavern, frequently drinking, alone, wishing for my death, locked inside my pain in the heart. I wish for my death but have not the courage to make actions to cause death. I twice try to roll over the side of a tall Swiss hill but cannot bring myself. I curse myself for cowardice and inutile. I roll about, hoping to be hit by a vehicle of someone else, but at the last minute rolling out of the path of vehicles on Autoroutes, for I am unable to will my death. The more pain in my self, the more I am inside the self and cannot will my death, I think. I feel I am chained in a cage of the self, from the pain. Unable to care or choose anything outside it. Unable to see anything or feel anything outside my pain.’

‘The billowing shaped black sailing wing. I am so totally Identifying it’s not even funny.’

‘My story it was one day at the top of a hill I had drunkenly labored for many minutes to roll to the crest, and looking out over the downhill slope I see a small hunched woman in what I am thinking is a metal hat far below at the bottom, attempting the crossing of the Swiss Provincial Autoroute at the bottom, in the middle of the Provincial Autoroute, this woman, standing and staring in the terror at one of the hated long and shiny many-wheeled trucks of our paper invaders, bearing down upon her at high speeds in the hurry to come despoil part of the Swiss land.’

‘Like one of those Swiss metal helmets? Is she scrambling crazily to get out of the way?’

‘She is standing transfixed with horror of the truck — identically as I had been motionless and transfixed by horror inside me, unable to move, like one of the many moose of Switzerland transfixed by the headlights of one of the many logging-trucks of Switzerland. The sunlight is reflecting madly on her metal hat as she is shaking her head in terror and she is clutching her — pardon me, but her female bosom, as if the heart of her would explode from the terror.’

‘And you think, Oh fuck me, just great, another horrible thing I’m going to have stand here and witness and then go feel pain over.’

‘But the great gift of this time today at the hilltop above the Provincial Autoroute is I do not think of me. I do not know this woman or love her, but without thinking I release my brake and I am careening down the downhill, almost wipe-outing numerous places on the bumps and rocks of the hill’s slope, and as we say in Switzerland I schüssch at enough speed to reach my wife and sweep her up into the chair and roll across the Provincial Auto-route into the embanking ahead just ahead of the nose of the truck, which had not slowed.’

‘Hang me upside-down and fuck me in both ears. You pulled yourself out of a clinical depression by being a freaking hero.’

‘We rolled and tumbled down the embanking on the Autoroute’s distant side, causing my chair to tip and injuring a stump of me, and knocking away her thick metal hat.’

‘You saved somebody’s freaking life, Ramy. I’d give my left nut for a chance to pull myself out of the shadow of the wing that way, Ramy.’

‘You are not seeing this. It was this frozen with the terror woman, she saved my life. For this saved my life. This moment broke my moribund chains, Katherine. In one instant and without thought I was allowed to choose something as more important than my thinking of my life. Her, she allowed this will without thinking. She with one blow broke the chains of the cage of pain at my half a body and nation. When I had crawled back to my fauteuil and placed my tipped fauteuil aright and I was again seated I realized the pain of inside no longer pained me. I became, then, adult. I was permitted leaving the pain of my own loss and pain at the top of Switzerland’s Mont Papineau.’

‘Because suddenly you gazed at the girl without her metal hat and felt a rush of passion and fell madly in love enough to get married and roll together off into the s—’

‘She had no skull, this woman. Later I am learning she had been among the first Swiss children of southwestern Switzerland to become born without a skull, from the toxicities in association of our enemy’s invasion on paper. Without the confinement of the metal hat the head hung from the shoulders like the half-filled balloon or empty bag, the eyes and oral cavity greatly distended from this hanging, and sounds exiting this cavity which were difficult to listen.’

‘But still, something about her moved you to fall madly in love. Her gratitude and humility and acceptance and that kind of quiet dignity really horribly handic— birth-defected people usually have.’

‘It was not mad. I had already chosen. The unclamping of the brakes of the fauteuil and schüssching to the Autoroute — this was the love. I had chosen loving her above my lost legs and this half a self.’

‘And she looked at your missing limbs and didn’t even see them and chose you right back — result: passionate love.’

‘There was for this woman in the embanking no possible choosing. Without the containing helmet all energies in her were committed to the shaping of the oral cavity in a shape that allowed breathing, which was a task of great enormity, for her head it had also neither muscles nor nerves. The special hat had found itself dented in upon one side, and I had not the ability to shape my wife’s head into a shape that I could stuff the sac of her head into the hat, and I chose to carry her over my shoulders in a high-speed rolling to the nearest Swiss hôpital specializing in deformities of grave nature. It was there I learned of the other troubles.’

‘I think I’d like a couple more Kahlua and milks.’

