Infinite Jest

The Dean at left, a lean yellowish man whose fixed smile nevertheless has the impermanent quality of something stamped into uncooperative material, is a personality-type I've come lately to appreciate.

The Director of Composition seems to have more than the normal number of eyebrows.

My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it.

The huge window gives out on nothing more than dazzling sunlight and cracked earth with heat-shimmers over it.

It strikes me that exit signs would look to a native speaker of Latin like red-lit signs that say HE leaves.

I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear.

I had stopped crying, he remembers, and simply stood there, the size and shape of a hydrant, in red PJ's with attached feet, holding out the mold, seriously, like the report of some kind of audit.

I am not just a boy who plays tennis. I have an intricate history. Experiences and feelings. I'm complex.

Sounded most of all like a drowning goat. A goat, drowning in something viscous.

We witnessed something only marginally mammalian in there, sir.

The jet's movement and trail seem incisionish, as if white meat behind the blue were exposed and widening in the wake of the blade.

I think of John N. R. Wayne, who would have won this year's WhataBurger, standing watch in a mask as Donald Gately and I dig up my father's head.

He was afraid that if he came closer and saw it closer he would kill it, and he was afraid to kill it.

Once he'd been set off inside, it mattered so much that he was somehow afraid to show how much it mattered.

It occurred to him that he would disappear into a hole in a girder inside him that supported something else inside him.

It wasn't that he was afraid of the dope, it was that smoking it made him afraid of everything else.

he'd make it a mission, treating it like a penance and behavior-modification regimen all at once, he'd smoke his way through thirty high-grade grams a day

He would use discipline and persistence and will and make the whole experience so unpleasant, so debased and debauched and unpleasant, that his behavior would be henceforward modified, he'd never even want to do it again because the memory of the insane four days to come would be so firmly, terribly emblazoned in his memory.

The insect sat inside its dark shiny case with an immobility that seemed like the gathering of a force, it sat like the hull of a vehicle from which the engine had been for the moment removed.

He was committed to touching neither.

The moment he recognized what exactly was on one cartridge he had a strong anxious feeling that there was something more entertaining on another cartridge and that he was potentially missing it.

He stood splay-legged, arms wildly out as if something's been flung, splayed, entombed between the two sounds, without a thought in his head.

Is Himself still having this hallucination I never speak? Is that why he put the Moms up to having me bike up here?

As a matter of fact I'll go ahead and tell you your whole face is kind of running, sort of, if you want to check. Your nose is pointing at your lap.

Who used to pray daily for the day his own dear late father would sit, cough, open that bloody issue of the Tucson Citizen, and not turn that newspaper into the room's fifth wall?

Shoving three coverless Dunlop widebodies into the gear bag and zipping the bag partway up so the handles had room to stick out.

To say nothing of the arresting image of the idolatrous West's most famous and self-congratulating idol, the colossal Libertine Statue, wearing some type of enormous adult-design diaper, a hilariously apposite image popular in the news photos of so many international journals.

The Saudi Minister of Home Entertainment's inability to control his appetites for Wednesday Töblerone often requires the medical attache to remain in personal attendance all evening.

The procedures for ordering specific spontaneous pulses from the service are so technologically and cryp-tographically complex that the attache has always left the whole business to his wife.

The medical attache, in sum, feels tightly wound and badly underappreciated and is prepared in advance to be irritated by the item inside, which is merely a standard black entertainment cartridge, but is wholly unlabelled.

He run his finger with grease so careful down pink lines of her getting beat with a hanger.

Mildred Bonk had become an imposing member of the frightening Winchester High School set that smoked full-strength Marl-boros in the alley between Senior and Junior halls.

You get somebody who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.

The sun like a sneaky keyhole view of hell.

The bird seemed to have just had a coronary or something in flight and died and fallen out of the empty sky and landed dead in the Jacuzzi, right by the leg.

The yellow tile floor of the bathroom is sometimes a little obstacle course of glasses with huge roaches dying inside, stoically, just sitting there, the glasses gradually steaming up with roach-dioxide.

These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light — the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.

MATRIX PRESENTS SCHIZOPHRENIA: MIND OR BODY?' and had had to lie there, moist and paralyzed, curled fetal on his

The machine's blurps and tweets not even coming close to covering Fenton's entombed howls as his worst delusional fears came true in digital stereo.

Hal likes to get high in secret, but a bigger secret is that he's as attached to the secrecy as he is to getting high.

And ultimately, she's told Drs. Rusk and Tavis, she'd rather have Hal abide in the security of the knowledge that his mother trusts him, that she's trusting and supportive and doesn't judge or gizzard-tear or wring her fine hands over his having for instance a glass of Canadian ale with friends every now and again.

The Pump Room is essentially like a pulmonary organ, or the epicenter of a massive six-vectored wind tunnel, and when activated roars like a banshee that's slammed its hand in a door.

ATHSCME guys will attach some of the Lung's arterial pneumatic tubing at some point soon when Schtitt et al. on Staff decide the real weather has moved past enduring for outdoor tennis.

American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels.

He sits there, attached to a congealed supper, watching, at 0020h., having now wet both his pants and the special recliner.

In the envelope were a standard American Dental Association glossy brochure on the importance of daily oral hygiene — available at like any dentist's office anywhere — and two high-pixel Polaroid snapshots.

People turned out so identical in certain root domestic particulars it made Gately feel strange sometimes, like he was in possession of certain overlarge private facts to which no man should be entitled.

not the good-silver-for-company silverware; that was in a calfskin case underneath some neatly folded old spare Christmas wrapping

And here comes Gately across the kitchen looking like a sort of Bozo from hell, and the Québecer guy's mouth goes oval with horror, and into that mouth goes a balled-up, faintly greasy-smelling kitchen towel.

they had to carry him out as if he were still seated, so militarily comme-il-faut had his limbs and spine hardened.

Troeltsch'd been straightening the straps on his jock, idly calling the match's action into his fist, when it came on.

The vaporizer seethes and burps, and all four of the room's windows weep against the outside cold.

And then its mouth opens at your light. And then you wake like that, quivering like a struck drum, lying there awake and quivering, summoning courage and spit.

A father who somewhere around the nadir of his professional fortunes apparently decided to go down to his Raid-sprayed basement workshop and build a promising junior athlete the way other fathers might restore vintage autos or build ships inside bottles.

And those of E.T.A.'s junior players whose hypertrophied arms could fit inside them wore black bands on court for almost a year.

At some point it starts sounding like the crowd's roaring at its own roar, a doubling-back quality like something'll blow.

The lines that bound and define play are on this court as complex and convolved as a sculpture of string.

I never get quite to see the distant opponent, for all the apparatus of the game.

Kate Gompert's hair was so long-unwashed it had separated into discrete shiny strands, and black bangs lay like a cell's glossy bars across the visible half of the forehead.

She said I was on the floor flushed red and all wet like when I was a newborn; she said she thought at first she hallucinated me as a newborn again.

I wasn't trying to hurt myself. I was trying to kill myself. There's a difference.

It's like something horrible is about to happen, the most horrible thing you can imagine — no, worse than you can imagine because there's the feeling that there's something you have to do right away to stop it but you don't know what it is you have to do, and then it's happening, too, the whole horrible time.

Like every cell and every atom or brain-cell or whatever was so nauseous it wanted to throw up, but it couldn't, and you felt that way all the time.

And she gave him back a frightening smile, a smile empty of all affect, as if someone had contracted her circumorals with a thigmotactic electrode.

I'm like so obsessed with Do They Know, Can They Tell, and then after a while I'm having my mother call in sick for me so I can stay home after she goes in to work and have the whole place to myself with nobody to worry about Do They Know.

It's not wanting to hurt myself it's wanting to not hurt.

He was adding his own post-assessment question, Then what?, when Kate Gompert began weeping for real.

One of the positives to being visibly damaged is that people can sometimes forget you're there, even when they're interfacing with you.

That real tennis was no more reducible to delimited factors or probability curves than chess or boxing, the two games of which it's a hybrid.

Without there is something bigger. Nothing to contain and give the meaning. Lonely. Verstiegenheit.

The competing boy on the net's other side: he is not the foe: he is more the partner in the dance.

He'd kept noticing mice scurrying around his room, mice as in rodents, vermin, and when he lodged a complaint and demanded the room be fumigated at once and then began running around hunched and pounding with the heel of a hand-held Florsheim at the mice as they continued to ooze through the room's electrical outlets and scurry repulsively about.

The man, like Tiny Ewell, has the rouged-corpse look that attends detox from late-stage alcoholism.

It hung and trembled slightly like a viscous drop about to fall.

Steeply's gigantic prosthetic breasts pointed in wildly different directions now, one nearly at the empty sky.

The local constabulary were shall we say unprepared for an Entertainment like this.

