6/3/09

p 538-619

this section in 16 parts

p 538-547

YDAU [2009] presumably November
place Ennet House & environs
narrated in third person

synopsis:

Randy Lenz has found his own way to deal with the Rage and Powerlessness issues recovering alcoholics face. While he has a car, a heavily modified Duster, he always rides to meetings with someone else, and sits in the northernmost seat in the car. But after the meetings he always walks back to Ennet House, and soon begins returning right at 11:29, a minute before curfew. This raises red flags, but whatever urine spot-checks haven't come back messed up by the lab, were clean, so he's left alone. It all started with a rat: one night on the way home he comes across two rats eating garbage in an alley, and picks up a chunk of concrete and drops it on one of the rats, squishing it. He discovers what he likes to say at the moment of issue resolution- 'there.' From rats he moves on to cats, using tuna to lure them into a hefty bag where they will squirm for air until they've suffocated. There. Eventually he moves to 'Hefty Steel-Sak' reinforced bags to ensure that the cats cannot claw their way out. Lenz develops a preference for the interval 10:16-10:26, and he therefore likes to keep the Brighton Best Savings Bank giant clock within view. This reminds him of a story related by Doony Glynn at a meeting, that once under the influence of 'Madame' he had viewed the entire sky as a viewer screen with the time and temperature displayed at all times. Glynn went crazy, but Lenz likes the idea. Lenz has used cocaine a few times since coming to Ennet House. He stores it in his copy of 'Principles of Psychology and the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion' which has hole cut in the middle 300 pages. He considers it enough of a miracle that under such duress, hiding from threats from both sides of the law, that he's only broken down a few times. He considers that sobriety. He is careful not to do it when he's out alone, and he knows how to beat the urine test, by drinking lemon juice and putting a dash of powdered bleach on his hand.He soon feels the need to move on from swinging the cats against a pole to setting them on fire with kerosene. That soon leads him to dogs, which he lures with meat and then slits their throats with his Browning X444 knife. He has a close call when he sees a street drunk urinating in an alley and imagines him on fire with his throat slit, but that's as far as it goes. When Bruce Green starts walking home from meetings with Lenz, it presents Lenz with a dilemma. On the one hand, Green is a decent listener, throwing in enough 'no shit's' and 'fucking-A's' to make Lenz feel validated. On the other hand, Lenz is deprived of his much needed 2216-2226h interval. Plus he feels like it would be no big deal to Green anyway and that just increases his tension over the matter. He does manage to exterminate a small bird in the garbage disposal, but still is left feeling unresolved.

p 548

YDAU [2009] November
place Ennet House
narrated in third person

synopsis:

None of the rooms at Ennet House have locks, except for Pat M's office, the House manager's office and the two live-in staff bedrooms downstairs.

p 548-549

YDAU [2009] early November
place metro Boston
narrated in third person

synopsis:

The only blackmailable thing about Rodney Tine is that he carries a ruler with him so that he can measure his penis every morning. He is in Boston because of national security implications of the Entertainment. More casualties have been reported, including a film professor and his companion in Berkeley. Tine has toured a ward in Boston, where the victims of the Entertainment have been reduced to vegetative existence. The Berkeley cartridge was stolen from SFPD, by someone who left behind red flannel fibers. A retarded inmate with a headset recorder reported that the opening scene is of a veiled woman going through a revolving door and catching sight of someone, which makes her veil billow. After that the inmate was incapacitated. Attempts to trace the dissemination of the samizdat point to somewhere along the Canadian border, with hubs in Boston, New Bedford and somewhere in the desert Southwest. The possibility of Canadian involvement is the reason Tine is in Boston.

p 550-553

YDAU [2009] November 9, late PM [2100h]
place ETA
narrated in third person

synopsis:

Pemulis passes by Dr. Rusk's office and overhears Ortho Stice discussing his 'counterphobia' of linoleum. Stice is objecting to her Oedipal-GI Joe suggestions, assuring her that he doesn't play with dolls, nor want to have sex with them. Pemulis had tried to dress as insolently as possible, but the result was simply that he looked poorly dressed. As he passes through the ETA lobby, all is dark and quiet. There is 'an odd vehicular shape near the north wall's trophy case' but he doesn't look into it. He enters the Headmaster's office, and there are cracks of light underTavis's and Mrs. Inc's lack of a door, but Lateral Alice Moore has gone home. He snoops through her desk, hearing Tavis on his stair-master. He hears something coming from Avril's office and enters. He finds John Wayne in his jockstrap and a football helmet and shoulder-pads, and Hal's mom in a cheerleader's outfit nearly doing the splits on the shag carpet, and blowing a silent whistle. When he says 'hoping for a second of your time' Wayne stops, gets dressed and leaves. Mrs. Incandenza remains in the splits on the shag, and Pemulis makes a point of keeping his eyes on her face.


p 553-559

YDAU [2009] Nov 11
place Ennet House & environs
narrated in third person

synopsis:

Lenz in his topcoat, dark slacks and loafers, and Green in his cheap leather jacket are out on one of their walks and by 2200h the meatloaf is burning a hole in Lenz's pocket, but he can't bring himself to ask Green to find another route back to Ennet House. Earlier today Lenz had sprayed hairspray in the face of one of the house cats, but it wasn't satisfying, and then he had diarrhea. All of which necessitated the need to get high, which he convinces himself he is doing in the interests of sobriety and growth. He miscalculates the effect of the cocaine, however; instead of giving him the nerve to ask Green to leave him alone with his meatloaf, it compels him to tell Green more or less every experience he's ever had. He explains how his clock phobia relates to his stepfather who made him wind and polish his stopwatch and keep it accurate to the second. He relates how obese his mother had been, and other less credible tales about his thumb having been cut off and growing back, about his knowledge of secret marshall arts moves, about a hydrocephalic woman with a necklace of dead gulls at a Halloween party at the home of an orthodontist where there had also been an infant Concavity-victim that became the subject of mescal-related rituals. He tells of a 'recurving' dream about wearing a safari hat seated under a ceiling fan. Green doesn't dream or at least cannot remember his dreams. Green keeps Lenz abreast of the time. Lenz says that AA/NA works alright but that it's a cult. He claims to remember things that happened to him in vitro.

p 560

YDAU [2009] possibly November 10
place ETA
narrated in third person

synopsis:

Hal is lying on his bunk at lunchtime. Troeltsch pokes his head in but gets no answer as to what Hal is doing. Pemulis comes by '41 breaths later' and asks if Hal has eaten, he gestures that he has and says that 'the beast has killed and gorged and now lies in the shade of the baobab tree.' Then 'over 200 breaths later' John Wayne puts his head in the door and neither says anything, and then Wayne leaves.


p 560-562

YDAU [2009] Nov 11
place Ennet House & environs
narrated in third person

synopsis:

Lenz is showing off his ravaged septum and rattling off conspiratorial tidbits to Green. He seems to know something about the Entertainment, which he describes as holographic pornography, and in the same breath he mentions a Canadian cult whose members jump in front of trains. He tells of his obese stepfather, and of the disadvantages of being a coke dealer, etc. Green's done some coke, but doesn't appear to follow Lenz's coke-addled rant. He veers from how male actors are usually 'closet pooftas' to how the feral animal population in the Great Concavity descended from housepets, and on to how a cult of Rastafarians worship 'The Infant' which was a fetus reanimated by some toxic mixture. Green says that if AA is a brainwashing cult, then he reckons he's due for a washing, which Lenz recognizes as something Gately repeats daily.

p 560-562

YDAU [2009] Nov 11 up to 11:29pm
place Ennet House
no narration

synopsis:

This section in the form of extracts from Gately's interface with various residents. In the first Gately asks why all the interest in football, and refuses to flex his muscle. She asks if his father is still alive and reveals that hers is, but that her mother is 'worm-farming.' Joelle comments on how she was drawn to one of the speakers at a meeting, because he had kind of a 'broken authority' to him. She comments on how like a lot of Bostoners, he wrecks a perfectly acceptable outfit by omitting the socks. Gately says maybe she shouldn't be the one to comment on wardrobe. The next excerpt is between Foss and Gately. Foss is trying to report on Nell G. and Geoff D. without feeling like a rat. He says that they're telling newbies to 'think about if their Higher Power is omni-potent enough to make a suitcase that's too heavy for him to lift' and that's this is wreaking havoc, especially on Tingley, the new kid. The next two regard the plumbing. In the last extract Yolanda is reporting that Lenz [not named] has connived her into incorporating oral sex into the morning ritual of getting down on knees and thanking the Higher Power.

p 565-567
YDAU November
place Tucson
narrated in third person

synopsis:

Orin is in a hotel room with a putatively Swiss hand model, whom he met at the airport after driving Helen Steeply [and having struck out with her]. She had asked him to sign a football for her son. At the hotel she has photos of her family all laid out. His pursuit is not of love, but of conquest. He needs to feel 'he has' the Subject,and she can do nothing but yearn for him, to feel 'a vividness vacuumed of all but his name: O, O. That he is the One.' This why there must be many Subjects, if the One had a One, then they'd merge into We. Orin had felt that once, but would never again recover. And there's also contempt, he hates all of them a little, but this he disguises, pretending to be tender and feeling. This section also contains a lengthy footnote [p 1038-1044] which is another excerpt of Helen Steeply's interview with Orin. Steeply's questions aren't given, but apparently she's asked him if Himself and/or the Moms is insane. His answer is a qualified yes w/r/t Himself; he says that you'd have to be insane to kill yourself in that way, but that mostly he just drank himself blind everyday, and he made films in his spare time, about which people are still writing doctoral theses. With the Moms, it's a different story-- he admits that she can function and more, and relates how she belongs to the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts whose obsession it is to correct public misuse of grammar, eg '10 items or less.' She never leaves the ETA grounds now, but her OCD is not the debilitating kind. She has her compulsions compulsively arranged to maintain time for her kids. He says that she has 'Hal's skull lashed tight to hers' but without him being aware of it. She worships Mario, having made him a 'secular martyr to the mess she's made of her adult life.' He says that they both have to get away from ETA before they realize that the Moms is bats. He reveals that Himself is buried in the Moms's family plot in Quebec. He then tells a story to relate just how bats the Moms is. This is the same story from p 10-11. The Moms is in her Weston yard roto-tilling the garden [she makes Orin put the gas in it because she thinks that petroleum products cause cancer] wearing plastic bags over her espadrilles and a filtration mask. Hal comes up to her with a big old piece of mold and announces that he has eaten some of it. He interrupts the story to mention that for more info on the Moms and Himself, Helen should contact Marlon Bain, who practically lived with them at the time. He's also OCD and possibly bats. Back to the story-- The Moms becomes hysterical and just runs around the yard yelling 'Help! my son ate this!' Meanwhile Mario imitates Himself who watches the situation from the porch making a frame with his hands as if he were filming. The neighbor finally intervenes and hooks up the hose, presumably to wash out Hal's mouth.


p 567-574
YDAU [2009] possibly November
place ETA
no narration

synopsis:

This section is just dialog without narration. Schacht runs into Arslanian outside the weight room Arslanian is blindfolded, as Coach Thorp's experiment in anticipation of the soon to arrive blind player, Dymphna. He explains how he went through a training match wearing the blindfold, to attempt to train his ear. He had some trouble, often facing the wrong direction, etc. He then runs into Pemulis, who at first pretends to also be blindfolded. Pemulis says that Doucette in in with Kyle receiving advice about his depression over his mole, and trying to get tutored so that he can get through Watson's Energy Survey class. Arslanian asks to be shown to the restroom, but Pemulis goes right on talking about how Mario is in there with them trying to explain annulation to Doucette, using the somersault with one hand nailed to the floor analogy. Arslanian confesses that he's one of the few Pakistani's who doesn't excel in science and he himself has a hard time with annulation. Pemulis says picture a triangle, and explains how the cycle works-- the fusion facility in what used to be Vermont in the Concavity pumps its waste to Methuen Fan-Complex just south of the Concavity, where it's processed into U-239 waste and then trucked or catapulted to Maine where it's allowed to decay and then added to UF4 waste also pumped from Vermont, and turned into the radioactive raw materials which are sent back to Vermont and the process begins again. Arslanian's head is spinning, and says he's confused that fusion creates no waste. Pemulis says that this is where Himself came into the picture, inventing holographic conversions that allowed the team to study annulation safely in highly poisonous environments. Pemulis says that the whole idea for using waste as raw material for annulation came from medicine-- the giving cancerous cells cancer to treat them. All you need is a huge amount of toxic, waste which is why the annulation site was placed in the Great Concavity. It turns out also that the process sucks all the poisonous stuff out of the environment, and leaves it hyper-fertile, which is why it's necessary to catapult the toxins from other places into the region to keep the fertile zone from overrunning the entire area. So the area goes from wasteland to overgrown several times a month and it's as if it's a sped up evolutionary model-- this 'accelerated phenomena' is 'actually equivalent to an incredible slowing down of time.' Pemulis says that this is the part that Doucette is having trouble with. Arslanian pleads again to be shown to the bathroom. Pemulis realizes [or perhaps reveals] that Arslanian is Muslim and his urine is thus clean and valuable, and convinces him to part ways with it.

p 574-575
YDAU November
place Tucson
narrated in third person

synopsis:

Now that Ms. Steeply has gone, Orin has noticed that the legless wheelchair guys are back, as if they were afraid of her. He also notes that the legless man at the hotel room door had had the same Swiss accent as the putatively Swiss hand model.


p 575-589
YDAU [2009] Nov 11
place Ennet House & environs
narrated in third person

synopsis:

Lenz is pretending to Green that his sniffing comes from allergies, forgetting his experience with cocaine. He tells Green that the 'new Joel girl's' veil conceals a single eye in the center of her forehead. Lenz rattles on-- about how his mother was so obese that when she came to Parent's Day at Lenz's school she was unable to sit at his desk like all the other parents,and when she attempted to, she crushed the desk. Lenz describes how she died: on a bus trip she had been in the bathroom when the ride became very turbulent due to some construction and she was flung about in the bathroom, ending up with her rear-end stuck protruding from the bathroom window, where she remained for the rest of the voyage. She then sued the bus company and the transportation agency and won an enormous settlement, after which she lost all will to do anything but eat and watch InterLace cartridges, and eventually ruptured and died. Lenz tells Green that his mother's will left him in the cold, giving all her money to ex-husbands . Amidst the faint sound of Polynesian music, Lenz urinates behind a dumpster, while Green parses his repressed memories of his own parents who had died when he was small. His father was an aerobics instructor until one of his legs suddenly grew longer than the other, and he was forced to take a job in a novelties store. His mother dies by opening a Christmas present which is a can she thinks holds her favorite macadamia nuts, but actually contains a cloth snake that springs out of the can and gives her a heart attack. Bruce never spoke a word until his final year of grade school. His father went nuts and was executed after sending Blammo-cigars to and killing a bunch of Shriners and Rotarians. Due to the macadamia nuts, Green has an aversion to all things remotely Polynesian, and perhaps the presence of the faint music explains why he wanders off in the direction of the Unexamined Life, without realizing that he and Lenz have become separated. Green after detox has about one thought every 60 seconds. He wanders through a neighborhood toward the Hawaiian music with horrified fascination. He spots Lenz some distance ahead of him and hangs back without calling out to him. At 412 W. Brainerd he finds the source of the music someone has placed speakers in the window of a house adorned with a Canadian flag. He sees Lenz approaching the dog that's chained in the yard of the same house, where the party is in full tilt. Green has a flashback to a Hawaiian party that he and Mildred [at 7 months pregnant] had crashed, and at which he had gotten so drunk that he shit his pants and had to take the subway home wearing a grass skirt after ditching his pants. He sees Lenz offering the dog some of Don G's meatloaf. The music is disturbing Green to no end, causing him to have way more than one thought per minute. Green watches Lenz lures the dog with the meatloaf and then slits his throat, the sounds of which cause one of the party-goers to the window. Lenz finishes the dog off and then goes tearing off down the street, as the party-goers come out and alternately shriek in horror and give chase. Green stands there finger almost frozen in his ear, noticing a couple of guys in wheelchairs.



