p 321-379

this section in 8 parts

p 321-342
YDAU [2009] Nov 8 [Interdependence Day]
place ETA
narrated in third person [revealed to be Hal's transcription]

synopsis:

This section lays out the ground rules for a game played by younger kids at ETA called Eschaton. While he didn't invent it, Pemulis, when he was 12, had 'helped make it way more compelling.' The game requires 8-12 players and 400 old tennis balls, representing nuclear warheads. The players are divided into teams representing nations/alliances--AMNAT, SOVWAR, REDCHI, LIBSYR, or IRLYBSYR, and sometimes SOUTHAF and INDPAK. Distribution of the warheads/balls requires a knowledge of calculus, and a computer armed with number crunching software. Different T-shirts and wrist bands are distributed throughout each team's map to signify metropolitan areas and other strategic areas. The warheads can launched only with a racquet [requiring good lobbing skills] which is why the academy tacitly permits the game. This year's gamemaster is Otis P. Lord, whose responsibilities are to be statistician and also to come up with the 'Triggering Mechanism' that starts the game-- an impossibly convoluted set of circumstances which in the end requires AMNAT to initiate attacks against SOVWAR. One might expect that the game consists of 'warheads getting whacked indiscriminately skyward all over the place' but in reality an Eschaton game more resembles a restrained game of chess. The Nov 8 game proceeds with even more 'probity and cold deliberation' than is the norm. Since 11/8 is a mandatory R&R day, Hal watches the game with Troeltsch [who is calling the game as announcer] and Pemulis [who has ingested Tenuate] s Hal is suppressing the urge to get high for the second time today, due to his distaste for doing so in public, especially in front of the 'little buddies.' There is a mysterious mention of an 'idling Ford sedan... conspicuous for the excruciated full color old Nunhagen Aspirin ad on the green of it's right rear door.' About half the megatonnage has been expended and SOVWAR [Sleepy TP Peterson] petitions to have a meeting with AMNAT [LaMont Chu] to avoid an all out escalation, that would probably ensure that neither won the game. While this is happening REDCHI sends a warhead lob to INDPAK, and there is some disagreement as to whether it was a direct hit, which would be Lord's call, but his attention was elsewhere at the time. Lord appeals to the Eschaton guru Pemulis for an independent ruling, but Pemulis refuses. There is then an argument over whether as INDPAK's Penn suggests that the snow on the court would diffuse the effects of the warhead. Pemulis objects strenuously saying that it's 'snowing on the goddamn *map,* not the *territory*' Hal decides to smoke the pot after all. Ingersoll [IRLIBSYR] decides, in order to prevent the AMNAT/SOVWAR summit, and to everyone's surprise, to send a forehand straight into the back of Ann Kittenplan's head. He claims that he has just taken out both AMNAT and SOVWAR's heads of state in the blast kill radius. Lord, over Pemulis' strenuous objections dons the red beanie that means utter global crisis. Pemulis claims that it's a precondition of the game that you can only launch an attack on the territory and not on the players themselves, and that this is the only thing that keeps the game from devolving into chaos. And that's exactly what happens next. The chaos ends when Lord, in a mad dash to try to save the computer from crashing to the ground, stumbles and crashes head first into the monitor screen. Meanwhile 'the idling Ford reveals a sudden face at the driver's-side window.'

p 343-367
YDAU [2009] Nov 8 [Interdependence Day]
place AA meeting near Ennet House
narrated in third person [primarily Gately's perspective]

synopsis:

Ennet House members are required to attend the 'White Flag' AA meeting once a week in the cafeteria of the Provident Nursing Home off Commonwealth Ave [a few blocks from ETA]. At these meetings the speakers are visitors from another Boston AA group, part of an exchange agreement called a 'Commitment.' John L. from Concord is this week's speaker, and his speech is intercut with an explanation [presumably from Gately's perspective] of what it's like to break down and enter AA. John L tells how he lost his job-- one day he showed up for work, and someone else was there doing his job,and his wife-- same story. Meanwhile the other narrative explains that all the speakers' narratives of decline and fall and surrender are alike. It appears that the Substance is the only consolation against the pain of the Losses [suffered because of the substance] and eventually you can't even get that relief anymore, but still you cannot quit. When you hit bottom you have two choices-- you can 'eliminate your own map for keeps' or you can try AA which seems at best like 'Unitarian happy horseshit' or at worst like 'cover for some glazed and canny cult-type thing.' But then comes the shocking discovery that this 'actually does seem to work.' No one knows how it works, you just have to 'Hang In' and keep repeating the cliches. The second speaker is an Irish immigrant who tells the story of his first solid bowel movement in adult life. Gately's gift as a staffer [besides his formidable size] is his ability to explain to newcomers his own initial skepticism, about how he raised his hand at a meeting early on and said that he hates AA, thinks it's 'horseshit' and 'drivel' and how he hates all the people who propagate it, which ended up making him sort of a hero, since as everyone told him, they had felt exactly the same way but hadn't the guts to say it out loud. However one of the 'Crocodiles' [as the old-timers are called] tells him he might be OK if he Keeps Coming, and starts to *listen* in stead of talk. Gately eventually started hanging out with them at their haunt,the 'Elit Diner' next to Steve's Donuts at Enfield Center, where they sit around and relate stories of all the guys who have Come In only to go back Out There and die or go back to 'not living.' Boston's AA is like a 'benign anarchy' --there are no rules only 'suggestions' and you have to *want* to follow them. But if you don't, no one will kick you out; they won't have to. Early in his AA tenure Gately had a dream where he was kneeling in a church basement with many others, when he notices some of the others are being sucked out through the glass wall silently. He then sees the 'authoritative figure' with a giant shepherd's crook who radiates 'good cheer and abundant charm and limitless patience.' The 'slow silent stick with the hook' is what keeps them all kneeling in the basement. Gately didn't have to get assistance from the staffer on 'Dream Duty' to understand the meaning-- AA has 'the planet's most remorselessly hard-ass and efficient sergeant at arms' and he was always on duty 'Out There.' Gately likes the new member Ken Erdedy, although he can't relate to the fact that marijuana could be responsible for landing someone in Ennet House. Erdedy along with the brand new girl Joelle, both object to the AA terms, especially 'miracle' and 'for the grace of God.' Gately explains to Erdedy and Joelle that the phrase 'good to hear you' is used instead of 'you spoke well' because it can't be anybody's place to judge, and that it means two things-- that what the speaker said was helpful, and that the listener was glad to be *able* to hear it. Gately has no handle yet on Joelle, who was admitted overnight without being on the waiting list, after a 'horrific O.D.-type situation.' To Gately's utter incomprehension, Joelle complains that 'But for the grace of God' is a subjunctive, and makes no sense introducing anything but a conditional clause. 'I'm here but for the grace of God' is senseless, regardless of whether she 'hears' it or not. Looking into her veil, Gately is baffled and for a moment seized with panic, that he will someday succumb, and get high again.

p 367
no date/place [backstory]
narrated in third person

synopsis:

The statue of liberty holds aloft a product, which is changed each Jan. 1 by workers with cranes.


p 367-375
YDAU [2009] Nov 8 [Interdependence Day]
place AA meeting near Ennet House
narrated in third person [primarily Gately's perspective]

synopsis:

The next two speakers at the White Flag meeting demonstrate that it's got to be 'real' to get a response-- the first tries a well rehearsed joke, and the second an unintended one, and the former gets an icy response while the latter has them rolling with laughter. It has to be real and irony-free. Ironically you are encouraged to say stuff like 'one day at a time' and 'I'm an alcoholic' until you believe it. The next speaker commits one of the cardinal sins of AA when she says that she was a dope fiend *because* at 16 she had run away from home and become a stripper. She explicates the story in gory detail of how she was adopted by parents who had a biological daughter who was 'totally paralyzed and retarded and catatonic.' The mother was 'crazy as a Fucking Mud-Bug' [in Joelle's words] and forced the adopted daughter to drag *it* [as the speaker referred to her sister] along with her on dates. The father had begun coming into their room at night and molesting the catatonic girl, whom he would call 'Raquel' and equip with a rubber Raquel Welch mask. The adopted daughter would have to cover for him, and remove the mask afterwards for fear that if the mother ever found out it would mean that eventually the focus of the father's attentions would shift to her. What eventually led her to run away was, one night she had to turn the light on to get the Raquel wig untwisted and noticed that the catatonic sister had the same look on her face that she remembered from the picture in the hallway of 'some Catholic statue' with a woman 'whose stone robes were half hiked up.' That was 'what caused it' and why she's here recovering from 'One Day at a Time.' Gately's objection to the story is not that he's known plenty of people with worse childhood experiences, but rather that the *cause* of the disease is really just an excuse. At AA you don't ask why.

p 375
YDAU [2009] Apr 30-May 1
place Tucson
narrated in third person

synopsis:

Marathe and Steeply are still in the desert at night,and it's getting cold. Steeply has divulged that he had been on marital leave after his divorce, but is now back in the field undercover as a journalist 'assigned to cultivate some of the Entertainment's alleged filmmaker's relatives and inner circles.'


p 375-376
ca Year of the Whopper [2002]
place ETA
narrated in third person

synopsis:

Himself emerges from the sauna drunk and depressed by the fact that even the avant-garde critics complain that his narrative films lacked plot. Mario and Joelle are probably the only ones who know that Found Drama and anti-confluentialism came out of the resulting conversation between Himself and Kyle. In a footnote [p 1026-1028] the concept of 'Found Drama' is explained by way of excerpts from Helen Steeply's interview with Orin. Orin interjects his attempts to charm the interviewer with the details-- that 'Found Dramas' were never actually filmed, but consisted simply of choosing a subject at random from the phone book.

p 376-379

YDAU [2009] Nov 8 [Interdependence Day]
place AA meeting near Ennet House
narrated in third person [primarily Gately's perspective]

synopsis:

Boston's AA doesn't recoil from the idea of responsibility, just cause. The 'meeting's last and maybe best speaker' is a 'round pink girl with no eyelashes' who turned tricks and used freebase cocaine all the way through her pregnancy 'even though she knew it was bad for the baby and wanted desperately to quit.' Eventually she gives birth to a stillborn infant, and goes into to complete Denial. She carries the baby around with her rolled up in a blanket, trying to turn tricks and score drugs. Eventually she is turned into Social Services and put in a hospital for four months. When she is released and given SSI checks, she turns from crack to alcohol and ends up facing the two option choice on the window-ledge of a welfare-hotel, and here she is trying to live. Her speech invokes rapt attention all around. No cause or excuse, just what happened.

p 379
ca Year of the Whopper [2002]--?
place ETA
narrated in third person

synopsis:

Lyle and Himself were the 'odd couple of libations' down in the weight room-- Himself with his Wild Turkey and Lyle with his diet Coke. Often Mario would struggle to stay awake and accompany them. Himself was a 'profound-personality-change drinker' and one night Mario awoke to hear him saying he would give his marriage a C-. Lyle would take things as they came, and would often get out William Blake and read it to Himself in the voices of cartoon characters.


notes

The Ennet House thread is now inextricably linked to the ETA thread and the Tucson thread by the appearance of Joelle at Ennet House. The reason behind Steeply's interviews with Orin are also made explicit here-- they have to do with Unspecified Services' interest in the film cartridge, of which Orin's father is the putative director.