Infinite Jest Part 13

That the smell of Athlete's Foot is sick-sweet v. the smell of podiatric Dry Rot is sick-sour.

That a person - one with the Disease/-Ease - will do things under the influence of Substances that he simply would not ever do sober, and that some consequences of these things cannot ever be erased or amended. 71 71 Felonies are an example of this.

As are tattoos. Almost always gotten on impulse, tattoos are vividly, chillingly permanent. The shopworn 'Act in Haste, Repent at Leisure' would seem to have been almost custom-designed for the case of tattoos. For a while, the new resident Tiny Ewell got first keenly interested and then weirdly obsessed with people's tattoos, and he started going around to all the residents and outside people who hung around Ennet House to help keep straight, asking to check out their tattoos and wanting to hear about the circ.u.mstances surrounding each tattoo. These little spasms of obsession - like first with the exact definition of alcoholic, alcoholic, and then with Morris H.'s special tollhouse cookies until the pancreat.i.tis-flare, then with the exact kinds of corners everybody made their bed up with - these were part of the way Tiny E. temporarily lost his mind when his enslaving Substance was taken away. The tattoo thing started out with Tiny's white-collar amazement at just how many of the folks around Ennet House seemed to have tattoos. And the tattoos seemed like potent symbols of not only whatever they were pictures of but also of the chilling irrevocability of intoxicated impulses. and then with Morris H.'s special tollhouse cookies until the pancreat.i.tis-flare, then with the exact kinds of corners everybody made their bed up with - these were part of the way Tiny E. temporarily lost his mind when his enslaving Substance was taken away. The tattoo thing started out with Tiny's white-collar amazement at just how many of the folks around Ennet House seemed to have tattoos. And the tattoos seemed like potent symbols of not only whatever they were pictures of but also of the chilling irrevocability of intoxicated impulses.

Because the whole thing about tattoos is that they're permanent, of course, irrevocable once gotten - which of course the irrevocability of a tattoo is what jacks up the adrenaline of the intoxicated decision to sit down in the chair and actually get it (the tattoo) - but the chilling thing about the intoxication is that it seems to make you consider only the adrenaline of the moment itself, not (in any depth) the irrevocability that produces the adrenaline. It's like the intoxication keeps your tattoo-type-cla.s.s person from being able to project his imagination past the adrenaline of the impulse and even consider the permanent consequences that are producing the buzz of excitement.

Tiny Ewell'll put this same abstract but not very profound idea in a whole number of varied ways, over and over, obsessively almost, and still fail to get any of the tattooed residents interested, although Bruce Green will listen politely, and the clinically depressed Kate Gompert usually won't have the juice to get up and walk away when Tiny starts in, which makes Ewell seek her out vis-a-vis tattoos, though she hasn't got a tattoo.

But they don't have any problem with showing Tiny their tatts, the residents with tatts don't, unless they're female and the thing is in some sort of area where there's a Boundary Issue.

As Tiny Ewell comes to see it, people with tattoos fall under two broad headings. First there are the younger scrofulous boneheaded black-T-s.h.i.+rt-and-spiked-bracelet types who do not have the sense to regret the impulsive permanency of their tatts, and will show them off to you with the same fake-quiet pride with which someone more of Ewell's own social stratum would show off their collection of Dynastic crockery or fine Sauvignon. Then there are the more numerous (and older) second types, who'll show you their tattoos with the sort of stoic regret (albeit tinged with a bit of self-conscious pride about the stoicism) that a Purple-Hearted veteran displays toward his old wounds' scars. Resident Wade McDade has complex nests of blue and red serpents running down the insides of both his arms, and is required to wear long-sleeved s.h.i.+rts every day to his menial job at Store 24, even though the store's heat always loses its mind in the early A.M. and it's always wicked motherf.u.c.king hot in there, because the store's Pakistani manager believes his customers will not wish to purchase Marlboro Lights and Ma.s.s. Gigabucks lottery tickets from someone with vascular-colored snakes writhing all over his arms. 72 72 McDade also has a flaming skull on his left shoulderblade. Doony Glynn has the faint remains of a black dotted line tattooed all the way around his neck at about Adam's-apple height, with instruction-manual-like directions for the removal of his head and maintenance of the disengaged head tattooed on his scalp, from the days of his Skinhead youth, which now the tattooed directions take patience and a comb and three of April Cortelyu's barrettes for Tiny even to see. McDade also has a flaming skull on his left shoulderblade. Doony Glynn has the faint remains of a black dotted line tattooed all the way around his neck at about Adam's-apple height, with instruction-manual-like directions for the removal of his head and maintenance of the disengaged head tattooed on his scalp, from the days of his Skinhead youth, which now the tattooed directions take patience and a comb and three of April Cortelyu's barrettes for Tiny even to see.

Actually, a couple weeks into the obsession Ewell broadens his dermo-taxonomy to include a third category, Bikers, of whom there are presently none in Ennet House but plenty around the area's AA meetings, in beards and leather vests and apparently having to meet some kind of weight-requirement of at least 200 kilos. Bikers Bikers is the metro Boston street term for them, though they seem to refer to themselves usually as Scooter-Puppies, a term which (Ewell finds out the hard way) non-Bikers are not invited to use. These guys are veritable one-man tattoo festivals, but when they show them to you they're disconcerting because they'll bare their tatts with the complete absence of affect of somebody just showing you like a limb or a thumb, not quite sure why you want to see or even what it is you're looking at. is the metro Boston street term for them, though they seem to refer to themselves usually as Scooter-Puppies, a term which (Ewell finds out the hard way) non-Bikers are not invited to use. These guys are veritable one-man tattoo festivals, but when they show them to you they're disconcerting because they'll bare their tatts with the complete absence of affect of somebody just showing you like a limb or a thumb, not quite sure why you want to see or even what it is you're looking at.

A like N.B. N.B. that Ewell ends up inserting under the heading that Ewell ends up inserting under the heading Biker Biker is that every professional tattooist everybody who can remember getting their tattoos remembers getting them from was, from the sound of everybody's general descriptions, a Biker. is that every professional tattooist everybody who can remember getting their tattoos remembers getting them from was, from the sound of everybody's general descriptions, a Biker.

W/r/t the Stoic-Regret group within Ennet House, it emerges that the male tattoos with women's names on them tend, in their irrevocability, to be especially disastrous and regretful, given the extremely provisional nature of most addicts' relations.h.i.+ps. Bruce Green will have MILDRED BONK MILDRED BONKon his jilted right triceps forever. Likewise the DORIS DORIS in red-dripping Gothic script just below the left breast of Emil Minty, who yes apparently did love once. Minty also has a palsied and amateur swastika with the caption in red-dripping Gothic script just below the left breast of Emil Minty, who yes apparently did love once. Minty also has a palsied and amateur swastika with the caption f.u.c.k NIGERS f.u.c.k NIGERSon a left biceps he is heartily encouraged to keep covered, as a resident. Chandler Foss has an undulating banner with a redly inscribed MARY MARY on one forearm, said banner now mangled and necrotic because Foss, dumped and badly c.o.ked out one night, tried to nullify the romantic connotations of the tatt by inscribing on one forearm, said banner now mangled and necrotic because Foss, dumped and badly c.o.ked out one night, tried to nullify the romantic connotations of the tatt by inscribing BLESSED VIRGIN BLESSED VIRGINabove the MARY MARYwith a razor blade and a red Bic, with predictably ghastly results. Real tattoo artists (Ewell gets this on authority after a White Flag Group meeting from a Biker whose triceps' tattoo of a huge disembodied female breast being painfully squeezed by a disembodied hand which is itself itself tattooed with a disembodied breast and hand communicates real tattoo-credibility, as far as Tiny's concerned) real tatt-artists are always highly trained professionals. tattooed with a disembodied breast and hand communicates real tattoo-credibility, as far as Tiny's concerned) real tatt-artists are always highly trained professionals.

What's sad about the gorgeous violet arrow-pierced heart with PAMELA PAMELAincised in a circle around it on Randy Lenz's right hip is that Lenz has no memory either of the tattoo-impulse and -procedure or of anybody named Pamela. Charlotte Treat has a small green dragon on her calf and another tattoo on a breast she's set a Boundary about letting Tiny see. Hester Thrale has an amazingly detailed blue and green tattoo of the planet Earth on her stomach, its poles ab.u.t.ting pubis and b.r.e.a.s.t.s, an equatorial view of which cost Tiny Ewell two weeks of doing Hester's weekly Ch.o.r.e. Overall searing-regret honors probably go to Jennifer Belbin, who has four uncoverable black teardrops descending from the corner of one eye, from one night of mescaline and adrenalized grief, so that from more than two meters away she always looks like she has flies on her, Randy Lenz points out. The new black girl Didi N. has on the plane of her upper abdomen a tattered screaming skull (off the same stencil as McDade's, but w/o the flames) that's creepy because it's just a tattered white outline: Black people's tattoos are rare, and for reasons Ewell regards as fairly obvious they tend to be just white outlines.

Ennet House alumnus and volunteer counselor Calvin Thrust is quietly rumored to have on the shaft of his formerly professional p.o.r.n-cartridge-performer's Unit a tattoo that displays the magiscule initials CT CT when the Unit is flaccid and the full name when the Unit is flaccid and the full name CALVIN THRUST CALVIN THRUSTwhen hyperemic. Tiny Ewell has soberly elected to let this go unsubstantiated. Alumna and v.c. Danielle Steenbok once got the bright idea of having eyeliner-colored tattoos put around both eyes so she'd never again have to apply eyeliner, not banking on the inevitable fade that over time's turned the tattoos a kind of nauseous dark-green she now has to constantly apply eyeliner to cover up. Current female live-in Staffer Johnette Foltz has undergone two of the six painful procedures required to have the snarling orange-and-blue tiger removed from her left forearm and so now has a snarling tiger minus a head and one front leg, with the ablated parts looking like someone determined has been at her forearm with steel wool. Ewell decides this is what gives profundity to the tattoo-impulse's profound irrevocability: Having a tatt removed means just exchanging one kind of disfigurement for another. There are Tingly and Diehl's identical palmate-cannabis-leaf-on-inner-wrist tattoos, though Tingly and Diehl are from opposite sh.o.r.es and never crossed paths before entering the House.

Nell Gunther refuses to discuss tattoos with Tiny Ewell in any way or form.

For a while, Tiny Ewell considers live-in Staffer Don Gately's homemade jailhouse tattoos too primitive to even bother asking about.

He'd made a true pest of himself, though, Ewell did, when at the height of the obsession this one synthetic-narc-addicted kid came in who refused to be called anything but his street name, Skull, and lasted only like four days, but who'd been a walking exhibition of high-regret ink - both arms tattooed with spiderwebs at the elbows, on his fishy-white chest a naked lady with the same kind of overlush measurements Ewell remembered from the pinball machines of his Watertown childhood. On Skull's back a half-m.-long skeleton in a black robe and cowl playing the violin in the wind on a crag with THE DEAD THE DEADin maroon on a vertical gonfalonish banner unfurling below; on one biceps either an icepick or a mucronate dagger, and down both forearms a kind of St. Vitus's dance of leather-winged dragons with the words - on both forearms - HOW DO YOU LIK YOUR BLUEYED BOY NOW MR DETH!?, HOW DO YOU LIK YOUR BLUEYED BOY NOW MR DETH!?,the typos of which, Tiny felt, only served to heighten Skull's whole general tatt-gestalt's intended effect, which Tiny presumed was primarily to repel.

In fact Tiny E.'s whole displacement of obsession from bunks' hospital corners to people's tattoos was probably courtesy of this kid Skull, who on his second night in the newer male residents' Five-Man Room had shed his electrified muscle-s.h.i.+rt and was showing off his tattoos in a boneheaded regretless first-category fas.h.i.+on to Ken Erdedy while R. Lenz did headstands against the closet door in his jockstrap and Ewell and Geoffrey D. had their wallets' credit cards spread out on Ewell's drum-tight bunk and were trying to settle a kind of admittedly childish argument about who had the more prestigious credit cards - Skull flexing his pectorals to make the over-developed woman on his chest writhe, reading his forearms to Erdedy, etc. - and Geoffrey Day had looked up from his AmEx (Gold, to Ewell's Platinum) and shaken his moist pale head at Ewell and asked rhetorically what had ever happened to good old traditional U.S. tattoos like MOM MOM or an anchor, which for some reason touched off a small obsessive explosion in Ewell's detox-frazzled psyche. or an anchor, which for some reason touched off a small obsessive explosion in Ewell's detox-frazzled psyche.

Probably the most poignant items in Ewell's survey are the much-faded tattoos of old Boston AA guys who've been sober in the Fellows.h.i.+p for decades, the crocodilic elder statesmen of the White Flag and Allston Groups and the St. Columbkill Sunday Night Group and Ewell's chosen Home Group, Wednesday night's Better Late Than Never Group (Non-smoking) at St. Elizabeth's Hospital just two blocks down from the House. There is something queerly poignant about a deeply faded tattoo, a poignancy something along the lines of coming upon the tiny and poignantly unfas.h.i.+onable clothes of a child long-since grown up in an attic trunk somewhere (the clothes, not the grown child, Ewell confirmed for G. Day). See, e.g., White Flag's cantankerous old Francis ('Ferocious Francis') Gehaney's right forearm's tatt of a martini gla.s.s with a naked lady sitting in the gla.s.s with her legs kicking up over the broad flaring rim, with an old-style Rita Hayworthera bangs-intensive hairstyle. Faded to a kind of underwater blue, its incidental black lines gone soot-green and the red of the lips/nails/ SUBIKBAY'62USN4-07 SUBIKBAY'62USN4-07 not lightened to pink but more like decayed to the dusty red of fire through much smoke. All these old sober Boston blue-collar men's irrevocable tattoos fading almost observably under the low-budget fluorescence of church bas.e.m.e.nts and hospital auditoria - Ewell watched and charted and cross-referenced them, moved. Any number of good old U.S.N. anchors, and in Irish Boston sooty green shamrocks, and several little frozen tableaux of little khaki figures in G.I. helmets plunging bayonets into the stomachs of hideous urine-yellow bucktoothed Oriental caricatures, and screaming eagles with their claws faded blunt, and not lightened to pink but more like decayed to the dusty red of fire through much smoke. All these old sober Boston blue-collar men's irrevocable tattoos fading almost observably under the low-budget fluorescence of church bas.e.m.e.nts and hospital auditoria - Ewell watched and charted and cross-referenced them, moved. Any number of good old U.S.N. anchors, and in Irish Boston sooty green shamrocks, and several little frozen tableaux of little khaki figures in G.I. helmets plunging bayonets into the stomachs of hideous urine-yellow bucktoothed Oriental caricatures, and screaming eagles with their claws faded blunt, and SEMPER FI, SEMPER FI,all autolyzed to the point where the tattoos look like they're just under the surface of a murky-type pond.

