Infinite Jest Part 28

Lenz abroad in the urban night, solo, on almost a nightly basis, sometimes carrying a book.

Residents who seem to make it a point to go off alone a lot are redflagged at Thursday's All-Staff Meeting in Pat's office as clear relapse-risks. But they've pulled spot-urines on Lenz five times, and the three times the lab didn't f.u.c.k up the E.M.I.T. test Lenz's urine's come back clean. Gately's basically decided to just let Lenz be. Some newcomers' Higher Power is like Nature, the sky, the stars, the cold-penny tang of the autumn air, who knows.

So Lenz abroad in the night, unaccompanied and disguised, apparently strolling. He's mastered the streets' c.o.c.keyed grid around Enfield-Brighton-Allston. South Cambridge and East Newton and North Brookline and the hideous Spur. He takes side-streets home from meetings, mostly. Low-rent dumpster-strewn residential streets and Projects' driveways that become alleys, gritty pa.s.sages behind stores and dumpsters and warehouses and loading docks and Empire Waste Displacement's mongo hangars, etc. His loafers have a wicked s.h.i.+ne and make an elegant dancerly click as he walks along with his hands in his pockets and open coat flared wide, scanning. He scans for several nights before he even becomes aware of why or what he might be scanning for. 224 224 He moves nightly through urban-animal territory. Liberated housecats and hard-core strays ooze in and out of shadows, rustle in dumpsters, f.u.c.k and fight with h.e.l.lish noises all around him as he walks, senses very sharp in the downscale night. You got your rats, your mice, your stray dogs with tongues hanging and countable ribs. Maybe the odd feral hamster and/or racc.o.o.n. Everything slinky and furtive after sunset. Also non-stray dogs that clank their chains or bay or lunge, when he goes by yards with dogs. He prefers to move north but will move east or west on the streets' good sides. His shoes' fine click precedes him by several hundred meters on cement of varying texture. He moves nightly through urban-animal territory. Liberated housecats and hard-core strays ooze in and out of shadows, rustle in dumpsters, f.u.c.k and fight with h.e.l.lish noises all around him as he walks, senses very sharp in the downscale night. You got your rats, your mice, your stray dogs with tongues hanging and countable ribs. Maybe the odd feral hamster and/or racc.o.o.n. Everything slinky and furtive after sunset. Also non-stray dogs that clank their chains or bay or lunge, when he goes by yards with dogs. He prefers to move north but will move east or west on the streets' good sides. His shoes' fine click precedes him by several hundred meters on cement of varying texture.

Sometimes near drainage pipes he sees serious rats, or sometimes near cat-free dumpsters. The first conscious thing he did was a rat that this one time he came on some rats in a wide W-E alley by the loading dock out behind the Svelte Nail Co. just east of Watertown on N. Harvard St. What night was that. It'd been coming back from East Watertown, which meant More Will Be Revealed NA with Glynn and Diehl instead of St. E.'s Better Late Than Never AA with the rest of the House's herd, so a Monday. So on a Monday he'd been strolling through this one alley, his steps echoing trebled back off the cement sides of the docks and the north left wall he hugged, scanning without knowing what he was scanning for. Up ahead there was the Stegosaurus-shape of a Svelte Co. dumpster as versus your lower slimmer E.W.D.-type dumpster. There were dry skulky sounds issuing from the dumpster's shadow. He hadn't consciously picked anything up. The alley's surface was coming apart and Lenz barely broke his dancerly stride picking a kilo-sized chunk of tar-shot concrete. It was rats. Two big rats were going at a half-eaten wiener in a mustardy paper tray from a Lunchwagon in a recess between the north wall and the dumpster's barge-hitch. Their hideous pink tails were poking out into the alley's dim light. They didn't move as Randy Lenz came up behind them on the toes of his loafers. Their tails were meaty and bald and like twitched back and forth, twitching in and out of the dim yellow light. The big flat-top chunk came down on most of one rat and a bit of the other rat. There'd been G.o.dawful twittering squeaks, but the major hit on the one rat also made a very solid and significant noise, some aural combination of a tomato thrown at a wall and a pocket.w.a.tch getting clocked with a hammer. Material came out of the rat's a.n.u.s. The rat lay on its side in a very bad medical way, its tail twitching and a.n.u.s material and there were little beads of blood on its whiskers that looked black, the beads, in the sodium security-lights along the Svelte Nail Co. roof. Its side heaved; its back legs were moving like it was running, but this rat wasn't going anywhere. The other rat had vanished under the dumpster, dragging its rear region. There were more chunks of dismantled street lying all over. When Lenz brought another down on the head of the rat he consciously discovered what he liked to say at the moment of issue-resolution was: 'There.'

Demapping rats became Lenz's way of resolving internal-type issues for the first couple weeks of it, walking home in the verminal dark.

Don Gately, House chef and shopper, buys these huge econo-size boxes of Hefty 225 225 bags that get stored under the kitchen sink for whoever's got Trash for their weekly ch.o.r.e. Ennet House generates serious waste. bags that get stored under the kitchen sink for whoever's got Trash for their weekly ch.o.r.e. Ennet House generates serious waste.

So after vermin started to get a little ho-hum and insignificant, Lenz starts cabbaging a Hefty bag out from under the sink and taking it with him to meetings and walking back home with it. He keeps a trashbag neatly folded in an inside pocket of his topcoat, a billowing top-collared Lauren-Polo model he loves and uses a daily lint-roller on. He also takes along a little of the House's Food-Bank tunafish in a Zip-loc baggie in another pocket, which your average drug addict has expertise in rolling baggies into a cylinder so they're secure and odor-free.

The Ennet House residents call Hefty bags 'Irish Luggage' - even McDade - it's a street-term.

Randy Lenz found that if he could get an urban cat up close enough with some outstretched tuna he could pop the Hefty bag over it and scoop up from the bottom so the cat was in the air in the bottom of the bag, and then he could tie the bag shut with the complimentary wire twist-tie that comes with each bag. He could put the closed bag down next to the vicinity's northernmost wall or fence or dumpster and light a gasper and hunker down up next to the wall to watch the wide variety of changing shapes the bag would a.s.sume as the agitated cat got lower on air. The shapes got more and more violent and twisted and mid-air with the pa.s.sage of a minute. After it stopped a.s.suming shapes Lenz would dab his b.u.t.t with a spitty finger to save the rest for later and get up and untie the twist-tie and look inside the bag and go: 'There.' The 'There' turned out to be crucial for the sense of brisance and closure and resolving issues of impotent rage and powerless fear that like accrued in Lenz all day being trapped in the northeastern portions of a squalid halfway house all day fearing for his life, Lenz felt.

There evolved for Lenz a certain sportsman's hierarchy of types of cats and neighborhoods of types of your abroad cats; and he becomes a connoisseur of cats the same way a deep-sea sportsman knows the fish-species that fight most fiercely and excitatingly for their marine lives. The best and most fiercely alive cats could usually claw their way out of a Hefty bag, though, which created this conundrum where the ones most worth watching a.s.suming bagged shapes were the ones Lenz risked maybe not getting his issues resolved on. Watching a spike-furred hissing cat run twisting away still half wrapped in a plastic bag made Lenz admire the cat's fighting spirit but still feel unresolved.

