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she had an almost parodic Québecois accent and
Who is this woman? Does Hal get killed/taken by the AFR in the hospital? The very end of the timeline?
I’ll make the journey first, then depart. I think very briefly of the late Cosgrove Watt.
I think of the hypophalangial Grief-Therapist.
Hal’s Dad in disguise?
catch what he sees as my eye
?
‘You think we haven’t thoroughly researched your own connection with the whole current intra-Provincial crisis in southern Québec?’
What connection?
would fail to probe beak-deep into your family’s sordid liaison with the pan-Canadian Resistance’s notorious M. DuPlessis and his malevolent but allegedly irresistible amanuensis-cum-operative, Luria P______?’
of the fact that photos of the aforementioned… liaison being leaked to Der Spiegel resulted in the bizarre deaths of both an Ottawan paparazzo and a Bavarian international-affairs editor, of an alpenstock through the abdomen and an ill-swallowed cocktail onion, respectively?’
AFR or Orin?
‘That you could dare to imagine we’d fail conversationally to countenance certain weekly shall we say maternal… assignations with a certain unnamed bisexual
Who is this? It’s gotta be a character in the book.
‘… that her introduction of esoteric mnemonic steroids, stereochemically not dissimilar to your father’s own daily hypodermic “megavitamin” supplement derived from a certain organic testosterone-regeneration compound distilled by the Jivaro shamen of the South-Central L.A. basin, into your innocent-looking bowl of morning Ralston….’
Hal is being fed performance enhancers? Shamen? Like ayahuasca shamen? Like DMZ?
The sideboard is against the wall opposite the room’s electronic recliner under a triptych of high-quality Byzantine erotica.
Hal shares a similar interest. This guy is Hal's bio dad
with a small drawn crude face, smiling, in ballpoint ink,
The logo for the entertainment and DMZ
‘How come the Moms never cried when Himself passed away? I cried, and you, even C.T. cried. I saw him personally
Heartless killer
‘Hey Hal, did the Moms seem like she got happier after Himself passed away, to you?’
Heartless
apocopes,
dipsomaniacal
Good word to describe alcoholics or more specifically, compulsive binge drinkers.
his death in the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar—although
TSDB year in which JOI died
for even a U.S.-spoused Professor Mondragon whose involvement, however demonstrably nonviolent, with certain members of the Québecois-Separatist Left while in graduate school had placed her name on the R.C.M.P.’s notorious ‘Personnes à Qui On Doit Surveiller Attentivement’ List.
Avril involvement in separatist orgs
ARPA-NET
First internet in real life. Good reading up on it
two rock and bob Hasidically to stay alert;
The doctor wrote down something much too brief to correspond directly to what she’d said.
‘But when you’re in the feeling you forget. The feeling feels like it’s always been there and will always be there, and you forget. It’s like this whole filter drops down over the whole way you think about everything, a couple weeks after—’
the seconds keep coming on and on.’
Like Gateley's pain
‘Either ECT or you could just sedate me for a month. You could do that. All I’d need is I think a month at the outside. Like a controlled coma. You could do that, if you guys want to help.’
Classic unipolars were usually tormented by the conviction that no one else could hear or understand them when they tried to communicate.
Same as Hal or his Dad. Or even DFW himself as he’s expressed this fear in his own interviews.
The doctor was summarizing her choice of treatment-option, as was her right, on her chart. He had extremely good penmanship for a doctor. He put her get me out of this in quotation marks. He was adding his own post-assessment question, Then what?, when Kate Gompert began weeping for real.
Dark passage for experienced depressed persons.
The houses are skinny three-deckers, mashed together, wharf-gray w/ salt-white trim, madonnas in the yards, bowlegged dogs hurling themselves against the fencing.
‘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.’
outside when the tiny .5-sector of digital space each punt’s programmed to require runs out and the crowd-sound moos and dies and you can hear the disk-drive stalled at the terminal byte and Orin’s chin-strapped plastic-barred face is there on the giant viewer, frozen and High-Def in his helmet, right before impact, zoomed in on with a quality lens. Of particular interest are the eyes.
When it descended, the seizure felt less like a separate distinct health-crisis than simply the next exhibit in the corridor of horrors that was the Old Cold Bird. In actual fact the seizure—a kind of synaptic firefight in Poor Tony’s desiccated temporal lobes—was caused entirely by Withdrawal not From Heroin but from plain old grain alcohol, which was Codinex Plus cough syrup’s primary ingredient and balm.
and so was cruising for a real neurochemical bruising when he just up and stopped. The
Schacht was just looping the d in mail fraud when Jim Troeltsch’s pseudo-radio program, backed by its eustacian-crumpling operatic sound-track, came over 112 West House’s E.T.A.-intercom speaker up over the classroom clock.
The sour Saskatchewanese kid next to Hal has been making impressive schematic drawings of automatic weaponry in his notebook all semester.
The kid’s assigned ROM-diskettes are always visible in his bookbag still in their wrapper, yet the Skatch kid always finishes quizzes in like five minutes. It
The first birth of the Incandenzas’ second son was a surprise. The tall and eye-poppingly curvaceous Avril Incandenza did not show, bled like clockwork; no hemorrhoids or gland-static; no pica; affect and appetite normal; she threw up some mornings but who didn’t in those days?
Luckily Avril’s half-brother Charles Tavis was upstairs, using the portable StairMaster he’d brought with him for an extended and emotional-battery-recharging visit the preceding spring, after the horrible snafu with the video-scoreboard at Toronto’s Skydome; and he heard the commotion and scuttled out and down and promptly took charge.
Plus the thin lank slack hair, at once tattered and somehow too smooth, that looked at 18+
like the hair of a short plump 48-year-old stress engineer and athletic director and Academy Headmaster who grows one side to girlish length and carefully combs it so it rides thinly up and over the gleaming yarmulke of bare gray-green-complected scalp on top and down over the other side where it hangs lank and fools no one and tends to flap back up over in any wind Charles Tavis forgets to carefully keep his left side to. Or that he’s slow, Hal’s brother is, technically, Stanford-Binet-wise, slow, the Brandeis C.D.C. found—but not, verifiably not, retarded or cognitively damaged or
...more
Hal fears that Avril sees Mario as the family’s real prodigy, an in-bent savant-type genius of no classifiable type, a very rare and shining thing, even if his intuition—slow and silent—scares her, his academic poverty breaks her heart, the smile he puts on each A.M. without fail since the suicide of their father makes her wish she could cry.
It was Avril, not Hal, who insisted that Mario live not in HmH with her and Charles Tavis but with Hal in an E.T.A. subdorm.
U.S.A. where such a thing could be possible enough for your Office to fear: can such a U.S.A. hope to survive for a much longer time? To survive as a nation of peoples?
To much less exercise dominion over other nations of other peoples? If these are other peoples who still know what it is to choose? who will die for something larger? who will sacrifice the warm home, the loved woman at home, their legs, their life even, for something more than their own wishes of sentiment? who would choose not to die for pleasure, alone?’
‘You’re saying that the administration wouldn’t even be concerned about the Entertainment if we didn’t know we were fatally weak. As in as a nation. You’re saying the fact that we’re worried speaks volumes about the nation itself.’
‘Us, we will force nothing on U.S.A. persons in their warm homes. We will make only available. Entertainment. There will be then some choosing, to partake or choose not to.’ Smoothing slightly at his lap’s blanket. ‘How will U.S.A.s choose? Who has taught them to choose with care?
your Offices and Agencies protect them, your people? By laws? By killing Québecois?’ Marathe rose, but very slightly. ‘As you were killing Colombians and Bolivians to protect U.S.A. citizens who desire their narcotics? How well did this work for your Agencies and Offices, the kill...
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such as “Herrrrrre we are going.” Someone taught that temples are for fanatics only and took away the temples and promised there was no need for temples. And now there is no shelter. And no map for finding the shelter of a temple. And you all stumble about in the dark, this confusion of permissions. The without-end pursuit of a happiness of which someone let you forget the old things which made happiness possible.
coruscating
Coruscant
Eschaton
This year it’s been Otis P. Lord, a thirteen-year-old baseliner and calculus phenom from Wilmington DE, who ‘Wears the Beanie’ as Eschaton’s game-master and statistician of record, though Pemulis, since he’s still around and is far and away the greatest Eschaton player in E.T.A. history, has a kind of unofficial emeritus power of correction over Lord’s calculations and mandate.
This even though Kittenplan isn’t even strictly in Ms. Thode’s like umbrella of authority, Axford observes to Troeltsch, who relays this fact into his headset.
wall-eyed from caffeine and trying to read illegibly scrawled