A tall silent hard-looking old black-haired BLTN-Group veteran has the terse and hateful single word p.u.s.s.y p.u.s.s.y in what's faded to pond-sc.u.m green down one liver-spotted forearm; but yet the fellow transcends even stoic regret by dressing and carrying himself as if the word simply wasn't there, or was so irrevocably there there was no point even thinking about it: there's a deep and tremendously compelling dignity about the old man's demeanor w/r/t the in what's faded to pond-sc.u.m green down one liver-spotted forearm; but yet the fellow transcends even stoic regret by dressing and carrying himself as if the word simply wasn't there, or was so irrevocably there there was no point even thinking about it: there's a deep and tremendously compelling dignity about the old man's demeanor w/r/t the p.u.s.s.y p.u.s.s.y on his arm, and Ewell actually considers approaching this fellow re the issue of sponsors.h.i.+p, if and when he feels it's appropriate to get an AA sponsor, if he decides it's germane in his case. on his arm, and Ewell actually considers approaching this fellow re the issue of sponsors.h.i.+p, if and when he feels it's appropriate to get an AA sponsor, if he decides it's germane in his case.

Near the conclusion of this two-month obsession, Tiny Ewell approaches Don Gately on the subject of whether the jailhouse tattoo should maybe comprise a whole separate phylum of tattoo. Ewell's personal feeling is that jailhouse tattoos aren't poignant so much as grotesque, that they seem like they weren't a matter of impulsive decoration or self-presentation so much as simple self-mutilation arising out of boredom and general disregard for one's own body and the aesthetics of decoration. Don Gately's developed the habit of staring coolly at Ewell until the little attorney shuts up, though this is partly to disguise the fact that Gately usually can't follow what Ewell's saying and is unsure whether this is because he's not smart or educated enough to understand Ewell or because Ewell is simply out of his f.u.c.king mind.

Don Gately tells Ewell how your basic-type jailhouse tatt is homemade with sewing needles from the jailhouse canteen and some blue ink from the cartridge of a fountain pen promoted from the breast pocket of an unalert Public Defender, is why the jailhouse genre is always the same night-sky blue. The needle is dipped in the ink and jabbed as deep into the tattooee as it can be jabbed without making him recoil and f.u.c.king up your aim. Just a plain ultraminimal blue square like Gately's got on his right wrist takes half a day and hundreds of individual jabs. How come the lines are never quite straight and the color's never quite all the way solid is it's impossible to get all the individualized punctures down to the same uniform deepness in the, like, twitching flesh. This is why jailhouse tatts always look like they were done by s.a.d.i.s.tic children on rainy afternoons. Gately has a blue square on his right wrist and a sloppy cross on the inside of his mammoth left forearm. He'd done the square himself, and a cellmate had done the cross in return for Gately doing a cross on the cellmate. Oral narcotics render the process both less painful and less tedious. The sewing needle is sterilized in grain alcohol, which Gately explains that the alcohol is got by taking mess-hall fruit and mas.h.i.+ng it up and adding water and secreting the whole mess in a Ziploc just inside the flush-hole thing of the cell's toilet, to, like, foment. The sterilizing results of this can be consumed, as well. Bonded liquor and cocaine are the only things hard to get inside of M.D.C. penal inst.i.tutions, because the expense of them gets everybody all excited and it's only a matter of time before somebody goes and eats cheese. The inexpensive C-IV oral narcotic Talwin can be traded for cigarettes, however, which can in turn be got at the canteen or won at cribbage and dominoes (M.D.C. regs prohibit straight-out cards) or got in ma.s.s quant.i.ties off smaller inmates in return for protection from the romantic advances of larger inmates. Gately is right-handed and his arms are roughly the size of Tiny Ewell's legs. His wrist's jailhouse square is canted and has sloppy extra blobs at three of the corners. Your average jailhouse tatt can't be removed even with laser surgery because it's incised so deep in. Gately is polite about Tiny Ewell's inquiries but not expansive, i.e. Tiny has to ask very specific questions about whatever he wishes to know and then gets a short specific answer from Gately to just that question. Then Gately stares at him, a habit Ewell tends to complain about at some length up in the Five-Man Room. His interest in tattoos seems to be regarded by Gately not as invasive but as the temporary obsession of a still-quivering Substanceless psyche that in a couple weeks will have forgot all about tattoos, an att.i.tude Ewell finds condescending in the extremus. Gately's att.i.tude toward his own primitive tattoos is a second-category att.i.tude, with most of the stoicism and acceptance of his tatt-regret sincere, if only because these irrevocable emblems of jail are minor Rung Bells compared to some of the f.u.c.ked-up and really really irrevocable impulsive mistakes Gately'd made as an active drug addict and burglar, not to mention their consequences, the mistakes', which Gately's trying to accept he'll be paying off for a real long time. irrevocable impulsive mistakes Gately'd made as an active drug addict and burglar, not to mention their consequences, the mistakes', which Gately's trying to accept he'll be paying off for a real long time.

Michael Pemulis has this habit of looking first to one side and then over to the other before he says anything. It's impossible to tell whether this is unaffected or whether Pemulis is emulating some film-noir-type character. It's worse when he's put away a couple 'drines. He and Trevor Axford and Hal Incandenza are in Pemulis's room, with Pemulis's roommates Schacht and Troeltsch down at lunch, so they're alone, Pemulis and Axford and Hal, stroking their chins, looking down at Michael Pemulis's yachting cap on his bed. Lying inside the overturned hat are a bunch of fair-sized but bland-looking tablets of the allegedly incredibly potent DMZ.

Pemulis looks all around behind them in the empty room. 'This, Incster, Axhandle, is the incredibly potent DMZ. The Great White Shark of organo-synthesized hallucinogens. 'The gargantuan feral infant of -'

Hal says 'We get the picture.'

'The Yale U. of the Ivy League of Acid,' says Axford.

'Your ultimate psychosensual distorter,' Pemulis sums up.

'Think you mean psychosensory, unless I don't know the whole story here.' unless I don't know the whole story here.'

Axford gives Hal a narrow look. Interrupting Pemulis means having to watch him do the head-thing all over again each time.

'Hard to find, gentlemen. As in very hard to find. Last lots came off the line in the early 70s. These tablets here are artifacts. Certain amount of decay in potency probably inevitable. Used in certain shady CIA-era military experiments.'

Axford nods down at the hat. 'Mind-control?'

'More like getting the enemy to think their guns are hydrangea, the enemy's a blood-relative, that sort of thing. Who knows. The accounts I've been reading have been incoherent, gistless. Experiments conducted. Things got out of hand. Let's just say things got out of control. Potency judged too incredible to proceed. Subjects locked away in inst.i.tutions and written off as casualties of peace. Formula shredded. Research team scattered, rea.s.signed. Vague but I've got to tell you pretty sobering rumors.'

