Infinite jest

Footnotes

[1] 1. Methamphetamine hydrochloride, a.k.a. crystal meth.

[2] Orin’s never once darkened the door of any sort of therapy-professional, by the way, so his takes on his dreams are always generally pretty surface-level.

[3] E.T.A. is laid out as a cardioid, with the four main inward-facing bldgs. convexly rounded at the back and sides to yield a cardioid’s curve, with the tennis courts and pavilions at the center and the staff and students’ parking lots in back of Comm.-Ad. forming the little bashed-in dent that from the air gives the whole facility the Valentine-heart aspect that still wouldn’t have been truly cardioid if the buildings themselves didn’t have their convex bulges all derived from arcs of the same r, a staggering feat given the uneven ground and wildly different electrical-and-plumbing-conduit wallspace required by dormitories, administrative offices, and polyresinous Lung, pull-offable probably by on the whole East Coast one guy, E.T.A.’s original architect, Avril’s old and very dear friend, the topology world’s closed-curve-mapping-Übermensch A.Y. (‘Vector-Field’) Rickey of Brandeis U., now deceased, who used to wow Hal and Mario in Weston by taking off his vest without removing his suit jacket, which M. Pemulis years later exposed as a cheap parlor-trick-exploitation of certain basic features of continuous functions, which revelation Hal mourned in a Santa’s-not-real type of secret way, and which Mario simply ignored, preferring to see the vest thing as plain magic.

[4] Those younger staffers who double as academic and athletic instructors are, by convention at North American tennis academies, known as ‘prorectors.’

[5] Known usually as ‘drines — i.e. lightweight speed: Cylert, Tenuate,³ Fastin, Preludin, even sometimes Ritalin. It’s worth an N.B. that, unlike Jim Troeltsch or the Preludin-happy Bridget Boone, Michael Pemulis (out of maybe some queer sort of blue-collar street-type honor) rarely ingests any ‘drines before a match, reserving them for recreation — some people are wired to find heart-pounding eye-wobbling ‘drine-stimulation recreational.

a. Tenuate’s the trade name of diethylpropion hydrochloride, Marion Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, technically a prescription antiobesity agent, favored by some athletes for its mildly euphoric and resources-rallying properties w/o the tooth-grinding and hideous post-blood-spike crash that the hairier-chested ‘drines like Fastin and Cylert inflict, though with a discomfitting tendency to cause post-spike ocular nystagmus. Nystagmus or no nystagmus, Tenuate’s a particular favorite of Michael Pemulis, who hoards for personal ingestion every 75-mg. white Tenuate capsule he can lay hands on, and does not sell or trade them, except sometimes to roommate Jim Troeltsch, who nags Pemulis for them and also goes into Pemulis’s special entrepôt-yachting-cap and promotes still more of them on the sly, a couple at a time, feeling that they help his sports-color-commentary loquacity, which secret promotions Pemulis knows about all too well, and is biding his time to retaliate, never you fear.

[6] Lightweight tranqs: Valium-III and Valrelease, good old dependable Xanax, Dai-mane, Buspar, Serax, even Halcion (legally available in Canada, unbelievably, still); with those kids inclined toward a heavier slide — reds, Meprospan, ‘Happy Patch’ transder-mals, Miltown, Stelazine, the odd injury-’scrip Darvon) never lasting for more than a couple seasons for the obvious reason that serious tranqs can make even breathing seem like too much trouble to go to, the cause of a meaty percentage of tranq-related deaths being attributed off the record by Emergency Room personnel to ‘P.S.’ or ‘Pulmonary Sloth.’

[7] Top jr. players are for the most part pretty cautious with alcohol, mostly because the physical consequences of heavy intake — like nausea and dehydration and poor hand-eye interface — make high-level performance almost impossible. Very few other standard substances have prohibitive short-term hangovers, actually, though an evening of even synthetic cocaine will make the next day’s Dawn Drills very unpleasant indeed, which is why so few of E.T.A.’s hard core do cocaine, though there’s also the issue of expense: though many E.T.A.s are the children of upscale parents, the children themselves are rarely flush with $ from home, since the gratification of pretty much every physical need is either taken care of or prohibited by E.T.A. itself. It’s maybe worth noting that the same people hardwired to enjoy recreational ‘drines also tend to gravitate toward cocaine and methedrine and other engine-revvers, while another broad class of more naturally higher-strung types tend more toward the edge-bevelling substances: tranqs, cannabis, barbiturates, and — yes — alcohol.

[8] I.e.: psylocibin; Happy Patches^a; MDMA/Xstasy (bad news, though, X); various low-tech manipulations of the benzene-ring in methoxy-class psychedelics, usually home-makable; synthetic dickies like MMDA, DMA, DMMM, 2CB, para-DOT I–VI, etc. — though note this class doesn’t and shouldn’t include CNS-rattlers like STP, DOM, the long-infamous West-U.S.-Coast ‘Grievous Bodily Harm’ (gamma hydroxybutyric acid), LSD-25 or -32, or DMZ/M.P. Enthusiasm for this stuff seems independent of neurologic type.

a. Homemade transdermals, usually MDMA or Muscimole, with DDMS or the over-counter-available DMSO as the transdermal carrier.

[9] A.k.a. LSD-25, often with a slight ‘drine kicker added, called ‘Black Star’ because in metro Boston the available acid usually comes on chip-sized squares of thin cardboard with a black stencilled star on them, all from a certain shadowy node of supply down in New Bedford. All acid and Grievous Bodily Harm, like cocaine and heroin, come into Boston mostly from New Bedford MA, which in turn gets most of its supply from Bridgeport CT, which is the true lower intestine of North America, Bridgeport, be advised, if you’ve never been through there.

[10] Like most sports academies, E.T.A. maintains the gentle fiction that 100 % of its students are enrolled at their own ambitious volition and not that of, say for instance, their parents, some of whom (tennis-parents, like the stage-mothers of Hollywood legend) are bad news indeed.

[11] An involved Arab women’s game involving little shells and a quilted gameboard — rather like mah jongg without rules, by the diplomatic and medical husbands’ estimate.

[12] Meperedine hydrochloride and pentazocine hydrochloride, Schedule C–II and C–IV^a narcotic analgesics, respectively, both from the good folks over at Sanofi Winthrop Pharm-Labs, Inc.

a. Following the Continental Controlled Substance Act of Y.T.M.P., O.N.A.N.D.E.A.’s hierarchy of analgesics/antipyretics/anxiolytics establishes drug-classes of Category-II through Category-VI, with C–II’s (e.g. Dilaudid, Demerol) being judged the heaviest w/r/t dependence and possible abuse, down to C–VTs that are about as potent as a kiss on the forehead from Mom.

[13] Though masked in the evidentiary photo and never once given up or named by Gately to anyone, this can be presumed to have been one Trent (‘Quo Vadis’) Kite, Gately’s old and once-gifted friend from his Beverly MA childhood.

[14] This A.D.A.’s little personal trademark was that he always wore an anachronistic but quality Stetson-brand businessman’s hat with a decorative feather in the band, and frequently touched or played with the hat in tense situations.

[15] The Bureau of Alcohol/Tobacco/Firearms, at that time under the temporary aegis of the United States Office of Unspecified Services.

[16] Extremely unpleasant Québecois-insurgents-and-cartridge-related subsequent developments make it clear that this was (again) Trent (‘Quo Vadis’) Kite.

[17] The codeineless kind, though — almost the first physical datum Gately took in in the nasty flashbulb-flash shock of the occupied bedroom’s light coming on, to give you an idea of an oral-narcotics man’s depth of psychic investment.

[18] On top of the seascape safe’s more negotiable contents, themselves on top of an unplugged and head-parked and absolutely top-hole genuine InterLace state-of-the-art TP/viewer ensemble in a multishelved hardwood rollable like entertainment-system-console thing, with a cartridge-dock and double-head drive in a compartment underneath with doors with classy little brass maple-leaf knob things and several shelves crammed tight with upscale arty-looking film cartridges, which latter Don Gately’s colleague just about drooled all over the parquet flooring at the potential discriminating-type-fence-value of, potentially, if they were rare or celluloid-transferred or not available on the InterLace Dissemination Grid.

[19] ‘Une Personne de I’Importance Terrible,’ presumably.

[20] Fluorescence has been banned in Quebec, as have computerized telephone solicitations, the little ad-cards that fall out of magazines and have to be looked at to be picked up and thrown in the trash, and the mention of any religious holiday whatsoever to sell any sort of product or service, is just one reason why his volunteering to come live down here was selfless.

[21] Q.v. Note 211 sub.

[22] Trade name of terfenadine, Marion Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, the tactical nuclear weapon of nondrowsy antihistamines and mucoidal desiccators.

[23] Office of Naval Research, U.S.D.D.

[24] JAMES O. INCANDENZA: A FILMOGRAPHY³

The following listing is as complete as we are able to make it. Because the twelve years of Incandenza’s directorial activity also coincided with large shifts in film venue — from public art cinemas, to VCR-capable magnetic recordings, to InterLace TelEntertainment laser dissemination and reviewable storage disk laser cartridges — and because Incandenza’s output itself comprises industrial, documentary, conceptual, advertorial, technical, parodic, dramatic noncommercial, nondramatic (‘anti-confluential’) noncommercial, nondramatic commercial, and dramatic commercial works, this filmmaker’s career presents substantive archival challenges. These challenges are also compounded by the facts that, first, for conceptual reasons, Incandenza eschewed both L. of C. registration and formal dating until the advent of Subsidized Time, secondly, that his output increased steadily until during the last years of his life Incandenza often had several works in production at the same time, thirdly, that his production company was privately owned and underwent at least four different changes of corporate name, and lastly that certain of his high-conceptual projects’ agendas required that they be titled and subjected to critique but never filmed, making their status as film subject to controversy.

Accordingly, though the works are here listed in what is considered by archivists to be their

a. From Comstock, Posner, and Duquette, The Laughing Pathologists: Exemplary Works of the Anticonfluential Après Garde: Some Analyses of the Movement Toward Stasis in North American Conceptual Film (w/ Beth B., Vivienne Dick, James O. Incandenza, Vigdis Simpson, E. and K. Snow).’ ONANite Film and Cartridge Studies Annual, vol. 8, nos. 1–3 (Year of D.P. from the A.H.), pp. 44-117.

probable order of completion, we wish to say that the list’s order and completeness are, at this point in time, not definitive.

Each work’s title is followed: by either its year of completion, or by ‘B.S.,’ designating undated completion before Subsidization; by the production company; by the major players, if credited; by the storage medium’s (‘film’ ‘s) gauge or gauges; by the length of the work to the nearest minute; by an indication of whether the work is in black and white or color or both; by an indication of whether the film is silent or in sound or both; by (if possible) a brief synopsis or critical overview; and by an indication of whether the work is mediated by celluloid film, magnetic video, Interlace Spontaneous Dissemination, TP-compatible InterLace cartridge, or privately distributed by Incandenza’s own company(ies). The designation UNRELEASED is used for those works which never saw distribution and are now publicly unavailable or lost.

Cage.^bDated only ‘Before Subsidization.’ Meniscus Films, Ltd. Uncredited cast; 16 mm.;.5 minutes; black and white; sound. Soliloquized parody of a broadcast-television advertisement for shampoo, utilizing four convex mirrors, two planar mirrors, and one actress. UNRELEASED

Kinds of Light. B.S. Meniscus Films, Ltd. No cast; 16 mm.; 3 minutes; color; silent. 4,444 individual frames, each of which photo depicts lights of different source, wavelength, and candle power, each reflected off the same unpolished tin plate and rendered disorienting at normal projection speeds by the hyperretinal speed at which they pass. CELLULOID, LIMITED METROPOLITAN BOSTON RELEASE, REQUIRES PROJECTION AT.25 NORMAL SPROCKET DRIVE

Dark Logics. B.S. Meniscus Films, Ltd. Players uncredited; 35 mm.; 21 minutes; color; silent w/ deafening Wagner/Sousa soundtrack. Griffith tribute, limura parody. Child-sized but severely palsied hand turns pages of incunabular manuscripts in mathematics, alchemy, religion, and bogus political autobiography, each page comprising some articulation or defense of intolerance and hatred. Film’s dedication to D. W. Griffith and Taka limura. UNRELEASED

Tennis, Everyone? B.S. Heliotrope Films, Ltd./U.S.T.A. Films. Documentary cast w/ narrator Judith Fukuoka-Hearn; 35 mm.; 26 minutes; color; sound. Public relations/advertorial production for United States Tennis Association in conjunction with Wilson Sporting Goods, Inc. MAGNETIC VIDEO

‘There Are No Losers Here.’ B.S. Heliotrope Films, Ltd./ U.S.T.A. Films. Documentary cast w/ narrator P. A. Heaven; 35 mm.; color; sound. Documentary on B.S. 1997 U.S.T.A. National Junior Tennis Championships, Kalamazoo MI and Miami FL, in conjunction with United States Tennis Association and Wilson Sporting Goods. MAGNETIC VIDEO

Flux in a Box. B.S. Heliotrope Films, Ltd./Wilson Inc. Documentary cast w/ narrator Judith Fukuoka-Hearn; 35 mm.; 52 minutes; black and white/color; sound. Documentary history of box, platform, lawn, and court tennis from the 17th-century Court of the Dauphin to the present. MAGNETIC VIDEO

Infinite Jest (I). B.S. Meniscus Films, Ltd. Judith Fukuoka-Hearn; 16/35 mm.; 90(?) minutes; black and white; silent. Incandenza’s unfinished and unseen first attempt at commercial entertainment. UNRELEASED

Annular Fusion Is Our Friend. B.S. Heliotrope Films, Ltd./Sunstrand Power & Light Co. Documentary cast w/ narrator C. N. Reilly; Sign-Interpreted for the Deaf; 78 mm.; 45 minutes; color; sound. Public relations/advertorial production for New England’s Sunstrand Power and Light utility, a nontechnical explanation of the processes of DT-cycle lithiumized annular fusion and its applications in domestic energy production. CELLULOID, MAGNETIC VIDEO

Annular Amplified Light: Some Reflections. B.S. Heliotrope Films/Sunstrand Power & Light

b. With the possible exception of Cage III — Free Show, Incandenza’s Cage series bears no discernible relation to Sidney Peterson’s 1947 classic, The Cage.

Co. Documentary cast w/ narrator C. N. Reilly; Sign-Interpreted for the Deaf; 78 mm.; 45 minutes; color; sound. Second infomercial for Sunstrand Co., a nontechnical explanation of the applications of cooled-photon lasers in DT-cycle lithiumized annular fusion. CELLULOID, MAGNETIC VIDEO

Union of Nurses in Berkeley. B.S. Meniscus Films, Ltd. Documentary cast; 35 mm.; 26 minutes; color; silent. Documentary and closed-caption interviews with hearing-impaired RNs and LPNs during Bay Area health care reform riots of 1996. MAGNETIC VIDEO, PRIVATELY RELEASED BY MENISCUS FILMS, LTD.

Union of Theoretical Grammarians in Cambridge. B.S. Meniscus Films, Ltd. Documentary cast; 35 mm.; 26 minutes; color; silent w/ heavy use of computerized distortion in facial close-ups. Documentary and closed-caption interviews with participants in the public Steven Pinker-Avril M. Incandenza debate on the political implications of prescriptive grammar during the infamous Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts convention credited with helping incite the M.I.T. language riots of B.S. 1997. UNRELEASED DUE TO LITIGATION

Widower. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Cosgrove Watt, Ross Reat; 35 mm.; 34 minutes; black and white; sound. Shot on location in Tucson AZ, parody of broadcast television domestic comedies, a cocaine-addicted father (Watt) leads his son (Reat) around their desert property immolating poisonous spiders. CELLULOID; INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE RERELEASE #357-75-00 (Y.P.W.)

Cage II. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Cosgrove Watt, Disney Leith; 35 mm.; 120 minutes; black and white; sound. Sadistic penal authorities place a blind convict (Watt) and a deaf-mute convict (Leith) together in ‘solitary confinement,’ and the two men attempt to devise ways of communicating with each other. LIMITED CELLULOID RUN; RERELEASED ON MAGNETIC VIDEO

Death in Scarsdale. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Cosgrove Watt, Marlon R. Bain; 78 mm.; 39 minutes; color; silent w/ closed-caption subtitles. Mann/Allen parody, a world-famous dermatological endocrinologist (Watt) becomes platonically obsessed with a boy (Bain) he is treating for excessive perspiration, and begins himself to suffer from excessive perspiration. UNRELEASED

Fun with Teeth. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Herbert G. Birch, Billy Tolan, Pam Heath; 35 mm.; 73 minutes; black and white; silent w/ non-human screams and howls. Kosinski/Updike/Peckinpah parody, a dentist (Birch) performs sixteen unanesthetized root-canal procedures on an academic (Tolan) he suspects of involvement with his wife (Heath). MAGNETIC VIDEO, PRIVATELY RELEASED BY LATRODECTUS MACTANS PROD.

Infinite Jest (II). B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Pam Heath; 35/78 mm.; 90(?) minutes; black and white; silent. Unfinished, unseen attempt at remake of Infinite Jest (I). UNRELEASED

Immanent Domain. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Cosgrove Watt, Judith Fukuoka-Hearn, Pam Heath, Pamela-Sue Voorheis, Herbert G. Birch; 35 mm.; 88 minutes; black and white w/ microphotography; sound. Three memory-neurons (Fukuoka-Hearn, Heath, Voorheis (w/ polyurethane costumes)) in the Inferior frontal gyrus of a man’s (Watt’s) brain fight heroically to prevent their displacement by new memory-neurons as the man undergoes intensive psychoanalysis. CELLULOID; INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE RERELEASE #340-03-70 (Y.P.W.)

Kinds of Pain. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Anonymous cast; 35/78 mm.; 6 minutes; color; silent. 2,222 still-frame close-ups of middle-aged white males suffering from almost every conceivable type of pain, from an ingrown toenail to cranio-facial neuralgia to inoperable colo-rectal neoplastis. CELLULOID, LIMITED METRO BOSTON RELEASE, REQUIRES PROJECTION AT.25 NORMAL SPROCKET-DRIVE

Various Small Flames. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Cosgrove Watt, Pam Heath, Ken N. Johnson; 16 mm.; 25 minutes w/ recursive loop for automatic replay; color; silent w/ sounds of human coitus appropriated from and credited to Caballero Control Corp. adult videos. Parody of neoconceptual structuralist films of Godbout and Vodriard, n-frame images of myriad varieties of small household flames, from lighters and birthday candles to stovetop gas rings and grass clippings ignited by sunlight through a magnifying glass, alternated with anti-narrative sequences of a man (Watt) sitting in a dark bedroom drinking bourbon while his wife (Heath) and an Amway representative (Johnson) have acrobatic coitus in the background’s lit hallway. UNRELEASED DUE TO LITIGATION BY I96os US CONCEPTUAL DIRECTOR OF VARIOUS SMALL FIRES ED RUSCHA — INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE RE-RELEASE #330-54-94 (Y.T.-S.D.B.)

Cage HI — Free Show. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions/Infernatron Animation Concepts, Canada. Cosgrove Watt, P. A. Heaven, Everard Maynell, Pam Heath; partial animation; 35 mm.; 65 minutes; black and white; sound. The figure of Death (Heath) presides over the front entrance of a carnival sideshow whose spectators watch performers undergo unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling that the spectators’ eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow tent the figure of Life (Heaven) uses a megaphone to invite fairgoers to an exhibition in which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable degradations, they can witness ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs. INTERLACE TELENT FEATURE CARTRIDGE #357-65-65

‘The Medusa v. the Odalisque* B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Uncredited cast; zone-plating laser holography by James O. Incandenza and Urquhart Ogilvie, Jr.; holographic fight-choreography by Kenjiru Hirota courtesy of Sony Entertainment-Asia; 78 mm.; 29 minutes; black and white; silent w/ audience-noises appropriated from network broadcast television. Mobile holograms of two visually lethal mythologic females duel with reflective surfaces onstage while a live crowd of spectators turns to stone. LIMITED CELLULOID RUN; PRIVATELY RERELEASED ON MAGNETIC VIDEO BY LATRODECTUS MACTANS PRODUCTIONS

The Machine in the Ghost: Annular Holography for Fun and Prophet. B.S. Heliotrope Films, Ltd./National Film Board of Canada. Narrator P. A. Heaven; 78 mm.; 35 minutes; color; sound. Nontechnical introduction to theories of annular enhancement and zone-plating and their applications in high-resolution laser holography. UNRELEASED DUE TO US/CANADIAN DIPLOMATIC TENSIONS

Homo Duplex. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Narrator P. A. Heaven; Super-8 mm.; 70 minutes; black and white; sound. Parody of Woititz and Shulgin’s ‘poststructural antidocu-mentaries,’ interviews with fourteen Americans who are named John Wayne but are not the legendary 20th-century film actor John Wayne. MAGNETIC VIDEO (LIMITED RELEASE)

Zero-Gravity Tea Ceremony. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Ken N. Johnson, Judith Fukuoka-Hearn, Otto Brandt, E. J. Kenkle; 35 mm.; 82 minutes; black and white/color; silent. The intricate Ocha-Kai is conducted 2.5 m. off the ground in the Johnson Space Center’s zero-gravity-simulation chamber. CELLULOID; INTERLACE TELENT RERELEASE #357-40-01 (Y.P.W.)

Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions/ Infernatron Animation Concepts, Canada. Animated w/ uncredited voices; 35 mm.; 59 minutes; color; sound. God and Satan play poker with Tarot cards for the soul of an alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman obsessed with Bernini’s ‘The Ecstasy of St. Teresa.’ PRIVATELY RELEASED ON CELLULOID AND MAGNETIC VIDEO BY LATRODECTUS MACTANS PRODUCTIONS

The Joke. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Audience as reflexive cast; 35 mm. X 2 cameras; variable length; black and white; silent. Parody of Hollis Frampton’s ‘audience-specific events,’ two Ikegami EC-35 video cameras in theater record the ‘film’ ‘s audience and project

the resultant raster onto screen — the theater audience watching itself watch itself get the obvious ‘joke’ and become increasingly self-conscious and uncomfortable and hostile supposedly comprises the film’s involuted ‘antinarrative’ flow. Incandenza’s first truly controversial project, Film & Kartridge Kultcher’s Sperber credited it with ‘unwittingly sounding the death-knell of post-poststructural film in terms of sheer annoyance.’ NONRECORDED MAGNETIC VIDEO SCREENABLE IN THEATER VENUE ONLY, NOW UNRELEASED

Various Lachrymose U.S. Corporate Middle-Management Figures. Unfinished. UNRELEASED

Every Inch of Disney Leith. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions/Medical Imagery of Alberta, Ltd. Disney Leith; computer-enlarged 35 mm./x 2 m.; 253 minutes; color; silent. Miniaturized, endoscopic, and microinvasive cameras traverse entire exterior and interior of one of Incandenza’s technical crew as he sits on a folded scrape in the Boston Common listening to a public forum on uniform North American metricization. PRIVATE RELEASE ON MAGNETIC VIDEO BY LATRODECTUS MACTANS PRODUCTIONS; INTERLACE TELENT RERELEASE #357-56-34 (Y.P.W.)

Infinite Jest (HI). B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Uncredited cast; 16/35 mm.; color; sound. Unfinished, unseen remake of Infinite Jest (I), (II). UNRELEASED

Found Drama I.

Found Drama II.

Found Drama HI…. conceptual, conceptually unfilmable. UNRELEASED

The Man Who Began to Suspect He Was Made of Glass. Year of the Whopper. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Cosgrove Watt, Gerhardt Schtitt; 35 mm.; 21 minutes; black and white; sound. A man undergoing intensive psychotherapy discovers that he is brittle, hollow, and transparent to others, and becomes either transcendentally enlightened or schizophrenic. INTERLACE TELENT FEATURE CARTRIDGE #357-59-00

Found Drama V.

Found Drama VI…. conceptual, conceptually unfilmable. UNRELEASED

The American Century as Seen Through a Brick. Year of the Whopper. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Documentary cast w/ narration by P. A. Heaven; 35 mm.; 52 minutes; color w/ red filter and oscillophotography; silent w/ narration. As U.S. Boston’s historical Back Bay streets are stripped of brick and repaved with polymerized cement, the resultant career of one stripped brick is followed, from found-art temporary installation to displacement by E.W.D. catapult to a waste-quarry in southern Quebec to its use in the F.L.Q.-incited anti-O.N.A.N. riots of January/Whopper, all intercut with ambiguous shots of a human thumb’s alterations in the interference pattern of a plucked string. PRIVATELY RELEASED ON MAGNETIC VIDEO BY LATRODECTUS MACTANS PRODUCTIONS

The ONANtiad. Year of the Whopper. Latrodectus Mactans Productions/Claymation action sequences © Infernatron Animation Concepts, Canada. Cosgrove Watt, P. A. Heaven, Pam Heath, Ken N. Johnson, Ibn-Said Chawaf, Squyre Frydell, Maria-Dean Chumm, Herbert G. Birch, Everard Meynell; 35 mm.; 76 minutes; black and white/color; sound/silent. Oblique, obsessive, and not very funny claymation love triangle played out against live-acted backdrop of the inception of North American Interdependence and Continental Reconfiguration. PRIVATELY RELEASED ON MAGNETIC VIDEO BY LATRODECTUS MACTANS PRODUCTIONS

The Universe Lashes Out. Year of the Whopper. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Documentary cast w/ narrator Herbert G. Birch; 16 mm.; 28 minutes; color; silent w/ narration. Documentary on the evacuation of Atkinson NH/New Quebec at the inception of Continental Reconfiguration. MAGNETIC VIDEO (LIMITED RELEASE)

Poultry in Motion. Year of the Whopper. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Documentary cast w/ narrator P. A. Heaven; 16 mm.; 56 minutes; color; silent w/ narration. Documentary on renegade North Syracuse NNY turkey farmers’ bid to prevent toxification of Thanksgiving crop by commandeering long, shiny O.N.A.N. trucks to transplant over 200,000 pertussive fowl south to Ithaca. MAGNETIC VIDEO (LIMITED RELEASE)

Found Drama IX.

Found Drama X.

Found Drama XL … conceptual, conceptually unfilmable. UNRELEASED

Möbiu$ Strips. Year of the Whopper. Lactrodectus Mactans Productions. ‘Hugh G. Rection,’ Pam Heath, ‘Bunny Day,’ ‘Taffy Appel’; 35 mm.; 109 minutes; black and white; sound. Pornography-parody, possible parodic homage to Fosse’s All That Jazz, in which a theoretical physicist (‘Rection’), who can only achieve creative mathematical insight during coitus, conceives of Death as a lethally beautiful woman (Heath). INTERLACE TELENT FEATURE CARTRIDGE #357-65-32 (Y.W.)

Wave Eye-Eye to the Bureaucrat. Year of the Whopper. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Everard Maynell, Phillip T. Smothergill, Paul Anthony Heaven, Pamela-Sue Voorheis; 16 mm.; 19 minutes; black and white; sound. Possible parody/homage to B.S. public-service-announcement cycle of Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints,^c a harried commuter is mistaken for Christ by a child he knocks over.

Blood Sister: One Tough Nun. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Telma Hurley, Pam Heath, Maria-Dean Chumm, Diane Saltoone, Soma Richardson-Levy, Cosgrove Watt; 35 mm.; 90 minutes; color; sound. Parody of revenge/recidivism action genre, a formerly delinquent nun’s (Hurley’s) failure to reform a juvenile delinquent (Chumm) leads to a rampage of recidivist revenge. INTERLACE TELENT PULSE-DISSEMINATION 21 JULY Y.T.M.P., CARTRIDGE #357-87-04

Infinite Jest (IV). Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Pam Heath (?), ‘Madame Psychosis’(?); 78 mm.; 90 minutes(?); color; sound. Unfinished, unseen attempt at completion of Infinite Jest (HI). UNRELEASED

Let There Be Lite. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Documentary cast w/ narrator Ken N. Johnson; 16mm.; 50 minutes(?); black and white; silent w/ narration. Unfinished documentary on genesis of reduced-calorie bourbon industry. UNRELEASED

Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED

No Troy. Year of the Whopper. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. No cast; liquid-surface holography by Urquhart Ogilvie, Jr.; 35 mm.; 7 minutes; enhanced color; silent. Scale-model holographic recreation of Troy NY’s bombardment by miscalibrated Waste Displacement Vehicles, and its subsequent elimination by O.N.A.N. cartographers. MAGNETIC VIDEO (PRIVATE RELEASE LIMITED TO NEW BRUNSWICK, ALBERTA, QUEBEC) Note: Archivists in Canada and the U.S. West Coast do not list No Troy but do list titles The Violet City and The Violet Ex-City, respectively, leading scholars to conclude that the same film was released under several different appellations.

Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED

Valuable Coupon Has Been Removed. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Enter-

c. See Romney and Sperber, ‘Has James O. Incandenza Ever Even Once Produced One Genuinely Original or Unappropriated or Nonderivative Thing?’ Post-Millennium Film Cartridge Journal, nos. 7–9 (Fall/Winter, Y.P.W.), pp. 4-26.

tainment Unlimited. Cosgrove Watt, Phillip T. Smothergill, Diane Saltoone; 16 mm.; 52 minutes; color; silent. Possible Scandinavian-psychodrama parody, a boy helps his alcoholic-delusional father and disassociated mother dismantle their bed to search for rodents, and later he intuits the future feasibility of D.T.-cycle lithiumized annular fusion. CELLULOID (UNRE-LEASED)

Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Documentary or uncredited cast w/ narrator P. A. Heaven; 16 mm.; 45 minutes; black and white; sound. Children and adolescents play a nearly incomprehensible nuclear strategy game with tennis equipment against the real or holographic(?) backdrop of sabotaged ATHSCME 1900 atmospheric displacement towers exploding and toppling during the New New England Chemical Emergency of Y.W. CELLULOID (UNRELEASED)

Stand Behind the Men Behind the Wire. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Documentary cast w/ narrator Soma Richardson-Levy; Super-8 mm.; 52 minutes; black and white/color; sound. Shot on location north of Lowell MA, documentary on Essex County Sheriff’s Dept. and Massachusetts Department of Social Services’ expedition to track, verify, capture, or propitiate the outsized feral infant alleged to have crushed, gummed, or picked up and dropped over a dozen residents of Lowell in January, Y.T.M.P. INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE #357-12-56

As of Yore. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Cosgrove Watt, Marlon Bain; 16/78 mm.; 181 minutes; black and white/color; sound. A middle-aged tennis instructor, preparing to instruct his son in tennis, becomes intoxicated in the family’s garage and subjects his son to a rambling monologue while the son weeps and perspires. INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE # 357-16-09

The Clever Little Bastard. Unfinished, unseen. UNRELEASED

The Cold Majesty of the Numb. Unfinished, unseen. UNRELEASED

Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms That Utilize Every Centimeter of Available Space With Mind-Boggling Efficiency. Unfinished due to hospitalization. UNRELEASED

Low-Temperature Civics. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Cosgrove Watt, Herbert G. Birch, Ken N. Johnson, Soma Richardson-Levy, Everard Maynell, ‘Madame Psychosis,’ Phillip T. Smothergill, Paul Anthony Heaven; 35 mm.; 80 minutes; black and white; sound. Wyler parody in which four sons (Birch, Johnson, Maynell, Smothergill) intrigue for control of a sandwich-bag conglomerate after their CEO father (Watt) has an ecstatic encounter with Death (‘Psychosis’) and becomes irreversibly catatonic. NATIONAL DISSEMINATION IN INTERLACE TELENT’S ‘CAVALCADE OF EVIL’ SERIES — JANUARY/YEAR OF TRIAL-SIZE DOVE BAR — AND INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE #357-89-05

(At Least) Three Cheers for Cause and Effect. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Cosgrove Watt, Pam Heath, ‘Hugh G. Rection’; 78 mm.; 26 minutes; black and white; sound. The headmaster of a newly constructed high-altitude sports academy (Watt) becomes neurotically obsessed with litigation over the construction’s ancillary damage to a V.A. hospital far below, as a way of diverting himself from his wife’s (Heath’s) poorly hidden affair with the academically renowned mathematical topologist who is acting as the project’s architect (‘Rection’). CELLULOID (UNRELEASED)

(The) Desire to Desire. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Robert Lingley, ‘Madame Psychosis,’ Maria-Dean Chumm; 35 mm.; 99 minutes(?); black and white; silent. A pathology resident (Lingley) falls in love with a beautiful cadaver (‘Psychosis’) and the paralyzed sister (Chumm) she died rescuing from the attack of an oversized feral infant. Listed by some archivists as unfinished. UNRELEASED

Safe Boating Is No Accident. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad(?). Poor Yorick Entertainment

Unlimited/X-Ray and Infrared Photography by Shuco-Mist Medical Pressure Systems, Enfield MA. Ken N. Johnson, ‘Madame Psychosis,’ P. A. Heaven. Kierkegaard/Lynch (?) parody, a claustrophobic water-ski instructor (Johnson), struggling with his romantic conscience after his fiancee’s (‘Psychosis”s) face is grotesquely mangled by an outboard propeller, becomes trapped in an overcrowded hospital elevator with a defrocked Trappist monk, two overcombed mis-sionarjes for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, an enigmatic fitness guru, the Massachusetts State Commissioner for Beach and Water Safety, and seven severely intoxicated opticians with silly hats and exploding cigars. Listed by some archivists as completed the following year, Y.T.-S.D.B. UNRELEASED

Very Low Impact. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Maria-Dean Chumm, Pam Heath, Soma Richardson-Levy-O’Byrne; 35 mm.; 30 minutes; color; sound. A narcoleptic aerobics instructor (Chumm) struggles to hide her condition from students and employers. POSTHUMOUS RELEASE Y.W.-Q.M.D.; INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE * 357-97-29

The Night Wears a Sombrero. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad (?). Ken N. Johnson, Phillip T. Smothergill, Dianne Saltoone, ‘Madame Psychosis’; 78 mm.; 105 minutes; color; silent/sound. Parody/homage to Lang’s Rancho Notorious, a nearsighted apprentice cowpoke (Smothergill), swearing vengeance for a gunslinger’s (Johnson’s) rape of what he (the cowpoke) mistakenly believes is the motherly brothel-owner (Saltoone) he (the cowpoke) is secretly in love with, loses the trail of the gunslinger after misreading a road sign and is drawn to a sinister Mexican ranch where Oedipally aggrieved gunslingers are ritually blinded by a mysterious veiled nun (‘Psychosis’). Listed by some archivists as completed the preceding year, Y.W. INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE #357-56-51

Accomplice! Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Cos-grove Watt, Stokely ‘Dark Star’ McNair; 16 mm.; 26 minutes; color; sound. An aging pederast mutilates himself out of love for a strangely tattooed street hustler. INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE # 357-10-10 withdrawn from dissemination after Cartridge Scene reviewers called Accomplice! ‘… the stupidest, nastiest, least subtle and worst-edited product of a pretentious and wretchedly uneven career.’ NOW UNRELEASED

Entitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED

Dial C for Concupiscence. Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Soma Richardson-Levy-O’Byrne, Maria-Dean Chumm, Ibn-Said Chawaf, Yves Fran-coeur; 35 mm.; 122 minutes; black and white; silent w/ subtitles. Parodic noir-style tribute to Bresson’s Les Anges du Peché, a cellular phone operator (Richardson-Levy-O’Byrne), mistaken by a Québecois terrorist (Francoeur) for another cellular phone operator (Chumm) the FLQ had mistakenly tried to assassinate, mistakes his mistaken attempts to apologize as attempts to assassinate her (Richardson-Levy-O’Byrne) and flees to a bizarre Islamic religious community whose members communicate with each other by means of semaphore flags, where she falls in love with an armless Near Eastern medical attache (Chawaf). RELEASED IN INTERLACE TELENT’S ‘HOWLS FROM THE MARGIN’ UNDERGROUND FILM SERIES — MARCH/ Y.T.-S.D.B. — AND INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE #357-75-43

Insubstantial Country. Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Cosgrove Watt; 16 mm.; 30 minutes; black and white; silent/sound. An unpopular après-garde filmmaker (Watt) either suffers a temporal lobe seizure and becomes mute or else is the victim of everyone else’s delusion that his (Watt’s) temporal lobe seizure has left him mute. PRIVATE CARTRIDGE RELEASE BY POOR YORICK ENTERTAINMENT UNLIMITED

It Was a Great Marvel That He Was in the Father Without Knowing Him. Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Cosgrove Watt, Phillip T. Smothergill;

16 mm.; 5 minutes; black and white; silent/ sound. A father (Watt), suffering from the delusion that his etymologically precocious son (Smothergill) is pretending to be mute, poses as a ‘professional conversationalist’ in order to draw the boy out. RELEASED IN INTERLACE TELENT’S ‘HOWLS FROM THE MARGIN’ UNDERGROUND FILM SERIES — MARCH/ Y.T.-S.D.B — AND INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE #357-75-50

Cage IV— Web. Unfinished. UNRELEASED Cage V–Infinite Jim. Unfinished. UNRELEASED Death and the Single Girl. Unfinished. UNRELEASED.

The Film Adaptation of Peter Weiss’s ‘The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.’Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. James O. Incan-denza, Disney Leith, Urquhart Ogilvie, Jr., Jane Ann Prickett, Herbert G. Birch, ‘Madame Psychosis,’ Maria-Dean Chumm, Marlon Bain, Pam Heath, Soma Richardson-Levy-O’Byrne-Chawaf, Ken N. Johnson, Dianne Saltoone; Super-8 mm.; 88 minutes; black and white; silent/ sound. Fictional ‘interactive documentary’ on Boston stage production of Weiss’s 20th-century play within play, in which the documentary’s chemically impaired director (Incandenza) repeatedly interrupts the inmates’ dumbshow-capering and Marat and Sade’s dialogues to discourse incoherently on the implications of Brando’s Method Acting and Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty for North American filmed entertainment, irritating the actor who plays Marat (Leith) to such an extent that he has a cerebral hemorrhage and collapses onstage well before Marat’s scripted death, whereupon the play’s nearsighted director (Ogilvie), mistaking the actor who plays Sade (Johnson) for Incandenza, throws Sade into Marat’s medicinal bath and throttles him to death, whereupon the extra-dramatic figure of Death (‘Psychosis’) descends deus ex machina to bear Marat (Leith) and Sade (Johnson) away, while Incandenza becomes ill all over the theater audience’s first row. 8 MM. SYNC-PROJECTION CELLULOID. UNRELEASED DUE TO LITIGATION, HOSPITALIZATION

Too Much Fun. Unfinished. UNRELEASED

The Unfortunate Case of Me. Unfinished. UNRELEASED

Sorry All Over the Place. Unfinished. UNRELEASED

Infinite Jest (Vï). Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. ‘Madame Psychosis’; no other definitive data. Thorny problem for archivists. Incandenza’s last film, Incandenza’s death occurring during its post-production. Most archival authorities list as unfinished, unseen. Some list as completion of Infinite Jest (IV), for which Incandenza also used ‘Psychosis,’ thus list the film under Incandenza’s output for Y.T.M.P. Though no scholarly synopsis or report of viewing exists, two short essays in different issues of Cartridge Quarterly East refer to the film as ‘extraordinary’^d and ‘far and away [James O. Incandenza’s] most entertaining and compelling work.’^e West Coast archivists list the film’s gauge as ‘16 … 78 … n mm.,’ basing the gauge on critical allusions^f to ‘radical experiments in viewers’ optical perspective and context’ as IJ(Vì)’s distinctive feature. Though Canadian archivist Tête-Bêche lists the film as completed and privately distributed by P.Y.E.U. through posthumous provisions in the filmmaker’s will, all other comprehensive filmographies have the film either unfinished or UNRELEASED, its Master cartridge either destroyed or vaulted sui testator.

d. E. Duquette, ‘Beholden to Vision: Optics and Desire in Four Après Garde Films,’ Cartridge Quarterly East, vol. 4 no. 2, Y.W.-Q.M.D., pp. 35–39.

e. Anonymous, ‘Seeing v. Believing,’ Cartridge Quarterly East, vol. 4 no. 4, Y.W.-Q.M.D., pp. 93–95.

f. Ibid.

[25] More like July-October, actually.

[26] Synthetically enhanced enkephalin, an opiate-like pentapeptide or so-called endor-phin manufactured in the human spine, one of the compounds prominently involved in the infamous ‘CadaverGate’ scandal that brought down so many funeral directors in the Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken.

[27] Metro Boston subdialectical argot — origin unknown — for cannabis, pot, grass, du-Bois, dope, ganja, bhang, herb, hash, m. jane, kif, etc.; with ‘Bing Crosby’ designating cocaine and organic methoxies (‘drines), and — inexplicably — ‘Doris’ standing for synthetic dickies, psychs, and phenyls.

[28] Monoamine-oxidase inhibitors, a venerable class of antidepressants/anxiolytics, of which Parnate — SmithKline Beecham’s product-name for tranylcypromine sulfate — is a member. Zoloft is sertraline hydrochloride, a serotonin-reuptake-inhibitor (SRI) not all that dissimilar to Prozac, manufactured by Pfizer-Roerig.

[29] Electro-Convulsive Therapy.

[30] A neutral boric acid eyewash, a kind of turbo-charged Visine, available over-counter from Wyeth Labs, with its own eye-cup of apothecary-blue plastic that’s downright gorgeous when held up to a window’s light.

