Infinite Jest Part 14

'They used to be less beautiful but then Rutherford said to quit sleeping face-down.'

'No no I'm saying that this, this this, this whole thing, what you and I are discoursing whole thing, what you and I are discoursing within, within, is a technologically const.i.tuted s.p.a.ce.' is a technologically const.i.tuted s.p.a.ce.'

'a du nous avons foi au poison.'

'It's good cheese, but I've had better cheese.'

'Mainwaring, this is Kirby, Kirby here's in pain, he's been telling me about it and now he'd like to tell you about it.'

'- complete mystery why Eve Plumb didn't show, it's known she'd reupped for the part, the whole rest of them were there, even Henderson and that Davis woman as Alice who had to be wheeled out under nurses' care, my G.o.d and Peter, looking as if he'd eaten nothing but pastry for the past forty years, Greg with that absurd hairpiece and snakeskin boots, yes but all the kids recognizable, underneath, somehow, this pre-digital insistence on continuity through time that was the project's whole magic and raison, raison, you know this, you're current on pre-digital phenomenology and Brady-theory. And then but now here's this entirely incongruous you know this, you're current on pre-digital phenomenology and Brady-theory. And then but now here's this entirely incongruous middle-aged black woman middle-aged black woman playing Jan!' playing Jan!'

'De gustibus non est disputandum.'

'b.a.l.l.s.'

'An incongruous central blackness could have served to accentuate the terrible whiteness that had been in ineluct -'

'The entire historical effect of a seminal program was horribly, horribly altered. Terribly altered.'

'Eisenstein and Kurosawa and Michaux walk into a bar.'

'You know those ma.s.s-market cartridges, for the ma.s.ses? The ones that are so bad they're somehow perversely good? This was worse than that.'

'- so-called phantom, but real. And mobile. First the spine. Then not the spine but the right eye-socket. Then the old socket's fit as a fiddle but the thumb, the thumb doubles me over. It won't stay put.'

'f.u.c.ks with the emulsion's gradient so that all the tesseract's angles appear appear to be right-angled, except in -' to be right-angled, except in -'

'So what I did I sat right up next to him, you see, so in a sense he didn't have room to stalk or draw a bead, Keck had said they needed a good ten m., so I c.o.c.ked the hat just so, just ever so slightly, like so, just c.o.c.ked it over to the side like so and sat down practically on the man's knee, asked after his show-carp, he keeps pedigreed carp, and of course you can imagine what -'

'- more interesting issue from a Heideggerian perspective is a priori, a priori,whether s.p.a.ce as a concept is enframed by technology as a concept.'

'It has a mobile cunning, a kind of wraith- or phantom-like -'

'Because they're emotional more labile at that stage.'

' "So get dentures?" she said. "So get dentures? dentures?" '

'Who shot The Incision? The Incision? Who did the cinematography on Who did the cinematography on The Incision? The Incision?'

'- way it can be film qua film. Comstock says if it even exists it has to be something more like an aesthetic pharmaceutical. Some beastly post-annular scopophiliacal vector. Suprasubliminals and that. Some kind of abstractable hypnosis, an optical dopamine-cue. A recorded delusion. Duquette says he's lost contact with three colleagues. He said a good bit of Berkeley isn't answering their phone.'

'I don't think anyone here would dispute that they're absolutely fetching t.i.ts, Melinda.'

'We had blinis with caviar. There were tartines. We had sweetbreads in mushroom cream sauce. He said it was all on him. He said he was treating. There was roast artichoke topped with a sort of sly aioli. Mutton stuffed with foie gras, double chocolate rum cake. Seven kinds of cheese. A kiwi glace and brandy in snifters you needed two hands to swirl.'

'That c.o.ke-addled f.a.g in his Morris Mini.'

The prosthetic film-scholar: 'Fans do not begin to keep it all in the Great Convexity. It creeps back in. What goes around, it comes back around. This your nation refuses to learn. It will keep creeping back in. You cannot give away your filth and prevent all creepage, no? Filth by its very nature it is a thing that is creeping always back. Me, I can remember when your Charles was cafe with cream. Look now at it. It is the blue river. You have a river outside you that is robin-egg's blue.'

'I think you mean Great Concavity, Alain.'

'I meant Great Convexity. I know what is the thing I meant.'

'And then it turned out he'd put ipecac in the brandy. It was the most horrible thing you've ever seen. Everyone, all over, spouting like whales. I'd heard the term projectile vomiting projectile vomitingbut I never thought that I - you could aim, aim, the pressure was such that you could the pressure was such that you could aim. aim. And out come his grad technicians from under the tablecloth's like overhang, and he pulls out a canvas chair and clapper and begins filming the whole horrible staggering spouting groaning -' And out come his grad technicians from under the tablecloth's like overhang, and he pulls out a canvas chair and clapper and begins filming the whole horrible staggering spouting groaning -'

'This ultimate cartridge-as-ecstatic-death rumor's been going around like a lazy toilet since Dishmaster, for Christ's sake. Simply make inquiries, mention some obscure foundation grant, obtain the thing through whatever shade of market the thing's alleged to be out in. Have a look. See that it's doubtless just high-concept erotica or an hour of rotating whorls. Or something like late Makavajev, something that's only entertaining after it's over, on reflection.'

