Infinite Jest Part 48

Gately's also powerless over memories of the older-type lady that had been their neighbor when he and his mother shared bed and board with the M.P. A Mrs. Waite. There was no Mr. Waite. The smeared window of the little empty garage the M.P. kept his weights in was right next to the spiny neglected garden Mrs. Waite kept in the narrow strip between the two houses. Mrs. Waite's house had been shall we say indifferently maintained. Mrs. Waite's house had made the Gately house look like the Taj. There was something wrong about Mrs. Waite. None of the parents said what it was, but none of the kids were allowed to play in her yard or ring her bell on Halloween. Gately never got clear on what was supposed to be wrong about her, but the little poor neighborhood's psyche throbbed with something dire about Mrs. Waite. Older kids drove across her lawn and shouted s.h.i.+t that Gately never quite made out, at night. The littler kids thought they had it: they were pretty sure Mrs. Waite was a witch. Yes, she did look a little witchy, but who over like fifty didn't? But the big thing was she kept jars of stuff she'd jarred herself in her little garage, brown-green viscous nameless vegetoid stuff in mayonnaise jars stacked on steel shelves and rusty-lidded and bearded with dust. The littler kids snuck in and broke some of the jars and stole one and ran away in mortal terror to break it elsewhere and then run again. They dared each other to ride their bikes in tiny diagonals across the edge of her lawn. They told each other stories of seeing Mrs. Waite in a pointy hat roasting missing kids whose pictures were on milk-cartons and pouring the juice into jars. Some of the bigger littler kids even tried that inevitable gag of putting a paper bag full of dog s.h.i.+t on her stoop and lighting it. It was somehow a further indictment of Mrs. Waite that she never complained. She rarely left her house. Mrs. Gately would never say what was wrong about Mrs. Waite but absolutely forbade Don to f.u.c.k with her in any way. Like Mrs. Gately was in any position to enforce any, like, forbiddings. Gately never f.u.c.ked with Mrs. Waite's stored jars or rode across her lawn, and never much joined in on the witch-stories, which who needed witches to fear and despise when you had the good old M.P. right there at the kitchen table. But he was still scared of her. When he'd once seen her gnarly-eyed face up against the smeared garage window one P.M. when he had left the M.P. to beating Mrs. Gately and gone out to lift weights he screamed and almost dropped the bench-press bar on his Adam's apple. But over the long haul of a low-stimulation North Sh.o.r.e childhood, he'd gradually developed a slight relations.h.i.+p with Mrs. Waite. He'd never all that much liked her; it wasn't like she was this lovable but misunderstood old lady; it's not like he ran to her dilapitated house to confide in her, or bond. But he went over once or twice, maybe, under circ.u.mstances he'd forgot, and had sat in her kitchen, interfaced a little. She was lucid, Mrs. Waite, and apparently continent, and there was no pointy hat anywhere in sight, but her house smelled bad, and Mrs. Waite herself had swollen veiny ankles and little white bits of that dried paste at the corners of her mouth and about a million newspapers stacked and mildewing all over the kitchen, and the old lady basically radiated whatever mixture of unpleasantness and vulnerability it was that made you want to be cruel to people. Gately was never cruel to her, but it's not like he loved her or anything. When Gately went over there the couple times it was mostly when the M.P. was canning chowder and his mother had pa.s.sed out in vomit she expected somebody else to clean up, and he probably wanted to act out his kid's anger by doing something Mrs. G.'d pathetically tried to forbid. He didn't eat much of whatever Mrs. Waite offered. She never offered him viscous material from a jar. His memories of whatever they discussed are unspecific. She hung herself, eventually, Mrs. Waite - as in eliminated her own map - and because it was fall and cool she wasn't found for maybe weeks after. It wasn't Gately who found her. A meter-reader guy found her several weeks after Gately's eighth or ninth birthday. Gately's birthday was the same week as several other kids's in the neighborhood, by some chance. Usually Gately'd have his party over with some of the other kids that were having their birthdays with a party. Hats and Twister, X-Men videos, cake on Chinette plates, etc. Mrs. Gately was together enough to come a couple times. In retrospect, the other kids' parents let Gately have birthdays with them because they'd felt sorry for him, he's involuntarily realized. But at some sober neighbors' party, part of which was for his own eighth or ninth birthday, he remembers how Mrs. Waite had left her house and come rung the sober neighbor's bell and had brought a birthday cake. For the birthday. A neighborly gesture. Gately'd spilled the beans on the annual ma.s.s party at a kitchen-table interface with her. The cake was uneven and slightly tilted to one side, but it was dark chocolate and decorated with four cursive names and had clearly been made with care. Mrs. Waite had spared Gately the humiliation of putting just his name on the cake as if the cake was especially for him. But it was. Mrs. Waite had saved up for a long time to afford to make the cake, Gately knew. He knew she smoked like a chimney and had given up cigarettes for weeks to save up for something; she wouldn't tell him what; she'd tried to make her scary eyes twinkle when she wouldn't tell; but he'd seen the mayonnaise jar full of quarters on a pile of papers and had wrestled with himself over promoting it, and won. But there were only like nine candles on the cake when the party's Mom brought it in, and a couple of the kids having birthdays were like twelve, was the private tip-off on who the cake was really for. The party's Mom had taken the cake at the door and said Thank You but had neglected to invite Mrs. Waite in. Gately was in a position during Twister in the garage to see Mrs. Waite walking back home across the street, slowly but very straightly and dignified and upright. A lot of the kids went to the garage door to look: Mrs. Waite had rarely been seen outside her house before, and never off her property. The sober Mom brought the cake in the garage and said it was a Touching Gesture from Mrs. Waite across the street; but she wouldn't let anybody eat the cake or even come close enough to it to blow out the nine candles. The candles didn't all match. The candles burned down far enough so that there was a smell of burnt frosting before they went out. The cake sat tilted by itself in a corner of the clean garage. Gately didn't defy the sober Mom or any of the kids and eat a piece of the cake; he didn't even go near it. He didn't join in the delicious whispery arguments about what kind of medical waste or roasted-kid renderings were in the cake, but he didn't stand up and argue with the other kids about the fact of the poisoning, either. Before the party climaxed and the other kids that had got presents opened their presents, the sober Mom had taken the cake into the kitchen when she thought n.o.body was watching and threw it out in the wastebasket. Gately remembers the cake must have landed upside-down, because the unfrosted side was facing up in the waste-basket when he snuck in and had a look at the cake. Mrs. Waite had disappeared back inside her house way before the Mom threw the cake away. There's no way she could have seen the Mom take the uneaten cake back inside the house. A couple days later Gately had promoted a couple packs of Benson & Hedges 100s from a Store 24 and put them in Mrs. Waite's mailbox, where junk mail and utility bills were already piling up. He sometimes rang the bell but never saw her. Her bell had been a buzzer instead of a bell, he remembers. She got found by a frustrated meter-reader some indefinite number of weeks after that. The circ.u.mstances of her death and discovery became more dark myth for the littler kids. Gately wasn't so into self-torture as to think the cake getting not eaten and getting thrown out was in any way connected with Mrs. Waite hanging herself. Everybody had their own private troubles, Mrs. Gately had explained to him, and even at that age he could see her point. It's not like he'd like mourned Mrs. Waite, or missed her, or even thought about her even once for many years after that.

Which is what makes it somehow worse that his next, even more unpleasant Joelle van Dyne pain-and-fever dream takes place in what is, unmistakably and unavoidably, Mrs. Waite's kitchen, in great detail, right down to the ceiling's light-fixture full of dried bugs, the br.i.m.m.i.n.g ashtrays, the bar-graph of stacked Globe Globe s, the maddening arrhythmic drip of the kitchen sink and the bad smell - a mixture of mildew and putrid fruit. Gately is in the ladder-back kitchen chair he used to sit in, the one with one rung broken, and Mrs. Waite is in her chair opposite, seated on the thing he thought then was a weird pink doughnut instead of a hemorrhoid pillow, except in the dream Gately's feet reach all the way to rest on the floor's dank tile, and Mrs. Waite is played by veiled U.H.I.D. House resident Joelle van D., except without her veil, and what's more without any clothes, as in starkers, gorgeous, with that same incredible body as in the other one except here this time with the face not of a jowly British P.M. but of a total female angel, not s.e.xy so much as angelic, like all the world's light had gotten together and arranged itself into the shape of a face. Or something. It looks like somebody, Joelle's face, but Gately can't for the life of him place who, and it's not just the distraction of the inhumanly gorgeous naked bod below, because the dream is not like a s.e.x-dream. Because in this dream, Mrs. Waite, who is Joelle, is Death. As in the figure of Death, Death incarnate. n.o.body comes right out and says so; it's just understood: Gately's sitting here in this depressing kitchen interfacing with Death. Death is explaining that Death happens over and over, you have many lives, and at the end of each one (meaning life) is a woman who kills you and releases you into the next life. Gately can't quite make out if it's like a monologue or if he's asking questions and she's responding in a Q/A deal. Death says that this certain woman that kills you is always your next life's mother. This is how it works: didn't he know? In the dream everybody in the world seems to know this except Gately, like he'd missed that day in school when they covered it, and so Death's having to sit here naked and angelic and explain it to him, very patiently, more or less like Remedial Reading at Beverly H.S. Death says the woman who either knowingly or involuntarily kills you is always someone you love, and she's always your next life's mother. This is why Moms are so obsessively loving, why they try so hard no matter what private troubles or issues or addictions they have of their own, why they seem to value your welfare above their own, and why there's always a slight, like, twinge of selfishness about their obssessive mother-love: they're trying to make amends for a murder neither of you quite remember, except maybe in dreams. As Death's explanation of Death goes on Gately understands really important vague stuff more and more, but the more he understands the sadder he gets, and the sadder he gets the more unfocused and wobbly be- comes his vision of the Death's Joelle sitting nude on the pink plastic ring, until near the end it's as if he's seeing her through a kind of cloud of light, a milky filter that's the same as the wobbly blur through which a baby sees a parental face bending over its crib, and he begins to cry in a way that hurts his chest, and asks Death to set him free and be his mother, and Joelle either shakes or nods her lovely unfocused head and says: Wait. s, the maddening arrhythmic drip of the kitchen sink and the bad smell - a mixture of mildew and putrid fruit. Gately is in the ladder-back kitchen chair he used to sit in, the one with one rung broken, and Mrs. Waite is in her chair opposite, seated on the thing he thought then was a weird pink doughnut instead of a hemorrhoid pillow, except in the dream Gately's feet reach all the way to rest on the floor's dank tile, and Mrs. Waite is played by veiled U.H.I.D. House resident Joelle van D., except without her veil, and what's more without any clothes, as in starkers, gorgeous, with that same incredible body as in the other one except here this time with the face not of a jowly British P.M. but of a total female angel, not s.e.xy so much as angelic, like all the world's light had gotten together and arranged itself into the shape of a face. Or something. It looks like somebody, Joelle's face, but Gately can't for the life of him place who, and it's not just the distraction of the inhumanly gorgeous naked bod below, because the dream is not like a s.e.x-dream. Because in this dream, Mrs. Waite, who is Joelle, is Death. As in the figure of Death, Death incarnate. n.o.body comes right out and says so; it's just understood: Gately's sitting here in this depressing kitchen interfacing with Death. Death is explaining that Death happens over and over, you have many lives, and at the end of each one (meaning life) is a woman who kills you and releases you into the next life. Gately can't quite make out if it's like a monologue or if he's asking questions and she's responding in a Q/A deal. Death says that this certain woman that kills you is always your next life's mother. This is how it works: didn't he know? In the dream everybody in the world seems to know this except Gately, like he'd missed that day in school when they covered it, and so Death's having to sit here naked and angelic and explain it to him, very patiently, more or less like Remedial Reading at Beverly H.S. Death says the woman who either knowingly or involuntarily kills you is always someone you love, and she's always your next life's mother. This is why Moms are so obsessively loving, why they try so hard no matter what private troubles or issues or addictions they have of their own, why they seem to value your welfare above their own, and why there's always a slight, like, twinge of selfishness about their obssessive mother-love: they're trying to make amends for a murder neither of you quite remember, except maybe in dreams. As Death's explanation of Death goes on Gately understands really important vague stuff more and more, but the more he understands the sadder he gets, and the sadder he gets the more unfocused and wobbly be- comes his vision of the Death's Joelle sitting nude on the pink plastic ring, until near the end it's as if he's seeing her through a kind of cloud of light, a milky filter that's the same as the wobbly blur through which a baby sees a parental face bending over its crib, and he begins to cry in a way that hurts his chest, and asks Death to set him free and be his mother, and Joelle either shakes or nods her lovely unfocused head and says: Wait.

20 NOVEMBER.

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT GAUDEAMUS IGITUR GAUDEAMUS IGITUR.

I was in a zoo. There were no animals or cages, but it was still a zoo. It was close to a nightmare and it woke me before 0500h. Mario was still asleep, gently lit by the window's view of tiny lights down the hill. He lay very still and soundless as always, his poor hands folded on his chest, as if awaiting a lily. I put in a plug of Kodiak. His four pillows brought Mario's chin to his chest when he slept. I was still producing excess saliva, and my one pillow was moist in a way I didn't want to turn on a light and investigate. I didn't feel good at all. A sort of nausea of the head. The feeling seemed worst first thing in the morning. I'd felt for almost a week as if I needed to cry for some reason but the tears were somehow stopping just millimeters behind my eyes and staying there. And so on.

