IJ study archive

Scene 069: poor tony seizure

Scene
69
Pages
299–307
When
14 Nov YDAU (2009) (dateline, p. 299); flashback coverage of the preceding ~4 months
Where
Watertown MA: a new apple-green Empire Waste Displacement dumpster in Fort Point, downtown Boston (flashback), then the Armenian Foundation Library men's-room rear stall; finally a Gray Line T train, Watertown Center toward Inman Square, Cambridgein: Watertown · Inman Square / "Little Lisbon", Cambridge (also)
POV
Poor Tony Krause (3rd person, tightly focalized in his fastidious idiom)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 9)

Summary

Hunted from every quarter of his old life — by Wo's people over last winter's scam, by Harvard Square since the July day he boosted a purse containing an artificial heart — Poor Tony Krause runs out of proxies, money, and finally heroin itself, and undergoes total Withdrawal: first in a virgin E.W.D. dumpster, then enthroned for weeks in a rear stall of the Armenian Foundation Library men's room, stretching the agony with bottles of Codinex Plus cough syrup. Time itself turns predatory — a procession of flesh-taking ants, then a musty wingless fowl squatting atop the stall, then something that enters and exits his body at will until he becomes an hourglass time passes through. When even the syrup money is gone he sets out, soiled and hallucinating, for the Antitoi brothers' Inman Square shop — the last people who owe him a kindness — and on the Gray Line train suffers a full grand-mal seizure (actually alcohol withdrawal from sixteen 80-proof Codinex bottles a day), rendered as a hallucinatory childbirth attended by his dead father, ending on the command PUSH and the terror that "red-handed Poppa could see up his dress, what was hidden."

What to notice

Withdrawal rendered from inside the skull, and the register is doing half the work: Poor Tony's fastidious, high-camp diction holds off abjection sentence by sentence — "A fastidious gender-dysphoric's horror of incontinence cannot properly be described." — dignity as the last substance he can still dose. The set-piece is the phenomenology of time: notice how time itself acquires bodies as the agony deepens — first sharp edges, then a column of flesh-taking ants, then the orange-eyed wingless fowl atop the stall, then an assailant entering him at will, until "time had become the shit itself" and Tony is the hourglass it passes through. That sequence is the addict's version of Kate Gompert's It, and the direct dark twin of Gately's later discovery that the present tense can be survived one second at a time. On the train, notice the social physics: the respectables slide and drift quietly away "without even seeming to notice" — Tony becomes a figurant, present and erased, the book's loneliness rendered as public transit. And the seizure arrives as obstetrics: a childbirth attended by his dead obstetrician father, ending on PUSH and the terror of what the father could see "up his dress, what was hidden" — shame, gender, and paternal judgment fused at the moment of neural catastrophe.

Beats — page-by-page
  • pp. 299-300: dateline 14 Nov YDAU; the seizure announced up front; a week of codeine syrup in the library loo; the vile cadged longshoreman ensemble — nothing comely, not even the Antitois' red leather coat, since "that poor woman's bag had turned out to have a heart inside"; the geography of his banishments (Emil's de-mapping mark, the Wo/Bobby C thing, Harvard Sq. since 29 July; palpitations at the sight of an Oriental or an Aigner accessory).
  • p. 300: no one left to cop through — S. T. Cheese and Lolasister untrustworthy, Tenderhole and Dark Star lost to hospice and Brockton; hiding in the dumpster behind the I.B.P.W.D.W. hall (n.102); October's hepatitis-G/drought; and so, friendless, he begins to Withdraw — "The Wingless Fowl. Turkeyfication. Kicking. The Old Cold Bird."
  • pp. 300-301: the body's collapse itemized (50 kg, squash-colored skin, the bunny-pink eyeball, the failed wig-pawning in Armenian); symptoms develop symptoms; the new apple-green dumpster stays unused because no one will come near him; ants, his particular childhood horror, colonize one wall.
  • p. 301: incontinence — "A fastidious gender-dysphoric's horror of incontinence cannot properly be described"; the memory of his father's symbolic shiva in the Y.W. kitchen at 412 Mount Auburn St.; the flight to the library stall, domesticated with magazine photos and knickknacks; Codinex as corridor-extender — "it slowed up time."
  • pp. 301-302: stall life: heels raised at the 1900h. staff check, darkness within darkness; paper-towel-shawled dashes to Brooks Pharmacy "maybe once every two days."
  • pp. 302-303: time turns ontological: passage with sharp edges, borne by a column of red Southern ants each taking its portion of flesh; then time as the orange-eyed wingless fowl atop the stall saying unrepeatable things; then time entering him "like the very most feared prison-shower assailant," chill like ground glass in the joints, time in an orange mohawk and Merry Widow; finally time-as-shit, Poor Tony become an hourglass; the unbidden word Zuckung echoing; visions of the sonless father — training wheels, green gown, the rended sportshirt, the bronze casket watched "through dark glasses from a distance."
  • p. 303: the syrup funds run out; a last night and day enthroned, afraid to trust his own body long enough to go anywhere.
  • pp. 303-304: the alcohol/codeine Withdrawal arrives on top of the heroin's; first D.T. army-ant refuses to be brushed away; he pulls up the ten-days-puddled slacks and lights out for the "sinister and duplicitous" but hapless Antitoi brothers' Glass-Entertainment-'N-Notions front, his place of very last resort "since the affair of the heart."
  • p. 304: on the Watertown platform the first hot loose load down the leg; the boa discreet in a breast pocket; on the train he discovers he's become one of the loathsome specimens respectables drift away from without seeming to notice; silent weeping that has ceased to be silent.
  • pp. 304-305: the aura: phosphene sparks from the ceiling, violet flame around the respectables' stricken faces, the unbidden Classic Original Scent of his Poppa's Old Spice (he's been violently allergic since puberty); limbs detach as white dirigibles; "a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied."
  • pp. 305-307: the seizure itself (n.103's dry clinical definition vs. the rendered horror): floor becomes ceiling, heels drumming the booming Zuckung Zuckung Zuckung; Bobby C's blood misting up in the Copley blower; the father kneeling, extolling the Red Sox of Rice and Lynn; the fish-wrapped headline PUSH; the swallowed tongue and the bitten-off rubber-gloved fingers; labor-stirrups of light spreading him "all the way inside-out on the ceiling"; last worry — "that red-handed Poppa could see up his dress, what was hidden."