The striated parallelogram of P.M. sunlight is elongating in transit across the coop's eastern wall, over bottle-laden sideboard and gla.s.s cabinet of antique editing equipment and louvered vent and shelves of art-cartridges in their dull black and dun cases. The mole-studded man in the equestrian helmet is either winking at her or has a tic. There's the pre-suicide's cla.s.sic longing: Sit down one second, I want to tell you everything. My name is Joelle van Dyne, Dutch-Irish, and I was reared on family land east of s.h.i.+ny Prize, Kentucky, the only child of a low-pH chemist and his second wife. I now have no accent except under stress. I am 1.7 meters tall and weigh 48 kilograms. I occupy s.p.a.ce and have ma.s.s. I breathe in and breathe out. Joelle has never before today been conscious of the sustained volition required to just breathe in and breathe out, her veil recessing into nose and rounded mouth and then bowing out slightly like curtains over an opened pane.

'Convexity.'

'Concavity!'

'Convexity!'

'Concavity d.a.m.n your eyes!' d.a.m.n your eyes!'

The bathroom has a hook and a mirrored medicine cabinet over the sink and is off the bedroom. Molly Notkin's bedroom looks like the bedroom of someone who stays in bed for serious lengths of time. A pair of pantyhose has been tossed onto a lamp. There are not crumbs but whole portions of crackers protruding from the gray surf of wopsed-up bedding. A photo of the phalloneurotic New Yorker with the same fold-out triangular support as the blank cartridge's anti-ad. A Ziploc of pot and EZ-Widers and seeds in the ashtray. Books with German and Cyrillic t.i.tles lie open in spine-cracking att.i.tudes on the colorless rug. Joelle's never liked the fact that Notkin's father's photograph is nailed at iconic height to the wall above the head-board, a systems planner out of Knoxville TN, his smile the smile of a man who wears white loafers and a squirting carnation. And why are bathrooms always way brighter lit than whatever room they're off? On the private side of the bathroom door she's had to take two damp towels off the top of to close all the way, the same rotten old hook for a lock never quite ever seeming to want to fit its receptacle in the jamb, the party's music now some horrible collection of mollified rock cla.s.sics with all soft rock's grim dental a.s.sociations, the business side of the door is hung with a Selective Automation of Knoxville calendar from before Subsidized Time and cut-out photos of Kinski as Paganini and Leaud as Doinel and a borderless still of the crowd scene in what looks like Peterson's The Lead Shoes The Lead Shoesand rather curiously the offprinted page of J. van Dyne, M.A.'s one and only published film-theory monograph. 81 81 Joelle can smell, through her veil and own stale exhalations, the little room's complicated spice of sandalwood rubble in a little violet-ribboned pomander and deodorant soap and the sharp decayed-lemon odor of stress-diarrhea. Low-budget celluloid horror films created ambiguity and possible elision by putting Joelle can smell, through her veil and own stale exhalations, the little room's complicated spice of sandalwood rubble in a little violet-ribboned pomander and deodorant soap and the sharp decayed-lemon odor of stress-diarrhea. Low-budget celluloid horror films created ambiguity and possible elision by putting ? ? after after THE END, THE END,is what pops into her head: THE END? THE END? amid the odors of mildew and d.i.c.ky academic digestion? Joelle's mother's family had no indoor plumbing. It is all right. She represses all bathetic this-will-be-the-last-thing-I-smell thought-patterns. Joelle is going to have Too Much Fun in here. It was beyond all else so much amid the odors of mildew and d.i.c.ky academic digestion? Joelle's mother's family had no indoor plumbing. It is all right. She represses all bathetic this-will-be-the-last-thing-I-smell thought-patterns. Joelle is going to have Too Much Fun in here. It was beyond all else so much fun, fun, at the start. Orin had neither disapproved nor partaken; his urine was an open book because of football. Jim hadn't disapproved so much as been vacant with disinterest. His Too Much was neat bourbon, and he had lived life to the fullest, and then gone in for detoxification, again and again. This had been simply too much fun, at the start. So much better even than nasaling the Material up through rolled currency and waiting for the cold bitter drip at the back of your throat and cleaning the newly s.p.a.cious apartment to within an inch of its life while your mouth twitches and writhes unbidden beneath the veil. The 'base frees and condenses, compresses the whole experience to the implosion of one terrible shattering spike in the graph, an afflated o.r.g.a.s.m of the heart that makes her feel, truly, at the start. Orin had neither disapproved nor partaken; his urine was an open book because of football. Jim hadn't disapproved so much as been vacant with disinterest. His Too Much was neat bourbon, and he had lived life to the fullest, and then gone in for detoxification, again and again. This had been simply too much fun, at the start. So much better even than nasaling the Material up through rolled currency and waiting for the cold bitter drip at the back of your throat and cleaning the newly s.p.a.cious apartment to within an inch of its life while your mouth twitches and writhes unbidden beneath the veil. The 'base frees and condenses, compresses the whole experience to the implosion of one terrible shattering spike in the graph, an afflated o.r.g.a.s.m of the heart that makes her feel, truly, attractive, attractive, sheltered by limits, deveiled and loved, observed and alone and sufficient and female, full, as if watched for an instant by G.o.d. She always sees, after inhaling, right at the apex, at the graph's spike's tip, Bernini's 'Ecstasy of St. Teresa,' behind gla.s.s, at the Vittoria, for some reason, the saint rec.u.mbent, half-supine, her flowing stone robe lifted by the angel in whose other hand a bare arrow is raised for that best descent, the saint's legs frozen in opening, the angel's expression not charity but the perfect vice of barb-headed love. The stuff had been not just her encaging G.o.d but her lover, too, fiendish, angelic, of rock. The toilet seat is up. She can hear a helicopter's chop somewhere overhead east, a traffic helicopter over Storrow, and Molly Notkin's shriek as an enormous gla.s.s crash sounds off in the living room, imagines her beard hanging aslant and her mouth ellipsed with champagne's foam as she waves off the breakage that signals good Party, can hear through the door the ecstatic Melinda's apologies and Molly's laugh, which sounds like a shriek: sheltered by limits, deveiled and loved, observed and alone and sufficient and female, full, as if watched for an instant by G.o.d. She always sees, after inhaling, right at the apex, at the graph's spike's tip, Bernini's 'Ecstasy of St. Teresa,' behind gla.s.s, at the Vittoria, for some reason, the saint rec.u.mbent, half-supine, her flowing stone robe lifted by the angel in whose other hand a bare arrow is raised for that best descent, the saint's legs frozen in opening, the angel's expression not charity but the perfect vice of barb-headed love. The stuff had been not just her encaging G.o.d but her lover, too, fiendish, angelic, of rock. The toilet seat is up. She can hear a helicopter's chop somewhere overhead east, a traffic helicopter over Storrow, and Molly Notkin's shriek as an enormous gla.s.s crash sounds off in the living room, imagines her beard hanging aslant and her mouth ellipsed with champagne's foam as she waves off the breakage that signals good Party, can hear through the door the ecstatic Melinda's apologies and Molly's laugh, which sounds like a shriek: 'Oh everything falls off the wall sooner or later.'

