Infinite Jest Part 12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Hey Hal?' he calls across the plants.

Like for months in the spring semester of Y.D.P.A.H. she referred to her own program as 'Madame's Downer-Lit Hour' and read depressing book after depressing book - Good Morning, Midnight Good Morning, Midnight and and Maggie: A Girl of the Streetsand Giovanni's Room Maggie: A Girl of the Streetsand Giovanni's Roomand Under the Volcano, Under the Volcano,plus a truly ghastly Bret Ellis period during Lent - in a monotone, really slowly, night after night. Mario sits on the low little van der Roheknockoff coffee table with bowed legs (the table) with his head c.o.c.ked right up next the speaker and his claws in his lap. His toes tend to point inward when he sits. The background music is both predictable and, within that predictability, surprising: it's periodic. It suggests expansion without really expanding. It leads up to the exact kind of inevitability it denies. It is heavily digital, but with something of a choral bouquet. But unhuman. Mario thinks of the word haunting, haunting, like in 'a like in 'a haunting haunting echo of thus-and-such.' Madame Psychosis's cued music - which the student engineer never chooses or even sees her bring in - is always terribly obscure echo of thus-and-such.' Madame Psychosis's cued music - which the student engineer never chooses or even sees her bring in - is always terribly obscure 66 66 but often just as queerly powerful and compelling as her voice and show itself, the M.I.T. community feels. It tends to give you the feeling there's an in-joke that you and she alone are in on. Very few devoted WYYY listeners sleep well M-F. Mario has horizontal breathing-trouble sometimes, but other than that he sleeps like a babe. Avril Incandenza still sticks with the old L'Islet-region practice of taking just tea and nibbles at U.S. suppertime and waiting to eat seriously until right before bed. Cultured Canadians tend to think vertical digestion makes the mind unkeen. Some of Orin and Mario and Hal's earliest memories are of nodding off at the dining-room table and being gently carried by a very tall man to bed. This was in a different house. Madame Psychosis's cued musics stir very early memories of Mario's father. Avril is more than willing to take some good-natured guff about her inability to eat before like 2230h. Prandial music holds little charm or a.s.sociations for Hal, who like most of the kids on double daily drills makes fists around his utensils and eats like a wild dog. but often just as queerly powerful and compelling as her voice and show itself, the M.I.T. community feels. It tends to give you the feeling there's an in-joke that you and she alone are in on. Very few devoted WYYY listeners sleep well M-F. Mario has horizontal breathing-trouble sometimes, but other than that he sleeps like a babe. Avril Incandenza still sticks with the old L'Islet-region practice of taking just tea and nibbles at U.S. suppertime and waiting to eat seriously until right before bed. Cultured Canadians tend to think vertical digestion makes the mind unkeen. Some of Orin and Mario and Hal's earliest memories are of nodding off at the dining-room table and being gently carried by a very tall man to bed. This was in a different house. Madame Psychosis's cued musics stir very early memories of Mario's father. Avril is more than willing to take some good-natured guff about her inability to eat before like 2230h. Prandial music holds little charm or a.s.sociations for Hal, who like most of the kids on double daily drills makes fists around his utensils and eats like a wild dog.

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

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

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

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

'Hey Hal?'