So the next stage is Lenz gives Ms. Charlotte Treat or Ms. Hester Thrale some of his own $ when they go down to the Palace Spa or Father/Son to buy smokes or LifeSavers and has them start to get him special Hefty Steel-Sak 226 226 trashbags, fiber-reinforced for your especially sharp or uncooperative waste needs, described by Ken E. as 'Irish Guccis,' extra resilient and a businesslike gunmetal-gray in tone. Lenz has such a panoply of strange compulsive habits that a request for SteelSaks barely raises a brow on anybody. trashbags, fiber-reinforced for your especially sharp or uncooperative waste needs, described by Ken E. as 'Irish Guccis,' extra resilient and a businesslike gunmetal-gray in tone. Lenz has such a panoply of strange compulsive habits that a request for SteelSaks barely raises a brow on anybody.

And then he doubles them, the special reinforced bags, and employs industrial-growth pipe-cleaners as twist-ties, and then now the grittiest most salutary cats make the doubled bags a.s.sume all manners of wickedly abstract twisting shapes, even sometimes moving the closed bags a couple dozen m. down the alley in a haphazard hopping-like fas.h.i.+on, until finally the cat runs out of gas and resolves itself and Lenz's issues into one nightly shape.

Lenz's interval of choice for this is the interval 2216h. to 2226h. He doesn't consciously know why this interval. Anchovies turn out to be even more effective than tuna. A Program of Attraction, he recalls coolly, strolling along. His northern routes back to the House are restricted by the priority to keep Brighton Best Savings Bank's rooftop digital Time and Temperature display in view as much as possible. B.B.S.B. displays both EST and Greenwich Mean, which Lenz approves of. The liquid-crystal data sort of melts upward into view on the screen and then disappears from the bottom up and is replaced by new data. Mr. Doony R. Glynn said at the House's Community Meeting Monday once that one time in B.S. 1989 A.D. after he'd done a reckless amount of a hallucinogen he'd refer to only as 'The Madame' he'd gone around for several subsequent weeks under a Boston sky that instead of a kindly curved blue dome with your clouds and your stars and sun was a flat square coldly Euclidian grid with black axes and a thread-fine reseau of lines creating grid-type coordinates, the whole grid the same color as a D.E.C. HD viewer-screen when the viewer's off, that sort of dead deepwater gray-green, with the DOW Ticker running up one side of the grid and the NIKEI Index running down the other, and the Time and Celsius Temp to like serious decimal points flas.h.i.+ng along the bottom axis of the sky's screen, and whenever he'd go to a real clock or get a Herald Herald and check the like DOW the skygrid would turn out to have been totally accurate; and that several unbroken weeks of this sky overhead had sent Glynn off first to his mother's Stoneham apartment's fold-out couch and then into Waltham's Metropolitan State Hospital for a month of Haldol and check the like DOW the skygrid would turn out to have been totally accurate; and that several unbroken weeks of this sky overhead had sent Glynn off first to his mother's Stoneham apartment's fold-out couch and then into Waltham's Metropolitan State Hospital for a month of Haldol 227 227 and tapioca, to get out from under the empty-grid accurate sky, and says it makes his a.s.s wet to this day to even think about the grid-interval; but Lenz had thought it sounded wicked nice, the sky as digital timepiece. And also between 2216 and 2226 the ATHSCME giant fans off up at the Sunstrand Plaza within earshot were typically shut off for daily de-linting, and it was quiet except for the big Ssshhh of a whole urban city's vehicular traffic, and maybe the odd E.W.D. airborne deliverer catapulted up off Concavityward, its little string of lights arcing northeast; and of course also sirens, both the Eurotrochaic sirens of ambulances and the regular U.S.-sounding sirens of the city's very Finest, Protecting and Serving, keeping the citizenry at bay; and the winsome thing about sirens in the urban night is that unless they're right up close where the lights bathe you in red-blue-red they always sound like they're terribly achingly far away, and receding, calling to you across an expanding gap. Either that or they're on your a.s.s. No middle distance with sirens, Lenz reflects, walking along and scanning. and tapioca, to get out from under the empty-grid accurate sky, and says it makes his a.s.s wet to this day to even think about the grid-interval; but Lenz had thought it sounded wicked nice, the sky as digital timepiece. And also between 2216 and 2226 the ATHSCME giant fans off up at the Sunstrand Plaza within earshot were typically shut off for daily de-linting, and it was quiet except for the big Ssshhh of a whole urban city's vehicular traffic, and maybe the odd E.W.D. airborne deliverer catapulted up off Concavityward, its little string of lights arcing northeast; and of course also sirens, both the Eurotrochaic sirens of ambulances and the regular U.S.-sounding sirens of the city's very Finest, Protecting and Serving, keeping the citizenry at bay; and the winsome thing about sirens in the urban night is that unless they're right up close where the lights bathe you in red-blue-red they always sound like they're terribly achingly far away, and receding, calling to you across an expanding gap. Either that or they're on your a.s.s. No middle distance with sirens, Lenz reflects, walking along and scanning.

Glynn hadn't come right out and said Euclidian, Euclidian, but Lenz had gotten the picture all right. Glynn had thin hair and an invariant three-day growth of gray stubble and diverticulitis that made him stoop somewhat over, and remaining physique-type issues from a load of bricks falling on his head from a Workers Comp scam gone rye that included crossed eyes that Lenz overheard the veiled girl Joe L. tell Clenette Henderson and Didi Neaves the man was so cross-eyed he could stand in the middle of the week and see both Sundays. but Lenz had gotten the picture all right. Glynn had thin hair and an invariant three-day growth of gray stubble and diverticulitis that made him stoop somewhat over, and remaining physique-type issues from a load of bricks falling on his head from a Workers Comp scam gone rye that included crossed eyes that Lenz overheard the veiled girl Joe L. tell Clenette Henderson and Didi Neaves the man was so cross-eyed he could stand in the middle of the week and see both Sundays.

Lenz has gotten high on organic cocaine two or three, maybe half a dozen times tops, secretly, since he came into Ennet House in the summer, just enough times to keep him from going totally out of his f.u.c.king mind, utilizing lines from the private emergency stash he kept in a kind of rectangular bunker razor-bladed out of three hundred or so pages of Bill James's gargantuan Large-Print Principles of Psychology and The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Principles of Psychology and The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion. Such totally occasional Substance-ingestions in a rundown sloppy-clocked House where he's cooped up and under terrible stress all day every day, hiding from threats from two different legal directions, with, upstairs at all times, calling to him, a 20-gram stash from the under-reported South End two-way attempted scam whose very bad luck had forced him into hiding in squalor and rooming with the likes of f.u.c.king Geoffrey D. - cocaine-ingestion this occasional and last-resort is such a marked reduction of Use & Abuse for Lenz that it's a b.o.n.e.rfied miracle and clearly const.i.tutes as much miraculous sobriety as total abstinence would be for another person without Lenz's unique sensitivities and psychological makeup and f.u.c.king intolerable daily stresses and difficulty unwinding, and he accepts his monthly chips with a clear conscience and a head unmuddled by doubting: he knows he's sober. He's smart about it: he's never ingested cocaine on his solo walks home from meetings, which is where the Staff'd expect him to ingest if he was going to ingest. And never in Ennet House itself, and only once in the forbidden #7 across the roadlet. And anybody with half a clue can beat an E.M.I.T. urine-screen: a cup of lemon juice or vinegar down the hatch'll turn the lab's reading into gibberish; a trace of powdered bleach on the fingertips and let the stream play warmly over the fingertips on its way into the cup while you banter with Don G. A Texas catheter's a pain to get p.i.s.s for and put on, plus the obscene size of the thing's receptacle for his Unit gives Lenz inadequacy-issues, and he's only used it twice, both times when Johnette F. took the urine and he could embarra.s.s her into turning away. Lenz owns a Texas Cathy from his last halfway house in Quincy, in what Lenz recalls as the Year of the Maytag Quietmaster.

And then it turned out, when a cat aggrieved Lenz by scratching his wrist in a particularly hostile fas.h.i.+on on the way into the receptacle, that doubled Hefty SteelSaks were such quality-reinforced products they could hold something razor-clawed and frantically in-motion and still survive a direct swung hit against a NO PARKING sign or a telephone pole without splitting open, even when what was inside split nicely open; and so that technique got subst.i.tuted around United Nations Day, because even though it was too quick and less meditative it allowed Randy Lenz to take a more active role in the process, and the feeling of (temporary, nightly) issues-resolution was more definitive when Lenz could swing a twisting ten-kilo burden hard against a pole and go: 'There,' and hear a sound. On banner nights the doubled bag would continue for a brief period of time to undergo a subtle flux of smaller, more subtle and connoisseur-oriented shapes, even after the melony sound of hard impact, along with further smaller sounds.

Then it was discovered that resolving them directly inside the yards and porches of the people that owned them provided more adrenal excitation and thus more sense of what Bill James one time called a Catharsis Catharsis of resolving, which Lenz felt he could agree. A small can of oil in its own little baggie, for squeaky gates. But because SteelSak trashbags - and then also tunafish mixed with anchovies and Raid ant poison from behind the Ennet residents' fridge - caused too much resultant noise to allow for lighting a gasper and hunkering down to meditatively watch, Lenz developed the habit of setting the resolution in motion and then booking on out of the yard into the urban night, his Polo topcoat billowing, hurdling fences and running over the hoods of cars and etc. For a period during the two-week interval of give-them-poison-tuna-and-run Lenz had brief recourse to a small Caldor-brand squeeze-bottle of kerosene, plus of course his lighter; but a Wednesday night on which the alight cat ran (as alight cats will, like h.e.l.l) but ran after of resolving, which Lenz felt he could agree. A small can of oil in its own little baggie, for squeaky gates. But because SteelSak trashbags - and then also tunafish mixed with anchovies and Raid ant poison from behind the Ennet residents' fridge - caused too much resultant noise to allow for lighting a gasper and hunkering down to meditatively watch, Lenz developed the habit of setting the resolution in motion and then booking on out of the yard into the urban night, his Polo topcoat billowing, hurdling fences and running over the hoods of cars and etc. For a period during the two-week interval of give-them-poison-tuna-and-run Lenz had brief recourse to a small Caldor-brand squeeze-bottle of kerosene, plus of course his lighter; but a Wednesday night on which the alight cat ran (as alight cats will, like h.e.l.l) but ran after Lenz, Lenz, seemingly, leaping the same fences Lenz hurdled and staying on his tail and not only making an unacceptable attention-calling racket but also illuminating Lenz to the scopophobic view of pa.s.sing homes until it finally decided to drop to the ground and expire and smolder thereupon - Lenz considered this his only really close call, and took an enormous and partly non-north route home, with every siren sounding up-close and on his personal a.s.s, and barely got in by 2330h., and ran right up to the 3-Man room. This was the night Lenz had to have another recourse to the hollowed-out cavity in his seemingly, leaping the same fences Lenz hurdled and staying on his tail and not only making an unacceptable attention-calling racket but also illuminating Lenz to the scopophobic view of pa.s.sing homes until it finally decided to drop to the ground and expire and smolder thereupon - Lenz considered this his only really close call, and took an enormous and partly non-north route home, with every siren sounding up-close and on his personal a.s.s, and barely got in by 2330h., and ran right up to the 3-Man room. This was the night Lenz had to have another recourse to the hollowed-out cavity in his Principles of Psychology and The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Principles of Psychology and The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion after just beating curfew home, which who wouldn't need a bit of an unwinder after a stressful close-call-type situation with a flaming cat chasing you and screaming in a way that made porch lights go on all up and down Sumner Blake Rd.; except but instead of an unwinder the couple or few lines of uncut Bing proved to be on this occasion an after just beating curfew home, which who wouldn't need a bit of an unwinder after a stressful close-call-type situation with a flaming cat chasing you and screaming in a way that made porch lights go on all up and down Sumner Blake Rd.; except but instead of an unwinder the couple or few lines of uncut Bing proved to be on this occasion an un un-unwinder - which happens, sometimes, depending on one's like spiritual condition when ingesting it through a rolled dollar bill off the back of the john in the men's can - and Lenz barely made it through switching his car's parking spot at 2350h. before the verbal torrent started, and after lights-out had only gotten up to age eight in the oral autobiography that followed in the 3-Man when Geoff D. threatened to go get Don G. and have Lenz forcibly stifled, and Lenz was scared to go downstairs to find somebody to listen and so for the rest of the night he had to lie there in the dark, mute, with his mouth twisting and writhing - it always twisted and writhed on the times the Bing proved to be a rev-upper instead of a rough-edge-smoother - and pretending to be asleep, with phosphenes like leaping flaming shapes dancing behind his quivering lids, listening to Day's moist gurgles and Glynn's apnea and thinking that each siren abroad out there in the urban city was meant for him and coming closer, with Day's illuminated watchface in his f.u.c.king tableside drawer instead of out where anybody with some stress and anxiety could check the time from time to time.

So after the incident with the flaming cat from h.e.l.l and before Halloween Lenz had moved on and up to the Browning X444 Serrated he even had a shoulder-holster for, from his previous life Out There. The Browning X444 has a 25-cm. overall length, with a burl-walnut handle with a bra.s.s b.u.t.t-cap and a point Lenz'd sharpened the clip out of when he got it and a single-edge Bowie-style blade with .1-mm. serrations that Lenz owns a hone for and tests by dry-shaving a little patch of his tan forearm, which he loves.

The Browning X444, combined with blocks of Don Gately's highly portable cornflake-garnish meatloaf, were for canines, which your urban canines tended to be nonferal and could be found within the confinement of their pet-owners' fenced yards on a regularer basis than the urban-cat species, and who are less suspicious of food and, though more of a personal-injury risk to approach, do not scratch the hand that feeds them.

For when the dense square of meatloaf is taken out and unwrapped from the Zip-loc and proffered from the edgelet of yard out past the fence by the sidewalk, the dog at issue invariably stops with the barking and/or lunging and its nose flares and it becomes totally uncynical and friendly and comes to the end of its chain or the fence Lenz stands behind and makes interested noises and if Lenz holds the meat-item just up out of reach the dog if its rope or chain will permit it it'll go up on the hind legs and sort of play the fence with its front paws, jumping eagerly, as Lenz dangles the meat.

Day had had some Recovery-Issue paperback he was reading that Lenz had a look at one P.M. in their room when Day was downstairs with Ewell and Erdedy telling each other their windbagathon stories, lying on Day's mattress with his shoes on and trying to fart into the mattress as much as possible: some line in the book had arrested Lenz's attention: something about the more basically Powerless an individual feels, the more the likelihood for the propensity for violent acting-out - and Lenz found the observation to be sound.

The only serious challenge to using the Browning X444 is that Lenz has to make sure to get around behind the dog before he cuts the dog's throat, because the bleeding is far-reaching in its intensity, and Lenz is now on his second R. Lauren topcoat and third pair of dark wool slacks.

Then once near Halloween in an alley behind Blanchard's Liquors off Allston's Union Square Lenz comes across a street drunk in a chewed-looking old topcoat in the deserted alley taking a public leak against the side of a dumpster, and Lenz envisualizes the old guy both cut and on fire and dancing jaggedly around hitting at himself while Lenz goes 'There,' but that's as close as Lenz comes to that kind of level of resolution; and it's maybe to his credit that he's a little off his psychic feed for a few days after that close call, and inactive with pets circa 2216h.

Lenz has nothing much against his newer fellow resident Bruce Green, and when one Sunday night after the White Flag Green asks can he walk along with Lenz on the walk back after the Our Father Lenz says Whatever and lets Green walk with him, and is inactive during this night's 2216 interval as well. Except after a couple nights of Green strolling home along with him, first from the White Flag and then from St. Columbkill's on Tuesday and a double 19002200 shot of St. E.'s Sharing and Caring NA and then BYP on Wed., Green following him around like a terrier from mtg. to mtg. and then home, it begins to like emerge on Lenz that Bruce G. is starting to treat this walking-through-the-urban-P.M.-with-Randy-Lenz thing as like a regular f.u.c.king thing, and Lenz starts to jones about it, the unresolved Powerless Rage issues that the thing is now he's gotten so he's used to resolving them on a more or less nightly basis, so that being unable to be freely alone to be active with the Browning X444 or even a SteelSak during the 2216 2226h. interval causes this pressure to build up like almost a Withdrawal-grade pressure. But on the other side of the hand, walking with Green has its positive aspects as well. Like that Green doesn't complain about lengthy detours to keep a mainly north/northeastern orientation to the walks when possible. And Lenz enjoys a sympathetic and listening ear to have around; he has numerous aspects and experiences to mull over and issues to organize and mull, and (like many people hardwired for organic stimulants) talking is sort of Lenz's way of thinking. And but most of the ears of the other residents at Ennet House are not only unsympathetic but are attached to great gaping flapping oral mouths which keep horning into the conversation with the mouths' own opinions and issues and aspects - most of the residents are the worst listeners Lenz has ever seen. Bruce Green, on the hand's positive side, hardly says anything. Bruce Green is quiet the way certain stand-up type guys you want to have there with you beside you if a beef starts going down are quiet, like self-contained. Yet Green is not so quiet and unresponding that it's like with some silent people where you start to wonder if he's listening with a sympathizing ear or if he's really drifting around in his own self-oriented thoughts and not even listening to Lenz, etc., treating Lenz like a radio you can tune in or out. Lenz has a keen antenna for people like this and their stock is low on his personal exchange. Bruce Green inserts low affirmatives and 'No s.h.i.+t's and 'f.u.c.king-A's, etc., at just the right places to communicate his attentions to Lenz. Which Lenz admires.

So it's not like Lenz just wants to blow Green off and tell him to go peddle his papers and let him the f.u.c.k alone after Meetings so he can solo. It would have to be handled in a more diplomatic fas.h.i.+on. Plus Lenz finds himself nervous at the prospect of offending Green. It's not like he's scared of Green in terms of physically. And it's not like he's concerned Green would be the Ewell- or Day-type you have to stressfully worry about maybe going and ratting out on Lenz's place of whereabouts to the Finest and everything like that. Green has a strong air of non-rat about him which Lenz admires. So it's not like he's frightened to blow Green off; it's more like very tense and tightly wound.

Plus it agitates Lenz that he has the feeling that it really wouldn't be any big deal to Green that much one way or the other, and that Lenz feels like he's spending all this stress tensely worrying about his side of something that Green would barely think about for more than a couple seconds, and it enrages Lenz that he can know in his head that the tense worry about how to diplomatize Green into leaving him alone is unnecessary and a waste of time and tension and yet still not be able to stop worrying about it, which all only increases the sense of Powerlessness that Lenz is impotent to resolve with his Browning and meatloaf as long as Green continues to walk home with him.

And the schizoid cats with clotted fur that lurk around Ennet House cringing and neurotic and afraid of their own shadow are too risky, for the female residents are always formulating attachments to them. And Pat M.'s Golden Retrievers would be tattlemount to legal suicide. On a Sat.u.r.day c. 2221h., Lenz found a miniature bird that had fallen out of some nest and was sitting bald and pencil-necked on the lawn of Unit #3 flapping ineffectually, and went in with Green and ducked Green and went back outside to #3's lawn and put the thing in a pocket and went in and put it down the garbage disposal in the kitchen sink of the kitchen, but still felt largely impotent and unresolved.

Except for Pat Montesian's bay-windowed front office and the House Manager's phone-booth-sized back office and the two live-in Staff bedrooms down in the bas.e.m.e.nt, none of the doors inside Ennet House have locks, for predictable reasons.

EARLY NOVEMBER.

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.

The only bona fide blackmailable thing about Rodney Tine, Chief, U.S. Office of Unspecified Services: his special metric ruler. In a locked drawer of his bathroom cabinets at home on Connecticut Ave. NW in the District is kept a special metric ruler, and Tine measures his p.e.n.i.s every A.M., like clockwork; has since twelve; still does. Plus a special telescoping travelling model of the ruler he travels with, for on-the-road-A.M.-p.e.n.i.s-measurement. President Gentle has no N.S.A. 228 228 as such. Tine's in metro Boston because of the N.S. implications of what they'd first come to Unspecified Services about two summers past, both the head of D.E.A. and the Chair of the Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, now both here standing on one foot and then the other and twidgelling the brims of their hats. This unwatchable underground Entertainment-cartridge that at first seemed to be just popping haphazardly up in random locales: a film with certain he's given to understand from briefings quote 'qualities' such that whoever saw it wanted nothing else ever in life but to see it again, and then again, and so on. It had popped up in Berkeley NCA, in the home of a film-scholar and his male companion, neither of whom had appeared for appointments for days; and now lost to meaningful human activity henceforward, by all appearances, were the scholar and companion, the two cops dispatched to the Berkeley home, the six cops dispatched after the two cops never followed up their Code-Five, the watch sergeant and partner dispatched after them - seventeen police, paramedics, and teleputer-technicians in all, until the lethality of whatever they'd caught sight of presented itself with enough clarity for somebody to think to go around back and kill the Berkeley home's power. The Entertainment had popped up in New Iberia LA. Tempe AZ had lost two-thirds of the attendees of an avant-garde film festival in Arizona State U.'s Entertainment Studies amphitheater before a level-headed custodian killed the building's whole grid. J. Gentle had been apprised about the thing only after it had popped up and taken out a diplomatically immune Near Eastern medical attache and a dozen incidentals here in Boston MA late last spring. These persons now all in wards. Docile and continent but blank, as if on some deep reptile-brain level pithed. Tine had toured a ward. The persons' lives' meanings had collapsed to such a narrow focus that no other activity or connection could hold their attention. Possessed of roughly the mental/ spiritual energies of a moth, now, according to a diagnostician out of C.D.C. The Berkeley cartridge had vanished from an S.F.P.D. Evidence Room an electron-microscopy toss of which had revealed flannel fibers. The D.E.A. had lost four field researchers and a consultant before they'd bowed to the intractable problems involved in trying to have somebody view the confiscated Tempe cartridge and articulate the thing's lethal charms. The strongest possible language had been necessary to restrain a certain Famous Crooner from attempting a personal review of the thing's qualities. Neither C.D.C. nor the entertainment pros wanted any part of any controlled-viewing tests. Three members of the Academy of D.A.S. had received unlabelled copies in the mail, and the one who'd actually sat down to have a look now needed a receptacle under his chin at all times. Reports of the thing popping up yet again in metro Boston MA remain unsubstantiated. Tine's been dispatched here in part to coordinate substantiation. There's also the special pocket-Franklin-Plannersized chart he charts the daily A.M. p.e.n.i.s-measurement in, daily, though to the uninitiated the little leather notebook could look like almost anything statistical at all. By now several U.S.O. test-subjects, volunteers from the federal and military penal systems, have been lost in attempts to produce a description of the cartridge's contents. The Tempe and New Iberia cartridges are in custody, vaulted. A sociopathic and mentally r.e.t.a.r.ded Lance Corporal at Leavenworth, strapped down with electrode appliques and headset-recorder, was able to report that the thing apparently opens with an engaging and high-quality cinematic shot of a veiled woman going through a large building's revolving doors and catching a glimpse of someone else in the revolving doors, somebody the sight of whom makes her veil billow, before the subject's mental and spiritual energies abruptly declined to a point where even near-lethal voltages through the electrodes couldn't divert his attention from the Entertainment. Tine's staff had sifted through dozens of entries before deciding that the intelligence community's terse little name for the allegedly enslaving Entertainment would be 'the as such. Tine's in metro Boston because of the N.S. implications of what they'd first come to Unspecified Services about two summers past, both the head of D.E.A. and the Chair of the Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, now both here standing on one foot and then the other and twidgelling the brims of their hats. This unwatchable underground Entertainment-cartridge that at first seemed to be just popping haphazardly up in random locales: a film with certain he's given to understand from briefings quote 'qualities' such that whoever saw it wanted nothing else ever in life but to see it again, and then again, and so on. It had popped up in Berkeley NCA, in the home of a film-scholar and his male companion, neither of whom had appeared for appointments for days; and now lost to meaningful human activity henceforward, by all appearances, were the scholar and companion, the two cops dispatched to the Berkeley home, the six cops dispatched after the two cops never followed up their Code-Five, the watch sergeant and partner dispatched after them - seventeen police, paramedics, and teleputer-technicians in all, until the lethality of whatever they'd caught sight of presented itself with enough clarity for somebody to think to go around back and kill the Berkeley home's power. The Entertainment had popped up in New Iberia LA. Tempe AZ had lost two-thirds of the attendees of an avant-garde film festival in Arizona State U.'s Entertainment Studies amphitheater before a level-headed custodian killed the building's whole grid. J. Gentle had been apprised about the thing only after it had popped up and taken out a diplomatically immune Near Eastern medical attache and a dozen incidentals here in Boston MA late last spring. These persons now all in wards. Docile and continent but blank, as if on some deep reptile-brain level pithed. Tine had toured a ward. The persons' lives' meanings had collapsed to such a narrow focus that no other activity or connection could hold their attention. Possessed of roughly the mental/ spiritual energies of a moth, now, according to a diagnostician out of C.D.C. The Berkeley cartridge had vanished from an S.F.P.D. Evidence Room an electron-microscopy toss of which had revealed flannel fibers. The D.E.A. had lost four field researchers and a consultant before they'd bowed to the intractable problems involved in trying to have somebody view the confiscated Tempe cartridge and articulate the thing's lethal charms. The strongest possible language had been necessary to restrain a certain Famous Crooner from attempting a personal review of the thing's qualities. Neither C.D.C. nor the entertainment pros wanted any part of any controlled-viewing tests. Three members of the Academy of D.A.S. had received unlabelled copies in the mail, and the one who'd actually sat down to have a look now needed a receptacle under his chin at all times. Reports of the thing popping up yet again in metro Boston MA remain unsubstantiated. Tine's been dispatched here in part to coordinate substantiation. There's also the special pocket-Franklin-Plannersized chart he charts the daily A.M. p.e.n.i.s-measurement in, daily, though to the uninitiated the little leather notebook could look like almost anything statistical at all. By now several U.S.O. test-subjects, volunteers from the federal and military penal systems, have been lost in attempts to produce a description of the cartridge's contents. The Tempe and New Iberia cartridges are in custody, vaulted. A sociopathic and mentally r.e.t.a.r.ded Lance Corporal at Leavenworth, strapped down with electrode appliques and headset-recorder, was able to report that the thing apparently opens with an engaging and high-quality cinematic shot of a veiled woman going through a large building's revolving doors and catching a glimpse of someone else in the revolving doors, somebody the sight of whom makes her veil billow, before the subject's mental and spiritual energies abruptly declined to a point where even near-lethal voltages through the electrodes couldn't divert his attention from the Entertainment. Tine's staff had sifted through dozens of entries before deciding that the intelligence community's terse little name for the allegedly enslaving Entertainment would be 'the samizdat samizdat.' P.E.T.s on sacrificed subjects revealed unexceptional wave-activity, with not near enough alpha to indicate hypnosis or induced dopamine-surges. Attempts to trace the matrix of the samizdat samizdat without viewing it - from induction on postal codes, e-microscopies on the brown padded mailers, immolation and chromatography on the unlabelled cartridge-cases, extensive and maddening interviews of those civilians exposed - place the likely dissemination-point someplace along the U.S. north border, with routing hubs in metro Boston/New Bedford and/or somewhere in the desert Southwest. The U.S.'s Canadian Problem is U.S.O.U.S. Anti-Anti-O.N.A.N. Activities' Agency's without viewing it - from induction on postal codes, e-microscopies on the brown padded mailers, immolation and chromatography on the unlabelled cartridge-cases, extensive and maddening interviews of those civilians exposed - place the likely dissemination-point someplace along the U.S. north border, with routing hubs in metro Boston/New Bedford and/or somewhere in the desert Southwest. The U.S.'s Canadian Problem is U.S.O.U.S. Anti-Anti-O.N.A.N. Activities' Agency's 229 229 special province. So to speak. The possibility of Canadian involvement in the lethally compelling Entertainment's dissemination is what has brought to metro Boston Rodney Tine, his retinue, and his ruler. special province. So to speak. The possibility of Canadian involvement in the lethally compelling Entertainment's dissemination is what has brought to metro Boston Rodney Tine, his retinue, and his ruler.