'These are from the early 70s?' Axhandle says.

'See the little trademark on each one, with the guy in bell-bottoms and long sideburns?'

'Is that what that is?'

'Unprecedentedly potent, this stuff. The Swiss inventor they say was originally recommending LSD-25 as what to take to come down down off the stuff.' Pemulis takes one of the tablets and puts it in his palm and pokes at it with a callused finger. 'What we're looking at. We're looking here at either a serious sudden injection of cash -' off the stuff.' Pemulis takes one of the tablets and puts it in his palm and pokes at it with a callused finger. 'What we're looking at. We're looking here at either a serious sudden injection of cash -'

Axford makes a shocked noise. 'You'd actually try to peddle the incredibly potent DMZ around this sorry place?'

Pemulis's snort sounds like the letter K. 'Get a large economy-size clue, Axhandle. n.o.body here'd have any clue what they'd even be dealing with. Not to mention be willing to pay what they're worth. Why, there are pharmaceutical museums, left-wing think tanks, New York designer-drug consortiums I'm sure'd be dying to dissect these. Decoct like. Toss into the spectrometer and see what's what.'

'That we could get bids from, you're saying,' Axford says. Hal squeezes a ball, silently looking at the hat.

Pemulis turns the tablet over. 'Or certain very progressive and hip-type nursing homes I know guys that know of. Or down at Back Bay at that yogurt place with that picture of those historical guys Inc was saying at breakfast was up on the wall.'

'Ram Das. William Burroughs.'

'Or just down in Harvard Square at Au Bon Pain where all those 70s-era guys in old wool ponchos play chess against those little clocks they keep hitting.'

Axford's pretending to punch Hal's arm in excitement.

Pemulis says 'Or of course I'm thinking I could just go the sheer-entertainment route and toss them in the Gatorade barrels at the meet with Port Was.h.i.+ngton Tuesday, or down at the WhataBurger - watch every-body run around clutching their heads or whatever. I'd be way way into watching Wayne play with distorted senses.' into watching Wayne play with distorted senses.'

Hal puts one foot up on Pemulis's little frustum-shaped bedside stool and leans farther in. 'Would it be prying to ask how you finally managed to get hold of these?'

'It wouldn't be prying at all,' Pemulis says, removing from the yachting cap's lining every piece of contraband he's got and spreading it out on the bed, sort of the way older people will array all their valuables in quiet moments. He has a small quant.i.ty of personal-consumption Lamb's Breath cannabis (bought back from Hal out of a 20-g. he'd sold Hal) in a dusty baggie, a little Saran-Wrapped cardboard rectangle with four black stars s.p.a.ced evenly across it, the odd 'drine, and it looks like a baker's dozen of the incredibly potent DMZ, Sweet Tartsized tablets of no particular color with a tiny mod hipster in each center wis.h.i.+ng the viewer peace. 'We don't even know how many hits this is,' he muses quietly. There's sun on the wall with the hanging viewer and poster of the paranoid king and an enormous hand-drawn Sierpinski gasket. In one of the three big mullioned west windows - the Academy is nothing if not well-fenestrated - there's an oval flaw that's casting a bubble of ale-colored autumn sunlight from the window's left side to elongate onto Pemulis's tightly made bed, 73 73 and he moves everything his hat's got into the brighter bubble, going down on one knee to study a tablet between his forceps (Pemulis owns stuff like philatelic forceps, a loupe, a pharmaceutical scale, a postal scale, a personal-size Bunsen burner) with the calm precision of a jeweler. 'The literature's mute on the t.i.tration. Do you take one tablet?' He looks up on one side and then back around on the other at the boys' faces leaning in above. 'Is like half a tab a regulation hit?' and he moves everything his hat's got into the brighter bubble, going down on one knee to study a tablet between his forceps (Pemulis owns stuff like philatelic forceps, a loupe, a pharmaceutical scale, a postal scale, a personal-size Bunsen burner) with the calm precision of a jeweler. 'The literature's mute on the t.i.tration. Do you take one tablet?' He looks up on one side and then back around on the other at the boys' faces leaning in above. 'Is like half a tab a regulation hit?'

'Two or even three tablets, maybe?' Hal says, knowing he sounds greedy but unable to help himself.

'The accessible data's vague,' Pemulis says, his profile contorted around the loupe in his socket. 'The literature on muscimole-lysergic blends is spotty and vague and hard to read except to say how ma.s.sively powerful the supposed yields are.'

Hal looks at the top of Pemulis's head. 'Did you hit a medical library?'

'I got on MED.COM off Lateral Alice's WATS line and went back and forth and up and down through off Lateral Alice's WATS line and went back and forth and up and down through MED.COM. Plenty on lysergics, plenty on methoxy-cla.s.s hybrids. Vague and almost gossip-columny s.h.i.+t on fitviavi-compounds. To get anything you got to cross-key Ergotics with the phrase muscimole muscimole or or muscimolated. muscimolated. Only a couple things ring the bell when you key in Only a couple things ring the bell when you key in DMZ. DMZ. Then they're all potent this, sinister that. Nothing with any specifics. And jumbly polysyllables out the a.s.s. Whole thing gave me a migraine.' Then they're all potent this, sinister that. Nothing with any specifics. And jumbly polysyllables out the a.s.s. Whole thing gave me a migraine.'

'Yes but did you actually hop in the truck and actually go go to a real med- library?' Hal's his mother Avril's child when it comes to databases, software Spell-Checks, etc. Axford now really does punch him once in the shoulder, albeit the right one. Pemulis is scratching absently at the little hair-hurricane at the center of his hair. It's close to 1430h., and the flawed bubble of light on the bed is getting to be the slightly sad color of early winter P.M. There are still no sounds from the West Courts outside, but there's high song of much volume through the wall's water-pipes - a lot of the guys who are drilled past caring in the A.M. don't get it up to shower until after lunch, then sit through P.M. cla.s.ses with wet hair and different clothes than their to a real med- library?' Hal's his mother Avril's child when it comes to databases, software Spell-Checks, etc. Axford now really does punch him once in the shoulder, albeit the right one. Pemulis is scratching absently at the little hair-hurricane at the center of his hair. It's close to 1430h., and the flawed bubble of light on the bed is getting to be the slightly sad color of early winter P.M. There are still no sounds from the West Courts outside, but there's high song of much volume through the wall's water-pipes - a lot of the guys who are drilled past caring in the A.M. don't get it up to shower until after lunch, then sit through P.M. cla.s.ses with wet hair and different clothes than their A.M A.M. cla.s.ses.

Pemulis rises to stand between them and looks around the empty three-bedded room again, with neat stacks of three players' clothes and bright gear on shelves and three wicker laundry hampers bulging slightly. There is the rich scent of athletic laundry, but other than that the room looks almost professionally clean. Pemulis and Schacht's room makes Hal and Mario's room look like an insane asylum, Hal thinks. Axford drew one of only two single uppercla.s.s rooms in last spring's lottery, the other having gone to the Vaught twins, who get counted as one entry in Room Draw.

Pemulis still has his cheek screwed up to keep the loupe in as he looks around. 'One monograph had this toss-off about DMZ where the guy invites you to envision acid that has itself dropped acid.'

'Holy crow. crow.'