Themes in this scene

  • Addiction and Recovery: the book's most sustained Withdrawal set-piece — the substance bottom rendered from inside, without AA's vocabulary but confirming its physics (the cage, powerlessness, the Sergeant-at-Arms collecting); Codinex as the addict's bargain that only "extends the corridor."
  • Fathers and Sons: the dead obstetrician father presides over the whole scene — shiva-rending (declaring his son dead while alive), Old Spice, and finally the obstetric hallucination in which the father delivers Tony's seizure as a monstrous birth of what was hidden.
  • Communication and Solipsism: Poor Tony becomes a figurant in the T-car — present, audible, and socially erased; his interior scream is "soundless," and the respectables study floor-tiles; total isolation as both cause (no one to cop through) and content of the agony.
  • Time and Perception: the book's great time-phenomenology — withdrawal makes time corporeal by stages: "Time began to pass with sharp edges," then the column of flesh-taking ants, the orange-eyed wingless fowl atop the stall, time entering and exiting his body at will, until "time had become the shit itself" and Poor Tony is the hourglass it moves through (pp. 302-303); the Codinex is bought precisely because "it slowed up time" (p. 301).

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • "Marked for de-mapping" (p. 300) reuses the yrstruly idiom; cf. "eliminated his own map" of JOI (scene 068, p. 286) — the map/territory death-idiom binding threads. The "Emil" who marked him is plausibly the yrstruly narrator's circle; whether he is the catalogued Emil Minty (Ennet House) is a long-standing reader crux — flagged, not adjudicated.
  • The wingless-fowl/time material is the addict's version of Kate Gompert's It (scene of pp. 68-78, scene 024) — clinical horror given a body; useful depression-adjacent comparison even though tagged addiction here.
  • E.W.D. dumpster, land-barge crew (p. 301): the waste-displacement infrastructure of nationalism-onan threading through even the street-level story.
  • Direct sequel to the yrstruly Xmas narrative (pp. 128-135, scene 040: the Wo/Bobby C reprisal, C's death) and to the heart-boosting (pp. 142-144, scene 045) — both banishments are this scene's premise; "the affair of the heart" (p. 304) names the purse-job that also indebted him to the Antitois (the red leather coat, p. 300, is theirs).

Forward

  • Destination Antitoi: Poor Tony is aimed at the Inman Sq. shop (scene 057's DMZ dumbshow) days after the A.F.R. raid that killed Lucien and Bertraund (pp. 480-489, ~9 Nov; this walk is under the printed 14 NOVEMBER dateline) — the samizdat-and-mirrors stockroom he's heading toward is already an abattoir and an A.F.R. base, and he never learns it: scene 163 shows him held there as a test subject, purses still in hand.
  • His post-seizure hospital recovery and the Ruth van Cleve wallet-snatch relapse (pp. 689-700ish) continue this thread; the seizure becomes the time-anchor of Poor Tony's own strand ("post-seizure," scenes 133/144).
  • Old Spice and the obstetric birth-fantasy rhyme with the novel's other dead-father hauntings (JOI's wraith; JOI's own father "dropped dead on a set of stairs," scene 071 p. 312; this scene's p. 303 casket sequence — training wheels to bronze casket to Mount Auburn — is Tony's cardiac version).

Notable passages (5)
  • p. 300: "Withdraw. The words echoed... The Wingless Fowl. Turkeyfication. Kicking. The Old Cold Bird." — the dread-litany.
  • p. 301: "A fastidious gender-dysphoric's horror of incontinence cannot properly be described." — the scene's register in one sentence: high-camp diction holding off abjection.
  • pp. 302-303: the time-sequence ("time began to pass with sharp edges... time had become the shit itself: Poor Tony had become an hourglass") — among the book's great phenomenologies of suffering; pairs with Gately's later "abiding" in the trenches of the present (pp. 859-861).
  • p. 305: "a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied" — annihilation of self rendered spatially.
  • pp. 306-307: the PUSH childbirth-seizure and "what was hidden" — gender, shame, and paternal judgment fused at the moment of neural catastrophe.

What links here Timeline events here (9) · Echoes (1) · Connected from (7) · Passages quoted here (31) · Motifs (8)

Timeline events here

Echoes

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs