Pages 42–49
OCTOBER, YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT — and the streak of total strangers breaks: this is "Hal Incandenza’s brother Orin" (p. 42), #71, pro football player, waking alone at 0730h in a metro-Phoenix condominium. You've met him twice at one remove — as teller of the garden memory (p. 10) and as the voice that hung up the phone (pp. 32–33). Third person, tightly inside his head, and the announced subject is morning itself: "For Orin Incandenza, #71, morning is the soul’s night." (p. 42). Comedy and dread run simultaneously the whole way; neither cancels the other.
Terms, in order of appearance
- Ambush (p. 42) — real, inexpensive drugstore perfume.
- Subject (p. 43) — capital-S: Orin's own term for the women he brings home; the capitalization is a character note.
- punter (p. 45) — football's kicking specialist; explains the one oversized leg and arm (p. 44) — the body is occupational.
- Terminex (p. 45) — Terminix, real pest-control franchise, respelled.
- Blattaria implacablus (p. 45) — mock Latin: roughly "implacable roach"; not a real taxon.
- howling fantods (p. 45) — the fantods: old American slang for the creeps, here at full volume.
- Chalmette (p. 46) — real suburb of New Orleans.
- phylacteryish (p. 47) — like a phylactery: the small scripture-box strapped tight to the forehead in Jewish prayer.
- "the numeral 8" (p. 47) — her misreading of what he traces on her flank; tip an 8 on its side to see the figure.
- Moment magazine (p. 48) — glossy soft-profile magazine; the interview series his team wants him to sit for.
After you read: three things
1. The map does what the text won't. Orin lives in metro Phoenix — and the only Phoenix before this was a postmark on a smiley-faced cartridge-mailer (p. 36). The scene connects nothing; the noticing is yours to file. Likewise the trade that brought him here lands him "in a kind of desiccated circle, near the Tucson of his own father’s desiccated youth" (p. 46) — the same Tucson where the book opened (p. 3), and where a grandfather once read the Tucson Citizen (p. 31). And "calling Hallie" (p. 49) names a practice you've overheard once (pp. 32–33).
2. The dream is doing real work. The recurring nightmare: the Moms's cleanly amputated head strapped face-to-face onto his with racquet string, unremovable (pp. 46–47) — and last night's Subject's note shows it acting on actual bodies while he sleeps (p. 47). Endnote 2 hangs off the dream — a short flip on why Orin's self-analysis stays amateur. You hold this image's grim sibling: Hal's stretcher-vision of digging up his father's head (p. 17). One parent per brother, each reduced to a head.
3. The Fenton documentary is the scene's nightmare in miniature. A paranoid schizophrenic whose delusion is that machines were built to pursue and entomb him is — for science, with brisk voiceover cheer — strapped down and slid into exactly such a machine, howling (pp. 47–48), while Orin lies "paralytically awake" beside a Subject watching it rapt. Worst fear, mechanically realized. Around it, the scene's ledger of dread: the wren dead out of an empty sky ("no way could it have been a good sign," p. 44), roaches asphyxiating under tumblers, days "not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically" (p. 46).
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.