Lenz's coked monologue at Green (p. 559)
Lenz regales how at that Halloween Party with the necklace of birds there’d been allegedly a Concavity-refugee infant there, at the party […] a normal-size and unferal infant but totally without a skull, lying in a kind of raised platform or dais by the fireplace with its shapeless and deskulled head-region supported and, like (shuddering), contained in a sort of lidless plastic box, and its eyes were sunk way down in its face, which was the consistency of like quicksand, the face, and its nose concave and its mouth hanging out over either side of the boneless face, and the total head had like conformed to the inside of the containing box it was contained in, the head, and appeared roughly square in overall outline, the head, and the woman with the lei of gull-heads and other persons in costumes had ingested hallucinogens and drank mescal and ate the little worms in the mescal and had performed circled rituals around the box and platform around 2355h., worshipping the infant, or as they termed it simply The Infant, as if there were only One.
Context
The Infant's debut, retailed as coke-fueled gossip on the walk home from an AA meeting: a skull-less Concavity-refugee baby whose head has taken the square shape of its containing box, worshipped at a South Boston Halloween party. The deformed Concavity birth as cult object — "as if there were only One" is the catalog's anchor formula (scene 111 repeats it verbatim) — and the box-conformed head is the novel's body-horror version of environment-shapes-organism. Echoes Mme. Marathe, also born skull-less (pp. 753, 779). Lenz-voice solecisms sic throughout.