Pages 698–700

E.T.A., Ennet House, and the A.F.R., cross-cut · first-time reader guide · all scenes

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

Prospect Street just south of Inman Square, Cambridge, a little after 2200h on Saturday 14 November YDAU. Kate Gompert — four nights without sleep — is walking a brand-new Ennet House resident home from a late NA meeting: Ruth van Cleve, a Braintree Ice addict with enormous teased hair, making her first appearance; you haven't missed her. The narration runs through Kate's psychotically depressed free-indirect register, which the essay you just read (pp. 692–698) built the vocabulary for. The pair have 75 minutes to make Curfew, and they are not alone on the sidewalk.

Terms, in order of appearance

House Restriction (p. 698) — new Ennet House residents spend their first three days confined; outside meetings only with a Staff-approved senior resident.
Ice (p. 698) — endnote 284: crude, cheap, combustible methedrine; worth the flip for its sociology of who smokes it.
stem-artists (p. 699) — street slang; a stem is a crack pipe, and these are the sidewalk hustlers and beggars attached to one.
D.S.S. (p. 699) — Massachusetts Department of Social Services, the child-welfare agency; it and Family Court sent Ruth to Ennet House.
Clonidine (p. 699) — real adult blood-pressure drug; endnote 285 flags Ruth's incubator claim as a mispronunciation — the note is the joke.
Clean and Serene Group (p. 699) — N. Cambridge's only Saturday-night NA meeting, "infamous for cross-talk and chair-throwing."
NA Newcomers' keychains (p. 700) — real NA practice: keytags marking days and months clean; roughly what the purses actually hold.

After you read: three things

1. The essay just walked out onto the street. Pages 692–698 said an anhedonic "can navigate, but has no location"; here is what that looks like: Kate's whole spiritual energy going to "first her left foot and then her right foot," passersby reduced to "disconnected floating heads" in darkened shop windows (p. 699). The scene is the theory of the previous scene, embodied, one page later.

2. Ruth's story arrives deadpan, and the footnotes do the flinching. Remanded after her newborn was found in an alley swaddled in expired WalMart circulars, hospital ID bracelet still on its wrist; the father "operating a pharmaceutical company without a license" (p. 699). The narration keeps a flat catalog voice; endnotes 285–286 carry the commentary. Meanwhile the two women never actually converse — Ruth's chatter is "listener-interest-independent," Kate wholly inward. Side by side, zero contact.

3. You already know who the last floating head is. At pp. 691–692 you stood behind Poor Tony Krause as he sized up "the purses of the two young and unstriking women walking just a few steps ahead." This scene ends inside that same block of sidewalk from the women's side — and Kate, seeing only feet and floating heads, "does not see" the gaunt head matching their course step for step (p. 700). Same Saturday night, third camera angle.

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