brutal
speed, so that the old sneakers point up and then left and then down and then right
and then up, faster and faster, 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 and you could hear the last surviving bits of his functional dye-permeated
mind being screamed out of him for all time as the viewer digitally superimposed an
image of Fenton’s ember-red and neutron-blue brain in the lower-right corner, where
InterLace’s Time/Temp functions usually appear, and the brisk voiceover gave capsule
histories of first paranoid schizophrenia and then P.E.T. With Orin lying there slit-eyed,
wet and neuralgic with A.M. dread, wishing the Subject would put her own clothes and sharp jewelry on and take
the rest of her Töblerone out of the freezer and go, so he could go to the bathroom
and get yesterday’s asphyxiated roaches into an E.W.D. dumpster before the dumpsters
all filled for the day, and decide what kind of expensive present to mail the Subject’s
kid.
And then the matter of the dead bird, out of nowhere.
And then news of pressure from the AZ Cardinal administration to cooperate with some
sort of insipid-type personality-profile series of interviews with some profiler from
Moment
magazine, with personal backgroundish questions to be answered in some blandly sincere
team-PR way, the unexamined stress of which drives him to start calling Hallie again,
reopen that whole Pandora’s box of worms.
Orin also shaves in the shower, face red with heat, wreathed in steam, by feel, shaving
upward, with south-to-north strokes, as he was taught.
YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
Here’s Hal Incandenza, age seventeen, with his little brass one-hitter, getting covertly
high in the Enfield Tennis Academy’s underground Pump Room and exhaling palely into
an industrial exhaust fan. It’s the sad little interval after afternoon matches and
conditioning but before the Academy’s communal supper. Hal is by himself down here
and nobody knows where he is or what he’s doing.
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.
A one-hitter, sort of like a long FDR-type cigarette holder whose end is packed with
a pinch of good dope, gets hot and is hard on the mouth—the brass ones especially—but
one-hitters have the advantage of efficiency: every particle of ignited pot gets inhaled;
there’s none of the incidental secondhand-type smoke from a party bowl’s big load,
and Hal can take every iota way down deep and hold his breath forever, so that even
his exhalations are no more than slightly pale and sick-sweet-smelling.
Total utilization of available resources = lack of publicly detectable waste.
The Academy’s tennis courts’ Lung’s Pump Room is underground and accessible only by
tunnel. E.T.A. is abundantly, embranchingly tunnelled. This is by design.
Plus one-hitters are small, which is good, because let’s face it, anything you use
to smoke high-resin dope with is going to stink. A bong is big, and its stink is going
to be like commensurately big, plus you have the foul bongwater to deal with. Pipes
are smaller and at least portable, but they always come with only a multi-hit party
bowl that disperses nonutilized smoke over a wide area. A one-hitter can be wastelessly
employed, then allowed to cool, wrapped in two baggies and then further wrapped and
sealed in a Ziploc and then enclosed in two sport-socks in a gear bag along with the
lighter and eyedrops and mint-pellets and the little film-case of dope itself, and
it’s highly portable and odor-free and basically totally covert.
As far as Hal knows, colleagues Michael Pemulis, Jim Struck, Bridget C. Boone, Jim
Troeltsch, Ted Schacht, Trevor Axford, and possibly Kyle D. Coyle and Tall Paul Shaw,
and remotely possibly
speed, so that the old sneakers point up and then left and then down and then right
and then up, faster and faster, 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 and you could hear the last surviving bits of his functional dye-permeated
mind being screamed out of him for all time as the viewer digitally superimposed an
image of Fenton’s ember-red and neutron-blue brain in the lower-right corner, where
InterLace’s Time/Temp functions usually appear, and the brisk voiceover gave capsule
histories of first paranoid schizophrenia and then P.E.T. With Orin lying there slit-eyed,
wet and neuralgic with A.M. dread, wishing the Subject would put her own clothes and sharp jewelry on and take
the rest of her Töblerone out of the freezer and go, so he could go to the bathroom
and get yesterday’s asphyxiated roaches into an E.W.D. dumpster before the dumpsters
all filled for the day, and decide what kind of expensive present to mail the Subject’s
kid.
And then the matter of the dead bird, out of nowhere.
And then news of pressure from the AZ Cardinal administration to cooperate with some
sort of insipid-type personality-profile series of interviews with some profiler from
Moment
magazine, with personal backgroundish questions to be answered in some blandly sincere
team-PR way, the unexamined stress of which drives him to start calling Hallie again,
reopen that whole Pandora’s box of worms.
Orin also shaves in the shower, face red with heat, wreathed in steam, by feel, shaving
upward, with south-to-north strokes, as he was taught.
YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
Here’s Hal Incandenza, age seventeen, with his little brass one-hitter, getting covertly
high in the Enfield Tennis Academy’s underground Pump Room and exhaling palely into
an industrial exhaust fan. It’s the sad little interval after afternoon matches and
conditioning but before the Academy’s communal supper. Hal is by himself down here
and nobody knows where he is or what he’s doing.
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.
A one-hitter, sort of like a long FDR-type cigarette holder whose end is packed with
a pinch of good dope, gets hot and is hard on the mouth—the brass ones especially—but
one-hitters have the advantage of efficiency: every particle of ignited pot gets inhaled;
there’s none of the incidental secondhand-type smoke from a party bowl’s big load,
and Hal can take every iota way down deep and hold his breath forever, so that even
his exhalations are no more than slightly pale and sick-sweet-smelling.
Total utilization of available resources = lack of publicly detectable waste.
The Academy’s tennis courts’ Lung’s Pump Room is underground and accessible only by
tunnel. E.T.A. is abundantly, embranchingly tunnelled. This is by design.
Plus one-hitters are small, which is good, because let’s face it, anything you use
to smoke high-resin dope with is going to stink. A bong is big, and its stink is going
to be like commensurately big, plus you have the foul bongwater to deal with. Pipes
are smaller and at least portable, but they always come with only a multi-hit party
bowl that disperses nonutilized smoke over a wide area. A one-hitter can be wastelessly
employed, then allowed to cool, wrapped in two baggies and then further wrapped and
sealed in a Ziploc and then enclosed in two sport-socks in a gear bag along with the
lighter and eyedrops and mint-pellets and the little film-case of dope itself, and
it’s highly portable and odor-free and basically totally covert.
As far as Hal knows, colleagues Michael Pemulis, Jim Struck, Bridget C. Boone, Jim
Troeltsch, Ted Schacht, Trevor Axford, and possibly Kyle D. Coyle and Tall Paul Shaw,
and remotely possibly
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