this section in 25 parts
p 809-827
YDAU [2009] Nov 12
place St. Elizabeth Hospital trauma wing
narrated in third person [Gately]
synopsis:
Gately is lying in the trauma wing hallucinating that the ceiling is bulging and deflating, just as the polyurethane covering a hole in the ceiling above his bed had done when he was a child. As a child he had named the polyurethane hole Herman. He couldn't feel his upper right side, and he couldn't really move. His throat burned when he breathed. The blurred figure in the next bed sat upright very still, and 'seemed to have a box on its head.' He had been having a 'repetitious ethnocentric dream' where he's trying unsuccessfully to tie an 'Oriental' without a nose or mouth to a chair. He perceives going in and out of consciousness as light cycles, or as being held underwater and occasionally coming up for air. One time he comes up for air and finds that Tiny Ewell is seated beside him. Ewell had shaved his goatee. This was Gately's first full night in the trauma ward, and he feels as if he's been encased in hot cement. Ewell has been talking to Gately, presumably since before he had become aware. Ewell says that his wife had called the soul 'personality' and said that Tiny's was incorrigibly dark especially when drinking. Gately can't tell if Ewell thinks he's awake or not. Ewell tells the story of growing up in a tough Irish neighborhood, and how he although he failed to do even a single pull-up in the fitness exam, he still became the leader of the pack of blue collar kids and their club, the Money-Stealers' Club. He wins the kids over with his rhetoric and his big scheme to collect donations for a phony youth hockey club. Gately perceives Ewell and the other figures as receding and then looming in. Ewell says he was reveling in the discovery of fraud. He had persuaded the others to let him be the keeper of the can full of money, and he soon begins to dip into the funds, spending the money on candy, toys and magazines. To cover the fact that he had spent most of the money, he fabricated band statements. Eventually as Christmas nears, the boys decide that they want their share of the money. He puts them off until he can get the supposed money out of the bank, and then stays home sick from school. Gately cannot speak in response. Ewell finally decided to raid the 'IBEW Local 517 Petty Slush' in his father's closet to get the money to pay back the kids. The kids pummel him anyway, and going home and facing his own shame was worse. He had buried the whole thing until the other night after the fracas and Don's reluctant 'se offendendo' [which a footnote explains is either blundered Latin for self defense, or an oblique reference to Hamlet's graveyard scene, from which the title of this book also comes] Ewell had dreamed the whole episode again and awakened sans goatee. Gately starts to remember being offered Demerol, event though his chart had clearly been marked to indicate his history of narcotics dependency. The bullet had fragmented and passed through the tissue in his shoulder, and the surgeon had warned Gately that after the local anesthetic had worn off, the pain would be unlike any Gately had ever imagined, and also that he had developed toxemia because the bullet had possibly been treated with something unclean. Gately comes to again and it's nighttime and Ewell is still there intoning. Ewell asks how he'll be able to follow the 9th step and make amends to all those he defrauded, and to his mother, whom the revelations would kill. Ewell's wife shields his mother from anything unpleasant about Tiny, in fact she now thinks he's at a tax-law symposium. Ewell has the revelation that his whole descent into drinking may have been an attempt to bury his third-grade feelings of despicability. Gately's pain is intensifying, but he can neither move nor call out. The last thing he hears Tiny say is 'I'm scared' and he wishes that he could tell him that he can totally ID with him. Gately sleeps and dreams of a storm that rips the polyurethane vacuole over his bed off while a man with a shepherd's crook is beating up his mother. He broke out of his crib and ran down the beach trying to escape the tornado on his tail. He swims into the ocean and when he surfaces for air, he sees the tornado just outside the house and his mother standing on the porch with a bloody Ginsu knife. The tornado swallows his mother in its maw and when he awakes he really has to piss, and Tiny Ewell is gone. Later someone who is either Joelle or a nurse in a veil is running a cold washcloth over his forehead. After she's gone, he finally gives up and urinates and finds that he is catheterized, which term he'd always mistaken for castrated. At some point Pat M comes in tells him everything will be alright and that she's so sorry he had to deal with a situation like that all by himself. Her hair is a less radiant red than Joelle's. Gately is surprised the cops haven't come. He never shared certain things about his past with Pat M, namely the remorseless ADA or the suffocated Nuck. Pat tells him that he's showing tremendous resolution by not taking the narcotic painkillers, and that it wouldn't necessarily be a relapse, if he knew in heart that it wasn't. The whole interface was possibly unreal, because he couldn't think of a reason why she would have burst into tears. He's more sure that he dreamed seeing Mrs. Lopate in her wheelchair in the room, although his realization in the dream that she had been the same woman he'd often seen at night touching a tree in #5's lawn, when he was first on staff. He awoke again to find Joelle in a chair beside his bed. At some point senior Ennet House counselor Calvin Thrust straddles the chair beside the bed and goes on a longwinded rant, which explains more or less what happened in the aftermath of the incident. He says that they managed to drag Gately inside before the police came. Gately recalls having seen Thrust in a porn cartridge, having sex with a one-armed lady on a trapeze. Thrust explains that Lenz had complained that he would get blamed for the incident, and Bruce Green had rammed him against the cabinets, but then refused to rat him out. Thrust says that he could tell Lenz was coked up, and offered him the choice of resigning from Ennet House, or submitting to a spot-urine. Meanwhile Gately had been bleeding on the couch in Pat's office, while the veiled girl had unwittingly revealed parts beneath her robe while trying to stanch the blood. He says that he hadn't taken him straight to the hospital because it was known that Gately was on probation, and it wasn't clear exactly who had done what to whom in the melee. When Pat arrived they heaved him into Thrust's Corvette and Pat had driven her Aventura ahead of them to the hospital with Joelle riding shotgun. Thrust says not to worry, that the blood in his car was the least of the problems, which worries Gately in ways he cannot express. What Gately really wants to know is were any of the Nucks killed, and has there been an ADA looking into Gately's involvement. He also would like to whether any of the Ennet House residents might make a respectable enough witness, and also 'what the fuck Thrust was thinking of' when he let Lenz go. Thrust says it's lucky that Gately is so huge, so that even though he lost so much blood, he's still alive. He said that both Joelle and Pat had been pretty upset that he had let Lenz go before his involvement could be established. He says he had basically let him go to keep himself from eliminating Lenz's map right then and there. Lenz had tried to get his Duster started, but had apparently left without it because the new resident, Amy J had seen it being towed in the early morning. He says that the House Manager had kept the cops at bay, convincing them that they had no right to enter without a court order. Thrust says that the gun they'd shot Gately with had been serious ordnance, and asks if they've informed him how much of his shoulder and arm he'd be able to keep. Gately pictures himself as a pirate with a hook for a hand, and then with a prosthetic voice box. Thrust said that Hester Thrale had disappeared during the 'freakas' and Gately remembered seeing her running off. Thrust says that the porch is cluttered with all the bags of former residents' stuff that'd been set out. Gately tries to calculate the date based on this. Thrust says that Emil Linty got house restriction after being caught removing an undergarment from Hester's stuff. Thrust says that Ruth van Cleve and Kate Gompert had their purses snatched on the way to NA, and only Ruth had returned. Pat had a warrant issued for Kate on account of her suicidal impulses. Thrust gives an update of house-related news including mention of a new resident Dave K, who had come in after a drunken incident at Interdependence Day office party, where he attempted a limbo-dance challenge and injured his spine, and now scuttles around the house like a crab. He says the biggest issue at the House meeting was that Clenette had brought a bunch of cartridges back from the tennis academy, and Pat won't let them be disseminated until they're screened. He says Green hasn't said a thing about the 'embryoglio' but apparently shouts in his sleep about nuts and cigars. He says that something seems to have snapped in Tiny Ewell, who shaved off his Kentucky Chicken beard, and was heard weeping in the bathroom. Gately imagines Joelle in her room dressed as Madame Psychosis, eating a peach. He suddenly has anxiety over who's fixing dinner at the house. Gately finds Thrust insufferable but admits that he is keeping Gately's mind off the pain. Gately's heart skips and sinks as Thrust tells him that all of the residents whose legal status permits them to file depositions have backed Gately up 110% to the cops and the weird federal guys with crewcuts, who were probably called in on account of the Nucks. Several of the witnesses indicated that the Nucks appeared to be under the influence of some Substance. The biggest problem is that the weapon cannot be located. Green was the last one to see it when he dropped it on the lawn after taking it away from 'the Nuck the nigger girls stomped.' Gately's heart is somewhere near his knees at the mention of the feds, and he's dying to find out whether he actually killed anyone. Thrust says that finding the weapon is going to be in the best interests of Yolanda Willis too, since her spiked shoe was left in the eye socket of the guy that she'd killed. The sun was starting to go down, and night is when the ceiling breathes.
notes:
The figure with the box on its head must be Otis P. Lord, who was taken to the hospital to have the monitor removed from his head. This will allow us to date some of what happens, in spite of the fact that Gately cannot figure out the date himself. It has become unclear at times whether Gately is dreaming or not. The vacuole on the ceiling seems similar to Kate's billowing sail [p 648-651] as well as Joelle's veil.
p 827-845
YDAU [2009] sometime Nov 12-20
place St. Elizabeth Hospital trauma wing
narrated in third person [Gately]
synopsis:
Gately awakes again to find Geoffrey Day sitting where Thrust had been. It's night. Day informs him that Johnette is no Gately in the kitchen. It might be a different night, the ceiling no longer bulges. His side hurts so bad he can barely hear. It's now a deep tight pain with a flavor of emotional loss. Day is telling Gately about his developmentally-challenged brother who had a phobia of leaves, and whom Day would torment by threatening him with leaves. Gately has become much more popular since he's become paralyzed and mute. He sees a 'tallly insubstantial ghostish figure appearing and disappearing in the mist of his vision's periphery' but Gately may be sleeping. Gately's recurring dream ever since getting clean has been a 'tiny acne-scarred Oriental woman' looking down at him. Nothing happens she's just looking down at him, which means that either he's lying down or he has become smaller than the tiny woman. There is also a menacing dog standing just past the woman. When he awakes Day is gone and his bed has been moved over so it's right next to the adjacent patient, as if they are a 'sexless old couple sleeping together but in separate beds.' He strains to yell which wakes him up [implying perhaps that he wasn't actually awake] and his bed has returned to its original place. Sometime later in the night, but before midnight parking switch, he dreams of the ghostish figure who finally stays in one place long enough for Gately to see him. The figure is a very tall man with glasses and a sunken chest wearing very high-water chinos Gately flashes back to youthful beating of kids with floods. He experiences, in the dream, a remorseful flash that this tall figure might represent one of those kids. But the figure shrugged and said that no it was just a plain old 'garden variety wraith.' Gately considers the fact that in the dream he knows he's dreaming and is considering the 'up front dream quality' of the dream, and it all gets mulitlevelled and confusing. The wraith discourages him from getting hung of on the 'dream-v-real' stuff and take note of the important thing, which is that the wraith can hear him, even though Gately cannot speak. The wraith says it's difficult for him to stay in one position long enough for Gately to be able to see him, and he's not sure how long he can keep it up. Gately tries to pretend to go to sleep to see if the wraith will go away, and then he does actually sleep because the tiny Oriental woman returns. When he awakes from the dream's dream, the wraith is still there, now standing on the bed's railing, towering over him. Gately can see the wraith's nostril hair and brown socks, and notes that these are not the sort of details he associates with dreaming. The wraith was nodding in empathy with Gately's thoughts of his 'suffocated speechlessness' and explaining that wraiths never spoke out loud, which is why their words always seemed like thoughts in your head. The wraith said that very few wraiths have anything important enough to interface about to overcome their impatience and stand still long enough for a person to see them clearly, preferring to whiz around at the speed of quanta. He says that wraiths 'exist' in a completely different Heisenbergian dimension of rate-change and time-passage. Gately is thinking 'for fuck's sake what was this,' first Day and Ewell, and now even in his dreams, everyone suddenly wants to talk to him about their problems, now that he's mute. The wraith disappears and reappears several times, bringing each time another object- first a picture of Johnny Gentle, then a Coke can with Oriental writing in place of the logo. 