IJ study archive

Scene 004: erdedy waits for pot

Scene
4
Pages
17–27
When
YDAU (2009), exact date unspecified — first scene under the 'YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT' header (p. 17)
Where
Ken Erdedy's condominium, metro Bostonin: metro Boston (unspecified)
POV
Ken Erdedy (3rd person, tightly internal)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 10)

Summary

Ken Erdedy, an advertising executive, sits paralyzed in his condo waiting for a woman who promised to bring 200 grams of high-resin marijuana for $1,250, four-plus hours late. In one anxious unbroken block of prose, the scene anatomizes the addict's ritual logic: he has tried to quit "70 or 80 times," always via one premeditated terminal binge; he engineers elaborate casualness, third-party procurers, emergency voicemails, food stockpiles, and a new bong each cycle, then destroys the paraphernalia to begin again. An insect appearing and disappearing in a shelf girder becomes his self-image. The scene ends with phone and door-buzzer sounding simultaneously and Erdedy splayed motionless between them, "arms wildly out as if something's been flung, splayed, entombed between the two sounds, without a thought in his head."

What to notice

The opening line — "Where was the woman who said she'd come. She said she would come." — carries no question mark: the interrogative has flattened into incantation, a mind no longer really asking. The scene is one unbroken block of anxious prose, and that is the book's addiction method demonstrated before it is ever named: not a lecture on dependency but a syntax of it, clauses looping through rationalization, contingency-planning, and self-contempt at the speed of obsession. The insect appearing and disappearing in the shelf girder is the only other character, and watch Wallace make the figure explicit — Erdedy imagining he "would disappear into a hole in a girder inside him that supported something else inside him." Notice what never happens: no woman, no dope, no resolution — the first scene of the book's present year is pure waiting, ended with Erdedy "splayed, entombed between the two sounds, without a thought in his head", a Buridan's ass strung between phone and buzzer. The cleanest sentence the novel ever writes about substances is here — "It wasn't that he was afraid of the dope, it was that smoking it made him afraid of everything else." — and in the background an E.W.D. land barge grinds through emptying dumpsters: the waste-fed-back-as-fuel logic of his terminal-binge plan running at continental scale outside the window.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 17: "Where was the woman who said she'd come." The waiting posture; the insect on the audio-shelf girder introduced.
  • pp. 17-18: The quitting system: always a brand-new third-party source, every dealer already told to cut him off; "creepy" self-knowledge.
  • pp. 18-19: The deal's history: the set-designer, the Allston trailer dealer (harelip, snakes, no phone); Erdedy's "getting dope mostly for friends" fiction; the error of being too casual to create obligation.
  • p. 19: The commitment cascade: fake emergency at the agency, answering-device message, cleaning, throwing out alcohol, laying in food and InterLace cartridges.
  • pp. 20-21: The new bong from Bogart's, whose color he cannot even recall (it proves orange at p. 25); Randi-with-an-i's verdict ("insufficiently committed"); the dope's actual effects — fear, sagging face, pleurisy, compulsive masturbation, thoughts that "jut out crazily in jagged directions."
  • pp. 21-22: The plan to cure himself by excess: 200 grams in four days, "an insane and deliberately unpleasant amount," penance and behavior-mod at once.
  • pp. 22-25: The appropriation artist flashback: the fake meth-recovery backstory (n.1 at p. 23 — the novel's first endnote, digested inline below), her obscene kiss-off postcard, his three-day disappearance with 50 grams and a Tufts stein for a toilet; he ghosts every source after each binge. (Pointed contrast: the appropriation artist "had come with the stuff at precisely the time she'd promised," p. 25.)
  • pp. 25, 27: An E.W.D. land barge empties dumpsters up and down the street — first on-page appearance of the waste-displacement infrastructure (glossed as Empire Waste Displacement at p. 121, scene 037).
  • p. 25: He weeps "hard for two or three seconds" in the bathroom, then can't restart it; light through the windows tracked like a sundial all scene.
  • pp. 25-26: Cartridge-scanning paralysis: unable to stay with any one entertainment for fear something better is on another; a colleague's call mistaken for her, sick rush of wasted adrenaline.
  • p. 27: Phone and intercom sound at once; Erdedy splays between them, "without a thought in his head."