Joelle has lifted her veil back to cover her skull like a bride. Since she threw away her pipes and bowls and screens again this A.M. she is going to have to be resourceful. On the counter of an old sink the same not-quite white as the floor and ceiling (the wallpaper is a maddening uncountable pattern of roses twined in garlands on sticks) on the counter are an old splay-bristled toothbrush, tube of Gleem rolled neatly up from the bottom, unsavory old NoCoat sc.r.a.per, rubber cement, NeGram, depilatory ointment, tube of Monostat not squeezed from the bottom, phony-beard whiskerbits and curled green threads of used mint floss and Parapectolin and a wholly unsqueezed tube of diaphragm-foam and no makeup but serious styling gel in a big jar with no lid and hairs around the rim and an empty tampon box half-filled with nickels and pennies and rubber bands, and Joelle sweeps an arm across the counter and squunches everything over to the side under the small rod with a washcloth wrung viciously out and dried in the tight spiral of a twisted cord, and if some items do totter and fall to the floor it is all right because everything eventually has to fall. On the cleared counter goes Joelle's misshapen purse. The absence of veil dulls the bathroom's smells, somehow.

She's been resourceful before, but this is the most deliberate Joelle has been able to be about it in something like a year. From the purse she removes the plastic Pepsi container, a box of wooden matches kept dry in a resealable baggie, two little thick glycine bags each holding four grams of pharmaceutical-grade cocaine, a single-edge razor blade (increasingly tough to find), a little black Kodachrome canister whose gray lid she pops and discards to reveal baking soda sifted fine as talc, the empty gla.s.s cigar tube, a folded square of Reynolds Wrap foil the size of a playing card, and an amputated length of the bottom of a quality wire coat hanger. The overhead light casts shadows of her hands over what she needs, so she turns on the light over the medicine cabinet's mirror as well. The light stutters and hums and bathes the counter with cold lithium-free fluorescence. She undoes the four pins and removes the veil from her head and places it on the counter with the rest of the Material. Lady Delphina's little glycine baglets have clever seals that are green when sealed and blue and yellow when not. She taps half a glycine's worth into the cigar tube and adds half again as much baking soda, spilling some of the soda in a parenthesis of bright white on the counter. This is the most deliberate she's been able to be in at least a year. She turns the sink's C k.n.o.b and lets the water get really cold, then cranks the volume back to a trickle and fills the rest of the tube to the top with water. She holds the tube up straight and gently taps on its side with a blunt unpainted nail, watching the water slowly darken the powders beneath it. She produces a double rose of flame in the mirror that illuminates the right side of her face as she holds the tube over the matches' flame and waits for the stuff to begin to bubble. She uses two matches, twice. When the tube gets too hot to hold she takes and folds her veil and uses it as a kind of oven-mitt over the fingers of her left hand, careful (from habit and experience) not to let the bottom corners get close enough to the flame to brown. After it's bubbled for just a second Joelle shakes out the matches with a flourish and tosses them in the toilet to hear that briefest of hisses. She takes up the black wire prod from the hanger and begins to stir and mash the just-bubbled stuff in the tube, feeling it thicken quickly and its resistance to the wire's tiny circles increase. It was when her hands started to tremble during this part of the cooking procedure that she'd first known she liked this more than anyone can like anything and still live. She is not stupid. The Charles rolling away far below the windowless bathroom is vividly blue, more mildly blue on top from the fresh rainwater that had made purple rings appear and widen, a deeper Magic Markertype blue below the dilute layer, gulls stamped to the cleared sky, motionless as kites. A bulky thump sounds from behind the large flat-top Enfield hill on the river's south sh.o.r.e, a large but relatively shapeless projectile of drums wrapped in brown postal paper and belted with twine hurtling in a broad upward arc that bothers the gulls into dips and wheels, the brown package quickly a pinpoint in the yet-hazy sky to the north, where a yellow-brown cloud hangs just above the line between sky and terrain, its top slowly dispersing and opening out so that the cloud looks like a not very pretty sort of wastebasket, waiting. Inside, Joelle hears only a bit of the bulky thump, which could be anything. The only other thing besides what she's about to do too much of here right now she'd ever come close to feeling this way about: In Joelle's childhood, Paducah, not too bad a drive from s.h.i.+ny Prize, still had a few public movie theaters, six and eight separate auditoria cl.u.s.tered in single honeycombs at the edges of interstate malls. The theaters always ended in -plex, -plex, she reflected. The Thisoplex and Thatoplex. It had never struck her as odd. And she never saw even one film there, as a girl, that she didn't just about die with love for. It didn't matter what they were. She and her own personal Daddy up in the front row, they sat in the front rows of the narrow little overinsulated -plexes up in neck-crick territory and let the screen fill their whole visual field, her hand in his lap and their big box of Crackerjacks in her hand and sodapops secure in little rings cut out of the plastic of their seats' arms; and he, always with a wooden match in the corner of his mouth, pointing up into the rectangular world at this one or that one, performers, giant flawless 2D beauties irides-cent on the screen, telling Joelle over and over again how she was prettier than this one or that one right there. Standing in the placid line as he bought the -plex's paper tickets that looked like grocery receipts, knowing that she was going to love the celluloid entertainment no matter what it was, wonderfully innocent, still thinking she reflected. The Thisoplex and Thatoplex. It had never struck her as odd. And she never saw even one film there, as a girl, that she didn't just about die with love for. It didn't matter what they were. She and her own personal Daddy up in the front row, they sat in the front rows of the narrow little overinsulated -plexes up in neck-crick territory and let the screen fill their whole visual field, her hand in his lap and their big box of Crackerjacks in her hand and sodapops secure in little rings cut out of the plastic of their seats' arms; and he, always with a wooden match in the corner of his mouth, pointing up into the rectangular world at this one or that one, performers, giant flawless 2D beauties irides-cent on the screen, telling Joelle over and over again how she was prettier than this one or that one right there. Standing in the placid line as he bought the -plex's paper tickets that looked like grocery receipts, knowing that she was going to love the celluloid entertainment no matter what it was, wonderfully innocent, still thinking quality quality referred to the living teddy bears in Qantas commercials, standing hand-held, eyes even with his wallet's back-pocket bulge, she'd never so much again as in that line felt so referred to the living teddy bears in Qantas commercials, standing hand-held, eyes even with his wallet's back-pocket bulge, she'd never so much again as in that line felt so taken care of, taken care of,destined for big-screen entertainment's unalloyed good fun, never once again until starting in with this lover, cooking and smoking it, five years back, before Incandenza's death, at the start. The punter never made her feel quite so taken care of, taken care of, never made her feel about to be entered by something that didn't know she was there and yet was all about making her feel good anyway, coming in. Entertainment is blind. never made her feel about to be entered by something that didn't know she was there and yet was all about making her feel good anyway, coming in. Entertainment is blind.

