JOI's father's garage monologue
you’re a machine a body an object, Jim, no less than this rutilant Montclair, this coil of hose here or that rake there for the front yard’s gravel or sweet Jesus this nasty fat spider flexing in its web over there up next to the rake-handle, see it? See it? Latrodectus mactans, Jim. Widow. Grab this racquet and move gracefully and feelingly over there and kill that widow for me, young sir Jim. Go on. Make it say ‘K.’ Take no names.
Context
Tucson, winter 1960: JOI's father, working through a two-pint flask on what was to be ten-year-old Jim's first tennis lesson. Even ordering his son to squash a spider, the diction stays ornate — "rutilant," then the full Linnaean binomial for the black widow. Latrodectus mactans becomes the name of JOI's film company and part of the lexical flood the wraith later forces through Gately (p. 832): the grandfather's doomed pedantry is the verbal inheritance, delivered here at its source.