LATE P.M., MONDAY 9 NOVEMBER.

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.

For reasons that Pemulis couldn't for the life of him, Ortho Stice seemed to be in there in Dr. Dolores Rusk's office, interfacing with Dr. Rusk well after regular hours. Pemulis paused at the door on his way by.

'- nical a.s.sessment, after our work together on your fear of weights, would be that your presenting maladjustment, Ortho, like many males and athletes, is that you're suffering from counterphobia.'

'Fear of linoleum?' It was unmistakably the flat tw.a.n.g of The Darkness in there through the door's wood.

'On the level of objects and a projective infantile omnipotence where you experience magical thinking about your thoughts and the behavior of objects' relation to your narcissistic wishes, the counterphobia presents as the delusion of some special agency or control to compensate for some repressed wounded inner trauma having to do with absence of control.'

'Over linoleum?'

'My suggestion might be to forget linoleum and objects in general. In for instance an a.n.a.lytic model, the types of traumas counterphobic reactions cover are almost always pre-Oedipal, at which stage objects' cathexis is Oedipal and symbolic. For example small children's dolls and Action-Figurines.'

'I don't play with no G.o.dd.a.m.n Action-Figurines.'

'GI Joe typically being cathected as an image of the potent but antagonistic father, the "military" man, with "GI" representing at once the "General Issue" of a "weapon" the Oedipal child both covets and fears and and a well-known medical acronym for the gastro-intestinal tract, with all the attendant a.n.a.l anxieties that require repression in the Oedipal phase's desire to control the bowels in order to impress or quote "win" the mother, of whom the Barbie might be seen as the most obviously reductive and phallocentric reduction of the mother to an archetype of s.e.xual function and availability, the Barbie as image of the Oedipal mother a well-known medical acronym for the gastro-intestinal tract, with all the attendant a.n.a.l anxieties that require repression in the Oedipal phase's desire to control the bowels in order to impress or quote "win" the mother, of whom the Barbie might be seen as the most obviously reductive and phallocentric reduction of the mother to an archetype of s.e.xual function and availability, the Barbie as image of the Oedipal mother as image as image.'

'So you're saying I'm over overestimating objects?'

'I'm saying there's a very young Ortho in there with some very real abandonment-issues who needs some nurturing and championing from the older Ortho instead of indulging in fantasies of omnipotence.'

'I ain't omnipotent and I don't want to X no G.o.dd.a.m.n Barbiedoll.' Then Dark's voice went way up and cracked as he said something about his bed.

Dr. Rusk's office door had a nonconducting rubberized sheath on the k.n.o.b, and Dr. Rusk's name and degrees and t.i.tle, and a needlepoint sampler with a little heart inside a big heart and a cursive exhortation to Champion An Inner Child Today, Champion An Inner Child Today, which the little kids at E.T.A. find puzzling and upsetting. Pemulis, pausing by habit first at the silent locked infirmary door and then Rusk's bottom-crack-lit door on his way across the Comm.-Ad. lobby, was wearing the most insolent ensemble he could throw together. He wore maroon paratrooper's pants with green stovepipe stripes down the sides. The pants' cuffs were tucked into fuchsia socks above ancient and radically uncool Clark's Wallabies with dirty soles of eraserish gum. He wore an orange fake-silk turtleneck under an English-cut sportcoat in a purple-and-tan windowpane check. He wore naval shoulder-braid at the level of ensign. He wore his yachting cap, but with the bill bent up at a b.u.mpkinish angle. He looked less insolent than just extremely poorly dressed, really. Dr. Rusk's door was cool against his ear. Jim Troeltsch had been coming down B's hall just as Pemulis was leaving and said Pemulis looked like a hangover. Through the door, Rusk was urging Stice to name his anger and Stice was proposing to name his anger Horace after his old man's late pointer that had got into some coyote bait when The Darkness was nine and was much missed by the whole Stice brood, back in Kansas. The old Wallabies were from Pemulis's older brother's incomplete public-school career and had boogerish little greebles of dirty gum all around the soles' perimeter. The socks belonged to Jennie Bash and she made it explicit she wanted them back laundered. The sportcoat's checked arms were several cm. too short and exposed ribbed cuffs of s.h.i.+ny orange acetate esters. which the little kids at E.T.A. find puzzling and upsetting. Pemulis, pausing by habit first at the silent locked infirmary door and then Rusk's bottom-crack-lit door on his way across the Comm.-Ad. lobby, was wearing the most insolent ensemble he could throw together. He wore maroon paratrooper's pants with green stovepipe stripes down the sides. The pants' cuffs were tucked into fuchsia socks above ancient and radically uncool Clark's Wallabies with dirty soles of eraserish gum. He wore an orange fake-silk turtleneck under an English-cut sportcoat in a purple-and-tan windowpane check. He wore naval shoulder-braid at the level of ensign. He wore his yachting cap, but with the bill bent up at a b.u.mpkinish angle. He looked less insolent than just extremely poorly dressed, really. Dr. Rusk's door was cool against his ear. Jim Troeltsch had been coming down B's hall just as Pemulis was leaving and said Pemulis looked like a hangover. Through the door, Rusk was urging Stice to name his anger and Stice was proposing to name his anger Horace after his old man's late pointer that had got into some coyote bait when The Darkness was nine and was much missed by the whole Stice brood, back in Kansas. The old Wallabies were from Pemulis's older brother's incomplete public-school career and had boogerish little greebles of dirty gum all around the soles' perimeter. The socks belonged to Jennie Bash and she made it explicit she wanted them back laundered. The sportcoat's checked arms were several cm. too short and exposed ribbed cuffs of s.h.i.+ny orange acetate esters.

The Community & Administration Bldg.'s downstairs was real quiet. It was like 2100h., supposedly mandatory Study Period, and Harde's crew had gone home but the custodial graveyard s.h.i.+ft hadn't come on yet. Pemulis moved noiselessly NE-SW across the lobby's s.h.a.g. Except for lines of lamplight from under a couple doors the E.T.A. lobby was pitch-black, and the outer Academy doors locked. There was an odd vehicular shape near the north wall's trophy case that Pemulis didn't pause to investigate. He lifted up slightly to keep the little SW hall's door from squeaking as he opened it and entered the administrative reception area, snapping his fingers softly to himself. A loose music played in his head. Tavis's reception area was empty and dim, the wallpaper's clouds now stormy-dark. It wasn't totally quiet. Light came from Mrs. Inc's doorway and from the crack under Tavis's inner door. Lateral Alice Moore had gone home. Pemulis activated her Third Rail and played with her chair as he made a very quick survey of the material on her desk. Activating the P.A. mike was out of all question. Two of her five drawers were still locked. Pemulis scanned behind him and popped another breath mint and sat quietly for a moment as Moore's chair slid back and forth along the rail, his fingers in a steeple under his nose, considering.