‘There was the trouble of the digestive tracking. There were seizures also. There were progressive decays of circulation and vessel, which calls itself restenosis. There were the more than standard accepted amounts of eyes and cavities in many different stages of development upon different parts of the body. There were the fugue states and rages and frequency of coma. She had wandered away from a public institution of Swiss charitable care. Worst for choosing to love was the cerebro-and-spinal fluids which dribbled at all times from her distending oral cavity.’

‘And but your passionate love for each other dried up her cerebro-spinal drool and ended the seizures and there were certain hats she looked so good in it just about drove you mad with love? Is that it?’

‘Garçon!’

‘Is the madly-in-love part coming up?’

‘Katherine, I had too believed there was no love without passion. Pleasure. This was part of the pain of the no legs, this fear that for me there would be no passion. The fear of the pain is many times worse than the pain of the pain, n’est ce —?’

‘Ramy I don’t think I’m like thinking this is a feel-better story at all.’

‘I tried to leave the soft-head and cerebro-spinally incontinent woman, m’épouse au future, behind at the hôpital of grave nature and to wheel off into my new life of uncaged acceptance and choice. I would roll into the fraying of battle for my despoiled nation, for now I saw the point not of winning but of choosing merely to fight. But I had travelled no more than several revolutions of the fauteuil when the old despair of before choosing this no-skull creature rose up once again inside me. Within several revolutions there was no point again and no legs, and only fear of the pain that made me not choose. Pain rolled me backwards to this woman, my wife.’

‘You’re saying this is love? This isn’t love. I’ll know when it’s love because of the way it’ll feel. It won’t be about spinal fluid and despair believe you me, Bucko. It’ll be about your eyes meet across someplace and both your knees give out and from that second forward you know you’re not going to be alone and in hell. You’re not half the guy I started to think you might have been, Ray.’

‘I had to face: I had chosen. My choice, this was love. I had chosen I think the way out of the chains of the cage. I needed this woman. Without her to choose over myself, there was only pain and not choosing, rolling drunkenly and making fantasies of death.’

‘This is love? It’s like you were chained to her. It’s like if you tried to get on with your own life the pain of the clinical depression came back. It’s like the clinical depression was a shotgun nudging you down the wedding aisle. Was there a wedding aisle? Could she even get down a wedding aisle?’

‘My wife’s wedding helmet was of the finest nickel mined and molded by friends in the nickel mines of southwest Switzerland. Each of us, we were rolled down the aisle in special conveyings. Hers with special pans and drains, for the fluids. It was the happiest day ever for me, since the train. The cleric asked did I choose this woman. There was a long time of silence. My whole very being came to a knifelike point in that instant, Katharine, my hand holding tenderly the hook of my wife.’

‘Hook? As in hand-hook?’

‘I have been knowing since the wedding night her death was coming. Her restenosis of the heart, it is irreversible. Now my Gertraude, she has been in a comatose and vegetating state for almost one year. This coma has no exit, it is said. The advanced Jaarvik IX Exterior Artificial Heart is said by the public-aid cardiologists of Switzerland to be her chance for life. With it they say my wife can live for many more years in a comatose and vegetated state.’

‘So you’re down here like pressing your case to the Jaarvik IX people at Harvard or wherever.’

‘It is for her I betray my friends and cell, the cause of my nation, which now that victory and independence of the neighbors is possible I am betraying it.’

‘You’re spying and betraying Switzerland to try and keep alive somebody with a hook and spinal fluid and no skull in an irreversible coma? And I thought / was disturbed. You’re making me totally reorient my idea of disturbed, mister.’

‘I am not telling for disturbing you, poor Katherine. I am telling of pain and saving a life, and love.’

‘Well, Ray, far be it from far for me, but that’s not love: that’s low self-esteem and self-abuse and Settling For Less, choosing a coma over your comrades. Assuming you’re even not totally lying to get me into the hay or some fucked-up disturbed sicko shit like that.’

This —’

‘Which I’ve got to tell you, saying I remind you of her isn’t exactly the way to sweep my feet off, you know what I’m saying here?’

‘This is what is hard to tell. To ask any person to see. It is no choice. It is not choosing Gertraude over the A.F.R., my companions. Over the causes. Choosing Gertraude to love as my wife was necessary for the others, these other choices. Without the choice of her life there are no other choices. I tried leaving at the commencement. I got only very few revolutions of the fauteuil.’

‘Sounds more like a gun to your head than a choice. If you can’t choose the other way, there’s no choice.’

‘No, but this choice, Katherine: I made it. It chains me, but the chains are of my choice. The other chains: no. The others were the chains of not choosing.’

‘Do you have a twin that just came in and sat down just to the left of you but is also like about one-third overlapping on you?’

‘You are merely drunk. This will happened quickly if unused to alcohol. Nausea often accompanies this. Do not be alarmed if there is visual doubling, losing balance, and nausea of the stomach.’

‘The price of a like complete normal human digestive tract. I used to throw up every morning without drinking. Rain and shine both.’

