Pages 596–601

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.

Back in the Phoenix hotel room, 7 November — the book circling to the third panel of that afternoon: pp. 565–567 gave you the embrace, pp. 574–575 Orin's drive-home recap, and now here is the knock at the door itself, narrated in full after twenty-odd Boston pages made you hold it. Present: Orin in a towel, the hand-model hidden under the heaped bedding for nearly the whole scene, and a legless, bushy-haired man in a wheelchair with a clipboard. It opens with two more pages of the cool post-coital anatomy of pp. 565–567 before anyone knocks.

Terms, in order of appearance

zaftig (p. 598) — Yiddish: pleasantly plump; Orin's word for the print-journalist.
omnissent (p. 599) — Orin's coinage, as printed: the airport doors that "somehow knew you were there."
Schmeisser GBF (p. 599) — Schmeisser is a real German machine-pistol name; here a miniature one, in a purse.
"Sermonette" / "Evensong" / test patterns (p. 599) — real broadcast-era artifacts: sign-off devotionals and the off-hours station image.
Jeannie, Samantha, Sam and Diane, Gilligan, Hawkeye, Hazel, Jed (p. 600) — real sitcom characters (I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, Cheers, Gilligan's Island, MAS*H, Hazel, The Beverly Hillbillies).
comme on dit (p. 601) — French: "as they say."

After you read: three things

1. Read it against Orin's own checklist. You already have this scene's answer key: the oddities Orin assembled in the car on p. 575. Watch them occur in real time — the cycling cover story ("Chamber of Commerce survey. Concerned veterans' group systematic inquiry..."), the man who only "pretended to notate," the accent, and the final glance past Orin at the humped covers, which the text says he "was meant to see" (p. 601).

2. One sentence flips the room. While Orin reminisces about cocoa, the narration cuts behind him: "the non-Swiss woman lay very calmly and patiently on her side, breathing silently into the portable O2-mask... one hand in the purse on the Schmeisser GBF miniature machine pistol" (p. 599). Non-Swiss — the p. 565 "putatively" cashed out. Note the stacked irony: two pages earlier Orin was feeling for her "the sort of clinical contempt you feel for an insect... you're going to torture for a while" (p. 598).

3. The aria is worth slowing down for. Asked to "list what you miss," Orin — the family's least reflective member — produces "I miss sneering at something I love" and, pressed on reruns, "The familiarity was inflicted. Different now" (pp. 599–600). Saying it leaves him "dimly stunned and sad inside." The interviewer's crisp paraphrase — "Emotions of mastery and control and superiority. And pleasure" (p. 600) — is worth weighing too: someone wants this particular data.

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