Pages 367–375

8 November — Interdependence Day: Eschaton · first-time reader guide · all scenes

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

Same cafeteria, same Interdependence Day evening: the White Flag AA meeting resumes after its raffle break, still with Gately as your center of gravity and the essayistic Boston-AA narrator still running. This stretch is a taxonomy of podium speakers — a slick rehearsed newcomer, a terrified ex-Complaint-Department man, and a hard-faced young stripper whose story runs to the genuinely appalling: a catatonic foster sister treated as furniture, a smiling father, a celebrity mask. Heads-up on that middle stretch (pp. 370–74): it's the ugliest family material the book has offered, and the room's reaction to it — not the material itself — is the point being built.

Terms, in order of appearance

Filene's (p. 368) — real Boston department store; its Complaint Department, hence the hammer.
the Naked I (p. 370) — real Boston Combat Zone strip club; note the ashtrays when it's named.
Raquel Welch (p. 371) — real film star, the 1960s–70s sex-symbol; hers is the full-head mask.
chordate phylum (p. 370) — real biology: animals with spinal cords; the mother's floor for how "It" must be treated.
Wounded, Hurting, Inadequately Nurtured but Ever-Recovering Survivors (p. 372) — the speaker's splinter 12-Step group; read the initials.
the parlor statue-photo (p. 373) — the real statue is Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Teresa (Rome), famous for precisely that ambiguous face.
rasa the tabula (p. 373) — tabula rasa, Latin "blank slate," inverted; what the needle did.

After you read: three things

1. The meeting is a theory of speech. The polished newcomer dies by the crowd's worst punishment — getting embarrassed for him (p. 368) — while the hammer man brings the house down because his story "wasn't meant to be one bit funny: it was just the truth" (p. 369). Then the rule arrives in the flattest sentence in the book: "An ironist in a Boston AA meeting is a witch in church. Irony-free zone." (p. 369). Everything you've read the book do with irony is implicated.

2. Watch why the worst story in the room doesn't land. The stripper's testimony is more horrific than anything the hammer man had — and the heads clutch "only partly in empathy" (p. 374). Her offense isn't self-pity; it's shape: the story is pitched as exterior Cause, and the Why of the Disease is "a labyrinth... inhabited as the maze is by the twin minotaurs of Why Me? and Why Not?" The section closes with the no-Whys axiom in commode-seat doggerel — "Do not ask WHY / If you dont want to DIE" (pp. 374–75) — carved, note, by an ironist who's long gone.

3. Gately's undertow runs the whole time. Under the taxonomy he's still replaying the raffle break's "aphasiac terror" and trying to place the veiled girl's smooth, echoless, slightly Southern voice (p. 369). You've been ahead of him since pp. 219–40 on who she is — the book even described that voice, on p. 290, as sounding "like someone enunciating very carefully inside a soundproof enclosure" — but where Gately could know it from is a question the scene deliberately leaves open.

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