Pages 716–719

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.

Randy Lenz — several days out from his ejection after the night of pp. 601–619 — is on Prospect Street between Central and Inman Squares at about 2212h on 14 November, coked to the sinuses, stalking two small Chinese women and their enormous twine-handled shopping bags. The narration is soaked in Lenz's own idiom: the malaprops ("amonymous," "deducted," "The Star-Spanned Banner") and, be warned, the racism are his, rendered from inside without authorial rescue — the scene's method is to let his logic incriminate itself. Note the hour and the street; the book is being precise about both.

Terms, in order of appearance

Interval of Issues-Resolution (p. 716) — Lenz's own institutional-sounding name for the nightly time-window in which he "resolved his issues" on animals, pp. 538ff.
Little Lisbon (p. 717) — the Portuguese stretch of Cambridge around Inman Square, named as such since p. 478.
Lechmere's (p. 717) — real Boston-area department store at Cambridgeside; source, via mannequin, of the mustache.
otiose (p. 717) — functionless, pointless; what cocaine makes of eating.
Browning X444 Serrated (p. 718) — the knife he's carried since the pp. 538–547 nights, now holstered in his sock.
"The James Principles of the Gifford Lectures" (p. 718) — as printed: Lenz's garble of two real William James titles (The Principles of Psychology; the Gifford Lectures became The Varieties of Religious Experience); his hollowed-out cocaine stash since pp. 553ff.

After you read: three things

1. The scene has a countdown, and it isn't the women. The opening is cocaine phenomenology — past the crest into "regions of almost interstellar cold," heart "like a shoe in the Ennet House basement's dryer" (p. 716; even his similes still live at the House). The real clock: the razored-out book's "receptacled heart now quite a bit closer to empty than Lenz would be comfortable thinking about directly" (p. 718). Everything manic here sits on top of that approaching floor.

2. Paranoia has flipped into omnipotence, and the narrator steps outside exactly once. Lenz first assumed the women were tailing him — front-tails with temple-mirrors, helicopters disguised as your own heartbeat, "the well-read Geoffrey D." cited as authority (pp. 716–717; the same Day who, at p. 692, fills his journal with Lenz). Having "shaken" them twice, he concludes he's the surveillant, in "total control of this situation." Against all this, one cold sentence: "he tended to confuse a wide berth with invisibility" (p. 718). The closing line — "his adrenaline invisible for all to see" — cancels itself the same way.

3. You're inside the third predator on this street tonight. It's c. 2212–2214h on Prospect St. — the same minutes and blocks as the purse-snatch of pp. 714–716 and the stalk of pp. 689–692. And note the graduation: the Issues-Resolution ritual that worked through garbage, rats, cats, and dogs on pp. 538–559 has, out here, quietly moved up to people. The Frightful Hog — glossed for you by Day at p. 692 — "was not and never numb."

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