Marathe thought this as he opened and closed his upheld hand, making over the city Tucson a huge and black blossom open itself and close itself.

It was clear that Steeply could not fix his breasts' directions without pulling down severely his décolletage, which he was shy to do.

The noise of the herd is tornadic, locomotival. The expression on the hamsters' whiskered faces is businesslike and implacable — it's that implacable-herd expression.

Marathe said: '. . . have I merely pretended to pretend to pretend to betray.'

Ortho Stice and John ('N.R.') Wayne seem less fatigued than detached; they have the really top player's way of shutting the whole neural net down for brief periods, staring at the space they took up, hooded in silence, removed, for a moment, from the connectedness of all events.

Marathe could sense or feel many million floral pores begin slowly to open, hopeful of dew.

To a man, now, the upperclassmen are down slumped on the locker room's blue crush carpet, their legs straight out in front of them, toes pointing out at that distinctive morgue-angle.

So most of the E.T.A. upperclassmen have these vivid shoe- and-shirt tans that give them the classic look of bodies hastily assembled from different bodies' parts.

Hal's parents' pregnancies must have been all-out chro-mosomatic war.

The defecatory posture is an accepting posture, it occurs to him. Head down, elbows on knees, the fingers laced together between the knees. Some hunched timeless millennial type of waiting, almost religious.

The light saddening outside, a grief felt in the bones, a sharpness to the edge of the lengthening shadows.

These sentiments from a person who allows them to place him in the field as an enormous girl with tits at the cock-eyed angle, now discoursing on tragic love.

You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.

In a case such as this you become the slave who believes he is free. The most pathetic of bondage.

You're supposed to disappear into the loop and then carry that disappearance out with you, to play.

What the point is is that we'd all just spent three hours playing challenges against each other in scrotum-tightening cold, assailing each other, trying to take away each other's spots on the squads.

We're each deeply alone here. It's what we all have in common, this aloneness.

They give themselves up to our dislike, calculate our breaking points and aim for just over them, then send us into the locker room with an unstructured forty-five before Big Buddy sessions.

He always gets the feeling there's some clue to it on the tip of his tongue, some mute and inaccessible part of the cortex, and then he always feels vaguely sick, scanning for it.

And little by little, guys he used to beat start beating him, locating the chinks of the plateau, and his rank starts to slide, but he'll say he doesn't care, he says he's in it for the love of the game, and he always smiles but there gets to be something sort of tight and hangdog about his smile.

The plasticene gum-stuff yielding with sick sucking sounds, Schacht's five kids all either glazed-looking or glued to their watch's second-hand.

The point of repetition is there is no point. Wait until it soaks into the hardware and then see the way this frees up your head.

I mean the kind that's real urgent. But that it's not impossible it's actually a need to go to the bathroom, instead, masquerading as a fart.

I take the discomfort in the name of dignified caution, and when it's especially bad I look up at sky between points and I say to the sky Thank You Sir may I have another.

Bridget Boone had said the U.S.S. Milli-cent Kent's coiffure looked like a missile protruding from its silo in preparation for launch.

The U.S.S. Millicent revealed that she'd accepted a scholarship to E.T.A. at age nine for the sole reason of getting away from her father.

Obscene mottled hirsute flesh had pooched and spilled out over every centimeter of the leotard's perimeter, she recalled.

What Mario perceived as a sudden radical drop in the prevailing temperature was in fact the U.S.S. Millicent Kent's sexual stimulation sucking tremendous quantities of ambient energy out of the air surrounding them.

The sounds were like that of a domestic dog being given low voltage.

Everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of a man who finds himself rising toward what he wants to pull down to himself.

Its' a fucking bitch of a life dont' let any body get over on you diffrent.

Poor Tony beats it around the block to get up in front of him around the block on the ice in his fucking heels and feather snake around his neck and gets him some how.

Poor Tony is pisser to watch tearassing it down the street in hiheels with a feather stoal.

Slopes rarly stop shovling in

I yrstruly get a cold feeling of super station once more, you get wicked super stations in this fucked up kindof shit life because its' a never ending chase and you get too tired to go by much more than never ending habit and super station and everything like that.

And one eye it like allofa sudden pops outof his map, like with a Pop you make with fingers in your mouth with all this blood and materil and a blue string at the back of the eye and the eye falls over the side of Cs' map and hangs there looking at the fag Poor Tony.

The air has that spilled-fuel shimmer to it.

Trash bags have been swelling up and spontaneously combusting out in the dumpsters.

He sometimes, the founder, in the House's early days, required incoming residents to attempt to eat rocks — as in like rocks from the ground — to demonstrate their willingness to go to any lengths for the gift of sobriety.

In the vicinity of the third floor I met the barrel coming down.

The 'post'-modern hero was a heroic part of the herd, responsible for all of what he is part of, responsible to everyone, his lonely face as placid under pressure as a cow's face.

We await, I predict, the hero of non-action, the catatonic hero, the one beyond calm, divorced from all stimulus, carried here and there across sets by burly extras whose blood sings with retrograde amines.

In response to her plaintive calls, tragically, misunderstanding shoppers and passers by merely shook their heads at one another, smiling knowingly at what they ignorantly presumed to be yet another alternative lifestyle's relationship gone sour.

The tumescent demand curve for 'videophony' suddenly collapsed like a kicked tent.

It was an illusion and the illusion was aural and aurally supported: the phone-line's other end's voice was dense, tightly compressed, and vectored right into your ear, enabling you to imagine that the voice's owner's attention was similarly compressed and focused . . . even though your own attention was not, was the thing.

In an early and ominous InterLace/G.T.E. focus-group survey that was all but ignored in a storm of entrepreneurial sci-fi-tech enthusiasm, almost 60% of respondents who received visual access to their own faces during videophonic calls specifically used the terms untrustworthy, unlikable, or hard to like in describing their own visage's appearance.

The high-def masks, when not in use, simply hung on a small hook on the side of a TP's phone-console, admittedly looking maybe a bit surreal and discomfiting when detached and hanging there empty and wrinkled.

The career of videophony conforms neatly to this curve's classically annular shape: First there's some sort of terrific, sci-fi-like advance in consumer tech—which advance always, however, has certain unforeseen disadvantages for the consumer.

In other words a return to aural-only telephony became, at the closed curve's end, a kind of status-symbol of anti-vanity, such that only callers utterly lacking in self-awareness continued to use videophony and Tableaux.

‘Urine you’d be proud to take home and introduce to the folks!’

Mario's really come to look forward to, since he's found he has a real sort of mystical intuitive knack for finding Visine bottles in the sedimentary layers of packed dumpsters.

An old joke in Enfield-Brighton goes ' "Kiss me where it smells" she said so I took her to Allston'.

He is erumpent. He has made what Schtitt termed a 'leap of exponents' at a post-pubescent age when radical, plateaux-hopping, near-J.-Wayne-and-Show-caliber improvement is extraordinarily rare in tennis.

Michael Pemulis is nobody's fool, and he fears the dealer's Brutus, the potential eater of cheese, the rat, the wiretap, the pubescent-looking Finest sent to make him look foolish.

She never sees that in his quote careless way he actually really touched whatever he touched as if it were part of him.

Learn to do nothing, with your whole head and body, and everything will be done by what's around you.

I feel it, Jim, even here, standing on hot gravel and looking: in your eyes I see the appreciation of angle, a prescience re spin, the way you already adjust your overlarge and apparently clumsy child's body in the chair so it's at the line of best force against dish, spoon, lens-grinding appliance, a big book's stiff bend.

Nothing in there but evacuated air that smells like a kind of rubber hell. Empty. Pure potential.

I treat it as if it can feel. I give it its due, as a body.

You look chinless, son, and big-lipped. And that cape of mucus that's coming down on your upper lip, the way it shines, don't, just don't, it's revolting, son, you don't want to revolt people.

Will your face crumple and bulge like this when you're six-and-a-half grotesque feet tall, six-six-plus like your grandfather may he rot in hell's rubber vacuum when he finally kicks on the tenth tee and with your flat face and no chin just like him on that poor dumb patient woman's fragile wet snotty long-suffering shoulder did I tell you what he did?

He never acknowledged I even existed as I was, not as I do you, Jim, not as I take care to bend over backwards way, way out of my way to let you know I see you recognize you am aware of you as a body care about what might go on behind that big flat face bent over a homemade prism.

Never lumbered over all slumped and soft and cast his big grotesque long-even-at-midday shadow at any court I performed on.

I was in my body. My body and I were one. My wood Wilson from my stack of wood Wilsons in their trapezoid presses was a sentient expression of my arm, and I felt it singing.

You play right up to your limit and then pass your limit and look back at your former limit and wave a hankie at it, embarking.

All knotted and ragged, like something had torn at my own body's knees the way a slouching Brando would just rip a letter open with his teeth and let the envelope fall on the floor all wet and rent and torn?

