Page 692
A single page inside Ennet House, undated but sitting in the mid-November stretch, seen through Geoffrey Day — the ironic ex-professor who arrived at pp. 270ff — and the journal he keeps. No one else is on stage; the page is a survey of the House's men (Minty, Glynn, Foss, Ewell, Erdedy) and, above all, the departed Randy Lenz, whom you last saw running from the aftermath on pp. 601ff. The register is Day's own fussy data-collecting prose; the joke is that it can't stay detached.
Terms, in order of appearance
- cognomen (p. 692) — Latin: a nickname or added name; Day's deliberately stuffy word for what the residents call their genitals.
- Unit (p. 692) — the capitalized house euphemism Day adopts for the organ in question.
- the Polish Curse (p. 692) — Lenz's own coinage for the Hog's proportions; the scene quotes his definition in full.
- discharge (p. 692) — the House's administrative word for how Lenz left; you saw the actual manner of leaving on pp. 601ff.
- 3-Man room (p. 692) — Ennet House rooms go by bed-count; Lenz's exit opens a slot and Ewell moves up.
After you read: three things
1. Two sentences contradict each other, on purpose. "Day would die before admitting he missed either Lenz or his soliloquies about the Hog" sits a few lines above "A surprising amount of Day's Recovery Journal is filled with quotations from R. Lenz" (p. 692). The journal is the evidence the denial can't survive, and the page's own last sentence concedes it: Day is "nonplussed when he found himself, after a couple long nights, almost missing Lenz." Watch how the free-indirect voice lets him keep his dignity — he only ever gets to almost miss him.
2. This is the roommate war's quiet coda. Day versus Lenz — pedantry versus patter, sharing a room since the House scenes of pp. 270ff and Lenz's monologues around pp. 538ff — ends not with a scene but with an absence: the obsession with time, the upside-down wall-leaning, the brandished Hog, all listed in the past tense of someone taking inventory of what's gone.
3. Day is doing Ewell's kind of fieldwork. The "comparative-class data" journal-entry habit — noting which men name their Units and speculating it's a class thing — is the same resident-on-resident anthropology as Tiny Ewell's tattoo survey back on pp. 200–211. The House's two educated ironists cope identically: by turning the other residents into a dataset. Now they share a room.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.