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

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

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

The dessert Avril serves when Hal's over is Mrs. Clarke's infamous high-protein-gelatin squares, available in bright red or bright green, sort of like Jell-O on steroids. Mario's wild for them. C.T. clears the table and loads the dishwasher, since he didn't cook, and Hal gets into his coat at like 0101h. Mario's still listening to the WYYY nightly sign-off, which takes a while because they not only list the station's kilowattage specs but go through proofs for the formulae by which the specs are derived. C.T. always drops at least one plate out in the kitchen and then bellows. Avril always brings some h.e.l.l-Jell-O squares in to Mario and adopts a mock-dry tone and tells Hal it's been reasonably nice to see him outside les batiments sanctifies. The whole thing to Hal sometimes gets ritualistic and almost hallucinatory, the post-prandial farewell routine. Hal stands under the big framed poster of Metropolis Metropolis and whumps his gloves together casually and tells Mario there's no reason for him to leave too; Hal's going to blast down the hill for a bit. Avril and Mario always smile and Avril asks casually what his plans are. and whumps his gloves together casually and tells Mario there's no reason for him to leave too; Hal's going to blast down the hill for a bit. Avril and Mario always smile and Avril asks casually what his plans are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Don Gately was in the very early part of his Ennet House residency he almost got discharged for teaming up with a bad-news methedrine addict from New Bedford and sneaking out after curfew across the E.M.P.H.H. complex in the middle of the night to attach a big sign on the narrow front door of Unit #2's methadone clinic. The sign said CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE BY ORDER COMMONWEALTH OF Ma.s.sACHUSETTS. The first staffer at the methadone clinic doesn't get there to open up until 0800h., and yet it's been mentioned how #2's customers always begin to show up with twisting hands and bulging eyes at like dawn, to wait; and Gately and the speed freak from New Bedford had never seen anything like the psychic crises and near-riot among these semi-ex-junkies - pallid blade-slender chain-smoking h.o.m.os.e.xuals and bearded bruiser-types in leather berets, women with mohawks and multiple sticks of gum in, upscale trust-fund-fritterers with s.h.i.+ny cars and computerized jewelry who'd arrived, as they'd been doing like hyper-conditioned rats for years, many of them, arrived at sunup with their eyes protruding and with Kleenexes at their noses and scratching their arms and standing on first one foot and then the other, doing basically everything but truly congregating, wild for chemical relief, ready to stand in the cold exhaling steam for hours for that relief, who'd arrived with the sun and now seemed to be informed that the Commonwealth of MA was suddenly going to withdraw the prospect of that relief, until (and this is what really seemed to drive them right over the edge, out there in the lot) until Further Notice. Apes.h.i.+t Apes.h.i.+t has rarely enjoyed so literal a denotation. At the sound of the first windowpane breaking and the sight of a blown-out old wh.o.r.e trying to hit a leather-vested biker with an old pre-metric GRa.s.s GROWS BY INCHES BUT IT DIES BY FEET sign from #2's clinic's pathetic front lawn, the methedrine addict began laughing so hard that she dropped the binoculars from the Ennet House upstairs fire escape where they were watching, at like 0630h., and the binoculars fell and hit the roof of one of the Ennet House counselors' cars right below in the little roadlet, with a ringing clunk, just as he was pulling in, the counselor, his name was Calvin Thrust and he was four years sober and a former NYC p.o.r.n actor who'd gone through the House himself and now took absolutely zero in terms of s.h.i.+t from any of the residents, and his pride and joy was his customized 'Vette, and the binoculars made rather a nasty dent, and plus they were the House Manager's amateur-ornithology binoculars and had been borrowed out of the back office without explicit permission, and the long fall and impact didn't do them a bit of good, to say the least, and Gately and the methedrine addict got pinched and put on Full House Restriction and very nearly kicked out. The addict from New Bedford picked up the aminating needle a couple weeks after that anyway and was discovered by a night staffer simultaneously playing air-guitar and polis.h.i.+ng the lids of all the donated canned goods in the House pantry way after lights out, stark naked and sheened with meth-sweat, and after the formality of a Urine she was given the old administrative boot - over a quarter of incoming Ennet House residents get discharged for a dirty Urine within their first thirty days, and it's the same at all other Boston halfway houses - and the girl ended up back in New Bedford, and then within like three hours of hitting the streets got picked up by New Bedford's Finest on an old default warrant and sent to Framingham Women's for a 1-to-2 bit, and got found one morning in her bunk with a kitchen-rigged s.h.i.+v protruding from her privates and another in her neck and a thoroughly eliminated personal map, and Gately's individual counselor Gene M. brought Gately the news and invited him to see the methedrine addict's demise as a clear case of There But For the Grace of G.o.d Goeth D. W. Gately. has rarely enjoyed so literal a denotation. At the sound of the first windowpane breaking and the sight of a blown-out old wh.o.r.e trying to hit a leather-vested biker with an old pre-metric GRa.s.s GROWS BY INCHES BUT IT DIES BY FEET sign from #2's clinic's pathetic front lawn, the methedrine addict began laughing so hard that she dropped the binoculars from the Ennet House upstairs fire escape where they were watching, at like 0630h., and the binoculars fell and hit the roof of one of the Ennet House counselors' cars right below in the little roadlet, with a ringing clunk, just as he was pulling in, the counselor, his name was Calvin Thrust and he was four years sober and a former NYC p.o.r.n actor who'd gone through the House himself and now took absolutely zero in terms of s.h.i.+t from any of the residents, and his pride and joy was his customized 'Vette, and the binoculars made rather a nasty dent, and plus they were the House Manager's amateur-ornithology binoculars and had been borrowed out of the back office without explicit permission, and the long fall and impact didn't do them a bit of good, to say the least, and Gately and the methedrine addict got pinched and put on Full House Restriction and very nearly kicked out. The addict from New Bedford picked up the aminating needle a couple weeks after that anyway and was discovered by a night staffer simultaneously playing air-guitar and polis.h.i.+ng the lids of all the donated canned goods in the House pantry way after lights out, stark naked and sheened with meth-sweat, and after the formality of a Urine she was given the old administrative boot - over a quarter of incoming Ennet House residents get discharged for a dirty Urine within their first thirty days, and it's the same at all other Boston halfway houses - and the girl ended up back in New Bedford, and then within like three hours of hitting the streets got picked up by New Bedford's Finest on an old default warrant and sent to Framingham Women's for a 1-to-2 bit, and got found one morning in her bunk with a kitchen-rigged s.h.i.+v protruding from her privates and another in her neck and a thoroughly eliminated personal map, and Gately's individual counselor Gene M. brought Gately the news and invited him to see the methedrine addict's demise as a clear case of There But For the Grace of G.o.d Goeth D. W. Gately.

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

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

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

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

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

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

6 NOVEMBER.

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.

1610h. E.T.A. Weight Room. Freestyle circuits. The clank and click of various resistance-systems. Lyle on the towel dispenser conferring with an extremely moist Graham Rader. Schacht doing sit-ups, the board almost vertical, his face purple and forehead pulsing. Troeltsch by the squat rack blowing his nose into a towel. Coyle doing military presses with a bare bar. Carol Spodek curling, intent on the mirror. Rader nodding as Lyle bends and leans in. Hal up on the spotter-shelf in back of the incline-bench in the shadow of the monster copper beech through the west window doing single-leg toe-raises, for the ankle. Ingersoll at the shoulder-pull, steadily upping the weight against Lyle's advice. Keith ('The Viking') Freer 68 68 and the steroidic fifteen-year-old Eliot Kornspan spotting each other on ma.s.sive barbell-curls next to the water cooler's bench, taking turns bellowing encouragement. Hal keeps pausing to lean down and spit into an old NASA gla.s.s on the floor by the little shelf. E.T.A. Trainer Barry Loach walking around with a clipboard he doesn't write anything down on, but watching people intently and nodding a lot. Axford with one shoe off in the corner, doing something to his bare foot. Michael Pemulis seated cross-legged on the cooler's bench just off Kornspan's left hip, doing facial isometrics, trying to eavesdrop on Lyle and Rader, wincing whenever Kornspan and Freer roar at each other. and the steroidic fifteen-year-old Eliot Kornspan spotting each other on ma.s.sive barbell-curls next to the water cooler's bench, taking turns bellowing encouragement. Hal keeps pausing to lean down and spit into an old NASA gla.s.s on the floor by the little shelf. E.T.A. Trainer Barry Loach walking around with a clipboard he doesn't write anything down on, but watching people intently and nodding a lot. Axford with one shoe off in the corner, doing something to his bare foot. Michael Pemulis seated cross-legged on the cooler's bench just off Kornspan's left hip, doing facial isometrics, trying to eavesdrop on Lyle and Rader, wincing whenever Kornspan and Freer roar at each other.

'Three more! Get it up there!'

'Hoooowaaaaa.'

'Get that s.h.i.+t up there man!'

'Gwwwhoooooowaaaaa!'

'It raped your sister! It killed your f.u.c.king mother man!'

'Huhl huhl huhl huhl gwwwww gwwwww.'

'Do it!'

Pemulis makes his face very long for a while and then very short and broad, then all sort of hollow and distended like one of Bacon's popes.

'Well suppose' - Pemulis can just make out Lyle - 'Suppose I were to give you a key ring with ten keys. With, no, with a hundred keys, and I were to tell you that one of these keys will unlock it, this door we're imagining opening in onto all you want to be, as a player. How many of the keys would you be willing to try?'

Troeltsch calls over to Pemulis, 'Do the deLint-jerking-off face again!' Pemulis for a second lets his mouth gape slackly and his eyes roll way up and flutters his lids, moving his fist.

'Well I'd try every darn one,' Rader tells Lyle.

'Huhl. Huhl. Gwwwwwwww.'

'Motherf.u.c.ker! f.u.c.ker!'

Pemulis's wince looks like a type of facial isometric.

'Do Bridget having a tantrum! Do Schacht in a stall!'

Pemulis makes a shush-finger.

Lyle never whispers, but it's just about the same. 'Then you are are willing to make mistakes, you see. You are saying you will accept 99% error. The paralyzed perfectionist you say you are would stand there before that door. Jingling the keys. Afraid to try the first key.' willing to make mistakes, you see. You are saying you will accept 99% error. The paralyzed perfectionist you say you are would stand there before that door. Jingling the keys. Afraid to try the first key.'

Pemulis pulls his lower lip down as far as it will go and contracts his cheek muscles. Cords stand out on Freer's neck as he screams at Kornspan. There's a little hanging mist of spittle and sweat. Kornspan looks like he's about to have a stroke. There are 90 kg. on the bar, which itself is 20 kg.

'One more you f.u.c.k. f.u.c.k. f.u.c.king f.u.c.king take take it.' it.'

'f.u.c.k me. f.u.c.k me f.u.c.k meyou f.u.c.k. f.u.c.k. Gwwwwww.' Gwwwwww.'

'Take the pain.'

Freer has one finger under the bar, barely helping. Kornspan's red face is leaping around on his skull.

Carol Spodek's smaller bar goes silently up and down.

Troeltsch comes over and sits down and saws at the back of his neck with the towel, looking up at Kornspan. 'I don't think all the curls I've ever done all together add up to 110,' he said.

Kornspan's making sounds that don't sound like they're coming from his throat.

'Yes! Yiiissss! Yiiissss!' roars Freer. The bar crashes to the rubber floor, making Pemulis wince. Every vein on Kornspan stands out and pulses. His stomach looks pregnant. He puts his hands on his thighs and leans forward, a string of something hanging from his mouth.

'Way to f.u.c.king take it baby,' Freer says, going over to the box on the dispenser to get rosin for his hands, watching himself walk toward the mirror.

Pemulis starts very slowly to lean over toward Kornspan, looking around confidentially. He gets so his face is right up near the side of Kornspan's mesomorphic head and whispers. 'Hey. Eliot. Hey.'

Kornspan, bent over, chest heaving, rolls his head a little his way. Pemulis whispers: 'p.u.s.s.y.'

If, by the virtue of charity or the circ.u.mstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield MA's state-funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts. You will find out that once MA's Department of Social Services has taken a mother's children away for any period of time, they can always take them away again, D.S.S., like at will, empowered by nothing more than a certain signature-stamped form. I.e. once deemed Unfit - no matter why or when, or what's transpired in the meantime - there's nothing a mother can do.

Or for instance that people addicted to a Substance who abruptly stop ingesting the Substance often suffer wicked papular acne, often for months afterward, as the acc.u.mulations of Substance slowly leave the body. The Staff will inform you that this is because the skin is actually the body's biggest excretory organ. Or that chronic alcoholics' hearts are - for reasons no M.D. has been able to explain - swollen to nearly twice the size of civilians' human hearts, and they never again return to normal size. That there's a certain type of person who carries a picture of their therapist in their wallet. That (both a relief and kind of an odd let-down) black p.e.n.i.ses tend to be the same general size as white p.e.n.i.ses, on the whole. That not all U.S. males are circ.u.mcised.

That you can cop a sort of thin jittery amphetaminic buzz if you rapidly consume three Millennial Fizzies and a whole package of Oreo cookies on an empty stomach. (Keeping it down is required, however, for the buzz, which senior residents often neglect to tell newer residents.) That the chilling Hispanic term for whatever interior disorder drives the addict back again and again to the enslaving Substance is tecato gusano, tecato gusano,which apparently connotes some kind of interior psychic worm that cannot be sated or killed.

That black and Hispanic people can be as big or bigger racists than white people, and then can get even more hostile and unpleasant when this realization seems to surprise you.