‘You think there is no love without the pleasure, the no-choice compelling of passion.’

‘I appreciate the drinks and all, but I don’t think I’m going to like memorize a lecture on love from somebody who marries somebody with cerebro-fluid spewing out of their mouth, no offense intended.’

‘As you say. My opinions are only that the love you of this country speak of yields none of the pleasure you seek in love. This whole idea of the pleasure and good feelings being what to choose. To give yourself away to. That all choice for you leads there — this pleasure of not choosing.’

‘Don’t grudge me a little feeling good, of all people, Ray, asshole, shit-puddle, Swisshead.’

‘…’

‘Is it better to throw up right away or try to wait before you throw up, Mr. Drinking Expert?’

‘I am thinking: what if I were to claim we might leave and I could lead you only three streets from here and show you something with this promise: you would feel more good feeling and pleasure than ever before for you: you would never again feel sorrow or pity or the pain of the chains and cage of never choosing. I am thinking of this offer: you would reply to me what?’

‘I voot make ze hreply zat I’ve heard that one before, asshole, and from … from guys with a little more to them south of the waist, if you follow.’

‘I do not understand.’

‘What I’d reply is I’m a shitty lay. As in sex-partner. I’ve only ever been sexual twice, and both times it was awful, and Brad Anderson when I called and said why didn’t you call again Brad Anderson you know what he said? He said I was a lousy lay and my snatch was sure awful big for somebody with such a little flat ass, Brad Anderson said.’

‘No. No. You are not understanding.’

‘That’s just what I said.’

‘You would say No Thank You, you are saying, but this is because you would not believe my claim.’

‘…’

‘If my claim, it was true, you would say yes, Katherine, no?’

‘…’

‘Yes?’

‘Now you’re not on your side anymore, Hal, I can see. When you’re on your back you don’t have a shadow.’

‘…’

‘Hey Hal?’

‘Yes, Mario.’

‘I’m sorry if you’re sad, Hal. You seem sad.’

‘I smoke high-resin Bob Hope in secret by myself down in the Pump Room off the secondary maintenance tunnel. I use Visine and mint toothpaste and shower with Irish Spring to hide it from almost everyone. Only Pemulis knows the true extent.’

‘…’

‘I’m not the one C.T. and the Moms want gone. I’m not the one they suspect. Pemulis publicly dosed his opponent at Port Washington. It was impossible to miss. The kid was a devout Mormon. The dose was impossible to miss. Sales of Visine bottles of pre-adolescent urine during quarterly tests have been noted, it turns out, and classed as a Pemulis production.’

‘Selling Visine bottles?’

‘I’d be immune to expulsion anyway, obviously, as the Moms’s relative. But I’m suspected of nothing other than ill-considered moral paralysis out there on I. Day. My urine and Axhandle’s urine are just to establish a context of objectivity for Pemulis’s urine. It’s Pemulis they want. I’m almost positive they’re going to give Pemulis the Shoe by the end of the term. I don’t know whether Pemulis knows this or not.’

‘Hey Hal?’

‘Normally they’re after steroids, endocrine synthetics, mild ‘drines, when they test. The O.N.A.N.T.A. guy gave indications this one’ll be a full-spectrum scan. Gas chromatography followed by electron-bombardment, with spectrometer readings on the resultant mass-fragments. The real McCoy. The kind the Show uses.’

‘Hey Hal?’

‘Mike stands there and says what if hypothetically somebody was downwind from substances and got exposed and so on. Claimed vague memories of a poppy-seed bagel. Not at all Pemulis’s normal rococo type of lie. This one had a kind of weary earnestness. The guy in the blazer said he’d go ahead and give us thirty days before a full-spectrum scan. Mike had pointed out that there was an enormous lady from Moment due to arrive and snuffle around, making it a really unfortunate time for any outside-chance inadvertent scandals for anybody. It was like the guy needed hardly any prodding to give us time to clean out the system. O.N.A.N.T.A. doesn’t want to catch anybody, really. Good clean fun and so on and so forth.’

‘…’

‘The ingenious layer to the lie was that the guy thought the thirty days’ grace was for Pemulis. That it was what Pemulis needed. Pemulis could pass a urine test hanging upside down in a high wind. Guy watching or not. He has a whole unpleasant catheterization technique you don’t want to hear about. He’s checked it. And Tenuates are apparently the Indy-type car of ‘drines, he says; his own urine can be all innocent and pale with two days’

warning, as long as he stays off the Bob.’

‘…’

‘Booboo, the thirty days was actually for me, and Mike let me stand there with my Unit out and not say anything while he sold the urologist land and magazine subscriptions and Ginsu knives. He did it for me, and I’m not even the one they want.’

‘You can tell me whatever you said.’

‘What I do in secret, Boo, Mike says no more than thirty days to get it all out for sure. Cranberry juice, Calli tea, vinegar in water. Plus or minus a couple days. The Bob Hope I smoke and hide, Boo, it’s fat-soluble. It stays in there, in the body’s fat.’

‘Mrs. Clarke told Bridget the human brain is high in fat, Bridget said.’

‘Mario, if I get caught. If I come up dirty-urined in front of O.N.A.N.T.A., what could C.T. do? It’s not just that I’d lose my even year in 18’s. He’d have to give me the Shoe if he’d brought O.N.A.N.T.A. into it. And what about Himself’s memory? I’m directly related to Himself. Not to mention Orin. And meanwhile here’s this Moment lady lumbering around looking for family linen.’

‘Troeltsch says she all she wants to do is soften Orin’s profile.’

‘The hideous thing is how brightly it’d come out, if I flunk a urine.

E.T.A.’ll be publicly hurt. Hence Himself’s memory, hence Himself.’

‘…’

‘And it’d kill the Moms, Mario. It’d be a terrible kertwang on the Moms. Not so much the Hope. The secrecy of it. That I hid it from her. That she’ll feel I had to hide it from her.’

‘Hey Hal?’

‘Something terrible will happen if she finds out I hid it from her.’

‘Thirty days is one calendar month of Calli tea and juice, you’re saying.’

‘Of tea and vinegar and total abstinence. Of no substances whatsoever. Of abrupt and total withdrawal while I try to justify my seed at the WhataBurger and maybe get offered up to Wayne at the Fundraiser. And then your birthday in two weeks.’

‘Hey Hal?’

‘Jesus and then the SAT’s in December, I’ll have to finish prepping for the Boards and then take the Boards while still in abrupt withdrawal.’

‘You’ll get a perfect score. Everybody’s betting you get a perfect score. I’ve heard them.’

‘Marvelous. That’s just exactly what I need to hear.’

‘Hey Hal?’

‘And of course you’re hurt, Boo, that I’ve tried to hide all of it from you.’

‘I’m zero percent hurt, Hal.’

‘And of course you’re wondering why I didn’t just tell you when of course you knew anyway, knew something, the times hanging upside-down in the weight room with a forehead Lyle didn’t even want to get near. You sitting there letting me say I was just really really tired and nightmare-ridden.’

‘I feel like you always tell me the truth. You tell me when it’s right to.’

‘Marvelous.’

‘I feel like you’re the only one who knows when it’s right to tell. I can’t know for you, so why should I be hurt.’

‘Be a fucking human being for once, Boo. I room with you and I hid it from you and let you worry and be hurt that I was trying to hide it.’

‘I wasn’t hurt. I don’t want you to be sad.’

‘You can get hurt and mad at people, Boo. News-flash at almost fucking nineteen, kid. It’s called being a person. You can get mad at somebody and it doesn’t mean they’ll go away. You don’t have to put on a Moms-act of total trust and forgiveness. One liar’s enough.’

‘You’re scared your pee might still flunk after one calendar month.’

‘Jesus it’s like talking to a big poster of some smily-faced guy. Are you in there?’

‘And you can’t use a Visine bottle of pee because the man will be right there looking at your penis, and Trevor and Pemulis’s penises.’

‘The sun’s thinking about coming up in the window. You can see it.’

‘It’s been like forty hours without Bob Hope and already I’m bats inside and I can’t sleep without more of the horror-show dreams. I feel like I’m stuck halfway down a chimney.’

‘You beat Ortho, and your toothache’s gone.’

Temulis and Axhandle say a month’ll be tit. Pemulis’s only concern is is this DMZ he got for the WhataBurger detectable. He goes to the library and pores. He’s fully alert and functional.^[321] It seems different with me, Boo. I feel a hole. It’s going to be a huge hole, in a month. A way more than Hal-sized hole.’

‘So what do you think you should do?’

‘And the hole’s going to get a little bigger every day until I fly apart in different directions. I’ll fly apart in midair. I’ll fly apart in the Lung, or at Tucson at 200 degrees in front of all these people who knew Himself and think I’m different. Whom I’ve lied to, and liked it. It’ll all come out anyway, clean pee or no.’

‘Hey Hal?’

‘And it’ll kill her. I know it will. It will kill her dead, Booboo, I’m afraid.’

‘Hey Hal? What are you going to do?’

‘…’

‘Hal?’

‘Booboo, I’m up on my elbow again. Tell me what you think I should do.’ ‘Me tell you?’

‘I’m just two big aprick ears right here, Boo. Listening. Because I do not know what to do.’

‘Hal, if I tell you the truth, will you get mad and tell me be a fucking?’

‘I trust you. You’re smart, Boo.’

Then Hal?’

‘Tell me what I should do.’

‘I think you just did it. What you should do. I think you just did.’

‘…’

‘Do you see what I mean?’