Molly Notkin's party: Joelle's overdose (Memory and Forgetting)
The only other thing besides what she’s about to do too much of here right now she’d ever come close to feeling this way about: In Joelle’s childhood, Paducah, not too bad a drive from Shiny Prize, still had a few public movie theaters, six and eight separate auditoria clustered in single honeycombs at the edges of interstate malls. The theaters always ended in -plex, she reflected. The Thisoplex and Thatoplex. It had never struck her as odd. And she never saw even one film there, as a girl, that she didn’t just about die with love for. It didn’t matter what they were. She and her own personal Daddy up in the front row […] Standing in the placid line as he bought the -plex’s paper tickets that looked like grocery receipts, knowing that she was going to love the celluloid entertainment no matter what it was, wonderfully innocent […] she’d never so much again as in that line felt so taken care of, destined for big-screen entertainment’s unalloyed good fun, never once again until starting in with this lover, cooking and smoking it, five years back, before Incandenza’s death, at the start.
Context
The -plex memory: mid-cook, freebase thickening on the wire, Joelle's mind delivers the one childhood scene the drug has always been a replica of — front row in Paducah with her own personal Daddy, loved by a screen that didn't know she was there. The memory does the scene's explanatory work: it's what makes the overdose legible as a homecoming, remembering and relapse running on the same rail. (Note for p. 239, below: the replay inverts a detail.)