Ken Erdedy

Arc

Erdedy's timeline is a diptych with a hinge the book never shows: the man alone in the condo, and the same man in company at Ennet House, with the surrender that got him from one to the other happening offstage (all we get is "some cushy Belmont rehab" on an Intake form). The opening set piece (1) is the novel's first full portrait of addiction, and what it is really about is attention held hostage: a man who has engineered his whole environment for a debauch — calendar cleared, blinds vacuumed, Oreos and frosting laid in — and then cannot act, only wait and watch. The insect going in and out of the hole in the girder is his own self-reading ("similar to the insect," though "not sure just how"): something that lives inside the structure that holds up the entertainment, protruding but not moving. And the method of his using (2) is his profession turned inward — an ad man's campaign run on himself and on a rotating cast of casually deceived women, "impressions" he "conveyed and nurtured and allowed to gather" their "own life and force," each source burned as a firebreak against the next relapse that always comes anyway. The scene's last image — splayed between the ringing phone and the sounding buzzer, "without a thought in his head" — is the book's thesis about choice, stated in his body.

At Ennet House the same machinery persists, sober. He is the observer who does not enter: saying nothing at meetings and watching everybody closely (8), complaining with a connoisseur's fastidiousness about the Fellowship's "psychobabbly dialect" while giving Gately the intense professional listening-look that "doesn't communicate what he thinks his audience wants it to" (7). Even his attraction runs on spectatorship — the veiled Joelle pulls him "like a well-groomed moth to a lit window," desire once again aimed at a screen with something hidden behind it. The Roy Tony confrontation (8) is the arc's pivot because it is the one place the distance is forcibly closed: his polite "Thanks, but I don't particularly like to hug" is, in the meeting's economy, a refusal of surrendered will — Roy's whole enraged sermon is that nobody likes the hugs; they do it because "We done motherfucking surrendered our wills in here" — and Erdedy ends the scene hugging so hard "it looked like Erdedy was trying to climb him," the need under the manner made suddenly, comically visible.

The later texture keeps both truths in view. In the fracas (9) he is the noncombatant par excellence, hands and keys up for the duration — and he "rather likes" the gesture, self-consciousness finding a pose even at gunpoint — yet his noticing is the scene's finest instrument (it is Erdedy who registers that "this deformed veiled girl likes Don Gately in an extracurricular way"), and when Joelle finally gives him a job it is precisely his surfaces she deploys: go look high-income and respectable at the drunk guard. At 0245h (10) the withdrawal is still grinding — a year without sleep promised, cigarettes started, the leg still joggling — and his one incongruous sentence, aimed apparently at the grotesque Mr. Bouncety-Bounce on the viewer, shows where his attention still goes when it slips its leash: to the entertainment. That the last in-range sight of him (11) is secondhand and small — back from wheeling Burt F. Smith's wheelchair to a Kenmore Square meeting, bearing the House's news of what a relapsed Lenz looks like Out There — is the quietest possible progress report: the man who once could not move between two sounds is out pushing somebody else to a meeting. The book neither rewards nor punishes him for it. No relapse, no graduation, no departure, no death is recorded in-range. Fate open, as written.