Pages 589–593

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.

Same 11 November night, around 11 p.m., a few hundred yards from the dog and the Nucks: Mario Incandenza — nineteen in two weeks, hip bandaged from a stove burn he never felt — can't sleep, and takes his usual careful night walk from the Headmaster's House down to the Enfield Marine grounds and the sidewalk outside Ennet House. He's alone, and the narration walks at his pace and in his earnest idiom: short declaratives, worries taken one at a time. Nothing here is ironic; that turns out to be the point.

Terms, in order of appearance

Miss Diagnosis (p. 589) — WYYY's substitute for Madame Psychosis; first endured back on p. 449.
Familial Dysautonomia (p. 589) — a real neurological condition; the book's version centers on not feeling pain.
night terrors (p. 590) — real parasomnia: screaming arousals, worse than nightmares.
Dial C for Concupiscence (p. 590) — one of his father's films; it's in the endnote-24 filmography.
police lock (p. 591) — the bar-and-lead-block brace Mario leans on, part of his kit since pp. 121–126.
ONE DAY A (p. 591) — a half-scraped bumper sticker; you can supply the rest from the AA pages.
Year of the Wonderchicken (p. 591) — Subsidized year; it's on the p. 223 list.
apostrophe (p. 592) — real rhetorical term: speech addressed to someone absent; the Moms's definition is accurate.

After you read: three things

1. You can name what Mario can't. He misses a radio voice — "It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know" (p. 589) — and is thrilled to hear a taped "Sixty Minutes More or Less" playing from an upstairs Ennet window. You've had both the show and the woman since pp. 181–240, and you know from the Gately pages where she currently lives. And the "wide square-headed boy" writing at the Headmistress's black desk in the last window (p. 593): you can name him too, and what he's writing in.

2. Take Mario's instrument seriously. He "used to be able to sort of preverbally know in his stomach generally where Hal was... and now he can't anymore. Feel it" (p. 590). Mario's readings are the most reliable in the book precisely because "Mario never changes" — so the difference, the scene reasons, is Hal. File this next to what you've been watching Hal do alone underground.

3. Watch the two kinds of laughter. Mario likes Ennet House because "it's very real": people cry openly, and "once he heard somebody say God with a straight face and nobody looked at them" (p. 591). Against that, the lunch-table beat — Pemulis's Dial-a-Prayer-for-atheists joke, where Mario "was the only one at the big table whose laugh was a happy laugh" (p. 592). The scene is drawing a distinction it never names; draw it with him.

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