That it is possible, in sleep, for some roommates to secure a cigarette from their bedside pack, light it, smoke it down to the quick, and then extinguish it in their bedside ashtray - without once waking up, and without setting anything on fire. You will be informed that this skill is usually acquired in penal inst.i.tutions, which will lower your inclination to complain about the practice. Or that even Flents industrial-strength expandable-foam earplugs do not solve the problem of a snoring roommate if the roommate in question is so huge and so adenoidal that the snores in question also produce subsonic vibrations that arpeggio up and down your body and make your bunk jiggle like a motel bed you've put a quarter in.

That females are capable of being just as vulgar about s.e.xual and eliminatory functions as males. That over 60% of all persons arrested for drug-and alcohol-related offenses report being s.e.xually abused as children, with two-thirds of the remaining 40% reporting that they cannot remember their childhoods in sufficient detail to report one way or the other on abuse. That you can weave hypnotic Madame Psychosislike harmonies around the minor-D scream of a cheap vacuum cleaner, humming to yourself as you vacuum, if that's your Ch.o.r.e. That some people really do look like rodents. That some drug-addicted prost.i.tutes have a harder time giving up prost.i.tution than they have giving up drugs, with their explanation involving the two habits' very different directions of currency-flow. That there are just as many idioms for the female s.e.x-organ as there are for the male s.e.x-organ.

That a little-mentioned paradox of Substance addiction is: that once you are sufficiently enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance in order to save your life, the enslaving Substance has become so deeply important to you that you will all but lose your mind when it is taken away from you. Or that sometime after your Substance of choice has just been taken away from you in order to save your life, as you hunker down for required A.M A.M. and P.M P.M. prayers, you will find yourself beginning to pray to be allowed literally to lose your mind, to be able to wrap your mind in an old newspaper or something and leave it in an alley to s.h.i.+ft for itself, without you.

That in metro Boston the idiom of choice for the male s.e.x-organ is: Unit, Unit,which is why Ennet House residents are wryly amused by E.M.P.H. Hospital's designations of its campus's buildings.

That certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you do. Then that most nonaddicted adult civilians have already absorbed and accepted this fact, often rather early on.

That no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that.

That AA and NA and CA's 'G.o.d' does not apparently require that you believe in Him/Her/It before He/She/It will help you. 69 69 That, That, pace pace macho bulls.h.i.+t, public male weeping is not only plenty masculine but can actually feel macho bulls.h.i.+t, public male weeping is not only plenty masculine but can actually feel good good (reportedly). That (reportedly). That sharing sharing means talking, and means talking, and taking somebody's inventory taking somebody's inventory means criticizing that person, plus many additional pieces of Recoveryspeak. That an important part of halfway-house Human Immuno-Virus prevention is not leaving your razor or toothbrush in communal bathrooms. That apparently a seasoned prost.i.tute can (reportedly) apply a condom to a customer's Unit so deftly he doesn't even know it's on until he's history, so to speak. means criticizing that person, plus many additional pieces of Recoveryspeak. That an important part of halfway-house Human Immuno-Virus prevention is not leaving your razor or toothbrush in communal bathrooms. That apparently a seasoned prost.i.tute can (reportedly) apply a condom to a customer's Unit so deftly he doesn't even know it's on until he's history, so to speak.

That a double-layered steel portable strongbox w/ tri-tumblered lock for your razor and toothbrush can be had for under $35.00 U.S./$38.50 O.N.A.N. via Home-Net Hardware, and that Pat M. or the House Manager will let you use the back office's old TP to order one if you put up a sustained enough squawk.

That over 50% of persons with a Substance addiction suffer from some other recognized form of psychiatric disorder, too. That some male prost.i.tutes become so accustomed to enemas that they cannot have valid bowel movements without them. That a majority of Ennet House residents have at least one tattoo. That the significance of this datum is una.n.a.lyzable. That the metro Boston street term for not having any money is: sporting lint. sporting lint.That what elsewhere's known as Informing or Squealing or Narcing or Ratting or Ratting Out is on the streets of metro Boston known as 'Eating Cheese,' presumably spun off from the a.s.sociative nexus of rat. rat.

That nose-, tongue-, lip-, and eyelid-rings rarely require actual penetrative piercing. This is because of the