p 589-593

YDAU [2009] November
place ETA
narrated in third person

synopsis:

Mario's birthday will be the day before Thanksgiving, Nov. 25. As Madame P's hiatus enters its third week Mario cannot sleep. He has a burned pelvis, which his insensitivity to pain kept him from noticing. He hears the shrieks of the Moms's night terrors. Mario is worried because he can no longer tell whether Hal is sad. Mario has been taking insomniacal strolls on the grounds of the Enfield Marine PHH, across the street from Ennet House, where the headmistress has a disability and the people all cry in front of each other. He hears the sound of a taped broadcast of Madame P's show from her first year when she still had an accent coming from a window covered with a billowing flag. Mario had fallen in love with Madame P because she spoke of heartbreak, people dying, and stuff that was real. 'It's increasingly hard to find valid art about stuff that's real in this way.' Mario is confused by the fact that people roll their eyes every time something serious is mentioned. He was the only one who laughed at Pemulis's joke about the dial-a-prayer service for atheists where the phone just rings and rings. Neither Hal or Lyle can explain to him why everyone else looked down uncomfortably. Mario watches as people from Ennet House return just before curfew. One of them helps him down from his police lock, and he ambles up the hill, noticing Don G's square head through the window.

p 593-596
YDAU [2009] probably Nov 11
place Ennet House
narrated in third person

synopsis:

Gately's duties as live-in staffer are described-- head-counts, log-entries, unlocking the meds-locker for certain residents, and making out chore lists for Pat M. He has to check on Kate, who's too sick to leave her room. He has to give Doony Glynn his Slimfast shake. He has to figure out who made Rice Krispie treats and didn't clean the mess. He has to call Pat M to relay Kate's comment about hurting herself. He has to have each resident in the office for at least a few minutes. He has to meet with the newest resident, Ruth van Cleve, and go over the house rules. He often has to kick people off the one payphone in the house, and he's gotten quite apt at letting the abuse roll off of him. He does struggle daily with the urge to clobber Wade McDade, who is pushing up the end of his nose to flatten it like a pig's, and asking everyone whether they know anyone with such a nose. He is expected to keep an ear open to the house gossip to root out potential conflicts. The only thing residents are expected to report others for is using Substances, and all the rest Gately's got to ferret out.

p 596-601

YDAU November
place Tucson
narrated in third person

Orin feels a postcoital loss of hope, plus a contempt that he hides well. He can give pleasure but can't receive it. But it does give him pleasure to feign intimacy and caring afterwards. The putatively Swiss hand-model says that no one must know, and Orin assures her. When a knock comes at the door, the hand-model hides beneath the blankets as Orin wraps a towel around himself and goes to answer. He thinks of Swiss cuckolds, near-Eastern medical attaches, journalists, but the man at the door is in a wheelchair and claims to be conducting a survey, which Orin cheerfully accepts. The man asks him some basic questions and then asks him to please list what 'lifestyle elements he misses. Orin takes it as a shy ruse to get his autograph. He lists some childhood memories and then says he misses TV. When asked for the 'reason' he says he misses the commercials being louder than the program, the order-before-midnight sales pitches, sneering at something he loves. He says he misses stuff he could watch and know what people were going to say. Summer reruns. The man in the wheelchair reminds him that he can watch cartridges again and again, if he chooses. Orin says it's not the same; with TV you were subjected to the repetition, the familiarity was inflicted. The man in the wheelchair asks him to list things he does not miss. Orin asks how much time he has. The wheelchaired man glances briefly past him at the lump under the covers, and says he can return at a later time, since Orin is 'engaged.' Orin says that's a matter of opinion.

