Pages 707–711

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.

St. Elizabeth's Hospital, Enfield, the night of Saturday 14 November. Joelle van Dyne, veiled, has just come from mopping the forehead of Don Gately — feverish two floors up in the Trauma Wing, tube down his throat, refusing the Demerol his doctors keep offering — and slips into the back row of a Cocaine Anonymous meeting downstairs. One visiting speaker's story takes up nearly the whole scene, told in his own Boston idiom. Plain heads-up: it's a story about a family going hungry and a man at the edge of suicide, and the scene does not soften it.

Terms, in order of appearance

Cocaine Anonymous / CA (p. 707) — real NA splinter fellowship; endnote 291 explains why Ennet House staff discourage splinters as a primary program.
catexic (p. 707) — as printed; evidently for cachectic: wasted, emaciated — the sniffing newcomers around Joelle.
fearful sentiment (p. 707) — endnote 292 unpacks the "fearful": house and AA rules on newcomer romance; worth the flip for one famous slogan.
Demerol (p. 707) — real synthetic opioid painkiller; for Gately, the well-meaning offer is the danger.
drugologue (p. 708) — CA's version of AA's drunkalogue: the speaker's war-story autobiography; this speaker skips it.
Holmes (p. 709) — endnote 293 glosses the idiom and, in passing, Joelle's own dated Kentucky vocabulary.
"the fat woman with the little helmet with horns" (p. 709) — the opera Valkyrie of "it ain't over till the fat lady sings"; here she'd already sung.
B.H.A. (p. 709) — endnote 295: Boston Housing Authority; a green Last Warning, not yet a salmon Eviction Notice.
Shattuck Shelter (p. 710) — real homeless shelter in Jamaica Plain, four kilometers' walk from Mattapan.
Crocodile (p. 710) — Boston-fellowship term you know from pp. 343ff: an old-timer with serious clean time.

After you read: three things

1. The first word is "though" — the scene answers the page before it. Pages 706's coda described clever people who quit the Program over its platitudes; this scene opens on "Some Substance-dependent persons, though," the ones broken enough to want the platitudes. And the film thread crosses here too: Joelle's first appearance in a JOI project was in the very cartridge Hal was just brooding on, Low-Temperature Civics (p. 707).

2. The Bottom's evidence is a biscuit pan. The speaker's story builds to no crash or arrest — what "sent his face clear down off his skull" was a Pam-shiny empty pan and a peanut-butter safety-seal on the trash (pp. 709–710), and the sixth-floor window that "could be broke through with a running start." Set that kitchen floor against the burning-high-rise passage of p. 696: same physics, and a man who didn't jump. The Higher Power he ends up with is whatever he silently thanked for a peanut butter sandwich.

3. Watch Joelle choose to believe. Her critical ear registers the "autodidactic orator's" pauses — and she "chooses consciously to believe it isn't affected" (p. 710). The result is dated like a conversion: tonight, 11/14, the ratchet in her belly turns "three turns to the good," she's sure for the first time she wants to keep straight "no matter what it means facing" — and she considers, for the first time in a long time, possibly showing somebody the face.

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