I got up and went past the foot of Mario's bed to the window to stand on one foot. Sometime during the night heavy snow had begun to fall. I had been ordered by deLint and Barry Loach to stand on the left foot for fifteen minutes a day as therapy for the ankle. The countless little adjustments necessary to balance on one foot worked muscles and ligaments in the ankle that were therapeutically unreachable any other way. I always felt sort of d.i.c.kish, standing on one foot in the dark with nothing to do.

The snow on the ground had a purple cast to it, but the falling and whirling snow was virgin white. Yachting-cap white. I stood on my left foot for maybe five minutes tops. The Boards and A.P.s 344 344 were three weeks from tomorrow at 0800 in the C.B.S. were three weeks from tomorrow at 0800 in the C.B.S. 345 345 auditorium at B.U. I could hear a night-custodial crew rolling a mop-bucket somewhere on another floor. auditorium at B.U. I could hear a night-custodial crew rolling a mop-bucket somewhere on another floor.

This was to be the first A.M. without dawn drills since Interdependence Day, and everybody was invited to sleep in until breakfast. There were to be no cla.s.ses all weekend.

I'd awakened too early yesterday, too. I'd kept seeing Kevin Bain crawling my way in my sleep.

I straightened up my bed and put the pillow's wet side down and put on clean sweatpants and some socks that didn't smell foul.

The closest Mario comes to snoring is a thin sound he makes at the back of his throat. The sound is as if he's drawing out the word key key over and over. It's not an unpleasant sound. I estimated a good 50 cm. of snow on the ground, and it was really coming down. In the purple half-light the West Courts' nets were half-buried. Their top halves shuddered in a terrible wind. All over the subdormitory I could hear doors rattling slightly in their frames, as they did only in a bad wind. The wind gave the snowfall a swirling diagonal aspect. Snow was. .h.i.tting the exterior of the window with a sandy sound. The basic view outside the window was that of a briskly shaken paperweight - the kind with the Xmas diorama and shakeable snow. The grounds' trees, fences and buildings looked toylike and miniaturized somehow. In fact it was hard to distinguish new snow falling from extant snow simply whirling around in the wind. It only then occurred to me to wonder whether and where we would play today's exhibition meet. The Lung wasn't yet up, but the sixteen courts under the Lung wouldn't have accommodated more than an A-only meet anyway. A kind of cold hope flared in me because I realized this could be cancellation-weather. The backlash of this hope was an even worse feeling than before: I couldn't remember ever actively hoping not to have to play before. I couldn't remember feeling strongly one way or the other about playing for quite a long time, in fact. over and over. It's not an unpleasant sound. I estimated a good 50 cm. of snow on the ground, and it was really coming down. In the purple half-light the West Courts' nets were half-buried. Their top halves shuddered in a terrible wind. All over the subdormitory I could hear doors rattling slightly in their frames, as they did only in a bad wind. The wind gave the snowfall a swirling diagonal aspect. Snow was. .h.i.tting the exterior of the window with a sandy sound. The basic view outside the window was that of a briskly shaken paperweight - the kind with the Xmas diorama and shakeable snow. The grounds' trees, fences and buildings looked toylike and miniaturized somehow. In fact it was hard to distinguish new snow falling from extant snow simply whirling around in the wind. It only then occurred to me to wonder whether and where we would play today's exhibition meet. The Lung wasn't yet up, but the sixteen courts under the Lung wouldn't have accommodated more than an A-only meet anyway. A kind of cold hope flared in me because I realized this could be cancellation-weather. The backlash of this hope was an even worse feeling than before: I couldn't remember ever actively hoping not to have to play before. I couldn't remember feeling strongly one way or the other about playing for quite a long time, in fact.

Mario and I had begun to make a practice of keeping the phone console's power on at night but turning off the ringer. The console's digital recorder had a light that pulsed once for each incoming message. The double flash of the recorder's light set up an interesting interference pattern with the red battery-light on the ceiling's smoke detector, the two lights flas.h.i.+ng in synch on every seventh phone-flash and then moving slowly apart in a visual Doppler. A formula for the temporal relation between two unsyncopated flashes would translate spatially into the algebraic formula for an ellipse, I could see. Pemulis had poured a terrific volume of practical pre-Boards math into my head for two weeks, taking his own time and not asking for anything in return, being almost suspiciously generous about it. Then, since the Wayne debacle, the little tutorials had ceased and Pemulis himself had been very scarce, twice missing meals and several times taking the truck for long periods without checking with any of the rest of us about our truck-needs. I didn't even try to factor in the rapid single flash of the phone's power-unit display on the side of the TP; this would make it some sort calculus thing, and even Pemulis had conceded that I was not hardwired for anything past algebra and conic sections.

Every November, between I. Day and the WhataBurger Invitational in Tucson AZ, the Academy holds a semipublic exhibition meet for the 'benefit' of E.T.A.'s patrons and alumni and friends in the Boston area. The exhibition is followed by a semiformal c.o.c.ktail party and dance in the dining hall, where players are required to appear showered and semiformal and available for social intercourse with patrons. Some of them all but check our teeth. Last year Heath Pearson had appeared for the gala in a red vest and bellboy's cap and furry tail, carrying a little organ and inviting patrons to grind the organ while he capered around chattering. C.T. was unamused. The whole Fundraiser is a Charles Tavis innovation. C.T. is far better at public relations and pump-priming than was Himself. The exhibition and gala are possibly the climax of C.T.'s whole administrative year. He'd determined that mid-November was the best time for a fundraiser, with the weather not yet bad and the tax-year drawing to a close but the U.S. holiday season, with its own draining system of demands on goodwill, not yet under way. For the past three fiscal years, the Fundraiser's proceeds have all but paid for the spring's Southeast tour and the European terre-batu- terre-batu- fest of JuneJuly. fest of JuneJuly.

The exhibition meet involved both genders' A and B teams and was always against some foreign junior squad, to give the whole Fundraising affair a patriotic kicker. The gentle fiction was that the meet was just one stop for the foreign squad on a whole vague general U.S. tour, but in truth C.T. usually flew the foreigners in special, and at some expense. We had in the past done battle with teams from Wales, Belize, the Sudan, and Mozambique. Cynics might point to an absence of tennis juggernauts among the opponents. Last year's Mozambique thing was a particular turkey-shoot, 702, and there'd been an ugly xeno-racist mood among some of the spectators and patrons, a couple of whom cheerily compared the meet to Mussolini's tanks rolling over Ethiopian spearchuckers. Y.D.A.U.'s opponents were to be the Quebec Jr. Davis and Jr. Wightman Cup teams, and their arrival from M.I.A.-D'Orval 346 346 was keenly antic.i.p.ated by Struck and Freer, who claimed that the Quebecois Jr. Wightman girls were normally sequestered and saw very few coed venues and would be available for broadening intercultural relations of all kinds. was keenly antic.i.p.ated by Struck and Freer, who claimed that the Quebecois Jr. Wightman girls were normally sequestered and saw very few coed venues and would be available for broadening intercultural relations of all kinds.

It was improbable that anything was going to be landing on time at Logan in this kind of snow, though.

