Pages 941–958

Gately's bed · 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 room at E.T.A., morning of 20 November, the blizzard arriving in earnest. Hal — still narrating in the first person he's used since p. 851 — comes in to find Mario and a shaken Coyle watching another of his father's cartridges, Accomplice!, and gets the morning's gossip about Stice. Then everyone leaves, and for most of seventeen pages Hal lies supine on the carpet while the monologue ranges: the film, the storm coverage, the '98 blizzard, the old house in Weston, his mother, his father. The drift is the scene's method, not a flaw. One heads-up: Accomplice!'s plot, retold in full, is genuinely ugly — a razor blade, a deliberate infection.

Terms, in order of appearance

Bresson... Brecht (p. 944) — real: Robert Bresson cast nonactors as "models"; Bertolt Brecht wanted audiences never to forget it's theater.
Kaposi's Sarcoma (p. 946) — real: the skin-lesion cancer of late-stage AIDS; the blotch the film turns on.
Spontaneous Dissemination (p. 946) — InterLace's unrequested news-bulletin channel; in the lexicon since p. 42.
Nor'easter (p. 947) — real New England coastal storm type; the coverage's point is that this storm isn't one.
raster (p. 949) — endnote 380: the scanned rectangle a video image is built on; the note also decodes InterLace's name.
Noxzema (p. 950) — real drugstore shave cream; Himself teaching Orin to shave.
still of Lang directing Metropolis (p. 951) — real 1926 photograph, Fritz Lang shooting his silent film; endnote 381 gives its history in the family — worth the flip.
guilloche (p. 952) — real: ornamental molding of interlaced circling bands; Hal has counted its circles.
climacteric (p. 954) — real word: the change of life; here, sudden visible aging.
koans (p. 954) — real: Zen questions built to defeat a straight answer.

After you read: three things

1. You know more about Stice's room than Coyle does. The gossip — Troeltsch tearing skin off Stice's frozen face, and Stice's bed found up at the ceiling, "presumably bolted" — reaches Hal garbled; you watched the window scene yourself (pp. 864–76). And Stice's sworn-secret theory, a "beneficiary or guardian ghost" that "resides in and/or manifests in ordinary physical objects" (p. 943), sounds a lot like the object-moving figure who visited Gately's fever on pp. 829–40. The scene never connects them; you're equipped to.

2. The monologue has an undertow. Hal is days into the abstinence pact you read about in endnote 321: "trying to align myself along some sort of grain in the world I could barely feel, since Pemulis and I stopped" (p. 950). Read the drift against that — the "glitters of a possible incipient panic-attack" (p. 942), the questions that "force you to lie" (p. 954), and the detailed fantasy of wrecking his own ankle so he'd "never have to, never get to" play (pp. 954–55).

3. The scene's biggest fact arrives in one flat sentence. When John Wayne's head appears silently in the doorway, don't skim pp. 956–57: Hal discloses, without raising his voice, who Wayne has been involved with since his second month at the academy, then composes the pair into a stilted tableau — "They stay just like that." The scene ends on Hal's own stillness: "I decided to get up but then did not in fact get up."

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