Pages 714–716
Prospect Street near Central Square, same Saturday night, roughly 2215h: the purse-snatch that three scenes have been converging on has just happened, and you get it from inside Kate Gompert's freshly concussed head. The scene runs in reverse — aftermath first (a receding red coat, Ruth van Cleve in screaming pursuit, a street bum closing in), the snatch itself replayed only at the end. Everything is "tinged in violet" because her eye is swelling shut; the prose's jerks and blurs are her head injury, rendered — that's deliberate, not you losing the thread.
Terms, in order of appearance
- GIGABUCKS (p. 715) — a lottery ticket in the gutter; endnote 299 is one line about who holds the © — the era's branding reflex, even in litter.
- Go Screw (p. 715) — the text glosses it itself: the real-city brush-off, "with a deft little thumb-gesture"; Kate can't even manage it.
- Filene's (pp. 715–716) — real Boston department store; the quality all-cotton macramé strap is why Kate, not just her purse, got taken along.
- Crack-the-Whip (p. 716) — real skating game: a chain of skaters whips its end person outward at speed; Kate's childhood-rink flashback mid-spin.
- mafun (p. 716) — Ruth's minced street obscenity, as printed.
After you read: three things
1. You know what Kate can't see. To her, the thief is "the apparition of just about the most unattractive woman Kate Gompert had ever seen" — five-day facial growth, a smell "danker than the dankest municipal sewage" (pp. 715–716). You walked here inside that body at pp. 689–692, where the same figure narrated itself as a dignified creature "risen by will from the ashes." That scene warned, "It's a good thing you can't see what you look like, though." This is what he looks like.
2. Two sentences carry the scene's whole cruel logic. "Concussion is really another word for a bruised brain," Kate reasons, trying not to picture it — and then, deadpan: "The lightpost she held herself up with was what had hit her" (p. 715). She is clinging to the thing that injured her to stay upright. Given everything the book has let you learn about Kate since pp. 68–78, let that image do its own work.
3. Nobody in this scene connects with anybody. The bum shouts "I'm a witness!" at passersby, not at her, performing witnessing for an audience while holding a begging palm under the face of the person he just watched get robbed — Kate's one feat of reasoning is spotting the contradiction. Pedestrians give "that studious, urban kind of no-attention." And the last image fuses victim's and thief's voices: robber and pursuer receding up Prospect, "both seeming to be shrieking for help" (p. 716).
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.