The wind also produced a desolate moaning in all the ventilation ducts. Mario said 'key' and sometimes 'ski,' drawing them out. It occurred to me that without some one-hitters to be able to look forward to smoking alone in the tunnel I was waking up every day feeling as though there was nothing in the day to antic.i.p.ate or lend anything any meaning. I stood on one foot for a couple more minutes, spitting into a coffee can I'd left on the floor near the phone from the night before. The implied question, then, would be whether the Bob Hope had somehow become not just the high-point of the day but its actual meaning. That would be pretty appalling. The Penn 4 that was my hand-strengthening ball for November was on the sill against the window. I'd neither carried nor squeezed my ball for several days. No one seemed to have noticed.

Mario cedes me full control over the phone's ringer and answering machine, since he has trouble holding the receiver and the only messages he ever gets are In-House ones from the Moms. I enjoyed leaving different outgoing messages on the machine. But I refused ever to back the messages with music or digitally altered bits of entertainment. None of the E.T.A. phones was video-capable - another C.T. decision. Under C.T. the Academy's manual of honor codes, rules, and procedures had almost tripled in length. Probably our room's best message ever was Ortho Stice doing his deadly C.T.-impression, taking 80 seconds to list possible reasons why Mario and I couldn't answer the phone and outlining our probable reactions to all possible caller-emotions provoked my our unavailability. But at 80 seconds the thing wore thin after a while. Our outgoing this week was something like 'This is the disembodied voice of Hal Incandenza, whose body is not now able...,' and so on, and then the standard invitation to leave a message. It was honesty and abstinence week, after all, and this seemed a more truthful message to leave than the pedestrian 'This is Hal Incandenza...,' since the caller would pretty obviously be hearing a digital recording of me rather than me. This observation owed a debt to Pemulis, who for years and with several different roommates has retained the same recursive message - 'This is Mike Pemulis's answering machine's answering machine; Mike Pemulis's answering machine regrets being unavailable to take a first-order message for Mike Pemulis, but if you'll leave a second-order message at the sound of the clapping hand, Mike Pemulis's answering machine will...,' and so on, which has worn so thin that very few of Pemulis's friends or customers can abide waiting through the tired thing to leave a message, which Pemulis finds congenial, since no really relevant caller would be fool enough to leave his name on any machine of Pemulis's anyway.

Plus it was also creepy that, when the face's effulgence becomes the boiled white of the Trauma Wing ceiling as he comes up with a start up for air, the apparently real nondream Joelle van D. is leaning over the bed's crib-railing, wetting Gately's big forehead and horror-rounded lips with a cool cloth, wearing sweatpants and a sort of loose brocaded hulpil whose lavender almost matches the selvage on her clean veil. The hulpil's neckline is too high for there to be much cleavage-action as she leans over him, which Gately regards as probably kind of a mercy. The two brownies Joelle's got in her other hand (and her nails are bitten down to the ragged quick, just like Gately's) she says she liberated from the nurses' station and brought down for him, since Morris H. meant them for him and they're by all just rights his. But she can see he's in no shape to swallow, she says. She smells like peaches and cotton, and there's a sweet evil whiff of the discount Canadian gaspers so many of the residents smoke, and underneath those smells Gately can detect that she's got on a bit of perfume. 347 347 To amuse him she says 'And Lo' several times. Gately makes his chest go up and down rapidly to signify amus.e.m.e.nt. He declines either to moo or mew at her, out of embarra.s.sment. Her veil this morning has a springy light-purple around the border, and the hair framing the veil seems a darker red, duskier, than when she'd first come into the House and refused meat. Gately hadn't been much into WYYY or Madame Psychosis, but he'd sometimes run into people who were - Organics men, mostly, opium and brown heroin, terrible mulled wine - and he feels on top of the febrile pain and the creepiness of the amphetaminic-wraith- and Winston-Churchill-face-Joelle-and angelic-maternal-Death-Joelle-dreams an odd vividness in himself at being swabbed and maybe even generally admired by someone who's an underground local intellectual-dash-art-type celebrity. He doesn't know how to explain it, like as if the fact that she's a public personage makes him feel somehow physically actuated, like more there there -feeling, conscious of the way he's holding his face, hesitant to make his barnyard sounds, even breathing through his nose so she won't smell his unbrushed teeth. He feels self-conscious with her, Joelle can tell, but what's admirable is he has no idea how heroic or even romantic he looks, unshaven and intubated, huge and helpless, wounded in service to somebody who did not deserve service, half out of his tree from pain and refusing narcotics. The last and pretty much only man Joelle ever let herself admire in a romantic way had left and wouldn't even face up to why, instead erecting for himself a pathetic jealous fantasy about Joelle and his own poor father, whose only interest in Joelle had been first aesthetic and then anti-aesthetic. -feeling, conscious of the way he's holding his face, hesitant to make his barnyard sounds, even breathing through his nose so she won't smell his unbrushed teeth. He feels self-conscious with her, Joelle can tell, but what's admirable is he has no idea how heroic or even romantic he looks, unshaven and intubated, huge and helpless, wounded in service to somebody who did not deserve service, half out of his tree from pain and refusing narcotics. The last and pretty much only man Joelle ever let herself admire in a romantic way had left and wouldn't even face up to why, instead erecting for himself a pathetic jealous fantasy about Joelle and his own poor father, whose only interest in Joelle had been first aesthetic and then anti-aesthetic.

Joelle doesn't know that newly sober people are awfully vulnerable to the delusion that people with more sober time than them are romantic and heroic, instead of clueless and terrified and just muddling through day-by-day like everybody else in AA is (except maybe the f.u.c.king Crocodiles).

Joelle says she can't stay long this time: all nonworking residents have to report for the House's A.M. daily-meditation meeting, as Gately knows only too well. He isn't sure what she means by 'this time.' She describes the newest male resident's weird limbo-injury posture, and the way Johnette Foltz has to cut up this Dave guy's supper and drop it into his open mouth bit by bit like a bird with a chick. Lifting her face to the ceiling makes the linen veil conform to the features of the face below, mouth open wide in imitation of a chick. The crewneckish hulpil makes her hair's loose curls look dark and her wrists and hands look pale. Her hands's skin is taut and freckled and treed with veins. His bed's metal bars keep Gately's rolling eyes from seeing anything much south of her thorax until Joelle finishes with the washcloth and retreats to the edge of the other bed, which at some point has become empty and the crying guy's chart removed, and its crib-railings folded down, and she sits on the edge of the bed and crosses her legs, supporting one huarache's heel on the railing's joint, revealing she's got on white socks under flesh-colored huaraches and ancient baggy old birch-colored sweatpants with B.U.M. down one leg, which Gately's pretty sure he's seen at the Sunday A.M. Big Book meeting on Ken Erdedy, and belong to Erdedy, and he feels a flash of something unpleasant that she'd be wearing the upscale kid's pants. The A.M. light outside has gone from sunny yellow-white to now a kind of old-dime gray, with what looks like serious wind.

