Pages 648–651
The section opens with six lines that still belong to the Tucson mountainside — Marathe and Steeply finishing their exchange about the victims' emptiness — and then the header lands you at Ennet House, 2:45 a.m., 13 November, two nights after the streetlet fight the House is "still reeling" from. In the dark living room: Kate Gompert folded forehead-to-foot on the couch, Geoffrey Day beside her in bathrobe and dress shoes, Erdedy smoking, Bruce Green asleep with his broken nose taped, and the viewer stuck on the only 2-to-4 a.m. programming there is. Plain heads-up: this is a sustained, exact conversation about suicidal depression.
Terms, in order of appearance
- Dream Duty (p. 648) — the House's overnight sit-up shift; Eugenio M. has it tonight, from the office.
- Mr. Bouncety-Bounce (p. 648) — the diapered, rubber-infant-masked figure InterLace loops from 0200 to 0400; first seen here, and "not a soothing or pleasant figure at all."
- Green's sleep-cries (p. 651) — "Mr. Ho," "not the nuts," "don't light it": every fragment is from his own pp. 575–589 history, re-running.
After you read: three things
1. Read the first six lines twice. They end one conversation — an emptiness "as if there was something he'd forgotten" — "Misplaced. Lost." — and the book splices the next one straight onto it, no seam, a continent and a season apart. Hold the splice in mind while Day describes "cold empty black malevolent lonely voided space" (p. 650): the juxtaposition is doing the arguing.
2. Track Kate Gompert's posture. She starts with her forehead on her ankle, answering in sarcasm ("Like you really care"). Then she begins finishing Day's sentences — "But it was inside you, though"; "You like despised yourself for waking it up" — in the vocabulary she's owned since pp. 68–78. By the last page she's looking at him, her face "different." That arc, not the plot, is the scene's event. And this is Day: the House's fluent debunker, speaking with no defenses at all.
3. Two paragraphs are load-bearing; walk, don't skim. The boy who "sat up with me until it went away," who didn't converse or comfort and was "the piece of string by which I hung suspended over hell itself" (p. 650). And the definition: people who say hell "did not mean the black sail. They meant the associated feelings" (p. 651) — down to the closing line, "There is no way it could feel worse."
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.