Pages 181–193
Late October, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, around midnight, in two intercut places. At M.I.T.'s student radio station WYYY — housed in a Student Union built in the shape of a human brain — an asthmatic student engineer sound-checks the cult host Madame Psychosis, whose name you've seen exactly once, as a drug's street name on p. 170: she broadcasts veiled, behind a screen, contractually preceded by dead air, and spends tonight's hour reading a recruiting circular for something called the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed. Across the river, Mario listens through a late supper at E.T.A.'s Headmaster's House (HmH). The parody show before hers tonight apotheosizes a record-setting punter; you've met a punter (p. 45).
Terms, in order of appearance
- meatus / sephenoid sinus / Infundibular Recess (pp. 182–183) — real brain-anatomy names; the Union's rooms are labeled for the parts they occupy.
- Hundt Act (p. 184) — invented statute named for a real FCC chairman; it left low-watt student FM the last public band.
- Great Concavity (p. 184) — the studio clock is a numberless disk honoring its "No-Time"; the name surfaced once at p. 59, still unexplained.
- nodular leprosy with leonine facies (p. 185) — real medical terminology: advanced leprosy that makes the face lion-like.
- U-235 (p. 186) — real: the fissile uranium isotope; she once had its refinement recipe read on-air.
- A. Y. Rickey (p. 186) — architect of the brain-shaped Union; endnote 3 credited the same man with E.T.A.'s heart-shaped hilltop.
- trivium and quadrivium (p. 188) — the real medieval seven-subject curriculum; E.T.A. still runs a modified version.
- the howling fantods (p. 188) — fantods is a real old word for the horrors; a family idiom for Avril's phobias.
- Actaeonizing / Medusoid / odalisque (p. 190) — real myth and art: Actaeon destroyed for looking; Medusa destroying lookers; the odalisque painted to be looked at.
After you read: three things
1. A sound-check line becomes the narrator's sentence. Warming up the mike, she says: "Like most marriages, theirs was the evolved product of concordance and compromise" (p. 183). Five pages later the narration, explaining E.T.A.'s curriculum, begins: "Like most marriages, Avril and the late James Incandenza's was an evolved product of concordance and compromise" (pp. 187–188). Whose sentence is it? The scene never says; hold the question.
2. The circular is a pitch for the veil (pp. 187–192). The litany of disfigurements — from "Obesity with hypogonadism" to "The hated and dateless and shunned, who keep to the shadows" — resolves into an invitation: "Come don the veil of the type and token"; "All meeting rooms windowless. That's in ital." A fellowship organized around concealment, read inflectionless by a woman who is herself veiled behind a screen, in a voice "as if she were speaking from inside a small box." Attend to the how as much as the what.
3. Mario is the show's whole meaning on the listening end (pp. 183, 190–193). "The least cynical person in the history of Enfield MA" finds the opening "terribly compelling… for all its black cynicism"; her cued music stirs memories of being "carried by a very tall man to bed". Around him, the family: Avril, who gets the fantods from any voice "that does not exit a living corporeal head," in a house with no interior doors — and the good-night ritual, "Make trouble." / "Do not, under any circumstances, have fun."
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.