[31] Schtitt’s term for Mr. A. deLint, which means technically ‘soulmate’ or ‘spouse’ but isn’t meant at all sexually w/r/t deLint, we can rest assured.

[32] Roughly, ‘They Can Kill You, But the Legalities of Eating You Are Quite a Bit Dicier.’

[33] I.e., ‘Before Subsidization’ or the beginning of the subsidized O.N.A.N.ite lunar calendar under President Gentle; see sub.

[34] A.k.a. ‘E.L.D.,’ that still-green shoot off the pure branch of math that deals with systems and phenomena whose chaos is beyond even Mandelbrotian math’s Strange Equations and Random Attractants, a delimiting reaction against the Chaos Theories of fractal-happy meteorologists and systems analysts, E.L.D., whose post-GÖdelian theorems and nonexistence proofs amount to extremely lucid and elegant admissions of defeat in certain cases, hands thrown up w/ complete deductive justification. Incandenza, whose frustrated interest in grand-scale failure was unflagging through four different careers, would have been all over Extra-Linear Dynamics like white on rice, had he survived.

[35] I.e., presumably, ‘of-Georg-Cantor,’ Cantor being a!9OOs-era set-theorist (German also) and more or less founder of transfinite mathematics, the man who proved some infinities were bigger than other infinities, and whose 1905-ish Diagonal Proof demonstrated that there can be an infinity of things between any two things no matter how close together the two things are, which D. Proof deeply informed Dr. J. Incandenza’s sense of the transstatistical aesthetics of serious tennis.

[36] Low-Bavarian for something like ‘wandering alone in blasted disorienting territory beyond all charted limits and orienting markers,’ supposedly.

[37] Wheelchair.

[38] Ghostly light- and monster-shadow phenomenon particular to certain mountains; e.g. q.v. Part I of Goethe’s Faust, the Walpurgisnacht six-toed danceathon on the Harz-Bröcken, in which there’s described a classic ‘Bröckengespenstphänom.’ (Gespenst means specter or wraith.)

[39] Marathe’s superior in the A.F.R.,^a the leader of the Wheelchair Assassins’ U.S.A. cell, and the former boyhood friend of Rémy Marathe’s late older brothers, both struck and killed by trains.^b

a. Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, a.k.a. Wheelchair Assassins, pretty much Quebec’s most dreaded and rapacious anti-O.N.A.N. terrorist cell.

b. See Note 304 sub.

[40] In other words, M. Fortier and the A.F.R. (as far as Marathe knew) believed that Marathe was functioning as a kind of ‘triple agent’ or duplicitous ‘double agent’ — at Fortier’s direction, Marathe had pretended to approach B.S.S. seeking to trade knowledge of the A.F.R.’s anti-O.N.A.N. activities for protection and medical care for his hideously ill wife (Marathe’s) — only (as far as Marathe can know) Marathe and very few B.S.S. operatives know that Marathe is now only pretending to pretend to betray, that M. Steeply is fully aware that Marathe responds to B.S.S.’s summonses with what M. Fortier believes is his (Fortier’s) full knowledge, that M. Fortier is not (as far as Marathe and Steeply can reasonably posit) aware that Steeply and B.S.S. are aware that Fortier is aware of Marathe’s meetings with Steeply, and that Marathe’s own violent death will be the smallest of his (Marathe’s) problems should his Mont-Tremblant countrymen come to suspect the even-numbered total of his final loyalties.

[41] Intra-O.N.A.N. sobriquet for ‘acting as a double agent’; similarly w/ ‘tripling,’ and so on.

[42] The ‘thing of important’ seems to be that Marathe’s A.F.R. superiors believe he only is pretending to betray them in order to secure advanced U.S. cardiac-prosthetic technology for his wife; but that in fact he really is betraying them (the superiors, his country) — probably actually for that medical tech — and is thus only pretending only to pretend.

[43] Chronic inflammation of the terminal ileum and adjacent tissues, named in dubious honor of a Dr. Crohn in B.S. 1932.

[44] Professional euphemism for involuntary interrogation, either w/ or w/o physical inducements.

[45] See Note 304 sub.

[46] Over-the-counter topical stuff for the corticatization of skin, tincture of benzoin facilitates the development of the kinds of callus that don’t get blood-blisters underneath. Way more common and universal among serious players than Lemon Pledge. Finding the smell of t. of b. nauseous, some junior players prefer an applied layer of corn starch or baby powder, which makes the t. of b. easier to wash off later but also leaves weird little white fingerprints over everything you touch.

[47] Le Front de la Liberation de la Quebec, rather a younger and rowdier and less implacably businesslike cell than the A.F.R., and symbolically adopting certain cultural customs, musics and motifs associated with Hawaii, supposedly an ironic nod to the idea that Quebec is now, too, a kind of annex or territory of the U.S., a Canadian province only on paper, and separated from its real captor-nation by distances of space and culture that are unbridgeable.

[48] The progressive asymmetrical narrowing of one or more cardiac sinuses; can be either atherosclerotic or neoplastic; rare before continental Interdependence; now the third-leading cause of death among adults of Quebec and New Brunswick and the seventh among adults of the Northeastern U.S.A.; associated with chronic low-level exposure to 2,3,7,8 Tetrachlorodibenzo-P-Di- and — Trioxin compounds.

[49] Redundancy sic.

[50] Said galoots also known, in the old founder’s AA circle, Enfield MA’s White Flag Group, as ‘The Crocodiles.’

[51] Syntax sic, which had helped drive Mrs. Avril Incandenza — her Op-Ed letters and formal complaints apparently ignored at every political level — to help found the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts, ever since a bramble in the flank of advertisers, corporations, and all fast-and-loose-players with the integrity of public discourse — see sub.

[52] The Gas Chromatography/Mass Spectometry scan uses particle-bombardment and a positive-ion read by a spectrometer. It’s the mid-range test of choice for corporations and athletic bodies, way less expensive than chromosomatic breakdowns of hair samples, but — as long as environmental controls on the hardware’re strictly observed — more comprehensive and reliable than the older E.M.I.T. and AbuScreen/RIA urine tests.

[53] Eschaton is a real-participant and tennis-court-modified version of the EndStat® ROM-run nuclear-conflagration game.

[54] Viz. Prescriptive Grammar (Grade 10), Descriptive Grammar (11), Grammar and Meaning (12).

[55] Hal, who personally thinks the term that’d apply here would be suborned, not entrapped — unless the caller were himself a police officer — keeps his own counsel on this point and basically goes along to get along.

[56] or PMA, Grievous Bod., nutmeg’s myristicin, or Hawaiian baby-woodrose seeds’ ergine, or the African iboga’s ibogaine, the yagé’s harmaline … or the fly agaric fungus’s well-known muscimole, which fitviavi’s derived DMZ resembles chemically sort of the way an F-18 resembles a Piper Cub…

[57] Ingesters’ accounts of the temporal-perception consequences of DMZ in the literature are, as far as Pemulis is concerned, vague and inelegant and more like mystical in the Tibetan-Dead-Book vein than rigorous or referentially clear; one account Pemulis doesn’t completely get but can at least get the neuro-titillating gist of is one monograph’s toss-off quote from an Italian lithographer who’d ingested DMZ once and made a lithograph comparing himself on DMZ to a piece of like Futurist sculpture, plowing at high knottage through time itself, kinetic even in stasis, plowing temporally ahead, with time coming off him like water in sprays and wakes.

[58] Certified (by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) Substance Abuse Counselor.

[59] Oxycodone hydrochloride w/ acetaminophen, C–II Class, Du Pont Pharmaceuticals.

[60] Replacing the old neo-Georgian J. A. Stratton Student Center, right off Mass. Ave. and gutted with C4 during the so-called M.I.T. Language Riots of twelve years past.

[61] An après-garde digital movement, a.k.a. ‘Digital Parallelism’ and ‘Cinema of Chaotic Stasis,’ characterized by a stubborn and possibly intentionally irritating refusal of different narrative lines to merge into any kind of meaningful confluence, the school derived somewhat from both the narrative bradykineticism of Antonioni and the disassociative formalism of Stan Brakhage and Hollis Frampton, comprising periods in the careers of the late Beth B., the Snow brothers, Vigdis Simpson, and the late J. O. Incandenza (middle period).

[62] At the zenith of the self-help-group movement in the B.S. mid-1990s, there were estimated to be over 600 wholly distinct Step-based fellowships in the U.S.A., all modelled, however heretically or flakily, on the ‘12 Steps’ of Alcoholics Anonymous. By Y.D.A.U., the number has dropped to about one-third of that.

[63] (the student engineer’s analogy)

[64] Not 100 % clear on this, but the thrust is that the T and Q are the two basic courses of study leading historically to the like 18th-century equivalent of a H.S. diploma and a B.A., or maybe M.A., respectively, at nodes of hoary classicality like Oxford and Cambridge U. during the time of Samuel Johnson — more or less the original grammato-lexical-and-pedagogical hard-ass — and that the trivium makes you take grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and then if you’re still standing you get the quadrivium of math, geometry, astronomy, and music, and that none of the classes — including the potentially lightweight astronomy and music — were in fact lightweight, which is one possible reason why the portraits of all these classical and neo-classical B.A.s and D.Phil.s at Oxford and Cambridge look so pale and wasted and haunted and grim. Not to mention that the only day E.T.A.s get off classes is Sunday, partly to make up for how much they’re away from the classroom on trips; and back at E.T.A. classless Sunday is a three-session day on the courts, all of which strikes people outside academies as almost fanatically brutal. For more general pedagogy here see P. Beesley’s somewhat frumpy and dated B.S.-era Revival of the Humanities in American Education, or better yet Dr. A. M. Incandenza’s updated version of same, with its prose updated and typos eradicated and argument rather more keenly honed, available on CD-ROM through InterLace @cornup3.COM or in trade paperback from Cornell University Press, 3rd edition © Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad.

[65] E.T.A.s’ moniker for the Headmaster’s House.

[66] Some M.I.T.s are compulsive about taping the shows and then listening to the musics again and trying to track them down in stores and college archives, not unlike the way some of their parents had killed whole evenings trying to parse out the lyrics on R.E.M. and Pearl Jam tapes, etc.

[67] A couple of the Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital Security officers know E.T.A.’s Hal Incandenza from having met his brother Mario when James O. Incandenza had hired the officers as lineless figurant background-extra cops for both Dial C for Concupiscence and Three Cheers for Cause and Effect. The E.M. officers are sometimes down in The Unexamined Life tavern on Blind Bouncer nights when Hal is in there with like Axford, Hal hitting The Life quite a bit less frequently than Axford and Struck and Troeltsch, who rarely miss a Bring-Your-Braille-I.D. theme-night at The Unexamined Life, and seem able to function during A.M. drills even after several parasolled Mudslides or the House-Specialty Blue Flame cognac-based things you have to blow out before sipping from their huge blue-rimmed snifters. The E.M. cops are both young dim big good regular blue(literally)-collar Boston guys, high-school tackles now going soft, their jowls razor-burned and purpling with gin, and they’ll sometimes regale the E.T.A.s w/r/t some of the more colorful E.M. specimens they’re paid to keep secure. There’s something a little compulsive about the cops’ particular interest in #5 chronic catatonics, especially. The E.M. cops call Unit #5 ‘The Shed,’ they say, because its residents don’t seem housed there so much as more like stored there. The E.M. cops pronounce stored ‘stew-wad.’ The chronic catatonics themselves they refer to as ‘objay darts,’ which is something else Don G. over in #6 has never understood. Over Mudslides, they’ll often give little thumbnail anecdotes about various of The Shed’s objay darts, and one of the reasons why they regale the E.T.A.s only when Hal’s down there at The Unexamined Life is that Hal is the only E.T.A. who seems truly interested, which is the sort of thing your veteran off-duty cop can always sense. E.g. one of the objay darts they’re into is the lady who sits very still with her eyes closed. The cops explain that the lady is not catatonic in the strict sense of catatonic but rather a ‘D.P.,’ which is mental-health-facility slang for Debilitatingly Phobic. Her deal is apparently that she’s almost psychotically terrified of the possibility that she might be either blind or paralyzed or both. So e.g. she keeps her eyes shut tight 24/7/365 out of the reasoning that as long as she keeps her eyes shut tight she can find hope in the possibility that if she was to open them she’d be able to see, they say; but that if she were ever to actually open her eyes and actually not be able to see, she reasons, she’s lost that precious like margin of hope that she’s maybe not blind. Then they run through her similar reasoning behind sitting absolutely motionless out of a phobia of being paralyzed. After each anecdote-tale like (they’ve got like an anecdote-routine, the E.M. cops), the shorter E.M. Security officer always uses his tongue to manipulate the little green parasol from one side of his mouth to the other as he holds his snifter tight in both hands and makes his jowls accordionize as he nods and posits that the terrifying thing is that the common unifying symptom of most of The Shed’s objay darts is a terror so terrifying it makes the object of the terror come true, somehow, which observation always makes both of the big dim workingmen shiver an identical and kind of almost delicious-looking shiver, pushing their hats back and shaking their heads at their glasses, as Hal blows out the fire of the second Blue Flame they’ve bought him, making a wish before he blows.

[68] Freer’s ‘The Viking’ moniker is his own invention, and nobody else uses it, instead referring to him as just ‘Freer,’ and regarding it as a classic pathetic Freer-type move that he goes around trying to get people to refer to him as The Viking.’

[69] NA = Narcotics Anonymous; CA = Cocaine Anonymous. In some cities there are also Psychedelics Anonymous, Nicotine Anonymous (also, confusingly, called NA), Designer Drugs Anonymous, Steroids Anonymous, even (especially in and around Manhattan) something called Prozac Anonymous. In none of these Anonymous fellowships anywhere is it possible to avoid confronting the God stuff, eventually.

[70] Not to mention, according to some hard-line schools of 12-Step thought, yoga, reading, politics, gum-chewing, crossword puzzles, solitaire, romantic intrigue, charity work, political activism, N.R.A. membership, music, art, cleaning, plastic surgery, cartridge-viewing even at normal distances, the loyalty of a fine dog, religious zeal, relentless helpfulness, relentless other-folks’-moral-inventory-taking, the development of hard-line schools of 12-Step thought, ad darn near infinitum, including 12-Step fellowships themselves, such that quiet tales sometimes go around the Boston AA community of certain incredibly advanced and hard-line recovering persons who have pared away potential escape after potential escape until finally, as the stories go, they end up sitting in a bare chair, nude, in an unfurnished room, not moving but also not sleeping or meditating or abstracting, too advanced to stomach the thought of the potential emotional escape of doing anything whatsoever, and just end up sitting there completely motion- and escape-less until a long time later all that’s found in the empty chair is a very fine dusting of off-white ashy stuff that you can wipe away completely with like one damp paper towel.

[71] The Boston AA slogan w/r/t this phenomenon is ‘You Can’t Unring a Bell.’

[72] About which Pakistani manager and his ancestry and ratty little mustache and officious management style McDade has a colorful thing or two to say, boy.

[73] One of the graduate prorectors’ little tasks is supposedly to go around to different Subdorm floors and check the rooms for things like are the beds made up drum-tight, with unpleasant little extra drills added to the regimens of bed-making and toothpaste-cap-replacing slackers, though few of the prorectors have the combination anality and drive actually to go around to their assigned rooms with a checklist, the exceptions being Aubrey deLint, Mary Esther Thode, and the hatchet-faced Kenyan Tony Nwangi, who’s got the Pemulis/Troeltsch/Schacht suite under extremely beady scrutiny at all times.

[74] Davis Cup is male, Wightman female.

[75] Hal’s private dread is that Tavis will want him to offer up his personal competitive map and dignity to John (‘N.R.’) Wayne — who’s never in several matches lost more than three games in a set to Hal — for the titillation of the alumni and patrons at the November Fundraiser-gala’s exhibitions, though this is pretty unlikely right before the What-aBurger, when Hal’ll be apt to face Wayne in the semis anyway, and Schtitt isn’t apt to want an utter demapping that fresh in Hal’s mind right before a major event.

[76] Hal Incandenza had been thought for a while as a toddler to have some sort of Attention Deficit Disorder — partly because he read so fast and spent so little time on each level of various pre-CD-ROM video games, partly because just about any upscale kid even slightly to port or starboard of the bell curve’s acme was thought at that time to have A.D.D. — and for a while there’d been a certain amount of specialist-shuttling, and many of the specialists were veterans of Mario and were preconditioned to see Hal as also damaged, but thanks to the diagnostic savvy of Brandeis’s Child Development Center the damage assessments were not only retracted but reversed way out to the other side of the Damaged-to-Gifted continuum, and for much of the glabrous part of his childhood Hal’d been classified as somewhere between ‘Borderline Gifted’ and ‘Gifted’ — though part of this high cerebral rank was because B.C.D.C.’s diagnostic tests weren’t quite so keen when it came to distinguishing between raw neural gifts and the young Hal’s mono-maniacally obsessive interest and effort, as if Hal were trying as if his very life were in the balance to please some person or persons, even though no one had ever even hinted that his life depended on seeming gifted or precocious or even exceptionally pleasing — and when he’d committed to memory entire dictionaries and vocab-check software and syntax manuals and then had gotten some chance to recite some small part of what he’d pounded into his RAM for a proudly nonchalant mother or even a by-this-time-as-far-as-he-was-concerned-pretty-much-out-there father, at these times of public performance and pleasure — the Weston MA School District in the early B.S. 1990s had had interschool range-of-reading-and-recall spelling-beeish competitions called ‘Battle of the Books,’ which these were for Hal pretty much of a public turkey-shoot and approval-fest — when he’d extracted what was desired from memory and faultlessly pronounced it before certain persons, he’d felt almost that same pale sweet aura that an LSD afterglow conferred, some milky corona, like almost a halo of approved grace, made all the milkier by the faultless nonchalance of a Moms who made it clear that his value was not contingent on winning first or even second prize, ever.

[77] Granted, Pemulis, over the summer (he boards at E.T.A. during the summer but hasn’t qualified for the European trip since Y.P.W.), had made and distributed (at cost) a few copies of a highly amusing low-memory TP game whose graphics featured a picture of deLint and a mock-up of the hell-panel from H. Bosch’s tryptich The Garden of Earthly Delights, which TP game continues to enjoy a select late-night vogue among the sub-16’s.

[78] (Subject to O.N.A.N. Dept. of Weights and Measures Oversight Committee ratification of final contract between G.F.R. Co., Zanesville OH, and the Bureau of Endorsement Revenue, United States Office of Unspecified Services, Vienna VA, 15 December Y.D.A.U.)

[79] And, it goes w/o saying, w/o one of those video-recorded suicide notes or fond farewells from the terminally ill, which digital halloos from beyond the grave were, after a brief and videophony-like vogue, by the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar used only by the tasteless and trailer-park tacky, w/ the very tackiest using Tableaux w/ famous dead Elvis-/Carson-grade celebrities to convey their farewells.

[80] Orin Incandenza knew that Joelle van Dyne and Dr. James O. Incandenza weren’t lovers; Mrs. Avril Incandenza did not know that they weren’t lovers, although by the time of Joelle’s acquaintance with him Jim wasn’t in a position to be lovers with anybody, neurologically speaking, though it’s not clear to Joelle whether Avril even knew this, since Jim and Avril hadn’t been intimate with each other, i.e. conjugally, for quite some time, though Jim hadn’t known the precise reason why Avril was so sanguine about their not being intimate until the incident with the Volvo, where apparently Avril had been with someone (Orin would not say who or whether he knew who) in the Volvo and had idly — and disastrously, whether w/ unconscious intent or not — and presumably post-coitally idly written the person’s first name in the steam of the steamed-up car window, which name had disappeared with the steam but had reappeared the next time the window had steamed up, which had been when James had been driving to this very brownstone, to shoot Joelle in the weird wobble-lensed maternal Tm-so-terribly-sorry’ monologue-scene of the last thing he’d done, and then never shown her, and had ordered the cartridge’s burial in the brass casket w/ him in the same testament in which he’d willed Joelle an absurd (and addiction-enabling) annuity, which Avril’d never have lowered herself to the level of contesting, but which could hardly be expected not to have solidified the appearance that they’d been lovers, Joelle and Jim.

[81] ‘Theory and Praxis in Peckinpah’s Use of Red,’ Classic Cartridge Studies vol. IX, nos. 2 & 3, YY2007MRCVMETIUFI/ITPSFH,O,OM(s).

[82] Maybe in like psychic opposition to their Moms’s compulsive cleaning thing, both Orin when he was at E.T.A. and now Hal are horrific slobs. In Hal’s case this is facilitated by the fact that the third floor of Subdorm C’s prorector is the incredibly lax and laid-back Corbett Thorp, who may stutter and go in for half-baked motivational experiments on the younger players but never comes around with a white glove and clipboard. Mario makes his bed without fail, but you have to keep in mind that it’s not like he’s got all that much else to do. Hal’s fitted sheet and sheet are Bean-James River flannels in matching green and black Night Watch plaid, and for a comforter he uses a green fiberfill winter-camp sleeping bag that’s of unknown origin and price because he got it for Xmas and it had all the tags removed.

[83] Boston Police Department.

[84] Available on ROM via InterLace @deltad3.COM or in (remaindered) paperback from Delta/Delacorte division of Bantam-Doubleday-Dell-Little, — Brown, itself a division of Bell Atlantic/TCI.

[85] = no academy affiliation.

[86] The O.N.A.N.T.A. junior tour allows court-side oxygen ever since an unfortunate embolism in Raleigh NC, Y.W.Q.M.D.

[87] Q.v. Note 24 supra.

[88] Since claiming rampant and mysterious breakage and then one time having the Dun-lop rep passing through Allston on his way out of Boston from E.T.A. see not one but three kids on three separate corners hawking shiny new Dunlop sticks in what amounted, Dunlop charged, almost to Conspiracy to Defraud, in YY2OO7MRCVMETIUFI/ ITPSFH,O,OM(s).

[89] The fact that it’s not at all clear day-to-day what this it and caring mean, or how you can be expected both to care passionately and not care at all, that huge amounts of internal psychic energy get expended on trying to come to some acceptable understanding of all this stuff, particularly from 16 to like 18, is not accidental or a weakness in E.T.A. pedagogy, in Schacht’s opinion, though a sizable contingent of E.T.A.s view Schtitt as bats and essentially a figurehead and choose to steer more by head prorector deLint’s clipboard and reductive statistics, which at least afford you a firm idea of where you stand, comparatively, at all times.

[90] E.g.:

SELECTED SNIPPET FROM THE INDIVIDUAL-RESIDENT-INFORMAL–INTERFACE HOURS OF D. W. GATELY, LIVE-IN STAFF, ENNET HOUSE DRUG AND ALCOHOL RECOVERY HOUSE, ENFIELD MA, ON AND OFF FROM JUST AFTER THE BROOKLINE YOUNG PEOPLE’S AA MTNG UP to ABOUT 2329H., WEDNESDAY 11 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U.

‘I fear I simply have to deny the insinuation that it’s disloyal or ungrateful to find oneself troubled by certain quite glaring inconsistencies in this master quote unquote Program you all seem to expect us simply to open up and blindly swallow whole and then walk around glazed with our arms right out straight in front of us parroting, reciting.’ ‘Geoff— Geoffrey, man, I don’t think anybody’s trying to insinuate anything over on you, brother. I know I ain’t trying to.’

No, you simply sit there with your arms crossed nodding with that timeless patience that communicates condescension and judgment without exposing you to responsibility for insinuating anything aloud.’

‘Maybe when I look patient I’m really trying to be patient with myself, for not finishing school and etcetera and having a hard time keeping up with you.’

This AA tactic of masking condescension behind humility…’

‘I guess I’m just sorry for you you’re feeling frustrated with the Program today. I know there’s lots of days I’m frustrated with it. So I don’t know what to say helpful to you except what they said to me, to just hang in there.’

‘One Day at a One Day at a One Day.’

‘Brother, that’s just all I know to tell you that’s worked for me. I know for me it don’t matter if there’s days I fucking hate it. I just have to do it. And it don’t help me or anybody else if I go around negativing on newcomers and trying to take out my issues on trying to fuck them up with God-puzzles.’

‘Mr. Gately Sir, I found myself sitting tonight in yet another Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting the central Message of which was the importance of going to still more Alcoholics Anonymous Meetings. This infuriating carrot-and-donkey aspect of trudging to Meetings only to be told to trudge to still more Meetings.’

‘I hear you.’

‘As if, I mean, what’s supposedly going to be communicated at these future meetings I’m exhorted to trudge to that cannot simply be communicated now, at this meeting, instead of the glazed recitation of exhortations to attend these vague future revelatory meetings?’

‘I’m doing my best to stay with you here Day man.’

‘And tonight I’m just settling in in yet another uneven-legged chair, cultivating that glazed passive spectatorial state of mind that is clearly what they’re trying to inspire in the ephebe, settling in next to a positively redolent Emil M. and trying to hold my poor addled Denial-ridden mind open with all available main, listening to this ravaged-looking Yalie in yellow slacks detail episodes of tremens whose gruesomeness interdicted any possible Identification —’

‘I’m remembering I heard Pat tell you that thinking people who are walking ahead of you are following you is a pretty bad kind of D.T.s, brother.’

‘And I informed her that there’s a well-known surveillance tactic known as the Box-surveillance, which involves certain members of the surveillance team establishing themselves in front of the subject.’

‘Except I don’t ever remember you explaining why a sociology teacher weaving his way from his fourth bar to his fifth bar is important enough for four guys from some you-never-mentioned-what kind of conspiracy to be pulling this real complex surveillance thing.’

‘…’

‘Except I was interrupting your point you were sharing, I know, and I’m sorry.’

‘Your basic decency is why you’re whom I bring my thoughts to, Don. You know that.’

‘That makes me feel good Day man.’

‘I mean to whom else might I speak? The girl who takes her eye out and fondles it? Poor Ewell with his obsessive tattoo charts? Lenz^

‘It makes me feel good you think I’m decent to talk to. That’s supposed to be why I’m here. I sure needed to talk, at the start. Can you remember where you were headed before I broke i — interrupted?’

‘Something this broken Ivy Leaguer said, some AA sally. He said that only one newcomer in a million actually trudges into an Alcoholics Anonymous Closed Meeting and in fact doesn’t belong there.’

‘Meaning doesn’t turn out to have the Disease you mean.’

‘Yes. And that he said that quote if You — looking right at yours truly, seemingly, with that wearily amused patient expression you all must practice in front of the mirror — he said that only one newcomer in a million doesn’t belong here, and if quote You think You’re that one-in-a-million, You definitely belong here. And everyone howled with mirth, stomped their feet and blew coffee through their noses and wiped their eyes with the backs of their hands and elbowed each other. Howled with mirth.’

‘But you were, like, unsmiling at it.’

‘And everyone labels as Denial or ingratitude what’s actually horror, Don. The horror of acknowledging that you do apparently have some sort of problem with mild sedatives and fine Chianti, and wanting with all sincerity to give every fair chance to a treatment-modality which millions swear up and down has helped them with their own problem.’

‘You’re talking about AA.’

‘To want very much to believe in it, and to try, and then to your horror find the Program riddled with these obvious and idiotic fallacies and reductia ad absurdum which —’

Tm going to need to ask you to try and say that again in words I can follow, Geoffrey, if you want me to be right there alongside with you. And I’m sorry if that seems descending.’

‘Don, I am sincere when I say I’m frightened when I find that there are things about this allegedly miraculous Program’s doctrine that simply do not follow. That do not cohere. That do not make anything resembling rational sense.’

‘I’m with you on that one now, brother.’

‘Tonight’s example of the one-in-a-million, say. Don, let me ask you, Don. In all earnest. Why shouldn’t every human being in the world be in AA?’

‘Now I’m not with you anymore again, Geoffrey.’

‘Don, why doesn’t every featherless biped on earth qualify for AA? By AA’s reasoning, why isn’t everyone everywhere an alcoholic?’

‘Well Geoffrey man it’s a totally private decision to admit the Disease, nobody can go tell another man he’s —’

‘But indulge me for a moment. By AA’s own professed logic, everyone ought to be in AA. If you have some sort of Substance-problem, then you belong in AA. But if you say you do not have a Substance-problem, in other words if you deny that you have a Substance-problem, why then you’re by definition in Denial, and thus you apparently need the Denial-busting Fellowship of AA even more than someone who can admit his problem.’

‘Don’t look at me like that. Show me the flaw in my reasoning. I beg you. Show me why not everyone should be in AA, given the way AA regards those who don’t believe they belong there.’

‘And now you don’t know what to say. There’s no cockle-warming cliche that applies.’ ‘The slogan I’ve heard that might work here is the slogan Analysis-Paralysis’ ‘Oh lovely. Oh very nice. By all means don’t think about the validity of what they’re claiming your life hinges on. Oh do not ask what is it. Do not ask not whether it’s not insane. Simply open wide for the spoon.’

‘For me, the slogan means there’s no set way to argue intellectual-type stuff about the Program. Surrender To Win, Give It Away To Keep It. God As You Understand Him. You can’t think about it like an intellectual thing. Trust me because I been there, man. You can analyze it til you’re breaking tables with your forehead and find a cause to walk away, back Out There, where the Disease is. Or you can stay and hang in and do the best you can.’

‘AA’s response to a question about its axioms, then, is to invoke an axiom about the inadvisability of all such questions.’

‘I ain’t AA Day man. No one like individual can respond for AA.’

‘Am I out of line in seeing something totalitarian about it? Something dare I say un-American? To interdict a fundamental doctrinal question by invoking a doctrine against questioning? Wasn’t this the very horror the Madisonians were horrified of in 1791? Amendments I and IX? My Grievance is disallowed because my Petition for Redress is a priori interdicted by the inadvisability of all Petitioning?’

‘I’m about to get fucking lapped here I’m so not-following. You honestly don’t see what’s a little whacked-out about what you’re saying about Denial?’

‘I’m thinking your failure to engage me on the question itself means either I’m right, and AA’s whole Belonging-versus-Denial matrix is constructed on logical sand, in which case horror, or else it means you’re stupefied with condescending pity for me for some reason I fail to grasp, doubtless because of Denial, in which case the look on your face right now is the same weary patience that makes me want to scream in meetings.’

‘So scream. They can’t kick you out.’

‘How comforting.’

‘This is a thing I do know. They can’t kick you out.’

[91] Pillow-biter’s a North Shore term, one Gately grew up with, and it and the f-term are the only terms for male homosexuals he knows, still.

[92] Diane Prins, Perth Amboy NJ.

[93] An anxiety-fest captured nicely by the banner-shaped posters deLint used to have D. Harde put up each fall over the senior-locker sections of both locker rooms that had WINNERS NEVER HAVE TO QUIT until some of the other prorectors went to Schtitt and got him to make deLint take them down.

[94] It’s surely been spelled out already that prorectors teach one marginal class per term and serve as on-court assistants to Schtitt’s Lebensgefährtin Aubrey deLint, and that their existence at E.T.A. is marginal and low-prestige and their spiritual state on the low continuum between embittered and accepting, and for many of the more neurasthenic E.T.A. students the prorectors are kind of repellent the way hideously old people are repellent, reminding the students of the kind of low-prestige purgatorial fate that awaits the marginal and low-ranked jr. player; and while a couple of the prorectors are feared, none of them is all that much respected, and they’re avoided, and stick together with one another and keep to themselves and seem on the whole sad, with that grad-schoolish sense of arrested adolescence and reality-avoidance about them.

[95] Pink being Microsoft Inc.’s first post-Windows DOS, quickly upgraded to Pink₂ when InterLace took everything 100 % interactive and digital; by Y.D.A.U. it’s kind of a dinosaur, but it’s still the only DOS that’ll run a MathpakVEndStat tree without having to stop and recompile every few seconds.

[96] A kind of prorectorishly sad post in Amateur Sports Administration at tiny Throp-pinghamshire Provincial College in Fredericton N.B., C.T.’s undergrad alma mater.

[97] It’s both perverse and kind of understandable that getting some sort of college scholarship (or ‘Ride’), while very few E.T.A.s (and certainly not Orin Incandenza) have any real kind of financial need, that nevertheless a scholarship is enormously important self-esteem-wise, since opting for the college-tennis route in the first place is kind of an admission of defeat and a surrender of dearly held dreams of the professional Show.

[98] And to keep a distant but weirdly beady and obsessive eye on Mario, from whose lordotic presence in a room Tavis’d flee just as Avril was fleeing from the temptation of overlobbying Orin on B.U., such that for a few days when both Orin and Mario entered a room there’d be the sound of a tremendous collision in the hall outside as C.T. and Avril’s flights’ vectors met.

[99] MA Dept. of Revenue.

[100] The way a White Flagger formulates this, e.g., is that 99.9 % of what goes on in one’s life is actually none of one’s business, with the.1 % under one’s control consisting mostly of the option to accept or deny one’s inevitable powerlessness over the other 99.9 %, which just trying to parse this out makes Don Gately’s forehead turn purple.

[101] Some of their earliest dates were watching big-budget commercial films, and Orin had one time completely unpremeditatedly told her it was a strange feeling watching commercial films with a girl who was prettier than the women in the films, and she’d punched him hard in the arm in a way that just about drove him wild.

[102] International Brotherhood of Pier, Wharf, and Dock Workers.

[103] A quote ‘episode of excessive neuronal discharge manifested by motor, sensory and/or [psychic] dysfunction, with or without unconsciousness and/or convulsive [movements],’ plus eye-rolling and tongue-swallowing.

[104] In order for O.N.A.N.T.A. academies to qualify as actual schools and not just like extended-term sports camps, all instructors and prorectors except the Head have to be listed as more like academic instructors who prorect on the side.

[105] A Dworkinite heavy-leather organization whose membership on the U.S. East Coast was in the five figures up until the ugly Pizzitola Riots of Providence RI in Y.W.-Q.M.D. discredited the F.O.P.P.P.s, and fragmented them.

[106] There’s a Viewing Room on each subdorm floor, and room-size TP’s w/ phone consoles and (if a kid wants) modems are standard issue, but only E.T.A. juniors and seniors get to have actual cartridge-viewers in their subdorm rooms — a two-year-old administrative concession the credit for which goes largely to Troeltsch, who made such a pest of himself with Charles Tavis over the issue that Tavis finally relented just to keep the kid from lurking in his office’s waiting room, speaking into his fist, pretending to report on ‘the flames of controversy surrounding individual rights raging here in quaint and peaceful Enfield’ — and none of these viewers (likewise the Viewing Room’s units) can have motherboard-cards for Spontaneous InterLace Disseminations or for ROM-caliber games, which broadcasts and videoish games encourage a stuporous passivity that E.T.A.’s philosophy now regards as venomous to the whole set of reasons the kids are enrolled there in the first place.

[107] E.g. the WhataBurger Invitational will allegedly be recorded for fringe-market, order-only viewing, later this month.

[108] Sometimes, especially in early fall and late spring, this can involve a lapse of several weeks; WETA doesn’t broadcast when most of the kids are away at some competitive thing, and Saturday classes are likewise often canceled — this is one reason why so many prorectors’ classes are relegated by Mrs. A.M.I, to Saturdays.

[109] Apparently the Parti Q. is provincial, intra-Québecois; the Bloc’s its federal counterpart, w/ members in Parliament, and so on and so forth.

[110] Q.v. here later in the same day, 11/7, as Hal Incandenza sits on the edge of his unmade bed, undressed, with the good right leg curled under him and the bad ankle soaking in a janitor-pail of dissolved Epsom salts, looking through one of Mario’s old Hush Puppy shoeboxes of letters and snapshots. Saturdays involve classes and drills and P.M. matches but no conditioning run or weight circuits. Afternoon’s odd mismatched challenge matches held on staff-squeegeed Center Courts under a steady metal sunless sky. The air still damp after lunchtime’s rain. Hal’s own odd match was truncated when C-squadder Hugh Pemberton took a ball in the eye up at net and began wandering the service box in wobbled circles. Hal skipped a quick trip down to the Pump Room and got to shower nearly solo in the main locker room. Tomorrow’s Interdependence Day communal supper at E.T.A. is a big deal and includes each person’s own specially selected hat, plus real dessert, and a post-prandial Mario-made film, and sometimes a sing-along. Hal and Pemulis, Struck and Axford and Troeltsch and Schacht and sometimes Stice have their own special private day-before-I.-Day-ritualistic-supper-out-and-trip-to-The-Unexamined-Life blowout-gala, since Sunday is a day of total mandatory R&R. The untruncated matches are winding down out there, Hal can hear. The sun is coming out just in time to go down. The Comm.-Ad. pipes start to moan and sing with crowded showering kids. Pale net-shadows are starting to elongate acutely across the sidelines of the courts’ north sides. Mario is more or less the Incandenza family archivist ex officio. Mario has been closeted with Disney Leith all day preparing things for Sunday’s postprandial gala and filmiest. The phone sits mute atop the answering-machine attachment on the telephone’s power unit’s console. Its antenna is retracted and it simply sits there, exuding the vague contained menace of mute phones. The phone’s ringer sort of twitters instead of ringing. The audio-only comm.-system’s power console is bolted to a receptacle on the side of Hal and Mario’s TP, and its red power light blinks at the slow liquid rate of a radio tower. The phone and answering machine are hand-me-downs from Orin’s days at E.T.A., old models of transparent plastic, so you can see everything’s quad-colored pasta of wires and chips and tin disks. The only message when Hal got in was from Orin at I4l2h. Orin had said he’d just called to ask whether by any chance Hal’d ever realized that all of Emily Dickinson — as in the Belle of Amherst Emily Dickinson, the canonical agoraphobic poet — that every single one of Ms. Dickinson’s canonical poems could by sung without loss or syllabic distortion to the tune of ‘The Yellow Rose (of Texas).’ ‘Because I could not stop for Death He kindly stopped for Me,’ Orin had sung illustratively onto the recording. ‘I hope the Father in the skies Will lift his little Girl.’ Actually more like sort of sung. There’d been professional-locker-room sounds in the background — locker doors banging, bass voices on tile and steel, personal stereos, hisses of antiperspirant and styling-spritz. The odd enclosed echo of locker rooms everywhere, junior or pro. ‘On my volcano grows the Grass A meditative spot/ and so on. The fleshy pop of a professionally snapped towel on adult skin. A black man’s falsetto laughter. Orin’s recorded voice said he’d just grabbed an odd free second to inquire what Hal’s machine might make of this fact.

Hal spits Kodiak tobacco juice into an old rocket-emblazoned NASA glass on the bedside table, idly and for no special reason riffling through densely packed letters tri-folded and packed upright, a kind of Rolodex of different mementos and postal correspondence Mario’s rescued from wastebaskets and recycling bins and dumpsters and quietly saved in shoeboxes. Mario has no problem with Hal perusing his closet’s stuff. Mario’s closet has a canvas strap instead of a knob. Ideally there would also be a bucket of very cold water, and Hal would move the bad ankle from one bucket to the other and back again. A whistle sounds from down near the girls’ West Courts. Someone little in the hall outside the closed door shouts ‘Guess again!’ to someone else farther down the hall. None of the Hush Puppy box’s snail-mail letters are to or from Mario. Mario’s bed is loosely, unanally made. Hal’s bed is unmade. Hal and Mario’s mother had done her undergraduate Honors work at McGill on the use of hyphens, dashes, and colons in E. Dickinson. The Epsom-water whitens his calluses. Unlaundered bedding swims around him. The phone twitters. Ample make this bed, or Ample make this bed. The phone twitters again.

A MOVING EXAMPLE OF THE SORTS OF PHYSICAL-POST MAIL MRS. AVRIL INCANDENZA HAS SENT HER ELDEST CHILD ORIN SINCE the FELO DE SE OF DR. J. O. INCANDENZA, THE SORT OF CHIRPILY

QUOTIDIAN MAIL THAT — HERE’S THE MOVING PART — SEEMS to IMPLY A CONTEXT OF REGULAR INTER-PARTY COMMUNICATION, STILL

20 June Y.W.-Q.M.D.

Dear Filbert,³

It’s been a quiet week here on Mount Gawdforsaken^b — today is perishing hot, windless, quiet as a tomb, lush and pretty. Every floral unit on the grounds has its pistil aprick and petals atremble in a truly shameless fashion, for the bees are about. The whole hill hums drowsily. Yesterday, your Uncle Charles was accosted on the north path by a bumblebee that he alleges was so enormous it sounded like a tuba, and he dispatched Mr. Harde and the grounds crew with skeet rifles and orders to ‘ …bring the Sikorski-sized bugger down.’ I shall spare you details of the subsequent misadventures of the grounds crew, two of whom are now recovering satisfactorily.

The paucity of decibels here is due in part to all six A-teams’ departure yesterday for Milan, with Gerhardt, Aubrey, Carolyn, and Urquhart at the pedagogical tiller. It seems not so many moons ago that we were seeing you, Marlon, Ross, and the rest off on the European clay junket. I recall pressing the maternal beak to the terminal window’s glass, trying to make my Filbert out somewhere behind the airplane’s impossible little bullet-hole windows. I cried like a fool every time, as of course I did all over again yesterday, embarrassing everyone but Mario, who also cried.