p 601-619
YDAU [2009] Nov 11
place Ennet House
narrated in third person


From 2300-2330h Gately is conducting the nightly head count as the curfew approaches. Lenz slips through the door just as Gately's getting the keys ready to lock it. Green is 6 minutes late and Gately decides to let him in but gives him the obligatory chewing out, plus a week's house restriction. Green is so unresponsive that Gately decides he has to perform a spot-urine. He has to rush the urine down to his personal fridge where it's to be kept until the morning when the lab is open. He makes it back in time for the final head count at 2345h, when he notices that Amy J is still not back, and he has to make the call to discharge her. After that he has time for only 20 situps before he has to deal with the nightly car moving, which is necessary because each night at midnight, the legal side of the street switches, and all the residents who have cars must move them, or face citation and/or towing. Plus if some of the car owners have fallen asleep Gately feels he has to go up and find them. This happens to be the case with Lenz tonight, and Gately has to hold all the residents up at the door while he goes in search of Lenz. He finds him doing handstand pushups in his jockstrap and without a doubt high on cocaine. Gately wants to pull an immediate urine, but there's the car issue to be dealt with asap. So he lets everyone out and keeps a close eye on Lenz to make sure he doesn't bolt. However when he notices Doony Glynn's VW, he realizes he has to leave the residents unattended and go back inside and round up a resident to move it, because Glynn is legitimately incapacitated. He recruits Green but then has to go up and get the keys from Glynn, who is too delirious to answer coherently. After a minute, Green comes into the room and tells Gately to come down immediately. When he does he finds that two guys almost his size are chasing Lenz around a Montego car, while a third holds the rest of the residents at bay with a gun. Lenz is talking nonstop, denying doing whatever they think he did. Gately notes that the smaller guy is holding the gun like he knows how to shoot, and that the gun is a serious weapon. Gately feels a weird calm. He realizes the three are Canadian, and has a flashback to the Canadian he killed by gagging. The lady who yells 'help' is at her window yelling and Joelle is leaning out of a window yelling for someone to call Pat. The cops who are usually punctual with their tow trucks and parking tickets are nowhere to be found. One of the big guys advises Gately to mind his own business, but Gately says that he cannot. Lenz hides behind Gately, and Gately notices blood on his hands. One of the Canadians pulls out a knife, and Gately's 'subdural hardware' clicks into fight mode. He explains that he's responsible for these people and suggests that they talk it out instead of fighting. The guys explain that Lenz killed someone named Pepe or Bebe. When Lenz taunts them they charge and a fight ensues. The description goes into something like slow motion as Gately breaks the arm of one guy and sends the other flying onto the hood of the car with a kick to the chin. As he is kneeing the man with the broken arm in the groin, he is shot in the shoulder by the third man. Green grabs the man in a half nelson and Nell Gunther kicks him in the face, causing his head to snap back and break Green's nose. Gately grabs the guy on the hood of the car with his good hand and smashes his head repeatedly into the windshield. Erdedy standing with his hands up notes the appearance of possible extracurricular concern in Joelle's repeated calls to Gately, which use his first name. Lenz has come out of the shadows and is hitting the now unconscious shooter, exclaiming 'there.' Gately finishes off the guy with the broken arm and staggers to the street to lie down. Joelle jumps down from the window and runs to him. He thinks about his numb shoulder and worries about vomiting in front of Joelle, who takes off her robe [revealing a kimono-ish thing] and tries to use it to stop the bleeding. Lenz says 'what can I say?' and Gately answers that Lenz owes him urine. Gately says to call Pat but not to call an ambulance. He asks Lenz and Green to get him inside, since he can't be taken to the ER with a gunshot wound. One or two of the Canadians are apparently dead. Joelle takes charge ordering Lenz and the others to get him inside. Just then a security guard tells them to 'hold it right thaah.' Luckily it's the drunkard security, and Joelle orders Erdedy to deal with him. Gately suddenly recognizes her voice as Madame P. Her hand caresses him and he vomits on her as they heave him up bring him inside.

notes

We finally learn that the opening segment of the Entertainment consists of Joelle and her billowing veil. Perhaps this means that her face is revealed. We also get more of Joelle's actual character in this section. The section p 550-553 perhaps holds an important key to Orin's dysfunction. It seems clear that he's using his sexual conquests as a way to get back at his mother, and that it was surely he who saw Tavis and the Moms in the act. Meanwhile the Moms is acting out a fantasy of being her son's girlfriend!?

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