'The unfamiliar script on the Coke can is maybe the whole dream's worst moment.' The wraith then starts to defy nature appearing upside down and doing pirouettes on Gately's chest. Gately realizes he doesn't know the term 'PIROUETTE' which appears to him in all caps. He starts to feel something like 'lexical rape' as terms obscure to him appear in his head [see complete list below] the words suggest links to Hamlet, to annulation, to optics, to black widows, left-handedness, and levirate marriage [where the widow must marry one of her husband's brothers] all relating the wraith incontrovertibly to James O. Incandenza. Gately wants to scream, and the next time the wraith appears, it is sitting above him on the heart monitor in Lyle's cross-legged position, and the Oriental coke can is sitting on Gately's forehead smelling like low tide. An orderly shines a flashlight into the room and the wraith disappears. It occurs to Gately that the wraith may be Gately's 'Higher Power' but the wraith reappears to say 'don't we both wish.' Gately ponders the burglary-related implications of having the wraiths abilities, and wonders if wraith means 'ghost, as in dead.' The wraith tells Gately that he can Identify with his 'feelings of communicative impotence and mute strangulation' and asks if Gately remembers TV sitcoms. Gately laughs inside because everyone knows that drug addicts and TV go hand in hand. He waxes poetic about his favorites, most notably 'Cheers' which he loved because took place in Boston and because everyone always had a beer in hand. He bore an uncanny resemblance to the 'huge neckless simian-browed accountant Nom.' The wraith asks if Gately remembers the 'figurant' actors, those that served as 'human scenery' and were never heard. The wraith says that he spent the bulk of his animate life that way, especially to those closest to him. The wraith says you can't understand the pathos of figurants, until you realized how 'trapped and encaged' they are in their peripheral status. It's not as if one could just suddenly stand up and start yelling in a scene in 'Cheers.' Gately speculates briefly about lower-rung actor suicide rates. The wraith explains that he himself dabbled in making filmed entertainments, and that he went out of his way to make sure that unless the film was silent, you could hear the voice of each and every actor, no matter how peripheral. His critics often perceived this as a self-conscious heavy-art directorial pose instead of as radical realism. Gately is remembering how he would pretend that Nom was his father, who would be sarcastic and witty to Gately's mother instead of beating her. Gately is trying to focus on the ring of cold the foreign Coke can has left on his forehead, instead of either the pain or the memory of his mother trying to escape to the lockable bathroom without detection by her inebriated paramour. The wraith tells Gately that he's had to sit still for the equivalent of 3 weeks, so that Gately could see him. This reminds Gately that no one has mentioned how long he's been in here. Gately wonders why his sponsor Francis G has not yet come to visit. The wraith disappears briefly and returns to say he's paid a call to Francis G who seems to be on his way. The wraith says that when he was alive in the world he had seen his own son becoming something like a figurant. He said that witnessing this had marred the end of his animate life, and admits the foolishness of ever having blamed it on the boy's mother. Gately muses that 'resentment is the #1 offender' is one of the AA cliches he's starting to believe, not that he wouldn't mind a few minutes alone with Lenz. The wraith says to imagine spending your own youth trying to be heard or noticed by your own father only to have your own son become mute. The son who had done everything with an unslumped grace the father never could, had begun to disappear, and no one else in the family noticed. The family believed that the wraith was confusing the boy with his own boyhood self, or with his father's father who was notoriously wooden and had purportedly driven his father to drink. The wraith says that near the end, he feared his son was experimenting with substances. His family just thought the wraith had 'gone bats from Wild Turkey-intake and needed to get sober, again.' Gately asks if he tried to 'Surrender and Come In.' The wraith says he spent the whole last 90 days of his life sober trying to create a 'medium via which he and his muted son simply converse,' to make something so compelling that it would reverse thrust on his 'fall into the womb of solipsism,' to bring out of himself, a way to say 'I AM SO VERY, VERY SORRY and have it heard.' Gately recognizes this as self-pity, and doubts that the wraith could stay sober with such a poor-me attitude. The wraith says that he had, and he had found the AA cliches too vapid, not to mention their disdain for abstraction. The wraith says he bets Gately is dying to know if he ever came up with the thoroughly engaging entertainment. Gately thinks how he's spent his own sobriety fending off memories of the ex-MP, his mother's paramour, to which the wraith replies that any conversation is better than none at all. Gately wonders if the wraith has to endure as much pain as he does to hear Gately's brain-voice. Instead of asking him if he's representing the Higher Power Gately pretends to think he's wondering why the wraith is spending so much wrath-time here with Gately instead of just trying to interface with the son. He thinks maybe that would make the son kind of bats, though. He tries to keep from thinking of demerol. He thinks of the ex-MP, who had never laid a hand on Gately, but who scared him. He remembers the ex-MP teaching him the basics of weightlifting, and not being terribly happy when Gately became capable of lifting more. The ex-MP kept cafeful records in a little book of his weightlifting, and of his Heinekin consumption. When Gately remembers this stuff, he wonders why he never once thought to ask his mother why she loved him, in spite of the beatings. They never spoke his name when he was out of the house. He tries not to think about why he didn't just pull the ex-MP off of her. The ex-MP never hid the beatings from young Gately, and after a while he'd just turn the TV up or go off and lift weights. Without anyone's help, he soon figured out the difference between the beatings and the similar sounding activity in the bed. Gately remembers the ex-MP's way of dealing with house flies; instead of killing them he'd whack them hard enough to disable them, because he theorized that their screams of pain would scare off the other flies. Gately's memories fade into a dream where he's dressed Lenz's topcoat leaning over the Nuck whose head he just bashed in. When he wakes, he thinks he sees Francis G, who says at least Gately's still alive, and asks if he's sober still. Gately blinks and Francis is gone. There are 3 other White Flaggers in the room, and their talking about the tall well-dressed Civil-Service-looking guy in the hallway, with brown shoes and a hat, who appears to be in it for the long haul with his take-out food from many countries. Gately recognizes this as possibly a certain ADA, and grunts. The White Flaggers joke about CPR, which is their term for Al-Anon, the Church of Perpetual Revenge. Gately wishes he could laugh and get them to go away.
terms on p 832, with brief definitions
-acciacatura- a dissonant grace note used to embellish a note of a melody
-alembic- an alchemical still, or metaphorically something that refines or transforms through distillation
-lactrodectus mactans- black widow spider
-neutral density point- the point on which a photographer focuses to get the proper exposure
-proprioception--literally one's own perception, or the sense of relative position of neighboring parts of the body
-testudo- type of tortoise, or a military formation where soldiers aggregate together for protection
-annulate- the way energy is produced in IJ, invented in part by James O. Incandenza
-bricolage- something constructed out of whatever happens to be available, eg found art
-gerrymander- manipulation of boundaries to favor a certain group
-scopophilia- literally the love of looking, or 'male gaze' ie, objectification of women in films
-Laertes- the character who kills Hamlet
-extruding-thrusting or forcing out, or shaping by forcing through a die
-strigil- curved instrument used to scrape sweat off the skin
-lexical-relating to words or to the lexicon of words
-lordosis-curvature of the spine
-impost- a tax, or the handicap weight carried by a racehorse
-sinistral- left-handed
-meniscus-a lens that is concave on one side and convex on the other
-chronaxy-the minimum time required to excite a nerve using an electrical current of twice the threshold voltage
-Poor Yorick- the character whose skull is dug up in Hamlet, in the scene from which the title 'Infinite Jest' comes
-Luculus-Roman general famous for giving lavish banquets
-Cerise Montclair- deep red Montclair [the car James O. Incandenza's father had]
-De Sica neo-real crane dolly- a crane dolly named for Italian neo-realist filmmaker Vittorio De Sica
-Circumambientfounddramaleviratemarriage
-circumambient- surrounding,
-found drama- JOI's unfilmable films,
-levirate marriage- widow is required to marry the husband's brother after the husband's death
notes:
This is among the most densely packed sections of the book. Himself explains that he made Infinite Jest to get through to Hal, and to apologize. Nearly all of the book's symbols make an appearance here, with the chilling image of the 'figurant' actors being central. In typical DFW style, the revelations raise more questions than they answer. Why is the Asian script on the Coke can the most disturbing thing about an otherwise pretty disturbing dream? Are we to assume that Lyle is also a wraith, or perhaps just that Himself's wraith visits Lyle and helps him give the students advice. Who is the tiny acne scarred Asian woman? It must have been the wraith that moved Gately's bed right next to Otis P. Lord's bed, thus suggesting that Himself's wraith has been responsible for the bed moving and other inexplicable occurrences at ETA. The last 90 days of his life presumably refers to the making of Infinite Jest, and we thus have an explanation for why he made it, and possibly what it is about, at least from his perspective. This suggests that Molly Notkin's synopsis of the film [p 787-795] is spurious.
p 845-846
YDAU [2009] Nov 19
place Antitoi Brothers
narrated in third person [Marathe]
synopsis:
After Marathe, Ossowiecke and Balbalis failed to turn up the veiled performer, Fortier and Marathe turned to the final and most drastic means of trying to locate the cartridge, to acquire members of the Auteur's immediate family, which Marathe would be in charge of. Broullime was carrying out further tests on 'viewer willingness' on his newly acquired test subjects. One test subject is an irritating, eccentrically dressed homeless man with a white wig [Lenz] who was cutting off not his own fingers but the fingers of the other test subject, a weakened addict dressed as a gauche woman, and found carrying multiple purses of suspicious nature [Poor Tony]. This of course marred the statistics of the experiment, and Bruillime considers a 'lethal technical interview.' Fortier is going to Phoenix to assist Luria P__ in a more important technical interview, and leaving Marathe in charge of the 'preliminary acquisition.' A direct attack on the tennis academy was out of the question , on account of the tall steep hill. Instead he put Balbais in charge of acquiring the Quebecois team that was en route to play against ETA, while he remained at Antitoi's, occasionally going to nearby Ryle's for 'jazz nights.' Balbais would use the mirror across the highway trick to force the bus of the Quebecois players off the road, and then several AFR members would take the place of the young players. Marathe apparently had some plausible explanation prepared to deal with the issue of the wheelchairs and the beards of the putative youngsters.
notes:
This short section explains what happens at the book's end, namely that Hal and Orin will be acquired, and 'interviewed' to determine the location of the master cartridge. It also confirms that Marathe has sold out and failed to mention the fact that he did locate Joelle, and possibly another copy of the cartridge at Ennet House. It's not clear, though, why Marathe would still go ahead with the acquisition of the family members. Perhaps he handed Joelle over to Steeply in order to get a deal for his wife, while still maintaining his cover with AFR by going ahead with the operation.
p 846-851
YDAU [2009] sometime Nov 13-20
place St. Elizabeth Hospital trauma wing
narrated in third person [Gately]
synopsis:
Gately dreams that he is with Joelle in motel with Joelle in the South. Joelle raises her veil slightly to lick the sweat off his forehead. She is promising him a night of near terminal pleasure, as she disrobes revealing a incredible 'inhuman' body. Then she removes the veil revealing the face of Winston Churchill, complete with cigar and jowls. Gately is jolted awake briefly. He then remembers Mrs. Waite, who was his neighbor when he lived with his mother and the MP. There was something about Mrs. Waite, but no one said what it was. Her house and yard are in disarray, and she kept jars of brown-green viscous vegetoid stuff in her garage. She never left her house. Some of the littler kids said she was a witch. Mrs. Gately forbade Don to fuck with her. Although she was in no position to enforce such a rule, Don followed it. He didn't buy the witch stories, but was afraid of her. Eventually however, he developed a relationship of sorts with her. He went over once or twice under forgotten circumstances and interfaced with her in her kitchen. She never tried to feed him viscous stuff from a jar. She eventually hung herself. She was found by a meter-reader a few weeks after Gately's birthday. Realizing that Gately's mother was too pathetic to do much of anything for Don, she made him a cake and brought it to the birthday party that some other kids allowed Don to share with them, since he had no party of his own. He knew that she had given up cigarettes to save up money to make him the cake. The party's Mom accepted the cake without inviting Mrs. Waite to come in, but she forbade the kids to eat it or even blow out the candles, and put it directly into the trash. There's no way Mrs. Waite could have seen the mom throw the cake away, and Gately wasn't so into self-torture to think her suicide was related to the cake being thrown out. He didn't mourn her or even think about her for many years, which is what makes his next dream even more disturbing. The dream takes place in Mrs. Waite's kitchen with Joelle plays the part of Mrs. Waite, sitting on a pink plastic ring, again naked and unveiled, with the same unbelievable body, but this time instead of Winston Churchill there is the face of an angel. It's not a sex dream though, Mrs. Waite/Joelle is the figure of death. Death explains to Gately that death happens over and over, you have many lives and at the end of each one a woman kills you to release you into the next life, in which she will be your mother. This is why Moms are so obsessively loving, they're trying to make amends for a murder neither of you quite remembers. As Gately begins to understand, he becomes sad. He's seeing Joelle/Death through a milky filter, reminiscent of the way a baby sees a parent. He begins cry and asks Joelle/Death to set him free. She shakes her unfocussed head and says: Wait.
notes:
Gately's dream/vision seems to be similar to Molly Notkin's description of Infinite Jest [p 787-795] Perhaps the wraith has put the vision in his head. The head of Winston Churchill atop the perfect body is reminiscent of the description of Ortho Stice [727-638]
p 851-854
YDAU [2009] Nov 20
place ETA
narrated by Hal in first person
synopsis:
The header reading 'Gaudeamus Igitur' [Let us therefore rejoice] is a college drinking song. Hal awakes from a dream where he's in a zoo, that has no animals or cages. It's 5am and Mario is asleep. He puts in a plug of Kodiak tobacco and notes that he feels bad, 'a sort of nausea of the head.' He's felt on the verge of crying for a week. He gets up to stand on one foot, which is therapeutic for his ankle. It has begun snowing and the snow on the ground is purple from the light. The Boards and AP exams are 3 weeks from tomorrow. This is the first day without dawn drills since Interdependence Day [Nov 8] and he has missed a chance to sleep until breakfast. He had awakened early the day before as well, after seeing in his sleep Kevin Bain crawling toward him. The wind outside rattled the subdorm doors in their frames. The Lung hadn't been inflated and Hal is hopeful that this might be cancellation weather for the exhibition meet. He can't ever remember hoping to not play before, and he can't remember feeling strongly one way or another for a long time. The message machine is blinking twice, meaning 2 messages. Hal notes the relationship between this flashing and that of the light in the smoke detector. Pemulis has coached him through enough math for him to determine that the formula for this relationship would be that of an ellipse. Since the Wayne incident the lessons have stopped and Pemulis has been very scarce. Every year between I Day and the WhataBurger the academy holds a semipublic exhibition meet for purposes of fundraising, and each year Tavis has a team from another country flown in to compete against ETA. The teams chosen are always subpar, making the ETA kids look good. This year's opponents would be Quebecois, but Hal has his doubts about planes landing in this weather. It has occurred to Hal that without a few one-hitters to look forward to, he was waking up feeling like there was nothing to look forward to. The implied question was whether Bob Hope had become not just the high point of the day, but its actual meaning, which he finds pretty appalling. Hal is in charge of the messages on the machine, and this week their outgoing message goes 'this is the disembodied voice of Hal Incandenza...'
notes:
Hal's answering machine message seems an apt metaphor, if an unconscious one. Pemulis has been scarce but apparently Hal doesn't know he's been kicked out. Who has left the messages on Hal's machine?
p 854-864
YDAU [2009] Nov 20, or later
place St. Elizabeth Hospital trauma wing
narrated in third person [Gately]
synopsis:
When Gately wakes from the Joelle/Death dream, the actual Joelle is leaning over him wetting his forehead with a cloth. She's wearing a clean veil, and her hair seems darker red to Gately. He had never been into Madame Psychosis, but had known many who were, mostly 'Organics men' [heroin/opium users] and he feels an odd vividness that he is being swabbed by a celebrity. He has no idea how heroic and/or romantic he appears to her, and she has no idea that newly sober people are prone to see people with more sober time as heroic and/or romantic. Joelle says she can't stay long this time and as she moves away he notices that her sweatpants have the word BUM down one leg, and he thinks these were once Erdedy's sweatpants. The bed next to him is now empty. She tells Gately how she'd gone to St. Columbkill's Meeting and there'd been a guy from her home state of Kentucky named Wayne who had awakened in a disconnected sewage drain pipe after a ten year blackout. Wayne had a deep furrow across his face where his alcoholic father in the grip of post-binge Horrors had hit him with a hatchet. The gash had just about healed when his father dropped dead. He dragged his father under the farmhouse and began charging kids $5 to see a bona fide dead man. He took the money and headed out to 'lay up drunk as a cock on jimson.' Next thing he remembers is waking up in the drain pipe near Boston, with some 'right nasty' medical issues but the timer bell cuts him off, and he points at Joelle to speak next. Gately has to remind himself that Joelle is only 3 weeks clean. She has a big flat notebook in her lap, and when she looks down, the veil hangs loose like a white screen with nothing behind it. She raises her head and her veiled features return. She announces that she has to leave, but that she can come back later and bring him whatever he wants. He hikes an eyebrow. She says that now that his fever is down, they'll hopefully remove his feeding tube. Gately realizes that this is why he cannot speak, and Thanks God. Joelle compulsively flexes and twiddles her thumb and says that unlike her radio show, at Meetings, she doesn't know what she'll say until it comes out. She speaks about Recovery issues in an intellectualish way. She says that Pat keeps telling her to build a wall around each day, and not to look over or back or to add up the days. She says that she realizes this is why she could never quit. If she went straight, she always counted the days, and when she looked ahead it seemed like too staggering a number. She likens it to Evel Knievel jumping over cars on his motorcycle. Gately recalls his own detox in jail in Revere, when he had to build a wall around each second to endure it, but once the heaves and chills vanished so did this sense of the endless Now. His shoulder hurt now but nothing like the hurt of 'the Bird.' The White Flaggers call the Now 'The Present' -- the true gift of AA. Joelle says that when Wayne pointed to her to go up there, she realized that she really could do it, if she chose to do it as one endless day. He tries to give her a look that will validate her breakthrough. Gately has his own breakthrough and realizes that he can endure this pain and fear of the ADA the same he way. He decides that if he gets through this, he'll take the Evel Knievel picture from his wall and give it to Joelle. Joelle opens the big book in her lap to a picture of her own personal Daddy. There's a dog in the photo, and Joelle explains that none of her Daddy's dogs had names, and this one was later called the one that got hit by the UPS truck. She explains that her father was a low-pH chemist, and that her mother had inherited a farm, so her father moved them out there and 'jick-jacked' with farming. The nurse comes to change the catheter-receptacle and Joelle doesn't seem to notice, as she flips through the album showing him pictures of all the farm animals, who do have names. Gately realizes he could reach his left hand up and brush the veil aside as she shows him a picture of Uncle Lum, her father's partner who inhaled fumes and began acting strangely. He does move his hand enough to touch her wrist, and get her attention, and then mimics writing. Ordinarily when an attractive female so much as looks at Gately, he plays out a whole fantasy sequence in his mind which either ends with happily married sunset years, or a bitter divorce. With Joelle, though it ends with either bouncing veiled babies, or a a honeymoon eve deveiling, which reveals Winston Churchill. But still, he can't help envisioning 'the old X' with Joelle veiled and yelling 'And Lo!' Having Joelle sharing her personal photos with him, jumps his mind right over the moments wall. He envisions her smitten with him, volunteering to help in his escape from the hospital and from the Feds or whoever that is in the hallway. This fantasy fills him with shame, because even contemplating a romantic thing with a newcomer is known as 13th stepping and is regarded as the province of true bottom-feeders, and considered tantamount to rape. He realizes that it's no accident that his most vivid fantasy is the flight-from-the-law one, where the newcomer helps clean up his mess. His eyes roll back in his head in disgust.
notes
Since the bed next to Gately is now empty, this must be Nov 20 or later, since Otis P. Lord is brought back to ETA on Nov 20. This is also confirmed on p 96-964, when Joelle leaves the hospital the snowstorm of Nov 20 has already happened. Is there an intended allusion to John Wayne with Wayne from Kentucky? Why would Joelle have on Erdedy's sweatpants? The billowing of Joelle's veil, with nothing behind it,when she looks down [and away from Gately] is reminiscent of the vacuole in the ceiling [p 809-827], and of the black sail [p 648-651].
p 864-876
YDAU [2009] Nov 20
place ETA
narrated by Hal in first person
synopsis:
Hal can hear the sounds of early morning weeping from behind dorm doors as he goes down the hall to brush his teeth. Snow had piled up in the sill of a window left open, and Hal puts his head out to have a look, but visibility is too low to see the ATHSCME fans displacing great volumes of snowy air. The Headmaster's House was little more than a lump, but Hal can picture CT fretting over the snow, and possible consequences on the exhibition tournament. Hal pulls his head back when it becomes numb and realizes that he hasn't had to go to the bathroom in a serious way for 3 days. The digital display on the intercom reads '11-18 EST0456' [although this seems to be the same day as p 851-854, which was given as 11/20]. He finds Ortho Stice making an odd chanting sound with his forehead up against the glass of his window. When Hal enters, Stice asks without turning his head if Hal had been crying. Hal says no, and then contemplates that for the past 10 days, he had felt worst in the morning. Stice mentions playing the 'furriners' today, and Hal says if we do it's not going to be out there on the courts. Hal says they'll shuttle the kids around to various indoor courts, if the Quebecois kids managed to fly in before the airport closed. Hal says he figures they're stuck up at Dorval, and CT is probably on the case now. He expects Stice to do his CT impersonation, but Stice remains face to the window. After a silence, Stice tells Hal a joke about 3 statisticians duck hunting-- the first misses low, the second misses high, at which point the third jumps up whooping 'we got him!' Out the window Hal can see a figure sitting in the bleachers, getting buried with snow. It had never snowed like this in November, and the whole scene out the window has a pathos to it. Hal asks why Stice has his forehead up against the window this way, and isn't it getting cold. Stice says the forehead lost all feeling a couple of hours ago, and reveals that his forehead is actually stuck to the window. He had been unable to sleep, and feeling hot and sweaty, brought a chair to sit by the window where it was cool. He rested his head against the window, and before he knew it he was stuck. He had tried to unstick the head a couple hours later, but the sound it began to make discouraged him. He then just waited for someone to come along, praying it wouldn't be Pemulis, who surely would have thought of something cruel to do to him. Or Troeltsch who to Hal's surprise is sleeping in Axhandle's single room. Hal decides to try and pull him free. Stice asks if Hal believes in 'little kid shit. Telekiniption. Ghosts. Parabnormal shit' and Hal says he won't feel a thing. Hal says he used to believe in vampires, and that Himself used to claim to see his father's ghost, but they had written that off, because he also used to claim that Hal wasn't speaking even though he was. And Mario says that he's seen paranormal figures, and Mario never lies. So Hal says he's withholding judgement. Stice says if Hal pulls him free, he'll show him some paranormal stuff that'll shake his tree good. Hal counts to 3, but then pulls on 2, and there is a horrible sound as his forehead distended, pulling his ordinarily jowly flesh tight, giving Hal a view of what Stice would look like with a radical facelift. It all happened in less than a second, Stice screamed out for him to let go, and Hal does so, deciding that they're going to have to thaw it off. Troeltsch emerges from Axford's room and begins mock-announcing into his fist about reports of screaming. They discuss possibilities for thawing the head. It was as if there were a tacit agreement not to mention Troeltsch's being in Axford's room or to ask where Axford was. Troeltsch seemed oblivious to any appearance of impropriety. Hal leaves Stice alone with Troeltsch and goes in search of Kenkle and Brandt, the janitors. Brandt is is the submoronic sidekick to Kenkel who had risen from the rough Roxbury Crossing neighborhood to earn a doctorate in low-temperature Physics, had taken a job with the Office of Naval Research, and then had been court-martialed, for an offense that changes each time he's asked about. He's an incredible spitter, and their janitorial technique consists of Kenkel spitting with pinpoint accuracy onto whatever surface Brandt is about to clean. Himself had met them on the T which they rode recreationally, and they had steered him toward the proper train, and all but carried him to his door, where they were invited in at 2am and have been employed at ETA ever since. As Hal approaches, they are in the midst of a one-sided conversation about 'Canine-Style interface favored in huts, blue car-tridges, Tan-tric etchings.' Brandt introduces himself to Hal, presumably for the umpteenth time, and Kenkle greets him as 'Good prince Hal.' Hal explains the Stice situation and Kenkle says they are in route, but asks why the hilarity. Hal tries to make a serious face, but Kenkle stills sees it as mirthful. Hal tries to examine his face in the reflection of a window, but it has gotten too light and he looks 'tentative and ghostly against all that blazing white.'
notes:
Who is the figure in the bleachers covered in snow? Why does Hal's faith appear as mirthful to Kenkle while to Hal it seems ghostly? It's interesting that Himself was visited by his father's ghost. Can Hal not see his own father's ghost, or has Himself just decided it's no use visiting Hal. What is Himself's ghost trying to accomplish by visiting Stice, and by moving all of the objects around?
p 876-883
YDAU [2009] Nov 20
place 8th floor, State House Annex, Boston
no narration, partial transcript of a meeting.
synopsis:
This section transcribes the meeting between Rodney Tine, his son Rodney Jr.. Maureen Hooley from the children's division of Interlace, Carl Yee from Glad Corporation and Tom Veals from Viney & Veals Advertising. Tine has been delayed because of the weather to this meeting which has been called to get an OK before disseminating a 30-second advertising spot aimed at 6-10 year old demographic, to be shown during the 'Mr. Bouncety-Bounce Show.' They discuss the costs, which Yee thinks are a bit high. Tine Jr. reminds him that the following year is Glad's year, and asks if he wants everyone 'staring bug-eyed at some sinister cartridge' the whole year. Tine Sr. tells him shut up and stop tapping the ruler on the table. Veals, who has a cold, announces that they had to can 'Frankie the No-Thankee Hankie' icon because it had tested as uncool. He says that the present version is rough because there have been some bugs with 'Fully Functional Phil, the prancing ass.' Ms. Hooley explains that the mule icon provokes empathy, doesn't come off as an authority figure, plus everything besides the cockroach and the ass is basically copyrighted. Yee says surely he doesn't present himself as an ass. Hooley explains that he's never just Phil, he's Fully Functional Phil, in contrast with the adult figure who reclines passively before the Canadian cartridge. tine says he's foreseeing trouble selling the president on a prancing ass. Hooley explains that Phil's message is that not every cartridge is safe, that there are wicked cartridges with a smily face on the case. At 14 seconds there's a traumatic graphic where the animated cartridge has yellow fangs and is driving away with a kidnapped kid splayed against the car's rear window. 'Stuff of fucking nightmares' Veals says. At this point Yee has an epileptic seizure. Hooley says he'll be fine, just be sure not to mention it happened. Tine Sr finally takes the ruler, actually a weatherman's pointer away from Tine Jr. Hooley says that at this point Phil says that they don't even know what the cartridge to watch out for is even about, just that it looks like something you'd really want to watch, and that it's Canadian, which is why the kidnapper wears a plaid cap. At 19 seconds Phil dances a 'Native-American-cum-Breakdance-type' dance and says be sure to check with Mommy and Daddy before watching any cartridges. Yee is back up, and mentions floppy-ear and buck-teeth product tie-ins. Tine Jr asks if Yee's OK, which sends him into another seizure. Hooley continues, saying that at 25.35 seconds Phil emphatically warns that if Mommy or Daddy is observed in front of the viewer for a long time, that 'No-ho-ho-ho way' should you join them and watch whatever they're watching. Tine Sr says they're ready to view. Hooley says that Veals has already storyboarded an adolescent version of Phil for music videos and soft-core, with a more ironic angle. His trademark expression is 'It's your ass, ace.'
p 883-896
YDAU [2009] after Nov 20
place St. Elizabeth Hospital trauma wing
narrated in third person [Gately]
synopsis:
In the wake of Joelle's visit, and the ensuing fantasies Gately has yet to really get around to the implications of the wraith, that there may swarms of them flitting around his room. Gately couldn't get through 'Ethan From' in high school and he has no clue where ghostwords like 'sinistral' and 'ommatophoric' [having stalks with eyes at the end] are coming from. Not to mention ghostwords, which he thinks is at least a real word [although it is not]. The nurse gives him a stenographic notebook and a pen, saying that the visitor said that he requested it. He sees that Ferocious Francis has taken up the bedside chair, with his oxygen tank in tow. He coughs as a way of saying hello, and says 'still sucking air I see.' Gately tries to write 'yo' but it comes out illegible. Francis says he's heard that Gately was giving God a little help, protecting his fellowman from his consequences. Francis says he heard Gately had taken on six armed Hawaiians, broken one's nose, shoving bits of it into his brain. Gately tries to ask in writing whether any were dead and who the guy in the hall might be. A doctor comes in, it's one that Gately dislikes, an Indian or Pakistani doctor who had tried to hook Gately up to Demerol drip 4-8 days ago. The doctor looks at Gately's chart and says 'grade-two toxemia. Synovial inflammation' and asks if the pain is much worse today. He says that the pain is estimated to be comparable to ectopic labor. He asks if Gately is ready to succumb and accept the proper pain medication. He lists a host of 'very safe' alternatives. Gately wishes that Francis would step in help out here. But Francis sits silently and the doctor doesn't appear to notice him. The doctor says that he is Moslem and he too abstains from drugs by religious law, but that under these circumstances, he would accept relief from pain, since no god would will needless suffering on his children. Gately has written 'AA' on the paper, and shooting Francis a 'please-jump-in-here' look. Francis is blowing his nose, and Gately is remembering the taste in the mouth when Demerol is injected. The doctor looks uncomprehending at what Gately has scribbled, and Gately thinks that this must be the disease, the Spider talking. The doctor offers him Talwin, which was Gately's #2 after Demerol. Gately starts to feel that if the doctor offers him Demerol again that he will succumb. Then he thinks that this is the Disease telling him that he won't be able to handle a dosage of medically required Demerol. Instead of stepping in Francis says he's going to leave and let Gately handle this. The doctor pleads with 'Mr. Gately Senior' to help convince Gately of the extreme discomfort to come. Francis dismisses this saying 'Kid's gonna do what he decides he needs to do.' Gately takes his still good left hand and reaches over and grabs the doctor's balls and squeezes. The doctor screams out 'like a big opera lady in a Viking helmet' and the sound of the scream wakes Gately and causes so much pain that he hits nearly the same operatic note. When he wakes the morning light is 'Dilaudid-colored' and the visitor's chair is back by the wall. The stenographer's notebook was either part of the dream, or has been knocked off the bed. But the railing is folded down, so the part where Joelle had sat there showing him pictures was probably real. He really does have a tube in his throat. For the first time in the trauma wing, he realizes the need to shit, and suspects that the arrangements for that will not be pleasant. The dream could have been either a fever dream, or the Disease. In AA they teach you to accept that thoughts of the Substance pop into your head, and you should let them come and go; just don't entertain them. Gately had always found Demerol with a Talwin kicker to be a 'symmetrical buzz.' He tries to think about anything else to get his mind away from it-- bumper stickers, lobsters in traps with their eyestalks poking through, Joelle, the nurse who sold him bottles Demerol and then let him X her, etc. A large black nurse enters and calls him baby. He tries to convey the need to defecate. Gately was introduced to Demerol at age 23, when the intra-ocular itching forced him to switch from Percocet. The Demerol tabs were called Pebbles [50 mg] and Bam Bam [100 mg] and they were very small, and at first he'd been suspicious they'd have no effect. But once he ran out of everything else and tried them, he never went back. Gately remembers crewing for many of the Percocet/Demerol era with Fackelman and Kite [who had a background in computer hacking], whose scam was to manufacture fake background checks, and then rent a furnished luxury apartment, sell all the furnishings and live there getting high off the proceeds until they received notice for overdue rent. Gately remembers Fackelman bringing girls home to the apartment and pretending that they'd been robbed of all their furnishings. Fackelman and Kite thought that it was odd that Gately was a narcotics man, because he was such a good and stand-up guy, but while on the substance he became taciturn and what Pamela Hoffmann-Jeep called 'Other-Directed.' McDade and Diehl come into Gately's room after visiting Doony Glynn in the gastroenterology ward. They announce that they may not be able to legally depose for Gately after all, due to legal issues. They also inform him that it's looking like the gun with which Gately was shot may be in Lenz's possession, to which he reacts by making a 'whole new kind of noise.' They tell him that Lenz had possibly been spotted, totally relapsed, drunk, wearing a tux and a sombrero with balls. They say that Unit #3 is going to be rented out as a place that treats agoraphobia, and they are arranging to print invitations to a big welcome party. Gately realizes that it must have been them that put the 'help wanted' sign outside the window of the woman who cries for help. Diehl produces an unsigned 'get well' card, which Gately is sure is shoplifted. This brings on a wave of self-pity and resentment, about the fact that these losers won't stand up for him, about having to say no to the grinning doctor, about not getting his notebook, about having to shit. He starts to think that maybe the God of AA is really a cruel one who gets you straight only so you can feel the severity of the punishment more keenly. There are purple cords standing up on Gately's neck, and the visitors are backing away as the nurse comes in with a kidney shaped bedpan and cleaning fluid. The visitors duck out, and Gately's heart sinks with a thud when he sees the attractive nurse, whose job it is to clean up his shit and wipe his ass.
notes:
The doctor is reminiscent of the near Eastern medical attache and seems to possibly have been planted in Gately's dream, along with the fancy vocabulary, by the wraith.
p 896-902
YDAU [2009] Nov 20
place ETA
narrated by Hal in first person
synopsis:
Hal is going back up to check on Stice and Mario, check his reflection for signs of unintentional hilarity, and listen to the death aria from 'Tosca.' As he's walking down the hall he's hit with 'some variant of the telescopically self-conscious panic that can be so devastating during a match.' He's never felt this way off-court before. It was as Lyle had taught them, not totally unpleasant. His advice had been to focus on the your heightened perception on the fear itself. 'Everything came at too many frames per second. Everything had too many aspects. But it wasn't disorienting. The intensity wasn't unmanageable. It was just intense and vivid. It wasn't like being high, but it was still very: lucid. The world seemed almost edible, there for the ingesting.' Sleepy Perterson passes in his robe. 'But the panic was there too, endocrinal, paralyzing, and with overcognitive, bad-trip-like element... something like a shadow flanked the vividness and lucidity of the world...what didn't seem fresh and unfamiliar seemed suddenly old as stone. It all happened in the space of a few seconds. The familiarity of the Academy routine took on a crushing cumulative aspect.' Hal starts to imagine all the times he's ever done and ever will do certain things all added up-- the volume of food he'll ever eat added up, a huge room bulging with all the excrement he'll produce. He braces himself and hunches waiting for the worst of it to pass. He lies down in Viewing Room 5, with his toothbrush in the NASA glass balanced on his chest, fighting the feeling that either he'd never been there before, or he'd spent a whole lifetime there. Peterson puts his head in to ask if this qualifies as a blizzard, and after a long silence goes away. Hal lies there letting the saliva drip post-nasally and reviews his family history. His mothers mother was Quebecois and her father was an Anglo-Canadian binge-drinker. Himself's middle name was Orin, the name of his own grandfather. He considers the design and lighting of the viewing room, and the arrangement of Himself's films on the shelf. The Moms's full name is Avril Mondragon Tavis Incandenza and she's 197 cm tall [13.4 more than Hal, but only up to Himself's ear]. She had an aversion to overhead lighting. Petropolis Kahn puts his head in and asks what happened upstairs, and if Hal's going to breakfast. Hal doesn't answer. He thinks that if it came down to a choice between competitive tennis and Bob Hope it would be nearly impossible to decide. He's appalled by how distantly this appalls him. Rumor has it that there's to be a small Eschaton game today overseen by Pemulis himself, who seems to be avoiding Hal since he returned from the meeting in Natick. He ponders Himself's delusion that Hal was not speaking, even when he was. Hal contemplates the etymology of the word 'blizzard.' He remembers Orin alleging in YTMP [2003] that when he borrowed the Moms's car in the morning he found smeared prints of nude human feet inside on the windshield. John Wayne had been taken to St. Elizabeth's after the incident with the radio broadcast on Tuesday, and stayed overnight, but had recovered enough to come home the next day. The Moms had stayed by his side late into the night. Hal reviews the technical definition of 'blizzard' from a science dictionary, and revels at the dedication required for this level of perspicacity. It seems both admirable and pathetic that people are willing to give their lives to something. 'A flight from in the form of a plunging into.' This is why they start them so young at the Academy, before the questions of 'why and to what grow real beaks and claws.' The original meaning of 'addiction' was being bound over, and dedicated to either legally or spiritually. Hal considers Stice's ghost question, and thinks of Hamlet who for all his questioning, never questions the ghost, or whether his own madness might be real-- that he might be feigning feigning. He thinks of the professor's final soliloquy in Himself's unfinished parody of academia [that the Moms had considered a personal slap] 'Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms that Utilize Every Centimeter of Available Space with Mind-Boggling Efficiency.' Hal considers getting up and checking on Stice, but remains on the floor. The Moms and Tavis were probably not related. Her mother died when she was 8 and shortly afterwards her father disappeared on a drinking binge. He was found and bailed out, and returned with a new bride, who from the wedding photo appears to have been a dwarf, and her infant son, CT. The new bride is homodontic and bears several similarities with Mario. Most of the information on her comes from Orin who at age 7 had had an extended conversation with CT, while the Moms was in labor with Mario, and is thus the info is pretty much suspect. The Moms and CT had never represented themselves as anything other than unrelated but extremely close. 'The attack of panic and prophylactic focus's last spasm' overwhelms Hal with 'the intense horizontality' that surrounds him in the viewing room-- every line of everything in the room seems horizontal to him. He feels awakened to some basic dimension he's neglected during years of being mostly upright. 'I felt denser now; I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal. I was impossible to knock down.'
notes:
It's noteworthy that Hal's panic attack leaves him feeling more lucid as opposed to disoriented. He becomes divorced from his self, and gazes upon his life from outside. He ponders Himself's delusion that Hal was not speaking. He ponders the possibility that Hamlet was actually mad, but never questioned whether his feigned madness was itself feigned. Are these related? Perhaps Hal's muteness was real, and he cannot accept that. Was there a specific suspected partner in Orin's story of the footprints on the windshield? It seems all but confirmed that Mario is the offspring of CT.
p 902-906
YDAU [2009] after Nov 20
place St. Elizabeth Hospital trauma wing
narrated in third person [Gately]
synopsis:
Gately's decline from promising football player to drug addict is chronicled, presumably as Gately lies semi-conscious in the hospital ward. His cognomen Bim or Bimmy was derived from the acronym for Big Indestructible Moron. Even at 12 his head was huge, too big for a regulation helmet, and he seemed to be about a yard wide, and every coach who encountered him spoke of limitless possibilities. He played linebacker on defense and fullback on offense, and in spite of his size he was fast, he ran a 40 in 4.4 in the 7th grade. His head was indestructible, whether coming at an opponent with his special helmet, or being used to win bets-- he'd bet a 6-pack that he could endure being clocked in the head with various objects. He was definitely a boy's boy; he had no idea how to impress girls other than to let them watch someone do something extreme to his head. He wasn't a defender of the weak, but neither was he a bully. Gately smoked his first duBois at age 9, and soon he and the other players he hung around wanted nothing much else than to get high and having pissing contests, or talk about Xing big-haired girls. Gately was the only one who was truly interested in football. He had been classified as ADD and Special-Ed from grade school on, and had specific problems with 'Language Arts.' His whole memory of his sinsemilla/screwdriver beginnings telescopes to pissing orange juice into the Atlantic, while the waves washed it back up around his ankles, which he speaks of in AA, as pissing on himself with alcohol right from the start. At 13 he moves on to quaaludes and beer, and the attack of the killer sidewalks. He moved on to a whole new social set including Trent Kite, a laptop-carrying wienie who was perhaps the last fanatical Grateful Dead enthusiast in the east coast, and whose special talent was transforming the kitchen of any vacationing parents into a rudimentary lab for the synthesis of drugs. Gately's favorites were Kite's Quaalude isotopes, which he called 'QuoVadis' and which with a couple of beers inevitably led to the attack of a killer sidewalk. It was basically a 2-year brownout, which also coincided with the ex-MP leaving Gately's mother for a Newburyport divorcee, who apparently put up a more sporting fight. Amazingly, none of this really hurt Gately's football playing. He limited his intake to nighttime, not so much as a beer before 6pm. He caught up on sleep during classes. Most of the kids he hung out with were expelled by sophomore year, Gately made it until 17. QuoVadis and beer are lethal in terms of homework, and Gately had enough academic troubles even straight. Kite managed to tutor him through remedial math and science, and he and another player had arranged for the French teacher to have her 'strabysmic eyeballs fucked out' by a tanned football coach. English was Gately's tripping point. The coaches tried out all 4 English teachers, but none would agree to pass a student who couldn't do the work, regardless of his tragic home situation and his limitless football promise. Gately flunked Sophomore Comp in May, losing eligibility for the fall season, and withdrew for a year to preserve his junior season. His whole 16th year is a blur, he survived on the vegetables from his mother's vodka drinks, and when he returned for junior year season at 17 he was flabby and enervated, and could hardly keep the shakes off on the field. His coaches sent him for PET scans, and his ability to endure Ethan From, even in comic book form was gone. Kite was gone to college at Salem State to study computer science, which meant that Gately was on his own in math and science now. Just before midterms that Gately was set to fail, his mother had the cirrhotic hemorrhage, and the backs of Gately's eyeballs were too itchy [from Percocet] to even wave goodbye as the ambulance took her away. He smoked his first gasper, from her half empty pack, and he never went back to school or played organized ball again.
