Kate Gompert

Arc

Kate Gompert is the novel's expert witness on the thing most of its other people are fleeing, and her timeline is built like testimony: almost no biography, one year of attested events, and at the center two scenes that between them define the book's clinical vocabulary. In the psych ward she draws the distinctions everyone else blurs — "I wasn't trying to hurt myself. I was trying to kill myself. There's a difference" — and locates the depression not in the mind but everywhere ("I feel it all over. In my arms and legs"), a horror of the cells she fears more than pain or her mother's death, delivered to a resident who keeps literal-mindedly mishearing her, capped with the affectless "frightening smile" and a request not for talk but for ECT or her belt back (7, 8). The narrator then takes her testimony and builds the book's full taxonomy on it: anhedonia as "emotional novocaine," the world become "a map of the world" — versus "It," the Great White Shark of pain, "a hell for one," with the burning-building parable that recasts every suicide in the novel as flight from flames rather than desire for the fall (9). Her etiology is her own and the literature's nowhere: not drugs but Stopping — the depression rides the withdrawal from secret marijuana, so the cure and the cause chase each other in the No More, This Is It cycle (3), with Ernest Feaster, the model-train man whose "fondest dream was anhedonia, complete psychic numbing," standing as her private benchmark of where It ends (4).

The Ennet House stretch shows what a holding pattern looks like from inside one: a Suicidality Contract the narrator has already told us is absurd against Its terror (9, 10), bed-days with "Sylvia Plate" and a sideways comment that triggers the House's baroque ideation procedures (13), a revolver-finger at the temple through an NA meeting (12), and — the timeline's warmest beat — the 0245h couch conversation in which she and Geoffrey Day, staring into space in something that "isn't like a real interface," compare specifications on the black billowing shape, the wing "too big to see" (14). It is the one moment the record shows her Identifying with another sufferer face to face, and it rhymes directly with what follows.

The last attested night is a convergence the book stages with three cameras and then refuses to end. Walking Ruth van Cleve to a meeting — "soberly deciding how to kill myself" — she is seen volitionless from inside her own head (136), sized up through Poor Tony's (133), and watched crossing a restaurant window through Matty Pemulis's (131), before the purse-snatch swings her skull into a lightpost (15). Mugged and concussed, she staggers into Ryle's and meets Marathe: her first real drink is "novocaine of the soul" — the exact anhedonic relief the narrator's taxonomy predicted she'd trade anything for — and she spends the scene doing what she does best, Identifying with and then out-diagnosing a stranger's transposed life story ("You're depressed is what you are"), rejecting his doctrine of chosen love as "choosing a coma over your comrades" (16). Then the book runs its coldest experiment: the apostle of chosen attachment offers its foremost authority on wanting-to-stop-being-conscious the Entertainment itself, a pleasure after which she "would never again feel sorrow or pity or the pain of the chains and cage of never choosing." Her answer is not on the page. She never returns; the bunk sits empty; Pat swears out the P.C. warrant (17). The record ends exactly where the burning building left off — a woman at the window, the text declining to say whether she jumped.