Joelle eats the cream-cheese brownies Gately can't eat and works at pulling a kind of big notebookish thing out of her broad cloth purse. She talks about last night's St. Columbkill's 348 348 Meeting, where they'd all gone unsupervised because Johnette F. had to stay and keep an eye on Glynn who was sick and on Henderson and Willis, who were under legal quarantine upstairs. Gately racks his RAM for which f.u.c.king night St. Columbkill's is. Joelle says how last night's was St. Collie's once-a-month format where instead of a Commitment they had that round-robin discussion where somebody in the hall spoke for five minutes and then picked the next speaker out of the hall's crowd. There'd been a Kentuckian there, which Gately might recall she was from Kentucky? A Kentucky newcomer there, Wayne something, a real damaged-looking boy who hailed from the good old Blue Gra.s.s State but of late resided in a disconnected drainage pipe off a watershed facility down in the Allston Spur, he'd said. This guy, she said, said he was nineteen or thereabout, looked 40-some+, had clothes that looked to be decomposing on him even as he stood at the podium, had a ripe odor of drainage about him that produced hankies as far back as the fourth row, which he explained the odor by admitting his residential drainage pipe was in fact 'mostly' disconnected, like as in little-used. Joelle's voice is nothing like the hollow resonant radio-voice and she uses her hands a lot to talk, trying to recreate the whole thing for Gately. Trying to give him a little bit of a meeting, Gately realizes, with a slight tight smile of disbelief that he can't dredge up a mental meeting schedule so he'll know what day this is. Meeting, where they'd all gone unsupervised because Johnette F. had to stay and keep an eye on Glynn who was sick and on Henderson and Willis, who were under legal quarantine upstairs. Gately racks his RAM for which f.u.c.king night St. Columbkill's is. Joelle says how last night's was St. Collie's once-a-month format where instead of a Commitment they had that round-robin discussion where somebody in the hall spoke for five minutes and then picked the next speaker out of the hall's crowd. There'd been a Kentuckian there, which Gately might recall she was from Kentucky? A Kentucky newcomer there, Wayne something, a real damaged-looking boy who hailed from the good old Blue Gra.s.s State but of late resided in a disconnected drainage pipe off a watershed facility down in the Allston Spur, he'd said. This guy, she said, said he was nineteen or thereabout, looked 40-some+, had clothes that looked to be decomposing on him even as he stood at the podium, had a ripe odor of drainage about him that produced hankies as far back as the fourth row, which he explained the odor by admitting his residential drainage pipe was in fact 'mostly' disconnected, like as in little-used. Joelle's voice is nothing like the hollow resonant radio-voice and she uses her hands a lot to talk, trying to recreate the whole thing for Gately. Trying to give him a little bit of a meeting, Gately realizes, with a slight tight smile of disbelief that he can't dredge up a mental meeting schedule so he'll know what day this is.

Some of the St. Columbkillers were saying it was the longest single blackout they'd ever heard of. This Wayne fellow'd said he had no idea when, why or how he'd ended up so far up north as metro Boston ten years after his last memory. Most compelling, visually, Wayne had had a deep diagonal furrow in his face, extending from right eyebrow to left lip-corner - Joelle traces the length and angle with a ragged-nailed finger across her veil - splaying his nose and upper lip and rendering him so violently cross-eyed he seemed to address both corners of the front row at the same time. This old Wayne boy'd sketched how the facial dent - what Wayne had called 'the Flaw,' pointing at it like people might need help seeing what he was talking about - derived from his very own personal hard-drinking alcoholic & chicken-farmer Daddy, in the grip of the post-binge Horrors and seeing subjective pests in a big way, one day, up and hitting Wayne at age nine smack in the face with a hatchet one time when Wayne couldn't tell him where a certain Ball jar of distilled spirits had been hidden the day before, against the possibility of the Horrors. It had been just him and his Daddy and his Maw - ' "that was feeble" ' - and 7.7 acres of chicken farm, Wayne had said. Wayne said the Flaw had just about healed up fine with fresh air and plenty of exercise when his Daddy, trying one Monday P.M. to get outside a late lunch of mush and syrup, up and clutched his skull, turned red and then blue and then purple, and died. Little Wayne had reportedly wiped the face clean of mush, dragged the dead body under the farmhouse porch, wrapped it in Purina Chicken-Chow sacks, and told his feeble Maw his Daddy had gone off to lay up drunk. The diagonal-dented kid had apparently then gone off to school as usual, done some discreet w.o.m. advertising, and had brought home with him a different set of boys each day for almost a week, charging them a fiveski a head to crawl under the porch and eyeball a bona fried dead man. Late Friday P.M., he recollected, he'd set off with hard currency to the billiard establishment where the n.i.g.g.e.rs 349 349 that sold distilled Ball jars to his late Daddy was at, getting set to ' "lay up drunk as a c.o.c.k on jimson." ' The next thing this Wayne boy says he knows, he wakes up in the partially disconnected NNE pipe, one millennial decade older and with some ' "right nasty" ' medical issues the timer's bell prevents him from sharing in detail. that sold distilled Ball jars to his late Daddy was at, getting set to ' "lay up drunk as a c.o.c.k on jimson." ' The next thing this Wayne boy says he knows, he wakes up in the partially disconnected NNE pipe, one millennial decade older and with some ' "right nasty" ' medical issues the timer's bell prevents him from sharing in detail.

And this old Wayne boy had up and pointed to Joelle to come speak next. 'Almost as if he knew. As if he gut-intuited some sort of kins.h.i.+p, affinity of origin.'

Gately grunted softly to himself. He figured guys with ten-year blackouts who live in pipes probably didn't have to much to go on besides your gut-type intuitions. He knew he needed to be reminded that this strange girl was only about three weeks clean and still leaching Substances out of her tissues and still utterly clueless, but he felt like he resented it whenever he got reminded. Joelle had the big flat book in her lap and was looking down at her thumb and flexing it, watching it flex. What was disconcerting was that when her head was down the veil hung loose at the same vertical angle as when her head was up, only now it was perfectly smooth and untextured, a smooth white screen with nothing behind it. A loudspeaker down the hall gave those xylophone dings that meant G.o.d knows what all the time.

When Joelle's head came back up, the rea.s.suring little hills and valleys of veiled features reappeared behind the screen. 'I'm going to have to take off here in a second,' she said. 'I could come on back after, if you want. I can bring anything you think you'd like.'

Gately hiked an eyebrow at her, to get her to smile.

'Hopefully since your fever went down they said they'll decide you're out of the woods and take that out, finally,' Joelle said, looking at Gately's mouth. 'It's got to hurt, and Pat said you'll feel better when you can start quote sharing what you're feeling.'

Gately hiked both eyebrows.

'And you can tell me what you'd like brought. Who you'd want to have come. Whom.'