notes:
This section is a sort of microcosm for the book--a hilarious trip through Gately's past, which by the time it's finished is incredibly sad.
p 906-911
YDAU [2009] Nov 20
place ETA
narrated by Hal in first person
synopsis:
Hal may have been dozing. He seems to remember people poking their heads in. Then at some point Pemulis appeared, his right eye either twitchy or swollen from sleep. Hal considers asking him to explain where he's been, but opts for a less complicated response, telling him that he's just lying here. Pemulis says he heard something about hysterics. Pemulis doesn't look good; he's unshaven and his color isn't good. Hal is thinking of the lecture in 'Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms...' and also of CT's misadventure at Himself's funeral. Meanwhile Pemulis is asking that Hal come and do some 'important interfacing.' Pemulis says Eschaton's a no-go, and asks if Hal has seen the Moms around. Pemulis implies that this partly has to do with the DMZ, and Hal reminds him of the 30 days of drug-free living. Freer interrupts them to tell of the piece of human flesh that's stuck to the window. Pemulis tries to shrug him off, saying this is a tete-a-tete. Kiernan McKenna arrives and says that Troeltsch is charging $2 to see. Pemulis says this is what he means about going somewhere private, and asks when he's ever asked Hal to urgently dialog before. Hal answers not in the last few days. Pemulis says that he's going to have to eat before seeing Stice anyway, so maybe he'll come back afterwards. Hal asks him to get down the cartridge of Good-Looking Men...and cue it 2300 or 2350. Pemulis muses over the titles of Himself's films, half of which he hasn't even heard of. Meanwhile Hal's mind goes back to the funeral, which took place April 5 or 6, just west of the Great Concavity. A gull had shit on CT and when he'd opened his mouth in shock, a fly had flown in his mouth. The Moms had laughed hardest. Pemulis had cued the cartridge to the place where Paul Anthony Heaven, a a data-entry drone that Himself had loved to employ for his monotone speech, was delivering the lecture, saying that the real consequence of the Flood is revealed to be a pandemic of hydrophobia. Behind him a film by Peterson called The Cage was running. There are shots of the bored students. The lecturer says 'We thus become in the absence of death as teleologic end, ourselves desiccated, deprived of some essential fluid, aridly cerebral, abstract, conceptual, little more than hallucinations of God.' Hal considers how the critics miss the pathos of Heaven's speech, instead focussing on the presence of dumb or unappreciative audiences in Himself's films as evidence of the auteur's hostility toward the audience. The lecture continues, 'for while clinamen and tessera strive to revive or revise the dead ancestor, and while kenosis and daemonization act to repress consciousness and memory of the dead ancestor, it is, finally, artistic askesis which represents the contest proper, the battle-to-the-death with the loved dead.' All the while Heaven is silently weeping, tears running down his gaunt face and falling from view. Hal muses 'then this too began to seem familiar.'
the italicized words in this section
clinamen- the 'swerve' or indeterminacy in the motion of atoms, taken up by literary critic Harold Bloom to describe the inclination of writers to 'swerve' from the influence of their predecessors.
tessera- an individual tile in a mosaic, or in math a curvilinial parallelogram, also the Greek number 4
kenosis- Greek for emptiness, having a religious meaning of being empty and receptive to being filled with God.
daemonization- daemons are good or malevolent supernatural beings between mortals and gods, such as the ghosts of dead heroes.
askesis- Greek for the discipline of repressing lust or other worldly concerns
notes:
Is Pemulis's eye twitching because he has been freed from the worry over urinalysis, and gone on a binge? It's notable that Himself would use The Cage in the background of his own film, and also that the critics interpreted his obsession with the 'figurant' as a disdain for the audience. Once again Himself's film seems to precipitate what will transpire in his own [after]life. Is it just the tears that Hal finds familiar or is it the battle to the death with the loved one? It's pretty ironic that Himself has reached Hal on a level that few fathers ever reach their sons, and neither he nor Hal can recognize it.
p 911-916
YDAU [2009] after Nov 20
place St. Elizabeth Hospital trauma wing
narrated in third person [Gately]
synopsis:
More of Gately's backstory unfolds while he lies in the trauma ward. After he left school, Gately didn't go straight to burglary, although he did steal a few valuables from some of the nurses from whom he copped drug samples. His first job was for Whitey Sorkin, a North Shore bookie. Gately and Gene Fackelmann were Sorkin's muscle, collecting debts. Gately had never understood Whitey's moniker, since he spent hours under UV lamps to treat his cluster headache, and his skin was roughly the color of the Pakistani MD who had informed Gately that his mother's cirrhotic stroke had left her 'at roughly the neurologic level of a Brussels sprout.' Fackelmann was also a huge guy, and their collective nickname was the Twin Towers. The weren't bodyguards, and they didn't call Sorkin Boss, mostly they just collected debts. They didn't have to break bad debtor's kneecaps, usually Gately would just inform them that Sorkin was concerned, and work out an arrangement. The size of the Twin Towers was usually deterrent enough. The only cases that called for coercion were the real addict types who'd get themselves in a hole and try to bet their way out, and who would make up sob-stories of ill loved ones, which Gately would have to listen to and then report to Sorkin, and find out whether to believe them. This was Gately's first exposure to real addiction. These cases were what caused Sorkin's cluster headaches. Actual violence only entered the picture when the hole was deep enough that Sorkin was willing to forego future patronage, and then he'd try to demonstrate that he was the least pleasant bookie to be indebted to. Fackelmann would always handle the first stages, a light beating and a broken finger or two. This was partly because Gately would get carried away too easily, and reduce the guy to a condition not conducive to future gambling, or debt paying, and this would cause Gately great remorse, and lead to massive and temporarily debilitating drug use. So usually Gately only got called into action on the really serious, write-off type cases. Although Sorkin paid them handsomely, $1000 a week wasn't enough to support their escalating addictions. Fackelmann moonlighted with IDs and 'creative personal checking' while Gately worked security for card games and drug deliveries. They were able to cop together since Fackelmann was devoted to Dilaudid and Gately to Percocets. When Trent Kite got the boot from Salem State, he joined the crew, Fackelmann turned him on to Dilaudid and they were friends for life. They started the fake-ID, credit-history, luxury-apartment scam. Gately trying to Abide in the trauma ward, remembers one afternoon in Dec 2001 [the last year of unsubsidized time] in an apartment, helping with laminating a rush order on fake IDs while the other two were out fencing the furnishings, save for the TV viewer, which was always the last thing to go. He was watching Boston U play Clemson in the Ken-L-Ration-Magnavox-Kemper-Insurance Forsythia Bowl, in which Boston's punter is inspiring the announcers to rhapsodize. Gately is suddenly and out of nowhere struck by the loss of organized ball, and begins to cry like a babe. It was 2 days later that he got pinched for assaulting one bouncer with the unconscious body of another in Danvers, and 3 months later he was in Billerica Minimum Security.
notes:
Gately is unconsciously linked to the Incandenza's 8 years before the fact by way of Orin's performance in the Forsythia Bowl.
p 916
YDAU [2009] probably Nov 20
place ETA
narrated in third person [Pemulis]
synopsis:
Pemulis is about to retrieve his stash to take it to the Entrepot [trading post]. He finds that the ceiling panel in the hallway of Subdorm B has fallen to the floor, and there seems to be no trace of 'the shoe.'
p 916-934
YDAU [2009] after Nov 20
place St. Elizabeth Hospital trauma wing
narrated in third person [Gately]
synopsis:
Gately hadn't suspected that Fackelmann had been skimming money from Sorkin all along, and he didn't find out until the 'not at all small scam with Eighties Bill and Sixties Bob' which took place while Gately was out on bail. Gately had lost his taste for violence and had taken to burglary instead. Fackelmann had a new partner, Bobby C, a 'bad news' fuchsia-haired punk kid who liked to hurt people. Fackelmann had been keeping long-shot bets here and there, without calling them in, which is suicidal because if they came in he'd have to cough up the money. It wasn't until Fackelmann's map had been presumably eliminated, that Gately and Kite found $22,000 taped to his porn-cartridge case. Gately was amazed that Fackelmann had had the will to save this money against those long-shot bets. Gately split the money with Kite, and then turned his half over to Sorkin, mostly out of guilt for not knowing that Fax had been scamming the overgenerous boss, but also to cheer Sorkin up, and also in Fax's memory. Gately didn't rat out Kite, who spent his half of the money on Grateful Dead bootlegs and computer gear, all of which he quickly sold for drugs, and by the time Gately was out of Billerica, Kite was so far gone that Gately had to become the brains of the team. The beautiful RN who had flushed his colon returns to Gately's room with a doctor whom Gately doesn't recognize, and they set up some kind of device on the adjacent bed. Gately remembers that Fackelmann's favorite expression was 'that's a goddamned lie!' which he used in response to nearly everything. Bobby C claimed to have a collection of ears. The new MD is childlike and Gately despises him. The RN is so beautiful that it's 'almost grotesque' and Gately eyes her 'healthy' breasts, and laments the fact that he's never actually been with a healthy or even sober woman. When the nurse reaches up to unscrew a bolt, Gately thinks more ghostwords as he gazes at her thighs, 'lisle' [a fine thread used to make underwear] and 'embrasure' [an opening in a window with slanted sides making it wider on the outside than on the inside]. Then as he watches the obvious sexual tension as the MD ogles the RN, a third ghostword comes to mind, 'circumambient' [surrounding]. He realizes as he averts his gaze, that it's sleeting outside. The RN says her name is Cathy/Kathy, and Gately is self-conscious of his body odor. As they assemble something above the bed that looks to Gately like part of an electric chair, the nurse tells the doctor that Gately is allergic and doesn't get any meds. Gately wallows in the shame of having taken a dump in front of anyone as healthy and beautiful as the nurse. The MD whose name sounds like Pressburger or Prissburger, asks what Gately is intubated for. The nurse explains in technical language that Dr. Pendleton was concerned that he would get an infection from a fragment of the projectile, or have a hemorrhage or mucoidal flux. The RN says she'll try to fit in a sponge bath before she goes on break, and tells the doctor to let her screw in the cranial brace, with which he's been fumbling. The MD tries to impress the nurse with some technical jargon, which Gately finds pathetic. Gately thinks that since they never brought him the notepad, perhaps Joelle's visit was a dream, which means that it was also a dream that she was wearing Erdedy's sweatpants. Gately notes the sun, and thinks that it must be nearly 1600h, which means maybe he can avoid the horror of getting sponged by the C/Kathy, and instead get sponged by the 'big hairy-moled 1600-2400 nurse.' He wishes again for the pen and paper to communicate his desire to watch the Mr. Bouncety-Bounce Show at 1600, which had been a tradition with Kite and Fackelmann and him. He ponders if perhaps the man with the hat in the hallway had intercepted the request from Joelle, and was trying to keep him from getting his story straight before they interrogated him. Gately, like most addicts, suffers late-afternoon dread and has always tried to have some way to block it out, whether Mr. Bouncety-Bounce or Meetings. He traces his fear of being left alone in a room to his childhood, when his mother would pass out nightly, leaving him essentially all alone. The tube in his throat is functioning the same way now, leaving him alone in his head. Plus the late afternoon was the time of day that the wraith had visited him yesterday. He admits to himself that he liked the dialog, the fact that the wraith had been able to communicate with him. Then suddenly he returns to the memory of Fackelmann's demise, and Pamela Hoffmann-Jeep's involvement. Pamela was an upscale but directionless and unhealthy girl from Danvers, whom Gately became involved with. She fell in love with any man 'chivalrous' enough to drive her home without raping her after she had 'swooned and passed out' at one of the clubs on Route 1, which she did on a nightly basis. Fackelmann had handed her off to him one night, and Gately drove her home. She was always either leglessly drunk or passively hungover, meaning that any sex with her, would qualify as 'taking advantage' which Gately never did. She was a beautiful sleeper, and she spent so much time asleep that Gately pictured her at her hospital job asleep. Kite and Fackelmann thought Gately was out of his mind. Gately loved that she would awaken from her stupor long enough to laugh whenever he made the joke about being robbed as he carried her into the stripped apartment. She wore long white gloves, and called drinks 'highballs' in imitation of her mother, who was more of a lush than Gately's own mother. It was Pamela who first clued Gately into the suicidal mistaken-bet scam that Fackelmann had gotten himself into. Gately has to coax the story out of Pamela, whose coherence is not too dependable. Fackelmann had taken a bet from a guy known only as 'Eighties Bill' who was a 50-ish 'corporate take-overer' with red suspenders and docksiders. He had received some kind of a tip that made him want to bet $125K against his Yale, his alma mater, and Fackelmann has to call into Sorkin to get approval. Except Sorkin is being treated for his facial pain by Dr. Robert ['Sixties Bob'] Monroe, who had interned at Sandoz and was one of T. Leary's original circle, and also friends with Kite, by way of their shared enthusiasm for the Grateful Dead. He often took Kite around to search out Dead-related paraphernalia, and even fenced stuff for Kite [and hence for Gately] covering the money for Kite, and trading the stuff later. Gately has to slip an ice cube into Pamela's neckline to keep her focussed on the important details. So the point was that Sorkin couldn't take Fackelmann's call, and he got instead, Sorkin's secretary Gwendine O'Shay, a fomer IRA moll who'd been hit on the head one too many times, and whose skull was 'soft as puppy shit in the rain.' She's familiar with Eighties Bill and his penchant for Yale, and she gets the bet wrong, thinking that Eighties Bill is trying to bet for Yale. And she verifies that there's a fix against Yale, namely that a team of cheerleaders has been recruited go pantyless in order to exploit the neurologic disorder of Yale's star forward, which renders him vertiginous after intercourse. So O'Shay OKs the bet, which she thinks is for Yale. But then there's a wrench in the fix caused by a last minute intervention by the 'Female Objectification Protection and Protest Phalanx' [the FOPPPs] who swoop in on their Harley's and remove the pantyless cheerleaders, leaving the star forward's neurology intact. When Yale wins by 20 points, Fackelmann collects the money from Eighties Bill, and brings it to Sorkin, not knowing that the bet had been mixed up. Sorkin is working on spreadsheets with special goggles that look like lobsters' eyes on stalks. Sorkin eyes the 'Go Bruins' bag in Fackelmann's hands and says he fails to see the joke. He gives Fackelmann the money to give to Eighties Bill, and says that he can't really blame Fax or O'Shay, because the fix was supposed to have been in. Fackelmann says nothing, but eventually realizes what's going on here, and starts to visualize how much Dilaudid $250K will buy from a certain Chinatown dealer, and how much the street value of the drugs would be, provided he and Kite could move to some far away urban market. By this time Pamela is 'irreversibly swooned' but Gately can put the rest of the story together on his own. When he saw the massive amount of wholesale Dilaudid from Dr. Wo, Kite would have filled Fackelmann in that Eighties Bill is the son of Sixties Bob, Sorkin's personal migrainologist. And even if Sixties Bob somehow didn't tell Sorkin, he'd probably hear from Bobby C who regularly scored from Dr. Wo, and was sure to hear about his coworker's massive purchase. In short, Fackelmann was a Dead Man. Instead of donning a disguise and getting as far from Boston as possible, Fax did what any drug addict would do, he beelined it to the luxury apartment and started shooting up. And this is why he's been squatting in a corner of the living room for the past few days. Gately realizes that at root a drug addict is a 'craven and pathetic creature: a thing that basically hides.' The most sexual thing Gately ever did with Pamela was spoon her. The worst part to Gately, was the pretense that he was getting up to check on Fackelmann. He knew full well that the first thing that Fax would do would be to unwrap a new syringe and invite him to share in the mountain of Dilaudid. Which to Gately's shame he did, telling himself he was doing it to keep Fackelmann company. At this point Gately's memory is punctuated by a fever dream that he's riding north in a bus the same color as its own exhaust. The dream goes on and on without any kind of arrival. Gately comes to when he feels what feels like the tongue of his pet kitten Nimitz on his forehead. When he opens his eyes he sees that the wraith is back, and that the tongue belongs not to Nimitz, but to another more physically fit wraith in 'faggy biking shorts' who is licking his forehead. No man has licked Gately's forehead and lived! He strikes out reflexively, and realizes that the wraith's breath has no warmth or smell. The pain wakes him temporarily and the wraiths vanish. He falls back into something that's not quite sleep and his dreams continue. One dream consists only of the color blue. He's both in a bag and holding a bag. Visitors flit in and out of the room but never Joelle or Ferocious Francis. He dreams there are people in the room, but he's not one them. 'He dreams he's with a very sad kid and they're in a graveyard digging some dead guy's head up and it's really important, like Continental-Emergency important, and Gately's the best digger but he's wicked hungry, like irresistibly hungry, and he's eating with both hands out of huge economy-size bags of corporate snacks so he can't really dig, while it gets later and later and the sad kid is trying to scream at Gately that the important thing was buried in the guy's head and to divert the Continental Emergency to start digging the guy's head up before it's too late, but the kid moves his mouth but nothing comes out, and Joelle van D. appears with wings and no underwear and asks if they knew him, the dead guy with the head, and Gately starts talking about knowing him even though deep down he feels panic because he's got no idea who they're talking about, while the sad kid holds something terrible up by the hair and makes the face of somebody shouting in panic: Too Late.'
notes:
As Gately passively ogles the attractive nurse, there's a distinct aura of Himself in his thoughts. In a typical DFW move, Gately has to try to keep Pamela focussed on the 'important' details, when in reality her diversion about Sixties Bob being a fence, is perhaps the most important detail to the overall story. Presumably he was the fence for the stash of the 'arty looking film cartridges' from the DuPlessis burglary [p 55-60]. The 'dream' that begins with the long busride, and Gately being inside of a blue bag and continues with Gately and Hal digging up the corpse of Himself is clearly no dream, since we know already from p 15-17 that Hal has a memory of the same episode. Presumably Gately has been kidnapped from the hospital in a blue body bag and driven by bus with Hal to Himself's gravesite, and made to dig up the corpse, only to discover that they are too late and the cartridge that was buried with him is already gone.
p 934
YDAU [2009] Nov 20, or later
place St. Elizabeth Hospital
narrated in third person [Joelle]
synopsis:
A 'grotesquely huge' woman with stubble bulging in her hose grabs Joelle as she comes out of the hospital, and tells her that she's in almost mind-boggling danger. Joelle says 'this is supposed to be news?'
p 934-938
YDAU [2009] after Nov 20
place St. Elizabeth Hospital trauma wing
narrated in third person [Gately]
synopsis:
Back at the luxury apartment Gately and Fackelmann are still indulging in narcotics and M&M's the next morning, watching a video consisting of nothing but flames of different kinds, that Fackelmann got from Kite. Kite had declined to join them, and had packed up everything he owned and was on his way to a supposed trade show in another zip code. Pamela gets up, vomits and mousses her hair before leaving for work. Gately and Fackelmann continue their binge at a furious pace. Every time Gately asks anything about how Fackelmann had come into so much Dilaudid, Fackelmann gives the standard answer: 'that's a goddamn lie.' They found this increasingly funny. Eventually Fackelmann wets his pants, and the urine pools on the floor. The phone rang. At some point Gately tried to stand and was assaulted by the floor, and then he wet his own pants. The intercom's buzzer rang. Around sunset, Fackelmann has a convulsion and a bowel movement in his pants. The sun seemed to go up and down like a yo-yo. They ran out of distilled water and Fackelmann sopped up some candy-stained urine from the floor and used it to cook up the Dilaudid. Gately nods into a dream that he's on a Beverly-Needham bus whose sides say 'Paragon Bus Lines: The Gray Line' and he realizes [in the trauma ward] that this is the same bus from his dream that went on and on. But he has the sickening realization that the connection between the two buses is itself a dream. His fever returns to new heights that make his heart monitor send an alert to the nurse station. Back in the apartment, the buzzer sounds again and it's Pamela voice on the intercom, asking to be let in. Fackelmann was making his hand into the shape of a claw and then a spider. Gately gets up and tries to take a step, and misses the floor. He crashes down with a giant thud that knocks the TP viewer to the floor. Fackelmann holds out the spider for Gately's inspection.
notes:
Once again the 'dream' of the bus ride is the real part. Perhaps this is the same bus on which Fortier is riding [p 724-728]
p 938-941
YDAU [2009] Nov 20, or later
place presumably near St. Elizabeth Hospital
narrated in third person [Joelle]
synopsis:
Joelle is being interviewed presumably by Steeply. The questions are given only as 'Q.' She explains that she was only in two scenes. In the first scene she's going through s revolving door, when she sees someone whom she hasn't seen in a long time, and with whom she was formerly very close. They're to give each other shocked looks of recognition. She tries to follow the other person out through the revolving door, while he tries to follow her in. They do that for several whirls. The actor was male, not one of Jim's regulars, but the character is epicene [indeterminate sex]. She says she assumes the interviewer can relate.The other scene was filmed by a camera mounted in a bassinet, and had her in a floor length gown, leaning over the camera in the crib and apologizing. There were at least 20 minutes of permutations of 'I'm sorry.' She says that she was 'not exactly veiled.' The camera in the crib was fitted with an 'auto wobble' to make it blur, and looked like an eyestalk. She says that Jim cared more about lenses than the camera, and he made his own. She said the wobble was meant to reproduce the 'neonatal nystagmus' of an infant's vision, and that's what was driving the scene. Her face wasn't important, and wasn't meant to be captured realistically by the lens. She says that she never saw it, and that the masters were to be buried with him, at least according to his will. She says it had nothing to do with him killing himself. He'd stopped being drunk all the time and that's what killed him-- he couldn't take it, but he'd made a promise. She says she doesn't know if he even finished the master, but that there was nothing unendurable or enslaving about either of her scenes. She says he 'joked' about making something too perfect, and that he always referred to his work as 'entertainments' but he meant it ironically. He never would have carried the joke far enough to make an anti--version or an antidote. She says that when he spoke of it being terminally compelling it was a jab at her, because she used to say that the veil was there to disguise the fact that she was too lethally beautiful for people to stand. It was a joke she'd gotten from one of his films, the Medusa-Odalisk one. Even in UHID she'd hidden by hiddenness. She says that Jim had called his failed piece 'too perfect to release' as an ironic joke to her. She says that 'if it got made, and nobody's seen it, the Master, it's in there with him. Buried.' After several undisclosed questions she says that where he's buried is itself buried now, in the annulation-zone, and that's the part of the joke that he didn't know, but would certainly have enjoyed, that if they want the cartridge now...
notes:
Joelle's description of the Entertainment is quite different than Molly Notkin's [p 787-795] but jibes with the wraith's description [p 827-845]. Perhaps even with the auto wobble, Joelle's unveiled face is too lethally beautiful for people to stand. She clearly doesn't buy that explanation. But the fact that she sees the cartridge as an ironic joke sheds doubt on her understanding of it. Himself's wraith suggested that the film was by no means ironic. The references eyestalks permeate these final pages, and this description of Himself's cameral with its special lens seems as close to a source.
