Pages 17–27

Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment — Erdedy waits · first-time reader guide · all scenes

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

A new header — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT — and a clean break: third person now, no tennis academy, nobody you've met. Ken Erdedy, an advertising man alone in his metro-Boston condominium, is waiting for a woman who promised to bring him 200 grams of marijuana and is now hours late. He is a first appearance; so is everything in his world. The named years are piling up (this is the second) with still no explanation. And the scene's shape is deliberate: ten pages in huge unbroken paragraphs, because the prose loops the way waiting loops.

Terms, in order of appearance

Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (p. 17) — the year's name; Depend is a real brand of adult diapers. No explanation yet.
just audio (p. 18) — he calls her "using just audio": phones here can evidently be more than audio. The phrase is the only tell.
Allston (p. 18) — real Boston neighborhood across the river from Cambridge; "the Allston Spur" (p. 19) is this book's tag for it.
TP / teleputer (pp. 19–20) — the household screen: computer, phone console, and film-viewer in one; entertainment comes on rentable cartridges.
InterLace (p. 19) — the outlet the film cartridges are rented from.
Wedekind (p. 20) — Frank Wedekind, real German playwright (Spring Awakening); the theater company's festival.
pleurisy (p. 21) — real: inflamed lung lining; chest pain with every breath.
Tito Puente (p. 22) — real mambo and Latin-jazz bandleader.
methamphetamine hydrochloride (p. 23) — endnote 1, the novel's first: five words, "Methamphetamine hydrochloride, a.k.a. crystal meth." Now you know the apparatus exists.
magisculed (p. 24) — coinage from majuscule: written in capital letters.
E.W.D. land barge (p. 25) — the vehicle emptying dumpsters down the street; the initials go unexplained here.

After you read: three things

1. The system is the portrait. He has tried to stop "maybe 70 or 80 times" (p. 17), and every attempt has the same architecture: an all-new third-party source, an emergency message on the answering device, food laid in, a new bong bought and later thrown away. Read the ritual as one machine and notice that "one more last time" builds the next round into this round's cleanup. The plan this time: "He’d cure himself by excess" (p. 22).

2. The insect is doing double duty. He keeps returning to the dark shiny insect going in and out of a hole in his shelf girder, and the text says why without saying how: "He felt similar to the insect inside the girder his shelf was connected to, but was not sure just how he was similar" (p. 19). Meanwhile the window-light crosses the floor like a sundial. Between bug and light you can clock the entire wasted afternoon.

3. Every channel is an instrument of torture. He can't call (might tie up the line), can't leave a message (too needy), can't watch one cartridge because "there was something more entertaining on another cartridge and... he was potentially missing it" (p. 26). Then phone and door-buzzer sound at the same instant, and after ten pages of continuous thinking he ends "splayed, entombed between the two sounds, without a thought in his head" (p. 27).

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