sharp jewelry, refrigerated chocolate, InterLace educational cartridges,
and professional athletes who thrashed in their sleep. Not real bright—she thought
the figure he’d trace without thinking on her bare flank after sex was the numeral
8, to give you an idea. Their last morning together, right before he’d mailed her
child an expensive toy and then had his phone number changed, he’d awakened from a
night of horror-show dreams—woke up with an abrupt fetal spasm, unrefreshed and benighted
of soul, his eyes wobbling and his wet silhouette on the bottom sheet like a coroner’s
chalk outline—he woke to find the Subject up and sitting up against the reading pillow,
wearing his sleeveless Academy sweatshirt and sipping hazelnut espresso and watching,
on the cartridge-viewing system that occupied half the bedroom’s south wall, something
horrific called ‘INTERLACE EDUCATIONAL CARTRIDGES IN CONJUNCTION WITH CBC EDUCATIONAL
PROGRAMMING MATRIX PRESENTS
SCHIZOPHRENIA: MIND OR BODY?
’ and had had to lie there, moist and paralyzed, curled fetal on his own sweat-shadow,
and watch on the viewer a pale young guy about Hal’s age, with copper stubble and
a red cowlick and flat blank affectless black doll’s eyes, stare into space stage-left
while a brisk Albertan voiceover explained that Fenton here was a dyed-in-the-wool
paranoid schizophrenic who believed that radioactive fluids were invading his skull
and that hugely complex high-tech-type machines had been specially designed and programmed
to pursue him without cease until they caught him and made brutal sport of him and
buried him alive. It was an old late-millennial CBC public-interest Canadian news
documentary, digitally sharpened and redisseminated under the InterLace imprimatur—InterLace
could get kind of seedy and low-rent during early-morning off-hours, in terms of Spontaneous
Disseminations.
And so but since the old CBC documentary’s thesis was turning out pretty clearly to
be
SCHIZOPHRENIA: BODY,
the voiceover evinced great clipped good cheer as it explained that well, yes, poor
old Fenton here was more or less hopeless as an extra-institutional functioning unit,
but that, on the up-side, science could at least give his existence some sort of meaning
by studying him very carefully to help learn how schizophrenia manifested itself in
the human body’s brain… that, in other words, with the aid of cutting-edge Positron-Emission
Topography or ‘P.E.T.’ technology (since supplanted wholly by Invasive Digitals, Orin
hears the developmental psychology graduate student mutter to herself, watching rapt
over her cup, unaware that Orin’s paralytically awake), they could scan and study
how different parts of poor old Fenton’s dysfunctional brain emitted positrons in
a whole different topography than your average hale and hearty nondelusional God-fearing
Albertan’s brain, advancing science by injecting test-subject Fenton here with a special
blood-brain-barrier-penetrating radioactive dye and then sticking him in the rotating
body-sized receptacle of a P.E.T. Scanner—on the viewer, it’s an enormous gray-metal
machine that looks like something co-designed by James Cameron and Fritz Lang, and
now have a look at this Fenton fellow’s eyes as he starts to get the gist of what
the voiceover’s saying—and in a terse old Public-TV cut they now showed subject Fenton
in five-point canvas restraints whipping his copper-haired head from side to side
as guys in mint-green surgical masks and caps inject him with radioactive fluids through
a turkey-baster-sized syringe, then good old Fenton’s eyes bugging out in total foreseen
horror as he’s rolled toward the huge gray P.E.T. device and slid like an unrisen
loaf into the thing’s open maw until only his decay-colored sneakers are in view,
and the body-sized receptacle rotates the test-subject counterclockwise, with
and professional athletes who thrashed in their sleep. Not real bright—she thought
the figure he’d trace without thinking on her bare flank after sex was the numeral
8, to give you an idea. Their last morning together, right before he’d mailed her
child an expensive toy and then had his phone number changed, he’d awakened from a
night of horror-show dreams—woke up with an abrupt fetal spasm, unrefreshed and benighted
of soul, his eyes wobbling and his wet silhouette on the bottom sheet like a coroner’s
chalk outline—he woke to find the Subject up and sitting up against the reading pillow,
wearing his sleeveless Academy sweatshirt and sipping hazelnut espresso and watching,
on the cartridge-viewing system that occupied half the bedroom’s south wall, something
horrific called ‘INTERLACE EDUCATIONAL CARTRIDGES IN CONJUNCTION WITH CBC EDUCATIONAL
PROGRAMMING MATRIX PRESENTS
SCHIZOPHRENIA: MIND OR BODY?
’ and had had to lie there, moist and paralyzed, curled fetal on his own sweat-shadow,
and watch on the viewer a pale young guy about Hal’s age, with copper stubble and
a red cowlick and flat blank affectless black doll’s eyes, stare into space stage-left
while a brisk Albertan voiceover explained that Fenton here was a dyed-in-the-wool
paranoid schizophrenic who believed that radioactive fluids were invading his skull
and that hugely complex high-tech-type machines had been specially designed and programmed
to pursue him without cease until they caught him and made brutal sport of him and
buried him alive. It was an old late-millennial CBC public-interest Canadian news
documentary, digitally sharpened and redisseminated under the InterLace imprimatur—InterLace
could get kind of seedy and low-rent during early-morning off-hours, in terms of Spontaneous
Disseminations.
And so but since the old CBC documentary’s thesis was turning out pretty clearly to
be
SCHIZOPHRENIA: BODY,
the voiceover evinced great clipped good cheer as it explained that well, yes, poor
old Fenton here was more or less hopeless as an extra-institutional functioning unit,
but that, on the up-side, science could at least give his existence some sort of meaning
by studying him very carefully to help learn how schizophrenia manifested itself in
the human body’s brain… that, in other words, with the aid of cutting-edge Positron-Emission
Topography or ‘P.E.T.’ technology (since supplanted wholly by Invasive Digitals, Orin
hears the developmental psychology graduate student mutter to herself, watching rapt
over her cup, unaware that Orin’s paralytically awake), they could scan and study
how different parts of poor old Fenton’s dysfunctional brain emitted positrons in
a whole different topography than your average hale and hearty nondelusional God-fearing
Albertan’s brain, advancing science by injecting test-subject Fenton here with a special
blood-brain-barrier-penetrating radioactive dye and then sticking him in the rotating
body-sized receptacle of a P.E.T. Scanner—on the viewer, it’s an enormous gray-metal
machine that looks like something co-designed by James Cameron and Fritz Lang, and
now have a look at this Fenton fellow’s eyes as he starts to get the gist of what
the voiceover’s saying—and in a terse old Public-TV cut they now showed subject Fenton
in five-point canvas restraints whipping his copper-haired head from side to side
as guys in mint-green surgical masks and caps inject him with radioactive fluids through
a turkey-baster-sized syringe, then good old Fenton’s eyes bugging out in total foreseen
horror as he’s rolled toward the huge gray P.E.T. device and slid like an unrisen
loaf into the thing’s open maw until only his decay-colored sneakers are in view,
and the body-sized receptacle rotates the test-subject counterclockwise, with
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