As for me, I’ve swotted and wakked all morning, cranking up your Uncle Charles’s videophone and trying to cajole the editors of various supermarket trade publications to run M.G.M.’s^c latest plea for amending Less to Fewer’m those!*#!*# Express Check-Out lanes. One old editorial codger said that he’d dearly love to help me out but that his newsletter was devoted exclusively to issues of promotional display. When I suggested that a little comic relief in the form of the L--->F bulletin might not be amiss, he chortled. Chortling is good. We like chortling. However, I did manage to twist the arms (harder to do telephonically than one might think) of Produce Weekly, Star Market s Quarterly Register, and PriceChopper’s Shelf and Cart, so the wheels of adjectival justice continue, albeit creakily, to turn.

The very last gobbet of Academy news is that your Uncle Charles had his blood cholesterol tested late last week. Though the verdict rendered was no worse than a rather unperspicuous “Normal to Upper-normal” (sic), the penultimate modifier has caused, as you might anticipate, much pacing and high-decibel whingeing, as well as vows of eternal xerophagy from here on out. Your Uncle Charles has already, for some months now, made a practice of swallowing three teaspoons of fish-liver oil just before he hurls the administrative skeleton bedward for the night. Your brothers have taken to trekking over on slow nights to watch him swallow his oil, purely out of enthusiasm for the faces Charles makes as the stuff goes gulletward. I e-ordered the poor man a low-lipid, artery-friendly cookbook as a sort of Whatthehell present the day the results came in, and your Uncle Charles has already pored over the thing and marked several yummers. We’re to have a swot at cabbage patties tonight, fast-laners that we are. I do suppose the poor man will find a way to ladle rice bran^d into his toothpaste before this spasm of angst subsides. Bless his heart — as it were!

My, this machine does let one maunder on. I’d best get back to harrying grocers. One of this fall’s matriculates⁶ is the son of a man who’s apparently become an immensely wealthy Telegrocer^f in the Upper Midwest, so perhaps the Express Lane-Solecism issue will simply disappear in these here parts as well.

It goes without saying that you are of course wearing your halo and mouth-guard at all appropriate times and eating at least one green, leafy vegetable per day.

Oh — ‘twas wonderful to hear about the arbitration and contract. Mr. deLint read a detailed account and told us all about it. Proud, as ever, to know you.

Miss You and Love You Lots, and c.

AND AN EXAMPLE OF THE INVARIANT RESPONSE THESE PIECES OF MAIL ELICIT

Ms. Incandenza Dear__________________

Due to the large number of mail the New Orleans Saints® are so fortunate enough to receive from all across the 2nd InterLace Grid⁸, we regrettably say

ORTKTINCANDENZA #71__________can not answer your letter in person, however, on behalf of the New Orleans Saints”________________ ______has asked me to say

Thank-You for your message of support, and best wishes.

Inclosed, please accept a special, color 20 X 25 centimeter personally autographed

action photo of ORIN INCANDENZA_______________#71____________________{} as}

our way of saying Thank-You and how important you’re letter has been to us. Cordjally, Jethro Bodine

Assistant Mailroom Technician

And c.

‘Mmyellow.’

‘Presenting Speedy Seduction Strategy Number 7.’

‘Orin. Happy Inter-Day Eve. E Unibus Pluram and so on. Still dodging the disabled?’

‘A proviso up-front, Hallie: Number 7 never misses.’

‘And not every Dickinson poem is singable to ‘Yellow Rose,’ O. Sorry to disappoint you. For instance like “Ample make this bed — Make this bed with awe” isn’t even iambic, much less quatrameter/trimeter.’

‘Just a theory. Just tossing it out for the machine’s consideration.’

‘A practice to be encouraged. This particular theory’s unfortunately a dink. Plus I don’t think you quite meant proviso.’’

‘Number 7 remains a no-miss proposal, though. Picture this. Obtain a ring. As in a wedding band. So you present yourself to the Subject as visibly married.’

‘You know I hate these Strategy calls.’

‘Also of course works if you really do happen to be married. In which case you’ve got a ring already.’

Tm sitting here soaking my ankle, O.’

‘The object being, to present yourself to the Subject as married, as in happily married, and you engage her in a conversation in which you make a big deal of how head-over-heels in love you are with your wife, how wonderful she is, the wife, how blue and clean the pilot-light of passion still burns in the central heating system of your love for her, your wife, even after all these several years you’ve been hitched.’

Tm sitting here looking through an old box of letters to kill just a very few minutes before a bunch of us climb in the tow truck for Pemulis’s annual I.-Day-Eve town-painting.’

‘But as you’re saying all this to the Subject, your manner is nevertheless indicating that you’re attracted to her.’

‘It’s poignant somehow that you always use the word Subject when you mean the exact obverse.’

‘But it’s not like flirtatious or salivious, your manner. More like just strongly involuntarily attracted. Almost as if hypnotized against your will. Your manner can indicate this just by following the Subject’s conversational movements and changes of posture or facial expression in that sort of vacant intense way a hungry person watches somebody eating. Following the movements of the fork as if memerized. With, of course now, the occasional flicker of pain and conflict in your eyes, at the fact that here you are involuntarily memerized by somebody other than your serapic wife, which the point —’

‘Time. Yo. I think you mean seraphic. I also think you meant lascivious and mesmerized.’

‘You know what your problem is, Hallie?’

‘I have just one problem?’

‘But hang on until you see that 7’s worth not making me digress away from, though. Because the point being to get across how it’s an incredible tribute to the Subject’s overwhelming female charms that you can even really even see her, the Subject, since you’re so in love with your wife you barely even see most women as even female anymore, much less be involuntarily attracted to the Subject, much less have maybe the thought of infidelity skitter no matter how involuntarily across your devoted mind. And it’s not like you’ll have to volunteer any of this directly. The Subject’ll draw the observations on her own. That’s the point of the conflicted flickers in your memerized eyes, or at the most an involuntary tortured groan, a quick bite of the knuckle of the forefinger.’

‘A heel of the hand to the forehead or something like that.’

‘Get your manner down just conflicted-looking enough and the Subject herself’ll actually start drawing you out on this fact, the involuntary attraction that’s so painful to you and so flattering and tributary to her.’

‘So wait. This is like a conversation where you’re affecting all this flickering and groaning? Like you mean a cocktail-party-small-talk conversation? Or do you just brandish your fake ring at some girl at a bus stop and start a tortured tribute to your seraphic wife?’

‘It takes place anywhere. Venue-adjustable. 7’s portable and never-miss. The point is to maneuver the issue of your devoted attracted conflicted pain to the point where you can appear to almost sort of break down and can ask the Subject in all tortured sincerity if she thinks your involuntarily finding her so visibly female and attractive makes you a bad husband. Display vulnerability and ask her to evaluate the like integrity of your heart. Seem desperate. Your whole married self-concept shaken. Practically beg the Subject to reassure you you’re not a bad-hearted man. Plead with the Subject to say what she thinks it might be about her charms that could drive your serapic wife even momentarily from your heart. You present the attraction you feel for the Subject as this involuntary identity-threatening soul-searing-type crisis you just desperately need her help with, the Subject’s, person to person.’

‘Sounds very moving.’

‘And if it so happens you really are married, the additional advantage to 7’s pitch is that you and the Subject both, however briefly, get to believe it. The pitch. The involuntary passionate doomed knight-errant-type pitch.’

‘And of course, O., the Subject just happens to be married herself, often with small children, putting her directly in your crosshairs.’

‘A matter of what’s the word personal preference and taste that doesn’t impact 7’s surefire no-miss quality one way or the other. It’s the doomed involuntary conflicted good-man’s-downfall-type quality that no Subject can seemingly resist.’

‘Ainsi, then.’

‘Well O. the thing’s sick. It’s even sicker than 4. Was it 4? The one you said that Loach inspired, where you’d supposedly just that very day dropped out of Jesuit seminary after umpteen years of disciplined celibacy because of carno-spiritual yearnings you hadn’t even been quite in touch with as carno-spiritual in nature until you just now this very moment laid eyes on the Subject? With the breviary and rented collar?’

‘That was 4, yes. 4’s pretty much of a gynecopia also, but within a kind of narrower demographic psychological range of potential Subjects. Notice I never said 4 was no-miss.’

‘Well you must be a very proud young man. This is even sicker. The fake ring and fictional spouse. It’s like you’re inventing somebody you love just to seduce somebody else into helping you betray her. What’s it like. It’s like suborning somebody into helping you desecrate a tomb they don’t know is empty.’

‘This is what I get for passing down priceless fruits of hard experience to somebody who still thinks it’s exciting to shave.’

‘I ought to go. I have a blackhead I have to see to.’

‘You haven’t asked why I called right back. Why I’m calling during high-toll hours.’

‘Plus I feel some kind of toothache starting, and it’s the weekend, and I want to see Schacht before Mrs. Clarke’s confectionery day in the sun tomorrow. Plus I’m naked.’

‘I’m surprised you were even there. In person. I was expecting the Disembodied Voice and asking you to call back ASAP on this. What is it out there, 1600? Why aren’t you outside hard at play? Don’t tell me Schtitt started cancelling P.M.’S for I.-Day Eve.’

‘I tagged this kid Pemberton in the eye up at net. It was inadvertent. We were only four games in. He hit a big soft fluffy goose of an approach and I was trying to handcuff him. I hit it at him only to handcuff him. He never even got his stick up. Right in the left socket. It made a sound like a champagne cork. A prorector named Corbett Thorp said he thought Pemberton might have detached a retina. Something sure seemed detached. He was walking around in diminishing circles like he’d been hit with a mallet.’

‘You sound really, like, remorse-riddled.’

‘Kitchens arid heat, O. I’ve taken my share of balls in various spots. And whence bizarre metric theories about Emily Dickinson all of a sudden, by the way? And what’s up with the lurking figures with wheelchairs?’

‘You’re a Top-Ten junior stickman suddenly now this year, Hallie, what’s Schtitt doing giving you a cloth mouse like Hugh Pemberton to bat around anyway?’

‘You remember him?’

‘Who could forget a kid that looks like he’s curtsying when he serves? With the white visor and the little amber glasses? That kid’s been hanging from the bottom of the ladder by his nails since he was nine.’

‘It’s been carnage all week. Schtitt’s playing the C teams against the A’s. It’s for the C’s development, Donni said. Also because today word’s down from the tower some of the staff thought some of the A’s looked tentative against Port Wash.’

‘They despise tentativity.’

‘I think they want us just short of cocky for the Fundraiser and then the WhataBurger, where Wayne’s got a chance to knock this Veach kid off the pole.’

‘Let’s not forget you though either, H. I can get down for at least the WhataBurger semis if you get there, if you want incentive.’

‘As in in person, O.?’

‘Word is you’re worth watching now.’

‘Word?’

‘I keep my ear to the cement, Hallie.’

‘At least for very short Subjects, I’d imagine.’

‘We take off for the Patriots that Friday, what is that like the 27th or -8th, but it’s a Saturday afternoon game. I can be down there by midday Sunday if you’re still in the thick.’

‘You’ll probably need to wear some sort of sign around your neck so I know it’s you.’

‘So then you’ll be up here just as we’re down there, oddly, playing.’

‘It goes without saying you’d give me the advance skinny if anybody I didn’t want to see was by any chance flying down there with you guys.’

‘The C versus A thing’s been more like grotesque than confidence-building. Guys are taking out stress in kind of twisted ways. Struck beat Gloeckner in 40 minutes and then made a show of revealing he’d had 3-kilo ankle-weights on under his socks. Wayne made van Slack cry right there in front of everybody.’

‘Word is Wayne has exactly one gear.’

‘Then Thursday Coyle had his left wrist tied to his right ankle and was still beating this new kid Stockhausen until Schtitt sent Tex Watson down to tell him to knock it off.’

‘So but the reason I’m really calling, Hallie.’

‘And you’re being evasive about the dread about the disabled. The like rolling stalkers.’

‘I haven’t seen wheel one in days. I’m thinking possibly this was a kind of very shy sort of fan club of people without legs that look up to me —’

‘Grotesque entendre, O.’

‘— as, like, the ultimate leg. They use different ruses to follow me around and never come close or say anything because they’re really shy because they don’t have legs. So now my mind’s resting easier.’

‘Now if the roach- and spiders-at-heights fears’d subside you could really hold the head high.’

‘So the reason I’m calling.’

‘I already said I’d let you know when and if. No sightings of any journalists. Your Moment profiler.’

‘I’m actually glad I got you in person. I was going to ask you to call me ASAP.’

Tm pleased to call you a sap whenever you like, O.’

‘That’s below you. And I can hear you still chewing that grisly shit. That shit’s going to make your lower jaw fall right off. I’ve seen it happen down here, believe me. And you’re wondering why the tooth problems all the time suddenly.’

‘Snuff’s saliva-stimulating. It’s actually oral-hygiene-enhancing, when you factor in all the extra brushing. The caries are Himself’s legacy. You know that. The Himself whose root canals put Dr. Zegarelli’s kids through Andover.’

‘This basically nonsocial call, H., is because I need your feedback on some issues from these half-dozen or so very complex and far-ranging and in-depth conversations I had with a certain Subject.’

‘Not the mobile-home person, surely.’

‘Whole different ballpark of Subject. The Dickinson theory I have to admit came from these conversations.’

‘Sounds like one deep lady.’

‘Whole levels and dimensions to this one. We’ve had a whole series of very intense verbal interchanges. Transcendentalist poetics was just one of the in-depth issues ranged over. This subject keeps me on the cerebral toes.’

‘Dickinson’s about as Transcendentalist as Poe. Your Subject’s 0 for 2.’

‘This is all off to the side of the call. I told this Subject I’d consider certain issues very carefully before I really responded.’

‘Which meant you’d consider what she wanted to hear and how to ladle it on until she begs you to have intercourse with her.’

‘I hence need considered-sounding responses to two basic questions.’

‘Why this sick thing of making me complicit in these Strategic pursuits when you know I think they’re troubled and sick? It’s like asking somebody to help you culture anthrax or something.’

‘Just two questions is all.’

‘Now I’m beginning almost to be able to feel my pulse in the tooth, it feels like the infection’s gathering force so fast.’

‘Firstly, what does the following word I can’t find in the dictionary mean: s-a-m-i-z-d-a-t.’

‘Samizdat. Russian compound noun. Soviet twentieth-century idiom. Sam — stem: “self”; izdat — undeclined verb: “to publish.” I think the literal denotation’s technically archaic: the sub-rosa dissemination of politically charged materials that were banned when the Eschaton-era Kremlin was going around banning things. Connotatively, the generic meaning now is any sort of politically underground or beyond-the-pale press or the stuff published thereby. There’s no real samizdat in the U.S. per se, First Amendment-wise, I don’t think. I suppose ultra-radical Québecois and Albertan stuff could be considered O.N.A.N.ite samizdat.’

Tow.’

‘Not just Séparatisteur pamphlets, now. It’d have to be more incendiary. Materials advocating violence, destruction of property, disruption of Grids, anti-O.N.A.N. terrorism and so on. I don’t think O.N.A.N.’s got technical bans per se, I don’t think, but Poutrincourt said the R.C.M.P.s are empowered to impound literature and even desktop-publishing and InterLink hardware et cetera without any sort of warrant.’

‘R.C.M.P.’

‘Mounties, O.’

‘The Nelson Eddy guys in silly hats and equestrian jaspers.’

‘Close enough. Next question.’

‘So you’d have no idea why The Mad Stork’s name would come up in connection with somebody saying samizdat.’

‘This is the second question?’

‘Call it l(a).’

‘Not in any strict sense of the term. I guess I could see some Séparatisteurs trying to read The ONANtiad or Brick as anti-Reconfiguration films. Maybe stuff like Poultry in Motion. A lot of Himself’s stuff was self-distributed, too. And Immanent Domain’s allegedly on one level an allegory about the Concavity, though that overlooks that Gentle wasn’t even President when the thing came out. But you can tell your Subject that Himself’s work was all very self-consciously American. His interest in politics was subordinate to form. Always. And none of it’s banned. Whatever’s still on the InterLace back-menus is inter-Grid: you can order The ONANtiad in Manitoba, Vera Cruz, anywhere.’

‘Speaking of Quebec Separatism, interestingly.’

‘Why do I get a sinking feeling this is going to be l(a)-point-one or something. Maybe I could call you back tomorrow and we could chat on and on. I’m going to be here reading for Boards till the Eschaton at 1400. Holiday tolls are low.’

‘It’s my nickel, here.’

‘Or maybe you could simply call the person who’s really the person to chat with about all issues Canadian, O.’

‘Droll.’

‘Moving right along to question 2, then — my Epsom salts are getting cold.’

‘The big one is what you’d have to say if some tough-minded and spectacular Subject asked you what you have to say about the way every Nuck Séparatisteur up there, from the Bloc Québecois and Fils de Montcalm all the way out to the really bug-eyed radical fringe-type sects and terroristic cells —’

‘I’m going to have to object to the word Nuck, O.’

‘Beg pardon. The issue being why the whole Québec-Séparatisteur collection up there dropped the original Quebec-independence objective like a rock and switched seemingly overnight to putting everything into agitating against O.N.A.N. and the Reconfiguration and forcing the return of the Concavity to our map.’

‘O., this is O.N.A.N.ite politics. I’d look my Subject right in the big blue eye and tell her straight-out that the field of nanomicroscopy is not yet advanced enough to measure my interest in the intricacies of O.N.A.N.ite politics. Poutrincourt’s class is disquieting enough. The whole thing’s unpleasant and dry and repetitive and mostly dull. Thevet has a kind of compelling romanto-historical yarn to spin, though, about —’

Tm serious. You’ve had some background, at least. The only Nuck prorector we ever got taught ceramics.’

‘But you’re the one with the Pleiades and the 5 on the French Achievement boards and the ability to trill your R’s.’

‘That’s Parisian. And now I don’t even watch the sports summaries, much less the political stuff. Just try for just one second. This Subject raised issues that were way out of my depth.’

‘That’s not even coherent enough to be a mixed metaphor, O. Are you honestly telling me you want your depth increased? Or are you just looking for some Cliff-Note summary so you can incorporate the impression of depth into some new panty-removal campaign? Are you going to tell her you studied O.N.A.N.ite politics under the Jesuits?’

‘The whole thing was dicey. I had to tell the Subject that I had to think about it and ponder, that I always took time to ponder at depth before I just dashed off an opinion.’

‘And don’t tell me: this is your Moment profiler? Your Boswell in an E cup? Is this why she’s en route? Was the whole familio-historical profile story last week a dodge? Am I really just supposed to sit down with her and paint you now as a political-minded ex-seminarian who’s married to someone only some sort of heroically proportioned goddess could tempt you to betray? Because I’ll tell you right now that Schtitt’s not going to let any of us here talk to anybody from some glossy rag like Moment without him or deLint sitting right there with us. Gone are the days of Himself not caring how many who’s-the-next-Venus-Williams-hype journalists haunt the grounds, man. Schtitt’s now calling the shots on who talks to whom. DeLint has a whole scathing appendix to the Admissions Manual about junior development and toxic hype.’

‘Helen’ll be able to get in.’

‘Schtitt’s not going to let me hype your political acuity or pseudo-wife or anything else. He’s got C.T. seeing this place as a sort of prophylactic against commercial attention. He thinks junior commercial attention’s deforming. The Manual now invites us to see ourselves as in utero and hype as thalidomide. Schtitt’ll let her in and stick her in with C.T. and let C.T. filibuster her till she throws herself out the window like that journalist from Condé Nast last fall.’

‘Forget the profile. Speak to her or don’t. This is personal.’

‘Meaning you’ve discovered she has small children and maybe a marriage you can deform.’

‘I’m ignoring all this. Helen’s a different sort of Subject. I’ve discovered levels and dimensions to Helen that have nothing to do with profiles.’

‘Meaning she’s a tough nut. Meaning you’ve set your crosshairs and she hasn’t succumbed. And she knows you’re not married and not a tormented Jesuit. She’s Strategy-resistant because she knows too much to fall for a persona.’

‘Co-ponder with me a second, if you’re through. Stop me at any time. Jump right in at any time. On both the ultra-left and — right, the brass ring up there has always been independent secession for Quebec, historically, no? Am I off? The Fronte Liberation and so on? The Fils de Montcalm. Or is it maybe du? Are they the ones in Spandex and pancake makeup? The giant pies dropped on Ottawa after the third Meech Lake Accord?’

‘Parizeau et all and so on. Feel free to stop me or jump in. It all’d been about getting Quebec out of Canada, right? The Meech Lake and Charlottetown revolts. The Crétien assassination. “Notre Rai Pays.” Terrorists in plaid flannel. French Canada for the Fran-cophonic. Acadian Zionism. “La Québecois Toujours.” “On ne parle d’Anglais ici.” ‘

‘With all the terrorism especially directed at Ottawa, pressure on Ottawa and Canada. “Permettez Nous Partir, Permettez Nous Être.” Or we blow up the Frontenac. Or we irradiate Winnipeg. Or we put a railroad-spike through Crétien’s eye. This is not exactly deep-depth, O.’

‘Yes and then but suddenly everything changes when Ottawa, under duress or no, puts itself under the surgically sterile like thumb of O.N.A.N., with the advent of O.N.A.N., Gentle, quote unquote Experialism.’

‘You don’t sound like you need any input from me on all this, O.’

‘But so but then in immediate unison all the various different Separatist groups drop secession and independence like rocks and all transfer their insurgent resentment to O.N.A.N. and the U.S., and now insurge against O.N.A.N. on behalf of the same Canada they’d spent decades treating like the enemy. Does this seem a little bit odd?’

t 5

‘Doesn’t this seem a little odd, Hallie?’

‘I’m really the wrong blood-relative to ask about the intricacies of the Canadian radical mind, O. We have a blood-relative who’s got dual citizenship, if you recall. Who I’m sure’d be overjoyed to ponder Separatist ideological flux with you all you want and then some. I’m sure. Once her jaw recovered from being unhinged by joy that you actually called.’

‘I’m slapping not one but both knees at the dro—’

‘ ‘d you know she’s never once asked me whether Booboo and I hear from you? Not once. A sort of appalled pride. She’s ashamed of even hurting over it, some —’

‘Kidding all off to the side, I’m serious about this. The oddness of it. You know I respect your frontal lobes, Hallie. I’m asking for depth, not any kind of expertise.’

‘You just ignored the meat of everything I just said. You’re like an old person about this. With an old person’s weird selective hearing.’

‘I’m going to let this whole pot-insulting-the-kettle on selective awareness of things just slide right on by. As a gesture that this is a serious call. Why they all seemingly with one mind switched objectives.’

‘And acting on behalf of the whole of Canada, Quebec, suddenly, is what you want explained. Or do you simply want it confirmed as odd?’

‘The Subject cited polls from when they were still bothering to take polls up there that said like upwards of four-fifths of all Canadians wanted out of O.N.A.N. and hoped President Gentle had a ghastly accident in his UV-booth, et cetera.’

‘So the second and final question concerns this shift from anti-Canadian Québecer nationalism to anti-O.N.A.N. Canadian nationalism.’

‘What I was thinking is is this maybe a textbook case of Johnny-Gentle-type-find-an-enemy-for-a-divided-nation-to-come-together-by-blaming-and-hating theory in action? Is this somehow Quebec like circling its wagons with Alberta and all the other provinces in the face of a common enemy?’

‘…’

‘Hal?’

‘You could always point out to the profiler that there’s a nice little irony to Gentle’s strategy ending up bringing Canada together at our expense, when it was pretty obviously meant to bring us together at Canada’s expense.’

‘But you sound like you think the more deeply pondered response would be something else.’

‘All I know is some very basic schoolboy history from Poutrincourt’s class. And from the advantage of occasional contact with the Moms.’

‘Hit me.’

‘The historical record indicates pretty clearly that the one and only nationalism in the Québecois soul is Québecois nationalism. It’s been “Nous v. La Plupart Toujours,” and the more so the farther out on the fringes you get. I can’t see the Séparatisteurs considering Quebec a true part of Canada any more than Lesotho saw itself as part of SOUTHAF. Poutrincourt keeps thumping the fact that there’s no valid comparison between Quebec and our own antebellum South. Why do you think Meech Lake III^h failed? It’s because at root they’ve never seen themselves as anything other than hostages of Ottawa and the Anglophone provinces. Even moderate Séparatisteurs like Parizeau spoke of the final surrender on the Plains of Abraham as a kind of forced property-transfer, the whole original war¹ as one in which French-Canadians weren’t the losers so much as the spoils. Booty.’

‘This all checks with the Subject’s take.’

‘The impression I get is that Quebec’s hatred of anglophone Canada transcends anything they could work up against O.N.A.N. Just mention 1759 and the Moms’s lips disappear. Pemulis and Axford keep coming early and putting a big gothic 1759 on the blackboard before GÔcMJ just to watch the Moms’s lips disappear when she comes in and sees it.’

‘My sense is the Subject concurs on the hatred-assessment. They want plain out, always have. Health-care and NAFTA be damned. That’s why they sabotaged all three Meech Lake Accords, she says. She seems to imply the anti-O.N.A.N. thing is some sort of anomalous dodge or something.’

‘I’ve got to confess a sort of curiosity now about this profiler you just last week were preparing to fend off about Himself. Not to mention comparing her to defensive linemen. Rubensian was never your type, I didn’t think.’

‘…’

‘Plus any Subject you’re bothering about even giving the impression of depth to. This is more work than your type of Subject tends to demand, usually, isn’t it?’

‘…’

‘This is something else that isn’t you. You’ve never exactly been shy about discussing Subjects with me.’

‘It’s complex. She’s grown on me.’

‘It’s this certain way she takes notes on your explanation of Coffin-Corner punts.’

‘It’s complicated. There’s a lot I’m not saying. She’s got levels. I’ve discovered levels and dimensions to her I didn’t know were originally there.’

‘Oh O., please don’t let it just be you’ve just discovered she’s married with little kids.

That’s not it by any chance is it? Please let it be something other than little kids.’

‘…’

‘Let it be something other than the hordes of other Subjects I’ve sat and listened to excruciatingly detailed sadistic blow-by-blow Strategic accounts of. Orin “Home-wrecker” Incandenza, this is what the team calls you, in like jest? You sick pup.’

‘I’m a sick pup? I’m the sick one?’

‘… Wants to blame her, won’t admit it, needs to, won’t admit it, sweepingly blames the whole affair of Himself on her, won’t interface with her or worse even acknowledge her, resents even the fact she forgives things like you and Marlon Bain killing her dog —’

‘— a hit-and-run-and-back-up-and-hit-again driver, I told you rep—’

‘— pretends he gets the most retardate PR staffer he can make hold the crayon to send grotesque solecistic pseudo-impersonal replies to her pathetic letters. Jethro Bodine, O.? Jethro Bodine?

‘A private chuckle. She’d never get it.’

‘Disowns her — worse, sicker, tells himself he’s convinced himself she doesn’t even exist, as if she never existed, but by some coincidence has this rapacious fetish for young married mothers he can strategize into betraying their spouses and maybe damaging their kids for all time, and has this apparently even more rapacious compulsive need to call the blood-relative he hasn’t even seen in four years and tell him all about every Subject and Strategy, blow-by-blow, long distance, in nanomicroscopic detail. Let’s stop and ponder this all for a moment, O., what say?’

‘I’m letting all this be just water off a duck’s back. I can tell it’s the tooth talking. I can remember the stress of the place. All I can say is that trust me here: this Moment Subject is like strickenly dissimilar from what you’re indicting. The levels and circumstances aren’t the ones you’re so anxious to call rapacious. Is all I can say at this juncture.’

‘Why do I suspect it’s simply that you tried to make the big X with her and she demurred and this simply piqued your interest? During my can’t-miss nail-interval you were saying how enormous interior linemen were making comments about her bottom being so huge and soft you could whack it over and over with a car antenna and not hurt it.’

‘Hallie I never said any such fucking thing. You pulled that out of the air. And I’m sick?’

‘You said she was obese.’

‘I said she was a girl and a half in all directions. Which all of a sudden there was something that seemed cross-cultural about it: I had this sudden flash of understanding how cultures can regard largeness as erotic. More of someone to love. Not to mention queerly and oddly intense and alive and vibrant.’

‘And she declined a casual advance, and showed you pictures of her like enormous offspring, and you came to attention.’

‘With a heartbreakingly lovely face, too, Hal, all peachy and lissome, like big pretty girls get.’

Tm going to have to keep her away from this kid Ortho Stice up here, because he really is a Rubensophile. After P.M.s when we sit around he’ll go on and on about enormous breasts and melon bellies and quivering laps until we’re all grimacing and pinching our nose-bridges. And whatever you meant was not lissome.’

‘The reserve QB who’s next to me in these godawful pre-game costumed swoop-and-glides said something I liked. Helen passed him in the locker room and he — do you want to hear this?’

‘She was in the locker room?’

‘It’s the law. The pros aren’t a PR-gulag. He said she had a face that’d break your heart and then also break the heart of whoever like rushed over to your aid as you pitched over sideways grabbing your chest.’

‘That is a pretty good one, O.’

‘But so far we concur on the basic oddness, it sounds like. If the radicals want Quebec loose from Canada still, and that’s always been the priceless pearl, why like dissipate themselves trying to wreak mayhem down here almost the precise moment Interdependence is declared? ‘ce pas?’

‘I’d rather just agree it’s a stumper and then go dry my ankle and find a clean shirt and grab Schacht and hit him up for some Anbesol before we hit the truck.’

‘Right? And do these different groups get along, amongst themselves, the different Separatist flanges?’

‘Not according to Poutrincourt they don’t.’

‘So why then the united concerted switch from like Let Quebec Go or we stick knives in the eyes of Canadian VIPs and drop huge confections on Rue Sherbrooke during St. Jean-Baptiste Day to all of a sudden Let Canada Go or we blow up ATHSCME towers and stretch mirrors across U.S. highways and hang fleur-de-lis banners from U.S. monuments and disrupt InterLace pulses and skywrite Nuck obscenities over Buffalo and dicky with waste-vehicle launchers so it rains moose-guano on New Haven and shoot O.N.A.N.ite V.I.P.s on U.S. soil and only barely get foiled from injecting anaerobic toxins into jars of Planters peanuts?’

‘The New Haven Brown Rain thing was sort of a chortle, though, you have to admit.’

‘Chortles are good. We like chortles. But what’s the political motivation for the about-face? Account for this for me. All it has to do is sound soberly considered.’

‘Orin, I’m trying to reconcile your doubtless sincere seriousness about this with your choice of me as co-ponderer.’

‘All—’

Tm a privileged white seventeen-year-old U.S. male. I’m a student at a tennis academy that sees itself as a prophylactic. I eat, sleep, evacuate, highlight things with yellow markers, and hit balls. I lift things and swing things and run in huge outdoor circles. I am just about as apolitical as someone can be. I am out of all loops but one, by design. I’m sitting here naked with my foot in a bucket. What exactly is it you hope to get from me on this? I keep losing focus on whether you want a deep-sounding line of patter to facilitate Xing this fleshy Subject or have somehow been seduced into believing it’s really worth pondering the weedy thought-processes of fringe Canadians. Of fringe anybody. How consistent do the Brazilian Nuevo Contras’ objectives look? The Noie Störkraffs? Shining Path’s? The Belgian CCCY? Pro-Life assault squads? The Ez-ed-Dean-el-Qassan? P.E.T.A. fur-farm arsonists’ objectives? Jesus, Gentle and the poor C.U.S.P.s?’^k

‘Poor C.U.S.P.s?’

‘Why not just soberly shrug and invoke the term wacko and leave it at that? Why not tell her you’re a radically simple and somewhat sick young man who kicks balls really high in the air for a living?’

‘All I—’

‘Why not just say who cares? This stuff isn’t about you and me. The person this stuff is about is the person you say you’ve erased from all RAM. Why not tell the damn truth for once?’

‘Me tell the truth? Me lie?’

‘What, this ascapartic bathroom-mag journalist is going to give you like an SAT entrance-test on Francophone extremism? Like a gyno-entrance exam? You have to place above a certain percentile to get her to let you X her on the floor of the nursery right next to the bassinet? Whom are you trying to kid? Whom do you think this is really about? Can you be that sick that you can’t even admit it over the fucking phone?’

‘Or what?’

‘I’m sorry, O. I apologize.’

‘Think nothing of it. I know you didn’t mean it.’

‘I hate losing the temper.’

‘You don’t sound good, Hallie. You sound ground down.’

Hal grinds at his eye with a finger. ‘These tooth-episodes make me feel like that wobbled shrieking figure in that Munch lithograph.’

‘That chew’s going to eat right through your membranes. It’s a vicious vice. I’m urging in all earnest. Ask that Schacht kid.’

Michael Pemulis cracks Hal’s door slowly and slowly pokes his head and one shoulder in, saying nothing. He has showered but is still flushed, and his right eye gets wobbly in this certain way when two or three Tenuates are wearing off. He has his yachting cap, gold epaulets of fake naval braid, and in one ear a piratical gold hoop that lights up in sync with his pulse. With the door just cracked and his head poked in he brings his other arm in over from behind like it’s not his arm, his hand in the shape of a claw just over his head, and makes as if the claw from behind is pulling him back out into the hall. W/ an eye-rolling look of fake terror.

Hal is hunched, examining his finger for eye-material. ‘In all the excitement we’ve neglected the most obvious response, then, O. Your answer for the exam, and then I can go dry the ankle.’ He can hear PemuJis asking Petropolis Kahn and Stephan Wagenknecht something off down the hall through the cracked door.

‘I think I already tried the obvious response on her, but hit me.’

‘Pemulis just made his first pass and left the door ajar. I’m sitting here nude in a draft through an open door neglecting the maybe deceptively obvious fact that something like, what, three-quarters of the Concavity’s northern border runs contiguous to Quebec.’

‘Exactamundo.’

‘So that so what if Ottawa didn’t formally subjoin the Concavity to any particular province. Really big favor, I’m sure. Because the map speaks for itself. Bits of western New Brunswick and a smidgeon of Ontario aside, the Concavity — the physical fact and fallout of the Concavity — it’s Quebec’s problem. Something like 750 clicks of border along the Concavity, with attendant seepage, for Notre Rai Pays.’

‘Yes plus the brunt of the airborne wastes from the high-altitude ATHSCMEs, plus being the province that gets splatted when the E.W.D. vehicles overshoot the Concavity. This is what í tried right off the bat on her.’

‘So what’s the puzzle. Put yourself in Quebec’s shoes. Once again they get the gooey end of the Canadian dipstick. It’s mostly now western Québecer kids the size of Volkswagens shlumpfing around with no skulls. It’s Québecers with cloracne and tremors and olfactory hallucinations and infants born with just one eye in the middle of their forehead. It’s eastern Quebec that gets green sunsets and indigo rivers and grotesquely asymmetrical snow-crystals and front lawns they have to beat back with a machete to get to their driveways. They get the feral-hamster incursions and the Infant-depredations and the corrosive fogs.’

‘Although people aren’t exactly flocking to New Brunswick or Lake Ontario either. And the coastal ATHSCMEs send the coastal phenols out over Fundy, and supposedly the lobsters out there are like monsters in old Japanese films, and supposedly Nova Scotia glows, at night, in satellite photos.’

‘Still and all, O., tell her proportionally speaking it’s Quebec that’s borne the brunt of what Canada had to take. The brunt again, to their way of thinking, remember. Small wonder the fringe mentalities are violently anti-O.N.A.N. up there. There’s got to be a real straw-and-camel feel to the whole thing.’

The door swings all the way open and clunks against the wall behind it. Michael Pemulis has pretended to kick it in. ‘Good Lard preserve us he’s nekkid,’ he says, coming in and closing the door to check behind it. Hal holds up a hand for him to wait a second.

‘Except here’s the thing,’ Orin says. Pemulis stands expectantly in an uncluttered patch of Hal’s half of the floor and makes a show of looking at his wrist as if there were a watch there. Hal nods at him and holds up one finger.

‘Except here’s the thing,’ Orin is saying. ‘The issue she raises is is there really any sort of realistic hope of Quebec getting Gentle to get O.N.A.N. to reverse the Reconfiguration. Take back the Concavity, shut down the fans, make us acknowledge the waste as fundamentally American waste.’

‘Well probably of course not.’ Hal looks up at Pemulis and makes his own hand into a claw and makes clawing motions at the phone. Pemulis is compulsively going around zipping and unzipping everything in the room with a zipper, a habit of his Hal loathes. ‘But now she’s got you falling back into demanding realistic and consistent logic from fringe mentalities again.’

‘But Hallie just hang on. Canada as a whole couldn’t oppose O.N.A.N. Wouldn’t. Ottawa’s so far in now they wouldn’t say shit if they had three times the mouthful they already have. Of shit I mean.’

Pemulis is pointing vehemently out the west window at the parking lot where the tow truck is parked and making exaggerated Henry Vlll-like rending and chewing motions. His eyes, under the waning influence of P.M. stimulants, do not get mirthful or glazed.

They just get tiny and lightless and even closer together in his narrow face, like a second set of nostrils. The right eye’s little wobble is out of sync with the pulse of his earring.

There’s the sound of Orin switching phone-hands. ‘So then I’ll ask you what she seemed like she rhetorically asked: are the Separatists’ and fringe cells’ pathetic little anti-O.N.A.N. campaigns and gestures down here basically just hopeless and pathetic?’

‘Does fish-shit drift slowly bottomward, O.? How could she see it as anything but, if she’s as savvy as you say?’ Hal removes his pruned white foot from the janitor-bucket and dries it on a woppsed-up sheet. He points at a pair of underwear near Pemulis’s Dock-sider. Pemulis picks the briefs up off the floor with two fingers and tosses them to Hal with a pretend-shudder.

‘So simply largely symbolic at best, then?’

Hal’s lying back trying to get his legs into the briefs with one hand. ‘Tell her after much chin-stroking simply yes, O. O., Pemulis is standing here already in his hat pretending to clang a dinner bell. He’s got big glittery ropes of drool swinging from his lower lip.’ Pemulis is actually making a complex system of motions indicating both the procedures for rolling a duBois and the lateness of the hour. For the past two years, Hal and Pemulis and Struck and Troeltsch and sometimes B. Boone have made a little ritual of nipping out to the little hidden clearing behind West House’s parking lot’s dumpsters and sharing an obscene cigar-sized duBois before the I.-Day-Eve expedition and supper out, while Schacht and sometimes Ortho Stice sit inside the tow truck, faces green in the green glow of the truck’s instruments, warming it up. Hal sits up and makes a waggling go-on-ahead-on-down motion to Pemulis.

‘But you have the … Mr. Hope,’ Pemulis stage-whispers.

‘One moment please.’ Hal clamps a hand hard over the phone and covers phone and hand with two pillows and some bedding, and stage-whispers ‘Where’s your part of the Mr. H. all of a sudden? Why do we have to roll a zeppelin out of my part of the Hope I bought retail from you not three days ago?’

The nystagmus makes the eye-rolling lurider. ‘Extenuations. We can get it all sorted out right later. Nobody’s going to like exploit you.’

And then it’s hard to extract the hand and phone. ‘O., I’m going to have to book out of here in just about one second.’

‘Just how about this. Ponder this in advance for me and try and stay upright til you can call me back. This was the Subject’s crux-type proposal. You can call collect if you want.’

‘I don’t have to respond,’ Hal says.

‘Correct.’

‘I just listen and then break the connection.’

‘Calling me like tonight or tomorrow before lunch, collect if I.-Day’s full-toll.’

‘I just sit here very briefly and then the conversation’s over and we can go.’ Hal’s directing all this more at Pemulis, who’s pacing and holding the Constantine bust in his hands and examining it at close range, shaking his head.

‘All set? This is it. Are you set?’

‘So go already.’

‘Her poser goes roughly like this. If the Separatists’ big object has always been to independently secede, and if they’ve got about a snowball’s chance of ever really getting O.N.A.N. de-Reconfigured, and if pretty much all Canadians despise Gentle and the transfer of the Concavity and the whole Experialist merde sandwich, but especially the Concavity, the cartographic fact of a Concavity in our map and a new Convexity in theirs, that the maps now say it’s Canadian soil, this toxified like area: grant that all this is obviously right; then why don’t the Separatists in Quebec use the fact of the odiousness of the Concavity to go put their parliamentary wigs on and go to Ottawa to parliament and say to the rest of Canada like: Look, let us secede, and we’ll take the Concavity with us when we secede, it’ll be our problem not yours, it’ll go on the maps as Québecois and not Canadian, it’ll be our blot and our bone of dissension with O.N.A.N., and Canadian honor will be desmirched, and Canada’s pathetic standing in O.N.A.N. and the like world community of standings will be rehabilitated because of the ingenious way Ottawa’s parliament will have re-gerrymandered O.N.A.N.’s map without taking on the U.S. directly? Why not this? Why don’t they go to Ottawa and say Cuibono all around and say This way everybody wins? We get our own Notre Rai Pays, and you get the slap in the face of the Concavity off your map. The Subject posited why the Nucks don’t see the odiousness of the Concavity as maybe the best thing that ever happened to them in terms of Canada’s persuadability into letting Quebec go. She hit me with Why wouldn’t your thinking militant Nucks use the Concavity as a bargaining chip for independence, why would they want O.N.A.N. to take back the one thing odious enough to be a chip?’

‘Who’s this you’re talking to you can’t call back?’ Pemulis says loudly, pacing back and forth with little toy-soldier about-faces, his hoop flickering like mad.

Hal lowers the phone but doesn’t cover it. ‘It’s Orin, wanting to know why Quebec and the F.L.Q. and so on haven’t tried bargaining with the Canadian administration, offering Quebec’s cartographic adoption of the Concavity in exchange for Separation.’ Hal cocks his head slightly. ‘This could be Poutrincourt’s so-called Separation and return’s real meaning, it occurs to me.’

‘Orin as in your brother, with the leg?’

‘He’s all in a swivet about inter-O.N.A.N.ite politics.’

Pemulis makes a megaphone of his hands. ‘Tell him who gives a bright flaming fart! Tell him to go read a book! Tell him to access any one of a dozen D-bases off of the Net! Tell him you’re pretty sure he can afford it!’ Pemulis’s hands are slender and red-knuckled and his fingers long and sort of falcate. ‘Tell him you can hear the truck getting impatiently revved as on one of the very few totally free nights we ever get our friends get ready to leave without you. Remind him how we have to eat on schedule up here or we get the wobbles. Tell him we read books and tirelessly access D-bases and run our asses off all day here and need to eat instead of we don’t just stand there and swing one leg up and down over and over for seven-plus figures.’

‘Tell Penisless to go sit on something sharp,’ Orin says.

‘O., he’s right, I can feel that feeling of my body starting to feed on itself. You said I could think and call you back. I’ll use your pager if you like.’

Pemulis has used one foot to clear a path through laundry and diskettes and books and gear to the west window, where he’s making broad involved gestures with a person or persons outside down on the grounds whom the window’s big sill keeps Hal from being able to see. Hal’s underwear is at a diagonal across his pelvis. Orin on the phone is saying:

‘Picture this and see what you think. Imagine this. The F.L.Q. and other various Separatist cells all suddenly divert their terror’s energies away from Canada and suddenly start mounting an insurgent campaign of U.S. and Mexican harassment. But the thing is they make a big deal of terroristically insurging against O.N.A.N. on the behalf of all of Canada. They even find a way to bring the Albertan ultra-rightists in on it, plus other provincial fringes, so it looks to O.N.A.N. like maybe all of Canada as a whole is in on the insurging.’

‘I don’t have to picture it. It’s what’s going on. The C.P.C.P.¹ makes incursions against Montana like clockwork. There was that horrific jamming of InterLace pulses and substitution of porn-films for children’s programming around Duluth in June traced to that psycho quintet in southwest Ontario. The Interstates north of Saratoga are still supposed to be undrivable after sunset.’

‘Exactly.’

‘So some point for me to ponder needs to emerge really fast, here, Orin.’

‘The point is I was rhetorically invited by the Subject to entertain the picture of it all really being the Nucks. The pan-Canadian thing being a dodge. The Separatists all somehow united and orchestrating the anti-O.N.A.N.ism. The rhetorical question becomes to imagine this and ask: Why would they do this?’

‘We’re wearing a groove in the same track again, O. It’s because the Concavity impacts mainly Quebec.’

‘No, I mean she meant why would they make such a noise about insurging on behalf of all of Canada and go to such lengths to orchestrate the appearance of pan-Canadian anti-O.N.A.N.ism.’

‘And then judging by precedent the Subject gave a hypothetical answer to her own question. Have you gotten to get a word in edgewise throughout this series of interviews, O.?’

‘What if it’s that the Nuck Separatists know totally well that if the O.N.A.N. administration sees Canada as a big enough roach in the ointment, Gentle and Unspecified Services’ boys in white can get together with Mexico’s Vichified puppet-state and make things like really unpleasant indeed for Ottawa. They could make Canada the sort of black scapegoat of all of O.N.A.N. There’s little you can picture that might be worse than being the one country in a three-country continental Anschluss that the other two countries are ganging up on and making things unpleasant for.’

‘Vichified Anschluss? This doesn’t sound like any Orin I know. These are rabidly political catchwords. What kind of heartbreaking Rubensian Moment-type fluff-journalist is this you’re so determined to —?’

‘The unpleasantness is pretty easy to imagine a picture of. The E.W.D. vectors could easily be recalibrated further north, Gentle could tell them. Our waste-resources are extensive. At the mildest, he could say, good-sized chunks of Canada could be Concav-itized.’

‘I have to go. Pemulis is slumped back against the wall with his hands over his stomach and is slumping all the way down the wall looking wobbly and pale.’

‘Ponder the picture of the parliament’s nails bitten all the way down to the ragged pink pulpy stuff as the Nucks orchestrate the terrorism so it looks more and more like Canada versus O.N.A.N.’

Hal’s in slacks and one street-sock and one athletic sock and picking different shirts up off the floor, trying to smell a clean one. ‘But this is all —’

‘Kyaaaa!’ Pemulis vaults a corner of Hal’s bed and tries to claw at the transparent phone’s antenna like he’s going to break it off. Hal turns to protect the phone with a shoulder, whipping at Pemulis with a sweatshirt.

Orin is saying ‘What I’m asking is for you to ponder could it maybe end up that Quebec, after wreaking various mayhi down here and making it look like it’s all of Canada, the P.Q.s or somebody respectable gets wigged up and go to Ottawa and offers this deal: Parliament gets the P.M. and the government to get the other provinces to let Quebec go, Separate, aller, partir — and in return Québec’ll step up the anti-O.N.A.N. harassment and insurgency while dropping the pretense of other provinces being involved and all of Canada insurging and make it publicly clear that it’s Quebec and Quebec alone that’s O.N.A.N.’s real nemesis. They tell Ottawa they’ll offer the contiguousness of the Concavity as their reason and send absolutely everything they’ve got in terms of terrorism at O.N.A.N. and Gentle, taking full credit each time. Offering themselves as the culprit and de-Reconfiguration as the objective.’

‘So your multilevelled journalist’s hypothesizing a kind of meta-extortion.’ Hal can hear Pemulis’s whistle-lipped breathing. ‘Separation is still the Québecer insurgents’ real goal, and their anti-O.N.A.N. insurgency is not what it appears.’ Hal’s in the dark under the desk that the fold-out TP and drives and phone console and modem are stacked on one corner of, surrounded by nests of wires, trying to find his other street-shoe. ‘It’s supposedly just been a ruse to arouse O.N.A.N.’s ire at Canada so the Québecers can use the U.S. and Mexico as levers on Ottawa.’

‘Trying to engineer it so that Canada’ll be more than happy to disassociate from them,’

Orin says. ‘And Fm saying I don’t have the background or lobes to even know whether she might be putting me on, testing my depth.’

‘You’ve always had a special dread of depth-testing.’

‘How about why don’t you just toss me the Bob and Axhandle and me’ll go down and get things ready and wait for you,’ Pemulis stage-whispers to Hal’s slacks’ bottom, which is pretty much all that’s visible from under the desk. Hal’s hand comes up out of the leg-space under the desk and raises one finger and shakes it a little for emphasis. Pemulis is standing next to the small TP viewer — which is propped up like a large photo with a buttressy thing that folds out of its back — and the TP’s disk- and cartridge-drive, which takes up less than a quarter of the desktop and has the phone’s console and power unit bolted into a receptacle on the drive’s side.

Hal’s voice is muffled and has the strained pitch of someone trying to clear nests of dust-bunnied wire to find something. ‘Except Orin I don’t see a great deal of pondering required here. The total anti-U.S. insurgency so far’s been too hapless and small-potato for her theory to work. The odd pie- and guano-bombardment, stretching mirrors across lonely roads, even demapping officials and botulizing the occasional peanut jar. None of this is exactly bringing anyone to his knees. None of this is making Canada or Quebec look like any kind of serious threat.’

Michael Pemulis, his jaunty cap pushed back and his lips pursed as if whistling, but not whistling, is very casually brushing his hand over the drive and console’s power unit, as if killing time by casually dusting. His other hand’s jingling pocket-change. There’s the sound of Hal clunking his head on something under the desk. His bottom is bony and his belt has missed two loops. The power unit’s toggle’s next to a little red jewel of a power-light that blinks at the same rate as a smoke alarm when the toggle’s on ON.

Hal sneezes twice. Pemulis taps his fingers in a little anapestic gallop over the unit’s top. Orin sounds like he’s sitting up straight. ‘Hallie kid now you’re right with me, this is where your pondering lobes come in, because that was just my response, that there was nothing sufficiently more than just an annoying gnat-like annoyance about the insurgencies, which is where she moved beyond my depth back into l(a), if you remember, when she raised this samizdat-word in connec—’

a. Don’t ask.

b. Ibid.

c. I.e., the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts, a syntactic-integrity PAC Avril had put together with two or three very dear friends and colleagues around metro Boston.

d. The Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster’s anti-sclerotic miracle-food craze.

e. The then-skinny Eliot Kornspan, before Loach and Freer got hold of him.

f. At once high-tech and somehow atavistic, Telegrocery services let you order off your TP and then have the stuff brought right to your door by college-studenty types, often within hours, saving one the stress and fluorescent hassle of public food-shopping. As of Y.D.A.U. it’s still very big in some areas and not all that big in others. The first Tele-grocery service didn’t even launch in metro Boston until YY2007MRCVMETIUFI/ ITPSFH,O,OM(s), and it’s still mostly in Boston a downscale and blue-collar thing, oddly.

g. Interlace serves just about all of habitable O.N.A.N.; each nation comprises (roughly speaking) an entertainment-dissemination ‘Grid.’

h. After Meech Lake I, Charlottetown I and II, and Meech Lake II, this was Ottawa’s fifth and final attempt to placate Quebec with a constitutional amendment formalizing the Gallic province’s right to ‘preserve and promote’ a ‘distinct society and culture.’

i. The French and Indian War, known to Québecers as ‘La Guerre des Britanniques et des Sauvages,’ BS c. 1754-60, at the final battles of which, at the Plains of Abraham in ‘59 and Montreal in ‘60, the English and Americans kicked ass and took names in a large way that’s never quite been forgotten by the Québecois, whose memory for insult is the stuff of legend. The wily Amherst was there, too, at Ticonderoga and Montreal, with his trusty smallpox-blankets.

j. Grammar and Meaning.

k. The Clean U.S. Party of Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner.

1. The Calgarian pro-Canadian Phalanx.

[111] Hal’s term, actually an Incandenza-family term, actually not inappropriate here because like most Incandenza-family terms put into family usage by Avril, who’s an expatriate Québecer, whinge is some east-Canadian idiom for vigorous high-pitched complaining, almost like whining except with a semantic tinge of legitimacy to the complaint.

[112] The soon to be all-too-well-known and dread-inspiring Assassins des Fauteuils Roll-ents of the E.W.D.-receptacle-festooned Papineau region of southwestern Quebec.

[113] Which sinewy stuff is described by the OB-GYN specialist in his DictaChart as ‘neural-gray.’

[114] © B.S. MCMLXII, The Glad Flaccid Receptacle Corporation, Zanesville OH, sponsor of the very last year of O.N.A.N.ite Subsidized Time (q.v. Note 78). All Rights Reserved.

[115] Volkmann’s contracture’s some kind of severe serpentine deformation of the arms following a fracture that hadn’t been set right or splinted or where the arm’s been allowed to stay all woundedly bent in as it heals; bradyauxesis refers to some part(s) of the body not growing as fast as the other parts of the body — Himself and the Moms got plenty familiar with these sorts of congenital-challenge terms and many more, re Mario, particularly the variations on the medical root brady, from the Greek bradys meaning slow, such as bradylexia (w/r/t reading), bradyphenia (practical-problem-solving-type thinking), nocturnal bradypnea (dangerously slow breathing during sleep sometimes, which is why Mario uses four pillows minimum), bradypedestrianism (obvious), and especially bradykinesia, an almost gerontologic lentissimo about most of Mario’s movements, an exaggerated slowness that both resembles and permits extremely close slow attention to whatever’s being done.

[116] Pretty much the BMW of 16mm. digital-cartridge recorders, brought out in limited numbers by Paillard Cinématique of Sherbrooke, Quebec, CAN, just weeks before its manufacturing facilities were annularly hyperfloriated and the company went belly-up.

[117]. overshot the place to mention that Mario’s head — in perverse contradistinction to the arm-trouble — is hyperauxetic, and two to three times the size of your more average elf-to-jockey-sized head and facies.

[118] You’d somehow think that Mario would be thick as thieves with the blue-collar custodial and kitchen and physical plant/grounds staff, but it’s odd, he and they never have much to say to each other, and with rare exceptions none of the E.T.A.s including Mario has anything interpersonal to do with the nine-month part-time halfway-house rehabilitating workers, who mostly mow and mop and empty trash and load dishes into the dining hall’s steamer, and who radiate a kind of slitty-eyed reserve that seems far more sullen and ungrateful than shy.

[119] also overshot the spot to include that Mario’s a homodont: all his teeth are bicuspids and identical, front and back, not unlike a porpoise; it’s a source of unending struggle for Ted Schacht, who tends to avoid Mario because whenever he’s around him he has to fight the urge to have him open up and submit to scrutiny, which Schacht can well imagine would hurt his feelings: nobody wants to be an object of clinical interest like that.

[120] This basic phenomenon being what more abstraction-capable post-Hegelian adults call ‘Historical Consciousness.’

[121] Eschaton’s pre- and post-procedures are convolved enough so that an actual game gets gotten up every like month or so at most, almost always on Sunday, but even then not all twelve of a year’s kids can get the hours off to play, which is why the latitude and surplus in game-personnel.

W-520-500-268-6^w-9^w-9^w-

[122] O.N.A.N.ite Classroom Cartographic Series 14^W4, © B.S. 1994, Rand McNally & Company.

[123] Pemulis here, dictating to Inc, who can just sit there making a steeple out of his fingers and pressing it to his lip and not take notes and wait and like inscribe [sic] it anytime in the next week and get it verbatim, the smug turd. Using the Mean-Value formula for dividing available megatonnage among Combatants whose GNP/Military // Military/Nuke ratios vary from Eschaton to Eschaton keeps you from needing to crunch out a new ratio for each Combatant each time, plus lets you multi-regress the results so Combatants get rewarded for past thermonuclear largesse [occasional verbal flourishes Hal’s — HJI]. The formula’s also provable by the Extreme Value Theorem, which the EV Theorem itself has a proof that’s just about the biggest Unit-twisting bitch in the whole of applied differentiation, but I see Hal grimacing, so we’ll keep it compact, even though this whole thing is real interesting if you’re interested and whatnot.

Say you’ve got a Combatant and a record of his past GNP/Military // Military/Nuke ratios. We want to give the Combatant the like exact average of all the past megatonnages he’s gotten in the past. The exact average is called the ‘Mean Value,’ which ought to give us a bit of a giggle, given the hostility of the context here.

So then but let A stand for the Mean Value of a Combatant’s constantly fluctuating ratio and so constantly fluctuating initial megatonnage. We want to find A and give the Combatant exactly A megatons. How to do it’s pretty elegant, and all you need for it is two pieces of data: the most his ratio’s ever been and the least it’s ever been. These two datums [sic] are called the Extreme Values of the cn-n function for which A’s the Mean Value, by the way.

So then but so let / be a continuous non-negative function (meaning the ratio) on the interval [a, b] (meaning the difference between the least the ratio’s ever been and the most it’s ever been and whatnot). Are these little explanations aggravating [sic]? Inc’s looking at me like butter would freeze. It’s hard to know what to assume v. what to explain. I’m trying to be as clear as I can be [sic]. And now he’s looking at me like I’m digressing. Why don’t you just pass that certain item back on over here, Inculator. But so we’ve got / and we’ve got [a, bj. And let r and R be the smallest and biggest values of the function /(x) on the interval [a, b]. So now check out the rectangles of height r and height R over the interval [a, b] in the diagram marked let’s go ahead and mark it say PEEMSTER:

PEEMSTER

The Mean Value we’re after, A, can now be expressed integrally as the Area of some intermediate-type rectangle whose height is taller [sic] than r but shorter [sic] than R. From here on it’s just tit. We need a constant. You always need a constant. Inc’s nodding his head sarcastically like I think I’m saying something sage. Let d be any constant, for computational reasons the closer to 1 the better, so like let d be the size of Hal’s Unit.

Hal Incandenza’s Addendum: In meters.

Michael Pemulis’s Resumption: Very funny. So now, just looking at the wicked-illuminating PEEMSTER diagram above, you can see that this Area we want:

is going to be bigger than the area of the rectangle with height r and but also smaller than the area of the rectangle with height R. Pure mental reason [sic] compels, then, that [sic] somewhere in there between r and R there’s an exact height, f(x’), such that (I have to say that every demonstration of a stats theorem has Let and such that in them, mostly I think because they’re so wicked much fun to say) such that the rectangle of this height f(x’) over the whole interval [a, b] has exactly the Area we want, the Mean Value of all the historic [sic] expenditure-ratios; in other words in abstracted form:

where (b — a) is just the size of the interval. And so have a look at the revealing diagram labeled HALSADICK:

This fucking works. You don’t have to crunch out a whole new ratio each time for each Combatant to dole out the ordnance. You just skim the highest and lowest ratios off the Eschaton records the Beanie-man keeps on each time. This is wicked. This is fucking elegant. Note that (Note that’s another like compulsitory [sic] term) note that the Combatant’s Mean-Value megatonnage will change, slightly, from Eschaton to Eschaton, exactly the way a like hitter’s season average will alter just a bit from at-bat to at-bat, depending integrally on what he delivered on his last trip to the plate and whatnot. Note also that you can use this Mean-Value time-saver with anything that varies within a (definable) set of boundaries and whatnot — like any line, or a tennis court’s boundaries, or like maybe say a certain drug’s urine-level range between Clean and Royally Pinched. As a like exercise, if you’re interested, play three hours of high-level competitive jr. top-level [sic] tennis and then calculate the Mean Value of the ratios of first serves to appearances at net and appearances at net to points won; for a serve-and-volleyer, this is how to tell how serve-dependent his match-performance is. DeLint does this kind of exercise every morning sitting on the can. It’s going to be interesting to see if [sic] Hal, who thinks he’s just too sly trying to outline Eschaton in the 3rd-person tense [sic] like some jowly old

Eschatologist with leather patches on his elbows [sic], if Inc can transpose [sic?] the math here without help from his Mumster. Later. P.S. Allston Rules.

[124] Both EndStat and Mathpak are registered trademarks of Aapps Inc., itself now a division of InterLace TelEntertainment.

[125] Plastic-mesh laundry baskets take two hands to carry and keep you from being able to dribble up more balls with your stick’s face; the cast-off janitorial buckets are the size of like a middle-size wastebasket, but they have a sturdy steel pail-type handle, and their hard-polymer composition makes for lasting wear. It was into just such a bucket that Pemulis threw up before his kind of suspicious V.D. down at Port Washington.

(Various gear-companies sell various specially designed ball receptacles with names like ‘Ball-Hopper’ and ‘Ball-Bank’ — the general Academy consensus is these are for dilettantes and pussies.)

[126] It being well-nigh impossible to keep the present from infecting even a playful and childlike Historical Consciousness, Canadians often end up playing picayune but villainous roles in Eschatonic TRIGSITs.

[127] A lot of these little toss-ins and embellishments are Inc amusing himself, not Otis’s TRIGSIT, which is 100 % all biz.

P.S. Wolf-Spiders Ruleth the Land.

[128] Most Valuable Lobber.

[129] M. Pemulis is, in the best Allston MA tradition, a good friend and a bad-news enemy, and even E.T.A.s who don’t like him are careful not to do or even say anything that might call for score-settling, because Pemulis is a thoroughgoing chilled-revenge gourmet, and is not one bit above dosing someone’s water-jug or voltaging their doorknob or encoding something horrid in your E.T.A. med-files or dickying with the mirror over the bureau in the little recessed part of your subdorm room so that when you look in the mirror in the A.M. to comb or tend to a blackhead or something you see something staring back at you that you’ll never entirely get over, which is what took over two years to finally happen to M. H. Penn, who afterward wouldn’t say what he’d seen but stopped shaving altogether and, it’s agreed, has never been quite himself since.

[130] Pemulis doesn’t actually literally say ‘breath and bread.’

[131] Before Boston Groups’ regular speaker meetings there are often closed, half-hour Beginners’ Discussion Meetings, where newcomers can share their cluelessness, weakness, and despair in a warm supportive private atmosphere.

[132] The word Group in AA Group is always capitalized because Boston AA places enormous emphasis on joining a Group and identifying yourself as a member of this larger thing, the Group. Likewise caps in like Commitment, Giving It Away, and c.

[133] Gately’s little bedroom in the damp Ennet House basement is plastered all over every part of every wall that’s dry enough to take tape with cutout Scotch-taped photos of all sorts of variegated and esoteric celebrities past and present, which are varied as residents throw magazines into the E.M.P.H.H. dumpsters and are frequently selected because the celebrities are somehow grotesque; it’s a kind of compulsive habit held over from Gately’s fairly dysfunctional North Shore childhood, when he’d been a clipping and taping fiend.

[134] And if you’re brand-new, as in like your first three days, and so on mandatory nonpunitive House Restriction — like veiled Joelle van Dyne, who entered the House just today, 11/8, Interdependence Day, after the E.R. physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital who last night had pumped her full of Inderal³ and nitro had looked upon her unveiled face and been deeply affected, and had taken a special interest, a consequence of which after Joelle regained consciousness and speech had involved placing a call to Pat Montesian, whose paralyzying alcoholic stroke the physician had treated in this very same E.R. almost seven years before, and in whose case he’d also taken a special interest and had followed, such that he was now a personal friend of the sober Pat M.’s and sat honorarily on Ennet House’s Board of Directors, so that his call to Pat’s home on Saturday night had gotten Joelle into the House on the spot, as of Interdependence Day A.M.’S discharge from B&W, leap-frogging literally dozens of waiting-list people and putting Joelle into Ennet House’s intensive program of residential treatment literally before she even knew what was happening, which in retrospect might have been lucky — if you’re this new you’re actually not supposed ever to leave the Staffer’s sight, though in practice this rule gets suspended when you have to go to the ladies’ room and the Staffer’s male, or vice versa.

a. Propranolol hydrochloride, Wyeth-Ayerst, a beta-blocking antihypertensive.

[135] A conviction common to all who Hang In with AA, after a while, and abstracted in the slogan ‘My Best Thinking Got Me Here.’

[136] Trade-name Fastin, ®SmithKline Beecham Inc., a low-level ‘drine not unlike Tenu-ate, though w/ more associated tooth-grinding.

[137] None of these are Don Gately’s terms.

[138] In e.g. Boston: join Group, get Active, get phone #s, get sponsor, audio-call sponsor daily, hit meetings daily, pray like fiend for release from Disease, don’t kid self that you can still buy rodneys in liquor stores or date your dealer’s niece or think for a second you can still hang out in bars playing darts and just drinking Millennial Fizzies or vanilla Yoo-Hoos, etc.

[139] Volunteer Counselor Eugenio (‘Gene’) M. favors entomologic tropes and analogies, which is especially effective with brand-new residents fresh from subjective safaris through the Kingdom of Bugs.

[140] Don G.’s North Shore’s vulgate signifier for trite/banal is: limp.

[141] Likewise that his private term for blacks is niggers, which is unfortunately still all he knows.

[142] The speaker doesn’t actually use the terms thereon, most assuredly, or operant lim-bic system, though she really had, before, said chordate phylum.

[143] Sic.

[144] E.g. see Ursula Emrich-Levine (University of California-Irvine), ‘Watching Grass Grow While Being Hit Repeatedly Over the Head With a Blunt Object: Fragmentation and Stasis in James O. Incandenza’s Widower, Fun with Teeth, Zero-Gravity Tea Ceremony, and Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell,’ Art Cartridge Quarterly, vol. Ill, nos. 1–3, Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken.

[145] TRANSCRIPT-FRAGMENT FROM INTERVIEW SERIES FOR PUTATIVE

MOMENT MAGAZINE SOFT PROFILE ON PHOENIX CARDINAL

PROFESSIONAL PUNTER O. J. INCANDENZA, BY PUTATIVE MOMENT

MAGAZINE SOFT-PROFILE-WRITER HELEN STEEPLY, 3 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U. ‘Q.’

‘Well, there are odd sorts of consolations in having somebody go progressively bats in front of your eyes, such as for example sometimes The Mad Stork would go off on things in sort of a funny way. We always thought he was funny a good bit of the time.

‘You’ve got to remember he came at entertainment more from an interest in lenses and light. Most arty directors I think get more abstract as they go on. With him it was the opposite. A lot of his funniest stuff was very abstract. Are those earrings real copper? Can you wear real copper?’

•Q.’

‘You’ve got to remember that he came out of all these old artish directors that were really “ne pas a la mode” anymore by the time he broke in, not just Lang and Bresson and Deren but the anti-New Wave abstracters like Frampton, wacko Nucks like Godbout, anticonfluential directors like Dick and the Snows who not only really belonged in a quiet pink room somewhere but were also self-consciously behind the times, making all sorts of heavy art-gesture films about film and consciousness and isness and diffraction and stasis et cetera. Most extremely beautiful women Pve ever met complain of getting a sort of itchy green crust when they wear real copper. So the tenure-jockeys and critics who were hailing this millennial new Orthochromatic Neorealism thing as the real new avant-garde thing were getting tenure by blasting Dick and Godbout and the flying Snow Brothers and The Stork for trying to be avant-garde, when really they were self-consciously trying to be more like après-garde. I never did get straight on what Orthochromatic means, but it was very trendy. But The Mad Stork talked a lot about intentional atavism and retrogradism and stasis. Plus the academics who hated him hated the artificial sets and the chiaroscuro lighting, which the Stork had a total fetish for weird lenses and chiaroscuro.

‘After the thing about the Medusa and the Odalisque came out, and The Joke, and the film-establishment theory-queers were holding their noses and saying Incandenza’s still mired in this late-century self-referencing unentertaining formalism and unrealistic abstraction, after a while Himself, The Stork, in his own progressively bats way, decided to get revenge. He planned a lot of it out at McLean Hospital, which’s out in Belmont, which is where Himself had almost his own private reserved room, by then. He made up a genre that he considered the ultimate Neorealism and got some film-journals to run some proc-lamatory edictish things he wrote about it, and he got Duquette at M.I.T. and a couple other younger tenure-jockeys who were in on it to start referring and writing little articles in journals and quarterlies about it and talking at art openings and avant-garde theater and film openings, feeding it into the grapevine, hailing some new movement they called Found Drama, this supposedly ultimate Neorealism thing that they all declared was like the future of drama and cinematic art, etc.

‘Because I’m thinking if you like copper stuff and little Aztec suns there’s a small place down in Tempe where I know the owner and he has some incredible little copper pieces we could parp down and have you look at. My own theory is it takes an incredible natural complexion to be able to wear the baser metals, though it might just be an allergy-thing, the way some women react and some don’t.’

‘Q.’

‘What Found Drama was — and you’ve got to keep in mind that Duquette and a Brandeis critic named like Posener who was in on the revenge each got a mammoth grant for this, and The Mad Stork got two smaller ones somewhere, grants, to go cross-country to graduate film programs giving turgid theoretical deadly-serious lectures on this Found Drama, and then they’d come back up home to Boston and The Stork and the couple critics would lay up drunk and invent new Found-Drama theoretical lectures and chortle and laugh till there was evidence it was time for Himself to go back to detox again.’

‘Q.’

‘Like a family nickname. Hal and I either called him Himself or The Sad Stork. The Moms was the first to say Himself, which I think is a Canadian thing. Hal mostly said Himself. God knows what Mario used to call him. Who knows. I said Mad, The Mad Stork.’

‘Q.’

‘No see there weren’t any real cartridges or pieces of Found Drama. This was the joke. All it was was you and a couple cronies like Leith or Duquette got out a metro Boston phone book and tore a White Pages page out at random and thumbtacked it to the wall and then The Stork would throw a dart at it from across the room. At the page. And the name it hit becomes the subject of the Found Drama. And whatever happens to the protagonist with the name you hit with the dart for like the next hour and a half is the Drama. And when the hour and a half is up, you go out and have drinks with critics who like chortlingly congratulate you on the ultimate in Neorealism.’

‘Q.’

‘You do whatever you want during the Drama. You’re not there. Nobody knows what the name in the phone book’s doing.’

‘Q.’

‘The joke’s theory was there’s no audience and no director and no stage or set because, The Mad Stork and his cronies argued, in Reality there are none of these things. And the protagonist doesn’t know he’s the protagonist in a Found Drama because in Reality nobody thinks they’re in any sort of Drama.’

‘Q.’

‘Almost nobody. That’s a very good point. Almost nobody. I’m going to take a chance and just tell you I’m a little bit intimidated here.’

‘Q.’

‘I’m worried this might sound sexist or offensive. I’ve been around very, very beautiful women before, but I’m not accustomed to them being really acute and sharp and politically savvy and penetrating and multilevelled and intimidatingly intelligent. I’m sorry if that sounds sexist. It’s simply been my experience. I’ll go ahead and simply tell you the truth and take the chance that you might think I’m some kind of stereotypical Neanderthal athlete or sexist clown.’

‘Q.’

‘Absolutely no, no, nothing got recorded or filmed. Reality being camera-free, being the joke I’ll again underline. Nobody even knew what the guy in the phone book had been doing, nobody knew what the Drama had been. Although they liked to speculate when they’d go out after the time was up to have drinks and pretend to review how the Drama went. Himself usually imagined the guy was sitting there watching cartridges, or counting some pattern in his wallpaper, or looking out the window. It wasn’t impossible maybe even the name you hit with the dart was somebody dead in the last year and the phone book hadn’t caught up, and here was this guy who was dead and just a random name in a phone book and the subject of what people for a few months — until Himself couldn’t keep a straight face anymore or had had enough revenge on the critics, because the critics were hailing — not just the critics in on the joke, but actual tenure-jockeys who were getting tenure to assess and dismiss and hail — they were hailing this as the ultimate in avant-garde Neorealism, and saying maybe The Stork deserved reappraisal, for a Drama with no audience and oblivious actors who might have moved away or died. A certain Mad Stork got two grants out of it and later made a lot of enemies because he refused to give them back after the hoax was like unveiled. The whole thing was kind of bats. He spread the grant money for Found Drama around a couple of local improvisation companies. It’s not like he kept the money. It’s not like he needed it. I think he especially liked the idea that the star of the show might have already moved away or recently died and there was no way to know.’

[146] See for example Incandenza’s first narrative collaboration w/ Infernatron-Canada, the animated Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell, made at the acknowledged height of his anticonfluential period — B.S. Private Release, L.M.P.

[147] The festivity here being due largely to the fact that both he and Gerhardt Schtitt returned from putting on little E.T.A. presentations at various tennis clubs too late to have been informed about the degenerative Eschaton free-for-all and serious Lord-, Ingersoll-, and Penn-injuries, both trainer Barry Loach and prorector Rik Dunkel having told Avril, and Schtitt to be told by whichever of Nwangi and deLint first works up the pluck, and the issue of telling Tavis being as would be S.O.P. left up to Avril, who will — because Tavis has already lost a certain amount of sleep preparing emotionally and rhetorically for the impending arrival of putative Moment journalist ‘Helen’ Steeply, whom he’s been convinced to let onto the grounds by Avril’s argument that the Moment office promises the profile’s subject and inevitable hype involve only an E.T.A. alumnus (Avril neglected to tell Tavis she was pretty sure it was Orin) and that a certain amount of soft-news-publicity for E.T.A.-qua-institution couldn’t hurt in either the fundraising- or the recruiting-goodwill department — who will almost certainly wait and tell Tavis (who’s in far too festive a mood to notice three or four younger kids ominously absent from the supper and gala) in the morning, if the poor man’s to have a chance at any real sleep at all (also giving Avril time to figure out how upperclass heads can roll, as of course they must, given chaos and season-ending injuries under the direct gaze of designated Big Buddies, without those heads including that of Hal, who — unlike, thank God, John — was identified at the scene with that Pemulis person). Hal can tell just by the dining hall’s emotional gestalt that neither Schtitt nor Tavis knows about the Eschaton, but the Moms is next to impossible to read, and Hal won’t know whether she’s been told of the debacle until he is able to pry Mario away from Anton (The Boogerman’) Doucette and get the Moms-skinny right from Booboo direct, after the film.

[148] Troeltsch wears an InterLace Sports baseball cap, and Keith Freer a two-horned operatic Viking helmet along with his leather vest, and Fran Unwin a fez, and fierce little Josh Gopnik the white beanie with the dirty cart-wheel-track across it from this afternoon’s debacle. Tex Watson wears a tan Stetson with a really high crown, and little Tina Echt an outlandishly large plaid beret that covers half her little head, the Vaught twins a freakish bowler with two domes and one brim, Stephan Wagenknecht a plastic sallet — this is just scanning at random; the headwear goes on and on, a whole topography of hats — and Carol Spodek a painter’s cap with the name of a paint company, and Ber-nadette Longley a calpac that obstructs the view of people behind her. Duncan van Slack in a harquebus w/ buckle. Should probably also mention Avril’s wearing a Fukoama microfiltration mask, it being way too early in the day for supper for her anyway. Ortho Stice wears a calotte and the U.S.S. Millicent Kent a slanted noir-style fedora and Tall Paul Shaw, way in back, a conquistadorial helmet and escudo, and Mary Esther Thode a plain piece of cardboard propped on her head that says HAT. Idris Arslanian’s spectacular bearskin shako is held in place with a chinstrap.

[149] (I.e. silk-suited Vocalists snapping their fingers and telling their casino audiences they were beautiful human beings and but when it comes time to actually start crooning the Vocalists’ lips move but nothing Velvety emerges, all sound withheld, a Job Action, rendered even more chilling by the skill with which the Frankies and Tonies lip-synch to utter silence — and the way the beautiful casino audiences, hit someplace they lived, somehow, clearly, responded with near-psychotic feelings of deprivation and abandonment, became a mob, almost tore lounges down, upended little round tables, threw free ice-intensive drinks, audiences in their well-heeled majority behaving like dysfunctional or inadequately nurtured children.)

[150] The years right around the millennium being a terrible U.S. time for waste, then, ozone-wise and landfill-wise and shoddily-disposed-of-dioxins-wise, w/ DT-cycle annular fusion at the stage where they had the generating-massive-amounts-of-high-R-waste part down a lot more pat than the consuming-the-waste-in-a-nuclear-process-whose-own-waste-was-the-fuel-for-the-first-waste-intensive-phase-of-the-circle-of-reactions part.

[151] Actual term employed is downer-type.

[152] A lightless and eye-averted late-night weight room being not exactly a last-name type of place.

[153] Sometimes it’s as straightforward as directing someone to give her fiance the roundhouse forehand slap she’s been secretly aching to give him ever since he’d once teased her about putting some Band-Aids on those insect bites on her chest.

[154] = the anticoníluental Cage HI — Free Show; q.v. Note 24 supra.

[155] The Medusa wears a kind of chain-mail backless evening gown and Hellenic sandals, the Odalisque a Merry Widow.

[156] Mario’s speculative puppet-show comes down maybe a little hard on the implication that former O.C.D.-support-group-sponsor and later Clean U.S. Party campaign manager and now O.U.S. Chief Rodney P. Tine is the real dark force behind Reconfiguration and New England’s de-mapping and the transfer of the Great Concavity, that Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner was and remains a slightly unbent but basically genial and befuddled figurehead, content mostly to twirl his mike and immolate his epidermis so long as his office is clean and his food’s pre-tasted, and that it’s actually been Tine behind C.U.S.P.’s geopolitical anality and Experialism, and that Tine was essentially pulling Gentle’s strings all through the Concavity Cabinet and subsequent Reconfiguration and mass relocation. This is, in point of fact, simply one theory and direction for finger-pointing, and tends to founder on the unexplained issue of just what would motivate Tine to undertake all this anyway, since his own O.C.D. has been documented to be ruminative rather than hygienic, not to mention the fact that he’s hopelessly smitten with the Québecer Luria P---. J. O. Incandenza’s own ONANtiad, being an adult production, was considerably more restrained and ambiguous on the whole Tine-as-dark-force issue.

[157] An oblique little in-tribute from Mario to the Moms, at which line every year Avril at the Headmaster’s Table takes off the witch’s hat and holds it by the brim and whips it around in an enthused circle three times over her head.

[158] The umpires on the U.S. junior tour tend to be retired high-school principals whose only renumeration is the chance to exercise again some slight authority over the young.

[159] Clipperton eventually perfecting the toss-with-the-same-hand-you-serve-with maneuver pioneered by South African doubles specialist Colin van der Hingle after a hideous turbo-prop-charter-aircraft-propeller accident took off his right arm, ear, and sideburn in only the second year of his Show career, in Durban.

[160] Certain other and doubtless really disturbing footage of Clipperton’s suicide still exists, having — with perhaps half a dozen other emotionally or professionally sensitive cartridge-Masters — been designated Unviewable by testatory codicil and, as far as either Hal or Orin knows, enclosed in some sort of vault-apparatus that only Himself’s attorneys and maybe Avril have access to. As far as can be determined, only those lawyers, Avril, Disney Leith, and perhaps Mario know that the cartridges were, in fact, along with his case of special lenses, interred right there with J. O. Incandenza’s dead body^a — yickily enough — there having been room in the bronze casket only because Incandenza’s extreme height dictated a casket-size that his thin physique didn’t nearly fill the width and depth of.

a. (in the Mondragon-family-plot area of Le Cimetière du St. Adalbert in the now over-lush potato-growing country off Provincial Autoroute 204 in L’Islet Province, Quebec, just over the border from what is now the eastern Concavity, such that the funeral had to be delayed and then rushed to be fit in between annulation-cycles)

[161] The other having been that predictive call for the catatonic hero, also for Ogilvie’s Entertainment 2-termer.

[162] Every Nielsen respondent seemed to respond with especial neural repulsion to one or another particular portrait. There was one of a woman with every carpenter’s tool known to God exiting her face. One of a young male with a spear of scarlet light through the right temple and coming clear out the other side. A woman with her crown between the incisors of some sort of shark so huge it passes from view past the frame. A grandmotherly type with roses, human hands, a pencil, and other lush-type flora all coming serpentine out of her open skull’s top. A head coming out in a long string from a throttled tube of paste; a Talmudic scholar bearded in needles; a Baconian pope with his hat on fire. Three or four dental ones that sent people scrambling to the bathroom to floss themselves bloody. The painting that had particularly nailed nine-year-old Hal and had had him popping Nunhagen compulsively until his ears started ringing and didn’t stop for almost a week had been of a deeply parlor-tanned and vaguely familiar upscale male, a disembodied fist yanking a handful of brains out of the guy’s left ear while the guy’s overhealthy face, like most of the ad’s faces, wears a queer look of intense unhappy concentration, one more of like brooding than conventionally expressive of pain.

[163] NoCoat Inc. ended up occupying the #346 spot vacated by Hoechst’s CBS, Hal noted with surprisingly little irony.

[164] Granted that this stuff is all grossly simplified in Hal’s ephebic account; Lace-Forché and Veals are in fact transcendent geniuses of a particularly complex right-time-and-place sort, and their appeals to an American ideology committed to the appearance of freedom almost unanalyzably compelling.

[165] Granted, pace critics, this was partly to forestall A.C.D.C.’s apellate-court claims that InterLace was basically hopping up and down on the B.S. 1890 Sherman Act with spike heels.

[166] ‘Reduced Instruct-Set Computers,’ descendents of the IBM/Apple ‘Power PCs,’ with mainframe-caliber response-time and.25 terabytes of DRAM and numerous expansion-slots for various killer apps.

[167] A couple of Incandenza’s more accessible early documentaries were bought by Inter-Lace on a distribution-factored contingency basis, but except for a flat PBS-ish one on the lay priciples of DT-annulation they never brought Meniscus/Latrodectus more than a fraction of the interest on the interest from Himself’s rearview-mirror fortune. InterLace ended up optioning rights to only a couple of his higherbrow productions for its ‘Howls from the Margin’ low-volume-expectation product-line during Himself’s lifetime; the bulk of his stuff didn’t make any ILT menus until after his untimely death.

[168] It didn’t do J. Gentle F.C.’s original grass-roots-intensive campaign a whole lot of good around ultra-liberal Enfield that one of his earliest sign-carrying faithful had been E.T.A.’s own Gerhardt Schtitt, who politically listed so far to starboard that even people without watches looked at their watches and referred vaguely to just-recalled appointments whenever Schtitt’s eyes got a certain particular navy-blue cast and he uttered any one of such terms as America, decadence, State, or Law; but Mario I. was pretty much the only one clued in to the fact that Schtitt’s attraction to Gentle had more to do with Schtitt’s take on tennis than anything else: the Coach was swept away with the athleto-Wagnerian implications of Gentle’s proposals for waste, this business of sending from yourself what you hope will not return.

[169] Triaminotetralin, a synthesized hallucinogen whose high transdermal bioavailability makes it a popular ingredient in the ‘Happy Patches’ so prevalent in the American West and Southwest of Subsidized Time — Pharmochemical Quarterly 17, 18 (Spring, Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar) provides a detailed account of the synthesis and transdermal physiochemistry of aminotetralins in general.

[170] Québecois French: ‘working up steam.’

[171] ‘Homestyle. Ready to Serve.’

[172] ‘Pursuit of happiness.’

[173] Q.v. Note 304 sub.

[174] ‘Absolutely no bonking,’ presumably.

