Page 379
Another one-page interleaf, undated and habitual ("often," "sometimes"): the E.T.A. weight room late at night, years back — Lyle the guru and James Incandenza side by side on the towel dispenser, Caffeine Free Diet Coke and Wild Turkey respectively, with Mario standing by asleep in his police lock in case the ice ran out. A portrait, not an event; it slots between AA testimonies on purpose, and it reads in two minutes.
Terms, in order of appearance
- Wild Turkey (p. 379) — real Kentucky bourbon, 101 proof; Himself's brand.
- chyme (p. 379) — real physiology: half-digested stomach contents; here what his heart pours.
- police lock (p. 379) — Mario's brace-and-plate standing rig, part of his gear since pp. 314–15.
- William Blake (p. 379) — real poet and engraver (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell); endnote 146 shows the readings leaving a fingerprint.
After you read: three things
1. You've just been told where this institution leads. These are the same all-night Lyle sessions from which, per p. 375, Found Drama and anticonfluentialism were born — the book has wrapped the AA meeting in a two-scene history of a different kind of confession. And note how Lyle participates: he "would start to get tipsy himself as Himself's pores began to excrete the bourbon" — the sweat-diet of pp. 127–28 turned into secondhand drinking.
2. The C– is administered as data. Drunk, the affectless Incandenza would "open up in a way that was almost injudicious" — and one night Mario drifts awake to hear his father grade his own marriage a C–. The scene's whole ethics is in the next sentence: "Mario, like Lyle, tends to take data pretty much as it comes." Who overhears a family's verdict, and what he does with it (nothing), is the event.
3. Follow the Blake joke into the endnote. Cartoon-voice recitations "which Himself eventually started regarding as deep" — then endnote 146 notes JOI's animated Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell, a title you've already seen change Joelle's life on p. 297. Blake's original is The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; the downgrade from Marriage to Pre-Nuptial Agreement sits on the same page as the C–. The scene lets the two gradings rhyme without comment.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.