Pages 896–902
Continuous with the frozen-Stice morning: Hal, heading back upstairs to check on "Stice's defenestration," is hit in the second-floor hallway by an off-court version of the telescoping panic he knows from matches — and ends up flat on his back on the floor of Viewing Room 5 while the blizzard goes on. Still first person. Two small boys, Timmy Peterson and Petropolis Kahn, wander in with questions and get silence. What follows reads as a strange shuffle of unranked facts — dictionary entries filed next to family history filed next to "My full name is Harold James Incandenza, and I am 183.6 cm. tall in stocking feet." The flatness is the symptom; read the shuffle as the scene's actual weather.
Terms, in order of appearance
- defenestration (p. 896) — real word: being thrown out a window; Hal's dry tag for a man frozen to one.
- Tosca (p. 896) — real Puccini opera; its "protracted-death aria" is Hal's music "for free-floating misery."
- Vaipassana (p. 898) — the text's spelling of Vipassana, real Buddhist "Insight" meditation; Lyle's version is fully awakened contemplation of one's own death.
- Northern Vindicator (p. 899) — real O.E.D. material: an Iowa paper really did popularize "blizzard" in the 1860s–70s.
- phocomelic (p. 901) — real medical term: severely shortened, flipperlike limbs.
- homodontic (p. 901) — all teeth identical; Mario's are all second bicuspids.
After you read: three things
1. The panic has content, and the cure is a posture. What flanks the lucidity is repetition totalized: every stair-climb, breath, and meal of his remaining life pre-experienced — a room stacked with sixty years of breaded chicken fillets, and a dimmer room holding what they become, its steel door bowing outward. The scene ends by converting the spasm into a revelation of horizontality: flat among the room's stacked horizontal lines, Hal is "the meat in the room's sandwich," denser, "impossible to knock down."
2. Two sentences carry the freight. First, deadpan, mid-fugue: if it came down to tennis versus getting high, "it would be a nearly impossible choice to make. The distant way in which this fact appalled me itself appalled me." Second, the generalization: "We are all dying to give our lives away to something… A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into" — with addiction's actual etymology (being bound over, dedicated) and the diagnosis that E.T.A. kindly captures players "before the age when the questions why and to what grow real beaks and claws." His sport and his Substance turn out to be one structure. Alongside: Hamlet, who "never once doubts the reality of the ghost" and might be "only feigning feigning."
3. Grade the family facts like testimony. The Tavis genealogy — Avril's dwarf stepmother, C.T.'s father killed at a tavern darts match, "unrelated but extremely close" — all decocts from a distraught C.T. via a seven-year-old Orin, and Hal says so. Two more items get filed with no ranking at all: Orin's old claim of nude footprints on the inside of the Moms's windshield, and the news that during Wayne's broadcast collapse "the Moms herself had apparently stayed by Wayne's side late into the night." You saw pp. 550–553; Hal's narration declines to add anything.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.