p 941-958
YDAU [2009] Nov 20
place ETA
narrated by Hal in first person
synopsis:
By coincidence when Hal returns to his room he finds Coyle watching one of Himself's cartridges, Accomplice!, while Mario gets dressed. Mario notes that Hal woke up early, and that he looks sad. Mario describes how Troeltsch had tried to put toilet paper on Stice's forehead, and now that is stuck. Coyle is removing his apnea mouthguard, and Hal tells him not to think of putting it on his bed. Coyle tells Mario to tell him the worst part, which is that Coyle awoke to find Ortho missing and his bed appeared to be bolted to the ceiling. Coyle says that Stice explained to him that he had been selected by some kind of beneficiary ghost, who's trying to teach him not to underestimate the value of ordinary things, in order to help his game. Coyle says Stice is losing it, and that he had bet Coyle that he could stand on his desk chair and lift it up at the same time, which after a half hour of trying he hadn't been able to do. Coyle can't decide whether to go Schtitt, because what if it's the mental buckling that's raised his game. Mario reminds Hal that there are messages on the machine. Cosgrove Watt [star of Accomplice!] had been one of Himself's regulars, and one of the few professional actors that he used. Himself thought that amateur actors would help strip away the realism, and remind the audience that they were in fact watching actors. The irony that it required non-actors to achieve the I'm-only-acting feel, was one of the critics' principle interests in Himself's early work. The truth was that Himself had simply not wanted the actors to get in the way of his technical achievements. One way to look at his late work was that in abandoning this, he had been so desperate to make something entertaining and 'conducive to self forgetting' that he had professionals and amateurs emoting wildly all over the place. Cosgrove Watt was a pro, but not a very good one, and before Himself discovered him, his claim to fame had been portraying a Dancing Gland in a series of TV spots. Once Himself had recruited Watt, he used him in almost every project, and even put him and his family up at ETA for a time. Accomplice! was one of Watt's later roles in which he plays a depraved older man who meets a young male prostitute at a bus station and takes him home to his apartment, which was in reality the apartment that Himself had rented for Orin and the PGOAT. The boy agrees to have sex with the man, but insists that he use a condom. The old man's thoughts are rendered by thought bubbles, revealing that he's enraged by the insinuation that he might have It, the HIV virus. He dons the condom, and the sex scene is done under bright lamps without any soft-focus or music. What the boy doesn't realize is that the old man is holding a razor in his hand which he uses to cut through condom and phallus alike. Himself uses a footnote to point out that he's honoring what is apparently a homosexual-sex-scene convention that the recipient keeps his face turned away from the camera until the dominant partner is finished. When the old man removes his bloody deflated phallus, the boy turns to the audience and utters a mute howl, as he sees that his thigh is marked with the eight spidery tentacles of the Kaposi's Sarcoma, which is the symptom of It. The boy is sobbing that the old man has made him a murderer, and then he shrieks 'Murderer!' over and over for 500 seconds, which amounts to a third of the total length of the cartridge. Hal has argued with Mario about this ending, questioning whether there was a theoretical end to which the ending strived, or if Himself was simply a shitty editor. it was only after Himself's death that theorists really addressed this issue-- a woman at UC Irvine had earned tenure arguing that the reason-vs-no-reason debate illuminated one of the central conundra of apres-garde film, which involved the question of why so much ambitious film was so boring, and so much shitty commercial entertainment was so much fun. Outside the window the snow was piling up, and the TP was showing weather reports, which were all about snow, showing cars abandoned and buried in snow, and reporters floundering in gusts of snow trying to deliver their reports. This was the worst snowstorm since BS 1998 and the second worst since BS 1993. The news shows a man in a wheelchair staring stonily at the snow-covered ramp outside the State House. The news says that this storm was not a Nor'easter, but rather a collision of a moist ridge from the Gulf of Mexico and an Arctic cold front. A man impotently brushing the snow from his windshield becomes a thematic image of the news broadcasts. Hal has never skied, skated, or snowmobiled, since winter sports were all but forbidden by ETA. Hal can barely recall the '98 blizzard, which happened when the academy had only been open for a few months. The storm came barreling in from southeast Canada in March. The players had to be led to the Lung single file holding a rope, with Schtitt in the lead carrying a flare. Hal remembers Himself sitting in a chair sipping brandy throughout the storm. His interest moved from tennis pedagogy to film almost as soon as the academy was completed. The move to ETA from Weston had dragged on for nearly a year, because the Moms had attachments. Hal is lying on his subdorm's carpet which he had acquired during his Byzantine erotica phase. Hal had seen a titillating reference in the OED, and like Himself, he had stumbled from one obsession to another. Hal cannot distinguish his memories of the Weston house, from Mario's description of his own memories. He remembers a three-story Victorian, high above an elmed street. The Moms had an intricate garden, and her dog S. Johnson had a pen abutting the garage. Hal's memories seem more like tableaux or snapshots than films. He remembers 'Block Mother' in the front window. He remembers the smell of Lemon Pledge and a 'chilling' framed photo of Fritz Lang directing Metropolis which predates Himself's film obsession. He remembers chairs covered in protective plastic, a divan with cigarette burns and books, videos, cans in the kitchen, all alphabetized. He has a 'surreal memory of a steamed lavatory mirror with a knife sticking out of the pane.' Some of the memories must be confabulated or dreamed since the Moms would never have a divan with burns in it. Hal recalls Himself slumped in a chair while the Moms told him that she'd long since lost hope he could hear what she was telling him. It's impossible for Hal to reconcile the Himself of his memories with the director of Accomplice! with its sodomy and razors. Hal remembers a church down the street with a sign reading 'Life is like tennis-Those who serve-Best usually win.' In Hal's dorm room he has the 'really prurient part' of the Consummation of the Levirates over the chairs, dating from his Byzantinalia phase. There are five chairs in a room where no one even uses chairs. Hal knows that the rooms guilloche consists of 811 interwoven circles. He realizes that he cannot remember what he has done with a Constantine frieze that once hung from the guilloche. 'There had been a time when data like these were instantly available.' The Weston living room had an early version of Himself's full-spectrum lighting and the Moms's jungle of Green Babies. It takes Hal way too long to recall the concise term for optical perspective, when looking down at his NASA glass resting on his chest. It's hard to remember the Weston living room, in part because many of the things were transferred to the ETA living room, including a table on which Mario had chipped a tooth after an 'accidental' shove from Orin. The table had been a gift from Himself's mother who had died of emphysema. The Moms's mother had died of an infarction when she was 8, and her father had died under unknown circumstances during her sophomore year at McGill. The L'Islet potato farm is now part of the Great Concavity and forever lost. Orin had liked to do an impersonation of Himself's mother in her wheelchair, extending a claw. It's easier to see the climacteric [menopausal] changes in the Moms's body since she's confined herself to the Headmaster's House. Hal thinks of how he had to lie in answer to therapists questions like 'how does watching your mother age make you feel inside?' because the truth, Nothing At All, sounds like a textbook lie. It occurs to Hal with some force, that he doesn't want to play today, even if an indoor meet is arranged. He imagines contriving an accident where he injures his bad ankle, perhaps tearing the ligaments so that he never has to play again, so that he can be the object of compassionate sorrow rather than disappointed sorrow. he's then hit with 'the really moving thing' Himself had said to Orin concerning adult films, which films Hal finds more sad than nasty. Orin and some friends had gotten ahold of an X-rated video, and word got back to Himself that they were planning a screening. Himself brought Orin into the office, gave him a soda, and got a confession out of him without saying a word. Himself said that Orin was old enough, and could, if he desired, go ahead with the screening discreetly keeping the younger kids away. But if Orin wanted his fatherly advice, he'd advise that Orin not watch pornography until he'd experienced for himself what a moving thing sex can be. He said he was afraid Behind the Green Door would give Orin an impoverished, lonely idea of sexuality. Orin had claimed that what he found so moving was the assumption that he was still a virgin. Hal finds it sad that this rare openness on the part of Himself was wasted on Orin. Hal tries to picture Stice hoisting his bed up and bolting it to the ceiling without waking Coyle. Hal knows John Wayne has come into the room by the sound of his stride and breathing. He doesn't look at him, and neither speaks. Orin was convinced that Himself was a virgin until he met the Moms, and he will concede that he was faithful to her, and that his attachment to Joelle wasn't sexual. The Moms has made little attempt to hide her liaison with John Wayne. Hal cannot imagine the Moms and Himself in a sexual situation, but he pictures the Moms and CT as having 'frenetic and weary' sex, with the Moms staring at the ceiling while CT talked nonstop. Hal imagines all of the Moms's affairs were more a matter of athleticism and flexibility than passion. The passion would come in keeping it hidden. Hal wonders if there's a connection between this and all of the Himself films titled Cage, or to the veiled girl whom he became so attached to. Hal's picture of John Wayne and Moms having sex involves her staring upward motionless, and him above her face between her breasts and tongue outthrust like a stunned lizard.
notes:
The wraith has apparently revealed his purpose to Stice, or perhaps just implanted the info in his head, like he did the ghostwords in Gately's head. Note that Himself's idea of entertainment is 'self-forgetting' which is half way to self-eliminating, which apparently his final film achieved. It seems that Hal's suggestion that the ending of Accomplice was the result of bad editing, is close to the truth, which seems to be that Himself was so engrossed in accomplishing his objective, that he was oblivious to the fact that it would make for a boring film. Also, it seems worth noting that the 'murderer!' ending is pretty similar to the endless repeated variations of "I's so very sorry' that apparently comprise most of his final film. Note that Hal remembers the alphabetized soup cans and the knife in the mirror, perhaps DFW is trying to clue the reader in to recalling the crucial opening section [p 15-17], in which Hal remembers both of these things as well as the episode where a masked John Wayne watches while he and Gately dig up Himself's head. Note that the Moms tells Himself that she has lost hope of him hearing what she tells him. This seems related to the fact that Hal either doesn't speak, or Himself cannot hear him. Again the reference to Byzantine erotica seems to draw our attention back to the opening section of the book. It's perhaps crucial that Himself was responsible for developing annulation which produced the Great Concavity, which in turn demolished what remained of The Moms's family's estate. There are layers of irony in the story of Orin's porn tape, with Himself's own apparently impoverished and lonely idea of sexuality being passed to his sons in very different ways. And Orin's idea coming [perhaps even directly] more from the Moms. Hal cannot apparently see sex in anything but a detached way, much like one his tableaux.
p 958
YDAU [2009] Nov 20, or later
place Ennet House
narrated in third person [Joelle]
synopsis:
Joelle figures that they've let her loose just to see where she'll go, so she goes to Ennet House. Her clothes and veil are soaked from the snow [hence the dating of these episodes to Nov 20, or later]. She had thought of removing the veil in an attempt to get away from the linebacker federal lady. She considers whether Pat will be convinced to put her in quarantine and remove the wheelchair ramps. She sees a police car in the snow outside Ennet House as she approaches.
notes:
The fact that the last time Gately saw Joelle at the hospital was Nov 20 or later, implies that the episode that he 'dreams' of digging up Himself's head must have happened at least a few days after that, presumably after the AFR had acquired Hal from ETA.
p 958-960
YDAU [2009] presumably
place unknown lunchtime AA meeting
narrated in third person
synopsis:
Someone named Mikey is speaking at an AA meeting. He tells of going to pickup his son to take him bowling. The son is in the custody of his sister, whom he calls 'the cunt' and his mother, and Mikey has been issued a restraining order, requiring him to get their permission to visit. He calls to get permission and the sister asks him to wait while she checks with the mother, when she returns to the phone to announce he's been granted permission he asks if she wants a medal for letting him see his son, and she hangs up. This brings out the 'old Mikey' and drives over and parks on the grass, and goes to the door and says 'fuck you you cunt' and tells her she needs therapy. The sister says that the son has just recently had his cast removed after the stunt that Mikey pulled with 'that bimbo' and tells Mikey to get off the porch, denying him permission to see the son. When Mikey refuses, the sister gets the phone and threatens to call the police, and finally he gets in his truck, and in spite of his rage manages to leave. Then driving along he starts to pray and realizes that he has to go back and apologize. He does apologize and asks to at least see the kid without his cast, and the sister says 'fuck you... we don't accept your fucking apology.' To the AA members he says that he needed to share this because he scared himself. He asks if he's trying to set himself up to need a drink. He says that it looks like Vinnie is about to gong him, and calls on Tommy E. to speak next.
notes:
The meaning and placement of this section are, to this reader, completely elusive,
p 960-964
YDAU [2009] Nov 20 or later
place Ennet House
narrated in third person [Pat M]
synopsis:
Pat M is meeting with the ADA from the North Shore, who says that he's here about one the residents but not professionally, which is apparently the condition for Pat to have allowed the meeting. He says that he's been at St. Elizabeth for three days now, and he needs to share this to get up his nerve, and that his sponsor's no help. He says that he's in Phob-Comp-Anon, which is for codependency issues with loved ones who are phobic and/or compulsive. He says that Tooty's tormented by some oral-hygiene-violation issues, which it turns out have roots in her childhood. He says he's at the Ninth step, working on making direct amends with whomever he's harmed. He says it's Gately, and acknowledges her constraints, and assures her he wants nothing from her on him. He says he's held Gately accountable for making Tooty's issues reflare, and has been waiting to get him, and then this last chance 'went federal and then fizzled.' His entire group has said that pursuing Gately for the incident out of resentment will doom him, and will not help Tooty. He says he needs to let it go, not just prosecution, that was the easy part, he's already tossed the file for this man he's long wanted nothing more than to see behind bars. He says that the worst part is that he has to make amends, to reach out to him and ask for forgiveness. He says that he hasn't tossed the Canadian file, just let it simmer without pursuing it, because ironically if he tossed it, it would expose him to conflict of interest. He asks for Pat's confidence in this matter. He says that he cannot do it. He's sat outside Gately's room repeating the Serenity Prayer, but still believes that Gately is evil, and he can't go through with it. Pat says that it sounds very hard. He says he doesn't know why he's come here, and that he doesn't expect help or counsel. He says he's accepted that he has to do it, but that he hasn't yet been willing.
notes:
This explains why the shadowy figure outside the hospital room didn't just apprehend Gately.
