IJ study archive

Scene 041: orin calls separatism

Scene
41
Pages
135–137
When
3 Nov YDAU (2009), just before E.T.A. dinner (the West-house triangle audible at the end)
Where
Hal and Mario's room, subdorm A, E.T.A. (Orin calling from his condo in Phoenix)in: E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. subdormitories · Phoenix-area Arizona (also)
POV
3rd person close to Hal

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 9)

Summary

Hal, just up from the Pump Room and uneasy on the phone after getting high, answers Orin's transparent-cased hand-me-down phone ("Mmyellow"). Orin needles him with masturbation jokes from broiling Phoenix — high-beam glass and light, a pedestrian felled by heat whose face "made a sizzling noise" — while Hal privately estimates that over 60% of what he tells Orin since the calls resumed this spring is lies, and is then jolted by the realization that he's never once considered whether Orin lies to him too, a thought that spirals into involuted "marijuana-type thinking" about whether he's really intelligent at all. Orin floats a joke Kleenex-concession venture (which would require actually contacting C.T. and the Moms), confesses to missing New Orleans, and mentions meeting "a possibly very special somebody." As the dinner triangle clangs, he turns abruptly earnest: "What all do you know about Separatism?"

What to notice

The first paragraph plants the call's emblem: Orin's hand-me-down phone, whose "plastic case was transparent and you could see the phone's guts" — total visibility in the instrument, none in the channel it carries. Listen to the choreography of non-response: each brother keeps his own script running regardless of the other, so Hal's SAT cover story gets answered by "The man's face made a sizzling noise when it hit the pavement" — the dialogue is really two interleaved monologues politely taking turns. That dying pedestrian is its own quiet horror: Orin narrates a man collapsed outside his window in real time — "He's not moving anymore. Everyone's avoiding him" — as color commentary between masturbation jokes, spectation wholly replacing action, the book's couch-culture diagnosis rehearsed on a stranger's body. And even Orin's apocalypse comes glazed for presentation, dumpsters combusting into "sudden rains of coffee grounds and orange peels" — inferno as lyric, the punter's gift for turning anything, including a corpse on the pavement, into material.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 135: The ringing console; the room key from around the neck; Orin's old transparent phone with visible guts; "Mmyellow."
  • p. 135: Orin's opener (multiple rings, "sweaty urgency"); Hal's post-high phone-unease, cottonmouth and all, cause unknown to him.
  • p. 136: "I did myself raw for years on end on that hill"; Hal's 60%-lies estimate and his pleasure in lying to Orin; Phoenix as all glass and light, sunglasses indoors, the see-through hand.
  • p. 136: The felled pedestrian set piece — sizzling face, untouchably hot, a kid making off with his pith helmet; "Describe snow for me again, Hallie, I'm begging you."
  • p. 136: The reciprocal-lying realization and the involuted spiral re his own intelligence; cover story: SATs six weeks off, Pemulis "less and less helpful on the math."
  • p. 136-137: The Kleenex-concession-at-E.T.A. venture gag; Hal's quiet point that it would mean "actually contacting C.T. and the Moms" — Orin sails past it.
  • p. 137: Missing New Orleans during Advent; heat-craziness, spontaneously combusting trash bags, Displacement-barge guys in asbestos gloves; "Also I met somebody. Hallie, a possibly very special somebody."
  • p. 137: Hal reaches for the dinner-triangle exit; Orin, "kidding aside for a second": "What all do you know about Separatism?" — "You mean in Canada?" — "Is there any other kind?"

Themes in this scene

  • Communication and Solipsism: a fraternal phone call made of mutual performance — Hal lies recreationally, then realizes the channel is symmetric and opaque; the marijuana-thinking spiral is the in-head static the call can't penetrate.
  • Family and Hamlet: Orin's total estrangement from Avril and C.T. is the call's unspoken architecture (any E.T.A. venture founders on "actually contacting C.T. and the Moms"); Hal is Orin's only line back into the family.
  • Surveillance and Disguise: invisible to both brothers, the "very special somebody" is U.S.O.U.S. operative Helen Steeply working Orin for the Entertainment's master copy — the Separatism question is the op surfacing as small talk.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Same-day stitching (Carlisle's, both links): Hal is just up from the Pump Room — the impulse documented at pp. 120-121 (scene 036, same 3 Nov) acted on; and the dinner triangle is the one Mrs. Clarke sometimes lets Mario ring with a steel ladle (p. 120, scene 036) — possibly Mario himself at the other end of Hal's exit line.
  • E.W.D. barge-men in asbestos gloves keep annular waste-displacement in the scenery (cf. scenes 030, 037).

Forward

  • The "special somebody" is Steeply in his Helen persona (profile assignment established in scene 045's headline and the Marathe/Steeply serial); Orin's seduction-target turns interrogator across pp. 566+ and n.234's phone transcripts (+).
  • The Separatism question continues into the long Hal-Orin call on the Moms, Québec, and the Near East Med. Attaché (pp. 242-258, scene 064) — where Orin pumps Hal for family history he then retails to "Helen."
  • "Describe snow for me" comes full circle in Orin's final phone call asking Hal to describe weather while the AFR closes in; Phoenix heat-grotesquerie also continues scene 012 (roaches, Subjects, dread).
  • Hal's post-Pump-Room phone unease and 60%-lies bookkeeping extend scenes 013/036; the involuted is-he-intelligent spiral anticipates his November cognitive unraveling and the YG interview's "I am in here."
  • Orin "abruptly started calling again this spring" — i.e., right around April YDAU, when the Entertainment surfaces and Steeply's op spins up; the timing reads as non-coincidental in retrospect. (Carlisle floats scene 006's cryptic 9 May call — "I want to tell you… My head is filled with things to say" — as a documented instance of the abrupt restart — plausible, recorded as his hypothesis.)

Notable passages (6)
  • p. 135: "Mmyellow." — Hal's phone-voice; period texture for the voice-only telephony world scene 047 explains.
  • p. 136: "Hal estimated over 60% of what he told Orin on the phone… was a lie." — quantified solipsism.
  • p. 136: "it had never occurred to him to consider whether Orin was ever doing the same thing" — the call's hinge; lying and trusting at once (scene 047's phone-illusion, enacted fraternally).
  • p. 136: "Describe snow for me again, Hallie, I'm begging you." — exile asking for weather; the request his terminal call repeats while the A.F.R. closes in.
  • p. 137: "Hallie, a possibly very special somebody." — dramatic irony at maximum compression.
  • p. 137: "'You mean in Canada?' 'Is there any other kind?'" — the plot's two halves (family, geopolitics) touching wires.

What links here Manuscript differences (2) · Timeline events here (4) · Connected from (5) · Passages quoted here (14)

Manuscript differences

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here