Moving his left arm north along his chest and throat to get the left hand up to feel at his mouth made the whole right side sing with pain. A skin-warmed plastic tube led in from the right side and was taped to his right cheek and went into his mouth and went down his throat past where his fingers could feel at the back of his mouth. He hadn't been able to feel it in his mouth or going down the back of his throat to he didn't want to know where, or even the tape on his cheek. He'd had like this like tube in his throat the whole time and hadn't even known it. It had been in there so long by the time he came up for air he'd gotten like unconsciously used to it and hadn't even known it was there. Maybe it was a feeding tube. The tube was probably why he could only mew and grunt. He probably didn't have permanent voice damage. Thank G.o.d. He made his thoughts capitalized and Thanked G.o.d several times. He pictured himself at a lavish Commitment podium, like at an AA convention, off-handedly saying something that got an enormous laugh.

Either Joelle had some sort of problem with her thumb or she'd just got really interested in watching the thumb flex and twiddle. She was saying 'It's strange, not knowing it's coming, then standing up there to speak. Folks you don't know. Things I don't realize I think til I say them. On the show I was used to knowing quite well what I thought before I spoke. This isn't like that.' She seemed to be addressing herself to the thumb. 'I took a page from your manual and shared my complaint about the "But For the Grace of G.o.d," and you were right, they just laughed. But I also... I hadn't realized til I found myself telling them that I'd stopped seeing the "One Day at a Time" and "Keep It in the Day" as trite cliches. Patronizing.' Gately noticed she still talks about Recovery-issues in a stiff proper intellectualish way she doesn't talk about other stuff with. Her way of still keeping it all at arm's length a little. A mental thumb to pretend to look at while she talks. It was all right; Gately's own way of keeping it at arm's length at the start had involved an actual arm. He pictured her laughing as he tells her that, the veil billowing mightily in and out. He smiled around the tube, which Joelle saw as encouragement. She said 'And why Pat in counselling keeps telling me just to build a wall around each individual 24-hour period and not look over or back. And not to count days. Even when you get a chip for 14 days or 30 days, not to add them up. In counselling I'd just smile and nod. Being polite. But standing up there last night, I didn't even share it aloud, but I realized suddenly that this was why I'd never been able to stay off the stuff for more than a couple weeks. I'd always break down, go back. Freebase.' She looks up at him. 'I 'based, you know. You knew that. You all see the Intake forms.'

Gately smiles.

She said 'This was why I couldn't get off and stay off. Just as the cliche warns. I literally wasn't keeping it in the day. I was adding the clean days up in my head.' She c.o.c.ked her head at him. 'Did you ever hear of this fellow Evel Knievel? This motorcycle-jumper?'

Gately nods slightly, being careful of a tube he now feels. This is why his throat had had that raped feeling in it. The tube. He actually has an old cutout action picture of the historical Evel Knievel, from an old Life Life magazine, in a white leather Elvisish suit, in the air, aloft, haloed in spotlights, upright on a bike, a row of well-waxed trucks below. magazine, in a white leather Elvisish suit, in the air, aloft, haloed in spotlights, upright on a bike, a row of well-waxed trucks below.

'At St. Collie only the Crocodiles'd heard of him. My own Daddy'd followed him, cut out pictures, as a boy.' Gately can tell she's smiling under there. 'But what I used to do, I'd throw away the pipe and shake my fist at the sky and say As G.o.d is my f.u.c.king witness NEVER AGAIN, as of this minute right here I QUIT FOR ALL TIME As G.o.d is my f.u.c.king witness NEVER AGAIN, as of this minute right here I QUIT FOR ALL TIME.' She also has this habit of absently patting the top of her head when she talks, where little barrettes and spongy clamps hold the veil in place. 'And I'd bunker up all white-knuckled and stay straight. And count the days. I was proud of each day I stayed off. Each day seemed evidence of something, and I counted them. I'd add them up. Line them up end to end. You know?' Gately knows very well but doesn't nod, lets her do this on just her own steam. She says 'And soon it would get... improbable. As if each day was a car Knievel had to clear. One car, two cars. By the time I'd get up to say like maybe about 14 cars, it would begin to seem like this staggering number. Jumping over 14 cars. And the rest of the year, looking ahead, hundreds and hundreds of cars, me in the air trying to clear them.' She left her head alone and c.o.c.ked it. 'Who could do it? How did I ever think anyone could do it that way?'

Gately remembered some evil f.u.c.king personal detoxes. Broke in Malden. Bent with pleurisy in Salem. MCI/Billerica during a four-day lockdown that caught him short. He remembered Kicking the Bird for weeks on the floor of a Revere Holding cell, courtesy of the good old Revere A.D.A. Locked down tight, a bucket for a toilet, the Holding cell hot but a terrible icy draft down near the floor. Cold Turkey. Abrupt Withdrawal. The Bird. Being incapable of doing it and yet having to do it, locked in. A Revere Holding cage for 92 days. Feeling the edge of every second that went by. Taking it a second at a time. Drawing the time in around him real tight. Withdrawing. Any one second: he remembered: the thought of feeling like he'd be feeling this second for 60 more of these seconds - he couldn't deal. He could not f.u.c.king deal. He had to build a wall around each second just to take it. The whole first two weeks of it are telescoped in his memory down into like one second - less: the s.p.a.ce between two heartbeats. A breath and a second, the pause and gather between each cramp. An endless Now stretching its gull-wings out on either side of his heartbeat. And he'd never before or since felt so excruciatingly alive. Living in the Present between pulses. What the White Flaggers talk about: living completely In The Moment. A whole day at a crack seemed like t.i.t, when he Came In. For he had Abided With The Bird.

But this inter-beat Present, this sense of endless Now - it had vanished in Revere Holding along with the heaves and chills. He'd returned to himself, moved to sit on the bunk's edge, and ceased to Abide because he no longer had to.

His right side is past standing, but the hurt is nothing like the Bird's hurt was. He wonders, sometimes, if that's what Ferocious Francis and the rest want him to walk toward: Abiding again between heartbeats; tries to imagine what kind of impossible leap it would take to live that way all the time, by choice, straight: in the second, the Now, walled and contained between slow heartbeats. Ferocious Francis's own sponsor, the nearly dead guy they wheel to White Flag and call Sarge, says it all the time: It's a gift, the Now: it's AA's real gift: it's no accident they call it The Present The Present.

'And yet it wasn't til that poor new pipe-fellow from home pointed at me and hauled me up there and I said it that I realized,' Joelle said. 'I don't have have to do it that way. I get to choose how to do it, and they'll help me stick to the choice. I don't think I'd realized before that I could - I can really to do it that way. I get to choose how to do it, and they'll help me stick to the choice. I don't think I'd realized before that I could - I can really do do this. I can do this for one endless day. I can. Don.' this. I can do this for one endless day. I can. Don.'