Light shone from the crack of Tavis's inner door because the outer door stood open. Pemulis didn't even have to put any kind of ear to the wood of the inside door. He could hear the hiss and high-speed grind of Tavis's StairBlaster, and Tavis's breathless recessive voice. You could tell there was n.o.body else in there. You could tell Tavis had no s.h.i.+rt on and an E.T.A. towel around his neck and his hair a sweaty curtain down one side of his little head as he ran to keep up with what reminded everybody of a Satanishly-possessed Filene's escalator. He was exhorting himself in a kind of fast rhythmic chant that sounded to Pemulis like either 'Total worry total worry' or 'No don't worry no don't worry' and c. Pemulis could envision Tavis's round belly and little t.i.tties of fat bouncing with the action of the StairBlaster. You could hear the sudden m.u.f.fling when he probably brought the towel up to dab at his slanted mustache. Tavis's doork.n.o.b had no insulating rubber sheath, Pemulis noticed.

Pemulis's ensemble's belt was a plastic thing with chintzy fake-Navajo beading, purchased by little Chip Sweeny at one of last fall's WhataBurger's souvenir stands and subsequently transferred to Pemulis during a Big Buddy tennis-as-game-of-chance exercise. The beading-patterns were in Gila-monster orange and black, the orange a different shade than Pemulis's turtleneck.

He could never resist biting down once a mint'd melted to a certain size and texture.

The doorless Dean of Academic Affairs's office was a blazing rectangle of light. The light didn't spill very far into the reception area, however. At close-range, sounds issued from the office, but not exactly words. Pemulis checked his fly and snapped his fingers under his own nose and a.s.sumed a businesslike stride and rapped firmly on the doorless jamb without breaking stride. The heavier blue s.h.a.g of the office itself slowed him down a bit. He stopped once he was all the way in. 18-A John Wayne and Hal's Mumsly-Wumsly were both in the front of the office. They were about maybe two meters apart. The room was lit overhead and by four standing lamps. The seminar table and chairs cast a complicated shadow. Two homemade pompoms of shredded paper and what looked like the amputated handles of wooden tennis racquets were on the seminar table, which was otherwise bare. John Wayne wore a football helmet and light shoulderpads and a Russell athletic supporter and socks and shoes and nothing else. He was down in the cla.s.sic three-point stance of U.S. football. Inc's incredibly tall and well-preserved mother Dr. Avril Incandenza wore a little green-and-white cheerleader's outfit and had one of deLint's big bra.s.s whistles hanging around her neck. She was blowing on the whistle, which appeared to be minus the little inside pellet because no whistling sound resulted. She was about two meters from Wayne, facing him, doing near-splits on the heavy s.h.a.g, one arm up and pretending to blow the whistle while Wayne produced the cla.s.sic low-register growling sounds of U.S. football. Pemulis made rather a show of pus.h.i.+ng the b.u.mpkin-billed yachting hat back to scratch his head, blinking. Mrs. Inc was the only one looking at him.

'I probably won't even waste everybody's time asking if I'm interrupting,' Pemulis said.

Mrs. Inc seemed frozen in place. Her one hand was still up in the air, fine fingers splayed. Wayne craned his neck to look over at Pemulis from under his helmet without changing his three-point stance. The football-noises trailed off. Wayne's got a narrow nose and close-set witchy eyes. He wore a plastic mouthguard. The musculature of his legs and b.u.t.tocks was clearly outlined as he squatted forward with his weight on his knuckles. There was way less time pa.s.sing in the office than there seemed to be.

'Hoping for a second of your time,' Pemulis told Mrs. Inc. He was standing schoolboy-straight, hands clasped demurely over his fly, which on Pemulis this posture did look insolent.

Wayne straightened up and moved toward his clothing with no little dignity. His sweats were neatly folded on the Dean's desk at the rear of the office. The mouthguard was attached to the facemask and hung from it when removed. The chin strap had several snaps Wayne had to undo.

'Nice-looking helmet,' Pemulis told him.

Wayne, pulling hard on his sweatpants' cuffs to fit them over a shoe, didn't reply. He was so fit that his supporter's straps didn't even dent his b.u.t.tocks.

Mrs. Incandenza removed the mute whistle. She was still split down on the floor. Pemulis made rather a show of not looking south of her face. She pursed her lips to chuff hair out of her eyes.

'I predict this'll take about two minutes at most,' Pemulis said, smiling.

WEDNESDAY 11 NOVEMBER.

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.

Lenz wears a worsted topcoat and dark slacks and Brazilian loafers with a high-wattage s.h.i.+ne and a disguise that makes him look like Andy Warhol with a tan. Bruce Green wears a cheesy off-the-rack leather jacket of stiff cheap leather that makes the jacket creak when he breathes.

'This is when you man this is when you find out your like what like true character, is when it's pointed right at you and some bugeyed f.u.c.king spic's not five mitts 230 230 away pointing it, and I strangely I get real calm see and said I said Pepito I said I Pepito man you go on and do what you need to do man go on and shoot but man you away pointing it, and I strangely I get real calm see and said I said Pepito I said I Pepito man you go on and do what you need to do man go on and shoot but man you better better I mean f.u.c.king I mean f.u.c.king better better kill me with the first shot man or you won't get another one I said. Not even bulls.h.i.+tting man I'm serious it's like I found right then I meant it. You know what I'm saying?' Green lights both their smokes. Lenz exhales with that hiss of people in a rush to drive their point home. 'You know what I'm saying?' kill me with the first shot man or you won't get another one I said. Not even bulls.h.i.+tting man I'm serious it's like I found right then I meant it. You know what I'm saying?' Green lights both their smokes. Lenz exhales with that hiss of people in a rush to drive their point home. 'You know what I'm saying?'

'I don't know.'