[175] The both-hands-full logistics of which are hard to envision, but realism wasn’t really the point of the image for the bitter Brigade boys.

[176] It’s also where Mario’s most derivative of Himself, whose own ONANtiad was more centrally concerned with doomed high-office claymation romance than with political comment, though the love thing in Incandenza Sr.’s film had concerned not Tine and a Québecois fatale but an alleged doomed and unconsummated affair between President J. Gentle and the equally hygiene-and-germ-obsessed wife of Canada’s ‘Minister of Environment and Resource-Development Enterprises,’ the affair presented as doomed and unconsummated because the Minister hires a malevolent young Canadian Candida albicans specialist to induce in his wife a severe and more or less permanent yeast infection, driving both wife and Gentle to ardent-desire-v.-hygienic-neurosis breakdowns during which the wife throws herself across the tracks in front of a Québecois bullet-train and Gentle decides to exact his revenge on a macrocartographic scale. The ONANtiad was not Him-self’s strongest effort by a long shot, and pretty much everybody around E.T.A. agrees that Mario’s own Reconfiguration-explanation-parody is funnier and more accessible than Himself’s, if also a bit heavier-handed.

[177] The officially spun term for making Canada take U.S. terrain and letting us dump pretty much everything we don’t want onto it is Territorial Reconfiguration. Great Concavity and Grand Convexité are more like U.S./Canadian street argot that got adopted and genericized by the media.

[178] A more abstract but truer epigram that White Flaggers with a lot of sober time sometimes change this to goes something like: ‘Don’t worry about getting in touch with your feelings, they’ll get in touch with you.’

[179] Presumably North Shore AA meetings, but Gately never recollects hearing the word AA; all he remembers from the time is just ‘Meetings’ and a Diagnosis he’d construed as chivalric.

[180] But Avril had gotten former M.I.T. #1 Men’s Singles Corbett Thorp to drive Mario down to V.F. Rickey’s cerebral Student Union thing, where Thorp used his old student I.D. (thumb over expiration date) to get them past the Security lady at the Rectus Bulbi and down to the YYY studio’s freezing pink basement, where the only person who didn’t talk like an angry cartoon character, a severely carbuncular man at the engineer’s board, would by way of comment point only at a tripartite onionskin screen that stood folded beneath a handless wall-clock, possibly signifying that no hiatus could be all that long if the absent party hadn’t taken her trusty screen. Mario hadn’t had any idea M.P.’d used a screen, on-air. That’s when he’d gotten agitated.

[181] Corbett Thorp’s sobriquet among the less kind kids is ‘Th-th-th-th.’

[182] Known also sometimes as ‘Pukers.’

[183] The dull-metal Kenkle & Brandt kind, not the white plastic industrial-solvent buckets associated with Eschaton and yesterday’s debacle.

[184] Moving fast in one direction and having the ball hit someplace behind you and having to try to stop and reverse direction very quickly is known also as a ‘wrong-foot’ or ‘contre-pied,’ and it results in a fair number of injuries to junior knees and ankles; ironically enough it’s Hal, since the explosion, who’s known as the real E.T.A. master of placement and opponent-yanking-around and the old contre-pied. Also a quick insertion that Dennis van der Meer, father of Side-to-Sides, was a Dutch immigrant low-level pro who became a major pro coach and tennis-education-theory guru, on the same level with like a Harry Hopman or Vic Braden.

[185] Stice’s legendarily dysfunctional parents are in Kansas, but he’s got two vaguely lesbianic maiden aunts or great-aunts or something up in Chelsea who keep bringing him foods the staff won’t let him eat.

[186] Serious juniors never pick up tennis balls with their hands. Males tend to bend down and dribble the balls up with the face of their stick; there are various little substyles of this. Females and some younger males less into bending stand and trap the ball between their shoe and racquet and bring their foot up in a quick little twitch, the stick bringing the ball up with it. Males who do this trap the ball against the inside of the shoe, while females trap the ball against the outside of the shoe, which looks a bit more feminine. Reverse-snobbism at E.T.A. has never reached the point of people bending way down and picking balls up manually, which, like wearing a visor, is regarded as the true sign of the novice or hack.

[187] N.b.: Europeans and Australians refer to overheads as ‘overhands,’ while South Africans sometimes also call them ‘pointers.’

[188] The budget doesn’t allow for communal suppers on weekends, and the weekly menu has below SATR and SUND the word forage, which with a certain percentage of this fall’s residents ends up being literal.

[189] Expanding where appropriate on Note 12: Demerol is meperidine hydrochloride, a Schedule C–II synthetic narcotic, available from Sanofi Winthrop Laboratories in banana-flavored syrup; 25, 50, 75, and 100 mg./ml. cartridge-needle units; and (most popular w/ D.W.G.) the 50 and 100 mg. tablets known up on the Shore as Pebbles and Barn-Bam, respectively. (DôcD of course means Drunk and Disorderly, and P.D. and P.O. respectively mean Public Defender and Probation Officer or ‘Probie,’ by the way.)

[190] If somebody dies during the commission of a felony, even from so much as a defective pacemaker or a lightning bolt, the felon’s facing Murder-2 and unbargainable time, at least in MA, a ghastly statutory provision as far as most active drug addicts are concerned, since even though they’re not violence-oriented, efficiency and safety-consciousness are not exactly hallmarks of addiction-motivated crimes, which tend to be impulsive and fuzzily thought out at best.

[191] Also known as a case being ‘Blue-Filed,’ meaning put in a kind of judicial limbo for a specified period, and reopenable (‘Red-Filed’) at any time P.O.s and Boards decide the defendant isn’t making ‘satisfactory progress.’

[192] She didn’t literally say shitstorm.

[193] Gately didn’t get any of this from Pat Montesian; it’s mostly like Ennet House mythology, with some hard facts from Gene M. and Calvin Thrust, both of whom think Pat M. just about hung the moon.

[194] A totally different thing than Volkmann’s contracture (cf. Note 115).

[195] Which he had to make a fucking Financial Amend to have fixed, which luckily semi-Crocodile Sven R. was a refinisher and voluntarily fixed the crack with some weird fake-wood-resin, so Gately only had to pay for the tube of fake-wood-resin instead of a whole new institutional table.

[196] E.g. ‘Kid, sobriety’s like a hard-on: the minute you get it, you want to fuck with it’; they’d rattle this kind of stuff off; they had a million of them.

[197] (Never yet having checked the side of a box of pasta for possible directions.)

[198] Project MK-Ultra, U.S.-C.I.A. inception 4/3/B.S.53: ‘The central activity of the MK-Ultra program was conducting and funding brainwashing experimentation with dangerous drugs and other techniques [sic] performed on persons who were not volunteers by C.I.A. Technical Service Division employees, agents, and contractors.’ — Civil Action #80-3163, Orlikow et al. v. United States of America, B.S. 1980.

[199] Alprazolam, Upjohn Inc.’s big hat-throw into the benzodiazepine ring, only Schedule C–IV but wickedly dependence-producing, w/ severe unpleasant abrupt-withdrawal penalties.

[200] Ennet House near-alumnus Chandler Foss’s analysis, which you can bet was developed outside Gately’s earshot.

[201] Another vestige: Gately still always automatically notices bars and mesh, the foil and little magnetic contacts of residential alarms, plunger-buttons on the inside of hinges, etc.

[202] Local argot for Storrow Drive, which runs along the Charles from the Back Bay out to Alewife, with multiple lanes and Escherian signs and On- and Off-ramps within car-lengths of each other and no speed limit and sudden forks and the overall driving experience so forehead-drenching it’s in the metro Police Union’s contract they don’t have to go anywhere near it.

[203] Whether English misspelling or Québecois solecism, sic.

[204] Jolly-Jolt® hand-buzzers, Whoopi-Daisy® (celebrity-endorsed) cushions, Blammo® cigars, Oh, Waiter® plastic-ice-cubes-w/-fly, I See London!® X-ray specs, etc. usually just trucked over, along w/ the Saprogenic Greetings® treacly greeting and postcards, from the Waltham facilities of Acme Inc., a.k.a. ‘The Acme Family of Gags ‘N Notions, Pre-Packaged Emotions, Jokes and Surprises and Wacky Disguises,’ at a substantial and politically motivated discount, seeing that the company’s owned by the Quebec-sympathetic shadowy Albertan mogul who’d been such a force in the anti-broadcast A.C.D.C., and who over a decade back had exploited the then-U.S.-owned then-Acme’s severe PR and cash-flow problems right after the serial Blammo Cigar tragedies to move in and hostile t/o the firm for about 30 % of its real worth.

[205] Unknown to the hapless Antitois, this doesn’t mean they’re necessarily blank. Copy-Capable cartridges, a.k.a. Masters, require a 585-r.p.m.-drive viewer or TP to run, and on a conventional 450-drive decline to give off so much as static, appearing rather empty and blank. Q.v. here Note 301 sub.

[206] Being out of the sociolinguistic loop, L.A. has no way of knowing that ‘To hear the squeak’ is itself the very darkest of contemporary Canada’s euphemisms for sudden and violent de-mapping.

[207] L.A. having a pretty good intuition that the lone communicable ‘va chier, putain!’ wouldn’t be a good idea in this context.

[208] From Ch. 16, ‘The Awakening of My Interest in Annular Systems,’ in The Chill of Inspiration: Spontaneous Reminiscences by Seventeen Pioneers of DT-Cycle Lithiumized Annular Fusion, ed. Prof. Dr. Günther Sperber, Institut fur Neutronenphysik und Reak-tortechnik, Kernforschungszentrum Karlsruhe, U.R.G., available in English in ferociously expensive hardcover only, © Y.T.M.P. from Springer-Verlag Wien NNY.

[209] E.g.: Ted Schacht adjusting his wristbands and sash. Carol Spodek stretching for a volley at net, her whole body distended, face grim and full of cords. An old one of Marlon Bain at the follow-through of a big forehand, a corona of sweat shimmering around him, his bigger arm crossed across his throat. Ortho Stice doing a handstand. Yardguard gliding down through a low backhand. Wayne this summer sliding on Rome’s fine clay, a red cloud hiding everything below the knees. Pemulis and Stice standing cross-armed against desert light and a fence. Shaw without his silly wispy pseudo-Newcombe mustache. The photos have been looked at so often they’re pale. Hal at the height of his toss, knees more bent than he’d like. Wayne holding up a silver plate. The European-contingent males three summers past all lined up outside a square van with its steering wheel on the wrong side, somebody with either two or three fingers held up over Axford’s head. Schtitt addressing kids you can only see the backs of. Todd Possalthwaite shaking a small black kid’s hand at net. Troeltsch pretending to interview Felicity Zweig. The Vaught twins sharing a foot-long frank at a stand at the Bronx’s U.S. Jr. Open. Todd Possalthwaite at the net with a P.W.T.A. kid. Every muscle in Amy Wingo’s front leg ridged as she gets a little ahead of herself on a backhand. On and on. They’re not in a straight line; they’re more like chaotically placed. Heath Pearson, former tow-truck shareholder, now at Pepperdine, facing away from the camera, under Lung-light, running. The Palmer Academy courts looking cheesy in the heat. A lot of the photos are stills from Mario. Peter Beak falling nastily after a stretch-volley, both feet off what looks like Longwood’s synthetic grass. The photos surrounded by locationless clouds and sky. Freer in the bleachers at Brisbane in thongs and a tank-top, giving the camera a peace-sign. The Lung in mid-assembly with Pearson and Penn and Vandervoort and Mackey and the rest of that year’s seniors out in the pavilion’s webbed chairs, feet up in the cold, kibbitzing Hal and Schacht and the other kids lugging parts. One of Mrs. Clarke’s cooks in a hairnet mixing something with an arm-sized pestle in a bowl she has to tilt to hold. None of Mario or Orin. A battalion of kids in sweats doing sprints up the hill in deep snow, two or three well behind and ominously bent over. Some lighter-blue rectangles where pictures have been taken down and not yet replaced. A shirtless Freer playing microtennis with Lori Clow. A close-up of bespectacled Gretchen Holt staring in disbelief at a linesman’s call. Wayne and a Manitoban in T-shirts with leaves on them, hands over their hearts, facing north. Kent Blott with a horrified boomerang mouth and his nose a protrusion in the supporter fit over his ears and nose and Traub and Lord collapsing around him in either hilarity or horror. Hal and Wayne at the net in doubles, both leaning way over left like the whole court’s tilted.

[210] Hal and Mario have long since had to accept^a the fact that Avril, at 50+, is still endocrinologically compelling to males.

a. ‘Accept’ isn’t the same as ‘be crazy about,’ of course.

[211] As with the neuro-gastric thing, only Ted Schacht and Hal know that Pemulis’s deepest dread is of academic or disciplinary expulsion and ejection, of having to schlepp back down Comm. Ave. into blue-collar Allston diploma- and ticket-outless, and now in his final E.T.A. year the dread’s increased many-fold, and is one reason Pemulis takes such elaborate precautions in all extracurriculars — making a Substance-customer explicitly suborn him, etc. — and is why Hal and Schacht presented him on his last birthday with the poster over Pemulis’s room’s console that has a careworn large-crowned King sitting on his throne stroking his chin and brooding, with the caption: YES, I’M PARANOID — BUT AM I PARANOID ENOUGH?

[212] Though it’s unmentioned, everyone in the waiting room except Ann Kittenplan is keenly aware that Lord and Postal Weight are Pemulis’s charges, Penn and Ingersoll Ax-handle’s; plus that neither Struck nor Troeltsch seems to have been summoned for potential discipline.

[213] Since tennis courts are laid side to side and played on by hard-hitting but fallible humans, errant shots are always going off sticks’ frames and net-posts and even fences and bouncing and rolling into other people’s territory. In starting at usually the quarterfinal rounds of serious tournaments there are ballboys to retrieve them. In early rounds and practice, though, the delicate etiquette is that you suspend play and get other people’s balls for them, if they come rolling across, and shoot them back over to the court of origin. The way to signal for this sort of help is to yell ‘Sorry!’ or ‘A little help on Three?’ or something. But both Hal and Axford seem constitutionally incapable of doing this, asking for help with errant balls. They both have to hold everything and go and run all the way over to some other court, halting at each intervening court to wait for a point to be finished, to get their own balls. It’s a curious inability to request aid that no amount of negative reinforcement from Tex Watson or Aubrey deLint can seem to correct.

[214] Where it’s a non-overhead run-back-to-the-baseline-after-an-offensive-lob-then-run-all — the — way — back — up — and — tap — the — netcord — with — your — stick — j ust — as — Nwangi — or — Thode-hits-another-offensive-lob-over-your-head-you-have-to-run-back-and-get-successfully-back-or-they-pile-extra-lobs-onto-your-regular-allotment pure pain-fest.

[215] A Clipperton-level legend involves the now long-gone little E.T.A. who in Y.W.-Q.M.D. had called MA’s Department of Social Services and characterized disciplinary Pukers as child abuse, resulting in the appearance at the portcullis of two stitchy-mouthed and humorless D.S.S.-ladies who hung creepily around all day and required Schtitt’s actually confining Aubrey deLint to his room, so purply furious was deLint with the kid who’d dropped the dime.

[216] No clue.

[217] Hal had missed out on the soft grass, clay, and Har-Tru surfaces of the Jr. Slams, because a singular disadvantage of attending a North American academy is that O.N.A.N.T.A. rules for Jr. Slams permit just one entrant per academy in each age-division, and John Wayne got the nods.

[218] The late J. O. Incandenza’s Meniscus Optical Products Ltd.’s development of those weird wide-angle rear-view mirrors on the sides of automobiles that so diminish the cars behind you that federal statute requires them to have printed right on the glass that Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, which little imprints Incandenza found so disconcerting that he was kind of shocked when U.S. automakers and importers bought rights on the mirrors, way back, for Incandenza’s first unsettling entrepreneurial payday — E.T.A.s like to postulate that the mirrors had been inspired by the always-foreshortened Charles Tavis.

[219] Extremely annoying host of InterLace Spontaneous-Dissemm. children’s program.

[220] ® CardioMed Fitness Products, a fourth-generation StairMasterish thing except set more to resemble a down-escalator somehow dickied to a sadistically high number of r.p.m.s, so that the exerciser has to sort of run climbing for his life to avoid getting hurled backwards all the way across the office by the machine, which is what accounts for the big square weight-room floor-mat attached to the cleared expanse of office wall opposite the rear of the machine, which Tavis had moved up to from his StairMaster after a frightening cholesterol-count report, and had had kind of a tricky time with at first, once requiring a back-brace.

[221] The Satellite pro Hal’d gotten a set from, a barrel-chested Latvian who thought Hal’s name was AIL

[222] N.b. again that Marathe’s native tongue is not good old contemporary idiomatic Parisio/European French but cont. id. Québecois French, which is about on a par with Basque in terms of difficulty, being full of weird idioms and having both inflected and uninílected grammatical features, an inbred and obstreperous dialect, and which in fact Steeply barely got an ‘Acceptable’ in, in U.S.O. technical-interview training in Vienna / Falls Church VA, and which does not admit of easy coeval expression in English.

[223] Viz. at the allusion to the supposed samizdateur’s anticonfluential and meta-entertainmentish and hologram-intensive Medusa-v.-Odalisque thing, which in fact the play-within-film fight-scene part can be broken down into a series of what are called ‘Fast Fourier Transforms,’ though what the hell ‘ALGOL’ is is anybody’s guess, unless it’s not an acronym but some actual Québecois term, ‘I’algol,’ which if so it isn’t in any dictionaries or on-line lexical sources anywhere in the 2nd or 3rd IL/IN Grid.

[224] Q.v. William James on ‘… that latent process of unconscious preparation often preceding a sudden awakening to the fact that the mischief is irretrievably done,’ the line that actually snapped Lenz to what he was up to when he chanced to read it in a huge large-print edition he’d found behind a bookshelf along the north wall of the Ennet living room of something called The Principles of Psychology with The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion, by William James (obviously), available in EZC large-font print from Microsoft/NAL-Random House-Ticknor, Fields, Little, Brown and Co., © Y.T.M.P., a volume that’s come to mean a great deal to Lenz.

[225] ® The Mobil Chemical Co.’s Consumer Products Branch’s Plastics Division, Pitts-ford NNY.

[226] ® Ibid.

[227] A.k.a. Haloperidol, McNeil Pharmaceutical, 5 mg./ml. pre-filled syringes: picture several cups of Celestial Seasonings’ Cinnamon Soother tea followed by a lead-filled sap across the back of the skull.

[228] National Security Agency, absorbed w/ A.T.F. and D.E.A., C.I.A. and O.N.R. and Secret Service into the ambit of the Office of Unspecified Services.

[229] The A.A.O.A.A., Unspecified Services’ most elite and least specific division, which on Hugh Steeply’s latest field-assignment is paying his salary, though his checks and alimony’s garnishment are routed through something called the ‘Foundation for Continental Freedom,’ which one fervently hopes is a shell/dummy.

[230] Charlestown/Southie street term for meters.

[231] Powdered vitamin B₁₂, convincingly bitter and talc-textured, which Lenz has always preferred B₁₂ to Manitol as a cut because Manitol gives him this allergic thing where he got very tiny red bumps with weird pale caps on his fingertips.

[232] Hydrolysis is the metabolic process by which organic cocaine’s broken down into benzoylecgonine, methanol, ecgonine, and benzoic acid, and one reason not everybody is wired to enjoy Crosbulation is that the process is essentially toxic and can yield unpleasant neurosomatic fallout in certain systems: e.g. in Don Gately’s neurosystem, spider angiomas and a tendency to pluck at the skin on the backs of his hands, due to which tendency he’s always loathed and hated coke and most cokeheads; in Bruce Green’s system, binocular nystagmus and a walloping depression even while the coke-high’s still on that accounts for the tendency toward fits of weeping with his nystagmic face hidden in the crook of his big right arm; in Ken Erdedy an unstoppable rhinorrhagia that sent him to the Emergency Room both times he ever did cocaine; in Kate Gompert blepharospec-ticity and now instant cerebral hemorrhage because she’s on Parnate, an M. A.O.-inhibiting antidepressant; in Emil Minty a ballism so out-of-control he snorted Bing only once. Hemispasms of the oral labia are a common effect of coke-hydrolysis, one mild enough so that people can get them and still enjoy Bing very much; the spasming can range from a mild gnawing/writhing affect in Lenz, Thrale, Cortilyu, and Foss to an alternating series of Edvard Munch-Jimmy Carter-Paliaccí-Mick Jagger-like expressive contortions so severe that everyone in a room except for them is embarrassed. In former cokehead Calvin Thrust, hydrolysis had caused a priapism that led directly to his early choice of career. Randy Lenz also gets nystagmus, but of the right eye only, as well as vascular constriction, diuresis extremus, phosphenism, compulsive tooth-grinding, megalomania, phobophobia, euphoric recall, delusions of persecution and/or homicidal envy, sociosis, postnasal drip, a mild priapism that makes the diuresis a dicey and gymnastic affair, occasional acne rosea and/or rhinophyma, and — especially if there’s synergism from almost a whole pack of filterless Winstons and four cups of nipple-hardeningly strong and alkaline B.Y.P. coffee — confabulation concurrent with a manic garrulousness sufficient to cause lingual tendinitis, pulmonary phasece, and a complete inability to send from his presence anyone who seems at all willing to listen to him.

[233] A.k.a. lignocaine, xylocaine-L, a diethylamino-oxylidide compound used as a dental and maxillofacial anesthetic, the world’s best Bing-cut because it numbs and produces a bitter drip just like the Bingster, and also even temporarily heightens the rush of LV. coke, though if it’s ‘based it tastes nothing like oxidized coke, and it’s also more expensive than Manitol or B₁₂ and harder to get because it’s prescription, meaning the orthodontist was a very popular fellow with dealers indeed.

[234] TRANSCRIPT-FRAGMENTS FROM INTERVIEW SERIES FOR PUTATIVE MOMENT MAGAZINE SOFT PROFILE ON PHOENIX

CARDINAL PROFESSIONAL PUNTER O. J. INCANDENZA, BY PUTATIVE MOMENT MAGAZINE SOFT-PROFILE WRITER

HELEN STEEPLY — NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U.

‘I’m not going to talk about why I don’t talk to the Moms anymore.’ ‘Q.’ ‘Or The Mad Stork’s adventures in the mental-health community, either.’

‘Q.’

‘We’re not off to a good start here, ma’am, no matter how lovely you’re looking in that pantsuit.’

‘Q.’

‘Because the question doesn’t mean anything is why. Insane is just like a catch-term, it doesn’t describe anything, it isn’t a reason for anything. The Stork was a full-blown demented alcoholic for the last three years of his life, and he put his head in the microwave, and I think just in terms of unpleasantness you’d have to be sort of insane to kill yourself in such a painful way. So but was he insane. In the last five years of his life he put together a tennis academy and got together a national-caliber coaching staff and U.S.T.A. accreditation and sanction and multi-Grid funding and set up the start of an endowment for E.T.A., and also came up with that new kind of window glass that doesn’t fog or smudge from people touching it or breathing on it and drawing little finger-oil faces on it, then sold it to Mitsubishi, and also managed the revenues from all his previous patents, plus of course drank himself blind on a daily basis and then needed at least two hours to sit there naked under a scratchy blanket and shake, and went around impersonating various kinds of health-care professionals during the periods he believed he was a health-care professional, from when he had the delirium-tremen-type career delusions, and in his spare time made in-depth documentaries and a dozen art-films that people are still writing doctoral theses on. So was he insane? It’s true, the New Yorker guy, the film guy who replaced the guy who replaced Rafferty, what was his name, it’s true he kept saying the films were like the planet’s most psychotic psyche working out its shit right there on the screen and asking you to pay to watch him. But you have to remember that that guy got third-degree burned by the whole Found Drama scam. That guy was one of the high-caliber critics who said in print that here Incandenza had put drama ahead three or four leaps in one visionary leap, and after The Stork finally couldn’t keep a straight face anymore and spilled the beans on NPR radio during a ‘Fresh Air’ dramaturgy-panel the New Yorker guy dropped from critical sight for like a year and then when he came back he had it in for Himself in a very big way, which is understandable.’

‘Q.’

‘What I started to say is if quote unquote sources you cannot name say the reason I’m not in contact is I claim the Moms is insane, well, what is insane supposed to mean. Do I trust her I do not. Do I want to be in association with her in any way — that is a neg. Do I think she’s irretrievably bats? One of her best friends is the E.T.A. counselor, Rusk, with doctorates in both Gender and Deviance. Does she think the Moms is bats?’

‘Q.’

‘The criteria I was analogizing to The Stork is does the Moms function. And the Moms functions and then some. The Moms careers through the day turboed and in fifth gear. You’ve got the assorted Deaning at E.T.A. You’ve got the full teaching load there. You’ve got accreditation reports and structuring both quadrivium and trivium three years ahead of time at the start of every year. You’ve got writing prescriptive linguistics books that come out every thirty-six months so you could set your watch by them. You’ve got grammatical conferences and conventions, which she doesn’t leave the grounds ever anymore but she’s there videophonically rain or shine for them all. You’ve got the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts, which she co-founded with a couple quote cherished academic friends, also bats, where the M.G.M.s for instance go around to Mass, supermarkets and dun the manager if the Express Checkout sign says 10 ITEMS OR LESS instead of OR FEWER and so on. The year before The Mad Stork’s death the Orange Crush people had an ad on billboards and little magazine-fall-out cards that said CRUSH: WITH A TASTE THAT’S ALL IT’S O WN, with like a possessive /T¾ and I swear the M.G.M. squad lost their minds; the Moms spent five weeks going back and forth to NNY City, organized two different rallies on Madison Avenue that got very ugly, acted as her own attorney in the suit the Crush people brought, never slept, never once slept, lived on cigarettes and salad, huge salads always consumed very late at night, the Moms has a thing about never eating until it’s late.’

‘Q-’

‘Apparently it’s the noise, she can’t take urban noise, she says, is why Hallie says she hasn’t set glass-slipper-one off the Grounds in — you’d have to ask Hallie. The Volvo was already up on blocks when I was at college downtown. But I know she went to The Stork’s funeral, which was off the grounds. Now she’s got a tri-modem and videophony out the bazoo, though she’d never use a Tableau, I know.’

‘Q.’

‘Well it’s been pretty obvious since early on out in Weston the Moms has O.C.D. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. The only reason she’s never been diagnosed or treated for it is that in her the Disorder doesn’t prevent her from functioning. It all seems to come back to functioning. Traversion is character, according to Schtitt. One guy I was close to at E.T.A. for years developed the kind of impairing O.C.D. where you need treatment — Bain wasted huge amounts of time on all these countless rituals of washing, cleaning, checking things, walking, had to have a T-square on the court to make sure all the strings on his stick were intersecting at 90°, could only go through a doorway if he’d felt all around the frame of the doorway by hand, checking the frame for God knows what, and then was totally unable to trust his senses and always had to recheck the doorway he’d just checked. We had to physically carry Bain out of the locker room, before tournaments. Actually we’ve been close all our lives, notwithstanding that Marlon Bain is the single sweatiest human being you’d ever want to get within a click of. I think the O.C.D. might have started as a result of the compulsive sweat, which the sweat itself started after his parents were killed in a grotesque freak accident, Bain’s. Unless the strain of the constant rituals and fussing itself exaculates the perspiring. The Stork used Marlon in Death in Scarsdale, if you want to see way more than you want to know about perspiration. But the E.T.A. staff indulged Bain’s pathology about doorways because Schtitt’s own mentor had been pathologically devoted to this idea that you are what you walk between. It’s so nice to be able to end a sentence with a preposition when it’s easier. Jesus I’m thinking usage again. This is why I avoid the topic of the Moms. The whole topic starts to infect me. It takes me days to clean myself out of it. Traversion being character according to Schtitt. It takes a certain type of woman to look that good in a pantsuit, I think. I’ve always —’

‘Q.’

‘I think the point being that with actual clinical Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder I had to watch much of my ex-doubles partner’s life grind to a halt because it’d take him three hours to shower and then another two to get out through the shower door. He was in this sort of paralysis of compulsive motions that didn’t serve any kind of function. The Moms, on the other hand, can function with the compulsions because she’s also compulsively efficient and practical about her compulsions. Whether this makes her more insane than Marlon Bain or less insane than Marlon Bain, who can like say. As an instance the Moms solved a lot of her threshold-problems by having no real doors or doorways built on the first floor of HmH so the rooms are all split off by angles and partitions and plants. The Moms kept to a Prussian bathroom-schedule so she couldn’t spend hours in there washing her hands until the skin fell off the way Bain’s did, he had to wear cotton gloves the whole summer right before he left E.T.A. The Moms for a while had video cameras installed so she could obsessively check whether Mrs. Clarke’d left the oven on or check her plants’ arrangement or whether all the bathroom towels are lined up with their fringes flush without physically checking; she had a little wall of monitors in her study at HmH; The Stork put up with the cameras but the sense I get is that Tavis isn’t going to be keen on being photorecorded in the bathroom or anyplace else, so maybe she’s had to have other recourse.³ You can check that yourself out there. What I’m trying to say is she’s compulsively efficient even about her obsessions and compulsions. Of course there are doors upstairs, lockable doors, but that’s in service of other compulsions. The Moms’s. You can go ahead and ask her what I mean. She’s so compulsive she’s got the compulsions themselves arranged so efficiently that she can get everything done and still have plenty of time left over for her children. These are a constant drain on her batteries. She’s got to keep Hal’s skull lashed tight to hers without being so overt about it that Hallie has any idea what’s going on, to keep him from trying to pull his skull away. The kid’s still obsessed with her approval. He lives for applause from exactly two hands. He’s still performing for her, syntax- and vocabulary-wise, at seventeen, the same way he did when he was ten. The kid is so shut down talking to him is like throwing a stone in a pond. The kid has no idea he even knows something’s wrong. Plus the Moms has to obsess over Mario and Mario’s various challenges and tribulations and little patheticnesses and worship Mario and think Mario’s some kind of secular martyr to the mess she’d made of her adult life, all the while having to keep up a front of laissez-faire laid-back management where she pretends to let Mario go his own way and do his own thing.’

‘Q-’

‘I’m not going to talk about it.’

‘Q.’

‘No and don’t insult my intelligence, I’m not going to talk about why I don’t want to talk about it. If this is going to be a Moment article, Hallie’s going to read it, and then he’ll read it to Booboo, and I’m not talking about The Stork’s death or the Moms’s stability in a thing where they’ll read about it and have to read some authoritative report on my take on it instead of coming to their own terms about it. With it, rather. Terms with, terms about. No, terms with it.’

‘…’

‘They both might have to wait until they get away from there before they can even realize what’s going on, that the Moms is unredeemably fucking bats. All these terms that became cliches — denial, schizogenic, pathogenic family like systems and so on and so forth. A former acquaintance said The Mad Stork always used to say cliches earned their status as cliches because they were so obviously true.’

‘…’

‘I never once saw the two of them fight, not once in eighteen domestic and Academy years, is all I’ll say.’ ‘Q.’

‘The late Stork was the victim of the most monstrous practical joke ever played, in my opinion, is all I’ll say.’

‘All right, I’ll relate one antidote^b that might be more revealing of the Moms’s emotional weather than any adjective. Jesus, see, I start explicitly referring to parts of speech just thinking about the whole thing. The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy. In military science this is called Psy-Ops, for your info.’

‘Q.’

‘I’m sorry? Right then, one illustrative thing. Which thing to pick. Embarrassment of riches. I’ll pick one at random. I think I was maybe twelve. I was in 12’s, I know, on that summer’s tour. Though I was playing 12’s when I was still ten. It was ten to thirteen that I was regarded as gifted, with a tennis future. I began to decline around what should have been puberty. Call me let’s say twelve. People were talking about NAFTA and something called the quote Information Turnpike and there was still broadcast TV, though we had a satellite dish. The Academy wasn’t even a twinkle in anybody’s eye. The Stork would disappear periodically when money came in. I think he kept going back up to Lyle in Ontario. Call me age ten. We still lived in Weston, known also as Volvoland. The Moms gardened like a fiend out there. This was something else she had to do. Had a thing about. Hadn’t gone to indoor plants yet. Called the garden’s crops her Green Babies. Wouldn’t let us eat the zucchini. Never picked it, it got monstrous and dry and fell off and rotted. Big fun. But her real thing was preparing the garden every spring. She started making lists and pricing supplies and drafting outlines in January. Did I mention her own father had been a potato farmer, at one time a millionaire potato-baron-type farmer, in Quebec?

‘But so it’s early March. Are those earrings electric, or is it you? How come I’ve never seen those earrings up to now? I thought women who could bring off copper earrings never wore anything but copper. You should see yourself in this light. Fluorescence isn’t kind to most women. It must take an exceptional kind —’

‘Q.’

‘In the Moms’s family plot. St.-Quelquechose Quebec or something. Never been there. His will said only not anywhere near his own dad’s plot. Right near Maine. Heart of the Concavity. The Moms’s home town’s wiped off the map. Bad ecocycles, real machete-country. I’d have to try to recall the town. But so but then so the Moms is out in the cold garden. It’s March and it’s co-wold. I’ve got this story down. I’ve related this incident to several family-type professionals, and not one eyebrow stayed steady among them. This is the sort of antidote that makes pathogenic-systems-pros’ eyebrows go all the way up and over their skull and disappear down the back of their neck.’

‘So then I’m let’s say thirteen, which means Hallie’s four. The Moms is in the backyard garden, tilling the infamously flinty New England soil with a rented Rototiller. The situation is ambiguous between whether it’s the Moms steering the Rototiller or vice versa. The old machine, full of gas I’d slopped through a funnel — the Moms secretly believes petroleum products give you leukemia, her solution is to pretend to herself she doesn’t know what’s wrong when the thing won’t work and to stand there wringing her hands and let some eager-to-please thirteen-year-old puff out his chest at being able to diagnose the problem, and then I pour the gas. The Rototiller is loud and hard to control. It roars and snorts and bucks and my mother’s stride behind it is like the stride of someone walking an untrained St. Bernard, she’s leaving drunken staggery footprints behind her in the tilled dirt, behind the thing. There’s something about a very very tall woman trying to operate a Rototiller. The Moms is incredibly tall, way taller than everybody except The Stork, who towered even over the Moms. Of course she’d be horrified if she ever brought herself to recognize what she was doing, orchestrating a little kid into handling the gas that she thinks might be cancerous; she doesn’t even know she’s phobic about gas. She’s wearing two pairs of work-gloves and plastic surgery-type bags over her espadrilles, which were the only footwear she could garden in. And a Fukoama microfiltration pollution mask, which you might remember those from that period. Her toes are blue in the dirty plastic bags. I’m a few meters ahead of the Moms, in charge of preemptive rock- and clod-removal. That’s her term. Preemptive rock- and clod-removal.

‘Now work with me, see this with me. In the middle of this tilling here comes my little brother Hallie, maybe like four at the time and wearing some kind of fuzzy red pajamas and a tiny little down coat, and slippers that had those awful Nice-Day yellow smile-faces on both toes. We’ve been at it maybe an hour and half, and the garden’s dirt is just about tilled when Hal conies out and down off the pressure-treated redwood deck and comes walking very steadily and seriously toward the border of the garden the Moms had surveyed out with little sticks and string. He has his little hand out, he’s holding out something small and dark and he’s coming toward the garden as the Rototiller snorts and rattles behind me, dragging the Moms. As he gets closer the thing in his hand resolves into something that just doesn’t look pleasant at all. Hal and I look at each other. His expression is very serious even despite that his lower lip is having a sort of little epileptic fit, which means he’s getting ready to bawl. That’s with a w. I remember the air was gray with dust and the Moms had her glasses on. He holds the thing out toward the Moms’s figure. I squint. The thing covering his palm and hanging over the sides of the palm is a rhombusoid patch of fungus. Big old patch of house-mold. Underline big and old. It must have come from some hot furnace-hidden corner of the basement, some corner she must have missed with the flamethrower, after the flooding we had every January thaw. I heft a clod or rock, I’m staring, every follicle I’ve got is bunched and straining. You could feel the tension, it was like standing down at Sunstrand Plaza when they fired the transformers, every follicle bunches and strains. It was a sort of nasal green, black-speckled, hairy like a peach is hairy. Also some orange speckles. A patch of very bad-news-type mold. Hal looks at me in the noise, his lower lip all over the place. He looks to the Moms, the Moms is intent on a plumb-straight Rototilled line, weaving. The piece is that the mold looks, like, strangely incomplete. As in it dawns on me right then chewed on, Helen. And yes as I squint some sickening hairy stuff is still there like impacted in the kid’s front teeth and hairily smeared around the mouth.

‘Be there with me, Helen. Feel the sort of Wagnerish clouds gather. Hallie always said there was always this sense as a kid with the Moms that the whole cosmos was just this side of fulminating into boiling clouds of elemental gas and was being held materially together only through heroic exercise of will and ingenuity on the part of the Moms.

‘Everything slows waaay down. She’s coming around with the machine at the end of a row and sees Hallie wearing his happy-slippers outside in the cold, which just in itself is enough to gut-shot the cosmos as far as she’s concerned, usually. Now we’re seeing the Rototiller get shut down as she bends way down to where I’d showed her the choke. The machine diesels a little and farts some blue smoke. The machine sucks the nub of its starter-rope into itself. I can feel the voltage like I’m still there. Post-racket tingling quiet descends. There’s the tentative chirp of a bird. The Moms comes toward Hal standing there in his little red coat. She’s tucking a wisp of hair back under the special plastic cap’s elastic. Her hair at that time was dark brown, she’s addressing him, she has an unbelievably humiliating little family pet name for the kid that I’ll show him the mercy of never telling anybody.

‘But so she’s coming over. Hal is standing there. Holds the horrific patch of fungus out. The Moms sees at first only her child holding something out, and like all moms hardwired for motherhood she reaches to take whatever her baby holds out. The one sort of case where she wouldn’t check before reaching out toward something held out.’

‘Q.’

‘The Moms though now stops just inside the border of string and she squints, her glasses have dust, she starts to see and process just what it is the kid’s holding out to her. Her hand’s outstretched in the air over the garden’s string and she stops.

‘Hallie takes one step forward, arm up and out in a kind of like Nazi salute. He goes “I ate this.”

‘The Moms says she begs his pardon.

‘Helen, you decide. But consider the fragility of the obsesso-compulsive’s control. The terrible life-ruling phobias. Her four horsemen: enclosure, communicational imprecision, and untidiness, which you can’t get much untidier than basement-mold.’

‘Q.’

‘The fourth horseman stays hidden, of course, like in all quality eschatologies, the unturned card, under wraps till actual game-time.

‘ “I ate this” Hal goes, he’s still holding the thing out, not crying, a kind of clinical grimness to him about it, like the mold’s some audit it’s his job to show her. And do you want to know if she touched it?’

‘Q.’

‘It suddenly occurs to me that if you want stuff on the Moms and The Mad Stork you could contact Bain. He practically lived with us in Weston. As like a secondary source. I’m sure he’d discuss the Moms’s foibles all you want. The man still practically holds up a crucifix at any mention. His little greeting-card company has just been bought up by a huge novelty concern, so I’m sure he’s in his big room lying there having palm-fronds waved and his forehead wiped, feeling flush and voluble. I guess I’d rather you didn’t ask him about my foibles, but he’s inexhaustible on the subject of the Moms and O.C.D. He never leaves home, which home is one room, the converted Children’s Reading Room of what used to be the Waltham Public Library, which is the whole third floor. He learned from the Moms how to minimize doorways to traverse. I’m afraid he’s not InterNetted and has an O.C.D.-phobic thing about e-mail. His snail-mail address is Marlon K. Bain, Saprogenic Greetings Inc., BPL-Waltham Bldg., 1214 Totten Pond Road, Waltham MA 021549872/4. It’d also be good if you could avoid mentioning the number 2 to him. He has problems with the number 2. I don’t know if his not leaving home is similar to the Moms’s not leaving home. This is the most I’ve thought about the Moms in a dog’s age, to be honest with you. You have this way of getting stuff out of me. It’s like you do nothing but sit there with that cigarette and you’re all I can see and all I want is to please you. It’s like I can’t help it. Is this just good journalism, Helen?’

‘Or is there something more going on here, some kind of strange bond I feel between us that sort of like tears down all my normal personal-life boundaries and makes me open totally to you? I guess I have to hope you won’t take advantage. Does this all sound like some kind of line? Maybe if it was a line it’d sound less lame. I guess I do wish I could come off more suave. I don’t know what else to do except just tell what’s going on inside me, even if it sounds lame. I never have any clue what you’re thinking about it.’

‘ “Help! My son ate this!” She screamed the same thing over and over, holding the mold-rhombus up like a torch, running around just inside the string border while I and Hallie staggered back, literally like staggered back, gaping at our first taste of apocalypse, a corner of the universe suddenly peeled back to reveal what seethed out there just beyond tidiness. What lay just north of order.

‘ “Help! My son ate this! My son has eaten this! Help!” she kept screaming, running in tight little right-faces just inside this perfect box of string, and I’m seeing The Mad Stork’s face at the glass door over the deck, palms out and thumbs together to make a frame, and Mario my other brother next to him as usual down around his knee, with Mario’s face all squished against the glass from supporting his weight, their breath on the window spreading, Hal inside the string finally and trying to follow her, crying, and not impossibly I also crying a little, just from the infectious stress, and those two through the back door’s glass just watching, and fucking Booboo also trying to make that frame with his hands, so finally it was Mr. Reehagen next door, who was so-called “friends” with her, who had to come out and over and finally had to hook up the hose/

a. This may be a lie — no one else at E.T.A. knows anything else about there having been any cameras in HmH’s kitchen, bathroom, etc.

b. sic.

