Pages 769–774

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.

Hal and Mario's shared room at Enfield Tennis Academy, total darkness, the small hours after November 11, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. The whole scene is dialogue — no names, no "he said," just two voices in the dark; that's deliberate, and you can track them by manner: Hal analytic and worried, Mario (the one called "Booboo") glad, literal, and direct. Mario has recently moved his sleeping bag back into the room. No one new appears; everyone discussed — Orin, the Moms, Pemulis — you've already met.

Terms, in order of appearance

tapes of old Psychosis (p. 769) — recordings of Madame Psychosis, the late-night WYYY radio show Mario loves (from p. 181); he wants them "for until the return."
S. Johnson (p. 770) — Avril's dog from the family's pre-academy years, long dead; this conversation is the fullest account of him yet.
the Hayden (p. 770) — endnote 320 is one line: M.I.T.'s main library, East Cambridge.
Kinds of Light (p. 770) — a film of Himself's; the memory here is of its opening-night screening.
Family Trivia (p. 771) — the Incandenzas' quiz game about their own family history; it last surfaced on p. 522.
O.N.A.N.T.A. (p. 771) — the continent-wide tennis governing body; its traveling urologist handles the players' drug testing.
the WhataBurger (p. 772) — Thanksgiving-week junior tournament in Tucson; its full name has been around since p. 3.
Panglossian (p. 772) — real-world: after Dr. Pangloss in Voltaire's Candide, sure everything is for the best; Hal means Mario's built-in optimism.
Eve Arden (p. 774) — real Hollywood actress; the mask line Mario quotes is hers, from an old beauty brochure read on the radio show.

After you read: three things

1. It's two conversations, braided. Hal keeps circling what worries him — the dream, Orin's lying, the urine-test clock; Mario answers out of a different conversation entirely: total-recall happy memories, the dorm fans at night ("it'sOKit'sOKit'sOKit'sOK, over and over. From very far away."), and flat declarations — "Except with you I can feel you mean it." When an answer doesn't quite meet its question, nothing is wrong with your reading; that is the scene's shape. Hal even offers a physics for it: whatever is said to Mario "reverses its spin and hits you true."

2. The dream is about teeth, and yesterday was too. Hal's nightmare: his teeth dry-rotting to shale, then mailed bills for somebody else's teeth that the carrier won't acknowledge aren't his. Only pages back, Avril mentioned Hal's "tooth thing" and that he "inherited the dental problems from Himself," half of whose teeth were bridges (pp. 762–763). The dream sounds a lot like that inheritance restated: paying for damage that began in someone else's mouth.

3. Watch where the liar taxonomy lands. Hal starts from Orin, who lied "with a really pathological intensity," and from Pemulis, who "played the O.N.A.N.T.A. man like a fine instrument" and bought Hal, Axford, and himself thirty days before they must test clean. From there he builds a field guide of liar types — dominator, flutterer, digresser, kamikaze, over-elaborator — and ends at a new definition: at seventeen, monsters are no longer faces in the floor (his childhood nightmare, pp. 61–62); the only real monsters are the liars with no tells. "Inscrutable. Brass-faced."

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