Notkin’s party; Joelle’s overdose
‘The Face of the Deep’ had been the title she’d suggested for Jim’s unseen last cartridge, which he’d said would be too pretentious and then used that skull-fragment out of the Hamlet graveyard scene instead, which talk about pretentious she’d laughed. His frightened look when she’d laughed is for the life of her the last facial-expression memory she can remember of the man.
Context
The catalogued Hamlet-scaffold item, and it lands in a room with no Incandenza present — Joelle alone in Molly Notkin's bathroom, methodically preparing her overdose, remembering Himself. She had proposed "The Face of the Deep" (the Genesis darkness she used to invoke as Madame Psychosis) for his last cartridge; he called it too pretentious and reached instead for "that skull-fragment out of the Hamlet graveyard scene" — the title the whole novel wears, drawn from the same V.i exhumation that gives Poor Yorick Entertainment its name. And the memory she can't shake is his frightened look when she laughed at the choice: the dead king glimpsed, at the naming of the thing that will kill everyone who sees it, looking afraid. The Hamlet frame is fully assembled here without a single family member in the building — the graveyard-scene title, the skull, the frightened father — carried entirely by the woman his film was built around.