'The sun's thinking about coming up in the window. You can see it.'

'It's been like forty hours without Bob Hope and already I'm bats inside and I can't sleep without more of the horror-show dreams. I feel like I'm stuck halfway down a chimney.'

'You beat Ortho, and your toothache's gone.'

'Pemulis and Axhandle say a month'll be t.i.t. Pemulis's only concern is is this DMZ he got for the WhataBurger detectable. He goes to the library and pores. He's fully alert and functional. 321 321 It seems different with me, Boo. I feel a hole. It's going to be a huge hole, in a month. A way more than Hal-sized hole.' It seems different with me, Boo. I feel a hole. It's going to be a huge hole, in a month. A way more than Hal-sized hole.'

'So what do you think you should do?'

'And the hole's going to get a little bigger every day until I fly apart in different directions. I'll fly apart in midair. I'll fly apart in the Lung, or at Tucson at 200 degrees in front of all these people who knew Himself and think I'm different. Whom I've lied to, and liked it. It'll all come out anyway, clean pee or no.'

'Hey Hal?'

'And it'll kill her. I know it will. It will kill her dead, b.o.o.boo, I'm afraid.'

'Hey Hal? What are you going to do?'

'Hal?'

'b.o.o.boo, I'm up on my elbow again. Tell me what you think I should do.'

'Me tell you?'

'I'm just two big ap.r.i.c.k ears right here, Boo. Listening. Because I do not know what to do.'

'Hal, if I tell you the truth, will you get mad and tell me be a f.u.c.king?'

'I trust you. You're smart, Boo.'

'Then Hal?'

'Tell me what I should do.'

'I think you just did it. What you should do. I think you just did.'

'Do you see what I mean?'

17 NOVEMBER.

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.

In Don Gately's medical absence, Johnette F. had worked five straight night shifts on Dream Duty and was in the front office just after 0830 writing up the previous night in the Log, trying to think of synonyms for boredom boredom and periodically dipping a finger in her scalding coffee to stay awake, plus listening to distant toilets flush and showers hiss and residents clunking sleepily around in the kitchen and dining room and everything like that, when somebody all of a sudden starts knocking at the House's front door, which meant that the person was like a newcomer or stranger, since people in the Ennet House recovery community know that the front door's unlocked at 0800 and always completely open to all but the Law as of 0801. and periodically dipping a finger in her scalding coffee to stay awake, plus listening to distant toilets flush and showers hiss and residents clunking sleepily around in the kitchen and dining room and everything like that, when somebody all of a sudden starts knocking at the House's front door, which meant that the person was like a newcomer or stranger, since people in the Ennet House recovery community know that the front door's unlocked at 0800 and always completely open to all but the Law as of 0801.

The residents these days all know not to answer any knocks at the door themselves.

So Johnette F. at first thought it might be some more of those kind of police 322 322 that wore suits and ties, come to depose more residents as witnesses on the Lenz-and-Gately-and-Canadian f.u.c.k-up and everything like that; and Johnette got out the clipboard with the names of all the residents with unresolved legal issues who needed to be put upstairs out of sight before any police were let on the premises. A couple of the residents on the list were in the dining room in full view, eating cereal and smoking. Johnette carried the clipboard as a kind of emblem of authority as she went to the window by the front door to check out the knocking party and everything like that. that wore suits and ties, come to depose more residents as witnesses on the Lenz-and-Gately-and-Canadian f.u.c.k-up and everything like that; and Johnette got out the clipboard with the names of all the residents with unresolved legal issues who needed to be put upstairs out of sight before any police were let on the premises. A couple of the residents on the list were in the dining room in full view, eating cereal and smoking. Johnette carried the clipboard as a kind of emblem of authority as she went to the window by the front door to check out the knocking party and everything like that.

And but the kid at the door there was no way he was police or court-personnel, and Johnette opened the unlocked door and let him in, not bothering to explain that n.o.body had to knock. It was an upscale kid about Johnette's own age or slightly less, coughing against the foyer's pall of A.M. smoke, saying he wanted to speak in comparative private to someone in whatever pa.s.sed here for authority, he said. This kid he had the sort of cool aluminum sheen of an upscale kid, a kid with either a weird tan or a weird windburn on top of a tan, and just the whitest Nike hightops Johnette had ever seen, and ironed jeans, as in with like a crease down the front, and a weird woolly-white jacket with A.T.E. A.T.E. in red up one sleeve and in gray up the other, and slicked-back dark hair that was wet, as in showered and not oil, and had half frozen, the hair, in the early outside cold and was standing up straight and frozen in front, making his dark face look small. His ears looked inflamed from the cold. Johnette appraised him coolly, digging at her ear with a pinkie. She watched the boy's face as David Krone came scuttling over like a crab and blinked at the boy upside-down a few times and scuttled around and up the stairs, his forehead clunking against each stair. It was pretty obvious the boy wasn't any resident's like homey or boyfriend come to give somebody a ride to work or like that. The way the boy looked and stood and talked and everything like that radiated high-maintenance upkeep and privilege and schools where n.o.body carried weapons, pretty much a whole planet of privilege away from the planet of Johnette Marie Foltz of South Chelsea and then the Right Honorable Edmund F. Heany Facility for Demonstrably Incorrigible Girls down in Brockton; and in Pat's office, with the door only half shut, Johnette gave her face the blandly hostile expression she wore around upscale boys with no tatts and all their teeth that outside of NA wouldn't have interest in her or might view her lack of front teeth and nose-pin as evidence of they were like better than her and like that, somehow. It emerged this kid didn't seem like he had enough emotional juice to be interested in judging anybody or even noticing them, however. His talking had a burbly, oversalivated quality Johnette knew all too wicked well, the quality of somebody who'd just lately put down the pipe and/or bong. The kid's hair was starting to melt in the heat of Pat's office and drip and settle on his head like a slashed tire, causing that his face got bigger. He looked a little like what the fourth Mrs. Foltz had called green around the gills. The boy stood there very straight with his hands behind his back and said he lived nearby and had for some time been interested in sort of an idle, largely speculative way in considering maybe dropping in on some sort of Substance Anonymous meeting and everything like that, basically as just something to do, the exact same roundabout Denial s.h.i.t as persons without teeth, and said but he didn't know where any were, any Meetings, or when, and but knew The Ennet House in red up one sleeve and in gray up the other, and slicked-back dark hair that was wet, as in showered and not oil, and had half frozen, the hair, in the early outside cold and was standing up straight and frozen in front, making his dark face look small. His ears looked inflamed from the cold. Johnette appraised him coolly, digging at her ear with a pinkie. She watched the boy's face as David Krone came scuttling over like a crab and blinked at the boy upside-down a few times and scuttled around and up the stairs, his forehead clunking against each stair. It was pretty obvious the boy wasn't any resident's like homey or boyfriend come to give somebody a ride to work or like that. The way the boy looked and stood and talked and everything like that radiated high-maintenance upkeep and privilege and schools where n.o.body carried weapons, pretty much a whole planet of privilege away from the planet of Johnette Marie Foltz of South Chelsea and then the Right Honorable Edmund F. Heany Facility for Demonstrably Incorrigible Girls down in Brockton; and in Pat's office, with the door only half shut, Johnette gave her face the blandly hostile expression she wore around upscale boys with no tatts and all their teeth that outside of NA wouldn't have interest in her or might view her lack of front teeth and nose-pin as evidence of they were like better than her and like that, somehow. It emerged this kid didn't seem like he had enough emotional juice to be interested in judging anybody or even noticing them, however. His talking had a burbly, oversalivated quality Johnette knew all too wicked well, the quality of somebody who'd just lately put down the pipe and/or bong. The kid's hair was starting to melt in the heat of Pat's office and drip and settle on his head like a slashed tire, causing that his face got bigger. He looked a little like what the fourth Mrs. Foltz had called green around the gills. The boy stood there very straight with his hands behind his back and said he lived nearby and had for some time been interested in sort of an idle, largely speculative way in considering maybe dropping in on some sort of Substance Anonymous meeting and everything like that, basically as just something to do, the exact same roundabout Denial s.h.i.t as persons without teeth, and said but he didn't know where any were, any Meetings, or when, and but knew The Ennet House 323 323 was nearby, that dealt directly with Anonymous organizations of this sort, and was wondering whether he maybe could have - or borrow and Xerox and promptly return by either eor fax or First-Cla.s.s mail, whichever they might prefer - some sort of relevant meeting schedule. He apologized for intruding and said but he didn't know whom else to call. The sort of guy like Ewell and Day and snotty look-right-through-you-if-you-weren't-a-f.u.c.king-covergirl Ken E. that knew how to long-divide and say was nearby, that dealt directly with Anonymous organizations of this sort, and was wondering whether he maybe could have - or borrow and Xerox and promptly return by either eor fax or First-Cla.s.s mail, whichever they might prefer - some sort of relevant meeting schedule. He apologized for intruding and said but he didn't know whom else to call. The sort of guy like Ewell and Day and snotty look-right-through-you-if-you-weren't-a-f.u.c.king-covergirl Ken E. that knew how to long-divide and say whom whom but didn't even know how to look up s.h.i.t in the Yellow Pages. but didn't even know how to look up s.h.i.t in the Yellow Pages.