It's an urban November P.M.: very last leaves down, dry gray hairy gra.s.s, brittle bushes, gap-toothed trees. The rising moon looks like it doesn't feel very well. The click of Lenz's loafers and the crunchy thud of Green's old asphalt-spreader's boots with the thick black soles. Green's little noises of attention and a.s.sent. He says he's been broken by life, is all he'll personally say. Green. Life has kicked his a.s.s, and he's regrouping. Lenz likes him, and there's always this slight hangnail of fear, like clinging, whenever he likes somebody. It's like something terrible could happen at any time. Less fear than a kind of tension in the region of stomach and a.s.s, an all-body wince. Deciding to go ahead and think somebody's a stand-up guy: it's like you drop something, you give up all of your power over it: you have to stand there impotent waiting for it to hit the ground: all you can do is brace and wince. It kind of enrages Lenz to like somebody. There would be no way to say any of this out loud to Green. As it gets past 2200h. and the meatloaf in his pocket's baggie's gotten dark and hard from disuse the pressure to exploit the c. 2216 interval for resolution builds to a terrible pitch, but Lenz still can't yet quite get it up to ask Green to walk back some other way at least once in a while. How does he do it and still have Green know he thinks he's OK? But you don't come right out there and let somebody hear you say you think they're OK. When it's a girl you're just trying to X it's a different thing, straightforwarder; but like for instance where do you look with your eyes when you tell somebody you like them and mean what you say? You can't look right at them, because then what if their eyes look at you as your eyes look at them and you lock eyes as you're saying it, and then there'd be some awful like voltage or energy there, hanging between you. But you can't look away like you're nervous, like some nervous kid asking for a date or something. You can't go around giving that kind of thing of yourself away. Plus the knowing that the whole f.u.c.king thing's not worth this kind of wince and stress: the whole thing's enraging. The afternoon of tonight earlier at circa 1610h. Lenz'd sprayed RIJID-brand male hairspray in the face of a one-eyed Ennet House stray cat that had wandered by mischance into the men's head upstairs, but the result: unsatisfying. The cat had just run away downstairs, clunking into the bannister only once. Lenz then got diarrhea, which always disgusts him, and he had to stay in the head and open the little warped frosted-gla.s.s window and run the shower on C until the smell's evidence cleared, with f.u.c.king Glynn pounding on the door and attracting attention howling about who's flailing the whale in there all this time is it by any chance Lenz. But then how would he be supposed to act henceforward toward Green if he blows him off and says to let him walk solo home? How would he be supposed to act if it'd seemed like he'd like spurned Green? What does he henceforward say if he and Green pa.s.s each other in the aisle at Sat.u.r.day Night Lively or both reach for the same sandwich at the raffle-break at White Flag, or get caught standing there half-naked in towels in the hall waiting for somebody to get out of the shower? What if he like spurns Green and Green ends up in the 3-Man room while Lenz is still in there and they have to room together and interface constantly? And if Lenz tries to temper the spurning by telling Green he likes him, where the f.u.c.k is he supposed to look when he says it? If trying to X a female species Lenz would have nullo problemo with where to look. He'd have no problem with looking deep into some b.i.t.c.h's eyes and looking so sincere it's like he's dying inside him. Or if like a.s.suring a bad-complected Brazilian he hadn't stepped on a half-kilo three separate times with Inositol. 231 231 Or if high: zero problem. If he got high, he'd have no problem telling somebody he liked him even if he really did. For it'd give his spirits a voltage that'd more than overweigh whatever upsetting voltage might hang in the air between somebody. A few lineskers and there'd be no stress-issues about telling Bruce G. with all due respects to screw, go peddle his papers, go play in the freeway, go play with a chain saw, go find a short pier, that no disrespect but Lenz needed to fly solo in the urban night. So after the incident with the cat and diarrhea and some hard words with D. R. Glynn, who was slumped holding his abdomen down against the south wall of the upstairs hall, Lenz decides enough is enough and goes and gets a little square of foil off the industrial roll Don G. keeps under the Ennet sink and goes and takes a half-gram, maybe a gram at most out of the emergency stash out of the vault-thing he's razored out of the Or if high: zero problem. If he got high, he'd have no problem telling somebody he liked him even if he really did. For it'd give his spirits a voltage that'd more than overweigh whatever upsetting voltage might hang in the air between somebody. A few lineskers and there'd be no stress-issues about telling Bruce G. with all due respects to screw, go peddle his papers, go play in the freeway, go play with a chain saw, go find a short pier, that no disrespect but Lenz needed to fly solo in the urban night. So after the incident with the cat and diarrhea and some hard words with D. R. Glynn, who was slumped holding his abdomen down against the south wall of the upstairs hall, Lenz decides enough is enough and goes and gets a little square of foil off the industrial roll Don G. keeps under the Ennet sink and goes and takes a half-gram, maybe a gram at most out of the emergency stash out of the vault-thing he's razored out of the Principles of Natural Lectures Principles of Natural Lectures Far from your scenario of relapsing, the Bing is medicinal support for a.s.sertively sharing his need for aloneness with Green, so that issues of early sobriety can get resolved before standing in the way of spiritual growth - Lenz will use cocaine in the very interests of sobriety and growth itself. Far from your scenario of relapsing, the Bing is medicinal support for a.s.sertively sharing his need for aloneness with Green, so that issues of early sobriety can get resolved before standing in the way of spiritual growth - Lenz will use cocaine in the very interests of sobriety and growth itself.

So then like strategically, at the Brookline Young People's Mtg. over on Beacon near the Newton line on a Wednesday, at the raffle-break, at 2109h., Lenz moistens his half-gasper and puts it carefully back in the pack and yawns and stretches and does a quick pulse-check and gets up and saunters casually into the Handicapped head with the lockable door and the big sort of crib built around the s.h.i.+tter itself for crippled lowering onto the toilet and does like maybe two, maybe three generous lines of Bing off the top of the toilet-tank and wipes the tank-top off both before and after with wet paper towels, ironically rolling up the same crisp buck he'd brought for the meeting's collection and utilizing it and cleaning it thoroughly with his finger and rubbing his gums with the finger and then putting his head way back in the mirror to check the kidney-shaped nostrils of his fine aqua-line nose for clinging evidence in the trim hair up there and tasting the bitter drip in the back of his frozen throat and taking the clean rolled buck and back-rolling it and smoothing it out and hammering it with his fist on the lip of the sink and folding it neatly into half of half its original Treasury Dept. size so that all evidence anybody ever even had a pa.s.sing thought of rolling the buck into a hard tight tube is, like, anileated anileated. Then sauntered back out like b.u.t.ter wouldn't soften anywhere on his body, knowing just where to look at all times and casually hefting his b.a.l.l.s before he sat back down.

And then aside from the every so often hemispasm of the mouth and right eye he hides via the old sungla.s.ses and pretend-cough tactic the second half of the mtg.'s endless oratory goes fine, he supposes, even though he did smoke almost a whole expensive pack of gaspers in 34 minutes, and the holier-than-you Young-People AAs over in what were supposed to be the Nonsmoking rows of chairs against the east wall to his right shot him over some negative-type looks when perchance he happened to find he had one going in the little tin ashtray and two at once going in his mouth, but Lenz was able to play the whole thing off with insousistent aplomb, sitting there in his aviator sungla.s.ses with his legs crossed and his topcoated arms resting out along the backs of the empty chairs on either side.

The night-noises of the metro night: harbor-wind skirling on angled cement, the shush and sheen of overpa.s.s traffic, TPs' laughter in interior rooms, the yowl of unresolved cat-life. Horns blatting off in the harbor. Receding sirens. Confused inland gulls' cries. Broken gla.s.s from far away. Car horns in gridlock, arguments in languages, more broken gla.s.s, running shoes, a woman's either laugh or scream from who can tell how far, coming off the grid. Dogs defending whatever dog-yards they pa.s.s by, the sounds of chains and risen hackles. The podiatric click and thud, the visible breath, gravel's crunch, creak of Green's leather, the snick snick of a million urban lighters, the gauzy far-off humming ATHSCMEs pointing out true plumb north, the clunk and tinkle of stuff going into dumpsters and rustle of stuff in dumpsters