I'm just afraid of having a tombstone that says HERE LIES A PROMISING OLD MAN.

I learned what it means to be a body, Jim, just meat wrapped in a sort of flimsy nylon stocking, son, as I fell kneeling and slid toward the stretched net, myself seen by me, frame by frame, torn open.

The incredibly potent DMZ has a popular-lay-chemical-underground reputation as the single grimmest thing ever conceived in a tube.

Hal deliberately waits till the audio console's third ring, like a girl at home on Saturday night.

Squeeze the tennis ball rhythmically month after year until you feel it no more than your heart squeezing blood and your right forearm is three times the size of your left and your arm looks from across a court like a gorilla's arm or a stevedore's arm pasted on the body of a child.

Here is how to avoid thinking about any of this by practicing and playing until everything runs on autopilot and talent's unconscious exercise becomes a way to escape yourself, a long waking dream of pure play.

How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away.

SELECTED TRANSCRIPTS OF THE RESIDENT-INTERFACE-DROP-IN-HOURS OF MS. PATRICIA MONTESIAN, M.A., C.S.A.C., EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, ENNET HOUSE DRUG AND ALCOHOL RECOVERY HOUSE (SIC)

The sound of a fucking mind coming apart. You know what I'm saying?

How does to admit I am powerless make me stop what the thing is I am powerless to stop?

He'd been like sexually abusing fowls. He kept talking to her about it, with all t-h's, like You hath to like thcrew them on, but when you come they jutht thort of fly off of you.

Ronnie says he says that seventy-thwee sounded just like fucking bombs sounded, that kind of cwacking WHUMP, when they hit, to the boys in the squadwon in the planes when they let them go.

She is hidden from all view by a jointed triptych screen of cream chiffon that glows red and green in the lights of the phone bank and the cueing panel's dials and frames her silhouette.

The deep-water green of FM tuners all over the campus's labs and dorms and barnacled clots of grad apartments align themselves slowly toward the spatter's center, moving toward the dial's right, a little creepily, like plants toward light they can't even see.

The monologues seem both free-associative and intricately structured, not unlike nightmares.

The Union's soft latex-polymer roof is cerebrally domed and a cloudy pia-mater pink except in spots where it's eroded down to pasty gray.

Those with saddle-noses. Those with atrophic limbs. And yes chemists and pure-math majors also those with atrophic necks.

The light's oval a bloody halo over the very barest of all possible heads.

The plants are incredibly lush and hale and sometimes threaten to block off the whole easement from dining to living room, and the rope-handled Brazilian machete C.T. had mounted on the wall by the tremulous china-case has stopped really being a joke.

The ones it says here the ones the cruel call Two-Baggers — one bag for your head, one bag for the observer's head in case your bag falls off.

The thing it makes you see as she reads is something heavy swinging slowly at the end of a long rope.

Very rarely anymore does Hal bring Pemulis or Jim Struck, to whom Avril is so faultlessly, brittlely polite that the dining room's tension raises hair.

The engineer finishes his Fizzy and makes ready to descend again for the hour's close, his skin turned toward the terrible cerebral chill off the Charles, which is windy and blue.

50 or 60 people all managing to form a line on a narrow walkway waiting for the same small building to unlock its narrow front door and yet still managing to appear alone and stand-offish is a strange sight.

Apeshit has rarely enjoyed so literal a denotation.

He'll watch her standing there and feel an odd chilled empathy he tries not to associate with watching his mother pass out on some piece of living-room chintz.

It raped your sister! It killed your fucking mother man!

The paralyzed perfectionist you say you are would stand there before that door. Jingling the keys. Afraid to try the first key.

The chilling Hispanic term for whatever interior disorder drives the addict back again and again to the enslaving Substance is tecato gusano, which apparently connotes some kind of interior psychic worm that cannot be sated or killed.

You will find yourself beginning to pray to be allowed literally to lose your mind, to be able to wrap your mind in an old newspaper or something and leave it in an alley to shift for itself, without you.

That you can all of a sudden out of nowhere want to get high with your Substance so bad that you think you will surely die if you don't, and but can just sit there with your hands writhing in your lap and face wet with craving, can want to get high but instead just sit there, wanting to but not, if that makes sense.

That the people to be most frightened of are the people who are the most frightened.

It's like the intoxication keeps your tattoo-type-class person from being able to project his imagination past the adrenaline of the impulse and even consider the permanent consequences that are producing the buzz of excitement.

Doony Glynn has the faint remains of a black dotted line tattooed all the way around his neck at about Adam's-apple height, with instruction-manual-like directions for the removal of his head and maintenance of the disengaged head tattooed on his scalp.

Ewell decides this is what gives profundity to the tattoo-impulse's profound irrevocability: Having a tatt removed means just exchanging one kind of disfigurement for another.

All these old sober Boston blue-collar men's irrevocable tattoos fading almost observably under the low-budget fluorescence of church basements and hospital auditoria — Ewell watched and charted and cross-referenced them, moved.

This is why jailhouse tatts always look like they were done by sadistic children on rainy afternoons.

The Swiss inventor they say was originally recommending LSD-25 as what to take to come down off the stuff.

The literature on muscimole-lysergic blends is spotty and vague and hard to read except to say how massively powerful the supposed yields are.

I mean literally lost his mind, like the massive dose picked his mind up and carried it off somewhere and put it down someplace and forgot where.

The whole negotiated deal had resembled a kind of group psychomotor seizure, with different bits of whipping and waggling heads reflected in dislocated sections and at jagged angles in more mirrors and pebbled blown-glass vases than Pemulis had ever seen crammed into anywhere.

Hal's posture subtly but warmly inclined ever so slightly toward his tiny older brother, who resembles him the way creatures of the same Order but not the same Family might resemble one another.

The twins Siamese, fused at the left and right temple, banned from Singles by O.N.A.N. regs, the broad-shadow-casting Vaughts, flinty-eyed tire-executive's daughters out of Akron, using her/their four legs to cover chilling amounts of court.

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.

What if in fact there were ever only like two really distinct individual people walking around back there in history's mist?

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.

She'd lost the ability to lie to herself about being able to quit, or even about enjoying it, still.

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.

Imitate the wife and mother they both declined to shoot. Use Incandenza's toothbrush on tiles' grout.

Joelle had engaged with him completely, which was extremely rare, even off the air.

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.

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.

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.

How much must a person want out, to put his head in a microwave oven?

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.

Comstock says if it even exists it has to be something more like an aesthetic pharmaceutical. Some beastly post-annular scopophiliacal vector.

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.

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.

Molly's laugh, which sounds like a shriek: 'Oh everything falls off the wall sooner or later.’

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.

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.

She will never again say And Lo and invite people to watch

Deliberately setting about to make her heart explode has assumed the status of just one of these facts.

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.

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.

The devices' slings are of alloy-belted elastic and their huge cupped vehicle-receptacles like catcher's mitts from hell.

The bug-eyed spear-rattling grass-skirted primitive, feeding virgins to Pop-ogatapec and afraid of planes.

And now everywhere I go the last several days there seems to be a statistically improbable number of wheel-chaired figures around, lurking, somehow just a little too nonchalantly.

It's gradually emerging it's going to be some sort of memorial to the Stork as patriarch, everybody's talents and accomplishments profiled as some sort of refracted tribute to el Storko's careers.

I've been sitting here on the edge of the bed with my right knee up under my chin, poised, studying the foot, frozen with aboriginal terror.

The self-consciousness that kills the magic is getting worse and worse.

The B.P.D. field pathologist said the build-up of internal pressures would have been almost instantaneous and equivalent in kg.s.cm. to over two sticks of TNT.

It was like one of those final exams in nightmares where you prepare immaculately and then you get there and all the exam questions are in Hindi.

His face just hung there over his desk like a hypertensive moon, never turning away.

I actually said, "The nearest library with a cutting-edge professional grief- and trauma-therapy section, and step on it."

I said it wasn't my fault that my first unconscious thought turned out to be — 'That something smelled delicious!' I screamed.

This massive authoritative figure, with a huge red meaty face and thick walrus mustache and dewlaps and a neck that spilled over the rim of his shirt-collar, and his hands were tiny and pink and hairless and butt-soft, delicate as shells.

White halogen off the green of the composite surface, the light out on the indoor courts at the Port Washington Tennis Academy is the color of sour apples.

Nobody at the Academy talks to Hal much about the explosion, sort of the way you avoid a pitcher who's got a no-hitter going.

He comes around the side of the bounced ball's second ascent the way you come up around the side of somebody you're going to hurt.

The sounds on court in an indoor venue are huge and complex; everything echoes and the echoes then meld.

His play, like his manner in general, seems to Schacht less alive than undead.

Except for Pemulis and Rader and Unwin and a couple others who favor gut strings and really need protection, nobody at Enfield uses racquet-covers; it's like an antifashion statement.

Mario is wondering how you could get enough light back here in a tarp-tunnel to film a tense cold pre-match gladiatorial march behind an indoor tarp, carrying tennis racquets in your arms like an obscene bouquet.

It's like his hard flat game stopped having any purpose beyond itself and started feeding on itself and got fuller, looser, its edges less jagged.

A nervous spin-artist can be eaten more or less for lunch, if you hit as hard as Schacht does, and what Pemulis said is true: the guy's backhand is always sliced and lands shallow.

Like most very large men, he's getting comfortable early with the fact that his place in the world is very small and his real impact on other persons even smaller.

Wayne hits it so hard a little mushroom cloud of green fuzz hangs in the air where ball had met strings.

‘I Didn't Know That I Didn't Know’ is another of the slogans that looks so shallow for a while and then all of a sudden drops off and deepens like the lobster-waters off the North Shore.

I used to think in long compound sentences with subordinate clauses and even the odd polysyllable. Now I find I needn't.

They identify their whole selves with their head, and the Disease makes its command headquarters in the head.

It's a myth no one misses it. Their particular Substance. Shit, you wouldn't need help if you didn't miss it.

Watching Burt F. Smith smoke a Benson & Hedges by holding it between his stumps with his elbows out like a guy with pruning shears is an adventure in fucking pathos as far as Gately's concerned.

The needle makes a kind of thud and squeak when it goes in the cloth. It's not much like the soundless pop and slide of a real cook-and-shoot.

The ghastly wounds in her cheeks look for all the world like somebody got at her with a woodburning kit at some point in her career path.

Rooms full of Randy Lenzes, all hugging each other, pretending they don't miss the Substance.

White Flag newcomers so crazed and sick they can't sit and have to pace at the meeting's rear, like Gately when he first came.

Ennet House reeks of passing time. It is the humidity of early sobriety, hanging and palpable. You can hear ticking in clockless rooms here.

A fine, digital, incredibly wide watch, about five times the width of your wrist, so you have to hold it like a falconer, and it treats time like pi.

After the kid had delayed play for several minutes claiming the tennis balls were too pretty to hit, P.W.T.A. trainers had conducted him gently from the court, and the Peemster got 'V.D.,' which is jr.-circuit argot for a Victory by Default.

The luggage rack over everyone's heads bristled with grips and coverless strings, and liniment and tincture of benzoin had been handed out and liberally applied, so the warm air became complexly spiced.

His competitive peak had come at thirteen, when he'd gotten to the 14-and-Under quarterfinals of the National Clays in Indianapolis IN and in the Quarters had taken a set off the second seed; but starting soon after that he'd suffered athletically from the same delayed puberty that had compromised his father.

Orin had characterized the Moms to Hal as a kind of contortionist with other people's bodies, which Hal's never been able to forget.

Incandenza Himself having eliminated his own map on 1 April of the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar just as spring Letters of Intent were due from seniors who'd decided to slouch off to college tennis.

Well someone had had to come in and fill the void, and that person was going to have to be someone who could achieve Total Worry without becoming paralyzed by the worry.

invited florid fish-lipped guys from the French Academy to come speak with trilled r's on prescriptive preservation

Orin had been playing, eating, sleeping, and excreting competitive tennis since his racquet was bigger than he was.

The twirler induced in heterosexual males what U.H.I.D. later told her was termed the Actaeon Complex, which is a kind of deep phylogenic fear of transhuman beauty.

Orin watching the Kleenex soggify and get holes blown through it while he tried to articulate just what he meant by burned out and withered husk and carrot.

Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer.

The one huge wordless orgasmic voice rising and creating a vacuum that sucked the ball after it into the sky, the leather egg receding as it climbed in a perfect spiral, seeming to chase the very crowd-roar it had produced.

Orin's whole limited game had been indicted by Schtitt for depending way too often on the lob he'd developed as compensation.

So and then the only really cardiac-grade romantic relationship of Orin's life took bilateral root at a distance, during games, without one exchanged personal phoneme, a love communicated — across grassy expanses, against stadiums' monovocal roar — entirely through stylized repetitive motions.

The sound of the podiatric impact had silenced a major-sport crowd, and a retired USMC flier who always came with petroleum-jelly samples he hawked to the knuckle-chapped crowds in the Nickerson stands told his cronies in a Brookline watering hole after the game that this Incandenza kid's first public punt had sounded just the way Rolling Thunder's big-bellied Berthas had sounded, the exaggerated WHUMP of incendiary tonnage, way larger than life.

Orin had taken his off-campus housing subsidy and moved with Joelle van Dyne the heart-stopping Kentuckian into an East Cambridge co-op three subway stops distant from B.U. and the all-new inconveniences of being publicly stellar at a major sport in a city where people beat each other to death

Orin would shepherd the two of them back to their Ontario Place hotel, stopping the cab to let them both throw up, fireman-carrying Joelle while he watched The Mad Stork negotiate his suite by holding on to walls.

The clips of him punting unfolded like time-lapsing flowers and seemed to reveal him in ways he could never have engineered.

With Joelle the mess just disappears sometime during the night and you wake up and the place is sterile. It's like elves.

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.

He had simply never felt so beset and overcome on all sides as the black July day when it fell to his lot to boost a heart.

His symptoms themselves developed symptoms, troughs and nodes he charted with morbid attention in the dumpster, in his suspenders and horrid tweed cap.

Time began to pass with sharp edges. Its passage in the dark or dim-lit stall was like time was being carried by a procession of ants, a gleaming red martial column of those militaristic red Southern-U.S. ants that build hideous tall boiling hills; and each vile gleaming ant wanted a minuscule little portion of Poor Tony's flesh in compensation as it helped bear time slowly forward down the corridor of true Withdrawal.

Then at some point he realized: time had become the shit itself: Poor Tony had become an hourglass: time moved through him now; he ceased to exist apart from its jagged-edged flow.

subgenus, sinister and duplicitous but when it came down to it rather hapless political insurgents

He wept silently in shame and pain at the passage of each brightly lit public second's edge, and the driver ants that boiled in his lap opened needle-teethed little insectile mouths to catch the tears.

His body flopped around without OK from HQ. He didn't feel one bit like a puppet. He thought of gaffed fish.

M. E. Thode is regarded by the up-perclassmen as probably insane, by like clinical standards, although her coaching proficiency with the Girls' 16's is beyond dispute.

As an agoraphobic, you cannot so much as step off your front step of the porch of your home, without undergoing palpitations, drenching sweats, and feelings of impending doom.

Peter Beak spread Ville Dillard on a cracker like some sort of hors d'oeuvre and bit down 6-4, 7-6, while 14's A-4 Idris Arslanian ground his heel into the neck of David Wiere 6-1, 6-4.

Bridget Boone drove a hot thin spike into the right eye of Aimee Middleton-Law 6-3, 6-3.

They'd flash their high beams, but to all appearances the impending idiot would just flash his high beams right back.

Incandenza saw the whole slow thing in a light like he was Vermeer: she sank steadily from his side and he bent to hers and she then tried to rise.

He had to be more or less scraped out, Mario, like the meat of an oyster from a womb to whose sides he'd been found spiderishly clinging, tiny and unobtrusive, attached by cords of sinew at both feet and a hand, the other fist stuck to his face by the same material.

Mario's real eyelid — that had been sacrificed when the fist stuck to his face like a tongue to cold metal had been peeled away, at nativity.

Mario'd been like an honorary assistant production-assistant and carried the late Incandenza's film and lenses and filters in a complex backpack the size of a joint of beef for most of the last three years of the late-blooming filmmaker's life.

People who're somehow burned at birth, withered or ablated way past anything like what might be fair, they either curl up in their fire, or else they rise.

It was Hal, brandishing his Dunlop stick, who told the guy to go peddle his linen someplace else.

Marathe wondered why the presence of Americans could always make him feel vaguely ashamed after saying things he believed.

The choice for death of the head by pleasure now exists, and your authorities know, or you would not be now trying to stop the pleasure.

How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?

Its elegant complexity, combined with a dismissive-reenactment frisson and a complete disassociation from the realities of the present, composes most of its puerile appeal.

Each of the 400 dead tennis balls in the game's global arsenal represents a 5-mega-ton thermonuclear warhead.

Toe-worn cast-off corporate-supplied sneakers sit open-mouthed and serenely lethal, strongly suggesting the subs they stand for.

baroque apparatus of each Eschaton has to be worked out in advance and then sold to a kind of immature and easily bored

SOVWAR's bald and port-wine-stained premier calls AMNAT's wattle-chinned president on the Hot Line and asks him if he's got Prince Albert in a can.

Air Force Two tries to leave the ground and gets a flat tire.

Lord having to dramatize manually the effortless dictates of real logic and necessity, verifying that command decisions are allowable functions of situation and capacity.

Five megatons of heavy-hydrogen fusion yields at least 1,400,000 curies worth of strontium-^o, meaning microcephalic kids in Montreal for roughly twenty-two generations, and yes wiseacre McKenna of AMNAT the world will probably notice the difference.

Roentgens of straight X and gamma produces 6.36 deaths per hundred POP and for the other 93.64 means reduced lifespans

Whenever there's a direct hit, Troeltsch sits up straight and gets to use the exclamation he's hit on for a kind of announcerial trademark: 'Ho-/y CROW!'

The D. Tree's now indicating peace terms in whatever a D. Tree's version of neon letters is, because the biggest priority for AMNAT right at 1515h. is to avoid having to SACPOP with SOVWAR.

It's an uneasy moment: a dispute such as this would never occur in the real God's real world, since the truth would be

It's snowing on the goddamn map, not the territory, you dick!

Real-world snow isn't a factor if it's falling on the fucking map!

No Eschaton Combatant has ever intentionally struck another Combatant's physical person with a 5-megaton thermonuclear weapon.

The dreaded red UGC beanie has been donned by an Eschaton game-master only once before, and that was over three years ago, when human input-error on EndStat tallies of aggregate SUFDDIR during a three-way SACPOP free-for-all yielded an apparent ignition of the earth's atmosphere.

It's snowing on the players but not on the territory. They're part of the map, not the cluster-fucking territory.

Ann Kittenplan has been trembling and feeling at the back of her vein-laced head and looking across the Mediterranean at Ingersoll like somebody who knows they'll go to prison for what they want to do.

Lord's mewing ineffectually for order, but some of the other Combatants' staffs have begun to smell that Evan Ingersoll's become fair game for cruelty — the way kids can seem to smell this sort of thing out with such uncanny acuity.

The snowfall makes everything gauzy and terribly clear at the same time, eliminating all visual background so that the map's action seems stark and surreal.

There's a noise like the historical sum of all cafeteria accidents everywhere.

Sunstrand Power & Light is creepily muffled by the no-sound of falling snow.

Every night in Boston, bumper-stickered cars full of totally sober people, wall-eyed from caffeine and trying to read illegibly scrawled directions by the dashboard lights, crisscross the city.

The Advanced Basics chairperson looks like a perfect cross between pictures of Dick Cavett and Truman Capote except this guy's also like totally, almost flamboyantly bald, and to top it off he's wearing a bright-black country-western shirt with baroque curlicues of white Nodie-piping across the chest and shoulders.

When I was drunk I wanted to get sober and when I was sober I wanted to get drunk; I lived that way for years, and I submit to you that's not livin, that's a fuckin death-in-life.

you look in the mirror at midnight and see what owns you, what's become what you are —

You see now that It's your enemy and your worst personal nightmare and the trouble It's gotten you into is undeniable and you still can't stop.

Everybody, but everybody Comes In dead-eyed and puke-white and with their face hanging down around their knees and with a well-thumbed firearm-and-ordnance mail-order catalogue kept safe and available at home.

The newcomers who abandon common sense and resolve to Hang In and keep coming and then find their cages all of a sudden open, mysteriously, after a while, share this sense of deep shock and possible trap.

you keep getting ritually down on your big knees every morning and night asking for help from a sky that still seems a burnished shield against all who would ask aid of it

And now if the older guys say Jump you ask them to hold their hand at the desired height, and now they've got you, and you're free.

Gately says he defies the new Ennet House residents to try and shock the smiles off these Boston AAs' faces.

one or two Flaggers with medium amounts of sober time would come up to him after the meeting and say how it was so good to hear him

Gately sort of fears these old AA guys with their varicose noses and flannel shirts and white crew cuts and brown teeth and coolly amused looks of appraisal, feels like a kind of low-rank tribal knucklehead in the presence of stone-faced chieftains who rule by some unspoken shamanistic fiat.

The Crocodiles up front look into the rearview mirror and narrow their baggy bright-white eyes at Gately in the sagging backseat with the other new guys, and the Crocodiles say they can't even begin to say how many new guys they've seen Come In and then get sucked back Out There.

Old emphysemic Francis G. in particular likes to slow his LeSabre down at a corner in front of some jack-legged loose-faced homeless fuck who'd once been in AA and drifted cockily out and roll down his window and yell 'Live it up!'

Gately's sponsor Francis ('Ferocious Francis') G. compares the totally optional basic suggestions in Boston AA to, say for instance if you're going to jump out of an airplane, they 'suggest' you wear a parachute.

This is why, to the cynical newcomer or fresh Ennet House resident, serious AAs look like these weird combinations of Gandhi and Mr. Rogers with tattoos and enlarged livers and no teeth who used to beat wives and diddle daughters and now rhapsodize about their bowel movements.

The figure was so impressive and trustworthy and casually self-assured as to be both soothing and compelling.

And that was the first night that cynical Gately willingly took the basic suggestion to get down on his big knees by his undersized spring-shot Ennet House bunk and Ask For Help from something he still didn't believe in.

Erdedy's in the House mainly for 'marijuana addiction,' which Gately has a hard time Identifying with anybody getting in enough trouble with weed to leave his job and condo to bunk in a room full of tattooed guys who smoke in their sleep.

The White Flag hall is so brightly lit up all Gately can see out any of the windows is a kind of shiny drooling black against everybody's pale reflection.

There's a certain pathos to the Crocodile's kindness, his clean flannel arm around the weatherstained shoulders, which pathos Gately feels and likes being able to feel it.

What I think I like is how 'It was good to hear you' ends up, like, saying two separate things together.

She'd been up at Brigham and Women's for five days after some sort of horrific O.D.-type situation said to have included both defib paddles and priests.

It turned out hearing the speaker means like all of a sudden hearing how fucking similar the way he felt and the way I felt were, Out There, at the Bottom, before we each Came In.

The Crocodiles, decades sober, live in a totally different spiritual galaxy, inside.

His own heart grips him like an infant rattling the bars of its playpen, and he feels a greasy wave of an old and almost unfamiliar panic.

Close to two hundred people all punishing somebody by getting embarrassed for him, killing him by empathetically dying right there with him, for him, up there at the podium.

An ironist in a Boston AA meeting is a witch in church. Irony-free zone.

But he also shrugs and tells them that by the end of his oral-narcotics and burglary careers he'd sort of decided the old brain needed a good scrub and soak anyway.

It would lie in a heap, drooling and incontinent under exquisite mother-bought fashions specially altered for atrophy and top-shelf Lancôme cosmetics that looked just lurid on It.

the smiling quiet foster father even bought, had found somewhere, a cheesy rubber Raquel Welch full-head pull-on mask, with hair, and would now nightly come in in the dark and lift Its limp soft head up and struggle and lug to get the mask on

It's the kind of sick unspoken complicity characteristic of wildly dysfunctional families, confides the speaker, who's also proud she says to be a member of a splinter 12-Step Fellowship.

Its face looked post-coital sort of the way you'd imagine the vacuole and optica of a protozoan looking post-coital after it's shuddered and shot its mono-cellular load into the cold waters of some really old sea.

Do not ask WHY If you dont want to DIE Do like your TOLD If you want to get OLD

She tells about having her water break and contractions start late one night in her welfare-hotel room when she was right in the middle of an Eightball she'd had to spend the evening turning unbelievably sordid and degrading tricks to pay for.

She held and swaddled the dead thing just as if it were alive instead of dead, and she began to carry it around with her wherever she went, just as she imagined devoted mothers carry their babies with them everywhere they go.

Special D.S.S. spray-solvents had to be sent for and utilized in order to detach the Woolworth baby-blanket from her maternal bosom, and the blanket's contents were more or less reassembled and were interred in a D.S.S. coffin the speaker recalls as being the size of a Mary Kay makeup case.

Incandenza'd open up and pour his heart's thickest chyme right out there for all to be affected and potentially scarred by.

Mrs. Clarke gets to put on her floppy white chef's hat and just go sucrotically mad, out in West House's gleaming kitchen.

This Dermalatix-brand-shower-sized-Hypospectral-Flash-Booth-that-actually-like-burns-your-outermost-layer-of-skin-off-in-a-dazzling-flash-and-leaves-you-baby's-butt-new-and-sterile-once-you-wipe-off-the-coating-of-fine-epidermal-ash-with-a-boiled-hankie kind.

Johnny Gentle, the first U.S. President ever to swing his microphone around by the cord during his Inauguration speech.

The Johnny Gentle, Chief Executive who pounds a rubber-gloved fist on the podium so hard it knocks the Seal askew and declares that Dammit there just must be some people besides each other of us to blame.

This American penchant for absolution via irony is foreign to them.

Let them foot some defensive budgets and then try to subsidize their farmers into undercutting NAFTA.

The kid wrote accomplished juvenile verses about the dry clean boy inside, struggling to break the soggy surface.

He wants to get to the Show so bad it feels like it's eating him alive.

The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.

Do not believe the photographs. Fame is not the exit from any cage.

Burger King's Pillsbury awarded rights to New Year; Pizza Hut's PepsiCo files bid-rigging complaint with IRS.

'WE ARE NOT THIS CONTINENT'S SIGMOID COLON,' GENTLE WARNS O.N.A.N. JOINT SESSION

Ortho Stice can think of only three possible explanations for what's going on, and he presents them to an attentive cheek-sucking Lyle in ascending order of grimness.

The world, after all, which is radically old, is made up mostly of objects.

The cartridge goes on like this until there's nobody left in the Ford's Theater seats animate enough to applaud the nested narrative of the fight-scene play, and it ends with the two aesthetic foils still rumbling like mad before an audience of varicolored stone.

The Joke's total running time was just exactly as long as there was even one cross-legged patron left in the theater to watch his own huge projected image gazing back down at him with the special distaste of a disgusted and ripped-off-feeling art-film patron.

In the nation's capital, a quote "full and energetic investigation" has been promised by the Gentle administration into claims by residents of Berlin, NH and Rumford, ME that the incidence of soft-skulled and extra-eyed newborns in the toxicly affected area far exceeds the national average.

The last display's a real heartstring-plucker: a multi-eyed infant crawling backwards, its ear to the carpet, dragging its shapeless head like a sack of spuds.

If there's one natural resource we've still got in spades, it's territory.

We foresee a strictly temporary breakdown in the thin veneer of civilization over the souls of essentially frightened stampeding animals.

Apparently the term refugee can be plausibly denied if both — I'm quoting direct from Neil's memo here — if both, a, no homemade wagons piled high with worldly goods are pulled by slow bovine animals with curvy horns, and b, if the percentage of children under six who are either, a, naked, or b, squalling at the top of their lungs, or c, both, is under 20%.

Gentle has completely lost mind, claims confidant: threatens to detonate upside-down missiles in U.S. silos, irradiate Canada w/ aid of ATHSCME hell-fans.

He'd just sort of seepily risen, some sort of human radon, from someplace low and unknown, whence he lent the cliche 'Win or Die in the Attempt' grotesquely literal new levels of sense.

And but for the remainder of the match (which lasts exactly eleven more games) Clipperton plays tennis with the Clock 17 held steadily to his left temple.

No one is willing to beat him and risk going through life with the sight of the Clock going off on his conscience.

Hal has lost a bit of his grip and has just gotten on the outside of his fourth chocolate cannoli in half an hour, and is feeling the icy electric keening of some sort of incipient carie in the left-molar range.

Mounting an aggressive hearts-and-minds campaign that derided the 'passivity' of hundreds of millions of viewers forced to choose nightly between only four statistically pussified Network broadcasters.

The paintings themselves were excruciating, the more so because consumer HDTV had arrived, at least in the very upscale Incandenza home.

The slow-motion full-frontal shot of the maid's face going slack with disgust as she recoils, the returned cone falling unfelt from her repulsion-paralyzed fingers.

ABC had to fall back on old 'Happy Days' marathons of such relentless duration that bomb threats began to be received both by the Network and by poor old Henry Winkler, now hairless and sugar-addicted in La Honda CA.

The cable kabal's promise of 'empowerment,' the campaign argued, was still just the invitation to choose which of 504 visual spoon-feedings you'd sit there and open wide for.

Personal pleasure and gross revenue looked at last to lie along the same demand curve, at least as far as home entertainment went.

Billboards sprouted with near-mycological fury alongside even rural two-laners.

Part of Marathe floated off and hovered somewhere just above him, crossing its legs, nibbling at his consciousness as does a spectator at popcorn.

The feet were also visibly unused to high U.S.A. women's heels, for they were mangled-looking, deprived of flowing blood and abundantly blistered, and the smallest toes' nails were blackening and preparing, Marathe noted, in the future to fall off.

When there's some set of ends we can make sense of the malice with. Then it's just business.

The little things. Access to transport. Good digestion. Work-saving appliances. A wife who doesn't mistake your job's requirements for your own fetishes. Reliable waste-removal and disposal. Sunsets over the Pacific. Shoes that don't cut off circulation. Frozen yogurt. A tall lemonade on a squeak-free porch swing.

The United States: a community of sacred individuals which reveres the sacredness of the individual choice.

'No, for the ingenious Single-Serving Size of serving is notoriously for only one, and we are both large and vigorous U.S.A. individuals who have spent the afternoon watching huge men in pads and helmets hurl themselves at one another in the High Definition of InterLace, and we are both ravenous for the satiation of a complete hot bowl's serving.'

The straps of his prostheses' brassiere dug cruelly into the meat of his back and shoulders. Again there was for Marathe the picture of something soft being slowly throttled.

Like films' idylls in cities the moment before the nuclear blast, in old films of U.S.A. death and horror.

How do I calculate this distant road of long term into my action of this moment, now, with our dead comrade clutching the soup and both of us with spittle on our chins as we regard the soup?

The rising astral body Venus lit his left side of the face to the color of pallid cheese.

Clipper-ton must have been just broke out in brass and plastic, but he had no official ranking whatsoever: since his Clock 9 mm. and public intentions were instantly legendary, he was regarded by the U.S.T.A. as never having had a legitimate victory, or even a legit match, in sanctioned play.

Clipperton places to his right — not left — temple, as in with his good right stick-hand, closes his eyes and scrunches up his face and blows his legitimated brains out for real and all time, eradicates his map and then some.

It took the bradykinetic Mario all night and two bottles of Ajax Plus to clean the room with his tiny contractured arms and square feet; the 18's girls in the rooms on either side could hear him falling around in there and picking himself up, again and again.

Stavros Lobokulas, a troubling guy with a long cigarette-filter and an enormous collection of women's-shoes catalogues he keeps piled behind the seats in the cab of his 4x4.

There are industrial buckets for a.m. puking that they seem to treat like golfers treat the pin on like a golf course, aiming in its vague direction from a distance.

And since the family has six more various-aged kids who as the night wears on come in from dates or patter down the stairs in little pajamas with adorable little pajama-feet attached to them, drawn by the noise of all the cumulative keeling over, plus I should mention the odd agonized gurgle-sound, and

but since all six kids had gone through a four-hour Rotary-sponsored CPR course at Fresno's YMCA, by the end of the night the

Only the very newest E.T.A. players ever go to Rusk, and then not for long, and she spends her massive blocks of free time in her Comm.-Ad. office doing involved acrostics and working on some sort of pop-psych manuscript.

I ate an entire wiener stem to stern while one punt was in the air.

One sec. heard to ask whether there's even a name for a figure with this many zeroes.

One: waste. Two: no new enhancements. Three: find somebody outside the borders of our community selves to blame.

Boys, I heard punts, burped redhots, smelled beer-foam and recoiled from public urinals at the Ken-L-Ration-Magnavox-Kemper-Insurance-Forsythia Bowl.

Gately still feels like he has no access to the Big spiritual Picture.

He says when he tries to pray he gets this like image in his mind's eye of the brainwaves or whatever of his prayers going out and out, with nothing to stop them, going, going, radiating out into like space and outliving him and still going and never hitting Anything out there, much less Something with an ear.

Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when you're new and out of your skull with desperation and ready to eliminate your map and they tell you how it'll all get better and better as you abstain and recover: they somehow omit to mention that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain.

It starts to turn out that the vapider the AA cliche, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers.

Enfield Marine P.H.H. withheld maintenance services in reprisal for late utilities.

It's like a lot of memories of his youth sank without bubbles when he quit school and then later only in sobriety bubbled back up to where he could Get In Touch with them.

He'd ride a mop-handle horse and brandish a trashcan-lid and a batteryless plastic Light-Saber and tell the neighborhood kids he was Sir Osis of Thuliver, most fearsomely loyal and fierce of Arthur's vessels.

Hal listened to a few minutes of the stuff and told his brother it sounded like somebody's mind coming apart right before your ears.

The key to the successful administration of a top-level junior tennis academy lies in cultivating a kind of reverse-Buddhism, a state of Total Worry.

By the time they're all stretching out, lined up in rows along the service-and baselines, flexing and bowing, genuflecting to nothing, changing postures at the sound of a whistle, by this time the sky has lightened to the color of Kaopectate.

The sound of the bullhorn is scarier when you can't see him.

Wayne and Hal amuse themselves by making their cross-court balls collide on every fifth exchange or so — this is known around E.T.A. as 'atom-smashing' and is understandably hard to do.

Neil Hartigan, who's 2 m. tall and of so few words everybody fears him by default — he's having lower spasms from a mispositioned bed.

There is something creepy about a very fit older man, to say nothing of jackboots w/ Fila warm-ups of claret-colored silk.

There's a janitorial bucket placed in the doubles alley by the finish point, for potential distress.

Hal's tooth gives off little electric shivers with each inbreath, and he feels slightly unwell.

World built inside cold outside world of wind breaks the wind, shelters the player, you, if you stay the same, stay inside.

Make this second world inside the world: here there are no conditions.

Arm in the real tennis is like wheels of vehicles. Not engine. Legs: not either.

The engine sounds more like a jet engine than a piston engine, plus there's a scoop poking periscopically from the hood, and for Gately the vehicle's so terrifically tight and sleek it's like being strapped into a missile and launched at the site of a domestic errand.

At twenty-four he'd done 17 months at Billerica for assaulting two bouncers in a nightclub — it was more like he'd beaten the second bouncer bloody with the unconscious body of the first — and he knew quite well he could get by in a Commonwealth lockdown.

The dog trembled and shuddered and its eyes rolled up as Gately, who hadn't been told about Pat's thing about wanting her dogs petted, rubbed its scabby stomach.

It wasn't until she'd almost died from a stroke during the D.T.s one A.M. that she'd been able to Surrender and Come In with the requisite hopeless desperation.

Pat walked with a dignified but godawful lurch, dragging a terribly thin right leg in black leather pants behind her like something hanging on to her that she was trying to get away from.

It didn't matter one fuckola whether Gately like believed a cake would result, or whether he understood the like fucking baking-chemistry of how a cake would result: if he just followed the motherfucking directions, and had sense enough to get help from slightly more experienced bakers to keep from fucking the directions up if he got confused somehow, but basically the point was if he just followed the childish directions, a cake would result.

Substances hadn't even occurred to him. I.e. the Desire and Compulsion had been Removed.

He couldn't for the goddamn life of him understand how this thing worked, this thing that was working.

Don's food is the kind of food that helps you really appreciate whatever you're drinking along with it.

The rat would press the lever to stimulate his p-terminal over and over, thousands of times an hour, over and over, ignoring food and female rats in heat, completely fixated on the lever's stimulation, day and night, stopping only when the rat finally died of dehydration or simple fatigue.

And suddenly the neuro-team at Brandon pull in to work one day and find human volunteers lining up literally around the block outside the place, able-bodied and I should remember to recall mostly young Canadians, lining up and literally trampling each other in their desire to sign up as volunteers for p-terminal-electrode implantation and stimulation.

Bug-eyed, drooling, moaning, trembling, incontinent, dehydrated. Not working, not consuming, not interacting or taking part in community life.

For Marathe felt more uncomfortable not knowing whether Steeply believed a thing than if Steeply's emotion of face showed he did not believe.

He's able to minimize the suspicious time any particular bit of extra cruising adds to his errands by basically driving like a lunatic: ignoring lights, cutting people off, scoffing at One-Ways, veering wildly in and out, making pedestrians drop things and lunge curbward, leaning on a horn that sounds more like an air-raid siren.

It's almost perfectly square, massive and boxy and mysticetously blunt: the head of somebody who looks like he likes to lower his head and charge.

The weird hopelessness at the heart of lust.

Gately's never had sex sober yet, or danced, or held somebody's hand except to say the Our Father in a big circle.

The street shitty with litter and holes. Indifferent drainage. Big-assed girls stuffed like stuffed sausage into cigarette jeans in always trios in the twilight with that weird blond-brown hair Portuguese girls dye their hair to.

Bertraund's forever laughing in Québecois and telling Lucien he looks forward with humorous anticipation to the day Lucien

The unauto-matic revolver, it is a souvenir of affiliation.

He has that rare spinal appreciation for beauty in the ordinary that nature seems to bestow on those who have no native words for what they see.

Some of the cartridges do not even have labels, they're so obscure or illicit.

The shop, crammed to the acoustic-tile ceiling and dustless, resembles a junkyard for anal retentives.

Lucien now hears whole systems of squeaks, slow and soft but not stealthy squeaks, the squeaks of weighted wheelchairs moving slow, implacable, calm and businesslike and yet menacing, moving with the indifference of things at the very top of the food-chain.

Lucien bursts almost falling through the curtains, bug-eyed and corded and webbed in thread, to alert Bertraund facially that the shot had signified A.F.R.s.

The A.F.R. looks warmly into Lucien's eyes for a moment, then with a professionally vicious backhanded motion pegs the gun at Bertraund's profiled head, striking Bertraund in the side of the head.

The black thread has remained snagged on the Colt's sight-blade and in the middle caught somewhere on Bertraund's ear; the other remains also attached to Lucien by a persistent hangnail on his well-gnawed right thumb.

Lucien finds his gut and throat again and newly whole, clean and unimpeded, and is free, catapulted home over fans and the Convexity's glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world's well-known tongues.

Theory's that with a really sophisticated piece of holography you'd get the neural density of an actual stage play without losing the selective realism of the viewer-screen.

Sweat was running in dark orange lines down my father's face from under his rigid white professional wig.

Areas that gibber and squeak, until we both feel as if we're being eaten by rats.

He was the first of two actors to portray the Man from Glad.

The mattress's overall movement was like the crest of a breaking wave, I remember.

The joint and toggle made a painful squeaking sound as the cube was wrenched around upward.

There was something exoskeletal and frail-looking about the bed frame, a plain low-ratio rectangle of black steel.

It looked as if dust had not drifted under the bed and settled on the carpet inside the frame but rather had somehow taken root and grown on it, upon it, the way a mold will take root and gradually cover an expanse of spoiled food.

My father's mood surrounded him like a field and affected any room he occupied, like an odor or a certain cast to the light.

It was the wet sound of material hitting the dust inside the rectangle, plus the rising odor, that signified to me that, rather than coughing, my father had been taken ill.

My father's professional wig had detached and lay scalp-up in the mixture of dust and stomach material.

It occurred to me that the movement of the amputated knob perfectly schematized what it would look like for someone to try to turn somersaults with one hand nailed to the floor.

The paralytic stasis that results from the obsessive analysis of all possible implications of both getting up from the couch and not getting up from the couch.

And the male-to-male hugs were straight embraces, hugs minus the vigorous little thumps on the back that Erdedy'd always seen as somehow requisite for male-to-male hugs.

Now you gone risk vulnerability and discomfort and hug my ass or do I gone fucking rip your head off and shit down your neck?

His world's as if it has collapsed into one small bright point. Inner world. Lost to us.

Hal loathes sky-and-cloud wallpaper because it makes him feel high-altitude and disoriented and sometimes plummeting.

Avril's office's blue-and-black-checkered shag is deeper than the waiting room's shag, so that the border between the two is like a mowed v. unmowed lawn.

If the cleaning lady hadn't been wearing yellow rubber cleaning-lady gloves she would have ended up with way worse than the permanent perm and irreversible crossed eyes she regained consciousness with.

The only real thing Axford and Hal have in common on the court is a curious habit of refusing to ask for help from other courts when their balls go astray.

For post-Delco-incident legal reasons, the name-plaque on her reception desk has DANGER: THIRD RAIL instead of the name Lateral Alice Moore.

Puker-drills are really meant to do nothing but hurt you and make you think long and hard before repeating whatever you did to merit them.

It's almost like some ponderous creaky machine has to get up and running for Hal even to think about members of his immediate family as standing in relation to himself.

Tavis had been the one to take the lion's share of the heat when it turned out that Blue Jays' spectators in the stands could see right into the windows of guests having various and sometimes exotic sex in the hotel bedrooms over the center-field wall.

Each line of Alice's printed response sounds like some sort of supposedly unrippa-ble fabric getting ripped, over and over, a dental and life-denying sound.

The kid apparently had on-court use of only one hand because the other had to pull around beside him a kind of rolling IV-stand appliance with a halo-shaped metal brace welded to it at head-height, to encircle and support his head.

His smallness resembles the smallness of something that's farther away from you than it wants to be, plus is receding.

Stice can make them all double up now merely by shielding his eyes with his hand and assuming a horizon-scan expression whenever Tavis heaves into view, seeming to recede even as he bears down.

One possible way of couching it is to choose to say that we will take apart your skull very gently and reconstruct a skull for you that will have a highly developed bump of clarity and a slight concave dent where the fear-instinct used to be.

When Avril entered a room, any sort of pacing reduced to orbiting, and Hal's pacing became vaguely circular around the waiting room's perimeter.

He said she went around with her feelings out in front of her, one arm around the feelings' windpipe and a Glock 9 mm. to the feelings' temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot.

Is it showing off if you hate it?

The danger-sign to watch out for is if Tavis suddenly seems to expand, perspectivally, to grow.

Otis P. Lord, the Hitachi monitor still over his head like the sallet of some grotesque high-tech knight, slumped and with his sneakers pointing at each other in the blue and black shag.

The analogous part is how even the ones who know the pleasure of it will kill them, they go ahead anyway.

The cloudless sky above the east's Mountains of Rincon range was the faint sick pink of an unhealed burn.

You always maybe think of individuals bleeding in this one way, like steady. But your ous bleeding comes with the pulse, if you didn't know. It like shoots out and dies down and shoots out.

That no mortal eye will see it withdrawn. That they hereby declare openly that they wish to hide from all sight. Unquote.

You stick your hideous face right in there into the wine-tasting crowd's visual meatgrinder, you smile so wide it hurts and put out your hand and are extra gregarious and outgoing.

U.H.I.D. allows members to be open about their essential need for concealment, to take the veil and wear the veil proudly and stand very straight and walk briskly wherever we wish, veiled and hidden, and but now completely up-front and unashamed.

I am so beautiful I drive anybody with a nervous system out of their fucking mind.

Lenz sets loafer one outside Ennet House only after sunset, and then only in his white toupee and mustache and billowing tall-collared topcoat.

The big flat-top chunk came down on most of one rat and a bit of the other rat.

The 'There' turned out to be crucial for the sense of brisance and closure and resolving issues of impotent rage and powerless fear that like accrued in Lenz all day.

Lenz had thought it sounded wicked nice, the sky as digital timepiece.

The man was so cross-eyed he could stand in the middle of the week and see both Sundays.

A Wednesday night on which the alight cat ran (as alight cats will, like hell) but ran after Lenz, seemingly, leaping the same fences Lenz hurdled and staying on his tail.

The dog at issue invariably stops with the barking and/or lunging and its nose flares and it becomes totally uncynical and friendly.

Lenz envisualizes the old guy both cut and on fire and dancing jaggedly around hitting at himself while Lenz goes 'There.'

Lenz found a miniature bird that had fallen out of some nest and was sitting bald and pencil-necked on the lawn of Unit #3 flapping ineffectually, and went in and put it down the garbage disposal in the kitchen sink.

The persons' lives’ meanings had collapsed to such a narrow focus that no other activity or connection could hold their attention.

The subject's mental and spiritual energies abruptly declined to a point where even near-lethal voltages through the electrodes couldn't divert his attention from the Entertainment.

He looked less insolent than just extremely poorly dressed, really.

She was about two meters from Wayne, facing him, doing near-splits on the heavy shag, one arm up and pretending to blow the whistle while Wayne produced the classic low-register growling sounds of U.S. football.

Wayne's got a narrow nose and close-set witchy eyes.

Deciding to go ahead and think somebody's a stand-up guy: it's like you drop something, you give up all of your power over it: you have to stand there impotent waiting for it to hit the ground: all you can do is brace and wince.

Far from your scenario of relapsing, the Bing is medicinal support for assertively sharing his need for aloneness with Green, so that issues of early sobriety can get resolved before standing in the way of spiritual growth — Lenz will use cocaine in the very interests of sobriety and growth itself.

The State Bird of Massachusetts, he shares to Green, is the police siren.

Lenz on the way home finds himself under huge hydrolystic compulsion to have Green right there by his side — or basically anyone who can't get away or won't go away — right there with him, and to share with Green or any compliant ear pretty much the whole of the case of R. Lenz.

Lenz utilized akido to break the man's nose with one blow and then drive the bone's shards and fragments up into the vendor's brain with the follow-up heel of his hand, a maneuver known by a secret ancient Chinese term meaning The Old One-Two.

Lenz clues Green in that AA/NA works all right but there's no fucking question it's a cult, he and Green've apparently got themselves to the point where the only way out of the addictive tailspin is to enlist in a fucking cult and let them try and brainwash your ass.

What sounds like Lenz chewing gum is really Lenz trying to talk and grind his teeth together at the same time.

The ideas of ravacious herds of feral domesticated housepets and oversized insects not only taking over the abandoned homes of relocated Americans but actually setting up house and keeping them in model repair and impressive equity, allegedly.

Well Don he's sitting in the linen closet with his legs sticking out of the linen closet with his eyes bugging out with like smoke coming out his ears and duh-duh duh-duh going like He Can but He Can't but He Can, respecting the suitcase and duh-duh.

Because he needs them, needs her, because he needs her he fears her and so hates her a little, hates all of them, a hatred that comes out disguised as a contempt he disguises as a tender attention.

Not and never love, which kills what needs it.

I therefore experiment with volunteer blindness. Training the ear in degrees of intensity in play.

I'm saying apparently the Boogster just sits there in class, eyes bugging out, stomach in fucking knots, dope-slapped by anxiety.

'Just a moving right-triangular cycle of interdependence and waste-creation and -utilization. See?'

You end up with a surrounding environment so fertilely lush it's practically unlivable.

As if time itself were vastly sped up. As if nature itself had desperately to visit the lavatory.

Lenz swears Green to secrecy about how poor old scarred-up diseased Charlotte Treat had sworn him to secrecy about her secret dream in sobriety was to someday get her G.E.D. and become a dental hygienist.

Mrs. Lenz had, freakishly enough, ended up her human pinballing with her bare and unspeakably huge backside wedged tight in the open window of the potty, so forcefully ensconced into the recesstacle that she was unable to extricate.

She ruptured and died, her mouth so crammed with peach cobbler the paramedics were hapless to administer C.P.R.

If you close your eyes on a busy urban sidewalk the sound of everybody's different footwear's footsteps all put together sounds like something getting chewed by something huge and tireless and patient.

Bruce Green's one unrepressed visual memory of the man is of a man who progressively and perilously leaned as he hobbled from specialist to specialist.

Mr. Green howls with bitterly professional practical-gag mirth and clunks over and slaps little Bruce on the back so hard that Brucie expels a lime Gummi Bear he'd been eating.

Mr. Green pace-and-clunk around the living room all night every night after work and an undermicrowaved supper-for-two, in his Frankensteinian boot, clunking around in circles, scratching slowly at his face and arms until he looked less scourged than brambled.

It's like the whole nut-can-and-cigar traumas drained into some psychic sump at puberty, sank and left only an oily slick that catches the light in distorted ways.

A nonpeanut M&M box is like intaglioed into the concrete of the sidewalk under Green, so bleached by the elements it's turned bone-white and is only barely identifiable as a nonpeanut M&M box, for instance.

Something about Randy Lenz's movements up ahead, the high-kneed tiptoed skulk of a vaudeville fiend up to no good at all, keeps Green from calling out to him.

Green had gotten so uncomfortably fascinated and repelled and paralyzed by the Polynesian tunes that he'd set up a cabana-chair right by the kegs.

...ride the Red Line and C-Greenie and then a bus all the way home in February in a cheap leather jacket and asphalt-spreader's boots and a grass skirt, the grass of which rode up in the most horrifying way...

The hollow-log percussives are like a heart in your extremest-type terror.

The arm comes out from under the coat and goes up with something that looks like it would glitter if the windows' yardlight reached far enough.

The way Lenz stands over the hull of the big dog is like you stand over a punished child, at full height and radiating authority, and the moment hangs there distended like that until there's the shriek of long-shut windows opening.

The birth-related disability that wasn't even definitively diagnosed until Mario was six and had let Orin tattoo his shoulder with the red coil of an immersion heater is called Familial Dysautonomia, a neurological deficit whereby he can't feel physical pain very well.

This worries him and feels like when you've lost something important in a dream and you can't even remember what it was but it's important.

Mario'd fallen in love with the first Madame Psychosis programs because he felt like he was listening to someone sad read out loud from yellow letters she'd taken out of a shoebox on a rainy p.m., stuff about heartbreak and people you loved dying and U.S. woe, stuff that was real.

It's like there's some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn't happy.

Residents on meds respond to the sound of the meds locker the way a cat will respond to the sound of a can-opener.

The daily bullshit here is hip-deep and not so much annoying as soul-sucking; a double-shift here now empties him out by dawn, just in time to clean real shit.

Gately's gotten so stoic in the face of abuse that a resident has to mention actual unnatural acts in connection with his name for Gately to Log the abuse and give out a Restriction.

Orin was stroking her very tenderly and watching the twin curves of smoke pale and spread and trying not to shudder at the thought of what the inside of the Subject's fine nose must look like, what gray-white tangles of necrotic snot must hang and twine up in there.

There was something almost unbearably touching about a bald spot on a handicapped man.

With television you were subjected to repetition. The familiarity was inflicted. Different now.

Green looks at the floor of Pat's office like it's a loved one while Gately gives him the required ass-chewing.

Gately hates to have a warm blue-lidded cup of somebody's goddamn urine in his fridgelette with his pears and Polar seltzer, etc.

There's nothing very mysterious about the fact that metro Boston's battery- and homicide-rates during this ten-minute interval are the highest per diem, so that ambulances and paddy wagons are especially aprowl at this hour, too, adding to the general clot and snarl.

They'll piss and moan your ear off if somebody else fucks with the rules, but they don't deep down see themselves subject to them, the same rules.