The improbable thing of the whole thing is that, when the soda and water and cocaine are mixed right and heated right and stirred just right as the mix cools down, then when the stuff's too stiff to stir and is finally ready to come on out it comes out slick as s.h.i.+t from a goat, just an inverted-ketchup-bottle thump and out the son of a f.u.c.king wh.o.r.e slides, one molded cylinder hard-ened onto the black wire, its snout round from the gla.s.s tube's bottom. The average pre-chopped freebase rock looks like a .38 round. What Joelle now slides with three fillips from the cigar tube is a monstrous white wiener, a county-fair corn dog, its sides a bit rough, like mache, a couple clots left on the inside of the tube that are what you forage and smoke before the Ch.o.r.e Boys and panties.

She is now a little under two deliberate minutes from Too Much Fun for anyone mortal to hope to endure. Her unveiled face in the dirty lit mirror is shocking in the intensity of its absorption. Out in the bedroom doorway she can hear Reeves Mainwaring telling some helium-voiced girl that life is essentially one long search for an ashtray. Too Much Fun. She uses the razor blade to cross-section chunks out of the freebase wiener. You can't whittle thin deli-shaved flakes off because they'll crumble back to powder right away and they anyway don't smoke as well as you'd think. Blunt chunks are S.O.P. Joelle chops out enough chunks for maybe twenty good-sized hits. They form a little quarry on the soft cloth of her folded veil on the counter. Her Brazilian skirt is no longer damp. Reeves Mainwaring's blond imperial often had little bits of food residue in it. 'The Ecstasy of St. Teresa' is on perpetual display at the Vittoria in Rome and she never got to see it. She will never again say And Lo And Loand invite people to watch darkness dance on the face of the deep. 'The Face of the Deep' had been the t.i.tle she'd suggested for Jim's unseen last cartridge, which he'd said would be too pretentious and then used that skull-fragment out of the Hamlet Hamlet graveyard scene instead, which talk about pretentious she'd laughed. His frightened look when she'd laughed is for the life of her the last facial-expression memory she can remember of the man. Orin had referred to his father sometimes as Himself and sometimes as The Mad Stork and once in a slip as The Sad Stork. She lights one wooden match and blows it right out and touches the hot black head to the side of the plastic pop bottle. It melts right through and makes a little hole. The helicopter was probably a traffic helicopter. Somebody at their Academy had had some connection to some traffic helicopter that had had an accident. She can't for the life of her. No one out there knows she is in here getting ready to have Too Much. She can hear Molly Notkin calling through rooms about has anyone seen Keck. In her first theory seminar Reeves Mainwaring had called one film 'wretchedly ill-conceived' and another 'desperately acquiescent' and Molly Notkin had pretended to have a coughing fit and had had a Tennessee accent and that was how they met. The Reynolds Wrap is to make a screen that will rest in the bottle's open top. A regular dope screen is the size of a thimble, its sides spread like an opening bud. Joelle uses the point of some curved nail scissors on the back of the toilet to poke tiny holes in the rectangle of aluminum foil and shapes it into a shallow funnel large enough to siphon gasoline, narrowing its tip to fit in the bottle's mouth. She now owns a pipe with a monster-sized bowl and screen, now, and puts in enough chunklets to make five or six hits at once. The little rocks lie there piled and yellow-white. She puts her lips experimentally to the melted hole in the side of the bottle and draws, then, very deliberately, lights another match and extinguishes it and makes the hole bigger. The idea that she'll never see Molly Notkin or the cerebral Union or her U.H.I.D. support-brothers and -sisters or the YYY engineer or Uncle Bud on a roof or her stepmother in the Locked Ward or her poor personal Daddy again is sentimental and ba.n.a.l. The idea of what she's about in here contains all other ideas and makes them ba.n.a.l. Her gla.s.s of juice is on the back of the toilet, half-empty. The back of the toilet is lightly sheened with condensation of unknown origin. These are facts. This room in this apartment is the sum of very many specific facts and ideas. There is nothing more to it than that. Deliberately setting about to make her heart explode has a.s.sumed the status of just one of these facts. It was an idea but now is about to become a fact. The closer it comes to becoming concrete the more abstract it seems. Things get very abstract. The concrete room was the sum of abstract facts. Are facts abstract, or are they just abstract representations of concrete things? Molly Notkin's middle name is Cantrell. Joelle puts two more matches together and prepares to strike them, breathing rapidly in and out like a diver preparing for a long descent. graveyard scene instead, which talk about pretentious she'd laughed. His frightened look when she'd laughed is for the life of her the last facial-expression memory she can remember of the man. Orin had referred to his father sometimes as Himself and sometimes as The Mad Stork and once in a slip as The Sad Stork. She lights one wooden match and blows it right out and touches the hot black head to the side of the plastic pop bottle. It melts right through and makes a little hole. The helicopter was probably a traffic helicopter. Somebody at their Academy had had some connection to some traffic helicopter that had had an accident. She can't for the life of her. No one out there knows she is in here getting ready to have Too Much. She can hear Molly Notkin calling through rooms about has anyone seen Keck. In her first theory seminar Reeves Mainwaring had called one film 'wretchedly ill-conceived' and another 'desperately acquiescent' and Molly Notkin had pretended to have a coughing fit and had had a Tennessee accent and that was how they met. The Reynolds Wrap is to make a screen that will rest in the bottle's open top. A regular dope screen is the size of a thimble, its sides spread like an opening bud. Joelle uses the point of some curved nail scissors on the back of the toilet to poke tiny holes in the rectangle of aluminum foil and shapes it into a shallow funnel large enough to siphon gasoline, narrowing its tip to fit in the bottle's mouth. She now owns a pipe with a monster-sized bowl and screen, now, and puts in enough chunklets to make five or six hits at once. The little rocks lie there piled and yellow-white. She puts her lips experimentally to the melted hole in the side of the bottle and draws, then, very deliberately, lights another match and extinguishes it and makes the hole bigger. The idea that she'll never see Molly Notkin or the cerebral Union or her U.H.I.D. support-brothers and -sisters or the YYY engineer or Uncle Bud on a roof or her stepmother in the Locked Ward or her poor personal Daddy again is sentimental and ba.n.a.l. The idea of what she's about in here contains all other ideas and makes them ba.n.a.l. Her gla.s.s of juice is on the back of the toilet, half-empty. The back of the toilet is lightly sheened with condensation of unknown origin. These are facts. This room in this apartment is the sum of very many specific facts and ideas. There is nothing more to it than that. Deliberately setting about to make her heart explode has a.s.sumed the status of just one of these facts. It was an idea but now is about to become a fact. The closer it comes to becoming concrete the more abstract it seems. Things get very abstract. The concrete room was the sum of abstract facts. Are facts abstract, or are they just abstract representations of concrete things? Molly Notkin's middle name is Cantrell. Joelle puts two more matches together and prepares to strike them, breathing rapidly in and out like a diver preparing for a long descent.

'I say is someone in there?' The voice is the young post-New Formalist from Pittsburgh who affects Continental and wears an ascot that won't stay tight, with that hesitant knocking of when you know perfectly well someone's in there, the bathroom door composed of thirty-six that's three times a lengthwise twelve recessed two-bevelled squares in a warped rectangle of steam-softened wood, not quite white, the bottom outside corner right here raw wood and mangled from hitting the cabinets' bottom drawer's wicked metal k.n.o.b, through the door and offset 'Red' and glowering actors and calendar and very crowded scene and pubic spiral of pale blue smoke from the elephant-colored rubble of ash and little blackened chunks in the foil funnel's cone, the smoke's baby-blanket blue that's sent her sliding down along the wall past knotted washcloth, towel rack, blood-flower wallpaper and intricately grimed electrical outlet, the light sharp bitter tint of a heated sky's blue that's left her uprightly fetal with chin on knees in yet another North American bathroom, deveiled, too pretty for words, maybe the Prettiest Girl Of All Time (Prettiest G.O.A.T.), knees to chest, slew-footed by the radiant chill of the claw-footed tub's porcelain, Molly's had somebody lacquer the tub in blue, lacquer, she's holding the bottle, recalling vividly its slogan for the last generation was The Choice of a Nude Generation, when she was of back-pocket height and prettier by far than any of the peach-colored t.i.tans they'd gazed up at, his hand in her lap her hand in the box and rooting down past candy for the Prize, more fun way too much fun inside her veil on the counter above her, the stuff in the funnel exhausted though it's still smoking thinly, its graph reaching its highest spiked p.r.i.c.k, peak, the arrow's best descent, so good she can't stand it and reaches out for the cold tub's rim's cold edge to pull herself up as the white- party-noise reaches, for her, the sort of stereophonic precipice of volume to teeter on just before the speakers blow, people barely twitching and conversations strettoing against a ghastly old pre-Carter thing saying 'We've Only Just Begun,' Joelle's limbs have been removed to a distance where their acknowledgment of her commands seems like magic, both clogs simply gone, nowhere in sight, and socks oddly wet, pulls her face up to face the unclean medicine-cabinet mirror, twin roses of flame still hanging in the gla.s.s's corner, hair of the flame she's eaten now trailing like the legs of wasps through the air of the gla.s.s she uses to locate the de-faced veil and what's inside it, loading up the cone again, the ashes from the last load make the world's best filter: this is a fact. Breathes in and out like a savvy diver - 'Look here then who's that in there? Is someone in there? Do open up. I'm on one foot then the other out here. I say Notkin someone's been in here locked in and, well, sounding unwell, amid rather a queer scent.'

- and is knelt vomiting over the lip of the cool blue tub, gouges on the tub's lip revealing sandy white gritty stuff below the lacquer and porcelain, vomiting muddy juice and blue smoke and dots of mercuric red into the claw-footed trough, and can hear again and seems to see, against the fire of her closed lids' blood, bladed vessels aloft in the night to monitor flow, searchlit helicopters, fat fingers of blue light from one sky, searching.

Enfield MA is one of the stranger little facts that make up the idea that is metro Boston, because it is a towns.h.i.+p composed almost entirely of medical, corporate, and spiritual facilities. A kind of arm-shape extending north from Commonwealth Avenue and separating Brighton into Upper and Lower, its elbow nudging East Newton's ribs and its fist sunk into Allston, Enfield's broad munic.i.p.al tax-base includes St. Elizabeth's Hospital, Franciscan Children's Hospital, The Universal Bleacher Co., the Provident Nursing Home, Shuco-Mist Medical Pressure Systems Inc., the Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital Complex, the Svelte Nail Co., half the metro Boston turbine and generating stations of Sunstrand Power and Light (the part that gets taxed is in incorporated Allston), corporate headquarters for 'The ATHSCME Family of Air-Displacement Effectuators' (meaning they make really big fans), the Enfield Tennis Academy, St. John of G.o.d Hospital, Hanneman Orthopedic Hospital, the Leisure Time Ice Company, a Dicalced monastery, the combined St. John's Seminary and offices for the RCC's Boston Archdiocese (partly in Upper Brighton; neither half taxed), convent headquarters of The Sisters for Africa, the National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation, the Dr. George Roebling Runyon Memorial Inst.i.tute for Podiatric Research, regional s.h.i.+ny-truck, land-barge, and catapult facilities for the O.N.A.N.-subsidized Empire Waste Displacement Co. (what the Quebecois call les trebuchets noirs, les trebuchets noirs, spectacular block-long catapults that make a sound like a giant stamping foot as they fling great twine-bundled waste-vehicles into the subannular regions of the Great Concavity at a parabolic alt.i.tude exceeding 5 km.; the devices' slings are of alloy-belted elastic and their huge cupped vehicle-receptacles like catcher's mitts from h.e.l.l, a half dozen or so of the catapults in this like blimp-hangarish thing with a selectively slide-backable roof, taking up a good six square blocks of Enfield's brachiform incursion into the Allston Spur, occasional school tours tolerated but not encouraged), and so on. W/ the whole flexed Enfield limb sleeved in a perimeter layer of light residential and mercantile properties. The Enfield Tennis Academy occupies probably now the nicest site in Enfield, some ten years after balding and shaving flat the top of the big abrupt hill that const.i.tutes a kind of raised cyst on the towns.h.i.+p's elbow, the better part of 75 hectares of broad lawns and cloverleafing paths and topologically cutting-edge erections, 32 asphalt tennis courts and sixteen Har-Tru composition tennis courts and extensive underground maintenance and storage and athletic-training facilities and briers and calliopsis and pines mixed artfully in on the inclines with deciduous trees, the E.T.A. hilltop overlooking on one side, east, historic Commonwealth Avenue's acclivated migration out of the squalor of Lower Brighton - liquor stores and Laundromats and bars and palisades of somber and guano-dappled tenement facades, the huge and brooding Brighton Project high-rises with three-story-high orange I.D.-numerals on the sides, plus liquor stores, and pale men in leather and whole gangs of pale children in leather on the corners and Greek-owned pizza places with yellow walls and dirty corner markets owned by Orientals who try like heck to keep their sidewalks clean but can't, even with hoses, plus the quarter-hourly trundle and ding of the Green Line train's labor up the Ave.'s long rise to Boston College - into the spiky elegance of B.C. and the broad gentrification of Newton out to the west, where the haze-haloed Boston sun drops behind the last node in the four-km. sine wave that is collectively called the historic April Marathon's 'Heartbreak Hill,' the sun always setting fifteen minutes to the nanosecond after deLint turns on the courts' high-tower lights. To I think it must be the southwest, E.T.A. overlooks the steely gray tangle of Sunstrand's transformers and high-voltage grids and coaxial chokers strung with beads of ceramic insulators, with not one Sunstrand smokestack anywhere in sight but a monstrous mega-ohm insulator-cl.u.s.ter at the terminus of a string of signs trailing in from the northeast, each sign talking with many spectacular block-long catapults that make a sound like a giant stamping foot as they fling great twine-bundled waste-vehicles into the subannular regions of the Great Concavity at a parabolic alt.i.tude exceeding 5 km.; the devices' slings are of alloy-belted elastic and their huge cupped vehicle-receptacles like catcher's mitts from h.e.l.l, a half dozen or so of the catapults in this like blimp-hangarish thing with a selectively slide-backable roof, taking up a good six square blocks of Enfield's brachiform incursion into the Allston Spur, occasional school tours tolerated but not encouraged), and so on. W/ the whole flexed Enfield limb sleeved in a perimeter layer of light residential and mercantile properties. The Enfield Tennis Academy occupies probably now the nicest site in Enfield, some ten years after balding and shaving flat the top of the big abrupt hill that const.i.tutes a kind of raised cyst on the towns.h.i.+p's elbow, the better part of 75 hectares of broad lawns and cloverleafing paths and topologically cutting-edge erections, 32 asphalt tennis courts and sixteen Har-Tru composition tennis courts and extensive underground maintenance and storage and athletic-training facilities and briers and calliopsis and pines mixed artfully in on the inclines with deciduous trees, the E.T.A. hilltop overlooking on one side, east, historic Commonwealth Avenue's acclivated migration out of the squalor of Lower Brighton - liquor stores and Laundromats and bars and palisades of somber and guano-dappled tenement facades, the huge and brooding Brighton Project high-rises with three-story-high orange I.D.-numerals on the sides, plus liquor stores, and pale men in leather and whole gangs of pale children in leather on the corners and Greek-owned pizza places with yellow walls and dirty corner markets owned by Orientals who try like heck to keep their sidewalks clean but can't, even with hoses, plus the quarter-hourly trundle and ding of the Green Line train's labor up the Ave.'s long rise to Boston College - into the spiky elegance of B.C. and the broad gentrification of Newton out to the west, where the haze-haloed Boston sun drops behind the last node in the four-km. sine wave that is collectively called the historic April Marathon's 'Heartbreak Hill,' the sun always setting fifteen minutes to the nanosecond after deLint turns on the courts' high-tower lights. To I think it must be the southwest, E.T.A. overlooks the steely gray tangle of Sunstrand's transformers and high-voltage grids and coaxial chokers strung with beads of ceramic insulators, with not one Sunstrand smokestack anywhere in sight but a monstrous mega-ohm insulator-cl.u.s.ter at the terminus of a string of signs trailing in from the northeast, each sign talking with many 's about how many annular-generated amps are waiting underground for anyone who digs or in any way d.i.c.ks around, with hair-raising nonverbal stick-figure symbols of somebody with a shovel going up like a Kleenex in the fireplace. There are smokestacks in the visual background slightly south of Sunstrand, though, from the E.W.D. hangars, each stack with a monstrous ATHSCME 2100-Series A.D.E. (fan) bolted behind it and blowing due north with an insistent high-pitched fury that is somehow soothing, aurally, at E.T.A.'s distance and height. From both the north and northeast tree-lines E.T.A. looks down its hill's steepest, best-planted decline into the complexly decaying grounds of Enfield Marine.

