Pages 755–769
E.T.A., 11 November, around 2100h — the same evening as the montage and the viewing-room scenes. Mario, the Bolex camera strapped to his head for his fall documentary (the rig Himself built — "the last time I believe he enjoyed himself on something, thoroughly"), makes a slow circuit: Schtitt asleep in a bare soundproofed room amid deafening Wagner, the dorm halls at Study Period, LaMont Chu fresh from a Lyle consult — and then his mother's blazing-lit office, where he sets the camera aside and asks her a question. Much of the scene is literally lens-mediated: what Mario films, and what he sees around the viewfinder, are two different data-streams. Trust both.
Terms, in order of appearance
- Bolex H64 (p. 755) — real Swiss 16mm movie camera, a documentary workhorse.
- varicoceles (p. 756) — varicose veins of the scrotum; why Schtitt always sits knees-out.
- police lock (p. 760) — real apartment device, a brace-pole against the door; Mario's standing-support rig, his equipment since pp. 313ff.
- Introduction to Montague Semantics (p. 760) — real 1981 linguistics text; endnote 317 prices it.
- Rindge and Latin (p. 760) — real Cambridge public school; provenance of the clay ashtray Mario made her.
- 49-star flag (p. 761) — in C.T.'s office; endnote 318 is one line and worth it.
- 'Many Wonders' (p. 762) — endnote 319: family idiom for leftovers.
- lordotic (p. 763) — the spinal curvature behind Mario's canted-forward posture and his eye for carpet-prints.
- Delaware Punch (p. 765) — real, long-dead soda brand; the grandfather's losing bet against the fizzy coffee substitute "rumored to contain smidgeons of cocaine."
After you read: three things
1. The Chu conversation is a duet at perfect cross purposes. Chu wants hard intel — Eschaton fallout, the urine-guy, "What's going to happen to the Incster?" — and Mario answers only as a delighted filmmaker: "I feel like we're getting the totally real LaMont Chu here" (p. 758). Neither is being evasive; they're running different games entirely. "'I can't think what to say.' / 'That happens to me all the time.'" It's the funniest and saddest exchange in this stretch of the book, and a warm-up for the office scene's larger version.
2. Mario's question defeats his mother's entire vocabulary. "How can you tell if somebody's sad?" gets a clinically eloquent taxonomy — weeping, torpor, "disassociation," "engulfment" ("As if something truly and thoroughly felt... would become infinite and engulf them," p. 765), the frozen grandfather, the father who died out of his chair. She fishes — is it Hal? Charles? you? — while professing she'd "never traffic in third-party hearsay." What she cannot parse is the actual question: what if someone seems more himself than before the sad thing? Nobody says the name both of them mean.
3. Watch what Mario notices and declines to interpret. Knuckle-like prints in the shag; crinkly strips of bright red paper in a wastebasket that's "normally totally empty"; the X of brooms glued to the kitchen wall; Orin's helmet and pants kept as memento by the mother he won't call. And the diapers paragraph (p. 768): Himself and Hal changed him for years without comment; Avril, in tears, asked seven-year-old Mario to reassure her. The scene ends in his eyes going out the window — the statue atop St. Elizabeth's, and the WYYY transmitter's red rotating tip over the swollen Charles.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.