[235] She’d arrayed the photos herself, from her purse, on the dresser; he hadn’t had to ask her to; it added to the sense of synchronous mercy, a cosmic kindness balancing out the Jacuzzi’s dead bird and the frigidly invasive reporter.

[236] E.T.A. shorthand: Vector/Angle/Pace/Spin.

[237] The NW-to-NE angle at the former Monteplier VT isn’t quite 90°, but it is very close. By the way, the Syracuse-Ticonderoga-Salem triangle is one of those endless-based 25-130-25 triangles that looks so hideous when projected onto one of Corbett Thorp’s distorting globes in the Trivium’s Cubular Trigonometry.

[238] Quod vide here Ch. 7, ‘It All Started with a Colorectal Neoplastis, an Openness to Communicative Manifestations of Divine Grace, and a Seedy-Looking Fellow That Publicly Lifted a Chair He Was Standing On, That Was Clearly Just Such a Manifestation,’ in The Chill of Inspiration: Spontaneous Reminiscences by Seventeen Pioneers of DT-Cycle Lithiumized Annular Fusion, ed. Prof. Dr. Günther Sperber, Institut fur Neutronenphysik und Reaktortechnik, Kernforschungszentrum Karlsruhe, U.R.G., available in English in ferociously expensive hardcover only, © Y.T.M.P. from Springer-Verlag Wien NNY. (N.b. that while the annular meta-disease treatment is highly effective on metastatic cancers, it proved a disappointment on the HIV-spectrum viri, since AIDS is itself a meta-disease.)

[239] Because he’d been sworn to secrecy, Green doesn’t tell Lenz that Charlotte Treat had shared with Green that her adoptive father had been one-time Chair of the Northeast Regional Board of Dental Anesthesiologists, and had been pretty liberal with the use of the old N₂O and thiopental sodium around the Treats’ Revere MA household, for personal and extremely unsavory reasons.

[240] ® The Mauna Loa Macadamia Nut Corp., Hilo HI — ‘A LOW SODIUM FOOD.’

[241] Popular corporate-hard-rock bands, though it shows where Bruce Green’s psychic decline really started that, except for TBA₅, these bands were all truly big two or three years past, and are now slightly passe, with Choosy Mothers having split up entirely by now to explore individual creative directions.

[242] This is one reason why he consents to be hung way out into space from Schtitt’s transom for filming all-court play, held only by some prorector with a firm grip on the back of his lock’s vest, which the players looking up at Mario’s forward ski-jump posture off the crow’s nest find incredibly terrifying and audacious and ballsy, and Avril won’t even leave HmH during all-court filmings.

[243] This though Avril’s never come right out and articulated her worry about his P.M. safety to Mario, not wanting to seem as though she’s making a special issue of his deficits and vulnerability or to seem inconsistent when she lets Hal go off nightly wherever he likes or just basically in any way to inhibit Mario’s sense of autonomy and freedom by causing him to worry about her worrying — which he does, rather a lot, worry about Avril’s worrying about him. If that makes sense.

[244] Mario, like his maternal uncle Charles Tavis, has a dislike of fluorescent lighting.

[245] ‘Is that supposed to mean something? What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Nothing. Literally nothing.’

[246] A depressing new Sober Club in Somerville’s Davis Square where AAs and NAs — mostly new and young — get heartbreakingly dolled up and dance stiffly and tremble with sober sexual anxiety and they stand around with Cokes and M.F.s telling each other how great it is to be in an intensely social venue with all your self-conscious inhibitions unmedicated and screaming in your head. The smiles alone in these places are excruciating to see.

[247] A Restriction means just no Overnight that week and an extra Chore; a House Restriction means you have to be back an hour after work and nightly meetings; Full House is no leaving the House except for work and meetings, and 15 minutes to get back, and no even leaving to buy smokes or a paper, or even to go out in the lawn for oxygen, and one violation means a Discharge: F.H.R. is Ennet’s version of the Hole, and it’s dreaded.

[248] Ennet House takes its urines over to the methadone clinic, which has all manner of clients who have to submit weekly urines to courts and programs, and the clinic lets Ennet put its urines gratis in the weekly batch the clinic sends out to an E.M.I.T.-mill clinic all the way out in Natick, and in return every once in a while Pat gets a call from the trollish little social worker who runs #2 about some client down there who’s decided he wants off the methadone, as well, and Pat will shoot the client way up on the Interview list and give him an interview and usually let the client in — Calvin T. and Danielle S. had both originally gotten into Ennet House this way, i.e. via #2.

[249] It’s maybe significant that Don Gately never once failed to clean up any vomit or incontinence his mother’d just drunkenly left there or passed out in, no matter how pissed off or disgusted he was or how sick he himself was: not once.

[250] (who owns a Lincoln, Henderson does, origins unknown and suspicious)

[251] This is all for Insurance Reasons, the Staff sheet on which Gately doesn’t understand all the language of, and fears.

[252] It’s against House rules to smoke upstairs in the bedrooms — more Insurance Reasons — and a week’s Restriction is supposed to be mandatory, and Pat’s personally a fanatic about the rule, but Gately, much as he fears the grim boilerplate on the Insurance Sheet, always pretends he doesn’t see anything when he sees somebody smoking up here, since when he was a resident he actually used to sometimes smoke in his sleep he was so tense, and every once in a while will wake up and find that he has again, i.e. lit a gasper and apparently smoked it and put it out all in his sleep, down in bed in his Staff oubliette in the basement.

[253] (the items from the House’s donated-clothes baskets that fit Gately being few and far)

[254] Gately’s made it an iron point never again ever to run, once he got straight.

[255] NNE street argot for any kind of handgun.

[256] (Erdedy’s hands still up, w/ keys)

[257] (NNE Region, trying hard not to irritate Tine Sr. by fidgeting)

[258] (Desert-SW Region, understated in a massive peasant skirt and sensible flats)

[259] These, ® a number of fine companies, are like enormous versions of the little windshield-washer implements at service stations — an industrial mop-handle w/ a canted rubber blade at the end, used for spreading puddle-water out so it dries faster, at some academies replaced with the EZ-DRI hinged-roller-of-dense-sponge-at-the-end court-dryer, which E.T.A. eschews because of how fast the rolling sponge at the end mildews and smells bad.

[260] Mrs. Incandenza always grades everything in blue ink.

[261] A phenomenon not unknown, viz. menial employees and shift-workers mining E.T.A.’s collected waste for cast-off value, and permitted by the administration and Mr. Harde, or rather just not actively discouraged, since ‘One man’s trash …’ and so on, with the only requirement being a certain visual discretion when carrying off E.T.A.’s offal, simply because the whole thing’s kind of embarrassing for everybody.

[262] I.e. the Women’s Tennis Association, the distaff equivalent of the A.T.P.

[263] Sic, presumably for Betamax (®Sony).

[264] Sic, but it’s pretty obvious what Marathe means here.

[265] Reinforced Aluminum Spectation Unit.

[266] The occasional upscale parent could be seen exiting Comm.-Ad. and crossing behind the West Courts’ south fence to the asphalt lot and what were unmistakably parental autos, all remarkable for their textbook tire-pressure and bristles of cellular antennae and the absence of any little dust-smiles on their rear or side windows. Charles Tavis had spent the morning interfacing with parents of those E.T.A. kids injured in I.-Day’s Es-chaton free-for-all. Lateral Alice Moore, for a treat, had been listening to Tavis and parents on her headphones, while typing, instead of her collection of aerobic favorites. Struck and Pemulis had cruised by before lunch and blarneyed her into putting the exchanges on her intercom’s speaker for a couple minutes. You should hear C.T. enclosed with parents sometime. It was only some of the parents — Todd Possalthwaite’s dad was on honeymoon in the Azores, and Otis P. Lord’s mother had some inner-ear thing and the Lords couldn’t fly. But Pemulis and Struck concurred that everyone with any kind of administration in his blood should hear E.T.A.’s Headmaster with parents and a placative mission, a master charmer past all social gauge, a Houdini with the manacles of fact, the interfaces like fluidless seductions — Pemulis said the man’s missed a genuine calling in sales — everyone practically wanting to smoke a cigarette afterward, the parents leave weeping, pumping Tavis’s hands — one parent per hand — practically begging him to accept both their thanks and their apologies for daring to even possibly think, even for a moment. Then, supporting each other, making their way over Lateral Alice’s third rail and past the beaming extremely polite lads by her desk and out through the pressurized glass lobby doors and down off the white-pillared neo-Georgian porch and past courts and bleachers and into their well-maintained autos and out the portcullis and very slowly down the hill’s brick drive before they even recall they’d forgotten to pop in on their injured kid, sign his cast, feel his forehead, say Hey.

[267] I.e. ace/double fault, rather like the ratio of strikeouts to walks for a pitcher.

[268] It was like Steeply’d never seen so many left-handed people: both Hal Incandenza and the boy in black were left-handed, one of the two little girls four courts down was left-handed, deLint was marking the chart with his left hand. Both A.F.R. turncoat Rémy Marathe and Québecer triple-operative Luria P— — were southpaws, though Steeply realized that this could hardly be called significant.

[269]

Saprogenic Greetings*

WHEN YOU CARE ENOUGH TO LET A PROFESSIONAL SAY IT FOR YOU

*a proud member of the ACME Family of Gags ‘N Notions, Pre-Packaged Emotions, Jokes and Surprises and Wacky Disguises

Ms. Helen Steepley And So On November Y.D.A.U.

… (1) Orin Incandenza and I played, practiced, and generally hung out through most of what seemed at the time to be our formative years. We met because I kept encountering him across the net in the local tennis tournaments we played around metro Boston, Boys’ 10’s. We were the two best 10-year-old males in Boston. We soon became practice partners, our mothers driving us every weekday afternoon to a junior development program at the Auburndale Tennis Club in West Newton. After my own parents were horribly killed on the Jamaica Way commuter road one morning in the freak crash of a radio traffic-report helicopter, I became a sort of hanger-on at the Incandenza house out in Weston. When J.O.I, founded the Academy, I was one of the first matriculants. Orin and I were inseparable until around age 15, when I reached my own zenith in terms of early puberty and athletic promise and began to be able to beat him. He took it hard. We were never inseparable again. We spent quantity time together again briefly for a few months the next year, during a period when we both experimented heavily with recreational substances. We both ended up losing enthusiasm for substances after only a couple years, Orin because he had finally entered puberty and had discovered the weaker sex and found he needed all his faculties and guile, myself because a couple of really negative methoxy-psychedelic experiences left me with certain Disabilities that to this day make normal life an exceptional challenge, and which I tend to blame on having done deadly-serious hallucinogens at a sort of larval psychological stage during which no N. American adolescent should be allowed to do hallucinogens. These Disabilities led to my departure from the Enfield Tennis Academy at 17, prior to graduation, and my withdrawal from competitive junior tennis and contemporary life as we know it. Orin was largely burned out on tennis too by 17, though no one in his right mind could have foreseen a defection to organized U.S. football in his future.

A grunting, crunching ballet of repressed homoeroticism, football, Ms. Steepley, on my view. The exaggerated breadth of the shoulders, the masked eradication of facial personality, the emphasis on contact-vs.-avoidance-of-contact. The gains in terms of penetration and resistance. The tight pants that accentuate the gluteals and hamstrings and what look for all the world like codpieces. The gradual slow shift of venue to “artificial surface,” “artificial turf.” Don’t the pants’ fronts look fitted with codpieces? And have a look at these men whacking each other’s asses after a play. It is like Swinburne sat down on his soul’s darkest night and designed an organized sport. And pay no attention to Orin’s defense of football as a ritualized substitute for armed conflict. Armed conflict is plenty ritualized on its own, and since we have real armed conflict (take a spin through Boston’s Roxbury and Mattapan districts some evening) there is no need or purpose for a substitute. Football is pure homophobically repressed nancy-ism, and do not let O. tell you different.

… (3c) I cannot help you too much with the facts surrounding Dr. Incandenza’s suicide. I know that he erased his own cartography in a grisly way. I was told that in the year leading up to his death Dr. Incandenza was abusing ethyl alcohol on a daily basis and was working on a whole new genre of film-cartridge that Orin at the time claimed was driving Dr. Inc insane.

… (3e) The supposed cause of their separation is that Dr. Incandenza began using her in his work more and more extensively and eventually asked her to perform in the prenominate completely radical new type of filmed entertainment that supposedly was driving him to a breakdown. They supposedly became close, James and Jo-Ellen, though Orin in my judgment is not a reliable source of information about their relationship.

The only other apposite fact I have — and I have this not from Orin but from an innocent female relative of mine who was (briefly) in a position to interface with our punter in an intimate and unguarded way impossible between hetero males — is that some incident occurred in the Incandenzas’ Volvo involving one of the windows and a word — all I am given is that O. reports that in the days prior to Dr. Incandenza’s felo de se, a so-called “word” appeared on a “fogged” “window” of Mrs. Inc’s pale yellow Volvo, and the word cast a conjugal pall in all sorts of directions. This is it.

… (5) The “vailed warning” (typo?) you refer to in my postal response to you is simply that you have to take what Orin says in a fairly high-sodium way. I am not sure I would stand and point at Orin as an example of a classic pathological liar, but you have only to watch him in certain kinds of action to see that there can be such a thing as sincerity with a motive. I have no idea what your relationship with Orin is or what your feelings are — and if Orin wishes it I am afraid I can predict your feelings for him will be strong — so I shall just tell you that for instance at E.T.A. I saw Orin in bars or at post-tournament dances go up to a young lady he would like to pick up and use this fail-safe cross-sectional pick-up Strategy that involved an opening like “Tell me what sort of man you prefer, and then I’ll affect the demeanor of that man.” Which in a way of course is being almost pathologically open and sincere about the whole picking-up enterprise, but also has this quality of Look-At-Me-Being-So-Totally-Open-And-Sincere-I-Rise-Above-The-Whole-Disingenuous-Posing-Process-Of-Attracting-Someone-,-And — I-Transcend-The-Common-Disingenuity-In-A-Bar-Herd-In-A-Particularly-Hip-And-Witty-Self-Aware-Way-,-And-If-You-Will-Let-Me-Pick-You-Up-I-Will-Not-Only-Keep — Being — This — Wittily, — Transcendently — Open — , - But — Will — Bring-You — Into — This — World-Of-Social-Falsehood-Transcendence, which of course he cannot do because the whole openness-demeanor thing is itself a purposive social falsehood; it is a pose of poselessness; Orin Incandenza is the least open man I know. Spend a little time with Orin’s Uncle Charles a.k.a. “Gretel the Cross-Sectioned Dairy Cow” Tavis if you want to see real openness in motion, and you will see that genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette’s syndrome.

It is not that Orin Incandenza is a liar, but that I think he has come to regard the truth as constructed instead of reported. He came by this idea educationally, is all I will add. He studied for almost eighteen years at the feet of the most consummate mind-fucker I have ever met, and even now he remains so flummoxed he thinks the way to escape that person’s influence is through renunciation and hatred of that person. Defining yourself in opposition to something is still being anaclitic on that thing, isn’t it? I certainly think so. And men who believe they hate what they really fear they need are of limited interest, I find.

… Again I will remind you that Orin and I are on the outs a bit at the moment, so some of my judgments may be temporarily short on charity.

One reason Orin is not a straight-out liar is that Orin is not a particularly skillful liar. The few times I saw him try consciously to lie were pathetic. This is one reason why his juvenile recreational-chemical phase passed so quickly compared to some of our colleagues at E.T.A. If you are going to do serious drugs while you are still a minor and under your parents’ roof, you are going to have to — lie often and lie well. Orin was a strangely stupid liar. I am recalling there was one afternoon on Mrs. Clarke’s day off when Mrs. Inc had to go off and overfunction somewhere and Orin was supposed to baby-sit Mario and Hal, who were at the kind of crazed-toddler age where they would hurt themselves if they were not closely supervised, and I was over, and Orin and I decided to dart up to the loft over the Weston house’s garage to smoke a bit of Bob Hope, which is to say high-resin marijuana, and in the loft, high, wandered disastrously into the sort of pseudophilosophical mental labyrinth that Bob Hope-smokers are always wandering into and getting trapped in and wasting huge amounts of time³ inside

a. This tendency to involuted abstraction is sometimes called “Marijuana Thinking”; and by the way, the so-called “Amotivational Syndrome” consequent to massive Bob Hope-consumption is a misnomer, for it is not that Bob Hope-smokers lose interest in practical functioning, but rather Marijuana-Think themselves into labyrinths of reflexive abstraction that seem to cast doubt on the very possibility of practical functioning, and the mental labor of finding one’s way out consumes all available attention and makes the Bob Hope-smoker look physically torpid and apathetic and amoti-vated sitting there, when really he is trying to claw his way out of a labyrinth. Note that the overwhelming hunger (the so-called “munchies”) that accompanies cannabis intoxication may be a natural defense mechanism against this kind of loss of practical function, since there is no more practical function anywhere than foraging for food.

an intellectual room they cannot negotiate their way out of, and by the time we hadn’t resolved the abstract problem that had put us into the labyrinth but just as always had gotten so hungry we abandoned it and stumbled out and down the loft’s wooden ladder, the sun was all the way on the other side of the sky over Wayland and Sudbury, and the whole afternoon had passed without Hal and Mario having received any protective supervision; and Hal and Mario somehow survived the afternoon, but when Mrs. Incan-denza returned that night she asked Orin what we and the supervised toddlers had done all afternoon and Orin lied that we had all been right here, respectively playing and supervising, and Mrs. Incandenza expressed puzzlement to Orin because she said she had tried to call the house several times that afternoon but was unable to get through, and Orin replied that while supervising he had herded the toddlers carefully into rooms with phone-jacks and made calls and had been on the phone several times for Jong periods of time for this that or the other thing, was why she had been unable to get through, at which Mrs. Incandenza (who is extremely tall) had blinked several times and looked very confused and said that but the phone had not been busy, it had just rung and rung and rung. At a juncture like this, men and boys get separated in terms of prevarication, I submit. And all Orin could come up with was a steady gaze as he said, as if from the Rose Garden: “I have no response to that.” Which incredibly stupid response he and I found very funny for weeks afterward, especially since Mrs. Incandenza never punished and refused to act as if she believed lying was even a possibility as far as her children were concerned, and treated an exploded lie as an insoluble cosmic mystery instead of an exploded lie.

The worst instance of both Orin’s mendacious idiocy and Mrs. Incandenza’s unwillingness to countenance an idiotic lie came one grisly day soon after Orin had finally gotten his vehicle operator’s license. O. and I found ourselves with an idle weekday afternoon off in August after losing early at a synthetic-grass tournament down at Long-wood, and Hal was still alive in what was then Boys’ 10’s and thus a good bit of the E.T.A. summer community was still down at Longwood, including Mario and Mrs. Incandenza, who’d been driven down I remember by a sort of swarthily foreign-looking moniíial-internist medical resident Mrs. Inc had introduced as a so-called “dear and cherished friend” but hadn’t explained how they’d met, and Dr. Incandenza was indisposed and not in a position to bother anyone that day, I remember, and Orin and I had most of E.T.A. to ourselves, even the gate’s portcullis unmanned and up, and this being at the acme of our interest in such things we wasted little time in ingesting some sort of recreational substance, I cannot recall what kind but I remember them as particularly impairing, and we decided however that we weren’t yet impaired enough, and decided to drive down the hill to one of the disreputable liquor stores along Commonwealth Avenue that accepted your word of honor as proof of age, and we hopped into the Volvo and blasted down the hill and down Commonwealth Avenue, severely impaired, and wondered in a speculative way why people on the sidewalks all along Commonwealth seemed to be waving at us and holding their heads and pointing and jumping wildly up and down, and Orin waving cheerfully back and holding his own head in a sort of friendly imitation, but it was not until we got all the way down to the Commonwealth-Brighton Ave. split that the horrible realization hit us: Mrs. Incandenza often during summer days kept the Incandenzas’ beloved dog S. Johnson leashed to the back of her Volvo within reach of his water and Science Diet bowls, and Orin and I had peeled out in the car without even thinking to check for whether S. Johnson was attached to it. I will not try to describe what we found when we pulled into a parking lot and slunk to the rear of the car. Let’s call it a nubbin. Let’s say what we found was a leash and collar, and a nubbin. According to the couple of witnesses who were able to speak, S. Johnson had made a valiant go of trying to keep up back there for at least a couple blocks down Commonwealth, but at some point he either lost his footing or got his canine affairs in order and figured it was his day to shuffle off, and gave up, and hit the pavement, after which the scene the witnesses described was unspeakable. There was fur and let’s call it material down the middle of the inside east-bound lane for five or six blocks. What we had left to take slowly back up the Academy’s hill was a leash, a collar with tags describing medication-allergies and food-sensitivities, and a nubbin of let’s call it attached material.

The point is that I defy you to imagine how it felt later that day to stand there with Orin in the HmH living room before the prone and piteously weeping Mrs. Incandenza and listen to Orin try to construct a version of events in which he and I had sensed somehow that S. Johnson was dying for a good brisk August walk and were walking him down Commonwealth,¹⁵ saying there we were walking good old S. Johnson demurely down the sidewalk when a hit-and-run driver not only swerved up onto the sidewalk to run the dog down but then backed up and ran him over again and backed up and ran him over again, and on and on, so more like a pulverize-and-run driver, while Orin and I had stood there too paralyzed with horror and grief even to think of noticing the make and color of the car, much less the fiend’s license plate. Mrs. Incan-denza on her knees (there’s something surreal about a very tall woman on her knees), weeping and pressing her hand to her collarbone but nodding in confirmation at every syllable of Orin spinning this pathetic lie, O. holding up the leash and collar (and nubbin) like Exhibit A, with me next to him wiping my forehead and wishing the immaculately polished and sterilized hardwood floor would swallow up the whole scene in toto.

… (7) Ms. Steeples, to my way of thinking, the word “abuse” is vacuous. Who can define “abuse”? The difficulty with really interesting cases of abuse is that the ambiguity of the abuse becomes part of the abuse. Thanks over the decades to the energetic exercise of your own profession, Ms. Steeley, we have all heard ACOAs and AlaTeens and ACONAs and ACOGs and WHINERS relate clear cases of different kinds of abuse: beatings, diddlings, rapes, deprivations, domineerment, humiliation, captivity, torture, excessive criticism or even just utter disinterest. But at least the victims of this sort of abuse can, when they have dredged it back up after childhood, confidently call it “abuse.” There are, however, more ambiguous cases. Harder to profile, one might say. What would you call a parent who is so neurasthenic and depressive that any opposition to his parental will plunges him into the sort of psychotic depression where he does not leave his bed for days and just sits there in bed cleaning his revolver, so that the child would be terrified of opposing his will and plunging him into a depression and maybe causing him to suicide? Would that child qualify as “abused”? Or a father who is so engrossed by mathematics that he gets engrossed helping his child with his algebra homework and ends up forgetting the child and doing it all himself so that the child gets an A in Fractions but never in fact learns fractions? Or even say a father who is extremely handy around the house and can fix anything, and has the son help him, but gets so engrossed in his projects (the father) that he never thinks to explain to the son how the projects actually get done, so that the son’s “help” never advances past simply handing the father a specified wrench or getting him lemonade or Phillips-head screws until the day the father is crushed into aspic in a freak accident on the Jamaica Way and all opportunities for transgenerational instruction are forever lost, and the son never learns how to be a handy homeowner himself, and when things malfunction around his own one-room home he has to hire contemptuous filthy-nailed men to come fix them, and feels terribly inadequate (the son), not only because he is not handy but because this handiness seemed to him to have represented to his father everything that was independent and manly and non-Disabled in an American male. Would you cry “Abuse!” if you were the unhandy son, looking back? Worse, could you call it abuse without feeling that you were a pathetic self-indulgent piss-puddle, what with all the genuine cases of hair-raising physical and emotional abuse diligently reported and analyzed daily by conscientious journalists (and profiled?)?

I am not sure whether you could call this abuse, but when I was (long ago) abroad in the world of dry men, I saw parents, usually upscale and educated and talented and functional and white, patient and loving and supportive and concerned and involved in their children’s lives, profligate with compliments and diplomatic with constructive criticism, loquacious in their pronouncements of unconditional love for and approval of their children, conforming to every last jot/tittle in any conceivable definition of a good parent, I saw parent after unimpeachable parent who raised kids who were (a) emotionally retarded or (b) lethally self-indulgent or (c) chronically depressed or (d) bor- derline psychotic or (e) consumed with narcissistic self-loathing or (f) neurotically driven/addicted or (g) variously psychosomatically Disabled or (h) some conjunctive permutation of (a) … (g) Now, Orin had never once walked S. Johnson. Orin was not even all that keen on S. Johnson, because the dog was always trying to mate with his left leg. And anyway, S. Johnson was very much Mrs. Incandenza’s dog, and was normally exercised only by Mrs. Incandenza, and at rigidly specific times of day.

.

Why is this. Why do many parents who seem relentlessly bent on producing children who feel they are good persons deserving of love produce children who grow to feel they are hideous persons not deserving of love who just happen to have lucked into having parents so marvelous that the parents love them even though they are hideous?

Is it a sign of abuse if a mother produces a child who believes not that he is innately beautiful and lovable and deserving of magnificent maternal treatment but somehow that he is a hideous unlovable child who has somehow lucked in to having a really magnificent mother? Probably not.

But could such a mother then really be all that magnificent, if that’s the child’s view of himself?

I am not speaking about my own mother, who was decapitated by a plummeting rotorblade long before she could have much effect one way or the other on my older brother and innocent younger sister and me.

I think, Mrs. Starkly, that I am speaking of Mrs. Avril M.-T. Incandenza, although the woman is so multileveled and indictment-proof that it is difficult to feel comfortable with any sort of univocal accusation of anything. Something just was not right, is the only way to put it. Something creepy, even on the culturally stellar surface. For instance, after Orin had pretty clearly killed her beloved dog S. Johnson in a truly awful if accidental way, and then had tried to evade responsibility for it with a lie that a parent far less intelligent than Avril could have seen right through, Mrs. Inc’s response was not only not conventionally abusive, but seemed almost too unconditionally loving and compassionate and selfless to possibly be true. Her response to Orin’s pathetic pulverize-and-run-driver lie was not to act credulous so much as to act as if the entire grotesque fiction had never reached her ears. And her response to the dog’s death itself was bizarrely furcated. On the one hand, she mourned S. Johnson’s death very deeply, took the leash and collar and canine nubbin tenderly and arranged lavish memorial and funeral arrangements, including a heartbreakingly small cherrywood coffin, cried in audible private for weeks, etc. But the other half of her emotional energies went into being overly solicitous and polite toward Orin, upping the daily compliment-and-reinforcement-dose, arranging for favorite foods at E.T.A. meals, having his favorite little tennis appurtenances appear magically in his bed and locker with loving notes attached, basically making the thousands of little gestures by which the technically stellar parent can make her child feel particularly valued⁰ — all out of concern that Orin in no way think she resented him for S. Johnson’s death or blamed him or loved him less in any way because of the whole incident. Not only was there no punishment or even visible pique, but the love-and-support-bombardment increased. And all this was coupled with elaborate machinations to keep the mourning and funeral arrangements and moments of wistful dog-remembrance hidden from Orin, for fear that he might see that the Moms was hurt and so feel bad or guilty, so that in his presence Mrs. Inc became even more cheerful and loquacious and witty and intimate and benign, even suggesting in oblique ways that life was now somehow suddenly better without the dog, that some kind of unrecognized albatross had been somehow removed from her neck, and so on and so forth.

What does a trained analyst of our cultural profile’s soft contours like yourself make of this, Mrs. Starksaddle? Is it mind-bogglingly considerate and loving and supportive, or is there something … creepy about it? Maybe a more perspicuous question: Was the almost pathological generosity with which Mrs. Inc responded to her son taking her car in an intoxicated condition and dragging her beloved dog to its grotesque death and then trying to lie his way out of it, was this generosity for Orin’s sake, or for Avril’s own? Was it Orin’s “self-esteem” she was safeguarding, or her own vision of herself as a more stellar Moms than any human son could ever hope to feel he merits?

When Orin does his impression of Avril — which I doubt you or anyone else can get him to do anymore, though it was a party-stopper back in our days at the Academy — what he will do is assume an enormous warm and loving smile and move steadily toward you until he is in so close that his face is spread up flat against your own face and c. Yes — all right — this may start to touch on it: not “valuable” but “valued.”your breaths mingle. If you can get to experience it — the impression — which will seem worse to you: the smothering proximity, or the unimpeachable warmth and love with which it’s effected?

For some reason now I am thinking of the sort of philanthropist who seems humanly repellent not in spite of his charity but because of it: on some level you can tell that he views the recipients of his charity not as persons so much as pieces of exercise equipment on which he can develop and demonstrate his own virtue. What’s creepy and repellent is that this sort of philanthropist clearly needs privation and suffering to continue, since it is his own virtue he prizes, instead of the ends to which the virtue is ostensibly directed.

Everything Orin’s mother is about is always terribly well-ordered and multivalent. I suspect she was badly abused as a child. I have nothing concrete to back this up.

But if, Ms. Bainbridge, you have yielded your own charms to Orin, and if Orin strikes you as a wonderfully gifted and giving lover — which by various accounts he is — not just skilled and sensuous but magnificently generous, empathic, attentive, loving — if it seems to you that he does, truly, derive his own best pleasure from giving you pleasure, you might wish to reflect soberly on this vision of Orin imitating his dear Moms as philanthropist: a person closing in, arms open wide, smiling.

[270] ® The Glad Flaccid Receptacle Corporation, Zanesville OH.

[271] (including K. McKenna, who claims to have a bruised skull but does not in fact have a bruised skull)

[272] This is why Ann Kittenplan, way more culpable for Eschaton-damage than any of the other kids, isn’t down here on the punitive cleanup crew, is that it’s become a defacto Tunnel Club operation. LaMont Chu was nominated to tell her she could blow it off and they’d mark her down as present, which was just fine with Ann Kittenplan, since even the butchest little girls don’t seem to have this proto-masculine fetish for enclosure underneath things.

[273] = Stars, shooting stars, falling stars.

[274]Poutrincourt uses the Nuck idiom réflechis instead of the more textbook reflexes, and does indeed sound like the real Canadian McCoy, though her accent is without the long moany suffixes of Marathe, and but anyway it is for certain that a certain ‘journalist’ will be e-mailing Falls Church VA on the U.S.O.’s Clipper-proof line for the unexpurgated files on one ‘Poutrincourt, Thierry T.’

[275] Using s’annuler instead of the more Québecois se détruire.

[276] Using the vulgate Québecois transperçant, whose idiomatic connotation of doom Poutrincourt shouldn’t have had any reason to think the Parisian-speaking Steeply would know, which is the slip that indicates that Poutrincourt’s figured out that Steeply is neither a civilian soft-profiler nor even a female, which Poutrincourt’s probably known ever since Steeply’d lit his Flanderfume with the elbow of his lighter-arm out instead of in, which only males and radically butch lesbians ever do, and which together with the electrolysis-rash comprises the only real chink in the operative’s distaff persona, and would require an almost professionally hypervigilant and suspicious person to notice the significance of.

[277] Trois-Rivières-region idiom, meaning basically ‘reason to get out of bed in the morning.’

[278] Where was Mrs. Pemulis all this time, late at night, with dear old Da P. shaking Matty ‘awake’ until his teeth rattled and little Micky curled up against the far wall, shell-breathing, silent as death, is what I’d want to know.

[279] The kid’s the former E.T.A. whose name keeps eluding and torturing Hal, who hasn’t gone over twenty-four hours without getting high in secret for well over a year, and doesn’t feel very good at all, and finds the kid’s name’s elusiveness infuriating.

[280] Anhedonia was apparently coined by Ribot, a Continental Frenchman, who in his 19th-century Psychologic des Sentiments says he means it to denote the psychoequivalent of analgesia, which is the neurologic suppression of pain.

[281] This had been one of Hal’s deepest and most pregnant abstractions, one he’d come up with once while getting secretly high in the Pump Room. That we’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that he goes around feeling like he misses somebody he’s never even met? Without the universalizing abstraction, the feeling would make no sense.

[282] (the big reason why people in pain are so self-absorbed and unpleasant to be around)

[283] S.S.R.I.s, of which Zoloft and the ill-fated Prozac were the ancestors.

[284] A crude and cheap form of combustible methedrine, favored by the same sort of addictive class that sniffs gasoline fumes or coats the inside of a paper bag with airplane glue and puts the bag over their face and breathes until they fall down and start to convulse.

[285] This has got to be a mispronunciation or catachresis on R.v.C.’s part, since Clonidine — 2-(2,6-Dichloroanilino)-2-imidazoline — is a decidedly adult-strength anti-hypertensive; the infant’d have to be N.F.L.-sized to tolerate it.

[286] Kate G.’s never done Ice, or crack/’base/crank, nor even cocaine or low-impact ‘drines. Drug addicts tend to fall into different classes: those who like downs and Mr. Hope rarely enjoy stimulants, while coke- and ‘drine-fiends as a rule abhor marijuana. This is an area of potentially fruitful study in addictionology. Note that pretty much every class of addicts drinks, though.

[287] Since last winter, when a stale smell, litter of dental stimulators, and single slender spit-wet butt signified that a certain upperclassman had been smoking panatelas late at night in V.R.3.

[288] The Continent’s Best Yogurt®.

[289] In point of a fact wholly unknown to Hal, BS: OTN was in fact a very sad self-hate-festival on Himself’s part, a veiled allegory of sponsorship and Himself’s own miserable distaste for the vacant grins and reductive platitudes of the Boston AA that M.D.s and counselors kept referring him to.

[290] Whether the girl’s hideous facial burn-scars are the result of a freebase accident is never made explicit in the film. Bernadette Longley says she kind of hopes that’s the case, because otherwise the scars would function as symbols of some deeper and more spiritual wound/hideousness, and the symbolic equation of facial with moral deformity strikes everybody over thirteen in the room as terribly gooey and heavy and stock.

[291] After a heyday during the pre-millennial self-help craze, CA’s receded back to being a splinter of the still-enormous Narcotics Anonymous; and Pat Montesian and the Ennet House Staff, while they have nothing against a resident with cocaine-issues hitting the occasional CA venue, strongly suggest that residents stick with AA or NA and not make splinters like CA or Designer Drug Addicts Anonymous or Prescription Tranquilizers Anonymous their primary fellowship for recovery, mostly because the splinters tend to have way fewer Groups and meetings — and some none at all in certain parts of the U.S. — and because their extremely specific Substance-focus tends to narrow the aperture of recovery and focus too much on abstinence from just one Substance instead of complete sobriety and a new spiritual way of life in toto.

[292] Fearful partly because the Ennet House Staff strongly discourages residents forming any kind of sentimental attachment to members of the opposite sex during their nine-month stay,³ to say nothing of attachments to Staffers.

a. This is a corollary of Boston AA’s suggestion that single newcomers not get romantically involved for the first year of sobriety. The big reason for this, Boston AAs with time will explain if pinned down, is that the sudden removal of Substances leaves an enormous ragged hole in the psyche of the newcomer, the pain of which the newcomer’s supposed to feel and be driven kneeward by and pray to have filled by Boston AA and the old Higher Power, and intense romantic involvements offer a delusive analgesic for the pain of the hole, and tend to make the involvees clamp onto one another like covalence-hungry isotopes, and substitute each other for meetings and Activity in a Group and Surrender, and then if the involvement doesn’t pan out (which like how many between newcomers do you suppose do) both involvees are devastated and in even more hole-pain than before and now don’t have the intensive-work-in-AA-dependent strength to make it through the devastation without going back to the Substance. Relevant gnomes here might include ‘Addicts Don’t Have Relationships, They Take Hostages’ (sic) and ‘An Alcoholic Is a Relief-Seeking Missile.’ And so on. The no-involvement thing tends to be the Waterloo of all suggestions, for newcomers, and celibacy’s often the issue that separates those who Hang from those who Go Back Out There.

[293] Apparently the current colored word for other coloreds. Joelle van Dyne, by the way, was aculturated in a part of the U.S.A. where verbal attitudes toward black people are dated and unconsciously derisive, and is doing pretty much the best she can — colored and so on — and anyway is a paragon of racial sensitivity compared to the sort of culture Don Gately was conditioned in.

[294] It’s a Boston-colored thing on Commitments to make all speech a protracted apostrophe to some absent ‘Jim,’ Joelle’s observed in a neutral sociologic way.

[295] Boston Housing Authority.

[296] Mixes 5/1 with ferric chloride to produce ‘A + B Blood,’ an F/X staple of low-budget splatter-films.

[297] The cartridge’s repetitive emphasis on the Mother Superior’s desire to silence the novitiate leads B. Boone — a lazy student but very bright girl — to opine that the silent brown-cowled Trappists who’ve been hanging superfluously around the film’s edges like some mute Greek chorus have been serving a symbolic rather than a narrative function, which strikes Hal as perceptive.

[298] It’s also a sly Schtitt-directed à-clef, of course, amounting to something like We Are What We Revile or We Are What We Scurry Around As Fast As Possible With Our Eyes Averted, though when Schtitt mentions the motto he never attaches any moral connotation to it, or for that matter ever translates it, allowing prorectors and Big Buddies to adjust their translations to suit the needs of the pedagogical moment.

[299] © the Commonwealth of MA’s Lottery Authority.

[300] Easily found when pawning a cordless M. Cafe® Café-au-Lait Maker at a Brookline shop of pawning, for Fortier and Marathe and the A.F.R. knew well M. DuPlessis’s passion of breakfast cafe au lait.

[301] Having in her M.B.A. program absorbed the litigatory lessons of music producers v. cassette-tape manufacturers and film-production companies v. videotape-rental chains, Noreen Lace-Forché protected InterLace’s golden goose’s copyrights by specifying that all consumer-TP-compatible laser cartridges be engineered as Read-Only — copyable Master cartridges require special OS-codes and special hardware to run,^a and you need licenses for both the codes and the hardware, which keeps most consumers out of the bootleg-cartridge business but is not a hard hurdle to clear if you’ve got financial resources and political incentive (i.e., to dupe off a Master).

a. N.L.-F. had even rigged it so that Masters have to be run at 585 r.p.m. instead of a consumer-TP’s cartridge-drive’s 450 r.p.m.

[302] Thanks to the betrayal of Marathe, this pure-malice agenda is known to the Office of Unspecified Services, though it is not impossible that Fortier deliberately allowed Marathe to pass along this datum, Marathe knows, for the hope of instilling even deeper chills of fear in Sans-Chrìste Gentle and his O.N.A.N. chiens-courants. Suspected but unknown by Marathe, Fortier plans to have Marathe view the Entertainment by force before plans for the dissemination of copies from a Master are firm in execution. This not because Fortier for a moment suspects Marathe’s love of his wife’s health of prompting his betrayal of Leur Rai Pays — Fortier had overseen both jeux du procbain train* at which Marathe’s elder brothers had been struck and killed, and Fortier has long nursed a suspicion that Marathe nurses dreams of redress for this.

a. Q.v. Note 304 sub.

[303] Though hope springs eternal in the breasts, this news had been expected by Broullîme and Fortier the moment they witnessed the shop’s brothers active and alert. For they believed no Master cartridge would have lain unshelved in a bag or damp box: even the dim brothers Antitoi, seeing the unique case and slightly larger size of a Master, would have put this to the special side, and arranged for the special 585-r.p.m. hardware to view it to check for special value, and been already lost.

[304] Q.v. @ 2O3Oh. on 11 November Year of the D.A.U., 308 Subdorm B, Enfield Tennis Academy, where James Albrecht Lockley Struck Jr. sits slumped, chin in hands, forehead slathered in (C₂H₅CO)₂O2^a, elbows on tiny cleared spots on desktop, TP compactly humming, word-processing converter plugged into its green-lit dock, HD screen set atop the cartridge-viewer chassis on its fold-out support like a loved one’s photo, keyboard hauled out of McGee-like chaos of closet and set on Heavy Touch, cursor throbbing softly at screen’s upper left before Struck, hunched blearily over what’s starting to emerge as like unabsorbable amounts of research material for his post-Midterm termpaper for Ms. Pout-rincourt’s History of Canadian Unpleasantness course thing. Struck always refers mentally to his classes as ‘things.’ Original hopes for at least originality of topic have long since gone over the side of the boat, emotionally. It turns out the more luridly absorbing the angle of topic you choose, the more people have already been there before you with their footprints to fill and their obscurely academic-type-journal articles to try and absorb and, like, synthesize. Struck’s been at this over an hour, and his original sights have lowered considerably. He’s been feeling a bit punk all day, sinuses with that infallible storm’s-on-the-way feeling of weight and clot and a goalie-mask headache that throbs with his heart, and he’s now trying to find some new resource in the piles that’s obscure and amateurish enough for him to transpose and semi-plagiarize without worrying about Poutrincourt having read it or smelling a rat in the woodpile.

‘Almost as little of irreproachable scholarly definitiveness is known about the infamous Separatist “Wheelchair Assassins” (Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents or A.F.R.s) of southwestern Quebec as is accepted as axiomatic about the herds of oversized “Feral Infants” allegedly reputed to inhabit the periodically overinhabitable forested sections of the eastern Reconfiguration.’

A B.P.L. ArchFax database search off the conjunctive key terms A.F.R., wheelchair, fauteuil rollent, Quebec, Quebec, Separatism, terrorist, Experialism, history, and cult, which you’d think would narrow things down nicely, yielded over 400 items, articles, essays, and papers, in everything from The Continent to Us, from Foreign Affairs to something called Wild Conceits, a woebegone little marginal archaic desktop-pub.-looking thing put out by someplace called Bayside Community College up 1-93 in Med-ford, nowhere near any bays, and edited by the same-named guy whose Wild Conceits wheelchair-killers essay Struck, after having to read the first sentence a bunch of times to even make sense of it, gauges he’s pretty safe in ripping off, since no way Poutrincourt’d have spent the time to E.S.L. her way through U.S. Academese this insufferable:

‘… that the prenominate oversized infants reputedly do exist, are anomalous and huge, grow but do not develop, feed on the abundance of annularly available edibles the overgrowth periods in the region represent, do deposit titanically outsized scat, and presumably do crawl thunderously about, occasionally sallying south of murated retention lines and into populated areas of New New England.’ In a twist on the usual plagiarism-situation, the hardest work for Struck here is going to be sanitizing the prose in this Wild Conceits guy’s thing, or at least bringing the verbs and modifiers down out of the like total ozone, which the Academese here on the w^rhole sounds to Struck like the kind of foam-flecked megalograndiosity he associates with Quaaludes and red wine and then the odd Preludin to pull out of the grandiose nosedive of the Quaaludes and red wine. Plus let’s not even mention repair-work on the freewheeling transitions; Poutrincourt has a fetishy thing about transitions.

‘The massive, feral infants, formed by toxicity and sustained by annulation, however, are, from the vulgate perspective of this Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster, essentially passive icons of the Experialist gestalt. Would that the infamous Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents were, as well.’ Struck can almost see Poutrincourt putting a big red triple-underlined QUOI? under a transition this tortured and freewheeling. Struck pictures the Wild Conceits guy totally strafed as he goes, weaving over his foam-flecked desktop, almost. Tor the infamous Quebecker Separatist A.F.R. cell’s claims to irreduce-ably active status include the following. The legless Quebecker Wheelchair Assassins, although legless and confined to wheelchairs, nevertheless contrive to have situated large reflective devices across odd-numbered United States highways for the purpose of disorienting and endangering northbound Americans, to have disrupted pipelines between processing points in the eastern Reconfiguration’s annular fusion grid, have been linked to attempts at systemic damage of the federally contracted Empire Waste Displacement’s launch and reception facilities on both sides of the Reconfigured intracontinental border, and, perhaps most infamously, derive their cell’s own sobriquet in the vox populi---

“Wheelchair Assassins”---from the active practice of assassinating prominent Canadian officials who support or even tolerate what they---the A.F.R.s, in infrequent public communiques---regard as both Quebec and Canada in íoío’s “Sudetenlandization”

by the---as the A.F.R. characterize it---same American-dominated Organization of North American Nations which forced ecologically distorted and possibly mutagenic territory into their---the nation of Canada, and most specifically and intensively the province of Quebec---aegis in the newly subsidized Year of the Whopper …’ — Struck, canted slightly in his desk-chair from the overdevelopment of his body’s right side, is also trying to carve up each of this diarrheatic G. T. Day, M.S. guy’s clauses into less-long self-contained sentences that sound more earnest and pubescent, like somebody earnestly struggling toward truth instead of flecking your forehead with spittle as he ranted grandiosely — ‘… the Wheelchair Assassins at these all too publicly familiar assassinations materializing, quote “as if from nowhere” unquote, masters of stealth, striking terror into prominent, Canadian hearts, affording no warning excepting the ominous squeak of slow wheels, striking swiftly and without warning, assassinating prominent Canadians and then dissolving back into the dark night’ — as opposed to a light night? Struck forces sudden air through his full nose, producing a low and horn-like derisive sound — ‘striking always at night, a type of performative signature, to strike at night only, leaving behind only sinuous networks of thin, double tracks in snow, dew, leaves, or earth, as performative signatures, such that a double sinuous 5 shaped line across the traditional fleur-de-lis motif of Quebecois Separatism is the A.F.R. cell’s standard, its escutcheon or “symbol,” if you will, in their infrequent and always hostile communiques to the administrations of Canada and O.N.A.N. Such that, quote, “To hear the squeak,” unquote, is now an understood euphemismic locution among officials highly placed in Quebecois, Canadian, and O.N.A.N.ite power structures for instant, terrifying, and violent death. And for the media, as well. As in, quote, “Before many thousands of shocked subscribers, newly elected Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe and an aide, guarded by no fewer than a dozen units of the Domestic Detail’s elite mounted Cuirassiers, nevertheless heard the squeak last night during a spontaneously disseminated address at the lakeside resort of Pointe Clare.”*

Struck, clutching his head with one hand, is trying to find euphemismic in the TP’s Lex-Base.

‘… Affiliations, sometimes purported, between the Root Cult core of Les Assassins on one hand and the more extreme and violently subversive of Quebec’s Séparatisteur

organizations---the Fronte de la Liberation de la Quebec, the Fils de Montcalm, the ultra right anti-Reconfigurative vishnu of the Bloc Quebecois---tend, however, to be contradicted by both stated agendas---the conventional Separatist phalances demanding only the independent secession of provincial Quebec and the elimination of Anglo-American cognates from public discourse, while the A.RR.s’ stated aims being nothing less total than the total return of all Reconfigured territories to American administration, the cessation of all E.W.D. airborne waste displacement and ATHSCME rotary air mass displacement activity within 175 kilometers of Canadian soil, the removal of all fission/ waste/fusion annulars north of the 42°-N. Parallel, and the secession of Canada in toto

from the Organization of North American Nations---and by the fact that all too many

prominent figures in the recent sociohistory of the Separatist movement---for e.g., Schnede, Charest, Remillard, both Sr. and Jr. Bouchards---have, in the last 24 months---particularly, in the violent and bloody autumn of the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar---”heard the squeak.” ‘

Struck’s little TP’s internal Lex files confirm vishnu, at least. Plus there’s a kind of almost savage edge to the article’s incoherence that Struck’s getting almost to like, a little: he keeps imagining the little hyphen of wrinkle Poutrincourt gets between her eyebrows when she doesn’t follow something and can’t quite tell if it’s your English’s fault or her English’s fault. ‘Prior to Y.P.W.c.’s Freedom of Speculation Act, credible sociohistorical data on the origins and evolution of Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents from obscure, adolescent, nihilistic Root Cult to one of the most feared cells in the annals of Canadian extremism was regrettably patchy and dependent on the hearsay of sources whose scholarly veracity was of an integrity somewhat less than unimpeachable.’ Struck here pictures Thierry Poutrincourt, who tends to get that little annoyed-confusion wrinkle sometimes even with the lucidest of term papers, lowering her tall head and charging into a wall. One sinus feels noticeably bigger than the other sinus, and there’s something not quite right with his neck from sitting hunched all this time, and he’d kill relatives for a quick DuBois.

‘Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents of Quebec are essentially cultists, locating both their political raison d’etre and their philosophical dasein within the North American sociohistorical interval of intensive special interest diffraction that preceded---nay, one might daresay stood in integral causal relation with respect to---the nearly simultaneous inaugurations of O.N.A.N.ite governance, continental Interdependence, and the commercial subsidization of a lunar O.N.A.N. calendar. Like most Canadian cult extensions, however, the Wheelchair Assassins and their cultic derivations have proven substantially more fanatical, less benign, less reasonable, and substantially more malignant---in sum, more difficult for responsible authorities to anticipate, control, ⁴ CBC/PATHÉ 1200h.-0000h. Summary Cartridge * 911-24-04, 4 May Y.P.Wc., © Y.P. We., PATHÉ Nouvelle Toujours, Ltd. interdict, or reason with than even the most passionate U.S. kabals. This scholarly essay concurs in many essential respects with the thesis that Canadian and other non American Root Cults, in contrast to all but what Phelps and Phelps argue are isolated pockets of antihistorical American stelliformism, persist so queerly in directing their reverent fealty toward principles, quote, “often not only isomorphic with but activally opposed to the cultists’ own individual pleasure, comfort, cut bono, or entertainment as to be all but outside the ken of both the sophisticated predictive models of psychosocial science and the rudimentary comprehension of human reason.”⁵’

This all takes serious labor for Struck to decoct the gist out of and then recast in rather less uptown and more basic studential prose. Twice in the hall outside his and Shaw’s and Pemberton’s room, Rader and Wagenknecht and some other 16’s-sounding males go down the hall, all of them together going ‘Er, ah, ee, oo, ah, er, ah, ee …,’ and so on. ‘It is an accepted fact that Les Assassins’ Root Cult, in a fashion typical of those whose objects are divorced from the rational advancement of individual interest, takes, for its rites and personality, rituals intimately bound up with “Les jeux pour-memes” formal competitive games whose end is less any sort of “prize” than it is a manner of basic identity: i.e., that is, “game” as metaphysical environment and psychohistorical locus and geatalt.’ Struck’s own historical dad, during Jim’s own childhood in Rancho Mirage, was an inveterate red-wine-with-heavy-tranqs-on-the-side drinker, who used to make late-night phone calls to people he didn’t know very well and make statements he later had to retract at great length, until finally one autumn night the Dad had staggered out and attempted a one-and-a-half tuck into the Struck family’s backyard pool that he hadn’t recalled had been drained, resulting in a neck brace for life that ended his career as a low-80s golfer, resulting in incredible bitterness and family trauma, before little J.A.L.S. Jr. was shipped off to the Rolling Hills Academy.

‘It is, for example, largely conceded that Les Assassins’ confinement to their epithetic wheelchairs can be traced to rural southwestern pre-Experialist Quebec’s infamous “Le]eu du Prochain Train,” and that the A.F.R.’s Root Cult itself was comprised largely or perhaps even entirely of veteran devotees and practitioners of this savage, nihilistic, and mettle testing jeu pour-meme.

‘ “La Culte du Prochain Train,” often translated as “The Cult of the Next Train,” is known to have originated at least a decade prior to Reconfiguration among the male offspring of asbestos, nickel and zinc miners in the desolate Papineau region of what was then extreme southwest Quebec. The chilling game’s competition and its upspringing cult soon spread throughout the network of non-ionized and pre-Interdependent railroad lines which carried raw minerals south to Ottawa and the United States’ Great Lake Ports.’ Over Struck’s little desk hangs a model airplane made entirely from different parts of beer cans. While Inc was keen on the whole lurid mirror-across-highway terrorism thing of early O.N.A.N., and Schacht’s paper’s focus was the violent French-Catholic protests against municipal fluoridation under Mulroney, Struck had picked the A.F.R.-and-Russian-Roulettish-train-jumping-cult-thing connection, and was sticking to it with the same tenacity that kept him on the 18’s A-squad despite a serve that deLint described as resembling a debutante’s curtsy. The plane’s got flattened cans for wings, smunched-flat cans for wheels, part of a tallboy for fuselage and snout.

‘As with many games, Le Jeu du Prochain Train was itself substantially simpler than ⁵ in Phelps and Phelps, The Cults of the Unwavering I: A Field Guide to Cults of Currency Speculation, Melanin, Fitness, Bioflavinoids, Spectation, Assassination, Stasis, Property, Agoraphobia, Repute, Celebrity, Acraphobia, Performance, Amway, Fame, Infamy, Deformity, Scopophobia, Syntax, Consumer Technology, Scopophilia, Presleyism, Hunterism, Inner Children, Eros, Xenophobia, Surgical Enhancement, Motivational Rhetoric, Chronic Pain, Solipsism, Survivalism, Preterition, Anti-Abortionism, Kevorkianism, Allergy, Albinism, Sport, Chiliasm, and Telentertainment in pre-O.N.A.N. North America, © Y.P.W. the organization of the competition.’ A cool smile from Struck. ‘It was played after sunset at specified sites, specifically les passages a niveau de vote ferrée that marked every rural Quebecker road’s intersection with a railroad track. In the Year of the Whopper, there were over two thousand (2,000) such intersections in the Papineau region alone, though not all saw heavy enough flow to accommodate the complexities of true competition.

‘Six boys, miners’ sons, ages ten to roughly sixteen, Quebecois French speaking boys, line up on six railroad ties’ juts just outside the track. Two hundred sixteen (216) boys---never either more nor less---are involved in a night’s opening rounds, organized into sixes, each group of six taking its turn with a different train, standing on consecutive juts just outside one track, waiting, doubtless tense, awaiting the procession of a fearsome bride, indeed. The night’s heavily travelled crossing’s schedule of trains is known to Lejeu du Prochain Train’s episcopate of les directeurs dejeu---older, post-adolescent boys, veterans of previous les jeux, many of them legless and in wheelchairs or---for the sons of asbestos miners, many orphaned and desperately poor---on crude rolling boards.

No timepieces are permitted the players, who are under the absolute discretion of the game’s directeurs, whose decisions are final and often brutally enforced. They all are silent, listening for the sound of the engine’s whistle, a sound which is sad and cruel at the same time, as the sound approaches and begins to subtly undergo Doppler Effects. They tense palely muscled legs beneath hand me down corduroys as the next train’s one white eye rounds the track’s curve and bears down on the game’s waiting boys.’

Struck keeps bogging down in these parts where it seems like the guy just totally abandons a scholarly tone, and even probably starts making up or hallucinating details which there’s no way Jim Struck could represent himself as having been there to see, and he’s blue-delete-looping all over the place, plus grinding his eye and picking at his forehead, his two more or less constant responses to creative stress.

‘Le Jeu du Prochain Train itself is simplicity in motion. The object: Be the last of your round’s six to jump from one side of the tracks to the other---that is, across the tracks---before the train passes. Your only real opponents are your six’s other five.

Never is the train itself regarded as an opponent. The speeding, screaming train is regarded rather as le jeu’$ boundary, arena, and reason. Its size, its speed down the extremely gradual north-to-south grade of what was then southwestern Quebec, and the precise mechanical specifications of each scheduled train---these are known to the directeurs, they comprise the constants in a game the variables of which are the respective wills of the six ranged along the track, and their estimates of one another’s will to risk all to win.’

Struck transposes clearly nonadolescent uptown material like this into: ‘The variable of the game isn’t so much a matter of the train, but the player’s courage and will.’

‘The last few instants, vanishingly small, when the player may hurl himself athwart the expanse of track, across timber ties, creosote stench, gravel and scarred iron, amid the ear splitting scream of the whistle almost overhead, able to feel the huge push of terrible air from the transport’s cow catcher or express train’s rounded nose, to go sprawling in the gravel past the tracks’ other side and roll to see wheels and flanges, couplings and driving rods, the furious back and forth of transverse axles, feeling the whistle’s steam condense to drizzle all around---these few seconds are known, familiar as their own pulse, to the boys who assemble and play.’ Struck’s now progressed to grinding the whole heel of his hand into his eyesocket, producing a kind of ectoplasmic pinwheel of red in there. Did like even pre-bullet railroad engines have flanges and cowcatchers and whistles that steamed?

In a disastrous lapse, Struck copies hurl himself athwart, a decidedly un-Struckish-sounding verb phrase, verbatim into his text.

‘… that the true variable which renders le Jeu du Prochain Train a contest and not merely a game involves the nerve and heart and willingness to risk all of any or all of the five waiting beside you at the track. How long can they wait? When will they choose? Their lives and limb worth how much Queen-headed coin this night? More radical by far than the American youth automobile game of “Chicken” to which its principle is frequently compared (five, not one, different wills to comparatively gauge, in addition to your own will’s resolve, and no motion or action to distract you from the tension of waiting motionlessly to move, waiting as one by one the other five quail and save themselves, leap to beat the train …,’ and then the sentence just ends, without even a close to the parenthesis, though Struck, with a canny sense for this sort of thing, knows the analogy to Chicken’11 ring just the right bell, term-paper-wise.

‘Le Jeu’s historic best, reportedly, however, ignore their five competitors completely, concentrating their entire attention on determining the last viable instant in which to leap, regarding the last, final, and only true opponent in the game to be their own will, mettle, and intuition about the last viable instant in which to leap. These nerveless few, le Jeu’s finest---many of whom will go on to directeur future jeux (if not, often, to membership in Les Assassins or its stelliform offshoots)---these nerveless and self-contained virtuosi never see their opponents’ flinches or tics or the darkenings at corduroys’ crotches, none of the normal signs of will faltering which lesser players scan for---for the game’s finest players frequently close their eyes entirely as they wait, trusting the railroad ties’ vibration and the whistle’s pitch, as well as intuition, and fate, and whatever numinous influences lie just beyond fate.’ Struck at certain points imagines himself gathering this Wild Conceits guy’s lapels together with one hand and savagely and repeatedly slapping him with the other — forehand, backhand, forehand.

‘The cult’s game’s principle is simple. The last of the six to jump before the train and land intact wins the round. The fifth through the second to leap have lost, but acquitted themselves.

‘The first in a round to quail and jump walks home from there, alone under the moon, disgraced and ashamed.

‘But even the first to quail and jump has jumped. Far beyond prohibited, not to jump at all is regarded as impossible. To “perdre son coeur” and not jump at all is outside le Jeu’s limit. The possibility simply does not exist. It is unthinkable. Only once, in le Jeu du Prochain Train’s extensive oral history, has a miner’s son not jumped, lost his heart and frozen, remaining on his jut as the round’s train passed. This player later drowned. “Perdre son coeur” when it is mentioned at all, is known also as “Faire un Bernard Wayne,” in dubious honor of this lone unjumping asbestos miner’s son, about whom little beyond his subsequent drowning in the Baskatong Reservoir is known, his name denoting a figure of ridicule and disgust among speakers of the Papineau Region vulgate.’ Disastrously, Struck blithely transposes this stuff too, with not even a miniature appliance-size bulb flickering anywhere over his head.

‘The game’s object is to jump last and land still fully limbed upon the opposite embankment.

‘Expresses are 30 k.p.h. faster than conventional transports, but a transport’s cow catcher mangles. A boy struck head on by a moving train is shot as from a cannon, knocked out of his shoes, describes a towering, flailing arc, and is transported home in a burlap sack. A player caught beneath a wheel and run over is frequently spread out along a hundred red meters or more of reddened track, and is transported home in a number of ceremonial asbestos and nickel mining shovels provided by the Jeu’s older and frequently dismembered directeurs.

‘As happens more often, purportedly, a boy who has dived more than half way across the tracks when he is struck and hit, loses one or more legs---either there on the spot, if lucky, or later, under surgical gas and orthopedic saws applied to what are customarily violently angled masses of unrecognizably contuded meat.’ The paradox here for Struck as plagiarist, who needs something with sufficient detail to be able to basically just rehash, is that this thing here has almost too much detail, much of it purple; it doesn’t even seem all that scholarly; it seems more like the Wild Conceits Bayside C.C. guy seemed to get more and more tipsy as the thing went on until he felt free to make a lot of it up, like e.g. the contuded-meat bits, etc. What’s interesting to Hal Incandenza about his take on Struck, sometimes Pemulis, Evan Ingersoll, et al. is that congenital plagiarists put so much more work into camouflaging their plagiarism than it would take just to write up an assignment from conceptual scratch. It usually seems like plagiarists aren’t lazy so much as kind of navigationally insecure. They have trouble navigating without a detailed map’s assurance that somebody has been this way before them. About this incredible painstaking care to hide and camouflage the plagiarism — whether it’s dishonesty or a kind of kleptomaniacal thrill-seeking or what — Hal hasn’t developed much of any sort of take.

‘It is frightfully simple and straightforward. Sometimes the last of the six to jump is struck; then the second to last leaper becomes the last and victor, and advances, each winner literally “surviving” into the game’s next round, a sort of sextupled semi final, six rounds of six Canadian boys each: the, quote, “Les Trente-Six” for the evening. the initial rounds’ boys---those who have been neither the last nor the disgraceful first to leap---are permitted to stay at the le passage a niveau de vote ferree, assembled to become the semi finals’ silent audience. The entire Le Jeu du Prochain Train is customarily conducted in silence.’ In a disastrous and maybe unconsciously self-destructive set of lapses, Struck rehabilitates the prose but keeps a lot of the hallucinatory specific descriptive stuff in, unfootnoted, though there’s obviously no way he could pretend to have been there.

‘The surviving losers from among the Les Trente-Six then swell the ranks of the silent gallery as the six nerveless winners---the finalists, this night’s “attendants longtemps ses tours”---some bleeding or gray with shock, survivors already of two separate long delayed leaps and hairbreadth escapes, eyes blank or closed, mouths working in savored distaste, await the nightly 2359 Express, the ultra ionized “Le Train de la Foudre” from Mont Tremblant to Ottawa. They will jump athwart the tracks in front of its high speed nose at the final moment, each trying to be the last to leap and live. It is not rare for several of the le Jeu’s finalists to be struck.’ Struck tries to decide whether it’d be unrealistic or unself-consciously realistic to keep using his own name as a verb — would a man with anything to camouflage use his own name as a verb?

‘… that several among the La Culte du Prochain Train’s survivors and organizational directorate went on to found and comprise Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents is beyond sociohistorical dispute, though the precise ideological relation between the B.S. era’s simultaneously chivalric and nihilistic Cult of the Train’s savage tournaments and the present’s limbless cell of anti-O.N.A.N. extremists remains the subject of the same scholarly debate that surrounds the evolution of northern Quebec’s La Culte de Baiser Sans Fin into the not particularly dreaded but media savvy Fils de Montcalm cell credited with the helicoptered dropping of the 12 meter, human waste filled, pie shell onto the rostrum of U.S. President Gentle’s second Inaugural.

‘As with the La Culte du Prochain Train, the Cult of the Endless Kiss of the iron mining regions surrounding the Gulf of St. Lawrence, coalesced around a periodic, tournament style competition, this one comprised of 64 adolescent Canadian participants, of whom one half were female.⁶ Thus, the first round pitted 32 couples, each of which consisted of one male and one female Quebecker.’ Struck is trying to phone Hal, but gets only his room’s wearisome phone-machine-message; can you ever say pitted without some kind of against in there someplace later in the sentence? Struck envisions the Wild Conceit scholar utterly strafed by this time, the guy’s eyes crossed and his head lolling and having to cover one eye with a hand just to see a single screen, and typing with his nose. But with the apparent self-destructive credulity that characterizes many plagiarists, no matter how gifted, Struck goes ahead and puts in the complementless pitted, imagining forehand and backhand slaps all the while. ‘Of each pair, one half, designated by lot, filled his or her lungs to capacity with inhaled air, while the other exhaled maximally to empty his or hers. Their mouths were then fitted together and quickly sealed by an

⁶ Except in certain very esoteric variations on the game.

organizing cultist with occlusive tape, who then expertly employed the thumb and forefinger of both hands to seal the combatants’ nostrils. Thus, the battle of the Endless Kiss had been joined. The entire lung contents of the designatedly inhaled player was then exhaled orally into the emptied lungs of his or her opponent, who in turn exhaled the inhalation back to its original owner, and so forth, back and forth, the same air being traded back and forth, with oxygen and carbon dioxide ratios becoming progressively more Spartan, until the organizer holding their nostrils closed officially declared one combatant or the other to be “evanoui” or, “swooned,” either fallen to the ground or out on his or her feet. The theoretics of the contest lends itself to an appreciation of the patient, attritive, grinding down tactics of traditional Quebecois Séparatisteurs such as Les Fils de Montcalm and the Fronte de la Liberation du Quebec, as opposed to the viciousness and brinksmanship of “Le Prochain Train”‘s Root Cult’s disabled heirs. The figurative object of the “Bai$ser” competition appears---according to Phelps and Phelps---to involve using what one is given with maximally exhaustive levels of efficiency and endurance before excreting it back whence it came, a stoic stance toward waste utilization that the Phelps somewhat cavalierly employ to illuminate the Montcalmistes’ relative indifference to a continental Reconfiguration that constitutes Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents’ whole “raison de la guerre outrance” ‘^b

a. Pimple cream.

b. ‘Reason for all-out war,’ which Struck inserts without bothering even to check for the definition Day’d been too befogged to give, which is in and of itself almost suicidal, given that Poutrincourt knows exactly how much French facility Struck’s got, or rather hasn’t.

[305] (she thought then)

[306] Some of her and Jim’s best arguments had been over the connotations of ‘Everybody’s a critic,’ which Jim had liked to repeat with all different shades and pitches of ironic double-edge.

[307] Joelle van Dyne and Orin Incandenza each remember themselves as the original approachee. It’s unclear which if cither’s memory is accurate, though it’s noteworthy that this is one of only two total times Orin has perceived himself as the approachee, the other being the ‘Swiss hand-model’ on whose nude flank he’s been furiously tracing infinity signs all during the Moment Subject’s absence.

[308] = point of view.

[309] In the Chestnut Hills Shopping Center on Boylston/Rte. 9, which the E.T.A. A-squad staggers past several times a week, on runs — a chain, but a very top-shelf and fine one, and the Brookline Legal puts on a particularly fine marine spread, and the boniface seemed to know Dr. Incandenza and called him by name, and brought him a double bonded without being asked.

[310] Jargon: Film/Cartridge Studies.

[311] Trilateral North American immigration bureaucracy.

[312] Boston AA jargon. Y.E.T. is ‘You’re Eligible Too,’ a denial-buster for those who compare others’ ghastly consequences to their own so far, the point being to get you to see the street-guy with socks for gloves drinking Listerine at O7OOh. as just slightly farther down the same road you’re on, when you Come In. Or something close to that.

[313] The bureaucracy of Quebecois pensions, which had ruled against buying anything more than a used Kenbeck pacemaker for Marathe’s father, now deceased.

[314] See Note 304 supra.

[315] Marathe’s malentendu of live-in, 316. Like e.g. the times C.T. and the Moms would come out to Logan to pick Mario and Himself up from a filming trip, Mario lugging gear, Himself damp and pasty from the cabin pressure and not enough leg-room and his sportcoat pockets always clicking with little plastic bottles with unopenable caps, and in the car up to Enfield Mario’s uncle would keep up an Opheliac mad monologue of chatter that would get Himself’s poor teeth grinding so bad that when they pulled over to the breakdown lane and Mario came around to open the door and let Himself lean out and be ill there’d be grit in the throw-up that came out, white dental visible grit, from all the grinding.

[316]

[317] © B.S. 1981, Routledge & Kegan Paul Pic, London UK, wildly expensive hdcover; not on disk.

[318] Maine having been lost altogether, recall.

[319] Incandenza family idiom for leftovers.

[320] Main library, M.I.T., East Cambridge.

[321]Q.v. for a confirming example!93Oh. Thurs., 12 November Y.D.A.U., Rm. 204 Sub-dorm B:

‘No, look, it’s still Rise Over Run. The derivative’s the slope of the tangent at some point along the function. It doesn’t matter what point until they give you the point on the test.’

‘Will this even be on the Boards? Do they go past trig?’

‘This is fucking trig. They’ll give you word problems that may involve changing quantities — something accelerating, a voltage, inflation of O.N.A.N. currency over U.S. currency. Differentiation’ll save you half the time, all those triangles inside triangles to figure change with trig. Trig’s a Unit-bender on rate-changes. Derivatives’re just trig with some imagination. You imagine the points moving inexorably toward each other until for all practical purposes they’re the same point. The slope of a defined line becomes the slope of a tangent to one point.’

‘One point that’s in fact actually two points?’

‘You use your goddamn imagination, Inc, plus a couple prescribed limits. Which they won’t fuck with you on limits on the general test, trust me. This is a big pink titty compared to an Eschaton calculation. You move the two points you’re doing Rise-over-Run on infitesimally close together, you end up with a plug-in formula.’

‘Can I tell you about my dream now and then we’ll use the momentum from that to plow through this?’

‘Just write this on your wrist or something. Function x, exponent n, the derivative’s going to be nx + x^n-1 for any kind of first-order rate-of-increase thing they’re going to ask you. This assumes a definable limit, of course, which no way they’re going to fuck with you on limits on the fucking Boards.’

‘It was a DMZ-dream.’

‘Do you see how you’re going to apply this to a rate-of-increase-type little story they’ll pose?’

‘It involved your experimental soldier, the massive dose.’

‘Let me just close this door, here.’

‘It was the Leavenworth convict. The one you said had left the planet. The one belting out Ethel Merman. It was horrific, Mikey. In the dream I was the soldier.’

‘So you’re now going to assume a real you-know-what experience will be similar to the experience of a nightmare.’

‘Aha. Why nightmare? Why do you assume it was a nightmare? Did I use the word nightmare?’

‘You used the word horrific. I assume it wasn’t a romp through the heather.’

‘In the dream the horror was that I wasn’t really singing “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” I was really screaming for help. I was screaming like “Help! I’m screaming for help and everybody’s acting as if I’m singing Ethel Merman covers! It’s me! It’s me, screaming for help!” ‘

‘A Rusk-level dream, Inc. A standard nobody-understands-me dream. The DMZ and Mermanization were incidental.’

‘There was a quality of loneliness to it, though. Unlike anything. To be screaming that I’m screaming for help instead of singing a show-tune and to have the wardens and doctors gathered around snapping their fingers and tapping their feet.’

‘Have I mentioned DMZ doesn’t show up on a G.C./M.S.? Struck tracked this down off an obscure Digestive-Flora footnote. It’s the fitviavi-mold base. If the stuff shows up at all it shows as a slight case of unbalanced yeast.’

‘I thought only girls got yeast.’

‘Inc, don’t be so fucking naïve. Data number two is Struck is halfway toward nailing down that this stuff’s original intent was to induce what they called quote transcendent experiences in get this chronic alcoholics in the like 1960s at Verdun Protestant Hospital in Montreal.’

‘How come everywhere I turn this fall now everybody’s suddenly mentioning Quebec in all kinds of radically different contexts? Orin’s calling with some protracted obsession about anti-O.N.A.N. Québecers.’

‘… Tavis up and announces Quebec are the lambs in this year’s fundraiser. Your Mum’s from Quebec.’

‘And then this term of all terms I take Poutrincourt’s insurgency class, which is basically a Québecathon.’.

‘Oh I definitely I’d suspect some kind of conspiracy or trap. It’s obvious everything’s pointing toward getting you in a cell belting out Mermanalia. Inc, I think your hinges are starting to squeak. I think this is what plateaux-hopping up to the top does to somebody. I think a meaningful transcendent DMZ-type non-uremic-fallout interlude before Tucson is just what the carpenter ordered, for the old hinges. Keep you from going back to just smoking that Bob Hope day in day out when the test’s up. Shit’ll kill your lungs. Shit’ll make you fat, soft, moist and pale, Inc. Seen it happen. You need something more than a 30-day cleanout. The tu-sais-qué could be just the reconfiguration you need to start branching out, leave the Bob Hope alone, find something you can take to college or the Show and not get paralyzed. Shit’ll paralyze you over time, Incblob. Saw it happen time and over, back in the neighborhood. Once-promising stand-up guys spending their lives in front of the TP, eating Nutter Butters and whacking off into an old sock. The shit-fairy moves in with luggage for an extended stay, Inc. Plus indecisive? You haven’t seen indecisive til you’ve seen a guy with little fat-titties slumped in a chair in his tenth year of nonstop Bob Hope. It’s not pretty. Incster my friend it’s not pretty at all. A transcendent experience with me and the Axhandle could be just what the hinges are squeaking for. Be around some other people for a change. Don’t make me sit there with just Axhandle babbling about Yale. Leave the Visine at home.’

‘Was it transcendent? The term in Struck’s literature? Or was it transcendental?’

‘ ‘s the difference for Christ’s sake?’

‘Mike, what if I said I’ve been moving toward more than just a month off.’

‘Abandon All Hope.³ This what I was talking.’

‘I mean maybe make a decision. Forever. What if it was that I was doing it more and more and it was getting less fun but I was still doing it more and more, and the only way to moderate would be to like wave a hankie at it altogether.’

‘I applaud. Some low-risk transcendentalism with me and the Human Hatchet could be just the impotence for this kind of like major re—’

‘But it’d be everything. Blue Flames, the odd ‘drine. If I do anything I know I’d go back to the Bob. I’d drop Madame Psychosis with you guys and all my firmest resolve would melt and I’d have the one-hitter out and be sniveling at you to spring some eternal Hope on me.’

‘You’re so naïve, Inc. You’re so sharp in one way and such a little bald little fat-legged baby in the woods in others. You think you’re just going to go Here I go, deciding, and reverse total thrust and quit everything?’

‘What I said was what if.’

‘Hal, you are my friend, and I’ve been friends to you in ways you don’t even have a clue. So brace yourself for a growth-spurt. You want to quit because you’re starting to see you need it, and —’

‘That’s exactly it. Peems, think how horrible that’d be, if somebody needed it. Not just liked it a great great great deal. Needing it becomes a whole separate order of… It seems horrific. It seems like the difference between really loving something and being —’

‘Say the word, Inc.’

‘Because you know why? What if it’s true? The word. What if you are? So the answer’s just walk away? If you’re addicted you need it, Hallie, and if you need it what do you imagine happens if you just hoist the white flag and try to go on without it, without anything?’

‘You lose your mind, Inc. You die inside. What happens if you try and go without something the machine needs? Food, moisture, sleep, O₂? What happens to the machine? Think about it.’

‘You were just now applauding the idea of Abandoning All Hope. You were just invoking an image of me with breasts, masturbating into laundry, with cobwebs between my ass and a chair.’

‘That’s the Bob. I didn’t hear me say everything. If you need the Bob, Inc, you can only quit the Bob if you move onward and up to something else.’

‘Harder drugs. Just like those old filmstrips about pot opening the door to larger drugs, where Jiminy Cricket —’

‘Oh fuck you. It doesn’t have to be harder. It just has to be something. I know guys quit heroin, coke. How? They make the strategic move to a case a day of Coors. Or to methadone, whatever. I know hard-drinking guys Inc that got off the booze by switching to the Bob Hope. Me myself, you’ve seen, I switch all the time. The trick is the right switch for a man’s wiring. I’m saying a real cobweb-blaster with me and Axford after the Fundraiser could help you get some serious perspective, cut the babytalk and sweeping bullshit decisions there’s no way you can do and start getting a real handle on how you’re going to branch out away from this Bob thing, which I applaud the getting away from the Bob for you, Inc, it’s not your thing, you were starting to get that look of a guy that’ll end up with tits.’

‘So you’re in a very subtle way lobbying for a DMZ-drop by saying you don’t believe I could simply quit everything. Since you sure don’t plan to quit. With your left eye wobbling all over the place. You haven’t even quit the Tenuate. “Winners don’t ever have to quit” and all deLint’s little —’

‘I didn’t hear me say none of that. And I think you probably could quit it all. For a while. You’re not a pussy. You’ve got balls, I know. I bet you could gut it out.’

‘For a while, you’re saying.’

‘And but what do you think would happen after a while, though? Without something you need?

‘What, you’re saying I’d grab my chest and keel over? Clutch my head in the middle of a Tap & Whack and die of an aneurism like that girl last year at Atwood?’

‘No. But you’d die inside. Maybe outside too. But what I’ve seen, if you’re the real thing and need it and just cut yourself off of it altogether, you die inside. You lose your mind. I’ve seen it happen. Cold Turkey they call it, the Bird. White-knuckling. Guys that’d just quit everything because they were in too deep and quit it all and just died.’

‘A Clipperton, you mean? You’re saying Himself killed himself because he got sober? Because he didn’t get sober. There was a thing of Wild Turkey right there on the counter by the oven he blew his fucking head up with. So don’t try to kertwang me with him, Mike.’

‘Inc, what I know about your Da could be inscribed with a blunt crayon along the rim of a shot glass. I’m talking guys I know. Wolf Spiders. Allston guys, that quit. Some did a Clipperton, yes. Some ended up in the Mental Marriott. Some got through by they joined NA or a cult or some bug-eyed church and went around with ties talking about Jesus or Surrendering, but that shit’s not going to work for you because you’re too sharp to ever buy the God-Squad shit. Most nothing big happened, that needed it and quit. They got up and went to work and came home and ate and went to sleep and got up, day after day. But dead. Like machines; you could almost see the keys in their backs. You looked into their maps and something was gone. The walking dead. They loved it so much they needed it and gave it up and now they were waiting to die. Something was all over, inside.’

‘Their joie de vivre. The fire in the belly.’

‘Hal, it’s been what, now, for you, two-and-a-half days without? three days? How you feeling in there already, brother?’

‘I’m all right.’

‘Uh-huh. Incpuddle, all I know’s I’m your friend. I am. You don’t want to communate with the Madame, you can hold me and Ax’s purses for us. You do what you want and point me toward whoever tells you different. I’m just giving you the advice to look a little further past that second of deciding something I know you won’t let yourself take back.’

‘Some vital part of my like personhood would die without something to ingest. This is your view.’

‘Sometimes you don’t listen real well, Hallie. That’s all right. Spend some time figuring out this needing. Like what part of you’s come to need it, do you think.’

‘You’re alleging that’s the part that’ll die.’

‘Just whatever part you feel has come to need what you’re planning to take away from it.’

‘The part that’s dependent or incomplete, you mean. The addict.’¹

‘That’s just a word.’

a. q.v. Note 334 sub.

[322] Johnette F., whose very first stepmother had been a Chelsea MA police officer, was conditioned in early childhood to refer to police as ‘police’ or ‘the Law,’ since most B.P.D. personnel find the street term the Finest sardonic.

[323] People outside the Boston AA community always use The and say The Ennet House; this is one way to always tell somebody new or from outside the community.

[324] 17 NOVEMBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT Sometimes at odd little times of day the E.T.A. males’ locker room downstairs in Comm.-Ad. is empty, and you can go in there and sort of moon around and listen to the showers drip and the drains gurgle. You can feel the odd stunned quality customarily crowded places have at empty times. You can take your time dressing, flex in front of the big plate mirror over the sink; the mirror has projecting side-mirrors so you can check out the old biceps from either side, see the jawline in profile, practice expressions, try to look all natural and uncomposed so you can try to see what you really might normally look like to other people. The air in the locker room hangs heavy with the smells of underarms, deodorant, benzoin, camphonated powder, serious feet, old steam. Also Lemon Pledge and a slight smell of electrical burn from overused blow-dryers. Traces of powder and fuller’s earth³ on the blue carpeting, down in too deep to get out without a steamer. You can take a comb out of the big jar of Barbicide on the shelf by the sink, and like a.38-caliber blow-dryer, and experiment boldly. It’s the best mirror in the Academy, intricately lit from all perspectives. Dr. J. O. Incandenza knew his adolescents. At slack times, sometimes head custodian Dave (‘F.D.V.’) Harde can be found in here, taking a tiny nap on one of the benches that run in front of the lockers, which he claims the benches do something palliative for his spinal funiculi. More often there’s one of Dave’s incredibly old and interchangeable menial-task janitors in here running a carpet sweeper or spraying industrial disinfectant in the urinals. You can go into the shower area and not turn the water on and sing, really let go. Michael Pemulis’s own vocals sound pro-quality good to him, but only when he’s surrounded by shower-tile. Sometimes when it’s empty in here you can catch snatches of voices and intriguing feminine-hygienic noises from the females’ locker room on the other side of the lockers’ wall.

At most other times of day, your certain type of more delicately constituted E.T.A. jr. uses the primitive subdorm hall showers and sinks and avoids the packed locker room at almost all costs. No way Western man ever should have conceived of commodes and hot showers in the same crowded air-space. T. Schacht can clear out most of a steamy locker room just by lumbering into a commode-stall and driving the latch home with a certain purposeful force.

The prorectors have their own showers in a kind of lounge near their rooms in the secondary tunnel, with a Viewer and recliners and a little fridgelet and a dicky-proof door.

When M. M. Pemulis came down to dress for P.M.S at about 1420h.,^b the only people in the locker room were 14-A lobber nonpareil Todd Possalthwaite, hunched and weeping, and Keith Freer, whom Pemulis was to play and who looked in no hurry to get dressed and out there to play, and could very possibly have been the thing that was making Postal Weight weep. The so-called ‘Viking’ was shirtless and had a towel around his neck and was at the mirror ministering to his skin. He had high hard white-blond hair and an extremely muscular neck and lower jaw, with a certain type of protrusive gonions that made his upper face look tapered and sly. His hair always reminded Hal Incandenza of frozen surf, Hal said. Todd Possalthwaite was near-nude and hunched on the bench under his locker, his face in his hands, with its nose’s white bandages visible through spread fingers, weeping softly, shoulders trembling.

Pemulis, who’s Postal Weight’s Big Buddy and sort of lob-and-Eschaton-mentor and genuinely likes the kid, dropped his gear and gave him a sort of male-affectionate fake one-two punch like Think Fast. ‘ ‘s the nose, Todder?’ Like all of them, Pemulis could do his locker’s combination by feel, from months and years of constant combination-doing. He was looking all around himself and the room. Freer made a slight noise when Pemulis asked the Postman if there was anything he could do.

Nothing’s true,’ Postal Weight sobbed, his voice palm-muffled, rocking slightly on the bench. His locker was open and little-boy cluttered. He was wearing only an an unbuttoned little flannel shirt and a Johnson & Johnson jr. jock strap, and had tiny white feet^c and delicate little shell-like toes. He was supposed to be in Donni Stott’s Valley-Map laugher right now, Pemulis knew.

‘What, metaphysical angst at thirteen?’ Pemulis directs the question to the quote-Viking’s reflection’s eye in the mirror. Freer’s back is tapered and uncolloped and for a tennis player’s back has superb latissimal definition but is mottled slightly from repeated applications and defoliations of Pledge, Freer being a profligate Pledge-user because he is complexion-obsessed and has the sort of Nordicular skin that peels instead of tanning. He still has his jeans and loafers on, Pemulis sees. Pemulis keeps waiting for the distinctive attitudinal upswing of two pre-match Tenuate spansules.^d Pemulis’s locker is both full and very precisely ordered, practically alphabetized, like the trunk of an experienced seaman. Disassemblable scale and armamentarium and mood-altering substances used to be concealed in several factory-concealed niches in the special system of niche-riddled portable shelving Pemulis had installed at age 15. Plus small cloth packets of ground cayenne pepper, to foil the always-remotely-possible sniffer-dog, when he was a callow youth. This was before the discovery of the ultimate entrepot above the false ceiling in Subdorm B’s male hallway.

‘Just a disappointed dinkle.’ Freer’s chuckle tends to be mirthless. ‘What I could get out of him before the waterworks, Postal Weight’s old man promised him so-and-so if the kid accomplishes thus-and-such.’ His speech was distorted because he was ballooning his cheek with his tongue and applying flesh-tinted cream to a possible pimple there. ‘And the Postmaster here feels like he’s held up his side of the accomplishment, and now I get the drift Daddy’s backing out.’

Possalthwaite’s shoulders continued to tremble as he cried into his hands.

‘In other words welching you’re saying the Dad is,’ Pemulis said to Freer.

‘I gather now the Dad’s trying to restructure the original deal all of a sudden.’

Pemulis undid his belt. ‘The dangled carrot’s snatched away, the brass ring plays hard to get, to coin a maxim.’

‘Something about Disney World, before the wa-wa started.’

Pemulis removed his nonplay sneakers by scraping downward at one heel with the other sneaker’s toe, looking down into the tender little whorl in the center of Possalth-waite’s hair. He’d never be so ephebic as to verbally ask Freer if he had plans to suit up so they could get out there; he’d never let Freer think he was renting Freer space in his head before the match started. ‘Postman, is this because of the Eschaton incident? Is it because of the nose? Because I can get on the horn and tell old Postal Weight Sr. they’re blaming nobody under 17, it turns out, you should tell him, Todder. There’s whole land-barges of shit, but none of it’s spraying in you guys’s direction, you should take comfort.’

‘Nothing’s true,” Possalthwaite keened, not looking up, muffled, ílat-nippled, fatless in the young gut, feet spectral below his legs’ brown, rocking, shaking his head, looking terribly young and innocently vulnerable, sort of pre-moral. Little white strips of bandage protuded from his palms’ outer edges, from I.-Day’s apocalypse.

‘Well, not much is fair, anyway,’ Pemulis conceded. The Viking made a noise at himself.

Pemulis calls Postal Weight’s father up on-screen. Minneapolis-area developer. Malls, corporate parks, bustling places at the edges of roaring beltways. Late forties, slim, an overmanaged tan, a little oversharp in the dress dept., with a motivational-seminar-type hard-sell charm. A dagger of a Dad, with a pencil mustache and blinding shoe-leather. He tried to conjure an image of this paternal figure hitting Keith Freer on the noggin with a rolling pin and a bald cartoon lump rising from Freer’s skull. (Pemulis calculates a win or even three-setter w/ Freer would mean a place on the WhataBurger plane, is why he’s willing to violate a kind of personal honor-code and take pre-match Tenuate, which even with the 36-hour-elimination curve is kind of cavalier, given that he and Inc’d escaped on-spot urinalysis only because Pemulis implied to Mrs. Incandenza that he’d tell the Incster about Avril having some sort of major-sport interlude with John Wayne, and Avril is kind of a coldly-biding-her-time-not-to-be-fucked-with administrative figure, and along with C. [‘Gretel the Cross-Sectioned Cow’] Tavis isn’t exactly a fan of Pemulis anyway, certainly since the electrified-Rusk-doorknob-and-litigation incident. The ‘drines didn’t seem to be kicking in. Instead of the surge of stomachless competitive verve, all Pemulis felt was a slight unpleasant spaciness and a kind of enforced-feeling dryness in his eyes and mouth, like he’s facing into a warm wind.) Pemulis had never once seen his own Da in anything other than a white Hanes T-shirt gone permanent yellow under the arms.

‘Nothing’s fair because nothing’s true,’ Possalthwaite wept into his palms. His little flannel shoulders shook.

Something old in one of the shower drains sighed and gurgled, a nauseous sound.

‘Buck up.’ Pemulis was removing all necessary match-articles and refolding them and placing them in his noncomplimentary Dunlop gear-bag with military precision. He put a foot on the bench and looked briefly to either side. ‘Because if that’s your burr then rest in my assurance, Postalcode: certain things are rock-solid, high-grade true.’

Freer had made a pincer of his fingers and was at the other cheek. ‘Let him cry. Let baby have his dinkle. Piss and moan. Thirteen for Christ’s sake. A kid thirteen hasn’t even been in the same room with real disappointment yet. Hasn’t even locked eyes across a room with real disillusion and and frustration and pain. Thirteen: pain’s a rumor. What’s the word. Angst. Baby wouldn’t know genuine-article angst if it walked up and got him in a headlock.’

‘Not like real true real possible-little-cheek-pimple angst, Vike, hey?’

‘Flip it over and squat, Pemulis,’ without bothering to look. Both Pemulis and Freer had pronounced a hard g in angst, Hal would have observed. The Viking contorted his mouth and raised his big chin to check the flesh of his jaw, turning slightly to use the side-mirrors as well.

Pemulis smiled broadly, trying to envision Keith Freer sitting in a canvas restraint-wrap in full lotus, staring blankly, hitting all the high notes in ‘No Business Like Show Business’ as orderlies in boiled whites and prim nurses in bent hats stand around snapping their fingers, clean white cheap institutional-care sneakers tapping noiselessly through all eternity. He was down to chinos and bare light-brown feet. He considered a blue T-shirt with a black wolf-spider on it v. a coincidentally red-on-gray T-shirt that had ‘Vodka is the Enemy of Production’ in presumably Russian. His good four Dunlop sticks were stacked on the bench to Possalthwaite’s left. He picked up two and tested the strings’ tension by hitting the side of one stick’s head against the the strung face of the other and listening to the strings and then switching sticks and repeating the process. The exact right tension has a certain pitch. Midsized Dunlop Enqvist TL Composites. $304.95 U.S. retail. Real catgut strings have a kind of a dentalish sweet stink. The dot-and-circumflex logo. He didn’t much look at Possalthwaite. He chose the Cyrillic shirt with the bottle-glyph. He rolled it up and put his head through the head-hole first, his late great Da’s old-fashioned way. The upscaler kids here all did the arm-holes first. Then they did the head. You can also tell the scholarship kids because for some reason they put on a sock and a shoe and then a sock and a shoe. See for instance Wayne, who’d been in their room right after lunch when Pemulis had made the decision to come up for some pre-match Tenuate. Wayne’s room was right nearby and he was standing there over Troeltsch’s pharmacopic bedside table with no shirt and wet hair, rheumy-eyed and shiny-nostriled from moisturizer on his Kleenex-chafed nostrils. The Viking was squeezing a damp tennis ball with his left hand while he scanned his forehead by mostly feel. Pemulis’s psychic counter-strategy was not to appear in any hurry to dress and stretch and get out there either. Pemulis — who feared and hated unauthorized people being in his room, and who was constantly on Schacht’s back about forgetting to lock up when he left, and who wasn’t intimidated by Wayne’s talent and success and affectless reserve, but was cautious around him, John Wayne, sort of the way a formidable predator will be unintimidated but cautious around another formidable predator, particularly since the virtuosic but tense performance in a certain administrative office a week ago, which had been mentioned by neither man — had coolly asked Wayne if he could help him, and Wayne had just as coolly not looked up from rattling through sickly Jim Troeltsch’s bedside table’s stuff and said he’d come in for some of Troeltsch’s Seldane⁶, which Pemulis had indeed heard Troeltsch at breakfast describing to a nose-blowing Wayne as the battlefield-nuke of anti-histamines that didn’t make you too drowsy to function at an incredibly high level of function. Pemulis adjusted his jock’s rear straps, trying to remember this Wayne-memory’s point. Wayne had wanted a clear head and high pulmonary function because he was down to play the Syrian Satelliter in an informal exhibition at I5l5h. Wayne hadn’t offered this explanation; Pemulis got it off the e-board. One reason Pemulis was cautiously unassertive about Wayne’s unauthorized presence in the room was the leaflet, which given a certain office-incident it wasn’t impossible Wayne might choose to suspect seeing Pemulis’s hand in the Olde-English-fonted leaflet up at various boards and inserted on the E.T.A. TPs’ communal e-board for 11/14 announcing a joint John Wayne/Dr. Avril Incandenza arithmetic presentation to the pre-quadrivial 14-and-Unders on how 17 can actually go into 56 way more than 3.294 times. The point was that the half-dressed Wayne had been standing there with one foot bare and one in a sock and shoe. Pemulis shook his head slightly and looked down at Possalthwaite and tried to gather spit.

The speaker out up by the clock in the cement hall by the sauna crackled to life for the start of weekly WETA, with its glass-shattering Joan Sutherland theme. Pemulis put his street-sneakers on his street-shoe shelf. ‘Buck up, T.P. It’s just an angst-spasm. You’re just reeling from a temporary paternal kertwang. Philosophical truth’s jutting out all over the place. Disney World or no. Nose or no. Eschaton lives on, believe me. Underground or no. You have a calling, a talent. A missileman of your caliber. Reach down and rally, me little button.’

Possalthwaite had taken his face from his hands and was staring stonily up somewhere past Pemulis, lips moving in the habitual sucking reflex for which he took so much guff. His face had the pink scrubbed look of a crying child all right. His hands had left brown spiders of tincture of benzoin on his cheeks. He had two little smudges of bruise under the eyes. He sniffed meatily through a nose still covered in horizontal strips of surgical tape. ‘I ab dot a little button.’

‘That’s what all the little buttons say, kid,’ the Viking said levelly, removing something from a nostril with tweezers. Pemulis’s sinuses felt like four-laners and his sense of smell was a lot keener than a man in a locker room might wish. Freer’s locker next to Gloeckner’s next to good old Inc’s was agape, the bolted colposcope gleaming in the overhead lights and his Fox large-head sticks a nauseous West-Coast fluorescent orange with the trademark fox-glyph painted on the strings.

Possalthwaite scratched at one foot with the nails of the other foot. ‘If you can’t trust your folks…’

‘Let me both validate and remind you that the kertwang you’re reeling under is emotion-based and not fact-based.’

Possalthwaite opened his mouth.

‘You’re getting ready to say if you can’t trust the ostensively loving patriarchal bosom you can’t trust anyone at all, and if you can’t trust people what can you trust, in terms of unvarying dependability, Postal Weight, am I right?’

‘Oh Jesus H. Christmastree here it comes,’ the Viking said to his forehead’s reflection.

Pemulis was putting on a sock and a shoe, his mouth right down by Postal Weight’s ear. ‘This is not a bullshit problem. This is a like serious emotiono-philosophical deal you’re confronting. I think it’s a good sign you’re coming to me instead of holding it all impactedly inside.’

‘Who’s coming to you?’ Freer turned the big face this way and that. ‘He was already in here having his little wa-wa-dinkle.’

Pemulis tried envisioning Keith Freer being bent over the net by Bedouins in purple turbans and roundly buggered, making the sort of sounds Leith’s historical b/w J. Gleason made when in pain. To Possalthwaite he was saying ‘Cause I can remember staring down the exact same-type thing, though from a more like philosophicalized kertwang than emotions.’

Freer said ‘Do not ask him what he means, kid.’

Then a couple of 16s came in, G. (‘Yardguard’) Rader and a marginal Slavic kid whose first name was Zoltan and whose last name nobody could pronounce, and ignored Freer’s advice to run for their lives because the good Dr. Pemulis had been prescribing for himself again and was going to begin to rant, and threw down their gear and proceeded immediately to get fresh towels from the dispenser over by the showers and to snap them at each other.

‘What do you mean?’ said Possalthwaite.

‘The snare closes, the trap closes, here it comes.’

Rader rolled his wrists and spiraled the towel for what he called maximum painage. The Viking turned and said if he felt so much as a terrycloth breeze on this personal ass right here they were toast, the two. Pemulis was taking racquets out. E.T.A.’s male 16s were as a group inbent, conspiratorial, glandular, cliqueish. They excluded anyone not in their set. They had techniques and strategems of exclusion way more advanced than the 18s or 14s. (They tended to exclude Stice, mostly because he roomed with Coyle and drilled a lot of the time up with the 18s, and mixed with them, and more recently Kornspan, excluded, basically because he was cretinous and cruel and now consensually suspected of having tortured and killed the two collarless cats whose burnt corpses had been found on the hillside during pre-drill sprints a couple weeks back.) They had their own dialect and codes, in-jokes inside in-jokes.^f And at E.T.A. only 16s snapped towels, and only for a year or two, but they went at it with a vengeance, towel-snapping, a brief flared genuflection to jock-stereotype, a stage where there’s this primate-like passion for red-assed bonding in steamy rooms. They were the age staring down the barrel not of Is anything true but of Am I true, of What am I, of What is this thing, and it made them strange.

Then 18’s-B/C fence-sitter Duncan van Slack, the kid who carried a guitar around with himself everyplace but never played it, and refused all late-night-sitting-around-someone’s-room requests to play, and who was suspected of not being able to play the thing at all, and whose own Da was supposedly a redoubted gene-sequencer in Savannah, poked his head and guitar’s neck in the door and said to come quick and then withdrew his head before anybody could ask what was up.

‘If you didn’t have such a way with a launch-vector I wouldn’t be sure you’re ready to hear this, Postalscale.’

‘It occurs to me this is your boring man’s true talent: the talent for ensnaring,’ says the Viking. ‘Flee while you can, kid.’

Possalthwaite blew his nose in the crook of his elbow and left it there.

Pemulis, who still used genuine catgut strings, zipped the two sticks he’d chosen into their Dunlop covers. He put an arch-support shoe up on the bench by Postalweight’s bottom, looking quickly right and left:

‘Todder, you can trust math.’

Freer said ‘You heard it here first.’

Pemulis compulsively zipped and unzipped one of the covers. ‘Take a breather, Keith. Todd, trust math. As in Matics, Math E. First-order predicate logic. Never fail you. Quantities and their relation. Rates of change. The vital statistics of God or equivalent. When all else fails. When the boulder’s slid all the way back to the bottom. When the headless are blaming. When you do not know your way about. You can fall back and regroup around math. Whose truth is deductive truth. Independent of sense or emotionality. The syllogism. The identity. Modus Tollens. Transitivity. Heaven’s theme song. The nightlight on life’s dark wall, late at night. Heaven’s recipe book. The hydrogen spiral. The methane, ammonia, H₂O. Nucleic acids. A and G, T and C. The creeping inevibatility. Caius is mortal. Math is not mortal. What it is is: listen: it’s true.’

‘This from a man on academic probation for who knows the length.’

Something involving Freer and a saline-moistened cattle-prod refused to quite mentally gel. There was still none of Tenuate’s stomachless verve or well-being, just a glittered hum in his head and sinuses that felt like wind-tunnels. Pemulis tended to be a mouth-breather. The Viking raised one leg to fart toward Pemulis in a vaudevillian way, getting a laugh from Csikszentmihalyi and Rader, who’d mostly undressed and taken seats on the bench opposite Pemulis and Postal Weight, towels hung unwinding in their hands, watching, and were only every once in a while and in a halfhearted way pretending to look like they were getting ready to snap each other.

‘I’m not a math person, Dad says,’ said Postal Weight. Again the nose made the words come out dot and bath and persod. Csikszentmihalyi feinted a lunge and then really lunged and there was brief flurry of terrycloth.

Pemulis unzipped the cover. ‘The axiom. The lemma. Listen: “If two different sets of parametric equations represent the same curve J, but the curve is traced in opposite directions in the two cases, then the two sets of equations produce values for a line integral over J that are negatives of each other.” Not “If thus-and-such.” Not “unless a gladhand-ing commercial realtor from Boardman MN in $400 Banfi loafers changes his mind.” Always and ever. As in puts the am a priori. An honest lamp in the inkiest black, Tod-dleposter.’

There were voices and running feet like some sort of ruckus. McKenna stuck his head in and looked wildly around and withdrew without saying anything. Csikszentmihalyi went out after him. Freer and Rader both said What the fuck. Pemulis had only one button of his fly buttoned and was pointing at the ceiling with a finger:

‘… Only that at times like this, when you’re directionless in a dark wood, trust to the abstract deductive. When driven to your knees, kneel and revere the double S. Leap like a knight of faith into the arms of Peano, Leibniz, Hubert, L’Hôpital. You will be lifted up. Fourier, Gauss, LaPlace, Rickey. Borne up. Never let fall. Wiener, Reimann, Frege, Green.’

Csikszentmihalyi came back in with Ortho Stice, their color high.

Pemulis compulsively zips and unzips zippers, is the reason why he wears only button-fly pants and tennis shorts.

Cs/yi said ‘There is expression. You must immediately come.’

Freer turned from the mirror, both hands on a comb. ‘What the fuck’s going on?’

‘John Wayne is insanely holding forth innermost thoughts for public ears.’

‘Never trust the father you can see,’ Pemulis told Possalthwaite.

Stice was already on his way back out and said over his shoulder, ‘Troeltsch’s got Wayne on the air and Wayne’s lost his mind.’

a. Like dry loamy clay, highly absorbent, used by some for traction on their grips, eschewed by others because it has a lot of aluminum silicates and the Y.T.M.P.’s ‘aluminum-causes-impotence’ panic still weighs hard on some pubescent players’ minds.

b. A good many seniors’ schedules have no last-period classes, or have Independent-Study stuff slated for last period, and when two of these seniors — e.g. Pemulis & Freer — are scheduled for a P.M. challenge-match, they get to start at 1430h. instead of 1515h., and usually then finish up early, which is a great perk, given that they’ll get to hit both the weight room and the locker room at slack and empty times.

c. An advantage of competitive mediocrity is you get to sit in the stands and get lots of sun on your feet and chest, because you’re knocked out of competition by like the second round. Hence grotesquely pale feet are sort of a perverse mark of competitive status, maybe like toothlessness in hockey or something.

d. Specially engineered to react very fast with the hydrolytic enzyme esterase and thus to be completely out of the tissues within 36 hrs.

e. Q.v. Note 22 supra.

f. For example, during the first month of last summer’s Euroclay junket, at some prearranged signal the male 16s would all hunch and hop around brachiatishly with their knuckles just off the ground in a circle, hitting their chests and going ‘Er ah ee oo ah,’ over and over, until prorector N. Hartigan finally lost his patience as they did it again in the line for Customs at L’Aéroport Orly and had hysterics so gruesome in someone that tall that the practice stopped as mysteriously as it’d started.

[325] (whose theories of detection and interview are strongly informed by the b/w noir films Tine so enjoyed as a boy late at night on local broadcast television, and misses)

[326] (and then some)

[327] Bolex H64, -32 and -16 models come with a turret that accepts three C-mount lenses, which gives the models a kind of multi-eyed, alien-facial look.

[328] (though never unveiled)

[329] (which is actually complete horseshit, but goes unchallenged by the O.U.S. operatives, who are pretty savvy at choosing their heuristic battles)

[330] (given the guy’s track record with ingestion)

[331] Picaresque pretty obviously referring to the comic-Surrealist tradition of Bay Area avant-gardeists like Peterson & Broughton, since Peterson’s Potted Psalm’s mother-and-Death stuff and The Cage’s cranial-imprisonment and disconnected-eyeball stuff are pretty obvious touchstones in a lot of Himself’s more parodic-slapstick productions.

[332] 17 NOV. Y.D.A.U.

‘Gracious me and mine,’ Pemulis said, clutching the ankle of the leg he’d crossed to keep the foot from joggling.

‘Rusk and Charles and Mrs. Incandenza are with him now. Schtitt’s been up to see him. Loach has done a thorough reflex-check. John Wayne’s going to be OK.’

‘Well thank heavens for that load off everyone’s mind,’ Pemulis said.

It was Pemulis, deLint, Nwangi, and Watson in the Dean of Academic Affairs’ Office. Mrs. Inc’s ventilator hissed and something up in there whirred a little. DeLint was behind the high desk, looking like a mean little boy. Nobody’d said if anybody higher up than deLint was going to show. Pemulis didn’t know if this was good or bad.

‘Let’s make perfectly sure we got this in order and in your words.’ Nwangi and Watson were window-dressing. This was A. deLint’s show. His face kind of came apart when he smiled. ‘With no prior knowledge of anything untoward, you’re pulled from the locker room and stand out in the hall with several other students, which is your first knowledge anything’s untoward with Wayne.’

Pemulis figured none of the administrators had heard the thing; they always shut their soundproof doors at I435h.; Pemulis had no idea what Wayne’s said about anything, or Jim Troeltsch, who very prudently hasn’t shown facial-feature one in their room since the apocalyptic broadcast. It’d taken Pemulis about half the salivaless sprint up to B-204 to figure out what had happened and to find his pilfered Tenuates in the little pecker’s Sel-dane bottle. Pemulis sort of shuddered to imagine the impact of the ‘drine on Wayne’s cherry-red and virgin bloodstream. The slight whir of his cortex working at full speed was masked by the hiss of the ventilator and the sound of whistles and play and Schtitt’s megaphone outside.

‘I’m in there suiting up waiting for Freer and doing a little B.B.-intervention on Pos-salthwaite who was in crisis and Zoltan and The Darkness come like spasming in saying Troeltsch’d jury-rigged the Duke into candid sharing for the WETA broadcast.’

‘They said what, that Troeltsch had tricked Wayne into speaking candidly without awareness it’s going out over WETA into all the rooms?’

Pemulis realized the limpness of this, in like that anybody’d see that Wayne’d have to have been sitting right there with Troeltsch by the little old-time gunmetal handheld mike at Lateral Alice Moore’s curved desk. He’d already heard from Lateral Alice that it was more like Wayne had come rattling in and shoved Troeltsch aside and grabbed the mike and started ranting while Troeltsch and Lateral Alice Moore had looked on aghastly; and that Dave Harde, down doing some maintainance to L.A.M.’s deactivated third rail, had been so aghasted he’d pitched forward narcoleptically and stayed like that with his face in the blue carpet and ass in the air for nearly an hour, and that Lateral Alice’s own stress had brought on an aggravation of her chronic cyanosis to the point where her whole face was still blue-tinged and between her knees when Pemulis had got to her.

‘This was more like a general sort of impression which I feel like I might have misbegotten from the agitation of the guys. Plus how completely un-Wayneish Wayne sounded, like how could anybody ever have said that shit if they thought it wasn’t just them and Troeltsch alone, much less Wayne, who as we all know is pretty much reserve in motion.’

DeLint’s nostrils got that pale flare they got, Pemulis knew, when he smelled horseshit and knew you knew it. Pemulis knows deLint’s been laying for him ever since the incident with the P.W.T.A. guy who started to wobble and then rant down at P.W.T.A., which was a totally different type of deal. The irony was that the Wayne-dosing had been a total accident and in no way Pemulis’s deal, if anybody’s Troeltsch’s, but the cortex couldn’t nail down any way to get this across without admitting to possession of a ‘drine, which given the shaky pharmaceutical ground since the Eschaton and O.N.A.N.T.A. urologist would be tantamount to Clippertonizing himself. Nwangi showed almost blinding 3rd-World teeth but was saying nothing. Watson’s eyes had almost this nictitater of stupidity-film on them, less a dullness than a deadness, the dead porch light of nobody home at chez Tex Watson. Pemulis saw the leaflet about Wayne and Mrs. I. and deviant division in the papers deLint held.

‘Which is in your words your first knowledge of untowardness with Wayne.’

‘My first is I get out there still trying to counsel the Postheimer and here on the speaker’s Wayne doing what Keith observed may have been a sort of imitation of Dr. Tavis.’

It had been uncanny. It had made Stice look like a rank amateur. Wayne had told Troeltsch to pretend he was some adolescent girl: this was adolescent Tavis asking her for a date; Pemulis shuddered; he couldn’t exactly remember all the little mannerisms, which Wayne’d clearly gotten locked down from Tavis always sitting next to him on the bus back from victories going at him nonstop, but in outline it was Chuckie Tavis coming up to some Canadian cheerleader or something and telling her he was going to be completely open with her: he had a terrible fear of rejection; he was telling her up-front now that tomorrow he was going to ask her out for a date and was begging her not openly to reject him if she didn’t want to go, to think up some plausible excuse — though of course he said he realized that what he was saying would make that excuse hard to believe, now that he’s openly asked her to make up an excuse.

‘Whereupon the whole Academy hears Mr. Troeltsch prompt Wayne into making public castigations of his various peers and instructors.’

‘I’ve got to say it did seem like Troeltsch had kind of orchestrated things somehow, sir, was my impression.’

‘Referring to Corbett Thorp as a —’ pretending to riffle through the papers so Pemulis’d have to see the 17-into-56 leaflet several times as it came up in the riffle.

‘I believe the expression was “a palsied twit,” ‘ Nwangi said to deLint.

‘Yes “palsied twit.” And Francis Unwin quote “has the on-court look of a cornered rodent.” And Disney R. Leith: the quote “sort of man you always end up sitting next to at civic functions.” Ms. Richardson-Levy-o’Byrne-Chawaf as chair of some sort of committee dealing with the topic of the quote “Itty Bitty Titty.” On Coach Schtitt, quote, seeming as if he’d been “denied some kind of vitally important moisture from birth henceforward.” Our own Mr. Nwangi here being in rough quote if I’ve got it quote “the sort of fellow who’ll be in a Chinese restaurant with you and won’t even share food or trade food.” ‘

‘Meaning mean-spirited.’ Nwangi threw his head back and beamed like he was blind. What was chilling was that in Wayne’s scenario Tavis does succeed, Wayne projects, in seducing the Canadian cheerleader or whatever, even when he’s totally open on the date about the fact that he’d deliberately told her he was afraid of rejection in the first place only as a strategy to make him seem to her different from other boys, more honest and open, so that the scenario was that the honesty was so exhausting she’d basically just laid back exhausted and let him X her just to shut him up. Except — chillingly — he hadn’t shut up.

‘— including some sort of imitation of Dr. Tavis carrying on a monologue during the act of sexual intercourse,’ deLint said, trying to find it in the sheaf. ‘On Bernadette Long-ley: “Bernadette Longley looks like her hair grew her head instead of the other way around.” On Mary Esther Thode: “a face like a pancake.” On the Academy’s own late Founder and husband of the Dean of Ac.-Aff.: “so full of himself he could have shit limbs.” Unquote. On his own doubles partner Hal Incandenza: “by all appearances addicted to everything that is not tied down, cannot outrun him, and is fittable in the mouth.” ‘

‘I’m remembering the word as insertable.’ Pemulis kicked himself, mentally. The pancake thing had been expanded to like fifteen seconds as Wayne had sketched M. E. Thode’s face as circular, burned, freckled, cratered, doughy, shiny, soggy, on and on. Plus somehow even more chilling was that Pemulis knew from Inc that Wayne’s pseudo-Tavis ‘I-live-in-fear-of-rejection’ ploy was actually in the top five or ten of the troubling ‘Strategies’ that Inc’s brother Orin the punter called up to Hal about employing to X young married women.

‘Donni Stott has we’re informed “skin like an attache case and is a compelling advertisement for sunscreen.” I myself am, here I quote, quote “a man who would not lend his own mother a quarter for a rubber tip for her crutch.” ‘

‘Is the emerging point that this is going to impact my getting to go on the WhataBurger trip?’

Nwangi crumpled and slapped his knee. His face literally looked like a very dark hatchet. Tex Watson reached down behind the console he was slumped in his chair by and brought out Pemulis’s special yachting cap and dangled it like something you want a dog to jump for. From someplace under Nwangi’s chair were brought out two pharmaceutical scales, several jeweller’s loupes, the tow truck’s supply of empty sterile Visine bottles, and plus every bottle from Troeltsch’s bedside table, which clearly Troeltsch had eaten some enormous wedge of putrid deal-cutting cheese.

Pemulis tasted the metallic taste of a seriously anxious stomach. ‘I request to see the Dean of Ac.-Aff. before any of this goes further.’

‘We have again Ms. Heath, apparently on someone’s mind very much today, now said to be the sort of person who quote “cries at card tricks.” We have a Rik Dunkel who “could not find his own bottom with both hands and a nautical compass of exacting precision.” We have a return engagement with Ms. Heath, described as “dwelling always at the edge of some vast continent of menstrual hysteria.” We have our own beloved Tex, sitting right here, described as having “a tiny liquid-filled nubbin at the top of the spine” in lieu of higher cortex function.’

‘Aubs, no kidding: something pressing I have to interface about with Mrs. Inc. Tell her it concerns U.S.-Canadian relations.’

Nwangi’s laugh was high and had the slight teakettle-wheeze to it of the laughs of large black men the world over. ‘She sends you her regards, the Dean said to tell you.’ He slapped his knee three times.

DeLint looked a little less happy because he clearly didn’t know what any of it was about and didn’t like playing coded messenger, but he still looked pretty happy: ‘Michael Mathew Pemulis, the Academy’s Dean of Academic Affairs said to tell you the administration’s too naturally concerned about the state of one of our two very finest current talents, who it’s clear he’s been unwittily dosed with an artificial stimulant prohibited by federal statute, O.N.A.N.T.A. regulations, and the Enfield Tennis Academy Honor-Code Specs on Artificial Substances, to permit itself the satisfaction of giving you the Dean’s very best regards and her wish that quote “may the road rise up to meet you whitherever your future travels lie.” ‘ DeLint probed his ear. ‘I think that was it in a nutshell.’

Pemulis got very cool and brass-mask-faced. He was breathing very clearly through his nose, and the office air seemed mentholated. Everything got very cool and formal inside and glycerine-clear. ‘Aubs, before anything gets nailed in stone that we’ll all I promise you and Mrs. Inc we’ll all of us regret —’

DeLint said ‘I was given to understand you can either finish out the term for credit or you can hit the trail with your little sailing cap full of pockets on a stick like a bandanna to some other O.N.A.N.T.A. institution and see if they’ll take a senior without any kind of positive reference, which the sense I get is the administration says fat chance on any kind of reference.’

Tex Watson said something about urine.

Pemulis recrossed his leg. DeLint looked at Nwangi:

‘I believe the kid is speechless.’

‘I believe he has nothing to say.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘And something about you’re invited to shout whatever you threatened the administration to shout about from the highest hill you can find, which pretty soon won’t be this one.’

Nwangi got out through laughter: ‘And that the administrative office doorknobs have been rubberized and grounded, the administrative files all recryptographilated, everyone’s room’s mirrors reanodized and sealed with Plastic Wood, Mrs. Inc said to tell you.’

The little deck-of-cards riffle of the wings of the Shit Fairy, which he privately envisions as a kind of violet incubus with the Da’s saggy frown. Pemulis scratched very coolly next to his ear. ‘And this affects the WhataBurger, my chances?’

DeLint told Pemulis he just fucking slayed him while Watson looked from face to face and Nwangi rocked and wheezed and slapped at his knee, and Pemulis, close-mouthed and breathing with terrible ease, found their good humor almost infectious.

[333] Put out by the Mass Division of S.A.S., listing meetings of all but the very most lunatic-fringe-type 12-Step Programs in city, sub-, and exurbs, all up and down both Shores, the Cape, and Nantucket.

[334] Hal’s Pemulis-inspired trope for putting down the secret daily Bob H., which started as a wry dark mental joke and now within a week has become the way Hal characterizes abstinence to himself, which any Boston AA would tell him isn’t a very promising way to think about it at all, in terms of self-pity.

[335] Except of course for a certain hardwired type of pornography- and onanistic sex-addict, which has given rise to a couple exceptionally icky Step-based fellowships.

[336] (according to his sudoriferous and and agora-compulsive younger brother, M. Bain)

[337] Latin blunder for self-defense’s se defendendo is sic, either a befogged muddling of a professional legal term, or a post-Freudian slip, or (least likely) a very oblique and subtle jab at Gately from a Ewell intimate with the graveyard scene from Hamlet — namely V.i. 9.

[338] Ketorolac tromethamine, a non-narcotic analgesic, little more than Motrin with ambition — ®Syntex Labs.

[339] International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

[340] Doxycycline hyclate, an I.V.-antibiotic — ®Parke-Davis Pharmaceuticals.

[341] Oxycodone hydrochloride + acetaminophen, a Schedule C–III narcotic oral analgesic — ®Du Pont Pharmaceuticals.

[342] Or possibly Babel.

[343] Boston AA slogan meaning trying to quit addictive Substance-use without working any kind of Recovery Program.

[344] E.T.S.V Advanced Placement Standardized Subject Tests, which Hal Incandenza’s signed up to take in English and (Parisian) French.

a. Educational Testing Service Inc., Princeton NJ.

[345] The College of Basic Studies Bldg. on Commonwealth and Granby, approx. 3 clicks east-southeast of E.T.A.

[346] Montreal International Airport-D’Orval, Cartierville Airport being now restricted to intra-Québec flights only.

[347] (Which in fact she doesn’t, but she had had perfume on the last time she wore the hulpil.)

[348] An R. Catholic church just off Brighton Center.

[349] Sic.

[350] Or a face writhing in involuntary disgust at Don G.’s own armlessness and hook, maybe.

[351] As in a combination of the First and Twelfth Steps, goes the AA joke: ‘My Life Is Unmanageable and I’d Like to Share It With You.’

[352] Reference to January-February Y.D.A.U., when person or persons unknown went around coating selected toothbrushes of the Boys and Girls 16’s with what was finally pinpointed as betel-nut extract, causing panic and internecine finger-pointing and resulting in serial oxidation-treatment visits to Dr. E. Zegarelli, D.D.S., by half a dozen E.T.A.s until the brush-tamperings ceased as suddenly as they’d begun; and now nine months later no one still has the slightest idea re perpetrator or point.

[353] Which runs not to Enfield-Brighton but to Roxbury and Mattapan, places where it is very bad nighttime joss indeed to be both white and incapacitated.

[354] Q.v. note a to Note 12.

[355] Anexsia — ®SmithKline Beecham Laboratories.

[356] Levo-Dromoran— ®Roche Laboratories.

[357] Numorphan, kind of a watered-down Dilaudid — ®Du Pont Pharmaceuticals.

[358] Perwin NX — ® Bos well Medications Ltd., Canada — which accounts for the C–III, because the Canadians are notoriously insane when it comes to forecasting abuse-potential.

[359] A.k.a. Chlordiazepoxide hydrochloride — ®Roche, Inc. — a low-grade Valiumish tranq.

[360] A C–III and sort of entry-level oral narcotic, the side-effects and inconsistent buzz of which often send abusers up the ladder to C–II compounds.

[361] A.k.a. hyoscyamine sulfate — ®Schwarz Pharma Kremers Urban, Inc. — an anti-spasmodic for anything from colitis to Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

[362] A.k.a. methaqualone, now manufactured outside O.N.A.N. jurisdiction under the trade name Parestol.

[363] Later one-third of the rent-and-strip-luxury-apts. crew, and even later Gately’s trusted colleague on some of his most disastrous and bottom-hastening home-invasions, including that of one G. DuPlessis, which Kite ended up regretting exponentially more than Gately did, once the A.F.R. got through with him.

[364] MDA, MDMA (‘X’), MMDA-2 (‘Love Boat’), MMDA-₃a (‘Eve’), DMMDA-2

(‘Starry Night’), etc.

[365] Long-Term Institution.

[366] Sounding rather suspiciously like Professor H. Bloom’s turgid studies of artistic influenza — though it’s unclear how either Flood- or dead-ancestor discussions have any connection to S. Peterson’s low-budget classic The Cage, which is mostly about a peripatetic eyeball rolling around, other than the fact that J. O. Incandenza loved this film and stuck little snippets of it or references to it just about anywhere he could; maybe the ‘disjunction’ or ‘disconnection’ between the screen’s film and Ph.D.’s scholastic discussion of art is part of the point.³

a. (Which of course assumes there’s a point.)

[367] Though they did, just as in depictions of organized crime in popular entertainment, often change the cell-phones they used, to avoid potential taps or Pen Registers — Sorkin buying new units and #s, Gately more often borrowing student R.N.s’ cellulars and then returning them after a few days. One of Gately’s biggest challenges in this career was remembering all the different fucking phone numbers and addresses of luxury-apts.-of-the-week when he was strafed on Barn-Bams just about all the time.

[368] Cimetidine — ®SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals — 8oo-mg. spansules for generalized cranio-vascular woe (derived, kind of interestingly, from the same ergot rye-mold as LSD).

[369] For the two maps Sorkin had to have eliminated altogether during this period, it’s maybe worth observing that he eschewed both Towers and instead used the thuggish ex-Québecer muscleboys DesMontes and Pointgravè, who had no real loyalties or membership in any community and hired themselves out as enforcers for books and high-interest lenders all up and down both Shores. Gately did, as a coercive collector, demap one person, but it was essentially an accident — the debtor had been blond, and drinking Heinekens, and then when things got physical he’d squirted Gately in the face with Mace, and a red curtain of rage had descended over Gately’s sight, and when he’d come back to himself the debtor’s head was turned 180° around on his neck and had the little Mace can all the way up one nostril, and it was the most professionally horrified Gately had ever been up until the thing with the suffocated Canadian P.I.T., which anyway occurred much later and when Gately was way more nonviolence-prone.

[370] Purified pork insulin in a zinc suspension — ®Lilly Pharmaceuticals.

[371] An elite private high school up near the Methuen salient.

[372] Surely skeet and vig, meaning debt and bookmaker’s automatic percentage (usually 10 % subtracted from winnings or added to skeet) are not just metro Boston terms.

[373] A.k.a. Acetylcysteine-zo — ®Bristol Laboratories — a nebulizable prophylaxis against the post-traumatic buildup of abnormal, viscid, or inspissated mucus.

[374] With the hard-ch sound distinctive of North Shore pronun. of words like Chicago and champagne.

[375] Known less sensitively among neuro-urology residents as ‘Dizzy Dick Disorder’ or sometimes just ‘3-D.’

[376] Knoll Laboratories’ good old Dilaudid — $666.00/g. wholesale and $5/mg. street at Y.W.-Q.M.D. valuations.

[377] A ‘Phillips Screwdriver,’ vodka and Milk of Magnesia, which Gately finds nauseous and privately refers to as a ‘lowball.’

[378] (As opposed to self-confronting, presumably.)

[379] See Note 144 supra.

[380] The 1.3:1-aspect-ratio rectangle scanned by electron beams in video imaging, now replaced by multi-interlace³ solid-field HD digital imaging.

a. Why Noreen Lace-Forché’s seminal corporation’s name was a kind of wry pun: 2:1 interlace was pre-HD television’s term for breaking the picture frame into two 262.5-line fields for standard 525-line raster-scanning… A very in-type joke designed to appeal to the same Big Four that Noreen L.-F. was then wooing.

[381] More like B.S. 1926, according to the Still Photo Archive at NNY City’s Museum of Modern Art. Plus n.b. the print — which Hal correctly remembers Avril always loathing ^a — long pre-dated J.O.I.’s ever picking up a camera.

a. Hence the relative queerness of its still being up on the HmH living room wall four years after Incandenza’s felo de se — it’s not like anybody asked her to keep the thing up.

[382] Whether in singles against him or doubles alongside, when Hal is on-court with Wayne he always gets the creepy feeling that Wayne has control out there not just of his voluntary CNS but also of his heartrate and blood pressure, the diameter of his pupils, etc., which feeling is not only creepy but distracting, adding to the tension of playing with Wayne.

[383] Winter Park FL facility for enmeshment-, codependency-, and compulsivity-related Issues.

[384] A.k.a. Lorazepam — ®Wyeth-Aherst Labs — a venerable anti-anxiety tranq, of which 25 mg./day is enough to anxiolytize a good-sized Clydesdale.

[385] Probably meaning Doryx, Parke-Davis’s doxycycline hyclate, the Cruise missile of gram-negative antibiotics.

[386] Nalaxone hydrochloride, the Exocet missile of narcotic antagonists — ®DuPont Pharm. — 2 ml./2Oml.-saline pre-filled syringes.

[387] Metro Boston’s third-hardest thing to street-cop after raw Vietnamese opium and the incredibly potent DMZ, Sunshine is pentazocine hydrochloride and mefenamic acid³ — ®Sanofi Winthrop, Canada, Inc. — w/ trade-name Talwin-PX — Day-Glo-yellow serum, 7ml./20ml.-saline pre-filled syringes.

a. A non-narc analgesic marketed in the U.S. as Ponstel — ®Parke-Davis — mostly (oddly enough) for dysmenorrhea, sort of like nuclear-grade Mydol.

[388] Talwin-NX — ®Sanofi Winthrop U.S.