5 NOVEMBER - YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT The transparent phone sounded from somewhere under the hill of bedding 82 82 as Hal was on the edge of the bed with one leg up and his chin on its knee, clipping his nails into a wastebasket that sat several meters away in the middle of the room. It took four rings to find the receiver in the bedding and pull the antenna out. as Hal was on the edge of the bed with one leg up and his chin on its knee, clipping his nails into a wastebasket that sat several meters away in the middle of the room. It took four rings to find the receiver in the bedding and pull the antenna out.

'Mmmyellow.'

'Mr. Incredenza, this is the Enfield Raw Sewage Commission, and quite frankly we've had enough s.h.i.+t out of you.'

'h.e.l.lo Orin.'

'How hangs it, kid.'

'G.o.d, please no, please O., not more Separatism questions.'

'Relax. Never crossed my mind. Social call. Shoot the breeze.'

'Interesting you should call just now. Because I'm clipping my toenails into a wastebasket several meters away.'

'Jesus, you know how I hate the sound of nail clippers.'

'Except I'm shooting seventy-plus percent. The little fragments of clipping. It's uncanny. I keep wanting to go out in the hall and get somebody in here to see it. But I don't want to break the spell.'

'The fragile magic-spell feel of those intervals where it feels you just can't miss.'

'It's definitely one of those can't-miss intervals. It's just like that magical feeling on those rare days out there playing. Playing out of your head, de-Lint calls it. Loach calls it The Zone. Being in The Zone. Those days when you feel perfectly calibrated.'

'Coordinated as G.o.d.'

'Some groove in the shape of the air of the day guides everything down and in.'

'When you feel like you couldn't miss if you tried to.'

'I'm so far away the wastebasket's mouth looks more like a slot than a circle. And yet in they go, ka-ching ka-ching. There went another one. Even the misses are near-misses, caroms off the rim.'

'I'm sitting here with the leg in a whirlpool in the bathroom of a Norwegian deep-tissue therapist's ranch-style house 1100 meters up in the Superst.i.tion mountains. Mesa-Scottsdale in flames far below. The bathroom's redwood-panelled and overlooks a precipice. The sunlight's the color of the bronze.'

'But you never know when the magic will descend on you. You never know when the grooves will open up. And once the magic descends you don't want to change even the smallest detail. You don't know what concordance of factors and variables yields that calibrated can't-miss feeling, and you don't want to soil the magic by trying to figure it out, but you don't want to change your grip, your stick, your side of the court, your angle of incidence to the sun. Your heart's in your throat every time you change sides of the court.'

