Mario's night walk past Ennet House (p. 589)
He gets a serious burn on his pelvis leaning against a hot steel stove talking to Mrs. Clarke. His hip is swaddled in bandages under Orin’s old corduroys, and there’s a sucking sound of salve when he walks, late at night, unable to sleep. The birth-related disability that wasn’t even definitively diagnosed until Mario was six and had let Orin tattoo his shoulder with the red coil of an immersion heater is called Familial Dysautonomia, a neurological deficit whereby he can’t feel physical pain very well. A lot of the E.T.A.s kid him about they should have such problems, and even Hal’s sometimes felt a twinge of envy about it, but the defect is a serious hassle and actually very dangerous, see for instance the burnt pelvis, which wasn’t even discovered until Mrs. Clarke thought she smelled her eggplant overcooking.
Context
Mario's condition named and defined from inside his own scene: Familial Dysautonomia, diagnosed at six only after Orin branded him with an immersion-heater coil and nothing happened. The unfelt stove burn — found by smell, like overcooking eggplant — is disability rendered without pathos or horror, envy and danger in the same breath. The definitional passage for the pain-deficit half of the Mario thread (071 has the visible morphology). "[K]id him about they should have such problems" is as written.