Much later, in subsequent events' light, Johnette F. would clearly recall the sight of the boy's frozen hair slowly settling, and how the boy had said whom, whom, and the sight of clear upscale odor-free saliva almost running out over his lower lip as he fought to p.r.o.nounce the word without swallowing. and the sight of clear upscale odor-free saliva almost running out over his lower lip as he fought to p.r.o.nounce the word without swallowing. 324 324 Technical interviewers under Chief of Unspecified Services R. ('the G.') Tine 325 325 really do do this, bring a portable high-watt lamp and plug it in and adjust its neck so the light shines down directly on the face of the interview's subject, whose homburg and shade-affording eyebrows had been removed by polite but emphatic request. And it was this, the harsh light on her fully exposed post-Marxist face, more than any kind of tough really do do this, bring a portable high-watt lamp and plug it in and adjust its neck so the light shines down directly on the face of the interview's subject, whose homburg and shade-affording eyebrows had been removed by polite but emphatic request. And it was this, the harsh light on her fully exposed post-Marxist face, more than any kind of tough noir noir -informed grilling from R. Tine Jr. and the other technical interviewer, that prompted M.I.T. A.B.D.-Ph.D. Molly Notkin, fresh off the N.N.Y.C. high-speed rail, seated in the Sidney Petersonshaped directorial chair amid dropped luggage in her co-op's darkened and lock-d.i.c.kied living room, to spill her guts, roll over, eat cheese, sing like a canary, tell everything she believed she knew: -informed grilling from R. Tine Jr. and the other technical interviewer, that prompted M.I.T. A.B.D.-Ph.D. Molly Notkin, fresh off the N.N.Y.C. high-speed rail, seated in the Sidney Petersonshaped directorial chair amid dropped luggage in her co-op's darkened and lock-d.i.c.kied living room, to spill her guts, roll over, eat cheese, sing like a canary, tell everything she believed she knew: 326 326 - Molly Notkin tells the U.S.O.U.S. operatives that her understanding of the apres-garde Auteur J. O. Incandenza's lethally entertaining Infinite Jest Infinite Jest ( (V or or VI VI) is that it features Madame Psychosis as some kind of maternal instantiation of the archetypal figure Death, sitting naked, corporeally gorgeous, ravishing, hugely pregnant, her hideously deformed face either veiled or blanked out by undulating computer-generated squares of color or anamorphosized into unrecognizability as any kind of face by the camera's apparently very strange and novel lens, sitting there nude, explaining in very simple childlike language to whomever the film's camera represents that Death is always female, and that the female is always maternal. I.e. that the woman who kills you is always your next life's mother. This, which Molly Notkin said didn't make too much sense to her either, when she heard it, was the alleged substance of the Death-cosmology Madame Psychosis was supposed to deliver in a lalating monologue to the viewer, mediated by the very special lens. She may or may not have been holding a knife during this monologue, and the film's big technical hook (the Auteur's films always involved some sort of technical hook) involved some very unusual kind of single lens on the Bolex H32's turret, 327 327 and it was unquestionably an f/x that Madame Psychosis looked pregnant, because the real Madame Psychosis had never been visibly pregnant, Molly Notkin had seen her naked, and it was unquestionably an f/x that Madame Psychosis looked pregnant, because the real Madame Psychosis had never been visibly pregnant, Molly Notkin had seen her naked, 328 328 and you can always tell if a woman's ever carried anything past the first trimester if you look at her naked. and you can always tell if a woman's ever carried anything past the first trimester if you look at her naked. 329 329 - Molly Notkin tells them that Madame Psychosis's own mother had killed herself in a truly ghastly way with an ordinary kitchen garbage disposal on the evening of Thanksgiving Day in the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, four-odd months before the film's Auteur himself had killed himself, also with a kitchen appliance, also ghastlyly, which she says though any Lincoln-Kennedy-type connections between the two suicides will have to be ferreted out by the interviewers on their own, since as far as Molly Notkin knew the two different parents didn't even know of each other's existence.

- That the lethal cartridge's digital Bolex H32 camera - already a Rube-Goldbergesque amalgam of various improvements and digital adaptations to the already modification-heavy cla.s.sic Bolex H16 Rex 5 - a Canadian line, by the way, favored throughout his whole career by the Auteur because its turret could accept three different C-mount lenses and adapters - that Infinite Jest Infinite Jest ( (V) or (VI)'s had been fitted with an extremely strange and extrusive kind of lens, and lay during filming on either the floor or like a cot or bed, the camera, with Madame Psychosis as the Death-Mother figure inclined over it, parturient and nude, talking down down to it - in both senses of the word, which from a critical perspective would introduce into the film a kind of synesthetic double-entendre involving both the aural and visual perspectives of the subjective camera - explaining to the camera as audience-synecdoche that this was why mothers were so obsessively, consumingly, drivenly, and yet somehow narcissistically loving of you, their kid: the mothers are trying frantically to make amends for a murder neither of you quite remember. to it - in both senses of the word, which from a critical perspective would introduce into the film a kind of synesthetic double-entendre involving both the aural and visual perspectives of the subjective camera - explaining to the camera as audience-synecdoche that this was why mothers were so obsessively, consumingly, drivenly, and yet somehow narcissistically loving of you, their kid: the mothers are trying frantically to make amends for a murder neither of you quite remember.

- Molly Notkin tells them she could be far more helpful and forth-comingly detailed if only they'd switch that beastly lamp off or train it someplace else, which is a bra.s.s-faced falsehood and dismissed as such by R. Tine Jr., and so the light stays right on Molly Notkin's glabrous unhappy face.

- That Madame Psychosis and the film's Auteur had not been s.e.xually enmeshed, and for reasons beyond the fact that the Auteur's belief in a finite world-total of available erections rendered him always either impotent or guilt-ridden. That in fact Madame Psychosis had loved and been s.e.xually enmeshed only with the Auteur's son, who, though Molly Notkin never encountered him personally and Madame Psychosis had taken care never to speak ill of him, was clearly as thoroughgoing a little rotter as one would find down through the whole white male canon of venery, moral cowardice, emotional chicanery, and rot.

- That Madame Psychosis had been present neither at the Auteur's suicide nor at his funeral. That she'd missed the funeral because her pa.s.sport had expired. That nor had Madame Psychosis been present at the reading of the late Auteur's will, despite the fact that she was one of the beneficiaries. That Madame Psychosis had never mentioned the fate or present disposition of the unreleased cartridge ent.i.tled either Infinite Jest Infinite Jest ( (V) or Infinite Jest Infinite Jest ( (VI), and had described it only from the perspective of the experience of performing in it, nude, and had never seen it, but had a hard time believing it was even entertaining, let alone lethally entertaining, and tended to believe it had represented little more than the thinly veiled cries of a man at the very terminus of his existential tether - the Auteur having apparently been extremely close to his own mother, in childhood - and had no doubt been recognized as such by the Auteur - who though not exactly the psychic sea's steadiest keel had been in many respects an acute reader and critic of film, and would have been able to distinguish the real filmic McCoy from pathetic cries veiled as film no matter how wildly his nautical compa.s.s was spinning around, on its tether, and would in all probability have destroyed the Master Print of the failed piece of art, the same way he'd reportedly destroyed the first four or five failed attempts at the same piece, which pieces had admittedly featured actresses of lesser mystique and allure.

- That the Auteur's funeral had purportedly taken place in the L'Islet Province of Nouveau Quebec, the birth-province of the Auteur's widow, featuring an interrment and not a cremation.

- That far be it from her to tell the U.S. Office of Unspecified Services its business, but why not simply go to J.O.I.'s widow and verify directly the existence and location of the purported cartridge?

- That it seemed pretty unlikely to her, Molly Notkin, that the Auteur's widow had any connections to any anti-American groups, cells, or movements, no matter what the files on her indiscreet youth might suggest, since from everything Molly Notkin's heard the woman didn't have much interest in any agendas larger than her own individually neurotic agendas, even though she came on to Madame Psychosis all sweet and solicitous. That Madame Psychosis had confessed to Molly Notkin that the widow struck her as very possibly Death incarnate - her constant smile the rictal smile of some kind of thanatoptic figure - and that it had struck Madame Psychosis as bizarre that it was she, Madame Psychosis, whom the Auteur kept casting as various feminine instantiations of Death when he had the real thing right under his nose, and eminently photogenic to boot, the widow-to-be, apparently a real restaurant-silencer-type beauty even in her late forties.

- That the Auteur had stopped ingesting distilled spirits as Madame Psychosis's personal condition for consenting to appear in what she knew to be her but did not know to be the J.O.I.'s final film-cartridge, and that the Auteur had, apparently, incredibly, 330 330 kept his side of the bargain - possibly because he'd been so deeply moved at M.P.'s consent to appear before the camera again even after her terrible accident and deformation and the little rotter of a son's despicable abandonment of the relationship under the excuse of accusing Madame Psychosis of being s.e.xually enmeshed with their - here Molly Notkin said that she of course had meant to say kept his side of the bargain - possibly because he'd been so deeply moved at M.P.'s consent to appear before the camera again even after her terrible accident and deformation and the little rotter of a son's despicable abandonment of the relationship under the excuse of accusing Madame Psychosis of being s.e.xually enmeshed with their - here Molly Notkin said that she of course had meant to say his his - father, the Auteur. And that the Auteur had apparently remained alcohol-free for the whole next three-and-a-half months, from Xmas of the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad to 1 April of the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, the date of his suicide. - father, the Auteur. And that the Auteur had apparently remained alcohol-free for the whole next three-and-a-half months, from Xmas of the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad to 1 April of the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, the date of his suicide.

- That the completely secret and hidden substance-abuse problem, the one that had now landed Madame Psychosis in an elite private dependency-treatment facility so elite that not even M.P.'s closest friends knew where it was beyond knowing only that it was someplace far, very far away, that the abuse-problem could have been nothing but a consequence of the terrible guilt Madame Psychosis felt over the Auteur's suicide, and const.i.tuted a clear unconscious compulsion to punish herself with the same sort of substance-abuse activity she had coerced the Auteur into stopping, merely subst.i.tuting narcotics for Wild Turkey, which Molly Notkin could attest was some very gnarly-tasting liquor indeed.

- No, that Madame Psychosis's guilt over the Auteur's felo de self felo de self had nothing to do with the purportedly lethal had nothing to do with the purportedly lethal Infinite Jest Infinite Jest ( (V) or (VI), which as far as Madame Psychosis had determined from the filming itself was little more than an olla podrida of depressive conceits strung together with flashy lensmanship and perspectival novelty. That, no, rather the consuming guilt had been over the condition that the Auteur suspend the ingestion of spirits, which it turned out, M.P. had claimed in deluded hindsight, had been all that was keeping the man's tether ravelled, the ingestion, such that without it he was unable to withstand the psychic pressures that pushed him over the edge into what Madame Psychosis said she and the Auteur had sometimes referred to as quote 'self-erasure.'

- That it did not strike her, Molly Notkin, as improbable that the special limited-edition turkey-shaped gift bottle of Wild Turkey Blended Whiskey-brand distilled spirits with the cerise velveteen gift-ribbon around its neck with the bow tucked under its wattles on the kitchen counter next to the microwave oven before which the Auteur's body had been found so ghastlyly inclined had been placed there by the spouse's widow-to-be - who may well have been enraged by the fact that the Auteur had never been willing to give up spirits quote 'for her' but had apparently been willing to give them up quote 'for' Madame Psychosis and her nude appearance in his final opus.

- That the by all reports exceptionally attractive Madame Psychosis had suffered an irreparable facial trauma on the same Thanksgiving Day that her mother had killed herself with a kitchen-appliance, leaving her (Madame Psychosis) hideously and improbably deformed, and that her membership in the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed's 13-Step self-help organization was no kind of metaphor or ruse.

- That the intolerable stresses leading to the Auteur's self-erasure had probably way less to do with film or digital art - this Auteur's anti-confluential approach to the medium having always struck Molly Notkin as being rather aloof and cerebrally technical, to say nothing of naively post-Marxist in its self-congratulatory combination of anamorphic fragmentation and anti-Picaresque 331 331 narrative stasis - or with having allegedly sp.a.w.ned some angelic monster of audience-gratification - anyone with a nervous system who watched much of his oeuvre could see that fun or entertainment was pretty low on the late filmmaker's list of priorities - but rather much more likely to do with the fact that his widow-to-be was engaging in s.e.xual enmeshments with just about everything with a Y-chromo-some, and had been for what sounded like many years, including possibly with the Auteur's son and Madame's craven lover, as a child, seeing as it sounded like the little rotter had enough malcathected issues with his mother to keep all of Vienna humming briskly for quite some time. narrative stasis - or with having allegedly sp.a.w.ned some angelic monster of audience-gratification - anyone with a nervous system who watched much of his oeuvre could see that fun or entertainment was pretty low on the late filmmaker's list of priorities - but rather much more likely to do with the fact that his widow-to-be was engaging in s.e.xual enmeshments with just about everything with a Y-chromo-some, and had been for what sounded like many years, including possibly with the Auteur's son and Madame's craven lover, as a child, seeing as it sounded like the little rotter had enough malcathected issues with his mother to keep all of Vienna humming briskly for quite some time.

- That thus - with the Promethean-guilt angle on the Auteur's suicide cast into serious doubt - there was little question in A.B.D.-Dr. Notkin's mind that the entire perfect-entertainment-as-Liebestod myth surrounding the purportedly lethal final cartridge was nothing more than a cla.s.sic ill.u.s.tration of the antinomically schizoid function of the post-industrial capitalist mechanism, whose logic presented commodity as the escape-from-anxieties-of-mortality-which-escape-is-itself-psychologically-fatal, as detailed in perspicuous detail in M. Gilles Deleuze's posthumous myth surrounding the purportedly lethal final cartridge was nothing more than a cla.s.sic ill.u.s.tration of the antinomically schizoid function of the post-industrial capitalist mechanism, whose logic presented commodity as the escape-from-anxieties-of-mortality-which-escape-is-itself-psychologically-fatal, as detailed in perspicuous detail in M. Gilles Deleuze's posthumous Incest and the Life of Death in Capitalist Entertainment, Incest and the Life of Death in Capitalist Entertainment, which she'd be happy to lend the figures standing up somewhere above the lamp's white fire, one of them tapping something irritatingly against the lamp's conic metal shade, if they'd promise to return it and not mark it up. which she'd be happy to lend the figures standing up somewhere above the lamp's white fire, one of them tapping something irritatingly against the lamp's conic metal shade, if they'd promise to return it and not mark it up.

- That - in response to respectful but pointed requests to keep the responses on some sort of factual track and spare them all the eggheaded abstractions - Madame Psychosis's deforming trauma, in its combination of coincidence and malefic intention, had been like something right out of the Auteur's most ghastly and unresolvable proto-incestuous disaster films, e.g. The Night Wears a Sombrero, Dial C for Concupiscence, The Night Wears a Sombrero, Dial C for Concupiscence, and and The Unfortunate Case of Me The Unfortunate Case of Me. That Madame Psychosis, an only child, had been extremely and heart-warmingly close to her father, a low-pH chemist for a Kentucky reagent outfit, who'd apparently had an extremely close only-child and watching-movies-together-based relationship with his own mother and seemed to reenact the closeness with Madame Psychosis, taking her to movies on a near-daily basis, in Kentucky, and driving her all over the mid-South for various junior baton-twirling compet.i.tions while his wife, Madame Psychosis's mother, a devoutly religious but wounded and neurasthenic woman with a fear of public s.p.a.ces, stayed home on the family farm, canning preserves and seeing to the administration of the farm, etc. But that things had gotten first strange and then creepy as Madame Psychosis entered p.u.b.erty, apparently; specifically the low-pH father had gotten creepy, seeming to behave as if Madame Psychosis were getting younger instead of older: taking her to increasingly child-rated films at the local Cineplex, refusing to acknowledge issues of menses or b.r.e.a.s.t.s, strongly discouraging dating, etc. Apparently issues were complicated by the fact that Madame Psychosis emerged from p.u.b.erty as an almost freakishly beautiful young woman, especially in a part of the United States where poor nutrition and indifference to dent.i.tion and hygiene made physical beauty an extremely rare and sort of discomfiting condition, one in no way shared by Madame Psychosis's toothless and fireplug-shaped mother, who said not a word as Madame Psychosis's father interdicted everything from bra.s.sieres to Pap smears, addressing the nubile Madame Psychosis in progressively puerile baby-talk and continuing to use her childhood diminutive like Pookie Pookie or or Putti Putti as he attempted to dissuade her from accepting a scholarship to a Boston University whose Film and Film-Cartridge Studies Program was, he apparently maintained, full of quote Nasty Pootem Wooky Bam-Bams, unquote, whatever family-code pejorative this signified. as he attempted to dissuade her from accepting a scholarship to a Boston University whose Film and Film-Cartridge Studies Program was, he apparently maintained, full of quote Nasty Pootem Wooky Bam-Bams, unquote, whatever family-code pejorative this signified.

- That - to cut to a chase which the interviewers' hands-on-hip att.i.tudes and replacement of the lamp's bulb with a much higher wattage signified they'd very much like to see cut to - as is often the case, it wasn't until Madame Psychosis got to college and gradually acquired some psychic distance and matter for emotional comparison that she even began to see how creepy her reagent-Daddy's regression had been, and not until a certain major-sport-star son's autograph on a punctured football inspired more e-mailed suspicion and sarcasm than grat.i.tude from home in KY that she began even to suspect that her lack of social life throughout p.u.b.erty might have had as much to do with her Daddy's intrusive discouragement as with her actaeonizing p.u.b.escent charms. That - pausing briefly to spell actaeonizing actaeonizing - the s.h.i.t had hit the intergenerational psychic fan when Madame Psychosis brought the Auteur's little rotter of a son home to the KY spread for the third time, for Thanksgiving in the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, and witnessing her Daddy's infantilizing conduct of her and her mother's wordless compulsive canning and cooking, not to mention the terrific tension that resulted when Madame Psychosis attempted to move some of the stuffed animals out of her room to make room for the Auteur's son, in short experiencing her home and Daddy through the comparative filter of enmeshment with the Auteur's son brought Madame Psychosis to the crisis that precipitates Speaking the Unspeakable; and that it had been at Thanksgiving Dinner, at midday on 24 November Y.T.M.P., when the low-pH Daddy began not only cutting up Madame Psychosis's plate's turkey for her but mashing it into puree between the tines of his fork, all under the raised comparative eyebrows of the Auteur's son, that Madame Psychosis finally aired the unspoken question of why, with her now of legal age and living with a male and retired from childhood's twirling and carving out an adult career on one and potentially two sides of the film-camera, did her own personal Daddy seem to feel she needed help to chew? Molly Notkin's secondhand take on the emotional eruptions that ensued is not detailed, but she feels she can state w/ confidence that it's plausibly a case of any kind of system that's been under enormous silent pressure for some time, that when the system finally blows the accreted pressure's such that it's almost always a full-scale eruption. The low-pH Daddy's enormous stress had apparently erupted, right there at the table, with his grown daughter's white meat between his tines, in the confession that he'd been secretly, silently in love with Madame Psychosis from way, way back; that the love had been the real thing, pure, unspoken, genuflectory, timeless, impossible; that he never touched her, wouldn't, nor ogle, less out of a horror of being the sort of mid-South father who touched and ogled than out of the purity of his doomed love for the little girl he'd escorted to the movies as proudly as any beau, daily; that the repression and disguisability of his pure love hadn't been all that hard when Madame Psychosis had been juvenile and s.e.xless, but that at the onset of p.u.b.erty and nubility the pressure'd become so great that he could compensate only by regressing the child mentally to an age of incontinence and pre-mashed meat, and that his awareness of how creepy his denial of her maturation must have seemed - even though neither the daughter nor mother, even now wordlessly chewing a candied yam, had remarked on it, the denial and creepiness, although the man's beloved pointers were given to whimper and scratch at the door when the denial had gotten especially creepy (animals being way more sensitive than humans to emotional anomalies, in Molly Notkin's experience) - had raised his internal limbic system's pressure to near intolerable foot-kilo levels, and that he'd been hanging on for dear life for the past nigh on now a decade, but that now that he'd had to actually stand witness to the removal of Pooky and Urgle-Bear et al. from her ballerina-wallpapered room to make s.p.a.ce for a nonrelated mature male whose physical vigor through the peephole the Daddy'd exerted every gram of trembling will he'd possessed trying not to drill the hole in the bathroom wall just above the mirror over the sink whose pipes made the wall behind the headboard of Madame Psychosis's room's bed sing and clunk, and through which, late at night - claiming to Mother a case of skitters from all the holiday nibbles - hunched atop the sink, every night since Madame Psychosis and the Auteur's son had first arrived to sleep together in the unstuffed-animaled bed of a childhood through which he'd been all but tortured by the purity of his impossible love for the - - the s.h.i.t had hit the intergenerational psychic fan when Madame Psychosis brought the Auteur's little rotter of a son home to the KY spread for the third time, for Thanksgiving in the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, and witnessing her Daddy's infantilizing conduct of her and her mother's wordless compulsive canning and cooking, not to mention the terrific tension that resulted when Madame Psychosis attempted to move some of the stuffed animals out of her room to make room for the Auteur's son, in short experiencing her home and Daddy through the comparative filter of enmeshment with the Auteur's son brought Madame Psychosis to the crisis that precipitates Speaking the Unspeakable; and that it had been at Thanksgiving Dinner, at midday on 24 November Y.T.M.P., when the low-pH Daddy began not only cutting up Madame Psychosis's plate's turkey for her but mashing it into puree between the tines of his fork, all under the raised comparative eyebrows of the Auteur's son, that Madame Psychosis finally aired the unspoken question of why, with her now of legal age and living with a male and retired from childhood's twirling and carving out an adult career on one and potentially two sides of the film-camera, did her own personal Daddy seem to feel she needed help to chew? Molly Notkin's secondhand take on the emotional eruptions that ensued is not detailed, but she feels she can state w/ confidence that it's plausibly a case of any kind of system that's been under enormous silent pressure for some time, that when the system finally blows the accreted pressure's such that it's almost always a full-scale eruption. The low-pH Daddy's enormous stress had apparently erupted, right there at the table, with his grown daughter's white meat between his tines, in the confession that he'd been secretly, silently in love with Madame Psychosis from way, way back; that the love had been the real thing, pure, unspoken, genuflectory, timeless, impossible; that he never touched her, wouldn't, nor ogle, less out of a horror of being the sort of mid-South father who touched and ogled than out of the purity of his doomed love for the little girl he'd escorted to the movies as proudly as any beau, daily; that the repression and disguisability of his pure love hadn't been all that hard when Madame Psychosis had been juvenile and s.e.xless, but that at the onset of p.u.b.erty and nubility the pressure'd become so great that he could compensate only by regressing the child mentally to an age of incontinence and pre-mashed meat, and that his awareness of how creepy his denial of her maturation must have seemed - even though neither the daughter nor mother, even now wordlessly chewing a candied yam, had remarked on it, the denial and creepiness, although the man's beloved pointers were given to whimper and scratch at the door when the denial had gotten especially creepy (animals being way more sensitive than humans to emotional anomalies, in Molly Notkin's experience) - had raised his internal limbic system's pressure to near intolerable foot-kilo levels, and that he'd been hanging on for dear life for the past nigh on now a decade, but that now that he'd had to actually stand witness to the removal of Pooky and Urgle-Bear et al. from her ballerina-wallpapered room to make s.p.a.ce for a nonrelated mature male whose physical vigor through the peephole the Daddy'd exerted every gram of trembling will he'd possessed trying not to drill the hole in the bathroom wall just above the mirror over the sink whose pipes made the wall behind the headboard of Madame Psychosis's room's bed sing and clunk, and through which, late at night - claiming to Mother a case of skitters from all the holiday nibbles - hunched atop the sink, every night since Madame Psychosis and the Auteur's son had first arrived to sleep together in the unstuffed-animaled bed of a childhood through which he'd been all but tortured by the purity of his impossible love for the - - That it had been at this point that Madame Psychosis's mother's fork and then whole plate had clattered to the floor, and that amid the sounds of the pointers under the table fighting over that plate the mother's own denial-system's pressure blew, and she freaked, announcing publicly at the table that she and the Daddy had not once known each other as man and wife since Madame Psychosis had first menstruated, that she'd known something incredibly creepy was going on but had denied it, evacuated her suspicions and placed them under great pressure in the bell-jar of her own denial, because, she admits - admits admits is probably less accurate than something like is probably less accurate than something like keens keens or or shrieks shrieks or or jabbers jabbers - that her own father - an itinerant camp-meeting preacher - had molested her and her sister all through childhood, ogled and touched and worse, and that this had been why she'd married at just sixteen, to escape, and that now it was clear to her that she'd married the exact same kind of monster, the kind who spurns his ordained mate and wants his daughter. - that her own father - an itinerant camp-meeting preacher - had molested her and her sister all through childhood, ogled and touched and worse, and that this had been why she'd married at just sixteen, to escape, and that now it was clear to her that she'd married the exact same kind of monster, the kind who spurns his ordained mate and wants his daughter.

- That she'd said maybe it was her, she, the mother, who was the monster, which if so she was tired of hiding it and appearing falsely before G.o.d and man.

- That whereupon she'd reeled from her place and hurdled three pointers and run down to the Daddy's acid-lab in the cellar, to disfigure herself with acid.

- That the Daddy'd kept a world-cla.s.s collection of various acids in Pyrex-brand flasks on wooden shelves down in the cellar.

- That the Daddy, the rotter of a son, and finally a shock-slowed Madame Psychosis had all run down the stairs after the mother and hit the cellar just as the mother had removed the stopper of a Pyrex flask with an enormous half-eaten-away skull on the side, which along with the flaming scarlet piece of litmus paper afloat inside signified an incredibly low-pH and corrosive type of acid.

- That Madame Psychosis's name was in reality Lucille Duquette, and the Daddy's name either Earl or Al Duquette of extreme southeast KY, way down near TN and VA.

- That, despite the little rotter's professions of self-recrimination for allowing the deformity to take place and claim that the swirling systems of guilt and horror and denial-informed forgiveness made a committed relationship with Madame Psychosis increasingly untenable, it didn't take an expert in character-disorders and weaknesses to figure out why the fellow'd given Madame Psychosis the boot within months of the traumatic deformity, now did it.

- That, right on the hysterical cusp where internalized rage can so easily shift to externalized rage, the mother had hurled the low-pH flask at the Daddy, who'd reflexively ducked; and that the rotter, one Orin, Orin, right behind, a former tennis champion with superb upper-body reflexes, had instinctively ducked also, leaving Madame Psychosis - dazed and bradykinetic from the sudden venting of so many high-pressure repressive family systems - open for a direct facial hit, resulting in the traumatic deformity. And that it had been everyone's failure to press any charges that had liberated the mother from Southeast-KY custody and allowed her access once again to her home's kitchen, where, apparently despondent, she committed suicide by putting her extremities down the garbage disposal - first one arm and then, kind of miraculously if you think about it, the other arm. right behind, a former tennis champion with superb upper-body reflexes, had instinctively ducked also, leaving Madame Psychosis - dazed and bradykinetic from the sudden venting of so many high-pressure repressive family systems - open for a direct facial hit, resulting in the traumatic deformity. And that it had been everyone's failure to press any charges that had liberated the mother from Southeast-KY custody and allowed her access once again to her home's kitchen, where, apparently despondent, she committed suicide by putting her extremities down the garbage disposal - first one arm and then, kind of miraculously if you think about it, the other arm. 332 332 The most distant and obscure Tuesday P.M. Meeting listed in the little white Metro-Boston Recovery Options 333 333 booklet the incisorless nostril-pierced girl down at The Ennet House had given him looked to be a males-only thing at 1730h. out in Natick, almost in Framingham, at something with a location on Route 27 that the M.B.R.O. booklet listed only as 'Q.R.S.32A.' Hal, who had no last cla.s.s period, rushed through P.M.'s, dispatching Shaw 1 and 3 by the time the regular P.M.'s were even warming up, then skipping left-leg circuits in the weight room, and was also forgoing tonight's lemon chicken with potato rolls, all to blast out to Natick in time to check this anti-Substance-fellowship-Meeting business out. He wasn't sure why, since it didn't seem to be any kind of s...o...b..ring inability to abstain that was the problem - he hadn't had so much as a mg. of a Substance of any kind since the 30-day urological condonation of last week. The issue's the horrific way his head's felt, increasingly, since he abruptly Abandoned All Hope. booklet the incisorless nostril-pierced girl down at The Ennet House had given him looked to be a males-only thing at 1730h. out in Natick, almost in Framingham, at something with a location on Route 27 that the M.B.R.O. booklet listed only as 'Q.R.S.32A.' Hal, who had no last cla.s.s period, rushed through P.M.'s, dispatching Shaw 1 and 3 by the time the regular P.M.'s were even warming up, then skipping left-leg circuits in the weight room, and was also forgoing tonight's lemon chicken with potato rolls, all to blast out to Natick in time to check this anti-Substance-fellowship-Meeting business out. He wasn't sure why, since it didn't seem to be any kind of s...o...b..ring inability to abstain that was the problem - he hadn't had so much as a mg. of a Substance of any kind since the 30-day urological condonation of last week. The issue's the horrific way his head's felt, increasingly, since he abruptly Abandoned All Hope. 334 334 It wasn't just nightmares and saliva. It was as if his head perched on the bedpost all night now and in the terribly early A.M. when Hal's eyes snapped open immediately said Glad You're UP I've Been Wanting To TALK To You and then didn't let up all day, having at him like a well-revved chain-saw all day until he could finally try to fall unconscious, crawling into the rack wretched to await more bad dreams. 24/7's of feeling wretched and bereft. It wasn't just nightmares and saliva. It was as if his head perched on the bedpost all night now and in the terribly early A.M. when Hal's eyes snapped open immediately said Glad You're UP I've Been Wanting To TALK To You and then didn't let up all day, having at him like a well-revved chain-saw all day until he could finally try to fall unconscious, crawling into the rack wretched to await more bad dreams. 24/7's of feeling wretched and bereft.

Dusk was coming earlier. Hal signed out at the portcullis and blasted down the hill and took the tow truck up Comm. Ave. to the C.C. Reservoir and then south on Hammond, the same deadening route as the E.T.A. conditioning run, except when he hit Boylston St. he turned right and struck out west. Once it cleared West Newton, Boylston St. became shunpike Rte. 9, the major west-suburb-commuter alternative to the suicidal I90, and 9 suburb-hopped serpentine all the way west to Natick and Rte. 27.

Hal crawled through traffic on a major-flow road that had once been a cowpath. By the time he was in Wellesley Hills, the sky's combustionish orange had deepened to the h.e.l.lish crimson of a fire's last embers. Darkness fell with a clunk shortly after, and Hal's spirits with it. He felt pathetic and absurd even going to check this Narcotics Anonymous Meeting thing out.

Everybody always flashed his or her brights at the tow truck because the headlamps were set so senselessly high on the truck's grille.

The little portable disk player had been detached by either Pemulis or Axford and not returned. WYYY was a ghostly thread of jazz against a sea of static. AM had only corporate rock and reports that the Gentle administration had scheduled and then cancelled a special Spontaneous-Disseminated address to the nation on subjects unknown. NPR had a kind of roundtable on potential subjects - George Will's laryngectomy-prosthesis sounded hideous. Hal preferred silence and traffic-sounds. He ate two of three $4.00 bran m.u.f.fins he'd whipped in for at a Cleveland Circle gourmet bakery, grimacing as he swallowed because he'd forgotten a tonic to wash them down, then put in a mammoth plug of Kodiak and spat periodically into his special NASA gla.s.s, which fit neatly in the cup-holder down by the transmission, and pa.s.sed the last fifteen minutes of the dull drive considering the probable etymological career of the word Anonymous, Anonymous, all the way he supposed from the aeolic all the way he supposed from the aeolic oa oa through Thynne's B.S. 1580s reference to 'anonymall Chronicals'; and whether it was joined way back somewhere at the Saxonic taproot to the Olde English through Thynne's B.S. 1580s reference to 'anonymall Chronicals'; and whether it was joined way back somewhere at the Saxonic taproot to the Olde English on-ane, on-ane, which supposedly meant All as One or As One Body and became Cynewulf's eventual standard inversion to the cla.s.sic which supposedly meant All as One or As One Body and became Cynewulf's eventual standard inversion to the cla.s.sic anon, anon, maybe. Then called up on his mnemonic screen the developmental history since B.S. '35 of the initial Substance group AA, on which there'd been such a lengthy entry in the maybe. Then called up on his mnemonic screen the developmental history since B.S. '35 of the initial Substance group AA, on which there'd been such a lengthy entry in the Discursive O.E.D. Discursive O.E.D. that Hal hadn't had to hit any sort of outside database to feel more or less factually prepared to drop into its spin-off NA and at least give the thing an appraising once-over. Hal can summon a kind of mental Xerox of anything he'd ever read and basically read it all over again, at will, which talent the Abandonment of Hope hasn't (so far) compromised, the withdrawal's effects being more like emotional/salivo-digestive. that Hal hadn't had to hit any sort of outside database to feel more or less factually prepared to drop into its spin-off NA and at least give the thing an appraising once-over. Hal can summon a kind of mental Xerox of anything he'd ever read and basically read it all over again, at will, which talent the Abandonment of Hope hasn't (so far) compromised, the withdrawal's effects being more like emotional/salivo-digestive.

The rock faces on either side of the truck when 27 goes through blasted hills of rock, the very fringes of the Berkshires' penumbra, are either granite or gneiss.

Hal for a while also practices saying 'My name's Mike.' 'Mike. Hi.' 'Hey there, name's Mike,' etc., into the truck's rearview.

By 15 minutes east of Natick it becomes obvious that the little booklet's terse Q.R.S. Q.R.S. designates a facility called Quabbin Recovery Systems, which is easy to find, roadside ad-signs starting to announce the place several clicks away, each sign a little different and designed to form a little like narrative of which actual arrival at Q.R.S. would be the climax. Even Hal's late father was too young really to remember Burma-Shave signs. designates a facility called Quabbin Recovery Systems, which is easy to find, roadside ad-signs starting to announce the place several clicks away, each sign a little different and designed to form a little like narrative of which actual arrival at Q.R.S. would be the climax. Even Hal's late father was too young really to remember Burma-Shave signs.

Quabbin Recovery Systems is set far back from Rte. 27 on a winding groomed-gravel road flanked all the way up by cla.s.sy old-time standing lanterns whose gla.s.s shades are pebbled and faceted like candy dishes and seem more for mood than illumination. Then the actual building's driveway's an even more winding little road that's barely more than a tunnel through meditative pines and poor-postured Lombardy poplars. Once off the highway the whole nighttime scene out here in exurbia - Boston's true boonies - seems ghostly and circ.u.mspect. Hal's tires crunch cones in the road. Some sort of bird s.h.i.ts on his windshield. The driveway broadens gradually into a like delta and then a parking lot of mint-white gravel, and the physical Q.R.S. is right there, cubular and brooding. The building's one of these late-model undeformed cubes of rough panel-brick and granite quoins. Illuminated moodily from below by more cla.s.sy lanterns, it looks like a building-block from some child-t.i.tan's toy-chest. Its windows are the smoky brown kind that in daylight become dark mirrors. Hal's late father had publicly repudiated this kind of window-gla.s.s in an interview in Lens & Pane Lens & Pane when the stuff first came out. Right now, lit from inside, the windows have a sort of b.l.o.o.d.y, polluted aspect. when the stuff first came out. Right now, lit from inside, the windows have a sort of b.l.o.o.d.y, polluted aspect.

A good two-thirds of the lot's parking places say RESERVED FOR STAFF, which strikes Hal as odd. The tow truck tends to diesel and chuff after deignition, finally subsiding with a shuddering fart. It's dead quiet except for the hiss of light traffic down on 27 past all the trees. Only TP-link workers and marathon-type commuters live in exurban Natick. It's either way colder out here or else a front's been coming in while Hal drove. The lot's piney air has the ethyl sting of winter.

Q.R.S.'s big doors and lintel are more of that reflector-shade gla.s.s. There's no obvious bell, but the doors are unlocked. They open in that sort of pressurized way of inst.i.tutional doors. The savanna-colored lobby is broad and still and has a vague medical/dental smell. Its carpet's a dense low tan Dacronyl weave that evacuates sound. There's a circular high-countered nurse's station or reception desk, but n.o.body's there.

The whole place is so quiet Hal can hear the squeak of blood in his head.

The 32A 32A that follows that follows Q.R.S. Q.R.S. in the girl's little white booklet is presumably a room number. Hal has on a non-E.T.A. jacket and carries the NASA gla.s.s he spits in. He'd have to spit even if he didn't have chew in; the Kodiak's almost like a cover or excuse. in the girl's little white booklet is presumably a room number. Hal has on a non-E.T.A. jacket and carries the NASA gla.s.s he spits in. He'd have to spit even if he didn't have chew in; the Kodiak's almost like a cover or excuse.

There is no map or You-Are-Here-type directory on view in the lobby. The lobby's heat is intense and close but kind of porous; it's in a sort of uneasy struggle with the radiant chill of all the smoked gla.s.s of the entrance. The lamps out in the lot and off along the driveway are blobs of sepia light through the gla.s.s. Inside, cove-lighting at the seams of walls and ceiling produce an indirect light that's shadowless and seems to rise from the room's objects themselves. It's the same lighting and lion-colored carpeting in the first long hall Hal tries. The room numbers go up to 17 and then after Hal turns a sharp corner start at 34A. The room doors are false blond wood but look thick and private, flush in their frames. There's also the smell of stale coffee. The walls' color scheme is somewhere between puce and mature eggplant-skin, kind of nauseous against the sandy tan of the carpet. All buildings with any kind of health-theme to them have this thin sick sweet dental sub-odor to them. Q.R.S. also seems to have some sort of balsamy air-freshener going in the ventilation system, too, but it doesn't quite cover the sweet medical stink or the bland sour smell of inst.i.tutional food.

