NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

You can be at certain parties and not really be there. You can hear how certain parties have their own implied ends embedded in the choreography of the party itself. One of the saddest times Joelle van Dyne ever feels anywhere is that invisible pivot where a party ends — even a bad party — that moment of unspoken accord when everyone starts collecting his lighter and date, jacket or greatcoat, his one last beer hanging from the plastic rind’s five rings, says certain perfunctory things to the hostess in a way that acknowledges their perfunctoriness without seeming insincere, and leaves, usually shutting the door. When everybody’s voices recede down the hall. When the hostess turns back in from the closed door and sees the litter and the expanding white V of utter silence in the party’s wake.

Joelle, at the end of her rope and preparing to hang from it, listening, is supported by a polished hardwood floor above both river and Bay’s edge, perched uncomfortably in striated light in one of Molly Notkin’s chairs molded in the likeness of great filmmakers from the celluloid canon, seated between empty Cukor and frightening Murnau in Méliès’s fiberglass lap, his trousers’ crease uncomfortable and his cummerbund M.I.T.-crested. The lurid chairs’ directors are larger than life: Joelle’s feet dangle well off the floor, her squished hamstrings beginning to burn under a damp thick cotton Brazilian skirt which is vivid, curled pale purples and fresh red against a Latin black that seems to glow above pale knees and white rayon kneesocks and feet in clogs that are hanging half off, legs swinging like a child’s, always feeling like a child in Molly’s chairs, conspicuously perched in the eye of a bad party’s somewhat forced-feeling storm of wit and good cheer, sitting by herself under what used to be her window, the daughter of a low-pH chemist and homemaker from western Kentucky, a lot of fun to be with, normally, if you can get over the disconcerting veil.

Among pernicious myths is the one where people always get very upbeat and generous and other-directed right before they eliminate their own map for keeps. The truth is that the hours before a suicide are usually an interval of enormous conceit and self-involvement.

There are decorative bars, slender and of black iron that pigeon droppings have made piebald, over the west windows to this third-floor cooperative apartment on the East Cambridge fringes of the Back Bay, where near-Professor Notkin is holding a party to celebrate passing her Orals in Film & Film-Cartridge Theory, the doctoral program where Joelle — before her retreat into broadcast sound — had met her.

Molly Notkin often confides on the phone to Joelle van Dyne about the one tormented love of Notkin’s life thus far, an erotically circumscribed G. W. Pabst scholar at New York University tortured by the neurotic conviction that there are only a finite number of erections possible in the world at any one time and that his tumescence means e.g. the detumescence of some perhaps more deserving or tortured Third World sorghum farmer or something, so that whenever he tumefies he’ll suffer the same order of guilt that your less eccentrically tortured Ph.D.-type person will suffer at the idea of, say, wearing baby-seal fur. Molly still takes the high-speed rail down to visit him every couple weeks, to be there for him in case by some selfish mischance he happens to harden, prompting in him black waves of self-disgust and an extreme neediness for understanding and nonjudgmental love. She and poor Molly Notkin are just the same, Joelle reflects, seated alone, watching doctoral candidates taste wine — sisters, sororal twins. With her fear of direct light, Notkin. And the disguises and whiskers are simply veiled veils. How many sub-rosa twins are there, out there, really? What if heredity, instead of linear, is branching? What if it’s not arousal that’s so finitely circumscribed? What if in fact there were ever only like two really distinct individual people walking around back there in history’s mist? That all difference descends from this difference? The whole and the partial. The damaged and the intact. The deformed and the paralyzingly beautiful. The insane and the attendant. The hidden and the blindingly open. The performer and the audience. No Zen-type One, always rather Two, one upside-down in a convex lens.

Joelle is thinking about what she has in her purse. She sits alone in her linen veil and pretty skirt, obliquely looked at, listening to bits of conversation she reels in out of the overall voices’ noise but seeing no one really else, the absolute end of her life and beauty running in a kind of stuttered old hand-held 16mm before her eyes, projected against the white screen on her side, for once, from Uncle Bud and twirling to Orin and Jim and YYY, all the way up to today’s wet walk here from the Red Line’s Downtown stop, walking the whole way from East Charles St., employing a self-conscious and kind of formal stride, but undeniably pretty, the overall walk toward her last hour was, on this last day before the great O.N.A.N.ite Interdependence revel. East Charles to the Back Bay today is a route full of rained-on sienna-glazed streets and upscale businesses with awnings and wooden signs hung with cute Colonial script, and people looking at her like you look at the blind, naked gazes, not knowing she could see everything at all times. She likes the wet walk for this, everything milky and halated through her veil’s damp linen, the brick sidewalks of Charles St. unchipped and impersonally crowded, her legs on autopilot, she a perceptual engine, holding the collar of her overcoat closed at her poncho’s neckline in a way that lets her hold the veil secure against her face with a finger on her chin, thinking always about what she has in her purse, stopping in at a discount tobacco-nist and buying a quality cigar in a glass tube and then a block later placing the cigar inside carefully in among the overflowing waste atop a corner receptacle of pine-green mesh, but keeps the tube, puts the glass tube in her purse, can hear the rain’s thup on tight umbrellas and hear it hiss in the street, and can see droplets broken and regathering on her polyresin coat, cars sheening by with the special lonely sound of cars in rain, wipers making black rainbows on taxis’ shining windshields. In every alley are green I.W.D. dumpsters and the smaller red I.W.D. dumpsters to take the over-flow from the green dumpsters. And the sound of her wood-sole clogs against the receding staccato of brittle women’s high heels on brick westward as Charles St. now approaches Boston Common and becomes less quaint and upscale: sodden litter — flat the way only wet litter can be flat — appears on the sidewalk and in the curb’s seam, and now murky-colored people with sacks and grocery carts appraising that litter, squatting to lift and sift through litter; and the rustle and jut of limbs from dumpsters being sifted by people who all day do nothing but sift through I.W.D. dumpsters; and other people’s blue shoeless limbs extending in coronal rays from refrigerator boxes in each block’s three alleys, and the little cataract of rainwater off the edge of each dumpster’s red annex’s downsloping side and hitting refrigerator boxes’ tops with a rhythmless thappathappappathap; somebody going Pssssst from an alley’s lip, and ghastly-white or blotched faces declaiming to thin air from recessed doorways curtained by rain, and for an other-directed second Joelle wishes she’d hung on to the cigar, to give away, and moving westward into the territory of the Endless Stem near the end of Charles she starts to dispense change she is asked for from doorways and inverted up-tilted boxes; and she gets asked about the deal with the veil with a lack of delicacy she rather prefers. A sooty wheelchaired man with a dead white face below a NOTRE RAI PAYS cap silently extends a hand for coins — a puffed red cut across that businesslike palm is half-healed and almost visibly closing. It looks like a dent in dough. Joelle gives him a folded U.S. twenty and likes that he says nothing.

She buys a .473-liter Pepsi Cola in a blunt plastic bottle at a Store 24 whose Jordanian clerk just looks at her blankly when she asks if they carry Big Red Soda Water, and settles for the Pepsi and comes out and pours the pop out down a storm-drain and watches it pool there foaming brownly and stay put because the drain’s grate is clogged solid with leaves and sodden litter. She walks on toward the Common with the empty bottle and glass tube in her purse. There was no need to buy Chore Boy pads at the Store 24.

Joelle van Dyne is excruciatingly alive and encaged, and in the director’s lap can call up everything from all times. What will be that most self-involved of acts, self-cancelling, to lock oneself in Molly Notkin’s bedroom or bath and get so high that she’s going to fall down and stop breathing and turn blue and die, clutching her heart. No more back and forth. Boston Common is like a lush hole Boston’s built itself around, a two-k. square of shiny trees and dripping limbs and green benches over wet grass. Pigeons all over, the same sooty cream as the willows’ rinds. Three young black men perched like tough crows along a bench’s back approve her body and call her bitch with harmless affection and ask where’s the wedding at. No more deciding to stop at 2300h. and then barely getting through the hour’s show and hurtling back home at 0130h. and smoking the Chore Boy’s resins and not stopping after all. No more throwing the Material away and then half an hour later rooting through the trash, no more all-fours scrutiny of the carpet in hopes of a piece of lint that looks enough like the Material to try to smoke. No more singeing the selvage of veils. The Common’s south edge is Boylston Street with its 24/7 commerce, upscale, cashmere scarves and cellular holsters, doormen with gold braid, jewelers with three names, women with valence-curtain bangs, stores disgorging shoppers with their wide white monogrammed twine-handle bags. The rain’s wet veil blurs things like Jim had designed his neonatal lens to blur things in imitation of a neonatal retina, everything recognizable and yet without outline. A blur that’s more deforming than fuzzy. No more clutching her heart on a nightly basis. What looks like the cage’s exit is actually the bars of the cage. The afternoon’s meshes. The entrance says EXIT. There isn’t an exit. The ultimate annular fusion: that of exhibit and its cage. Jim’s own Cage III: Free Show.It is the cage that has entered her, somehow. The ingenuity of the whole thing is beyond her. The Fun has long since dropped off the Too Much. She’s lost the ability to lie to herself about being able to quit, or even about enjoying it, still. It no longer delimits and fills the hole. It no longer delimits the hole. There’s a certain smell to a rain-wet veil. Something about that caller and the moon, saying the moon never looked away. Revolving and yet not. She had hurtled on back home on the night’s final T and gone home and at least finally not turned her face away from the situation, the predicament that she didn’t love it anymore she hated it and wanted to stop and also couldn’t stop or imagine stopping or living without it. She had in a way done as they’d made Jim do near the end and admitted powerlessness over this cage, this unfree show, weeping, literally clutching her heart, smoking first the Chore Boy-scrap she’d used to trap the vapors and form a smokable resin, then bits of the carpet and the acetate panties she’d filtered the solution through hours earlier, weeping and veilless and yarn-haired, like some grotesque clown, in all four mirrors of her little room’s walls.

CHRONOLOGY OF ORGANIZATION OF NORTH AMERICAN NATIONS’ REVENUE-ENHANCING SUBSIDIZED TIME™, BY YEAR

(1) Year of the Whopper(2) Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad(3) Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar(4) Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken(5) Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster(6) Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office, Or Mobile (sic) (7) Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland(8) Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment(9) Year of Glad ⁷⁸ Jim’s eldest, Orin — punter extraordinaire, dodger of flung acid extra-ordinaire — had once shown Joelle van Dyne his childhood collection of husks of the Lemon Pledge that the school’s players used to keep the sun off. Different-sized legs and portions of legs, well-muscled arms, a battery of five-holed masks hung on nails from an upright fiberboard sheet. Not all the husks had names below them.

Boylston St. east means she passes again the black-bronze equestrian statue of Boston’s Colonel Shaw and the MA 54th, illuminated now by a patch of emergent sunlight, Shaw’s metal head and raised sword illicitly draped in a large Québecois fleur-de-lis flag with all four irises’ stems altered to red blades, so it’s absurdly now a red white and blue flag; three Boston cops on ladders with poles and shears; the Canadian militants come in the night, on the eve of Interdependence, thinking anyone cares whether they hang things from historic icons, hang anti-O.N.A.N. flags, as if anyone not paid to remove them cares one way or the other. The encaged and suicidal have a really hard time imagining anyone caring passionately about anything. And here too are E. Boylston’s dealers, sirens of the other, second cage, standing as always outside F.A.O. Schwartz, young little black boys, boys so black they’re blue, horrifically skinny and young, little more than living shadows in knit caps and knee-length sweatshirts and very white hightops, shifting and blowing into their cupped hands, alluding to the availability of a certain Material, just barely alluding is all, with their postures and bored blank important gaze. Certain salesmen have only to stand there. Certain types of sales: the customer comes to you; and Lo. The cops at the flag across the street don’t give them a look. Joelle hurries past the line of dealers, she tries to, her clogs loose and clocking, tarrying for just a moment at the end, just past the gauntlet’s end, still within two extended hands’ reach of the last bored dealer; for here on the street outside Schwartz is placed an odd adverting display, not a live salesman of any sort but rather a humanoid figure of something that’s better than cardboard, untouched by the vendors who don’t seem even to look, a display on an angled rear-mount stand like a photo-frame’s stand, 2-D, the figure a man in a wheelchair, in a coat and tie, his lap blanketed and no legs below, his well-fed face artistically reddened with some terrible joy, his smile’s arc of the extreme curvature that exists between mirth and fury, his ecstasy terrible to see, his head hairless and plastic and cast back, his eyes on the blue harlequin-patches of the post-storm sky, looking straight up, or having a seizure, or ecstatic, his arms also up and out in a gesture of submission or triumph or thanks, his oddly thick right hand the receptacle for the black spine of the case of some new film cartridge being advertised for distribution, the cartridge stuck like a tongue out of a slot in his (lineless) palm; except there is only this display, this ecstatic figure and a cartridge no feral vendor’s removed, no mention of title, no blurbs or quoted references to critics’ thumbs, the case’s spine itself bare black slightly pebbled generic plastic, conspicuously unlabelled. Two Oriental women’s shopping bags catch and make her raincoat billow slightly as Joelle stands there briefly, feeling the lines’ dealers looking at her, assessing; and then someone calls something to one of the cops halfway up the statue, using his first name, which echoes slightly and breaks the spell; the little black boys look away. None of the passersby seem to notice the display she stands before, reflecting. It’s some kind of anti-ad. To direct attention at what is not said. Lead up to an inevitability you deny. Not new. But an expensive and affecting display. The film-cartridge itself would be a blank, too, or the case empty, worthless because it really can be removed all the way from the slot in the figure’s hand. Joelle removes it and looks at it and puts it back. She’s had her last fling with film cartridges. Jim had used her several times. Jim at the end had filmed her at prodigious and multi-lensed length, and refused to share what he’d made of it, and died w/o a note. ⁷⁹ Her mental name for the man had been ‘Infinite Jim.’ The display cartridge shoves home with a click. One of the such young dealers calls her Mama and asks where’s the funeral at.

For a while, after the acid, after first Orin left and then Jim came and made her sit through that filmed apology-scene and then vanished and then came back but only to — only four years seven months six days past — to leave, for a while, after taking the veil, for a while she liked to get really high and clean. Joelle did. Scrub sinks until they were mint-white. Dust the ceilings without using any kind of ladder. Vacuum like a fiend and put in a fresh vacuum-bag after each room. Imitate the wife and mother they both declined to shoot. Use Incandenza’s toothbrush on tiles’ grout.

In places along Boylston cars are triple-parked. People’s wipers are on that setting that Joelle, who does not drive, imagines to read OCCASIONAL on the controls. Her own personal Daddy’s old car had wipers’ controls on the turn-signal stalk by the wheel. Available yellow cabs pass, hissing in the streets. Over half the passing cabs out here in the rain are advertising themselves as available, purple numbers lit below TAXI. As she remembers things Jim was, besides a great filmic mind and her true heart’s friend, the world’s best hailer of Boston cabs, known to have less hailed than conjured cabs in spots where Boston cabs by all that’s right just aren’t, a hailer of Boston cabs in places like Veedersburg, Indiana and Powell, Wyoming, something in the authority of the lifted arm’s height, the oncoming taxi undergoing a sort of parallax as it bore down over tumbleweed streets, appearing under Incandenza’s upraised palm as if awaiting benediction. He was a tall and physically slow-moving man with a great love of taxis. And they loved him back. Never again a cab in four-plus years, after that. And so Joelle van Dyne, a.k.a. Madame P., surrendered, suicidal, eschews tumbrel or hack, her solid clogs sounding formal on the smooth cement down Boylston’s sidewalk past fine stores’ revolving doors southeast toward serious brownstone-terrain, open coat swirling over poncho and hanging rain breaking into stutters and drips.

After she had smoked homemade freebase cocaine this A.M. for the last time and then fired up the Chore Boys and good panties she’d used as a last filter and choked on burnt acetate when she shredded and smoked them, and had wept and imprecated at the mirrors and thrown away her paraphernalia again for the final time, when an hour later she’d walked not formally to her T-stop under a parliament of gathering storm-clouds and faint sticky bits of autumn thunder to ride to Upper Brighton and find Lady Delphina, get real weight from Lady Delphina, so hard to just cut it off in mid-binge, on a Saturday, unless you just passed out, to tell L.D. when she’d said goodbye and it was the last time it had been really the penultimate time but that this was the last time, this was goodbye for real, and get serious weight from Lady Delphina, pay her twice the 8-gram rate as a generous farewell, as she walked without much real formality to her T-stop and stood on the platform, each time mistaking little mutters of thunder for the approach of the train, wanting more of it so badly she could feel her brain heaving around in its skull, then a pleasant and gentle-faced older black man in raincoat and hat with a little flat black feather in the band and the sort of black-frame styleless spectacles pleasant older black men wear, with the weary but dignified mild comportment of the older black, waiting alone with her on the chill dim Davis Square subway platform, this man had folded his Herald neatly lengthwise and had it under the same arm he tipped his hat with and said to excuse him if this was an intrusion, he said, but he’d had occasion to see one or two of these linen veils before, around, like what she wore, and was interested and rendered curious. He pronounced all four syllables of interested, which Joelle, from Kentucky, enjoyed. If he might be so bold, he said, tipping his hat. Joelle had engaged with him completely, which was extremely rare, even off the air. She rather welcomed the chance to think about anything else at all, with the train surely never pulling in. She reflected that the anecdote had gotten about, but not the incident’s legacy, she said, as if that part were hidden. The Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed was unofficially founded in London in B.S. 1940 in London U.K. by the cross-eyed, palate-clefted, and wildly carbuncular wife of a junior member of the House of Commons, a lady whom Sir Winston Churchill, P.M.U.K., having had several glasses of port plus a toddy at a reception for an American Lend-Lease administrator, had addressed in a fashion wholly inappropriate to social intercourse between civilized gentlemen and ladies. Unwittingly all but authoring the Union designed to afford the scopophobic empathic fellowship and the genesis of sturdy inner resources through shame-free and unconstrained concealment, W. Churchill — when the lady, no person’s doormat, informed him with prim asperity that he appeared to be woefully inebriated — made the anecdotally famous reply that while, yes, yea verily, he was indeed inebriated, he would the following A.M. be once again sober, while she, dear lady, would tomorrow still be hideously and improbably deformed. Churchill, doubtless under weighty emotional pressures during this period in history, had then proceeded to extinguish his cigar in the lady’s sherry and to place a finger-bowl napkin delicately over the ruined features of her flaming visage. The laminated non-photo U.H.I.D. membership card Joelle showed the interested old black gentleman related all this data and more in a point-size so tiny the card looked somehow both blank and defaced.

PUTATIVE CURRICULUM VITAE OF HELEN P. STEEPLY, 36, 1.93 M., 104 KG., A.B., M.J.A.

1 Year, Time (graduate intern, ‘Newsmakers’ Section); 16 Months, Decade Magazine(‘Hottest and Nottest,’ a trends-and-style-analysis column) until Decade folded; 5 Years, Southwest Annual(human-interest, geriatric-medical, personality and tourism articles); 5 Months, Newsweek (11 small features on trends and entertainment until her Executive Editor, with whom she was in love, left Newsweek and took her with him); 1 Year, Ladies Day(personality and medical-cosmetic features — some research first-hand — until one week in which the Executive Editor reconciled with his wife and H.P.S. got mugged and purse-snatched on W. 62nd and vowed never again to live in Manhattan); 15 Months–Present, Moment magazine, Southwest Bureau, Erythema AZ (medical, soft sports, personality, and home-entertainment-trends reporting, masthead byline, contributing-editor status). Thereafter proceeding first to the Upper Brighton and now to the cooperative Back Bay–edge brownstone she had lived in once with Orin and performed in with his father and then passed on to Molly Notkin, today’s party’s guest of honor and hostess in one, as of yesterday enjoying A.B.D. pre-doctoral status in Film & Film-Cartridge Theory at M.I.T., having cleared the notorious hurdle of Oral Examinations on that day by offering her examination committee a dramatically rendered and if she did say so herself devastating oral critique of post-millennial Marxist Film-Cartridge Theory from the point of view of Marx himself, Marx as pretend-film-cartridge theorist and scholar. Still dressed as K.M. a day later, in celebration — the glued beard matted and pubic-black, Homburg ordered direct from Wiesbaden, soot from a terribly obscure British souvenir-filth shop — she has no idea that Joelle’s been in a cage since Y.T.S.D.B., has no idea what she and Jim Incandenza were even about for twenty-one months, whether they were lovers or what, whether Orin left because they were lovers or what, ⁸⁰ or that Joelle even now lives hand-to-lung on a grossly generous trust willed her by a man she unveiled for but never slept with, the prodigious punter’s father, infinite jester, director of a final opus so magnumhe’d claimed to have had it locked away. Joelle’s never seen the completed assembly of what she’d appeared in, or seen anyone who’s seen it, and doubts that any sum of scenes as pathologic as he’d stuck that long quartzy auto-wobbling lens on the camera and filmed her for could have been as entertaining as he’d said the thing he’d always wanted to make had broken his heart by ending up.

Climbing to the third-floor, stairs pale from wear, still trembling from the A.M.’s interruptus, Joelle finds herself having a hard time, climbing, as if the force of gravity goes up as she does. The party-sounds start around the second landing. Here is Molly Notkin dressed as a crumbling Marx again greeting Joelle at her door with the sort of delighted mock-surprise U.S. hostesses use for greetings. Notkin secures Joelle’s veil for her during removal of the beaded coat and poncho, then lifts the veil slightly in a practiced two-finger gesture to deliver a double-cheek kiss that is sour with cigarettes and wine — Joelle never smokes when veiled — asking how Joelle got here and then without waiting for an answer offering her that odd kind of British-Columbian apple juice they’d found they both liked so, and that Joelle at home’s abandoned and gone back to the Big Red Soda Water of childhood, which Notkin doesn’t know, and still cluelessly considers extra-sweet Canadian juice to be pretty much both her and Joelle’s biggest vices. Molly Notkin’s the kind of soul you want desperately to be polite to but have to hide it with because she’d be mortified if she suspected you were ever just being polite to her about anything.

Joelle makes a get-out-of-here gesture. ‘The really really good kind?’

‘The kind that looks muddy it’s so fresh.’

‘Where’d you get it this late this far east?’

‘The kind you just about have to strain it’s so fresh.’

The living room is full and hot, campy mambo playing, walls still the same off-white but all the trim now a confectioner’s rich brown. Or plus there’s wine, Joelle sees, a whole assortment on the old sideboard it took three men with cigars in gray jumpsuits to get up the stairs when they got it, an assortment of bottles of different shapes and dim colors and different levels of what’s inside. Molly Notkin has one dirty-nailed hand on Joelle’s arm and one on the head of a chair of Maya Deren brooding avant-gardedly in vivid spun-glass polymers, and is telling Joelle about her Orals in a party’s near-shout that will leave her hoarse well before this big one’s sad end.

A good muddy juice fills Joelle’s mouth with spit that’s as good as the juice, and her linen veil is drying and beginning once again comfortingly to flutter with her breath, and, perched alone and glanced at covertly by persons who don’t know they know her voice, she feels the desire to raise the veil before a mirror, to refine some of her purse’s untouched Material, raise the veil and set free the encaged rapacious thing inside to breathe the only uncloth’d gas it can stomach; she feels ghastly and sad; she looks like death, her mascara’s all over the place; no one can tell. The plastic Pepsi bottle and glass cigar tube and lighter and packet of glycine bags are a shape in the corner of the rain-darkened cloth purse that rests on the floor just below her dangling clogs. Molly Notkin is standing with Rutherford Keck and Crosby Baum and a radically bad-postured man before the school-supplied Infernatron viewer. Baum’s wide back and pompadour obscure whatever’s on the screen. Academics’ voices sound nasal, with a cultivated stutter at sentences’ start. A good many of James O. Incandenza’s films were silent. He was a self-acknowledged visual filmmaker. His damaged grinning boy Joelle never got to know because Orin had disliked him often carried the case with the lenses, grinning like somebody squinting into bright light. That insufferable child actor Smothergill used to contort his face at the boy and he’d just laugh, which sent Smothergill into tantrums that Miriam Prickett would resolve in the bathroom somehow. An old Latin-revival CD issues at acceptable volume from the speakers screwed into planters and hung with thin chains from each corner of the cream ceiling. Another large loose group is dancing in the cleared space between the cluster of directorial chairs and the bedroom door, most favoring Y.D.A.U.’s Minimal Mambo, this autumn’s East Coast anticraze, the dancers appearing to be just this side of standing still, the subtlest possible hints of fingers snapping under right-angled elbows. Orin Incandenza, she has not forgotten, had a poor mottled swollen elbow above a forearm the size of a leg of lamb. He had switched neatly from arm to leg. Joelle was Orin Incandenza’s only lover for twenty-six months and his father’s optical beloved for twenty-one. A foreign academic with an almost Franciscan bald spot has the swirling limp of someone with a prosthesis — hired by M.I.T. after her time. The better dancers’ movements are so tiny they are evocative and compel watching, their near-static mass curdled and bent somehow subtly around one beautiful young woman, quite beautiful, her back undulating minimally in a thin tight blue-and-white-striped sailorish top as she alludes to a cha-cha with maracas empty of anything to rattle, watching herself almost dance in the full-length mirror of quality plate that after Orin left Joelle had forbidden Jim to hang and had slid beneath her bed face-down; now it’s the west wall’s framed mirror, hung between two empty ornate gilt frames Notkin thinks she’s been retroironic by having the frames themselves framed, in rather less ornate frames, in wry allusion to the early-Experialist fashion of making art out of the accessories of artistic presentation, the framed frames hanging not quite evenly on either side of the mirror he’d cut for the scenes of that last ghastly thing he’d made her stand before, reciting in the openly empty tones she’d gone on to use on-air; the girl stands transfixed in alternating horizontal blue and white, then vertically sliced by bar-cut sunlight, diced, drunk, so wrecked on good vintage her lips hang slack and the reflected cheeks’ muscles have lost all integrity and the cheeks jiggle like the outstanding paps in her little sailor’s top. Apocalyptic rouge and a nose-ring that’s either electrified or is catching bits of light from the window. She is watching herself with unselfconscious fascination in the only serviceable mirror here outside the bathroom. This absence of shame at the self-obsession. Is she Canadian? Mirror-cult? Not possibly a U.H.I.D.: the bearing’s all wrong. But now, whispered to by a near-motionless man in an equestrian helmet, she turns abruptly falling away from her own reflection to explain, not to the man so much as no one in particular, the whole dancing mass: I was just looking at my tits she says looking down at herself aren’t they beautiful, and it’s moving, there’s something so heartbreakingly sincere in what she says Joelle wants to go to her, tell her it is and will be completely all right, she’s pronounced beautiful like the earlier interested in four syllables, splitting the diphthong, betraying her class and origin with the heartbreaking openness Joelle’s always viewed as either terribly stupid or terribly brave, the girl raising her striped arms in triumph or artless thanks for being constructed this way, these ‘tits,’ built by whom and for whom never occurring, artlessly ecstatic, she is not drunk Joelle now sees but has taken Ecstasy, Joelle can see, from the febrile flush and eyes jacked so wide you can make out brain-meat behind the balls’ poles, a.k.a. X or MDMA, a beta-something, an early synthetic, emotional acid, the Love Drug so-called, big among the artistic young under say Bush and successors, since fallen into relative disuse because its pulverizing hangover has been linked to the impulsive use of automatic weapons in public venues, a hangover that makes a freebase hangover look like a day at the emotional beach, the difference between suicide and homicide consisting perhaps only in where you think you discern the cage’s door: Would she kill somebody else to get out of the cage? Was the allegedly fatally entertaining and scopophiliac thing Jim alleges he made out of her unveiled face here at the start of Y.T.S.D.B. a cage or really a door? Had he even cut the tape into something coherent? There was nothing coherent in the mother-death-cosmology and apologies she’d repeated over and over, inclined over that auto-wobbled lens propped up in the plaid-sided pram. He never let her see it, not even the dailies. He killed himself less than ninety days later. Fewer than ninety days? How much must a person want out, to put his head in a microwave oven? A dim woman all the kids had known of in Boaz had put her cat in a microwave to dry it after a tick-bath and set the oven just on Defrost and the cat ended up all over the woman’s kitchen’s walls. How would you rig the thing so it would activate with the door open? Is there just some sort of refrigerator-light button you could hold down and secure with tape? Would the tape melt? She cannot remember thinking of it once in four years. Did she kill him, somehow, just inclining veilless over that lens? The woman in love with her own breasts is being congratulated with the subtlest possible allusions to clapping hands from barely animate dancers with their glass tulips held between their teeth, and Vogelsong of Emerson College tries suddenly to stand on his head and is immediately ill in a spreading plum-colored ectoplasm the dancers do not even try to evade the spread of, and Joelle applauds the Xtatic woman as well, because they are, Joelle admits freely, the paps, they are attractive, which in the Union is designated Compelling Within Compatible Relative Limits; Joelle has no problem seeing beauty approved, within compatible relative limits; she feels not empathy or maternal nurture any longer, just a desire to swallow every last drop of saliva she will ever manufacture and exit this vessel, have fifteen more minutes of Too Much Fun, eliminate her own map with the afflatus of the blind god of all doorless cages; and she lets herself slide forward from Méliès’ lap, a tiny fall, leading with her lumpy purse and glass of matte apple juice toward the door beyond the lines of a becalmed conga and doorway’d huddles of a warm and well-felt theoretical party. And then, again, delays, dithers, and the easement to the bathroom is blocked. She is the only veiled woman here, and an academic generation ahead of most of these candidates, and rather feared, even though not many know she is an Aural Personality, feared for quitting instead of failing, and because of the connection of the memory of Jim, and she is given a certain wide social berth, allowed to delay and orbit and stand unengaged at the fringes of shifting groups, obliquely glanced at, veil going concave at each inbreath, waiting with hip-shot nonchalance for the bathroom off the bedroom to clear, Iaccarino the Chaplin-archivist and a jaundice-yellow older man have gone into Molly’s bedroom and left the door ajar, waiting nonchalantly, ignoring the foreign academic who wishes to know where she works with that veil, turning from him, rudely, brain heaving in its bone-box, memorizing every detail like collecting empty shells, sipping cloudy juice under neatly lifted corners of veil, now looking at instead of through the translucent cloth, the Improbably Deformed’s equivalent of closing the eyes in concentration on sound, letting the Very Last Party wash over her, passed gracefully by different mingling guests and once or twice almost touched, seeing only inrushing and then billowing white, listening to different mingling voices the way the unveiled young taste wine.

‘This is a technologically constituted space.’

‘— thing opens tight on Remington in a hideous grandfatherly flannel suit, b & w, straight full-frontal shot in this grainy b & w stuff Bouvier taught him to manipulate the f-stop to mimic that horrid old Super 8, straight full-frontal, staring past the camera, no attempt to disguise he’s reading off a prompter, monotone and all, saying “Few foreigners realize that the German term Berliner is also the vulgate idiom for a common jelly doughnut, and thus that Kennedy’s seminal ‘Ich bein ein Berliner’was greeted by the Teutonic crowds with a delight only apparently political,” at which point he aims his thumb and finger at his own temple at which point his TA doubles the focal-length so there’s this giant —’

‘I would die to defend your constitutional right to error, friend, but in this one case you —’

‘They used to be less beautiful but then Rutherford said to quit sleeping face-down.’

‘No no I’m saying that this, this whole thing, what you and I are discoursing within, is a technologically constituted space.’

‘À du nous avons foi au poison.’

‘It’s good cheese, but I’ve had better cheese.’

‘Mainwaring, this is Kirby, Kirby here’s in pain, he’s been telling me about it and now he’d like to tell you about it.’

‘— complete mystery why Eve Plumb didn’t show, it’s known she’d reupped for the part, the whole rest of them were there, even Henderson and that Davis woman as Alice who had to be wheeled out under nurses’ care, my God and Peter, looking as if he’d eaten nothing but pastry for the past forty years, Greg with that absurd hairpiece and snakeskin boots, yes but all the kids recognizable, underneath, somehow, this pre-digital insistence on continuity through time that was the project’s whole magic and raison, you know this, you’re current on pre-digital phenomenology and Brady-theory. And then but now here’s this entirely incongruous middle-aged black woman playing Jan!’

‘De gustibus non est disputandum.’

‘Balls.’

‘An incongruous central blackness could have served to accentuate the terrible whiteness that had been in ineluct —’

‘The entire historical effect of a seminal program was horribly, horribly altered. Terribly altered.’

‘Eisenstein and Kurosawa and Michaux walk into a bar.’

‘You know those mass-market cartridges, for the masses? The ones that are so bad they’re somehow perversely good? This was worse than that.’

‘— so-called phantom, but real. And mobile. First the spine. Then not the spine but the right eye-socket. Then the old socket’s fit as a fiddle but the thumb, the thumb doubles me over. It won’t stay put.’

‘Fucks with the emulsion’s gradient so that all the tesseract’s angles appear to be right-angled, except in —’

‘So what I did I sat right up next to him, you see, so in a sense he didn’t have room to stalk or draw a bead, Keck had said they needed a good ten m., so I cocked the hat just so, just ever so slightly, like so, just cocked it over to the side like so and sat down practically on the man’s knee, asked after his show-carp, he keeps pedigreed carp, and of course you can imagine what —’

‘— more interesting issue from a Heideggerian perspective is a priori,whether space as a concept is enframed by technology as a concept.’

‘It has a mobile cunning, a kind of wraith- or phantom-like —’

‘Because they’re emotional more labile at that stage.’

‘ “So get dentures?” she said. “So get dentures?” ’

‘Who shot The Incision? Who did the cinematography on The Incision?’

‘— way it can be film qua film. Comstock says if it even exists it has to be something more like an aesthetic pharmaceutical. Some beastly post-annular scopophiliacal vector. Suprasubliminals and that. Some kind of abstractable hypnosis, an optical dopamine-cue. A recorded delusion. Duquette says he’s lost contact with three colleagues. He said a good bit of Berkeley isn’t answering their phone.’

‘I don’t think anyone here would dispute that they’re absolutely fetching tits, Melinda.’

‘We had blinis with caviar. There were tartines. We had sweetbreads in mushroom cream sauce. He said it was all on him. He said he was treating. There was roast artichoke topped with a sort of sly aioli. Mutton stuffed with foie gras, double chocolate rum cake. Seven kinds of cheese. A kiwi glacé and brandy in snifters you needed two hands to swirl.’

‘That coke-addled fag in his Morris Mini.’

The prosthetic film-scholar: ‘Fans do not begin to keep it all in the Great Convexity. It creeps back in. What goes around, it comes back around. This your nation refuses to learn. It will keep creeping back in. You cannot give away your filth and prevent all creepage, no? Filth by its very nature it is a thing that is creeping always back. Me, I can remember when your Charles was café with cream. Look now at it. It is the blue river. You have a river outside you that is robin-egg’s blue.’

‘I think you mean Great Concavity, Alain.’

‘I meant Great Convexity. I know what is the thing I meant.’

‘And then it turned out he’d put ipecac in the brandy. It was the most horrible thing you’ve ever seen. Everyone, all over, spouting like whales. I’d heard the term projectile vomitingbut I never thought that I — you could aim, the pressure was such that you could aim. And out come his grad technicians from under the tablecloth’s like overhang, and he pulls out a canvas chair and clapper and begins filming the whole horrible staggering spouting groaning —’

‘This ultimate cartridge-as-ecstatic-death rumor’s been going around like a lazy toilet since Dishmaster, for Christ’s sake. Simply make inquiries, mention some obscure foundation grant, obtain the thing through whatever shade of market the thing’s alleged to be out in. Have a look. See that it’s doubtless just high-concept erotica or an hour of rotating whorls. Or something like late Makavajev, something that’s only entertaining after it’s over, on reflection.’

The striated parallelogram of P.M. sunlight is elongating in transit across the coop’s eastern wall, over bottle-laden sideboard and glass cabinet of antique editing equipment and louvered vent and shelves of art-cartridges in their dull black and dun cases. The mole-studded man in the equestrian helmet is either winking at her or has a tic. There’s the pre-suicide’s classic longing: Sit down one second, I want to tell you everything. My name is Joelle van Dyne, Dutch-Irish, and I was reared on family land east of Shiny Prize, Kentucky, the only child of a low-pH chemist and his second wife. I now have no accent except under stress. I am 1.7 meters tall and weigh 48 kilograms. I occupy space and have mass. I breathe in and breathe out. Joelle has never before today been conscious of the sustained volition required to just breathe in and breathe out, her veil recessing into nose and rounded mouth and then bowing out slightly like curtains over an opened pane.

‘Convexity.’

‘Concavity!’

‘Convexity!’

‘Concavity damn your eyes!’

The bathroom has a hook and a mirrored medicine cabinet over the sink and is off the bedroom. Molly Notkin’s bedroom looks like the bedroom of someone who stays in bed for serious lengths of time. A pair of pantyhose has been tossed onto a lamp. There are not crumbs but whole portions of crackers protruding from the gray surf of wopsed-up bedding. A photo of the phalloneurotic New Yorker with the same fold-out triangular support as the blank cartridge’s anti-ad. A Ziploc of pot and EZ-Widers and seeds in the ashtray. Books with German and Cyrillic titles lie open in spine-cracking attitudes on the colorless rug. Joelle’s never liked the fact that Notkin’s father’s photograph is nailed at iconic height to the wall above the head-board, a systems planner out of Knoxville TN, his smile the smile of a man who wears white loafers and a squirting carnation. And why are bathrooms always way brighter lit than whatever room they’re off? On the private side of the bathroom door she’s had to take two damp towels off the top of to close all the way, the same rotten old hook for a lock never quite ever seeming to want to fit its receptacle in the jamb, the party’s music now some horrible collection of mollified rock classics with all soft rock’s grim dental associations, the business side of the door is hung with a Selective Automation of Knoxville calendar from before Subsidized Time and cut-out photos of Kinski as Paganini and Léaud as Doinel and a borderless still of the crowd scene in what looks like Peterson’s The Lead Shoesand rather curiously the offprinted page of J. van Dyne, M.A.’s one and only published film-theory monograph. ⁸¹ Joelle can smell, through her veil and own stale exhalations, the little room’s complicated spice of sandalwood rubble in a little violet-ribboned pomander and deodorant soap and the sharp decayed-lemon odor of stress-diarrhea. Low-budget celluloid horror films created ambiguity and possible elision by putting ? after THE END,is what pops into her head: THE END? amid the odors of mildew and dicky academic digestion? Joelle’s mother’s family had no indoor plumbing. It is all right. She represses all bathetic this-will-be-the-last-thing-I-smell thought-patterns. Joelle is going to have Too Much Fun in here. It was beyond all else so much fun, at the start. Orin had neither disapproved nor partaken; his urine was an open book because of football. Jim hadn’t disapproved so much as been vacant with disinterest. His Too Much was neat bourbon, and he had lived life to the fullest, and then gone in for detoxification, again and again. This had been simply too much fun, at the start. So much better even than nasaling the Material up through rolled currency and waiting for the cold bitter drip at the back of your throat and cleaning the newly spacious apartment to within an inch of its life while your mouth twitches and writhes unbidden beneath the veil. The ’base frees and condenses, compresses the whole experience to the implosion of one terrible shattering spike in the graph, an afflated orgasm of the heart that makes her feel, truly, attractive, sheltered by limits, deveiled and loved, observed and alone and sufficient and female, full, as if watched for an instant by God. She always sees, after inhaling, right at the apex, at the graph’s spike’s tip, Bernini’s ‘Ecstasy of St. Teresa,’ behind glass, at the Vittoria, for some reason, the saint recumbent, half-supine, her flowing stone robe lifted by the angel in whose other hand a bare arrow is raised for that best descent, the saint’s legs frozen in opening, the angel’s expression not charity but the perfect vice of barb-headed love. The stuff had been not just her encaging god but her lover, too, fiendish, angelic, of rock. The toilet seat is up. She can hear a helicopter’s chop somewhere overhead east, a traffic helicopter over Storrow, and Molly Notkin’s shriek as an enormous glass crash sounds off in the living room, imagines her beard hanging aslant and her mouth ellipsed with champagne’s foam as she waves off the breakage that signals good Party, can hear through the door the ecstatic Melinda’s apologies and Molly’s laugh, which sounds like a shriek:

‘Oh everything falls off the wall sooner or later.’

Joelle has lifted her veil back to cover her skull like a bride. Since she threw away her pipes and bowls and screens again this A.M. she is going to have to be resourceful. On the counter of an old sink the same not-quite white as the floor and ceiling (the wallpaper is a maddening uncountable pattern of roses twined in garlands on sticks) on the counter are an old splay-bristled toothbrush, tube of Gleem rolled neatly up from the bottom, unsavory old NoCoat scraper, rubber cement, NeGram, depilatory ointment, tube of Monostat not squeezed from the bottom, phony-beard whiskerbits and curled green threads of used mint floss and Parapectolin and a wholly unsqueezed tube of diaphragm-foam and no makeup but serious styling gel in a big jar with no lid and hairs around the rim and an empty tampon box half-filled with nickels and pennies and rubber bands, and Joelle sweeps an arm across the counter and squunches everything over to the side under the small rod with a washcloth wrung viciously out and dried in the tight spiral of a twisted cord, and if some items do totter and fall to the floor it is all right because everything eventually has to fall. On the cleared counter goes Joelle’s misshapen purse. The absence of veil dulls the bathroom’s smells, somehow.

She’s been resourceful before, but this is the most deliberate Joelle has been able to be about it in something like a year. From the purse she removes the plastic Pepsi container, a box of wooden matches kept dry in a resealable baggie, two little thick glycine bags each holding four grams of pharmaceutical-grade cocaine, a single-edge razor blade (increasingly tough to find), a little black Kodachrome canister whose gray lid she pops and discards to reveal baking soda sifted fine as talc, the empty glass cigar tube, a folded square of Reynolds Wrap foil the size of a playing card, and an amputated length of the bottom of a quality wire coat hanger. The overhead light casts shadows of her hands over what she needs, so she turns on the light over the medicine cabinet’s mirror as well. The light stutters and hums and bathes the counter with cold lithium-free fluorescence. She undoes the four pins and removes the veil from her head and places it on the counter with the rest of the Material. Lady Delphina’s little glycine baglets have clever seals that are green when sealed and blue and yellow when not. She taps half a glycine’s worth into the cigar tube and adds half again as much baking soda, spilling some of the soda in a parenthesis of bright white on the counter. This is the most deliberate she’s been able to be in at least a year. She turns the sink’s C knob and lets the water get really cold, then cranks the volume back to a trickle and fills the rest of the tube to the top with water. She holds the tube up straight and gently taps on its side with a blunt unpainted nail, watching the water slowly darken the powders beneath it. She produces a double rose of flame in the mirror that illuminates the right side of her face as she holds the tube over the matches’ flame and waits for the stuff to begin to bubble. She uses two matches, twice. When the tube gets too hot to hold she takes and folds her veil and uses it as a kind of oven-mitt over the fingers of her left hand, careful (from habit and experience) not to let the bottom corners get close enough to the flame to brown. After it’s bubbled for just a second Joelle shakes out the matches with a flourish and tosses them in the toilet to hear that briefest of hisses. She takes up the black wire prod from the hanger and begins to stir and mash the just-bubbled stuff in the tube, feeling it thicken quickly and its resistance to the wire’s tiny circles increase. It was when her hands started to tremble during this part of the cooking procedure that she’d first known she liked this more than anyone can like anything and still live. She is not stupid. The Charles rolling away far below the windowless bathroom is vividly blue, more mildly blue on top from the fresh rainwater that had made purple rings appear and widen, a deeper Magic Marker–type blue below the dilute layer, gulls stamped to the cleared sky, motionless as kites. A bulky thump sounds from behind the large flat-top Enfield hill on the river’s south shore, a large but relatively shapeless projectile of drums wrapped in brown postal paper and belted with twine hurtling in a broad upward arc that bothers the gulls into dips and wheels, the brown package quickly a pinpoint in the yet-hazy sky to the north, where a yellow-brown cloud hangs just above the line between sky and terrain, its top slowly dispersing and opening out so that the cloud looks like a not very pretty sort of wastebasket, waiting. Inside, Joelle hears only a bit of the bulky thump, which could be anything. The only other thing besides what she’s about to do too much of here right now she’d ever come close to feeling this way about: In Joelle’s childhood, Paducah, not too bad a drive from Shiny Prize, still had a few public movie theaters, six and eight separate auditoria clustered in single honeycombs at the edges of interstate malls. The theaters always ended in -plex, she reflected. The Thisoplex and Thatoplex. It had never struck her as odd. And she never saw even one film there, as a girl, that she didn’t just about die with love for. It didn’t matter what they were. She and her own personal Daddy up in the front row, they sat in the front rows of the narrow little overinsulated -plexes up in neck-crick territory and let the screen fill their whole visual field, her hand in his lap and their big box of Crackerjacks in her hand and sodapops secure in little rings cut out of the plastic of their seats’ arms; and he, always with a wooden match in the corner of his mouth, pointing up into the rectangular world at this one or that one, performers, giant flawless 2D beauties irides-cent on the screen, telling Joelle over and over again how she was prettier than this one or that one right there. Standing in the placid line as he bought the -plex’s paper tickets that looked like grocery receipts, knowing that she was going to love the celluloid entertainment no matter what it was, wonderfully innocent, still thinking quality referred to the living teddy bears in Qantas commercials, standing hand-held, eyes even with his wallet’s back-pocket bulge, she’d never so much again as in that line felt so taken care of,destined for big-screen entertainment’s unalloyed good fun, never once again until starting in with this lover, cooking and smoking it, five years back, before Incandenza’s death, at the start. The punter never made her feel quite so taken care of, never made her feel about to be entered by something that didn’t know she was there and yet was all about making her feel good anyway, coming in. Entertainment is blind.

The improbable thing of the whole thing is that, when the soda and water and cocaine are mixed right and heated right and stirred just right as the mix cools down, then when the stuff’s too stiff to stir and is finally ready to come on out it comes out slick as shit from a goat, just an inverted-ketchup-bottle thump and out the son of a fucking whore slides, one molded cylinder hard-ened onto the black wire, its snout round from the glass tube’s bottom. The average pre-chopped freebase rock looks like a .38 round. What Joelle now slides with three fillips from the cigar tube is a monstrous white wiener, a county-fair corn dog, its sides a bit rough, like mâché, a couple clots left on the inside of the tube that are what you forage and smoke before the Chore Boys and panties.

She is now a little under two deliberate minutes from Too Much Fun for anyone mortal to hope to endure. Her unveiled face in the dirty lit mirror is shocking in the intensity of its absorption. Out in the bedroom doorway she can hear Reeves Mainwaring telling some helium-voiced girl that life is essentially one long search for an ashtray. Too Much Fun. She uses the razor blade to cross-section chunks out of the freebase wiener. You can’t whittle thin deli-shaved flakes off because they’ll crumble back to powder right away and they anyway don’t smoke as well as you’d think. Blunt chunks are S.O.P. Joelle chops out enough chunks for maybe twenty good-sized hits. They form a little quarry on the soft cloth of her folded veil on the counter. Her Brazilian skirt is no longer damp. Reeves Mainwaring’s blond imperial often had little bits of food residue in it. ‘The Ecstasy of St. Teresa’ is on perpetual display at the Vittoria in Rome and she never got to see it. She will never again say And Loand invite people to watch darkness dance on the face of the deep. ‘The Face of the Deep’ had been the title she’d suggested for Jim’s unseen last cartridge, which he’d said would be too pretentious and then used that skull-fragment out of the Hamlet graveyard scene instead, which talk about pretentious she’d laughed. His frightened look when she’d laughed is for the life of her the last facial-expression memory she can remember of the man. Orin had referred to his father sometimes as Himself and sometimes as The Mad Stork and once in a slip as The Sad Stork. She lights one wooden match and blows it right out and touches the hot black head to the side of the plastic pop bottle. It melts right through and makes a little hole. The helicopter was probably a traffic helicopter. Somebody at their Academy had had some connection to some traffic helicopter that had had an accident. She can’t for the life of her. No one out there knows she is in here getting ready to have Too Much. She can hear Molly Notkin calling through rooms about has anyone seen Keck. In her first theory seminar Reeves Mainwaring had called one film ‘wretchedly ill-conceived’ and another ‘desperately acquiescent’ and Molly Notkin had pretended to have a coughing fit and had had a Tennessee accent and that was how they met. The Reynolds Wrap is to make a screen that will rest in the bottle’s open top. A regular dope screen is the size of a thimble, its sides spread like an opening bud. Joelle uses the point of some curved nail scissors on the back of the toilet to poke tiny holes in the rectangle of aluminum foil and shapes it into a shallow funnel large enough to siphon gasoline, narrowing its tip to fit in the bottle’s mouth. She now owns a pipe with a monster-sized bowl and screen, now, and puts in enough chunklets to make five or six hits at once. The little rocks lie there piled and yellow-white. She puts her lips experimentally to the melted hole in the side of the bottle and draws, then, very deliberately, lights another match and extinguishes it and makes the hole bigger. The idea that she’ll never see Molly Notkin or the cerebral Union or her U.H.I.D. support-brothers and -sisters or the YYY engineer or Uncle Bud on a roof or her stepmother in the Locked Ward or her poor personal Daddy again is sentimental and banal. The idea of what she’s about in here contains all other ideas and makes them banal. Her glass of juice is on the back of the toilet, half-empty. The back of the toilet is lightly sheened with condensation of unknown origin. These are facts. This room in this apartment is the sum of very many specific facts and ideas. There is nothing more to it than that. Deliberately setting about to make her heart explode has assumed the status of just one of these facts. It was an idea but now is about to become a fact. The closer it comes to becoming concrete the more abstract it seems. Things get very abstract. The concrete room was the sum of abstract facts. Are facts abstract, or are they just abstract representations of concrete things? Molly Notkin’s middle name is Cantrell. Joelle puts two more matches together and prepares to strike them, breathing rapidly in and out like a diver preparing for a long descent.

‘I say is someone in there?’ The voice is the young post-New Formalist from Pittsburgh who affects Continental and wears an ascot that won’t stay tight, with that hesitant knocking of when you know perfectly well someone’s in there, the bathroom door composed of thirty-six that’s three times a lengthwise twelve recessed two-bevelled squares in a warped rectangle of steam-softened wood, not quite white, the bottom outside corner right here raw wood and mangled from hitting the cabinets’ bottom drawer’s wicked metal knob, through the door and offset ‘Red’ and glowering actors and calendar and very crowded scene and pubic spiral of pale blue smoke from the elephant-colored rubble of ash and little blackened chunks in the foil funnel’s cone, the smoke’s baby-blanket blue that’s sent her sliding down along the wall past knotted washcloth, towel rack, blood-flower wallpaper and intricately grimed electrical outlet, the light sharp bitter tint of a heated sky’s blue that’s left her uprightly fetal with chin on knees in yet another North American bathroom, deveiled, too pretty for words, maybe the Prettiest Girl Of All Time (Prettiest G.O.A.T.), knees to chest, slew-footed by the radiant chill of the claw-footed tub’s porcelain, Molly’s had somebody lacquer the tub in blue, lacquer, she’s holding the bottle, recalling vividly its slogan for the last generation was The Choice of a Nude Generation, when she was of back-pocket height and prettier by far than any of the peach-colored titans they’d gazed up at, his hand in her lap her hand in the box and rooting down past candy for the Prize, more fun way too much fun inside her veil on the counter above her, the stuff in the funnel exhausted though it’s still smoking thinly, its graph reaching its highest spiked prick, peak, the arrow’s best descent, so good she can’t stand it and reaches out for the cold tub’s rim’s cold edge to pull herself up as the white- party-noise reaches, for her, the sort of stereophonic precipice of volume to teeter on just before the speakers blow, people barely twitching and conversations strettoing against a ghastly old pre-Carter thing saying ‘We’ve Only Just Begun,’ Joelle’s limbs have been removed to a distance where their acknowledgment of her commands seems like magic, both clogs simply gone, nowhere in sight, and socks oddly wet, pulls her face up to face the unclean medicine-cabinet mirror, twin roses of flame still hanging in the glass’s corner, hair of the flame she’s eaten now trailing like the legs of wasps through the air of the glass she uses to locate the de-faced veil and what’s inside it, loading up the cone again, the ashes from the last load make the world’s best filter: this is a fact. Breathes in and out like a savvy diver —

‘Look here then who’s that in there? Is someone in there? Do open up. I’m on one foot then the other out here. I say Notkin someone’s been in here locked in and, well, sounding unwell, amid rather a queer scent.’

— and is knelt vomiting over the lip of the cool blue tub, gouges on the tub’s lip revealing sandy white gritty stuff below the lacquer and porcelain, vomiting muddy juice and blue smoke and dots of mercuric red into the claw-footed trough, and can hear again and seems to see, against the fire of her closed lids’ blood, bladed vessels aloft in the night to monitor flow, searchlit helicopters, fat fingers of blue light from one sky, searching.

Enfield MA is one of the stranger little facts that make up the idea that is metro Boston, because it is a township composed almost entirely of medical, corporate, and spiritual facilities. A kind of arm-shape extending north from Commonwealth Avenue and separating Brighton into Upper and Lower, its elbow nudging East Newton’s ribs and its fist sunk into Allston, Enfield’s broad municipal tax-base includes St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Franciscan Children’s Hospital, The Universal Bleacher Co., the Provident Nursing Home, Shuco-Mist Medical Pressure Systems Inc., the Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital Complex, the Svelte Nail Co., half the metro Boston turbine and generating stations of Sunstrand Power and Light (the part that gets taxed is in incorporated Allston), corporate headquarters for ‘The ATHSCME Family of Air-Displacement Effectuators’ (meaning they make really big fans), the Enfield Tennis Academy, St. John of God Hospital, Hanneman Orthopedic Hospital, the Leisure Time Ice

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 763