'You start to get like a superst.i.tious native. What's the word propitiate propitiatethe divine spell.'

'I suddenly understand the gesundheit-impulse, the salt over the shoulder and apotropaic barn-signs. I'm actually frightened to switch feet right now. I'm clipping off the tiniest aerodynamically viable clippings possible, to prolong the time on this foot, in case the magic's a function of the foot. This isn't even the good foot.'

'These can't-miss intervals make superst.i.tious natives out of us all, Hallie. The professional football player's maybe the worst superst.i.tious native of all the sports. That's why all the high-tech padding and garish Lycra and complex play-terminology. The like self-rea.s.suring display of high-tech. Because the bug-eyed native's lurking just under the surface, we know. The bug-eyed spear-rattling gra.s.s-skirted primitive, feeding virgins to Popogatapec and afraid of planes.'

'The new Discursive O.E.D. Discursive O.E.D.says the Ahts of Vancouver used to cut virgins' throats and pour the blood very carefully into the orifices of the embalmed bodies of their ancestors.'

'I can hear those clippers. Quit with the clippers a second.'

'The phone's no longer wedged under my jaw. I can even do it one-handed, holding the phone in one hand. But it's still the same foot.'

'You don't know from true bug-eyed athletic superst.i.tion till you hit the pro ranks, Hallie. When you hit the Show is when you'll understand primitive primitive. Winning streaks bring the native bubbling up to the surface. Jock straps unwashed game after game until they stand up by themselves in the overhead luggage compartments of planes. Bizarrely ritualized dressing, eating, peeing.'

'Micturation.'

'Picture a 200-kilo interior lineman insisting on sitting down to pee. Don't even ask what wives and girlfriends have to suffer during a can't-miss winning streak.'

'I don't want to hear s.e.xual stuff.'

'Then there are the players who write down exactly what they say to everybody before a game, so if it's a magical can't-miss-type game they can say exactly the same things to the same people in the same exact order before the next game.'

'Apparently the Ahts tried to fill up ancestors' bodies completely with virgin-blood to preserve the privacy of their own mental states. The apposite Aht dictum here being quote "The sated ghost cannot see secret things." The Discursive O.E.D. Discursive O.E.D.postulates that this is one of the earlier on-record prophylactics against schizophrenia.'

'Hey Hallie?'

'After a burial, rural Papineau-region Quebecers purportedly drill a small hole down from ground level all the way down through the lid of the coffin, to let out the soul, if it wants out.'

'Hey Hallie? I think I'm being followed.'

'This is the big moment. I've totally exhausted the left foot finally and am switching to the right foot. This'll be the real test of the fragility of the spell.'

'I said I think I'm being followed.'

'Some men are born to lead, O.'

'I'm serious. And here's the weird part.'

'Here's the part that explains why you're sharing this with your estranged little brother instead of with anybody whose credulity you'd actually value.'

'The weird part is I think I'm being followed by... by handicapped people.'

'Two for three on the right foot, with one carom. Jury's still out.'

'Quit with the clipping a second. I'm not kidding. Take the other day. I strike up a conversation with a certain Subject in line in the post office. I notice a guy in a wheelchair behind us. No big deal. Are you listening?'

'What are you doing going to the post office? You hate snail-mail. And you quit mailing the Moms the pseudo-form-replies two years ago, Mario says.'

'But so the conversation goes well and hits it off, Seduction Strategies 12 and 16 are employed, which I'll tell you about sometime at length. The point is the Subject and I walk out together hitting it off and there's another guy in a wheelchair whittling in the shade of a shop-awning just down the street. OK. Still not necessarily any kind of deal. But now the Subject and I drive to her trailer park -'

'Phoenix has trailer parks? Not those silverish metal metal trailers.' trailers.'

'So but we get out of the car, and across the park's lot here's yet another another wheelchaired guy, trying to maneuver in the gravel and not making a very good job of it.' wheelchaired guy, trying to maneuver in the gravel and not making a very good job of it.'

'Doesn't Arizona have more than its share of the old and infirm?'

'But none of these handicapped guys were old. And they were all awfully burly for guys in wheelchairs. And three in an hour's kind of stretching it, I was thinking.'

'I always picture you having your little trysts in more domestic suburban settings. Or else tall motels with exotically shaped beds. Do women in metal trailers even have small children?'

'This one had very sweet little twin girls who played very quietly with blocks without supervision the whole time.'

'c.o.c.kle-warming, O.'

'And but so the point is I decamp the trailer like x number of hours later, and the guy's still there, mired in gravel. And in the distance I could swear he's got on some kind of domino-mask. And now everywhere I go the last several days there seems to be a statistically improbable number of wheelchaired figures around, lurking, somehow just a little too nonchalantly.'

'Very shy fans, possibly? Some club of leg-dysfunctional people all obsessed in that shy-fan-like way with one of the first North American sports figures people think of in connection with the word leg? leg?'

'It's probably my imagination. A dead bird fell in my jacuzzi.'

'But now let me ask you a couple questions.'

'This all wasn't even why I originally called.'

'But you brought up trailer parks and trailers. I need to confirm some suspicions - two points, right in there, ka-ching. Never having been in a trailer, and even the Discursive O.E.D. Discursive O.E.D.having pretty much of a lacuna where trailer-park trailers are concerned.'

'And this is the one supposedly nonbats family-member I call. This is who I reach out to.'