The look he was giving her was meant to like validate her breakthrough and say yes yes she could, she could as long as she continued to choose to. She was looking right at him, Gately could tell. But he'd also gotten a personal p.r.i.c.kly chill all over from his own thinking. He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear of the A.D.A., whoever was out there in a hat eating Third World fast food; the fear of getting convicted of Nuckslaughter, of V.I.P.-suffocation; of a lifetime on the edge of his bunk in M.C.I. Walpole, remembering. It's too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it's as of now real. What's real is the tube and Noxzema and pain. And this could be done just like the Old Cold Bird. He could just hunker down in the s.p.a.ce between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What's unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise. He hadn't quite gotten this before now, how it wasn't just the matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed. If Gately got out of this, he decided, he was going to take the Knievel picture off his wall and mount it and give it to Joelle, and they'd laugh, and she'd call him Don or The Bimster, etc.

Gately rolls his eyes way over to the right to see Joelle again, who she's using both pale hands to get the big book open on her sweatpants' lap. Gray windowlight s.h.i.+nes on clear plastic sheets like little laminates inside the thing.

'... idea to haul this out last night and was looking at it. I wanted to show you my own personal Daddy,' she says. She's holding the photo alb.u.m out at him, wide open, like a kindergarten teacher at storytime. Gately makes a production of squinting. Joelle comes over and rests the big alb.u.m on the top of Gately's crib-railing, peering down over the top and pointing at a snapshot in its little square sleeve.

'Right there's my Daddy.' In front of a low white porch-railing, a generic lean old guy with lines around his nose from squinting into sunlight and the composed smile of somebody that's been told to smile. A skinny dog at his side, half in profile. Gately's more interested in how the shadow of whoever took the photo is canted into the shot's foreground, darkening half the dog.

'And that's one of the dogs, a pointer that got hit right after that by a UPS truck out to 104,' she says. 'Where no animal with a lick of sense would think it had business being. My Daddy never names dogs. That one's just called the one that got hit by the UPS truck.' Her voice is different again.

Gately tries to Abide in seeing what she's pointing at. Most of the rest of the page's pictures are of farm-type animals behind wooden fences, looking the way things look that can't smile, that don't know a camera's looking. Joelle said her personal Daddy was a low-pH chemist, but her late mother's own Daddy had left them a farm, and Joelle's Daddy moved them out there and jick-jacked around with farming, mostly as an excuse to keep lots of pets and stick experimental low-pH stuff in the soil.

At some point in here an all-business nurse comes in and f.u.c.ks with the I.V. bottles, then hunkers down and changes the catheter-receptacle under the bed, and for a second Gately likes to die of embarra.s.sment. Joelle seems not even to be pretending not to notice.

'And this right here's a bull we used to call Mr. Man.' Her slim thumb moves from shot to shot. The sunlight in Kentucky looks bright-yellower than NNE's. The trees are a meaner green and have got weird mossy s.h.i.+t hanging from them. 'And this right here's a mule called Chet that could jump the fence and used to get at everybody's flowers out along Route 45 til Daddy had to put him down. This is a cow. This right here's Chet's mama. It's a mare. I don't recollect any kind of name except "Chet's Mama." Daddy'd let her out to neighbors that really did farm, to sort of make up for folks' flowers.'

Gately nods studiously at each photo, trying to Abide. He hasn't thought about the wraith or the wraith-dream once since he woke up from the dream where Joelle was Mrs. Waite as a maternal Death-figure. Next life's Chet's Mama. He opens his eyes wide to clear his head. Joelle's head is down, looking down at the open alb.u.m from overhead. Her veil hangs loose and blank again, so close he could reach his left hand up and lift it if he wanted. The open book she's moving her hand around in gives Gately an idea he can't believe he's only having now. Except he worries because he isn't left-handed. Which is to say SINISTRAL SINISTRAL. Joelle's got her thumb by a weird old sepia shot of the a.s.s and hunched back of some guy scrabbling up the slope of a roof. 'Uncle Lum,' she says, 'Mr. Riney, Lum Riney, my Daddy's partner over to the shop, that breathed some kind of fume at the shop when I was little, and got strange, and now he'll always try and climb up on top of s.h.i.+t, if you let him.'

He winces at the pain of moving his left arm to put a hand on her wrist to get her attention. Her wrist is thin across the top but oddly deep, thick-seeming. Gately gets her to look at him and takes the hand off her wrist and uses it to mime writing awkwardly in the air, his eyes rolling a bit from the pain of it. This is his idea. He points at her and then out the window and circles his hand back to her. He refuses to grunt or moo to emphasize anything. His forefinger is twice the size of her thumb as he again mimes holding an implement and writing on the air. He makes such a big slow obvious show of it because he can't see her eyes to be sure she gets what he's after.

If a halfway-attractive female so much as smiles at Don Gately as they pa.s.s on the crowded street, Don Gately, like pretty much all heteros.e.xual drug addicts, has within a couple blocks mentally wooed, shacked up with, married and had kids by that female, all in the future, all in his head, mentally dandling a young Gately on his mutton-joint knee while this mental Mrs. G. bustles in an ap.r.o.n she sometimes at night provocatively wears with nothing underneath. By the time he gets where he's going, the drug addict has either mentally divorced the female and is in a bitter custody battle for the kids or is mentally happily still hooked up with her in his sunset years, sitting together amid big-headed grandkids on a special porch swing modified for Gately's ma.s.s, her legs in support-hose and orthopedic shoes still d.a.m.n fine, barely having to speak to converse, calling each other 'Mother' and 'Papa,' knowing they'll kick within weeks of each other because neither could possibly live without the other, is how bonded they've got through the years.

The projective mental union of Gately and Joelle ('M.P.') van Dyne keeps foundering on the vision of Gately knee-dandling a kid in a huge blue- or pink-bordered veil, however. Or tenderly removing the spongy clamps of Joelle's veil in moonlight on their honeymoon in Atlantic City and discovering just like one eye in the middle of her forehead or a horrific Churchill-face or something. 350 350 So the addictive mental long-range fantasy gets shaky, but he still can't help envisioning the old X, with Joelle well-veiled and crying out So the addictive mental long-range fantasy gets shaky, but he still can't help envisioning the old X, with Joelle well-veiled and crying out And Lo! And Lo! in that empty compelling way at the moment of orchasm - the closest Gately'd ever come to Xing a celebrity was the ragingly addicted nursing-student with the head-banging loft, who'd borne an incredible resemblance to the young Dean Martin. Having Joelle share personal historical snapshots with Gately leads his mind right over the second's wall to envision Joelle, hopelessly smitten with the heroic Don G., volunteering to bonk the guy in the hat outside the room over the head and sneak Gately and his tube and catheter out of St. E.'s in a laundry cart or whatever, saving him from the BPD Finest or Federal crew cuts or whatever direr legal retribution the guy in the hat might represent, or else selflessly offering to give him her veil and a big dress and let him hold the catheter under the muumuu and sashay right out while she huddles under the covers in impersonation of Gately, romantically endangering her recovery and radio career and legal freedom, all out of a in that empty compelling way at the moment of orchasm - the closest Gately'd ever come to Xing a celebrity was the ragingly addicted nursing-student with the head-banging loft, who'd borne an incredible resemblance to the young Dean Martin. Having Joelle share personal historical snapshots with Gately leads his mind right over the second's wall to envision Joelle, hopelessly smitten with the heroic Don G., volunteering to bonk the guy in the hat outside the room over the head and sneak Gately and his tube and catheter out of St. E.'s in a laundry cart or whatever, saving him from the BPD Finest or Federal crew cuts or whatever direr legal retribution the guy in the hat might represent, or else selflessly offering to give him her veil and a big dress and let him hold the catheter under the muumuu and sashay right out while she huddles under the covers in impersonation of Gately, romantically endangering her recovery and radio career and legal freedom, all out of a Liebestod Liebestod -type consuming love for Gately. -type consuming love for Gately.