Hal hasn't heard one human sound since he came in. The place's silence has that glittery sound of total silence. His footfalls make no sound on the Dacronyl. He feels furtive and burglarish and holds the NASA gla.s.s down at his side and the NA booklet higher up and cover-out as a sort of explanatory I.D. There are computer-enhanced landscapes on the walls, little low tables with glossy pamphlets, a framed print of Pica.s.so's 'Seated Harlequin,' and nothing else that wasn't just inst.i.tutional bulls.h.i.t, visual Muzak. Without any sound to his footfalls it's like the gauntlets of doors just glide by. The quiet has a kind of menace. The whole cubular building seems to Hal to hold the tensed menace of a living thing that's chosen to hold itself still. If you asked Hal to describe his feelings as he looked for room 32A the best he could do would be to say he wished he were somewhere else and feeling some way besides how he felt. His mouth pours spit. The gla.s.s's one-third full and heavy in his hand and not much fun to look at. He's missed the gla.s.s a couple of times and marred the tan carpet with dark spit. After two 90 turns it's clear the hallway's run is a perfect square around the cube's ground level. He's seen no stairs or entrances to stairways. He empties the NASA gla.s.s rather gooily into a potted rubber tree's dirt. Q.R.S.'s building may be one of those infamous Rubikular cubes that looks topologically undeformed but is actually impossible to negotiate on the inside. But the numbers after the third corner start at 18, and now Hal can hear either very distant or very m.u.f.fled voices. He carries the NA booklet in front of him like a crucifix. He has about $50 U.S. and another $100 in eagle-, leaf-, and broom-emblemized O.N.A.N. scrip, having had no idea what sort of introductory costs might be involved. Q.R.S. didn't purchase prime Natick acreage and the cutting-edge services of a So-Paulo-School Geometric-Minimalist architect with just altruistic goodwill, that was for sure.

Room 32A's wood-grain door was just as emphatically shut as all the others, but the m.u.f.fled voices were behind this one. The Meeting was listed in the book as starting at 1730, and it was only around 1720, and Hal thought the voices might signify some sort of pre-Meeting orientation for people who've come for the first time, sort of tentatively, just to scout the whole enterprise out, so he doesn't knock.

He still has this intractable habit of making a move like he's straightening a bow tie before he enters a strange room.

And except for the thin rubber sheaths, the doork.n.o.bs on the Quabbin Recovery Systems doors are the same as at E.T.A. - flat bars of bra.s.s toggle-bolted to the latch mechanism, so you have to push the bar down instead of turning anything to open the door.

But the Meeting is under way, apparently. It isn't near big enough to create a mood of anonymity or casual spectation. Nine or ten adult middle-cla.s.s males are in the warm room on orange plastic chairs with legs of molded steel tubing. Every one of the men has a beard, and each wears chinos and a sweater, and they all sit the same way, that Indian cross-legged style with their hands on their knees and their feet under their knees, and they all wear socks, with no footwear or winter jackets anywhere in sight. Hal eases the door shut and sort of slinks along the wall to an empty chair, all the time conspicuously brandishing the Meeting booklet. The chairs are placed in no discernible order, and their orange clashes nastily with the room's own colors, walls and ceiling the color of Thousand Island dressing - a color-scheme with unplaceable but uneasy a.s.sociations for Hal - and more of the lionskin Dacronyl carpet. And the warm air in 32A is stuffy with CO2 and unpleasantly scented with the aroma of soft male middle-aged bodies not wearing footwear, a stale meaty cheesy smell, more nauseous even than the E.T.A. locker room after a Mrs. Clarke Tex-Mex fiesta. and unpleasantly scented with the aroma of soft male middle-aged bodies not wearing footwear, a stale meaty cheesy smell, more nauseous even than the E.T.A. locker room after a Mrs. Clarke Tex-Mex fiesta.

The only guy in the Meeting to acknowledge Hal's entrance is at the front of the room, a man Hal would have to call almost morbidly round, his body nearly Leith-sized and globularly round and the smaller but still large globe of a head atop it, his socks plaid and his legs not all the way crossable so it looks like he might pitch disastrously backward in his chair any minute, smiling warmly at Hal's winter coat and NASA gla.s.s as Hal slinks and sits and slumps down low. The round man's chair is positioned under a small white Magic Marker blackboard, and all the other chairs approximately face it, and the man holds a Magic Marker in one hand and holds what looks quite a bit like a teddy bear to his chest with the other, and wears chinos and a cable-knit Norwegian sweater the color of toast. His hair is that waxy sort of blond, and he's got the blond eyebrows and creepy blond eyelashes and violently flushed face of a true Norwegian blond, and his little beard is an imperial so sharply waxed it looks like a truncated star. The morbidly round blond man's pretty clearly the leader of the Meeting, possibly a high-ranking official of Narcotics Anonymous, whom Hal could casually approach about tracts and texts to buy and study, afterward.

Another middle-aged guy up near the front is crying, and he too holds what looks like a bear.

The blond brows hike up and down as the leader says 'I'd like to suggest we men all hold our bears tight and let our Inner Infant nonjudgmentally listen to Kevin's Inner Infant expressing his grief and loss.'

They're all at subtly different angles to Hal, who's slumped low over by the wall in the second-to-last row, but it turns out after some subtle casual neck-craning that, sure enough, all these middle-cla.s.s guys in at least their thirties are sitting there clutching teddy bears to their sweatered chests - and identical teddy bears, plump and brown and splay-limbed and with a little red corduroy tongue protruding from the mouths, so the bears all look oddly throttled. The room is menacingly quiet now except for the sibilance of the heating vents and the sobbing guy Kevin, and the plip of Hal's saliva hitting the bottom of the empty gla.s.s rather more loudly than he might have wished.

The back of the crying guy's neck is turning redder and redder as he clutches his bear and rocks on his hams.

Hal sits with his leg crossed good-ankle-on-knee and joggles his white hightop and looks at his callused thumb and listens to the Kevin guy sob and snuffle. The guy wipes his nose with the heel of his hand just like the littler Buddies at E.T.A. Hal figures the tears and bears have something to do with giving up drugs, and that the Meeting is probably on the verge of coming around to talking explicitly about drugs and how to give up drugs for a certain period without feeling indescribably wretched and bereft, or maybe at least some data on how long one might expect the wretchedness of giving up drugs to continue before the old nervous system and salivary glands returned to normal. Even though Inner Infant Inner Infant sounds uncomfortably close to Dr. Doloros Rusk's dreaded sounds uncomfortably close to Dr. Doloros Rusk's dreaded Inner Child, Inner Child, Hal'd be willing to bet that here it's some sort of shorthand Narcotics Anonymous sobriquet for like 'limbic component of the CNS' or 'the part of our cortex that's not utterly wretched and bereft without the drugs that up to now have been pulling us through the day, secretly' or some affirming, encouraging thing like that. Hal wills himself to stay objective and not form any judgments before he has serious data, hoping desperately for some sort of hopeful feeling to emerge. Hal'd be willing to bet that here it's some sort of shorthand Narcotics Anonymous sobriquet for like 'limbic component of the CNS' or 'the part of our cortex that's not utterly wretched and bereft without the drugs that up to now have been pulling us through the day, secretly' or some affirming, encouraging thing like that. Hal wills himself to stay objective and not form any judgments before he has serious data, hoping desperately for some sort of hopeful feeling to emerge.

The diglobular leader has made a cage of his hands and rested his hands on his teddy bear's head and is breathing slowly and evenly, watching Kevin kindly from under the blond eyebrows, looking more than anything like some sort of Buddha-as-California-surfer-dude. The leader inhales gently and says 'The energies I'm feeling in the group are energies of unconditional love and acceptance fo