'One article out of f.u.c.king Moment Moment of all sources talks about how this one Army convict at Leavenworth got allegedly injected with some ma.s.sive unspecified dose of early DMZ as part of some Army experiment in Christ only knows what and about how this convict's family sued over how the guy reportedly lost his mind.' He directs the loupe dramatically at first Hal and then Axford. 'I mean literally of all sources talks about how this one Army convict at Leavenworth got allegedly injected with some ma.s.sive unspecified dose of early DMZ as part of some Army experiment in Christ only knows what and about how this convict's family sued over how the guy reportedly lost his mind.' He directs the loupe dramatically at first Hal and then Axford. 'I mean literally lost lost his mind, like the ma.s.sive dose picked his mind up and carried it off somewhere and put it down someplace and forgot where.' his mind, like the ma.s.sive dose picked his mind up and carried it off somewhere and put it down someplace and forgot where.'

'I think we get the picture, Mike.'

'Allegedly Moment Moment says how the guy's found later in his Army cell, in some impossible lotus position, singing show tunes in a scary deadly-accurate Ethel-Merman-impression voice.' says how the guy's found later in his Army cell, in some impossible lotus position, singing show tunes in a scary deadly-accurate Ethel-Merman-impression voice.'

Axford says maybe Pemulis stumbled on a possible explanation for poor old Lyle and his lotus position down in the weight room, gesturing with the bad right hand in the direction of Comm.-Ad.

Again Pemulis with the thing with the head. The slackening of a cheek lets the loupe fall out and bounce off the drum-tight bed, and Pemulis gets it to rebound into his palm without even looking. 'I think we can err on the side of not d.i.c.kying the Gatorade barrels, anyway. This soldier's story's moral was proceed with caution, big time. The guy's mind's still allegedly AWOL. An old soldier, now, still belting out Broadway medleys in some secretive inst.i.tution someplace. Blood-relatives try to sue on the guy's behalf, Army apparently came up with enough arguments to give the jury reasonable doubt about if the guy can even be said to legally exist enough to bring suit, anymore, since the dose misplaced his mind.'

Axford feels absently at his elbow. 'So you're saying let's proceed with care why don't we.'

Hal kneels to prod one of the tablets up against the dusty baggie's side. His finger looks dark in the elongated bubble of light. 'I'm thinking these look like two tablets are possibly a hit. A kind of Motrinish look to them.'

'Visual guesswork isn't going to do it. This is not Bob Hope, Inc.'

'We could even designate it "Ethel," for on the phone,' Axford suggests. Pemulis watches Hal arranging the tablets into the same general cardioid-shape as E.T.A. itself. 'What I'm saying. This is not a fools-rush-in-type substance, Inc. This show-tune soldier like left the planet. planet.'

'Well, so long as he waves every so often.'

'The sense I got is the only thing he waves at is his food.'

'But that was from a ma.s.sive early dose,' Axford says.

Hal's arrangement of the tablets on the red-and-gray counterpane is almost Zen in its precision. 'These are from the 70s?'

After intricate third-party negotiations, Michael Pemulis finally landed 650 mg. of the vaunted and elusive compound DMZ or 'Madame Psychosis' from a small-arms-draped duo of reputed former Canadian insurgents who now undertook small and probably kind of pathetic outdated insurgency-projects from behind the front-operation of a cut-rate mirror, blown-gla.s.s, practical joke 'n gag, trendy postcard, and low-demand old film-cartridge emporium called Ant.i.toi Entertainment, just up Prospect St. from Inman Square in Cambridge's decayed Portugo/Brazilian district. Because Pemulis always conducts business solo and speaks no French, the whole transaction with the Nuck in charge had to be negotiated in dumbshow, and since this lumberjackish Ant.i.toi Nuckwad tended to look from side to side before he communicated even more than Pemulis looked all around himself, with his dim-looking partner standing there cradling a broom and also scanning for eavesdroppers in the closed shop the whole time, the whole negotiated deal had resembled a kind of group psych.o.m.otor seizure, with different bits of whipping and waggling heads reflected in dislocated sections and at jagged angles in more mirrors and pebbled blown-gla.s.s vases than Pemulis had ever seen crammed into anywhere. A very low-rent TP indeed had a hardcorep.o.r.n cartridge going at five times the normal speed so it looked like crazed rodents and may have turned Pemulis's s.e.xual glands off for all time, he feels. G.o.d alone knew where these clowns had acquired thirteen incredibly potent 50-mg. artifacts of the B.S. 1970s. But the good news is they were Canadians, and like f.u.c.king Nucksters about almost anything they had no idea what what they were in possession of was worth, as it slowly emerged. Pemulis, w/ aid of 150 mg. of time-release Tenuate Dospan, almost danced a little post-transaction jig on his way up the steps of the otiose Cambridge bus, feeling the way W. Penn in his Quaker Oats hat in like the 16th century must have felt trading a few trinkets to babe-in-the-woods Natives for New Jersey, he imagines, doffing the nautical cap to two nuns in the aisle.

