Pages 299–307

Orin's story · first-time reader guide · all scenes

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

A dateline scene: 14 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, and the first sentence hands you the plot entire — Poor Tony Krause has a seizure on the T. What follows is the four months that put him on that train: hunted out of every neighborhood he knows, out of money, out of proxies, and finally out of heroin, withdrawing first in a dumpster and then in a Watertown library men's-room stall. You've met Poor Tony twice — in yrstruly's night-narrative (pp. 128–35) and as the purse-snatcher of pp. 142–44. Fair warning: eight graphic pages — incontinence, hallucination, seizure — told in his own fastidious high-camp idiom, and the collision of that voice with this material is deliberate.

Terms, in order of appearance

de-mapping (p. 300) — being killed; the map-for-life street idiom from yrstruly's narrative (pp. 128–35).
I.B.P.W.D.W. (p. 300) — a union local's acronym; endnote 102 gives the full name.
Wingless Fowl / Turkeyfication / Old Cold Bird (p. 300) — street riffs on "cold turkey": quitting with nothing to ease it.
Codinex Plus (p. 301) — codeine cough syrup; the narrator does the pharmacology inline (a trace metabolizes to morphine).
shiva (p. 301) — real Jewish mourning rite, garment-rending included; performed here by a father for a son still alive.
Merry Widow (p. 303) — real garment: a strapless long-line corset.
Zuckung (p. 303) — real German, not Yiddish as he guesses: a twitch or convulsion.
D.T.s (p. 303) — delirium tremens: the hallucinatory stage of alcohol withdrawal.
formicating (p. 304) — real word for the crawling-ants sensation; from Latin formica, "ant."
phosphenes (p. 304) — real: sparks of light seen without external light.
bilirubin (p. 304) — real: the yellow-brown pigment of jaundice.
Rice and Lynn (p. 306) — Jim Rice and Fred Lynn, real mid-1970s Red Sox stars; they date Poppa's era.

After you read: three things

1. Every hunter in the opening paragraph is a story you've already read. The "horrid thing with Wo and Bobby C last winter" (p. 300) is yrstruly's Christmas-Eve narrative of pp. 128–35, its bill now come due; the "black July day" purse with a heart inside is the Jarvik IX snatch of pp. 142–44 — even his palpitations at "an Aigner accessory" key to that purse's brand. The scene re-explains none of it; the placing is yours.

2. The subject is time. As Withdrawal deepens, the scene stops itemizing symptoms and starts describing what time does: carried past him by flesh-taking ants, then squatting overhead as a musty wingless fowl, until "time had become the shit itself: Poor Tony had become an hourglass" (p. 303). Even the syrup's one mercy is temporal — "it slowed up time" (p. 301). Read pp. 302–03 slowly; the physical inventory is the lesser horror.

3. Note who presides at the end. The narrator states the cause flatly — withdrawal from the syrup's grain alcohol, sixteen eighty-proof bottles a day (p. 304; endnote 103 is the dry clinical version). The rendering, though, is a delivery room: his late father was an obstetrician who rent his clothing over a living son (p. 301), and the hallucination builds itself from parts the scene already gave you — green gown, rubber gloves, Old Spice, PUSH — down to the final worry about "what was hidden."

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