Pages 449–450
A one-page interstitial under the dateline VERY LATE OCTOBER Y.D.A.U. — so you've stepped back a week or two from the gala. Pre-dawn in Hal and Mario's subdorm room: Hal wakes from a new recurring nightmare about his teeth, an hour before drills, and Mario's bed is empty — he's been sleeping at the Headmaster's House in front of the radio, upset in a way nobody can remember him ever being. Two brothers, two distresses, one page. No one new appears.
Terms, in order of appearance
- HmH (p. 450) — the Headmaster's House, up the hill at E.T.A.; Tavis's residence.
- Tatsuoka (p. 450) — Tavis's stereo receiver; brand-name furniture, nothing more.
- WYYY-109 / '60 Minutes +/−' (p. 450) — M.I.T.'s student radio station and its midnight program, both toured at pp. 181–193.
- Madame Psychosis (p. 450) — the program's never-seen host (pp. 181–193); also, oddly, the street name of Pemulis's drug DMZ (p. 214).
- Horkheimer and Adorno (p. 450) — real Frankfurt School philosophers, famously grim about mass entertainment; the fill-in host's reading material.
- Partridge Family (p. 450) — real saccharine 1970s TV-pop, here slowed "to a narcotized slur."
After you read: three things
1. The dream runs on being seen and not told. Hal's teeth "had become like shale and splintered when he tried to chew" — and everyone who sees it, including a dream-Schacht too busy to look, checks a watch and makes excuses, the rot "a symptom of something way more dire and distasteful that no one wanted to confront him about" (pp. 449–450). Note what Hal does on waking: he was pricing dentures — managing the symptom, not the something.
2. Mario, agitated. Madame Psychosis has vanished from the midnight slot without announcement, the station is "evasive and unforthcoming," and Mario — "usually next to impossible to agitate," per Hal, Schtitt, and the Moms — keeps a nightly vigil by the receiver. The scene never says what finally agitated him; endnote 180 does, and it's worth the flip before you move on.
3. Listen to the last line. With no one at the helm, the show now broadcasts only its background: Madame Psychosis's static ambient musics with no voice in front of them, "music as subject instead of environment." Hal listens a few minutes and gives the scene its closing verdict — it sounds "like somebody's mind coming apart right before your ears." A page this short ending on that sentence is asking you to weigh it.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.