This last fantasy makes him ashamed, it's so cowardly. And even contemplating a romantic thing with a clueless newcomer is shameful. In Boston AA, newcomer-seducing is called 13th-Stepping 351 351 and is regarded as the province of true bottom-feeders. It's predation. Newcomers come in so whacked out, clueless and scared, their nervous systems still on the outside of their bodies and throbbing from detox, and so desperate to escape their own interior, to lay responsibility for themselves at the feet of something as seductive and consuming as their former friend the Substance. To avoid the mirror AA hauls out in front of them. To avoid acknowledging their old dear friend the Substance's betrayal, and grieving it. Plus let's not even mention the mirror-and-vulnerability issues of a newcomer that has to wear a U.H.I.D veil. One of Boston AA's stronger suggestions is that newcomers avoid all romantic relations.h.i.+ps for at least a year. So somebody with some sober time predating and trying to seduce a newcomer is almost tantamount to rape, is the Boston consensus. Not that it isn't done. But the ones that do it never have the kind of sobriety anybody else respects or wants for themselves. A 13th-Stepper is still running from the mirror himself. and is regarded as the province of true bottom-feeders. It's predation. Newcomers come in so whacked out, clueless and scared, their nervous systems still on the outside of their bodies and throbbing from detox, and so desperate to escape their own interior, to lay responsibility for themselves at the feet of something as seductive and consuming as their former friend the Substance. To avoid the mirror AA hauls out in front of them. To avoid acknowledging their old dear friend the Substance's betrayal, and grieving it. Plus let's not even mention the mirror-and-vulnerability issues of a newcomer that has to wear a U.H.I.D veil. One of Boston AA's stronger suggestions is that newcomers avoid all romantic relations.h.i.+ps for at least a year. So somebody with some sober time predating and trying to seduce a newcomer is almost tantamount to rape, is the Boston consensus. Not that it isn't done. But the ones that do it never have the kind of sobriety anybody else respects or wants for themselves. A 13th-Stepper is still running from the mirror himself.

Not to mention that a Staffer seducing a new resident he's supposed to be there to help would be d.i.c.king over Pat Montesian and Ennet House on a grand scale.

Gately sees it's probably no accident that his vividest Joelle-fantasies are coincident with flight-from-Finest-and-legal-responsibility fantasies. That his head's real fantasy is this newcomer helping him avoid, escape, and run, joining him later in like Kentucky on a modified porch swing. He's still pretty new himself: wanting somebody else to take care of his mess, somebody else to keep him out of his various cages. It's the same delusion as the basic addictive-Substance-delusion, basically. His eyes roll up in his head at disgust with himself, and stay there.

I went down the hall to take out the tobacco and brush my teeth and rinse out the Spiru-Tein can, which had gotten an unpleasant crust along the sides. The subdorm halls were curved and had no corners as such, but you can see at most three doors and the jamb of the fourth from any point in the hall before the curve extrudes into your line of sight. I wondered briefly whether it was true that small children believed their parents could see them even around corners and curves.

The high wind's moan and doors' rattle were worse in the uncarpeted hall. I could hear faint sounds of early-morning weeping in certain rooms beyond my line of sight. Lots of the top players start the A.M. with a quick fit of crying, then are basically hale and well-wrapped for the rest of the day.

The walls of the subdorms' hallways are dinner-mint blue. The walls of the rooms themselves are cream. All the woodwork is dark and varnished, as is the guilloche that runs below all E.T.A. ceilings; and the dominant odor in the hallways is always a mixture of varnish and tincture of benzoin.

Someone had left a window open by the sinks in the boys' room, and a hump of snow lay on the sill, and on the floor beneath the window by the sink on the end, whose hot-water pipe shrieks, was a parabolic dusting of snow, already melting at the apex. I turned on the lights and the exhaust fan kicked on with them; for some reason I could barely stand its sound. When I put my head out the window the wind came from nowhere and everywhere, the snow swirling in funnels and eddies, and there were little grains of ice in the snow. It was brutally cold. Across the East Courts, the paths were obscured, and the pine's branches were near horizontal under their snow's weight. Scht.i.tt's transom and observation tower looked menacing; it was still dark and snow-free on the lee side facing Comm.-Ad. The sight of distant ATHSCME fans displacing great volumes of snowy air northward is one of the better winter views from our hilltop, but visibility was now too poor to make out the fans, and the liquid hiss of the snow was too total to make out whether the fans were even on. The Headmaster's House wasn't much more than a humped shape off by the north tree-line, but I could picture poor C.T. at the living room window in leather slippers and Scotch-plaid robe, seeming to pace even when standing still, raising and lowering the antenna of the phone in his hand, with several calls out already to Logan, M.I.A.-Dorval, WeatherNet-9000's recorded update, heavy-browed figures in Quebec's O.N.A.N.T.A. office, C.T.'s forehead a wash-board and lips moving soundless as he brainstormed his way toward a state of Total Worry.

I brought my head back in when I could no longer feel my face. I made my little ablutions. I hadn't had to go to the bathroom in a serious way in three days.

The digital display up next to the ceiling's intercom read 1118-EST0456. 1118-EST0456.

When the whap-whap of the bathroom door subsided I heard a quiet voice with an odd tone farther up around the curve of the hallway. It turned out that good old Ortho Stice was sitting in a bedroom-chair in front of a hall window. He was facing the window. The window was closed, and he had his forehead up against the gla.s.s, either talking or chanting to himself very quietly. The whole lower part of the window was fogged with his breath. I came up behind him, listening. The back of his head was that shark-belly gray-white of crew cuts so short the scalp shows through. I was more or less right behind his chair. I couldn't tell whether he was talking to himself or chanting something. He didn't turn around even when I rattled my toothbrush in the NASA gla.s.s. He had on his cla.s.sic Darknesswear: black sweats.h.i.+rt, black sweatpants on which he'd had a red and gray E.T.A. E.T.A. silkscreened down both legs. His feet were bare on the cold floor. I was standing right beside the chair, and he still didn't look up