Pages 312–317

7 November Y.D.A.U. — classes · first-time reader guide · all scenes

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

No dateline: five expository pages that stop the clock and hand you the Mario dossier — how Hal's older brother was born (a total surprise, on the brownstone stairs, in the seventh month of a pregnancy Avril never showed), a complete catalog of what his body is and does, and how he became his father's shoot-companion and E.T.A.'s beloved walker-and-recorder. A heads-up folded in: the catalog is clinically exhaustive, and Orin's childhood cruelties to Mario arrive in the same deadpan; the register's strange tenderness is doing deliberate work against both.

Terms, in order of appearance

Vermeer (p. 312) — real Dutch painter of lit interiors; how Himself sees even his son's birth.
the Man From Glad (p. 313) — real 1960s TV pitchman for Glad wrap; the book casts James Sr. in the role. Endnote 114 — worth the flip.
X-Ray Specs (p. 313) — real comic-book-ad novelty glasses; the grandfather's fortune.
bradyauxetic (p. 313) — Greek brady-, slow: slow-growing. Endnote 115 is a whole small brady- lexicon.
Volkmann's contracture (p. 313) — real orthopedic condition: forearms flexed rigidly at the wrist.
blepharoprosthesis (p. 314) — built from real parts: blepharo- (eyelid) + prosthesis. An artificial eyelid, horsehair lashes included.
corticate (p. 314) — bark-like, from Latin cortex; his khaki skin.
codicil (p. 315) — legal: an amendment to a will; this one arrives gaily wrapped.
Bolex (p. 315) — real Swiss camera marque; endnote 116 relocates its maker to Sherbrooke, Québec.
homodont (p. 317) — real zoology: teeth all of one kind; endnote 119.
U.H.I.D. (p. 317) — the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed, named in full here; heard before on pp. 184–85 and 290.

After you read: three things

1. The scene installs a question it refuses to ask. Nobody knew Avril was pregnant; Charles Tavis happened to be staying that spring, and is upstairs on his StairMaster when her water breaks (p. 312); a later aside compares Mario's hair to C.T.'s; and Mario is said to defer to "his possible half-uncle" (p. 316). The narration does all this with a perfectly straight face and moves on. Notice it doing it; it never once says what you're thinking.

2. The catalog bends toward buoyancy. Mario is "scraped out... like the meat of an oyster" (pp. 312–13), and the inventory that follows spares nothing — yet its verdict on his mind is "refracted... ever so slightly epistemically bent" (p. 314), not slow, and the section's credo (via Hal, p. 317) is that people "burned at birth... either curl up in their fire, or else they rise." When a veiled U.H.I.D. legate offers Mario concealment (pp. 317–18), watch who refuses on whose behalf, and how.

3. This is Himself at his warmest so far. The father you've mostly seen through filmographies, flasks, and a microwave here gets Mario as "honorary assistant production-assistant," inseparable on shoots, and wills him the head-mounted Bolex in a gaily wrapped codicil (pp. 314–15) — "the way any son would be whose dad let him into his heart's final and best-loved love." The tennis genius and the lexical prodigy got other things; weigh what the son who can't play got.

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