'Q.'

'It had nothing to do with killing himself. Less than nothing to do with it.'

'Q.'

'No I never saw his f.u.c.king will. He told me. He told me things.

'He'd stopped being drunk all the time. That killed him. He couldn't take it but he'd made a promise.'

'Q.'

'I don't know that he ever even got a finished Master. That's your your story. There wasn't anything unendurable or enslaving in either of my scenes. Nothing like these actual-perfection rumors. These are academic rumors. He talked about making something quote too perfect. But as a story. There wasn't anything unendurable or enslaving in either of my scenes. Nothing like these actual-perfection rumors. These are academic rumors. He talked about making something quote too perfect. But as a joke joke. He had a thing about entertainment, being criticized about entertainment v. nonentertainment and stasis. He used to refer to the Work itself as "entertainments." He always meant it ironically. Even in jokes he never talked about an anti-version or antidote for G.o.d's sake. He'd never carry it that far. A joke.'

'When he talked about this thing as a quote perfect entertainment, terminally compelling - it was always ironic - he was having a sly little jab at me. I used to go around saying the veil was to disguise lethal perfection, that I was too lethally beautiful for people to stand. It was a kind of joke I'd gotten from one of his entertainments, the Medusa-Odalisk thing. That even in U.H.I.D. I hid by hiddenness, in denial about the deformity itself. So Jim took a failed piece and told me it was too perfect to release - it'd paralyze people. It was entirely clear that it was an ironic joke. To me.'

'Q.'

'Jim's humor was a dry dry humor.' humor.'

'Q.'

'If it got made and n.o.body's seen it, the Master, it's in there with him. Buried. That's just a guess. But I bet you.'

'Call it an educated educated bet.' bet.'

'Q.'

'Q , Q, , Q, Q.' Q.'

' That's the part of the joke he didn't know. Where he's buried is That's the part of the joke he didn't know. Where he's buried is itself itself buried, now. It's in your annulation-zone. It's not even your buried, now. It's in your annulation-zone. It's not even your territory. territory. And now if you want the thing - he'd enjoy the joke very much, I think. Oh s.h.i.t yes very much.' And now if you want the thing - he'd enjoy the joke very much, I think. Oh s.h.i.t yes very much.'

By a rather creepy coincidence, it turned out that, up in our room, Kyle Dempsy Coyle and Mario were also watching one of Himself's old efforts. Mario had gotten his pants on and was using his special tool to zip and b.u.t.ton. Coyle looked oddly traumatized. He was sitting on the edge of my bed, his eyes wide and his whole body with the slight tremble of something hanging from the tip of a pipette. Mario greeted me by name. Snow continued to whirl and eddy outside the window. The position of the sun was impossible to gauge. The net-posts were now buried almost up to their scorecard attachments. The wind was piling snow up in drifts against all Academy right angles and then pummelling the drifts into unusual shapes. The window's whole view had the gray grainy quality of a poor photo. The sky looked diseased. Mario worked his tool with great patience. It often took him several tries to catch and engage the tool's jaws on the tongue of his zipper. Coyle, still wearing his apnea-mouthguard, stared at our room's little viewer. The cartridge was Himself's Accomplice!, Accomplice!, a short melodrama with Cosgrove Watt and a boy no one had ever seen before or since. a short melodrama with Cosgrove Watt and a boy no one had ever seen before or since.

'You woke up early,' Mario said, smiling up from his fly. His bed was made up drum-tight.

I smiled. 'Turns out I wasn't the only one.'

'You look sad.'

I raised my hand with the NASA gla.s.s at Coyle. 'An unexpected pleasure, K.D.C.'

'Tht.i.the fickn meth,' Coyle said.

I put the gla.s.s and toothbrush on my dresser and straightened its doily. I picked some clothing up and began separating it by smell into wearable and unwearable.

'Kyle says Jim Troeltsch tore some of Ortho's face off trying to pull him off a window his face got glued to,' Mario said. 'And then Jim Troeltsch and Mr. Kenkle tried to put toilet tissue on the ripped parts, the way Tall Paul sometimes puts little bits of Kleenex on a shaving cut, but Ortho's face was a lot worse than a shaving cut, and they used a whole roll, and now Ortho's face is covered with toilet tissue, and the tissue's stuck now, and Ortho can't get it off, and at breakfast Mr. deLint was yelling at Ortho for letting them put toilet tissue on it, and Ortho ran to his and Kyle's room and locked the door, and Kyle doesn't have his key since the accident with the whirlpool.'

I helped Mario on with his police lock's vest and affixed the Velcro nice and tight. Mario's chest is so fragile-feeling that I could feel his heartbeat's tremble through the vest and sweatshirt.

Coyle removed the apnea-guard. Strings of white nighttime oral material appeared between his mouth and the guard as he extracted it. He looked to Mario. 'Tell him the worst part.'

I was watching Coyle very closely to see what he planned to do with the sickening mouthpiece he held.

'Hey Hal, your phone has messages, and Mike Pemulis came by and asked if you were up and about.'

'You haven't told him the worst part of it,' Coyle said.

'Don't even think about putting that thing down anywhere my bed, Kyle, please.'

'I'm holding it away from everything, don't worry.'

Mario used his tool to zip up the long curved zipper of his backpack. 'Kyle said there was a problem with a discharge again -'

'So I heard,' I said.

'- and Kyle says he woke up and Ortho was missing, and Ortho's bed was missing as well, so he turned on the light -'

Coyle gestured with the appliance: 'And lo and f.u.c.king-capital-B behold.'

'- yes and lo, and lo,' Mario said, 'Ortho's bed is up near the ceiling of their room. The frame has some way got lifted up and bolted to the ceiling sometime during the night without Kyle hearing it or waking up.'

'Until the discharge, that is,' I said.

'This is it,' said Coyle. 'The tin cans and accusations I'm moving his stuff around are one thing. I'm going to Lateral Alice for a switch like Troeltsch did. This is the straw straw.'

Mario said 'And his bed's up on the ceiling now, still, and if it falls it's going to go right through the floor and fall in Graham and Petropolis's room.'

'He's in there right now all mummified in toilet paper, sulking, with his bed hanging overhead, with the door locked, so I can't even get my apnea-guard-cleaning supplies,' Coyle said.

I'd heard nothing about Troeltsch apparently switching room-a.s.signments with Trevor Axford. A gigantic wedge of snow slid down a steep part of the roof over our window and fell past the window and hit the ground below with a huge whump. For some reason the fact that something as major as a midterm room-switch could have taken place without my knowing anything about it filled me with dread. There were a few glitters of a possible incipient panic-attack again.

Mario's bedside table had a tube of salve for his pelvis's burn, unevenly squeezed. Mario was looking at my face. 'Is it you're sad about not getting to play if the Quebec players are canceled?'

'And then to crown off the whole night he ends up with his face glued to a window,' Coyle said disgustedly.

'Frozen,' I corrected him. 'Except but now listen to Stice's explanation.'

'Let me guess,' I said. 'For the bed hovering.'

Mario looked at Coyle. 'You said bolted.'

'I said presumably presumably bolted is what I said. I said the only rationale that's possible is bolts.' bolted is what I said. I said the only rationale that's possible is bolts.'

'Let me guess,' I said.

'Let him guess,' Mario told Coyle.

'The Darkness thinks ghosts.' Coyle stood and came toward us. His two eyes were not set quite level in his face. 'Stice's explanation that he swore me to discretion but that was before the bed on the ceiling was he thinks he's been somehow selected or chosen to get haunted or possessed by some kind of beneficiary or guardian ghost that resides in and/or manifests in ordinary physical objects, that wants to teach The Darkness how to not underestimate ordinary objects and raise his game to like a supernatural level, to help his game.' One eye was subtly lower than the other, and set at a different angle.

'Or hurt somebody else's,' I said.

'Stice is mentally buckling,' Coyle said, still moving in. I was careful to stay just out of morning-breath range. 'He keeps staring at things with his temple-veins flexing, trying to exert will on them. He bet me 20 beans he could stand on his desk chair and lift it up at the same time, and then he wouldn't let me cancel the bet when I got embarra.s.sed for him after half an hour, standing up there flexing his temples.'

I was also keeping a careful eye on the oral appliance. 'Did you guys hear sausage-a.n.a.log and fresh-squeezed for breakfast?'

Mario asked again if I were sad.

Coyle said 'I was down down there. Stice's map was taking the edge off appet.i.tes all over the room. Then deLint started in yelling at him.' He was looking at me oddly. 'I don't see what's so funny about it, man.' there. Stice's map was taking the edge off appet.i.tes all over the room. Then deLint started in yelling at him.' He was looking at me oddly. 'I don't see what's so funny about it, man.'

Mario fell backward onto his bed and wriggled into his backpack's straps with practiced ease.

Coyle said 'I don't know if I should go to Scht.i.tt, or Rusk, or what. Or Lateral Alice. What if they haul him off somewhere, and it's my fault?'

'There's no denying The Dark's raised his game this fall though.'

'There are machine messages on the machine, Hal, too,' Mario said as I held his hands carefully and pulled him upright.

'What if it's the mental buckling that's raised his game?' Coyle said. 'Does it still count as buckling?'

Cosgrove Watt had been one of the very few professional actors Himself ever used. Himself often liked to use rank amateurs; he wanted them simply to read their lines with an amateur's wooden self-consciousness off cue cards Mario or Disney Leith would hold up well to the side of wherever the character was supposed to be looking. Up until the last phase of his career, Himself had apparently thought the stilted, wooden quality of nonprofessionals helped to strip away the pernicious illusion of realism and to remind the audience that they were in reality watching actors acting and not people behaving. Like the Parisian-French Bresson he so admired, Himself had no interest in suckering the audience with illusory realism, he said. The apparent irony of the fact that it required non non actors to achieve this stilted artificial I'm-only-acting-here quality was one of very few things about Himself's early projects that truly interested academic critics. But the real truth was that the early Himself hadn't wanted skilled or believable acting to get in the way of the abstract ideas and technical innovations in the cartridges, and this had always seemed to me more like Brecht than like Bresson. Conceptual and technical ingenuity didn't much interest entertainment-film audiences, though, and one way of looking at Himself's abandonment of anticonfluentialism is that in his last several projects he'd been so desperate to make something that ordinary U.S. audiences might find entertaining and diverting and conducive to self-forgetting actors to achieve this stilted artificial I'm-only-acting-here quality was one of very few things about Himself's early projects that truly interested academic critics. But the real truth was that the early Himself hadn't wanted skilled or believable acting to get in the way of the abstract ideas and technical innovations in the cartridges, and this had always seemed to me more like Brecht than like Bresson. Conceptual and technical ingenuity didn't much interest entertainment-film audiences, though, and one way of looking at Himself's abandonment of anticonfluentialism is that in his last several projects he'd been so desperate to make something that ordinary U.S. audiences might find entertaining and diverting and conducive to self-forgetting 378 378 that he had had professionals and amateurs alike emoting wildly all over the place. Getting emotion out of either actors or audiences had never struck me as one of Himself's strengths, though I could remember arguments during which Mario had claimed I didn't see a lot of what was right there. that he had had professionals and amateurs alike emoting wildly all over the place. Getting emotion out of either actors or audiences had never struck me as one of Himself's strengths, though I could remember arguments during which Mario had claimed I didn't see a lot of what was right there.

Cosgrove Watt was a pro, but he wasn't very good, and before Himself discovered him, Watt's career consisted mostly of regional-market commercials on broadcast television. His widest commercial exposure was as the Dancing Gland in a series of spots for a chain of East Coast endocrinology clinics. He'd worn a bulbous white costume, white toupee, and either a ball-and-chain or white tap-shoes, depending on whether he was portraying the Before-Gland or the After-Gland. Himself during one of these commercials had shouted Eureka at our HD Sony and travelled personally all the way to Glen Riddle, Pennsylvania, where Watt lived with his mother and her cats, to recruit him. He used Cosgrove Watt in almost every project for eighteen months. Watt for a time was to Himself as DeNiro was to Scorsese, McLachlin to Lynch, Allen to Allen. And up until Watt's temporal-lobe problem made his social presence unbearable, Himself had actually put Watt, mother, and cats up in a contiguous suite of what later became prorectors' rooms off the main E.T.A. tunnel, the Moms acquiescing in this but instructing Orin, Mario, and me never ever to remain in a room alone with Watt.

Accomplice! was one of Watt's later roles. It is a sad and simple cartridge, and so short that the TP retracked to the film's beginning in almost no time. Himself's film opens as a beautifully sad young bus-station male prost.i.tute, fragile and epicene and so blond even his eyebrows and lashes are blond, is approached in the Greyhound coffee shop by a flabby, dissipated-looking old specimen with gray teeth and circ.u.mflex eyebrows and obvious temporal-lobe difficulties. Cosgrove Watt plays the depraved older man, who takes the boy home to his lush but somehow scuzzy co-op apartment, in fact the place Himself had rented for O. and the P.G.O.A.T. and had decorated in various gradations of scuz for the interiors of almost all his late projects. was one of Watt's later roles. It is a sad and simple cartridge, and so short that the TP retracked to the film's beginning in almost no time. Himself's film opens as a beautifully sad young bus-station male prost.i.tute, fragile and epicene and so blond even his eyebrows and lashes are blond, is approached in the Greyhound coffee shop by a flabby, dissipated-looking old specimen with gray teeth and circ.u.mflex eyebrows and obvious temporal-lobe difficulties. Cosgrove Watt plays the depraved older man, who takes the boy home to his lush but somehow scuzzy co-op apartment, in fact the place Himself had rented for O. and the P.G.O.A.T. and had decorated in various gradations of scuz for the interiors of almost all his late projects.

The sad and beautiful Aryan-looking boy agrees to seduction by the dissipated old specimen, but only on the condition that the man wear protection. The boy, who is inarticulate, nevertheless makes this stipulation extremely clear. Safe s.e.x or No s.e.x, he stipulates, holding up a familiar foil packet. The hideous old specimen - now in a smoking jacket and ascot of apricot-colored silk, and smoking through a long white FDR-style filter - is offended, thinks the young male prost.i.tute has sized him up as such a depraved and dissipated old specimen that he might well have It, the Human Immuno Virus, he thinks. His thoughts are rendered via animated thought-bubbles, which Himself at that late-middle stage hoped the audience would find at once self-consciously nonillusory and wildly entertaining. Watt's old specimen is grinning grayly in what he thinks is a pleasant way as he obligingly takes the foil packet and removes his ascot with what he believes to be a sensual flourish... but inside his thought-bubble he's having temporal-lobe spasms of s.a.d.i.s.tic rage at the sad blond boy for appearing to size him up as a health risk. The obvious health risk here is referred to, both orally and in the thought-bubble, merely as It It. For example: 'Little b.a.s.t.a.r.d thinks I'm so dissipated-looking that I've been at this sort of thing so long that I'm likely to have It, It, does he,' the old specimen thinks, his thought-bubble going all jagged with rage. does he,' the old specimen thinks, his thought-bubble going all jagged with rage.

So the flabby old specimen's now, at only six minutes into the cartridge, Track 510, he's now taking the sad beautiful boy, in the standard (extravagantly hunched) h.o.m.os.e.xual way, on the canopied bed of his tacky boudoir: the young male prost.i.tute's dutifully a.s.sumed the hunched, h.o.m.o-submissive position because the old ponce has showed him he's wearing the condom. The young prost.i.tute, who's shown (hunched) only from the left side during the act itself, seems beautiful in a fragile, skinny-flanked, visible-ribs way, while the old specimen has the slack a.s.s and pointy little b.r.e.a.s.t.s of a man made grotesque by years of dissipation. The intercourse scene is done under bright lamps, without any sort of soft focus or light-jazz background score to lighten the atmosphere of clinical detachment.

What the sad blond submissive boy doesn't know is that the dissipated old specimen had secretly palmed an old-fashioned one-sharp-sided razor blade when he'd gone into his burgundy-tiled bathroom to gargle with cinnamon mouthwash and dab Calvin Kleinbrand Pheromonic Musk on his flabby pulse-points, and as he hunches animalistically over the boy, he's holding the business end of the blade right up next to the sad boy's a.n.u.s as he takes his pleasure, so that the blade's sharp side slices into both condom and erect phallus on each outthrust, the hideous old specimen unmindful of the blood and whatever pain's involved in the phallic slicing as, still hunched and thrusting, he peels the slit condom off like the skin of a sausage. The young male prost.i.tute, hunched submissively, feels the condom-peel and then the blood and starts struggling like a condemned man, trying to get the condomless bleeding flabby old specimen out and off of him. But the boy's thin and delicate, and the old man has no trouble holding him down with his soft slack flabby weight until he's grimaced and grunted and taken his pleasure to its end. It's apparently an explicit-h.o.m.os.e.xual-s.e.x-scene convention that whoever takes the submissive hunched position keeps his face turned away from the camera while the dominant partner's phallus is inside him, and Himself honors this convention, though a self-conscious footnote subt.i.tled along the bottom of the screen rather irritatingly points out that the scene is honoring a convention. The prost.i.tute turns his agonized face around to the camera only after the depraved older h.o.m.os.e.xual has removed his b.l.o.o.d.y and deflating post-pleasure phallus, brings his blond-browed face around to his left to face the audience in a mute howl as he collapses onto his delicate chest with his arms out on the satin sheets and his violated b.u.m hiked high in the air, revealing now at the crease of his b.u.m and upper hamstring a vivid purple splotch, more vivid than any bruise and with eight spidery tentacles radiating from it that are, the older man's horrified thought-bubble reveals, the unmistakable eight-legged-vivid-contusion-blotch sign of Kaposi's Sarcoma, that most universal symptom of It, It, and the boy is sobbing that the depraved old h.o.m.os.e.xual has made him - the prost.i.tute - a murderer, the boy's racking sobs making the hiked b.u.m waggle in front of the old specimen's horrified face as the boy sobs into the chartreuse satin and shrieks ' and the boy is sobbing that the depraved old h.o.m.os.e.xual has made him - the prost.i.tute - a murderer, the boy's racking sobs making the hiked b.u.m waggle in front of the old specimen's horrified face as the boy sobs into the chartreuse satin and shrieks 'Murderer! Murderer!' over and over, so that almost a third of Accomplice! Accomplice!'s total length is devoted to the racked repet.i.tion of this word - way, way longer than is needed for the audience to absorb the twist and all its possible implications and meanings. This was just the sort of issue Mario and I argued about. As I see it, even though the cartridge's end has both characters emoting out of every pore, Accomplice! Accomplice!'s essential project remains abstract and self-reflexive; we end up feeling and thinking not about the characters but about the cartridge itself. By the time the final repet.i.tive image darkens to a silhouette and the credits roll against it and the old man's face stops spasming in horror and the boy shuts up, the cartridge's real tension becomes the question: Did Himself subject us to 500 seconds of the repeated cry 'Murderer!' for some reason, i.e. is the puzzlement and then boredom and then impatience and then excruciation and then near-rage aroused in the film's audience by the static repet.i.tive final 1 13 of the film aroused for some theoretical-aesthetic end, or is Himself simply an amazingly s.h.i.tty editor of his own stuff?

It was only after Himself's death that critics and theorists started to treat this question as potentially important. A woman at U. CalIrvine had earned tenure with an essay arguing that the reason-versus-no-reason debate about what was unentertaining in Himself's work illuminated the central conundra of millennial apres-garde film, most of which, in the teleputer age of home-only entertainment, involved the question why so much aesthetically ambitious film was so boring and why so much s.h.i.tty reductive commercial entertainment was so much fun. The essay was turgid to the point of being unreadable, besides using reference reference as a verb and pluralizing as a verb and pluralizing conundrum conundrum as as conundra conundra. 379 379 From my horizontal position on the bedroom floor I could use the TP's remote to do everything but actually remove and insert cartridges into the drive's dock. The room's window was now a translucent clot of snow and steam. InterLace's Spontaneous Disseminations for New New England were all about weather. With our subscription system, E.T.A. got numerous large-market Spontaneous tracks. Each track took a slightly different angle on the weather. Each track had a slightly different focus. Remote reports from Boston's North and South sh.o.r.es, Providence, New Haven, and Hartford-Springfield served to establish a consensus that a terrific amount of snow had fallen and was continuing to fall and blow around and pile up. Cars were shown abandoned at hasty angles, and we got to see the universal white VW-Bug-shape of snow-buried cars. Black-helmeted gangs of adolescents on snowmobiles were shown prowling New Haven's streets, clearly up to no good. Pedestrians were shown bent over and floundering; remote-report journalists were shown trying to flounder over to them to get their thoughts and reflections. One floundering reporter in Quincy on the South Sh.o.r.e abruptly disappeared from view except for a hand with a microphone protruding bravely from some sort of sinkhole of snow; the bent backs of technicians were then shown floundering away from the remote camera to his aid. People with snow blowers stood in their own little blizzards. A pedestrian was filmed doing a spectacular pratfall. Cars at all angles in streets were shown with their tires spinning, shuddering in stasis. One track kept cutting back to a man endlessly trying to brush off a windshield that immediately whitened again behind each brushstroke. A bus sat with its snout in a monster-sized drift. ATHSCME fans atop the wall north of Ticonderoga NNY were shown making horizontal cyclones of snow in the air. Rouged somber women in InterLace studios concurred that this was the worst blizzard to hit the region since B.S. 1998 and the second-worst since B.S. 1993. A man in a wheelchair was shown staring stonily at a two-meter drift across the ramp outside the State House. Satellite maps of east-central O.N.A.N. showed a white formation that was spiralled and s.h.a.ggy and seemed to have what looked like claws. It was not a Nor'easter. A hot moist ridge from the Gulf of Mexico and an Arctic cold front had collided over the Concavity. The storm's satellite photo was superimposed on schemata of the '98 a.s.s-kicker and shown to be just about identical. An unwelcome old acquaintance was back, a striking woman with black bangs and vivid lipstick said, smiling somberly. Another track iterated: this was not a Nor'easter. It might have been better to say 'smiling mirthlessly.' The flat glazed eyes of the man brushing impotently at his windshield seemed to represent an important visual image; different tracks kept returning to his face. He refused to acknowledge journalists or requests for thoughts. His was the creepy businesslike face of someone carefully picking up gla.s.s in the road after an accident in which his decapitated wife's been impaled on the steering wheel. Another track's anchor was a beautiful black woman with purple lipstick and what looked like a very tall crew cut. Reports of snow came in from all directions. After a while I stopped keeping track of the number of times the word snow snow was repeated. All synonyms for was repeated. All synonyms for snowstorm snowstorm were rapidly exhausted. Helmetless thrill-seekers on snowmobiles were doing doughnuts in Copley Square downtown. Homeless men hunched nearly drift-covered in doorways, readying snorkels of rolled-up newspaper. Jim Troeltsch, now apparently a resident of B-204, had liked to do a pretty funny impression of an InterLace anchorwoman having an o.r.g.a.s.m. One of the thrill-seekers' snowmobiles spun out of control and plunged into a drift, and the remote camera stayed on the drift for several moments, but nothing emerged. Connecticut's National Guard Reserve had been ordered to a.s.semble but had not a.s.sembled because travel in Connecticut was impossible. Three men in uniforms and gray helmets chased two men in white helmets, all on snowmobiles, for reasons an on-site journalist described as not yet emergent. Remote-site journalists used such words as were rapidly exhausted. Helmetless thrill-seekers on snowmobiles were doing doughnuts in Copley Square downtown. Homeless men hunched nearly drift-covered in doorways, readying snorkels of rolled-up newspaper. Jim Troeltsch, now apparently a resident of B-204, had liked to do a pretty funny impression of an InterLace anchorwoman having an o.r.g.a.s.m. One of the thrill-seekers' snowmobiles spun out of control and plunged into a drift, and the remote camera stayed on the drift for several moments, but nothing emerged. Connecticut's National Guard Reserve had been ordered to a.s.semble but had not a.s.sembled because travel in Connecticut was impossible. Three men in uniforms and gray helmets chased two men in white helmets, all on snowmobiles, for reasons an on-site journalist described as not yet emergent. Remote-site journalists used such words as emergent, individual, alleged, utilize, emergent, individual, alleged, utilize, and and developing developing. But all this impersonal diction was preceded by the anchorperson's first name, as if the report were part of an intimate conversation. An InterLace delivery-boy was shown delivering recorded cartridges on a snowmobile and was described as plucky. Otis P. Lord had undergone a procedure for the removal of the Hitachi monitor on Thursday, LaMont Chu had said. I had never once ridden a snowmobile, skied, or skated: E.T.A. discouraged them. DeLint described winter sports as practically getting down on one knee and begging for an injury. The snowmobiles on the viewer all made sounds like little chain-saws that were extra pugnacious to compensate for being so little. There was a poignant shot of a stuck plow in Northampton. 'Individuals who are not with emergency reasons to travel' (sic) were being officially discouraged from travelling by a state trooper in a hat with a chinstrap. A Brockton man in a Lands' End parka took a fall too burlesque to have been unstaged.

I could barely recall the '98 blizzard. The Academy had been open for only a few months. I remember the edges of the shaved hilltop were still square and steep and striped in sedimentary layers, final construction delayed by some nasty piece of litigation from the VA hospital below. The storm came barrelling in southeast from Canada in March. Dwight Flechette and Orin and the other players had had to be led to the Lung roped together, single file, Scht.i.tt in the lead carrying a highway flare. A couple photos hung in C.T.'s waiting room. The last boy along the rope disappeared into a forlorn gray whirl. The Lung's new bubble had had to be taken down and fixed when snow-weight stove it in on one side. The T stopped running. I remember some of the younger players had cried and sworn up and down that the blizzard wasn't their fault. For days snow churned steadily out of a graphite sky. Himself had sat in a spindle-backed chair, at the same living-room window C.T. now uses for advanced worry, and aimed a series of nondigital cameras at the mounting snow. After years in which his consuming obsession was the establishment of E.T.A., Orin said, Himself had started in with the film-obsession almost immediately after the Academy was up and running. Orin has said the Moms had a.s.sumed the film thing was a pa.s.sing obsession. Himself had seemed interested mostly in the lenses and rasters 380 380 at first, and in the consequences of their modification. He sat in that chair throughout the whole storm, sipping brandy from a one-handed snifter, his long legs not quite covered by a plaid blanket. His legs had seemed to me almost endlessly long back then. He always seemed to be right on the edge of coming down with something. His record up until then indicated that he remained obsessed with something until he became successful at it, then transferred his obsession to something else. From military optics to annular optics to entrepreneurial optics to tennis-pedagogy to film. In the chair during the blizzard he'd had beside him several different types of camera and a large leather case. The inside of the case was striated with lenses down both sides. He used to let Mario and me put different lenses in our eyes and squint to hold them, imitating Scht.i.tt. at first, and in the consequences of their modification. He sat in that chair throughout the whole storm, sipping brandy from a one-handed snifter, his long legs not quite covered by a plaid blanket. His legs had seemed to me almost endlessly long back then. He always seemed to be right on the edge of coming down with something. His record up until then indicated that he remained obsessed with something until he became successful at it, then transferred his obsession to something else. From military optics to annular optics to entrepreneurial optics to tennis-pedagogy to film. In the chair during the blizzard he'd had beside him several different types of camera and a large leather case. The inside of the case was striated with lenses down both sides. He used to let Mario and me put different lenses in our eyes and squint to hold them, imitating Scht.i.tt.

One way of looking at the film-obsession's endurance is that Himself was never really successful or accomplished at filmmaking. This was something else on which Mario and I had agreed to disagree.

It took almost a year to complete the move from Weston to E.T.A. The Moms had attachments in Weston and she drew things out. I was pretty small. I lay flat on my back on our room's carpet and tried to recall details of our home in Weston, twidgeling the TP's remote with my thumb. I do not have Mario's head for remembered detail. One dissemination-track simply panned the metro-Boston sky and horizons from atop the Hanc.o.c.k tower. On the FM band, WYYY was apparently doing its weather-report via mimesis, broadcasting raw static while the student staff doubtless did bongs in celebration of the storm and then went up sliding around the Union's cerebral rooftop. The Hanc.o.c.k camera's pan included the sinciput of the M.I.T. Union, its roof's convolutions filling with snow ahead of the rest of it, creepy filigrees of white against the roof's deep gray.

Our subdorm room's only carpet was an oversized corruption of the carpet page from the Lindisfarne Gospels in which you had to look very closely to make out the tiny p.o.r.nographic scenes in the Byzantine weave surrounding the cross. I'd acquired the carpet years ago during a period of intense interest in Byzantine p.o.r.nography inspired by what I'd seen as a t.i.tillating reference in the O.E.D. O.E.D. I too had moved serially between obsessions, as a child. I adjusted my angle on the carpet. I was trying to align myself along some sort of grain in the world I could barely feel, since Pemulis and I stopped. Meaning the grain, not the world. I realized I could not distinguish my own visual memories of the Weston house from my memories of hearing Mario's detailed reports of his memories. I remember a late-Victorian three-level on a low quiet street of elms, hyperfertilized lawns, tall homes with oval windows and screen porches. One of the street's homes had a pineapple finial. Only the street itself was low; the lots were humped up high and the houses so tall the broad street seemed nevertheless constricted, a sort of affluence-flanked defile. It seemed always to be summer or spring. I could remember the Moms's voice high overhead at a screen-porch door, calling us in as dusk drifted down and leaded fanlights began to light up at homes' doors in some sort of linear sync. Either our driveway or another driveway flanked with whitewashed stones the shapes of beads or drops. The Moms's intricate garden in a backyard enclosed by a fencework of trees. Himself on the screen porch, stirring a gin and tonic with his finger. The Moms's dog S. Johnson, not yet neutered, confined by psychosis in a sort of large fenced pen ab.u.t.ting the garage, running around and around the pen when thunder sounded. The smell of Noxzema: Himself behind Orin in the upstairs bathroom, towering over and down, teaching Orin to shave against the grain, upward. I remember S. Johnson leaping up on his hind legs and sort of playing the fence with his paws as Mario approached the pen: the rattling chain-link's pitch. The circle of earth worn bare by S.J.'s...o...b..t in the pen when thunder sounded or planes crossed overhead. Himself sat low in chairs and could cross his legs and still have both feet flat on the floor. He'd hold his chin in his hand while he looked at you. My memories of Weston seemed like tableaux. They seemed more like snapshots than films. A weird isolated memory of summertime gnats knitting the air above the s.h.a.ggy animal-head of a neighbor's topiary hedge. Our own round shrubs trimmed flat as tabletops by the Moms. More horizontals. The chatter of hedge-clippers, their power-cords bright orange. I had to swallow spit with almost every breath. I remembered climbing with a dawdler's heavy tread the cement steps up from the street to a gambrel-roofed late-Victorian whose narrow height from the steps gave it the distended look of thick liquid hanging: gingerbread eaves, undulate shingles of weathered red, zinc gutters the Moms's graduate students came and kept clean. A blue star in the front window and the words I too had moved serially between obsessions, as a child. I adjusted my angle on the carpet. I was trying to align myself along some sort of grain in the world I could barely feel, since Pemulis and I stopped. Meaning the grain, not the world. I realized I could not distinguish my own visual memories of the Weston house from my memories of hearing Mario's detailed reports of his memories. I remember a late-Victorian three-level on a low quiet street of elms, hyperfertilized lawns, tall homes with oval windows and screen porches. One of the street's homes had a pineapple finial. Only the street itself was low; the lots were humped up high and the houses so tall the broad street seemed nevertheless constricted, a sort of affluence-flanked defile. It seemed always to be summer or spring. I could remember the Moms's voice high overhead at a screen-porch door, calling us in as dusk drifted down and leaded fanlights began to light up at homes' doors in some sort of linear sync. Either our driveway or another driveway flanked with whitewashed stones the shapes of beads or drops. The Moms's intricate garden in a backyard enclosed by a fencework of trees. Himself on the screen porch, stirring a gin and tonic with his finger. The Moms's dog S. Johnson, not yet neutered, confined by psychosis in a sort of large fenced pen ab.u.t.ting the garage, running around and around the pen when thunder sounded. The smell of Noxzema: Himself behind Orin in the upstairs bathroom, towering over and down, teaching Orin to shave against the grain, upward. I remember S. Johnson leaping up on his hind legs and sort of playing the fence with his paws as Mario approached the pen: the rattling chain-link's pitch. The circle of earth worn bare by S.J.'s...o...b..t in the pen when thunder sounded or planes crossed overhead. Himself sat low in chairs and could cross his legs and still have both feet flat on the floor. He'd hold his chin in his hand while he looked at you. My memories of Weston seemed like tableaux. They seemed more like snapshots than films. A weird isolated memory of summertime gnats knitting the air above the s.h.a.ggy animal-head of a neighbor's topiary hedge. Our own round shrubs trimmed flat as tabletops by the Moms. More horizontals. The chatter of hedge-clippers, their power-cords bright orange. I had to swallow spit with almost every breath. I remembered climbing with a dawdler's heavy tread the cement steps up from the street to a gambrel-roofed late-Victorian whose narrow height from the steps gave it the distended look of thick liquid hanging: gingerbread eaves, undulate shingles of weathered red, zinc gutters the Moms's graduate students came and kept clean. A blue star in the front window and the words BLOCK MOTHER, BLOCK MOTHER, which had always suggested either a rectangular woman or some type of football-crowd cheer. The inside cool and dim and a smell of Lemon Pledge. I had no visual memories of my mother without white hair; all that varied was the length. A touch-tone phone, with a cord running into the wall, on a horizontal surface in a recessed alcove near the front door. Cork floors and pre-mounted shelving of woody-smelling wood. The chilling framed print of Lang directing which had always suggested either a rectangular woman or some type of football-crowd cheer. The inside cool and dim and a smell of Lemon Pledge. I had no visual memories of my mother without white hair; all that varied was the length. A touch-tone phone, with a cord running into the wall, on a horizontal surface in a recessed alcove near the front door. Cork floors and pre-mounted shelving of woody-smelling wood. The chilling framed print of Lang directing Metropolis Metropolis in 1924. in 1924. 381 381 A hulking black chest with strap-hinges of bra.s.s. A few of Himself's old heavy tennis trophies as bookends on the mounted shelving. An etagere filled with old-fashioned magnetic videos in bright adverting boxes, a cl.u.s.ter of blue-and-white delfts on the etagere's top shelf that had dwindled as one figurine after another got knocked off by Mario, stumbling or shoved. The blue-white chairs with the protective plastic that made your legs sweat. A divan done in some sort of burlapesque Iranian wool dyed to the color of sand mixed with ash - this may have been a neighbor's divan. Some cigarette burns in the fabric of the divan's arms. Books, videotapes, kitchen's cans - all alphabetized. Everything painfully clean. Several spindle-backed captain's chairs in contrasting fruit-woods. A surreal memory of a steamed lavatory mirror with a knife sticking out of the pane. A ma.s.sive stereo television console of whose gray-green eye I was afraid when the television was off. Some of the memories have to be confabulated or dreamed - the Moms would never have had a divan with burns in it. A hulking black chest with strap-hinges of bra.s.s. A few of Himself's old heavy tennis trophies as bookends on the mounted shelving. An etagere filled with old-fashioned magnetic videos in bright adverting boxes, a cl.u.s.ter of blue-and-white delfts on the etagere's top shelf that had dwindled as one figurine after another got knocked off by Mario, stumbling or shoved. The blue-white chairs with the protective plastic that made your legs sweat. A divan done in some sort of burlapesque Iranian wool dyed to the color of sand mixed with ash - this may have been a neighbor's divan. Some cigarette burns in the fabric of the divan's arms. Books, videotapes, kitchen's cans - all alphabetized. Everything painfully clean. Several spindle-backed captain's chairs in contrasting fruit-woods. A surreal memory of a steamed lavatory mirror with a knife sticking out of the pane. A ma.s.sive stereo television console of whose gray-green eye I was afraid when the television was off. Some of the memories have to be confabulated or dreamed - the Moms would never have had a divan with burns in it.

A picture window east, the direction of Boston, with claret-colored figures and a blue sun all suspended in a web of lead. The candy-colored summer sunrise through that window as I watched television in the A.M.

The tall thin quiet man, Himself, with his razor-burn and bent gla.s.ses and chinos too short, whose neck was slender and shoulders sloped, who slumped in candied east-window sunlight with his tailbone supported by windowsills, meekly stirring a gla.s.s of something with his finger while the Moms stood there telling him she'd long-since abandoned any reasonable hope that he could hear what she was telling him - this silent figure, of whom I still remember mostly endless legs and the smell of Noxzema shave-cream, seems, still, impossible to reconcile with the sensibility of something like Accomplice! Accomplice! It was impossible to imagine Himself conceiving of sodomy and razors, no matter how theoretically. I lay there and could almost remember Orin telling me something almost moving that Himself had once told him. Something to do with It was impossible to imagine Himself conceiving of sodomy and razors, no matter how theoretically. I lay there and could almost remember Orin telling me something almost moving that Himself had once told him. Something to do with Accomplice! Accomplice! The memory hung somewhere just out of conscious reach, and its tip-of-the-tongue inaccessibility felt too much like the preface to another attack. I accepted it: I could not remember. The memory hung somewhere just out of conscious reach, and its tip-of-the-tongue inaccessibility felt too much like the preface to another attack. I accepted it: I could not remember.

Off down the Weston street a church with an announcement-board in the gra.s.s out front - white plastic letters on a slotted black surface - and at least once Mario and I stood watching a goatish man change the letters and thus the announcement. One of the first occasions where I remember reading something involved the announcement-board announcing: LIFE IS LIKE TENNIS THOSE WHO SERVE BEST USUALLY WIN.

with the letters all s.p.a.ced far out like that. A big fresh-cement-colored church, liberal with gla.s.s, denomination not recalled, but built in what was, in the B.S. 80's probably, modern - a parabolic poured-concrete shape billowed and peaked like a cresting wave. A suggestion in it of some paranormal wind somewhere that could make concrete billow and pop like a tucking sail.

Our own subdorm room now has three of those old Weston captain's chairs whose backs dent your spine if you don't fit it carefully between two spindles. We have an unused wicker basket for laundry on which are stacked some corduroy spectation-pillows. Floor plans for Hagia Sophia and S. Simeon at Qal'at Si'man on the wall over my bed, the really prurient part of Consummation of the Levirates Consummation of the Levirates over the chairs, also from the old interest in Byzantinalia. Something about the stiff and dismantled quality of over the chairs, also from the old interest in Byzantinalia. Something about the stiff and dismantled quality of maniera greca maniera greca p.o.r.n: people broken into pieces and trying to join, etc. At the foot of Mario's bed a surplus-store trunk for his own film equipment and a canvas director's chair where he's always laid out his police lock, lead weights, and vest for the night. A fiberboard stand for the compact TP and viewer, and a stenographer's chair for using the TP to type. Five total chairs in a room where no one ever sits in a chair. As in all the subdorm rooms and hallways, a guilloche ran around our walls half a meter from the ceiling. New E.T.A.s always drove themselves bats counting their room's guilloche's interwoven circles. Our room had 811 and truncated bits of -12 and -13, two left halves stuck like open parentheses up in the southwest corner. Between the ages of eleven and thirteen I'd had a plaster knock-off of a lewd Constantine frieze, the emperor with a hyperemic organ and an impure expression, hung by two hooks from the guilloche's lower border. Now I couldn't for the life of me recall what I'd done with the frieze, or which Byzantine seraglio the original had decorated. There had been a time when data like these were instantly available. p.o.r.n: people broken into pieces and trying to join, etc. At the foot of Mario's bed a surplus-store trunk for his own film equipment and a canvas director's chair where he's always laid out his police lock, lead weights, and vest for the night. A fiberboard stand for the compact TP and viewer, and a stenographer's chair for using the TP to type. Five total chairs in a room where no one ever sits in a chair. As in all the subdorm rooms and hallways, a guilloche ran around our walls half a meter from the ceiling. New E.T.A.s always drove themselves bats counting their room's guilloche's interwoven circles. Our room had 811 and truncated bits of -12 and -13, two left halves stuck like open parentheses up in the southwest corner. Between the ages of eleven and thirteen I'd had a plaster knock-off of a lewd Constantine frieze, the emperor with a hyperemic organ and an impure expression, hung by two hooks from the guilloche's lower border. Now I couldn't for the life of me recall what I'd done with the frieze, or which Byzantine seraglio the original had decorated. There had been a time when data like these were instantly available.

The Weston living room had had an early version of Himself's full-spectrum cove lighting and at one end an elevated fieldstone fireplace with a big copper hood that made a wonderful ear-splitting drum-head for wooden spoons, with memories of some foreign adult I didn't recognize grinding at her temples and pleading Do Do Stop. The Moms's jungle of Green Babies had spread out into the room from another corner, the plants' pots on stands of various heights, hanging in nests of twine suspended from clamps, arrayed at eye-height from projecting trellises of white-painted iron, all in the otherworldly glow of a white-hooded tube of ultraviolet light hung with thin chains from the ceiling. Mario can recall violet-lit laces of ferns and the wet meaty gloss of rubber-tree leaves. Stop. The Moms's jungle of Green Babies had spread out into the room from another corner, the plants' pots on stands of various heights, hanging in nests of twine suspended from clamps, arrayed at eye-height from projecting trellises of white-painted iron, all in the otherworldly glow of a white-hooded tube of ultraviolet light hung with thin chains from the ceiling. Mario can recall violet-lit laces of ferns and the wet meaty gloss of rubber-tree leaves.

And a coffee table of green-shot black marble, too heavy to move, on whose corner Mario knocked out a tooth after what Orin swore up and down was an accidental shove.

Mrs. Clarke's varicotic calves at the stove. The way her mouth overhead would disappear when the Moms reorganized something in the kitchen. My eating mold and the Moms's being very upset that I'd eaten it - this memory was of Orin's telling the story; I had no childhood memory of eating fungus.

My trusty NASA gla.s.s still rested on my chest, rising when my rib cage rose. When I looked down my own length, the gla.s.s's round mouth was a narrow slot. This was because of my optical perspective. There was a concise term for optical perspective optical perspective that I again could not quite make resolve. that I again could not quite make resolve.

What made it hard really to recall our old house's living room was that so many of its appointments were now in the living room of the Headmaster's House, the same and yet altered, and by more than rearrangement. The onyx coffee table Mario had fallen against (specular is what refers to optical perspective; it came to me after I stopped trying to recall it) now supported compact disks and tennis magazines and a cello-shaped vase of dried eucalyptus, and the red-steel stand for the family Xmas tree, when in season. The table had been a wedding gift from Himself's mother, who died of emphysema shortly before Mario's surprise birth. Orin reports she'd looked like an embalmed poodle, all neck-tendons and tight white curls and eyes that were all pupil. The Moms's birth-mother had died in Quebec of an infarction when she - the Moms - was eight, her father during her soph.o.m.ore year at McGill under circ.u.mstances none of us knew. The hydrant-sized Mrs. Tavis was still alive and somewhere in Alberta, the original L'Islet potato farm now part of the Great Concavity and forever lost. is what refers to optical perspective; it came to me after I stopped trying to recall it) now supported compact disks and tennis magazines and a cello-shaped vase of dried eucalyptus, and the red-steel stand for the family Xmas tree, when in season. The table had been a wedding gift from Himself's mother, who died of emphysema shortly before Mario's surprise birth. Orin reports she'd looked like an embalmed poodle, all neck-tendons and tight white curls and eyes that were all pupil. The Moms's birth-mother had died in Quebec of an infarction when she - the Moms - was eight, her father during her soph.o.m.ore year at McGill under circ.u.mstances none of us knew. The hydrant-sized Mrs. Tavis was still alive and somewhere in Alberta, the original L'Islet potato farm now part of the Great Concavity and forever lost.

Orin and Bain et al. at Family Trivia during that terrible first year's blizzard, Orin imitating the Moms's high breathy 'My son ate this! G.o.d, please!,' never tiring of it.

Orin had liked also to recreate for us the spooky kyphotic hunch of Himself's mother, in her wheelchair, beckoning him closer with a claw, the way she seemed always caved in over and around her chest as if she'd been speared there. An air of deep dehydration had hung about her, he said, as if she osmosized moisture from whoever came near. She spent her last few years living in the Marlboro St. brownstone they'd had before Mario and I were born, tended by a gerontologic nurse Orin said always wore the expression of every post-office mug shot you've ever seen. When the nurse was off, a small silver bell was apparently hung from an arm of the old lady's wheelchair, to be rung when she could not breathe. A cheery silver tinkle announcing asphyxiation upstairs. Mrs. Clarke would still pale whenever Mario asked about her.

It's become easier to see the climacteric changes in the Moms's own body since she began confining herself more and more to the Headmaster's House. This occurred after Himself's funeral, but in stages - the gradual withdrawal and reluctance to leave the grounds, and the signs of aging. It is hard to notice what you see every day. None of the physical changes has been dramatic - her nerved-up dancer's legs becoming hard, stringy, a shrinking of the hips and a girdly thickening at the waist. Her face settles a little lower on her skull than it did four years ago, with a slight bunching under the chin and an emerging potential for something pruny happening around her mouth, in time, I thought I could see.

The word that best connoted why the gla.s.s's mouth looked slotty was probably foreshortened foreshortened.

The Q.R.S. Infantilist would no doubt join the old grief-therapist in asking how watching one's Moms begin to age makes you feel inside. Questions like these become almost koans: you have to lie when the truth is Nothing At All, since this appears as a textbook lie under the therapeutic model. The brutal questions are the ones that force force you to lie. you to lie.

Either our old kitchen or a neighbor's kitchen panelled with walnut and hung with copper pate-molds and herbal sprigs. An unidentified woman - not Avril or Mrs. Clarke - standing in that kitchen in snug cherry slacks, loafers over bare feet, waggling a mixing spoon, laughing at something, a long-tailed comet of flour on her cheek.

It occurred to me then with some force that I didn't want to play this afternoon, even if some sort of indoor exhibition-meet came off. Not even neutral, I realized. I would on the whole have preferred not to play. What Scht.i.tt might have to say to that, v. what Lyle would say. I was unable to stay with the thought long enough to imagine Himself's response to my refusal to play, if any.

But this was the man who made Accomplice!, Accomplice!, whose sensibility informed the hetero-hardcore M whose sensibility informed the hetero-hardcore Mobius Strips and the sado-periodontal and the sado-periodontal Fun with Teeth Fun with Teeth and several other projects that were just thoroughgoingly nasty and sick. and several other projects that were just thoroughgoingly nasty and sick.

Then it occurred to me that I could walk outside and contrive to take a spill, or squeeze out the window on the rear staircase of HmH and fall several meters to the steep embankment below, being sure to land on the bad ankle and hurt it, so I'd not have to play. That I could carefully plan out a fall from the courts' observation transom or the spectators' gallery of whatever club C.T. and the Moms sent us to to help raise funds, and fall so carefully badly I'd take out all the ankle's ligaments and never play again. Never have to, never get to. I could be the faultless victim of a freak accident and be knocked from the game while still on the ascendant. Becoming the object of compa.s.sionate sorrow rather than disappointed sorrow.

I couldn't stay with this fantastic line of thought long enough to pa.r.s.e out whose disappointment I was willing to cripple myself to avoid (or forgo).

And then out of nowhere it returned to me, the moving thing Himself had said to Orin. This was concerning 'adult' films, which from what I've seen are too downright sad to be truly nasty, or even really entertainment, though the adjective adult adult is kind of a misnomer. is kind of a misnomer.

Orin had told me that once he and Smothergill, Flechette, and I think Penn's older brother had gotten hold of a magnetic video of some old hardcore X-film - The Green Door The Green Door or or Deep Throat, Deep Throat, one of those old chestnuts of cellulite and j.i.s.m. There were excited plans to convene in V.R.3 and watch the thing in secret after Lights Out. The Viewing Rooms at that point had broadcast televisions and magnetic VCR-devices, instructional magvids from Galloway and Braden, etc. Orin and co. were all around fifteen at the time, bombed by their own glands - they were pop-eyed at the prospect of genuine p.o.r.n. There were rules about videos' suitability for viewing in the Honor Code, but Himself was not noted for his discipline, and Scht.i.tt didn't yet have deLint - the first generation of E.T.A.s did pretty much as they pleased off-court, as long as they were discreet. one of those old chestnuts of cellulite and j.i.s.m. There were excited plans to convene in V.R.3 and watch the thing in secret after Lights Out. The Viewing Rooms at that point had broadcast televisions and magnetic VCR-devices, instructional magvids from Galloway and Braden, etc. Orin and co. were all around fifteen at the time, bombed by their own glands - they were pop-eyed at the prospect of genuine p.o.r.n. There were rules about videos' suitability for viewing in the Honor Code, but Himself was not noted for his discipline, and Scht.i.tt didn't yet have deLint - the first generation of E.T.A.s did pretty much as they pleased off-court, as long as they were discreet.

Nevertheless, word about this 'adult' film got around, and somebody - probably Mary Esther Thode's sister Ruth, then a senior and insufferable - ratted the boys' viewing-plans out to Scht.i.tt, who took the matter to Himself. Orin said he was the only one Himself called into the Headmaster's office, which in that era had only one door, which Himself asked Orin to close. Orin recalled seeing none of the unease that always accompanied Himself's attempts at stern discipline. Instead Himself invited Orin to sit and gave him a lemon soda and stood facing him, leaning back slightly so that the front edge of his desk supported him at the tailbone. Himself took his gla.s.ses off and ma.s.saged his closed eyes delicately - almost treasuringly, his old eyeb.a.l.l.s - in the way Orin knew signified that Himself was ruminative and sad. One or two soft interrogatives brought the whole affair out in the open. You could never lie to Himself; somehow you just never had the heart. Whereas Orin made almost an Olympic sport of lying to the Moms. Anyway, Orin quickly confessed to everything.

What Himself said then moved him, Orin told me. Himself told Orin he wasn't going to forbid them to watch the thing if they really wanted to. But just please to keep it discreet, just Bain and Smothergill and Orin's immediate circle, n.o.body younger, and n.o.body whose parents might hear about it, and for G.o.d's sake don't let your mother get wind. But that Orin was old enough to make his own entertainment-decisions, and if he decided he wanted to watch the thing.... And so on.

But Himself said that if Orin wanted his personal, fatherly as opposed to headmasterly, take on it, then he, Orin's father - though he wouldn't forbid it - would rather Orin didn't watch a hard-p.o.r.n film yet. He said this with such reticent earnestness there was no way Orin couldn't ask him how come. Himself felt his jaw and pushed his gla.s.ses up several times and shrugged and finally said he supposed he was afraid of the film giving Orin the wrong idea about having s.e.x. He said he'd personally prefer that Orin wait until he'd found someone he loved enough to want to have s.e.x with and had had s.e.x with this person, that he'd wait until he'd experienced for himself what a profound and really quite moving thing s.e.x could be, before he watched a film where s.e.x was presented as nothing more than organs going in and out of other organs, emotionless, terribly lonely. He said he supposed he was afraid that something like The Green Door The Green Door would give Orin an impoverished, lonely idea of s.e.xuality. would give Orin an impoverished, lonely idea of s.e.xuality.

What poor old O. claimed to have found so moving was Himself's a.s.sumption that O. was still cherry. What moved me me to feel sorry for Orin was that it seemed pretty obvious that that had nothing to do with what Himself was trying to talk about. It was the most open I'd ever heard of Himself being with anybody, and it seemed terribly sad to me, somehow, that he'd wasted it on Orin. I'd never once had a conversation nearly that open or intimate with Himself. My most intimate memory of Himself was the scratchiness of his jaw and the smell of his neck when I fell asleep at supper and he carried me upstairs to bed. His neck was thin but had a good meaty warm smell; I now for some reason a.s.sociate it with the odor of Coach Scht.i.tt's pipe. to feel sorry for Orin was that it seemed pretty obvious that that had nothing to do with what Himself was trying to talk about. It was the most open I'd ever heard of Himself being with anybody, and it seemed terribly sad to me, somehow, that he'd wasted it on Orin. I'd never once had a conversation nearly that open or intimate with Himself. My most intimate memory of Himself was the scratchiness of his jaw and the smell of his neck when I fell asleep at supper and he carried me upstairs to bed. His neck was thin but had a good meaty warm smell; I now for some reason a.s.sociate it with the odor of Coach Scht.i.tt's pipe.