p 964-971
YDAU [2009] Nov 20 [immediately pre-fundraiser-exhibition-fete]
place ETA
narrated in first person by a player other than Hal
synopsis:
The unnamed ETA student says that usually part of the experience of having a gala is getting to watch the different people arrive, but not so for this one. The players are all in the locker room getting ready to exhibit. John Wayne hunched as always, with a towel over his head, is running a coin over the backs of his fingers. Arslanian is still blindfolded. Rumors have circulated about the Quebec Jr team, and about the courts at MIT, where they were to play. Pemulis was nowhere to be seen since early morning, but Doucette said that he was lurking around the West House dumpsters looking 'anxiously depressed.' A small cheer went up when Otis P Lord entered, having returned from having the monitor removed from his neck. He would not be playing today. Rumor had it that the Quebec team had been seen, and they were in reality some kind of Special-Olympicish adult wheelchair-tennis contingent. A couple of the sub-14s went to check it out and never returned. Across the wall on the female side Thode could be heard. She had thrown a tantrum because Poutrincourt was apparently AWOL. Loach is shaving Hal's left ankle for the taping, and people note that Hal isn't eating thew customary Snickers or AminoPal. Traub and Whale later said that Hal was being weird, for example asking Loach if he ever felt like being in a pre-match locker room gave him the feeling that he'd been there so many times before that it was all pre-recorded, that they all existed as basically Fourier Transforms of postures and routines, all recorded and call-uppable, but as a consequence also erasable. Usually before a match Hal's face had a wide-eyed ingenuish anxiety of someone who'd never been in this situation before, but today his expressions had ranged from distended hilarity, to scrunched grimace, and seemed unrelated to what was going on. The word was that Mrs Inc had chartered three buses to take the players to MIT, and the whole gala would be moved over to the MIT Student Union. Traub had heard Hal use the word moribund [at the point of death]. No one could say they heard Loach responding to Hal's weird utterances. One ETA tradition involves telling Little Buddies the saga of how came to be the ETA Head Trainer without getting his degree from Boston College. The saga goes that Loach was from a large Catholic family and his mother had always want one of the children to enter the clergy. One brother had died in the Brazilian ONAN/UN joint action of YMTP, another had suffered food poisoning, etc. Until it's down to just Loach who from day one has wanted to be a trainer, or his brother, who it turns out has aspirations for the clergy. It then turns out that halfway through his pursuit of the priesthood, the brother suffers a crisis-type sudden spiritual decline. Loach's mother is fraught, and Loach is suddenly re-weighted with anxiety. So Loach tried to talk his brother down from the misanthropic ledge he was on. The brother sees it as little more than self-interest. He says that his faith in the goodness of humanity has been shaken by working in the nastier parts of Boston. He says that his brother should just look out for Numero Uno, since a basic absence of empathy and compassion and taking-the-risk-to-reach-out are an ineluctable part of the human character. Loach was, however, basically a spiritually upbeat guy, and while he was in over his head in terms of theology, he did manage to engage his brother in some healthy debates about the soul's potential, not unlike the conversations of Alyosha and Ivan in Brothers Karamazov. Loach and his brother agree to a challenge wherein Loach will dress as a homeless person and stand in front of the T station and ask passers by to simply touch him, to simply show human warmth and compassion. This he does and it turns out that no one will, on purpose, touch him. He gets plenty of money dropped into his hand. Loach refuses to concede the Challenge, and eventually loses his work-study job, and has to drop out of school. His upbeat view of humanity starts to undergo a dark revision. No one who tells the story at ETA says much about what happened to the brother after this point. Just as Loach was about to disappear forever into the void of street life, his appeal was met. Mario Incandenza had been sent to get a roll of subway tokens for a prop in a film being filmed by his father, which involved God and the Devil playing poker with Tarot cards for the soul of Cosgrove Watt. Mario was fourteen and unaccompanied by any adult who might have dissuaded him from reaching out and touching homeless people. Through a series of faith-reaffirming circumstances, Loach came to be a trainer at ETA, even though he never did finish his degree. He was appointed head trainer when the former head trainer suffered an accident which resulted in locks being taken off the sauna doors, and a maximum temperature of 50 C.
notes:
Has Hal just finally become so detached from himself that he narrates in first person, but refers to himself in third person? Here Otis P. Lord returns from the hospital, allowing us to date much of the Gately thread to after Nov 20. Also the 'rumor' about the Quebec team implies that the AFR have infiltrated and are about to carry out their plan to apprehend Hal. Also Poutrincourt has gone AWOL, which implies that she's been called into duty in some capacity by the AFR. Hal is clearly suffering or about to suffer a pretty severe breakdown, even uttering the word moribund. Perhaps Mario's purity can somehow have the same faith-reaffirning effect on Hal, as it had on Loach.
p 971-972
YDAU [2009] Nov 20 or later
place Phoenix
narrated in third person [Orin]
synopsis:
Orin is inside a glass cage resembling a giant bathroom tumbler. The glass is green and the sides are fogging up with CO2. He has already injured The Leg's foot by trying to kick through the glass. Outside the glass are his recent Subject, the Swiss hand-model and the shy handicapped fan, who he now realizes had shared the Subject's Swiss accent. The Subject would look at his eyes instead of into them and did not acknowledge anything he shouted. He had definitely injured his foot, and he was sick from whatever they had used to make him pass out. It was pretty clear that this wasn't a dream, but he was still in denial. The amplified voice, from behind a screen above him, that periodically demanded to know 'Where Is The Master Buried' was bizarre and surreal enough to be a dream. When the screen opens, Orin looks up expecting something surreal enough to cement that it's a dream. Mlle Luria P___ had lobbied to be given a pair of kitchen gloves and a few minutes alone with the Subject's testicles. She disdained the 'subtler aspects of technical interviews' and she had predicted what would happen when sewer roaches began pouring from behind the screen. Orin splays himself against the glass, his face pressed up against the glass turning from green to stark white. He shouts 'Do it to her!' and Luria P___ just rolls her eyes at the AFR leader, whom she had long regarded as something of a ham.
notes:
Orin has presumably told the Subject [Luria P___] that this true horror is roaches, and that his theory that the only way to kill them is to asphyxiate them beneath an overturned tumbler [p 42-29]. How exactly Fortier and Luria P__ constructed a tumbler-shaped giant glass cage is unknown. But clearly they're using everything they can to get him to give up the location of the master, which it seems doubtful that he knows.
p 972-981
YDAU [2009] after Nov 20
place St. Elizabeth Hospital trauma wing
narrated in third person [Gately]
synopsis:
In the trauma ward people are coming and going, at a seemingly accelerated rate. The RN feels Gately's forehead, and yelps. Someone down the hall is jabbering and weeping. Chandler F, the recent graduate seems to be there, as is the Ennet House manager with the missing eyebrow, explaining that Pat M couldn't come because she'd just kicked her daughter out of the house for using again. Gately feels hotter than he's ever felt. The MD says to try Doris [Doryx] to bring his fever down, and someone suggests an ice bath. A voice that sounds like Gately's brain voice says never try to pull a weight that exceeds yours. Gately figures he might die, and instead of it being calm and peaceful, it feels like pulling a weight that exceeds your own. He is the subject of much bedside chatter, none of it directed at him. There is the clinking of IVs, the sloshing of bag. He tries to say 'addict' but secretly hopes they'll put Demerol into his IV. The voice down the hall was weeping like it's heart would break. 'The harsh sound that he heard up close was the tape around his unshaved mouth being ripped off so quick he hardly felt it.' He heard conversing people passing his door, and he hears one say that it's getting harder to tell the homosexuals from the people who beat up homosexuals. He tries unsuccessfully to imagine a world without him in it, and also to imagine having to become a homosexual in prison. He saw the ADA with his head bowed and his hat against his chest. Some asks 'ready?' and someone comments on the size of Gately's head and then he feels an upward movement that was so 'personal and horrible that he woke up.' In reality he's passed out again, and finds himself back in the Fackelmann flashback. Gately is still lying on the wet floor, and looking through the dawn window he sees Pamela standing on a tree branch waving her arms. She vanishes and is replaced by Bobby C, who scans the room, and seeing Mt. Dilaudid breaks the window with a gloved hand. Bobby C comes in and checks Fackelmann's pupils, and then turns to Gately and whacks him over the head with a gun and kicks him in the balls. Bobby C goes downstairs to let his entourage inside, and Gately encourages Fackelmann to try and leave. Fackelmann says that he's numb from the scalp down. Bobby returns with his crew, which includes Canadian thugs Desmonts and Pontgrave, an eczematic pharmacist's assistant, three large unfamiliar girls with red leather coats, and two Oriental punks who accompany Pamela, whose shin bone is protruding through the skin on her leg. Gately is upside down pedaling his legs, trying to relieve the pain of the kick. Bobby C , asks if it's party time, referring to the case of booze and a bong that had been brought in, and then answers his own question with 'yes indeedy.' Next a bland collegiate guy enters, rehangs the TP monitor on the wall and removes the still playing flame cartridge. The last person to enter was a small grim woman with a tight gray bun. Pamela passes out. C comes to Gately and puts his hand around Gately's shoulder, and one of the tough girls hands Gately one of the bottles of Jack Daniels. C gives a toast to Fax and what looks like must have been a serious score, and everyone drank from their own bottle of Jack Daniels. Gately notices that the large women all have Adam's apples. He notes that the thugs also have guns, and suspects the Oriental punks do as well. The polite swallow almost makes Gately heave, while others down their entire bottle. C turns Gately's head to face the viewer, and the new cartridge playing shows a painting of Whitey Sorkin having a cluster headache, that had been used in an aspirin ad. The grim woman is threading a needle and the pharmacist's assistant is filling syringes from an ampule. It dawns on Gately that the girls in red leather are actually 'fags dressed up as girls, as in transvestals.' Gately realizes chillingly that the picture of Sorkin on the wall is indicative of the fact that he's not coming, but rather has sent Bobby C with his own crew to do the job. C says that Sorkin has told him that he knows Gately wasn't part of Fackelmann's betrayal, and he should just kick back and enjoy the party, and not get any ideas about defending the weak. He apologizes for the beating, bit says that he had to be sure Gately didn't try to get Fackelmann out while he was downstairs. As C's crew ingests various drugs, Gately asks can't they get cleaned up and go talk to Sorkin and work things out. Fackelmann invites all to Mt. Dilaudid to get 'fucking fucked up.' The pharmacist's assistant shoots a pre-filled syringe into Fackelmann's neck, and Fackelmann's face goes flush, the standard reaction to Narcan [a narcotic antagonist]. C holds Gately so that the pharmacist's assistant can tie him off, while the cassette player plays a tape of Linda McCartney singing on a Paul McCartney and Wings song, with all the other instruments and vocals removed from the mix. Gately finds the CD past cruel, more like sadistic. Gately says he's nearly straight, if they want to skip the Narcan, but C answers hold on to your hat, its actually 'pharm-grade Sunshine' which is next to impossible to get and Gately's never done it. The pharmacist's assistant shoots Gately up and Fackelmann begins screaming as the librarian lady starts to sew his eyelids open. C directs the Orientals to leave the room, and everyone except C, the corporate guy and the librarian-type start shooting dope, including Pamela who was being tied off by the pharmacist's assistant. Gately's high is very intense and he tries to think while he still can-- if they were going to give him an OD, they'd use something cheap, and if they were going to sew his eyelids open, why get him high first? Gately was preparing for the floor's assault but noticed that C was letting him down easy to prevent it, spinning him around on the way to give him a panoramic view of the room. The Orientals were sliding down along the wall their backs were against, one of the thugs was vomiting, and the other had pulled the cord from the TP viewer and was bringing it toward Fackelmann, whose second eye was being sewn open. One of the transvestals had Pamela's hem hiked up, and a spiderish hand on her thigh. Gately sees 'the chinks coming back through the door holding big shiny squares of the room' and as C lets him all the way down he sees a reflection of 'his own big square pale head with its eyes closing as the floor finally pounced. And when he came back to he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.'
notes
Clearly Gately is no longer simply recovering from a gunshot wound; he seems to be in the emergency room, with a flurry of activity all around him. The clinking of IVs and the sloshing of bags, suggest that he is being frantically wheeled through the hospital. The sound of the crying person, weeping like his heart would break, is clearly Hal, who revealed [p 15-17] that he had been in the emergency room in November, YDAU. Also the Ennet House manager with missing eyebrow, is Johnette, the one whom Hal had asked for the list of NA meetings, and who revealed that in light of subsequent events, she would recall him clearly because he knew how to use 'whom' [p 785-787]. This implies that Gately and Hal have been brought into the ER together, again confirming that Gately's 'dream' was no dream. The hospital staff remove the duct tape from Gately's mouth, where he had been gagged, and heave him onto the gurney causing him to pass out and return to his Fackelmann story. It's perhaps worth noting also that Gately and Ortho Stice were both traumatized by trying to pull a weight greater than their own [p 627-638]. The book ends with what feels like a coda-- the execution of Fackelmann, with its brutal buildup which is reminiscent of Blue Velvet. Fortunately neither Gately nor the reader actually see Fackelmann's death.
The story threads are pretty neatly, albeit obliquely, tied up by the book's end. The reader is given the roadmap to figure out what transpires between Nov 20, when we last see all of the main characters, and this final episode which is probably a few days, perhaps a week later. By a combination of whatever information Orin gave up, and/or more likely with what they got from Hal and the Moms, the AFR was able to locate the gravesite and kidnapping both Hal and Gately had dug up the corpse only to find that they were too late, the master copy had already been removed, or perhaps had never been there in the first place. John Wayne had broken his cover, and assisted in some way, which explains why in the opening section, Hal refers to him as the player who would have won this year's WhataBurger. We know that a year from the end of the book, Hal will be recovered somewhat from the 'rough spot,' at least in terms of his tennis performance. His academic performance will have suffered somewhat, and he will have seemingly reverted to the muteness that his father had tried so hard to cure. Presumably the AFR has yet to lay their hands on the master copy of the Entertainment. Perhaps Joelle gave Steeply some information that helped him foil the AFR plan, or at least intercept them and this explains how Hal and Gately wound up in the ER, as opposed to dead. Ultimately the ending is pretty sad. Orin is presumably either left for dead or with a career threatening injury to The Leg. Himself has failed in his quest to bring his son out of his solipsism and muteness. And Gately for all his heroic struggle against his addiction, ends up secretly hoping that they'll put Demerol in his IV.
1 comment:
thank you for writing this. it was very helpful!
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