Over the course of the next academic day - the incredibly potent stash now wrapped tight in Saran and stashed deep in the toe of an old sneaker that sits atop the aluminum strut between two panels in subdorm B's drop ceiling, Pemulis's time-tested entrepot - over the course of the next day or so the matter's hashed out and it's decided that while there's no real reason to involve Boone or Stice or Struck or Troeltsch, it's really Pemulis and Axford and Hal's right - duty, almost, to the spirits of inquiry and good trade practice - to sample the potentially incredibly potent DMZ in predeterminedly safe amounts before unleas.h.i.+ng it on Boone or Troeltsch or any unwitting civilians. Axford having been allowed in on the front end, the question of Hal's defraying the opportunity-cost of his part in the experiment is tactfully broached and turns out to be no problem. Pemulis's mark-up isn't anything beyond accepted norms, and there's always room in Hal's budget for spirited inquiry. Hal's one condition is that somebody tech-literate actually take the truck down to B.U. or M.I.T.'s medical library and physically verify that the compound is both organic and nonaddictive, which Pemulis says a physical hands-on library a.s.sault is already down in his day-planner in pen, anyway. After P.M. drills on Thursday, as Hal Incandenza and Pemulis with camera-mounted Mario Incandenza in tow stand with their hands in the chainlink mesh of one of the Show Courts' fencing and watch Teddy Schacht play a private exhibition against a Syrian Satellite-pro who's at E.T.A. for two paid weeks of corrective instruction on a service-motion that's eroding his rotator cuff - the guy wears thick gla.s.ses with a black athletic band around his head and plays with an upright square-jawed liquid precision and is dispatching Ted Schacht handily, which Schacht is taking with his customary sanguine good temper, giving his stolid all, learning what he can, one of very few genuinely stocky players at E.T.A. and one of the even fewer ranked junior players around without an apparent ego, wholly noninsecure since he blew out his knee on a contre-pied contre-pied in the pre-Thanksgiving exhibition three years back, which is odd, now still in and at it for just the fun - and more or less doomed, therefore, to a purgatorial existence in 128-256 Alphabetville - as Pemulis and Hal stand there sweaty in full redand-gray E.T.A. sweats on a raw 11/5 P.M., the sweat in their hair starting to accrete and freeze, Mario's head bowed under the weight of the head-mount rig and his hideously arachnodactylic fingers whitening as the fence takes his forward weight, Hal's posture subtly but warmly inclined ever so slightly toward his tiny older brother, who resembles him the way creatures of the same Order but not the same Family might resemble one another - as they stand watching and has.h.i.+ng matters out, Hal and Pemulis, there's the thud and sp.r.o.ng of an E.W.D. transnational catapult off way below to their left and then the high keen sound of a waste-displacement projectile the clouds are too low to let them see the flight of - though a weirdly yellow sheep-shaped cloud is visible somewhere up off past Acton, connecting the horizon's seam to some kind of coming storm-front held off by the ATHSCME fans along the Lowell-Methuen stretch of border, northwest. Pemulis finally nixes the notion of performing the spirited controlled experiment here in Enfield, where Axford has to be at the A squad's dawn drills every morning at 0500, and also Hal, unless he's slept over at HmH the night before, with HmH just not being a good DMZ-dropping venue at all. Pemulis, scanning up and down the length of the fence and winking at Mario, posits that a solid 36 hours of demand-free time will be advisable for any interaction with the incredibly potent you-know-whatski. That also lets out the inter-academy thing with Port Was.h.i.+ngton tomorrow, for which Charles Tavis has chartered two buses, because so many E.T.A. players are getting to go and do battle in this one - Port Was.h.i.+ngton Academy is gargantuan, the Xerox Inc. of North American tennis academies, with over 300 students and 64 courts, half of which they'll have already put under warm inflatable TesTar cover as of like Halloween, P.W.'s staff being less into the value of elemental suffering than Scht.i.tt & Co. - so many that Tavis will almost surely go ahead and bus them all back up from Long Island just as soon as the post-compet.i.tion dance is over, rather than sh.e.l.l out for all those motel rooms without corporate support. This E.T.A.P.W. meet and buffet and dance are a private, inter-academy tradition, an epic rivalry almost a decade old. Plus Pemulis says he'll need a couple weeks of quality med-library-stacks-tossing time to do the more exacting t.i.tration and side-effects research Hal agrees the soldier's sobering story seems to dictate. So, they conclude, the window of opportunity looks to be 11/2021 - the weekend right after the big End-of-Fiscal-Year fundraising exhibition with the E.T.A. A & B squads in singles against (this year) Quebec's notoriously hapless Jr. Davis and Jr. Wightman Cup squads, in the pre-Thanksgiving exhibition three years back, which is odd, now still in and at it for just the fun - and more or less doomed, therefore, to a purgatorial existence in 128-256 Alphabetville - as Pemulis and Hal stand there sweaty in full redand-gray E.T.A. sweats on a raw 11/5 P.M., the sweat in their hair starting to accrete and freeze, Mario's head bowed under the weight of the head-mount rig and his hideously arachnodactylic fingers whitening as the fence takes his forward weight, Hal's posture subtly but warmly inclined ever so slightly toward his tiny older brother, who resembles him the way creatures of the same Order but not the same Family might resemble one another - as they stand watching and has.h.i.+ng matters out, Hal and Pemulis, there's the thud and sp.r.o.ng of an E.W.D. transnational catapult off way below to their left and then the high keen sound of a waste-displacement projectile the clouds are too low to let them see the flight of - though a weirdly yellow sheep-shaped cloud is visible somewhere up off past Acton, connecting the horizon's seam to some kind of coming storm-front held off by the ATHSCME fans along the Lowell-Methuen stretch of border, northwest. Pemulis finally nixes the notion of performing the spirited controlled experiment here in Enfield, where Axford has to be at the A squad's dawn drills every morning at 0500, and also Hal, unless he's slept over at HmH the night before, with HmH just not being a good DMZ-dropping venue at all. Pemulis, scanning up and down the length of the fence and winking at Mario, posits that a solid 36 hours of demand-free time will be advisable for any interaction with the incredibly potent you-know-whatski. That also lets out the inter-academy thing with Port Was.h.i.+ngton tomorrow, for which Charles Tavis has chartered two buses, because so many E.T.A. players are getting to go and do battle in this one - Port Was.h.i.+ngton Academy is gargantuan, the Xerox Inc. of North American tennis academies, with over 300 students and 64 courts, half of which they'll have already put under warm inflatable TesTar cover as of like Halloween, P.W.'s staff being less into the value of elemental suffering than Scht.i.tt & Co. - so many that Tavis will almost surely go ahead and bus them all back up from Long Island just as soon as the post-compet.i.tion dance is over, rather than sh.e.l.l out for all those motel rooms without corporate support. This E.T.A.P.W. meet and buffet and dance are a private, inter-academy tradition, an epic rivalry almost a decade old. Plus Pemulis says he'll need a couple weeks of quality med-library-stacks-tossing time to do the more exacting t.i.tration and side-effects research Hal agrees the soldier's sobering story seems to dictate. So, they conclude, the window of opportunity looks to be 11/2021 - the weekend right after the big End-of-Fiscal-Year fundraising exhibition with the E.T.A. A & B squads in singles against (this year) Quebec's notoriously hapless Jr. Davis and Jr. Wightman Cup squads, 74 74 invited down under very quiet lowprofile political conditions via the good expatriate offices of Avril Incandenza to get vivisected by Wayne and Hal et al for the philanthropic amus.e.m.e.nt of E.T.A. patrons and alums, then to dance the P.M. away at a catered supper and Alumni Ball - the weekend right before Thanksgiving week and the WhataBurger Invitational in sunny AZ, because this year in addition to Friday 11/20 they also get Sat.u.r.day 11/21 off, as in from both cla.s.s and practice, because C.T. and Scht.i.tt have arranged a special one-match doubles exhibition for the Sat.u.r.day A.M. following the big meet, one between two female coaches of the Quebecois Wightmans and E.T.A.'s infamous Vaught twins, Caryn and Sharyn Vaught, seventeen, O.N.A.N.'s top-ranked junior women's doubles team, unbeaten in three years, an unbeatable duo, uncanny in their cooperation on the court, moving as One at all times, playing not just as if but in fact because they shared a brain, or at least the psych.o.m.otor lobes of one, the twins Siamese, fused at the left and right temple, banned from Singles by O.N.A.N. regs, the broad-shadow-casting Vaughts, flinty-eyed tire-executive's daughters out of Akron, using her/their four legs to cover chilling amounts of court, plus to sweep the Charleston compet.i.tion at every post-exhibition formal ball for the last five years running. Tavis'll be on Wayne to play some sort of exhibitory thing, too, though asking Wayne to publicly smear a second Quebecer in two days might be a bit much. And but everyone who's anyone'll be down at the Lung, watching the Vaughts vivisect some adult-ranked Nucks, plus maybe Wayne, invited down under very quiet lowprofile political conditions via the good expatriate offices of Avril Incandenza to get vivisected by Wayne and Hal et al for the philanthropic amus.e.m.e.nt of E.T.A. patrons and alums, then to dance the P.M. away at a catered supper and Alumni Ball - the weekend right before Thanksgiving week and the WhataBurger Invitational in sunny AZ, because this year in addition to Friday 11/20 they also get Sat.u.r.day 11/21 off, as in from both cla.s.s and practice, because C.T. and Scht.i.tt have arranged a special one-match doubles exhibition for the Sat.u.r.day A.M. following the big meet, one between two female coaches of the Quebecois Wightmans and E.T.A.'s infamous Vaught twins, Caryn and Sharyn Vaught, seventeen, O.N.A.N.'s top-ranked junior women's doubles team, unbeaten in three years, an unbeatable duo, uncanny in their cooperation on the court, moving as One at all times, playing not just as if but in fact because they shared a brain, or at least the psych.o.m.otor lobes of one, the twins Siamese, fused at the left and right temple, banned from Singles by O.N.A.N. regs, the broad-shadow-casting Vaughts, flinty-eyed tire-executive's daughters out of Akron, using her/their four legs to cover chilling amounts of court, plus to sweep the Charleston compet.i.tion at every post-exhibition formal ball for the last five years running. Tavis'll be on Wayne to play some sort of exhibitory thing, too, though asking Wayne to publicly smear a second Quebecer in two days might be a bit much. And but everyone who's anyone'll be down at the Lung, watching the Vaughts vivisect some adult-ranked Nucks, plus maybe Wayne, 75 75 then the E.T.A.s will get Sat.u.r.day to rest and recharge before starting both the pre-WhataBurger training week and the bell-lap of prep for 12/12's Boards, meaning late Friday night Sunday A.M. will give Pemulis, Hal, and Axford (and maybe Struck if Pemulis needs to let Struck in, for help with library-tossing) enough time to psychospiritually rally from whatever meninges-withering hangover the incredibly potent DMZ might involve... and Axford in the sauna predicted it would be a witherer indeed, since even just LSD alone he observed left you the next day not just sick or down but utterly empty, a sh.e.l.l, void inside, like your soul was a wrung-out sponge. Hal wasn't sure he concurred. An alcohol hangover was definitely no frolic in the psychic glade, all thirsty and sick and your eyes bulging and receding with your pulse, but after a night of involved hallucinogens Hal said the dawn seemed to confer on his psyche a kind of pale sweet aura, a luminescence. then the E.T.A.s will get Sat.u.r.day to rest and recharge before starting both the pre-WhataBurger training week and the bell-lap of prep for 12/12's Boards, meaning late Friday night Sunday A.M. will give Pemulis, Hal, and Axford (and maybe Struck if Pemulis needs to let Struck in, for help with library-tossing) enough time to psychospiritually rally from whatever meninges-withering hangover the incredibly potent DMZ might involve... and Axford in the sauna predicted it would be a witherer indeed, since even just LSD alone he observed left you the next day not just sick or down but utterly empty, a sh.e.l.l, void inside, like your soul was a wrung-out sponge. Hal wasn't sure he concurred. An alcohol hangover was definitely no frolic in the psychic glade, all thirsty and sick and your eyes bulging and receding with your pulse, but after a night of involved hallucinogens Hal said the dawn seemed to confer on his psyche a kind of pale sweet aura, a luminescence. 76 76 Halation, Axford observed. Halation, Axford observed.

