Pages 553–559

Randy Lenz, out at night · first-time reader guide · all scenes

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

Wednesday 11 November, late afternoon into night: Lenz and Bruce Green, the walking arrangement from pp. 546–547, now en route to and from the Brookline Young People's AA meeting. This is the Lenz situation in motion — his ritual interval still blocked by Green's faithful company, his solution pharmaceutical — told free-indirect in full Lenz register (the malaprops are his: "insousistent," "energois de vivre," "anileated"). Heads-up in plain terms: the scene opens with an act of cruelty to a stray cat, briefer than the last scene's but of a piece with it.

Terms, in order of appearance

Andy Warhol (p. 553) — real pop artist, famously pallid under a silver-white wig; Lenz's look, "with a tan."
the Bing (p. 554) — street term for cocaine, in circulation since p. 308.
gaspers (p. 556) — old slang: cigarettes; Lenz runs three at once in the Nonsmoking rows.
hydrolysis (p. 557) — real chemistry: how the body breaks cocaine down. Endnote 232 is the scene's engine, footnoted — worth the flip.
Track and Flange (p. 557) — the stepfather's railroading trade magazine, rolled tight; a weapon in the telling.
akido (p. 558) — Lenz's spelling and pronunciation of aikido, the real martial art; his mastery is part of the telling too.
Xero-Lube (p. 558) — a real artificial-saliva product; the book gives it a celebrity endorsement.
hydrocephalic (p. 559) — real condition: fluid-swollen skull; the Halloween party's guest of honor wears a dead-gull necklace.
in vitro (p. 559) — Latin, "in glass"; Lenz means in utero. The lab dish is the joke.

After you read: three things

1. The addict's syllogism, mid-flight. Lenz needs to tell Green to walk home alone; telling people things is easier high; therefore "Lenz will use cocaine in the very interests of sobriety and growth itself" (p. 555). The AA meeting itself becomes cover — lines off the Handicapped-toilet tank at the raffle break, the collection dollar rolled into a tooter. Then the chemistry betrays the plan: instead of assertiveness, a compulsion to keep his audience glued to his side. He never sends Green home.

2. The one thing he can't say. Under the torrent sits the scene's quiet center: liking somebody, for Lenz, is "like you drop something... all you can do is brace" (p. 554), and "where do you look with your eyes when you tell somebody you like them and mean what you say?" (pp. 554–555). Meanwhile Green's face "sort of crumples blankly" at the mention of late mothers — and Lenz, broadcasting, doesn't see it. Two griefs walk side by side, one talking, neither heard.

3. Confabulation with one true note. The autobiography Lenz unspools — Pepito, the regenerated fingertip, the sidewalk akido kill, The Infant worshipped in its lidless box "as if there were only One" — is openly unreliable. But listen against the night-noise catalogue ("The State Bird of Massachusetts... is the police siren"): his mother's laugh sounded "like she was being eaten alive" (p. 557). That one datum doesn't sound invented. Weigh it against what you watched him do all last scene.

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