Pages 782–785

E.T.A., Ennet House, and the A.F.R., cross-cut · first-time reader guide · all scenes

Endnote 321 arrives on page 785 — it gets its own page.

When you've finished these pages: three things worth a second look, at the bottom.

Same room, same night: the Hal–Mario conversation of pp. 769–774 continues without a break, the darkness thinning toward dawn. Still nothing but two unattributed voices — Hal's the analytic one, Mario's the plain one — and still nobody new: everyone discussed (Pemulis, C.T., the Moms, Himself, the urologist) is already familiar. This is the stretch where the night's long circling around liars arrives somewhere.

Terms, in order of appearance

Bob Hope (p. 782) — street code for marijuana, in use since p. 49; "high-resin" means strong.
the Pump Room (p. 782) — the room off E.T.A.'s secondary maintenance tunnel; the underground ritual you watched on pp. 49–54.
Port Washington (p. 782) — the Long Island academy from the big meet of pp. 109ff; scene of Pemulis's prior dosing offense.
the Shoe (p. 783) — expulsion; the coinage is new here, the meaning plain from context.
gas chromatography / mass-fragment spectrometry (p. 783) — real forensic drug screening (G.C./M.S.); "full-spectrum" means it sees everything, cannabis included.
Tenuate (p. 783) — real diet pill, a mild stimulant; Pemulis's 'drine of long standing (since p. 60).
kertwang (p. 784) — Pemulis-flavored E.T.A. slang: a nasty blow or bind.
DMZ (p. 785) — the ultra-potent hallucinogen Pemulis scored on pp. 211–219; his library research asks whether a scan detects it. Endnote 321 — a full narrative scene in the notes.

After you read: three things

1. The confession, flat and complete. Mario's "I'm sorry if you're sad, Hal. You seem sad" gets the whole thing in return: "I smoke high-resin Bob Hope in secret by myself down in the Pump Room" — the hidden ritual of pp. 49–54, told to another person for the first time, Visine and toothpaste and all. After a night spent classifying liars in the abstract, Hal names himself one. Notice that it takes total darkness, and Mario, to make it sayable.

2. The urine crisis, redrawn. Hal lays out the real shape of it: the administration wants Pemulis gone (Port Washington, the Visine-bottle urine trade of pp. 152–153), while Hal is "immune to expulsion anyway, obviously, as the Moms's relative." The reversal is that the thirty days Pemulis charmed out of the urologist were secretly for Hal, whose fat-soluble cannabinoids may not clear even in a month: "He did it for me, and I'm not even the one they want." Whether Pemulis knows he's the real target, Hal can't say.

3. What Hal actually fears, and what Mario answers. Not the test but the Moms: "Not so much the Hope. The secrecy of it. That I hid it from her" — he expects it to "kill her dead." Forty hours in he's "bats inside," predicting "a way more than Hal-sized hole" opening over the month ahead. He begs Mario to be hurtable for once ("One liar's enough"), then asks him point-blank what to do. Mario's whole answer: "I think you just did it. What you should do. I think you just did."

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