Pages 11–17

Year of Glad — Hal's interview in Tucson · first-time reader guide · all scenes

When you've finished these pages: three things worth a second look, at the bottom.

Same room, same second: this picks up the admissions interview exactly where "Call it something I ate" left off, with the mold memory sandwiched in between. Still Hal, first person, present tense. The scene moves in three panels — the conference room, then (after a space break) the floor of an old men's room, then a restraint stretcher outside in the Tucson sun. Fair warning, folded in plainly: Hal gets wrestled down and carried out, and the way the adults describe him is brutal to read.

Terms, in order of appearance

Dennis Gabor (p. 12) — real physicist, inventor of holography, Nobel 1971; Hal's nominee for Antichrist.
cretus (p. 12) — Latin: grown, sprung; not English in any dictionary — with cretin audible behind it.
enfilade (p. 14) — military: gunfire raking a line end to end; here, Tavis's stream of talk.
espadrilles (p. 15) — rope-soled canvas shoes.
cirri (p. 16) — plural of cirrus, the thin sheared high clouds.
infantophile (p. 16) — means what it looks like; the sentence arrives with no context and the scene gives it none.
hypophalangial (p. 16) — coinage: short of finger-bones; describes a Grief-Therapist who is only this once named.
Himself (p. 16) — capital-H, unintroduced; the umbrella by the mail table is all the scene gives.
O.E.D. VI (p. 17) — a sixth edition of the Oxford English Dictionary; the real world is a few editions behind.
etiology (p. 17) — medicine: the cause or origin of a condition.

After you read: three things

1. You get the inside and the reviews, never the event. Hal's speech reads on the page as passionate and exact — "I’m not a machine. I feel and believe" (p. 12) — and then he opens his eyes to horror. What the room actually saw and heard is never shown; you get only the Deans' competing descriptions afterward: "a drowning goat," "a stick of butter being hit with a mallet" (p. 14). And notice their cries as it happens — "God!" "Help!" (p. 13) — the Moms's exact words from the garden two pages back (p. 11).

2. The stretcher paragraph is a data dump disguised as drift. Strapped down in the sun (pp. 16–17), Hal's mind slides across things that get no introduction: last year's ER, the word KNIFE on a steamed mirror, "the late Cosgrove Watt," the Moms alphabetizing soup cans — and one flooring sentence: "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" (p. 17). The scene explains none of it. Take the names as real datapoints and hold them loosely.

3. Hal stays the calmest person on the page. Restrained, ambulanced, he runs tomorrow's tournament math — the blind player Dymphna will be tired at 0830; "I know he is mine" (p. 17) — and counts synonyms for unresponsive. Then he predicts his own intake, down to the one casual question the whole institutional apparatus never thought to ask, and the scene ends on it: "So yo then man what’s your story?" (p. 17).

Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.