Pages 67–68
Hal, first person — the voice that opened the book (pp. 3–17) and told the mold story (p. 10) — for a page and a half, no year header, looking back from some later vantage. He's explaining how he came to marijuana: he held out until nearly sixteen, when Bridget Boone, a fellow Enfield student in whose room the younger kids congregate at night, offered late-night bongs as a sleep aid against a recurring nightmare. Then he gives you the nightmare itself, in full. Nobody else is on stage; it's Hal, a memory, and a dream.
Terms, in order of appearance
- 'drines (p. 67) — clipped from amphetamines: pre-match stimulant pills; players' shorthand.
- enkephaline (p. 67) — endnote 26: a synthetic endorphin, i.e. a lab-made version of the body's own painkiller; taken after matches.
- Bob Hope (p. 67) — endnote 27, worth the flip: Boston-area argot for marijuana. The phrase has been appearing unglossed since p. 50.
- 16 and Unders (p. 67) — junior-tennis age bracket; here, the students that age.
- psychodysleptic Sominex (p. 67) — Sominex: real over-the-counter sleeping pill; psychodysleptic: mind-altering. Boone's prescription, deadpan: a hallucinogen as sleep aid.
- in medias (p. 67) — Latin, clipped from in medias res: in the middle of things — waking mid-dream.
- the Moms (p. 68) — the Incandenza sons' name for their mother, in use since the garden story on p. 10.
After you read: three things
1. The whole origin story is one sentence — watch its quietest clause. Hal says he stayed clean so long "having taken certain vows early on concerning fathers and differences," a phrase the scene drops once and never explains, then presents the bongs as medicine: something to sleep through a dream that was costing him rank. "The bongs worked like a charm" is the last word before the dream begins. The covert pump-room smoker of pp. 49–54 starts here, as a kid trying to sleep.
2. The nightmare has no monster — the dread is geometry. The court is football-field huge and public, with officials and a silent citrus-colored crowd, and its lines are "complex and convolved as a sculpture of string," systems inside systems, blurring out at the horizon. Hal stands at the baseline with a fresh ball, unable to tell where in all that mess he's supposed to serve. A competition dream in which the rules themselves have grown too involved to play.
3. You've now seen two brothers dream about the same mother. Here the Moms sits in the stands under her white sun-umbrella, "a delicate fist upraised and tight in total unconditional support" — presiding, supportive, fixed. Orin's nightmare back on pp. 46–47 had her face filling the room. Different distances, same figure. And catch the last line: the opponent never becomes visible — "Even the ‘we’ is theory."
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.