Pemulis appears to have left out of his calculations the fact that he'll get that Sat.u.r.day P.M. off cla.s.ses only if he makes the travelling list for the Tucson-WhataBurger the following week, and that unlike Hal and Axford he's not a lock: Pemulis's U.S.T.A. rank, excepting his halcyon thirteenth year in the Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken, has never gotten higher than 128, and the WhataBurger draws kids from all over O.N.A.N. and even Europe; the draw will have to be weak indeed for him to get even one of the 64 Qualifying-Round invitations. Axford's on the fringes of the top 50, but he got to go last year at seventeen, so he's almost got to get to go. And Hal is looking at getting a Third or maybe Fourth Seed in 18's Singles; he's definitely going, barring some sort of cataclysmic ankle-relapse against either Port Wash. or Quebec. Axford postulates that Pemulis isn't miscalculating so much as simply showing a slitty-eyed confidence, which as far as his match-play outlook is concerned would be unusual and rather a fine thing - prorector Aubrey deLint says (publicly) that seeing M. Pemulis in practice v. seeing M. Pemulis in a real match that means anything is like getting to know some girl through e-mail as like e-mail-keyboard-type penpals and really falling for her and then finally meeting her in person and finding out she's got like just one enormous t.i.t in the exact middle of her chest or something like that. 77 77 Mario will get to come along if Avril can convince C.T. to bring him along to get WhataBurger footage for this year's E.T.A. promotional Xmas-giveaway-to-private-and-incorporated-patrons cartridge.

Schacht and the glossy Syrian are laughing together about something up at the net-post, where they've walked to gather gear and various spare rotator-cuff- and knee-appliances after the Syrian kind of cornily jumped the net and pumped Schacht's hand, breath and sweat-steam rising up off and moving off through the fence's mesh toward the manicured western hills as Mario's laugh rings out at some broad mock-supplicant's gesture Schacht's just now made.

7 NOVEMBER.

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.

You can be at certain parties and not really be there. You can hear how certain parties have their own implied ends embedded in the ch.o.r.eography of the party itself. One of the saddest times Joelle van Dyne ever feels anywhere is that invisible pivot where a party ends - even a bad party - that moment of unspoken accord when everyone starts collecting his lighter and date, jacket or greatcoat, his one last beer hanging from the plastic rind's five rings, says certain perfunctory things to the hostess in a way that acknowledges their perfunctoriness without seeming insincere, and leaves, usually shutting the door. When everybody's voices recede down the hall. When the hostess turns back in from the closed door and sees the litter and the expanding white V of utter silence in the party's wake.

Joelle, at the end of her rope and preparing to hang from it, listening, is supported by a polished hardwood floor above both river and Bay's edge, perched uncomfortably in striated light in one of Molly Notkin's chairs molded in the likeness of great filmmakers from the celluloid canon, seated between empty Cukor and frightening Murnau in Melies's fibergla.s.s lap, his trousers' crease uncomfortable and his c.u.mmerbund M.I.T.-crested. The lurid chairs' directors are larger than life: Joelle's feet dangle well off the floor, her squished hamstrings beginning to burn under a damp thick cotton Brazilian skirt which is vivid, curled pale purples and fresh red against a Latin black that seems to glow above pale knees and white rayon kneesocks and feet in clogs that are hanging half off, legs swinging like a child's, always feeling like a child in Molly's chairs, conspicuously perched in the eye of a bad party's somewhat forced-feeling storm of wit and good cheer, sitting by herself under what used to be her window, the daughter of a low-pH chemist and homemaker from western Kentucky, a lot of fun to be with, normally, if you can get over the disconcerting veil.

Among pernicious myths is the one where people always get very upbeat and generous and other-directed right before they eliminate their own map for keeps. The truth is that the hours before a suicide are usually an interval of enormous conceit and self-involvement.

There are decorative bars, slender and of black iron that pigeon droppings have made piebald, over the west windows to this third-floor cooperative apartment on the East Cambridge fringes of the Back Bay, where near-Professor Notkin is holding a party to celebrate pa.s.sing her Orals in Film & Film-Cartridge Theory, the doctoral program where Joelle - before her retreat into broadcast sound - had met her.

Molly Notkin often confides on the phone to Joelle van Dyne about the one tormented love of Notkin's life thus far, an erotically circ.u.mscribed G. W. Pabst scholar at New York University tortured by the neurotic conviction that there are only a finite number of erections possible in the world at any one time and that his tumescence means e.g. the detumescence of some perhaps more deserving or tortured Third World sorghum farmer or something, so that whenever he tumefies he'll suffer the same order of guilt that your less eccentrically tortured Ph.D.-type person will suffer at the idea of, say, wearing baby-seal fur. Molly still takes the high-speed rail down to visit him every couple weeks, to be there for him in case by some selfish mischance he happens to harden, prompting in him black waves of self-disgust and an extreme neediness for understanding and nonjudgmental love. She and poor Molly Notkin are just the same, Joelle reflects, seated alone, watching doctoral candidates taste wine - sisters, sororal twins. With her fear of direct light, Notkin. And the disguises and whiskers are simply veiled veils. How many sub-rosa twins are there, out there, really? What if heredity, instead of linear, is branching? What if it's not arousal that's so finitely circ.u.mscribed? What if in fact there were ever only like two really distinct individual people walking around back there in history's mist? That all difference descends from this difference? The whole and the partial. The damaged and the intact. The deformed and the paralyzingly beautiful. The insane and the attendant. The hidden and the blindingly open. The performer and the audience. No Zen-type One, always rather Two, one upside-down in a convex lens.

Joelle is thinking about what she has in her purse. She sits alone in her linen veil and pretty skirt, obliquely looked at, listening to bits of conversation she reels in out of the overall voices' noise but seeing no one really else, the absolute end of her life and beauty running in a kind of stuttered old hand-held 16mm before her eyes, projected against the white screen on her side, for once, from Uncle Bud and twirling to Orin and Jim and YYY, all the way up to today's wet walk here from the Red Line's Downtown stop, walking the whole way from East Charles St., employing a self-conscious and kind of formal stride, but undeniably pretty, the overall walk toward her last hour was, on this last day before the great O.N.A.N.ite Interdependence revel. East Charles to the Back Bay today is a route full of rained-on sienna-glazed streets and upscale businesses with awnings and wooden signs hung with cute Colonial script, and people looking at her like you look at the blind, naked gazes, not knowing she could see everything at all times. She likes the wet walk for this, everything milky and halated through her veil's damp linen, the brick sidewalks of Charles St. unchipped and impersonally crowded, her legs on autopilot, she a perceptual engine, holding the collar of her overcoat closed at her poncho's neckline in a way that lets her hold the veil secure against her face with a finger on her chin, thinking always about what she has in her purse, stopping in at a discount tobacco-nist and buying a quality cigar in a gla.s.s tube and then a block later placing the cigar inside carefully in among the overflowing waste atop a corner receptacle of pine-green mesh, but keeps the tube, puts the gla.s.s tube in her purse, can hear the rain's thup thup on tight umbrellas and hear it hiss in the street, and can see droplets broken and regathering on her polyresin coat, cars sheening by with the special lonely sound of cars in rain, wipers making black rainbows on taxis' s.h.i.+ning winds.h.i.+elds. In every alley are green I.W.D. dumpsters and the smaller red I.W.D. dumpsters to take the over-flow from the green dumpsters. And the sound of her wood-sole clogs against the receding staccato of brittle women's high heels on brick westward as Charles St. now approaches Boston Common and becomes less quaint and upscale: sodden litter - flat the way only wet litter can be flat - appears on the sidewalk and in the curb's seam, and now murky-colored people with sacks and grocery carts appraising that litter, squatting to lift and sift through litter; and the rustle and jut of limbs from dumpsters being sifted by people who all day do nothing but sift through I.W.D. dumpsters; and other people's blue shoeless limbs extending in coronal rays from refrigerator boxes in each block's three alleys, and the little cataract of rainwater off the edge of each dumpster's red annex's downsloping side and hitting refrigerator boxes' tops with a rhythmless thappathappappathap; somebody going on tight umbrellas and hear it hiss in the street, and can see droplets broken and regathering on her polyresin coat, cars sheening by with the special lonely sound of cars in rain, wipers making black rainbows on taxis' s.h.i.+ning winds.h.i.+elds. In every alley are green I.W.D. dumpsters and the smaller red I.W.D. dumpsters to take the over-flow from the green dumpsters. And the sound of her wood-sole clogs against the receding staccato of brittle women's high heels on brick westward as Charles St. now approaches Boston Common and becomes less quaint and upscale: sodden litter - flat the way only wet litter can be flat - appears on the sidewalk and in the curb's seam, and now murky-colored people with sacks and grocery carts appraising that litter, squatting to lift and sift through litter; and the rustle and jut of limbs from dumpsters being sifted by people who all day do nothing but sift through I.W.D. dumpsters; and other people's blue shoeless limbs extending in coronal rays from refrigerator boxes in each block's three alleys, and the little cataract of rainwater off the edge of each dumpster's red annex's downsloping side and hitting refrigerator boxes' tops with a rhythmless thappathappappathap; somebody going Pssssst Pssssst from an alley's lip, and ghastly-white or blotched faces declaiming to thin air from recessed doorways curtained by rain, and for an other-directed second Joelle wishes she'd hung on to the cigar, to give away, and moving westward into the territory of the Endless Stem near the end of Charles she starts to dispense change she is asked for from doorways and inverted up-tilted boxes; and she gets asked about the deal with the veil with a lack of delicacy she rather prefers. A sooty wheelchaired man with a dead white face below a NOTRE RAI PAYS cap silently extends a hand for coins - a puffed red cut across that businesslike palm is half-healed and almost visibly closing. It looks like a dent in dough. Joelle gives him a folded U.S. twenty and likes that he says nothing. from an alley's lip, and ghastly-white or blotched faces declaiming to thin air from recessed doorways curtained by rain, and for an other-directed second Joelle wishes she'd hung on to the cigar, to give away, and moving westward into the territory of the Endless Stem near the end of Charles she starts to dispense change she is asked for from doorways and inverted up-tilted boxes; and she gets asked about the deal with the veil with a lack of delicacy she rather prefers. A sooty wheelchaired man with a dead white face below a NOTRE RAI PAYS cap silently extends a hand for coins - a puffed red cut across that businesslike palm is half-healed and almost visibly closing. It looks like a dent in dough. Joelle gives him a folded U.S. twenty and likes that he says nothing.

She buys a .473-liter Pepsi Cola in a blunt plastic bottle at a Store 24 whose Jordanian clerk just looks at her blankly when she asks if they carry Big Red Soda Water, and settles for the Pepsi and comes out and pours the pop out down a storm-drain and watches it pool there foaming brownly and stay put because the drain's grate is clogged solid with leaves and sodden litter. She walks on toward the Common with the empty bottle and gla.s.s tube in her purse. There was no need to buy Ch.o.r.e Boy pads at the Store 24.

Joelle van Dyne is excruciatingly alive and encaged, and in the director's lap can call up everything from all times. What will be that most self-involved of acts, self-cancelling, to lock oneself in Molly Notkin's bedroom or bath and get so high that she's going to fall down and stop breathing and turn blue and die, clutching her heart. No more back and forth. Boston Common is like a lush hole Boston's built itself around, a two-k. square of s.h.i.+ny trees and dripping limbs and green benches over wet gra.s.s. Pigeons all over, the same sooty cream as the willows' rinds. Three young black men perched like tough crows along a bench's back approve her body and call her b.i.t.c.h b.i.t.c.h with harmless affection and ask where's the wedding at. No more deciding to stop at 2300h. and then barely getting through the hour's show and hurtling back home at 0130h. and smoking the C