Themes in this scene

  • Addiction and Recovery: the definitive portrait of the substance-cage before Ennet House vocabulary exists — denial systems, terminal-binge logic, the secrecy and shame the Crocodiles will later name.
  • Communication and Solipsism: every channel (phone, answering device, buzzer) is a torture instrument; Erdedy ends literally suspended between two signals, connected to no one.
  • Entertainment and the Self: the cartridge-scanning panic — "missing something" anxiety as miniature of the Entertainment's lethal promise of perfect undivided pleasure.
  • Annularity: the quit/binge cycle is a closed loop (new bong → binge → discard → resolve → new bong); "cure himself by excess" is waste fed back in as fuel; the E.W.D. land barge grinding through the background is the same logic at continental scale.
  • Time and Perception: waiting stretches perception until the room becomes a clock — the "uneven X of light" through two windows tracked as its angles go oblique and its shadows turn parallelogram, the portable clock's clicks decomposing into "three smaller clicks" (p. 21) — four-plus hours experienced as pure duration; time as the torture instrument the dope is supposed to switch off.

Endnotes

  • n.1 (p. 983, cited at p. 23): "Methamphetamine hydrochloride, a.k.a. crystal meth." — five words; the novel's first endnote, establishing the deadpan-gloss register of the apparatus (first of 388).

Connections — backward & forward

Forward

  • The Allston-Spur trailer dealer with harelip and snakes (p. 18) is Tommy Doocey, named in scene 010 (p. 40) as Bruce Green and Mildred Bonk's housemate — Erdedy's supply chain and the Green thread share a node.
  • Erdedy resurfaces in YDAU-November as an Ennet House resident: the NA meeting where Roy Tony (scene 008) embraces him (pp. 503-507, scene 100) — this scene is the "before" of that recovery arc; he recurs through the Ennet strand (scenes 056/105/112/120; last seen in the living-room depression colloquy, pp. 648-650, scene 124; a final flicker in Gately's hospital delirium, p. 922).
  • The marijuana phenomenology here (secrecy as bigger high than the high; fear; one-more-last-time) is the template against which Hal's Pump Room habit (scene 013) and Hal's withdrawal arc should be read.
  • The insect-in-the-girder image returns conceptually in Erdedy's own later thoughts and in the book's many cage figures (Lyle's "the truth will set you free" cage material).
  • "Entombed" (p. 27) echoes Orin's fetal "entombed" mornings (scene 012, p. 42) and Fenton entombed in the P.E.T. scanner (p. 48) — a motif of live burial recurring across these scenes.

Notable passages (7)
  • p. 17: "Where was the woman who said she'd come. She said she would come." — incantatory opening; addiction as Beckettian waiting.
  • p. 20: "he would disappear into a hole in a girder inside him that supported something else inside him. He was unsure what the thing inside him was and was unprepared to commit himself to the course of action that would be required to explore the question." — the insect made explicit self-figure.
  • p. 21: "It made his thoughts jut out crazily in jagged directions and made him stare raptly like an unbright child at entertainment cartridges" — the book's first description of marijuana-thinking (cf. the communication-solipsism vocabulary).
  • p. 22: "It wasn't that he was afraid of the dope, it was that smoking it made him afraid of everything else." — cleanest single statement of the substance paradox.
  • p. 25: "his throat suddenly closed and he wept hard for two or three seconds before the weeping stopped abruptly and he could not get it to start again." — the addict's grief organ already broken; seed of Carlisle's weeping-addict recurrence thread.
  • p. 27: "he thought of impulses being starved of expression and drying out and floating dryly away" — desire anatomized at the moment of paralysis; leads directly into the final tableau.
  • p. 27: "splayed, entombed between the two sounds, without a thought in his head" — final tableau; Buridan's-ass paralysis as the addict's terminus.

What links here Manuscript differences (1) · Timeline events here (4) · Connected from (13) · Passages quoted here (40) · Motifs (8)

Manuscript differences

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs