Hal's teeth dream; Mario and the WYYY silence
Mario’d been spending the last few nights over at HmH, sleeping on an air mattress in the living room in front of Tavis’s Tatsuoka receiver, listening to WYYY–109 into the wee hours, weirdly agitated about Madame Psychosis’s unannounced sabbatical from the ‘60 Minutes +/−’ midnight thing where she’d been an unvarying M-F presence for several years, it seemed like. WYYY had been evasive and unforthcoming about the whole thing. For two days some alto grad student had tried to fill in, billing herself as Miss Diagnosis, reading Horkheimer and Adorno against a background of Partridge Family slowed down to a narcotized slur. At no time had anyone of managerial pitch or timbre mentioned Madame Psychosis or what her story was or her date of expected return.
Context
Very late October YDAU, an hour before dawn drills: Mario's bed is empty because he's been keeping vigil at the Headmaster's House receiver, and the Madame Psychosis radio thread goes silent for the first time in years. The reader knows why she's gone (the Notkin-party overdose); Mario only gets the station's evasions and a failed 'Miss Diagnosis' substitute. The beloved voice as pure medium — when it stops, the most unagitatable person in the book comes apart a little.