Scene 079: dead infant speaker

• pp. ~375-376: the doctrinal hinge — "Cause: no; responsibility: yes"; it all depends which way the arrow points; the speaker introduced (r-less brogue, ruined 'base-head teeth, no eyelashes).
• p. ~376: Eightballs through pregnancy "even though she knew it was bad for the baby and wanted desperately to quit"; water breaking mid-Eightball; freebasing through labor on the welfare-hotel-room floor; Gately notices Joelle's veil billowing in and out with her breath, as it had during the statue-orgasm description.
• p. ~376: the stillbirth — dry, hard, "the color of strong tea," faceless, "a little lipless hyphen of a mouth," arachnodactylic limbs, webbing between mucronate digits; the pipe smoked down to screen, steel wool, filter, and rug-lint; she passes out still umbilically linked.
• pp. ~376-377: noonlight; "the real business-end of the arrow of responsibility"; the fortification of total Denial — the corpse swaddled in the pink Woolworth's blanket bought at seven months, carried everywhere, the cord kept intact until her end fell out and dangled.
• p. ~377: August street-months — tricks turned with the bundle in arm, fuchsia minipants and green spike heels, passersby reeling; trick-business collapses; street-friends' "not ungentle r-less remonstrances" and scented hankies fail; the bundle "by now sort of stuck to her."
• p. ~377: the beat-cop's "hysterical olfactory alert" to D.S.S.; alcoholic moms across the hall cross themselves at the acronym; the Brighton mom clutching a daughter per bosom while one does the curtsies "of impending potty."
• p. ~378: the late-August heat wave's "insect-attraction problem"; her breakdown on the cement playground outside her late mother's abandoned Project building off the L Street Beach; the pinch, the spray-solvents, the Mary-Kay-case-sized D.S.S. coffin; "involuntarily toxified to death somewhere along in its development toward becoming a boy"; the D&C; four months psychotic at Met State.
• pp. ~378-379: discharge, S.S.I. check, "no taste for chunks or powders… only tall smooth bottles whose labels spoke of Proof"; drinking to the old two-option window-ledge; the 0200h. call; "trying to tell a truth she hopes someday to swallow, inside. So she can just try and live."; her closing request that they pray for her "almost doesn't sound corny."
• p. ~379: Gately's verdict — "Here is no Cause or Excuse. It is simply what happened"; all defenses burned away; "she looks like she's the one that's the infant"; the unblinking hall, Ewell and Gompert included, "looking not just at the speaker's face but into it"; no judgment — "It's clear she's been punished enough… it was basically the same all over, after all, Out There"; the tragic adventure nobody signed up for.

Backward

• Structural answer to scene 076's stripper: Cause-testimony produced writhing discomfort; responsibility-testimony produces the unblinking silence — the two speakers form the meeting's thesis/antithesis (the "arrow" framing makes it explicit, p. ~375-376).
• "She looks like she's the one that's the infant" extends these scenes' infant-motif (Gately's heart "like an infant rattling the bars of its playpen," p. 366): the newcomer as newborn; cf. AA rebirth idiom throughout scene 074.
• Tiny Ewell and Kate Gompert listening "without blinking" quietly advances both arcs: Ewell's deflationary cynicism (scenes 027, raffle-break snub p. 363) suspended; Gompert's own anhedonic isolation (scene 024) pierced by someone else's bottom.

Forward

• Joelle's billowing veil: her second marked somatic response of the night (after the Naked I shudder, p. 370, scene 076) — she who took the "too much fun" O.D. and whose veil hides her own contested face listens to a story about a child with no face; quiet predicate for her veil-philosophy debates with Gately (pp. 533, scene 104ff) and the Madame Psychosis radio litanies of deformity (pp. 181-193, scene 053).
• The faceless infant resonates forward with the Concavity's deformed/feral infants of Gentle-era lore (Marathe/Steeply installments and Mario's film, pp. 380, scene 081ff, 558ff) — toxic waste and toxified wombs producing the same icon.
• The unblinking-reception ideal returns inverted in the Entertainment: spectation so total you forget to blink, there as death — the White Flag hall is the book's benign twin of the attaché's recliner (scenes 007/011/014/025/028).

• p. ~376: "her baby had been poisoned before it could grow a face or make any personal choices" — responsibility, choice, and facelessness fused in one clause.
• p. ~377: the August street-procession — "she carried the blanket-wrapped infant in her arms as she walked the streets… hauntedly calm-looking" — Denial as Pietà; this scene's most indelible image.
• p. ~378: "interred in a D.S.S. coffin the speaker recalls as being the size of a Mary Kay makeup case" — the book's micro/macro horror-bathos signature.
• pp. ~378-379: "trying to tell a truth she hopes someday to swallow, inside. So she can just try and live." — swallowing the truth vs. swallowing Substances; the recovery thesis.
• p. ~379: "they have to consciously try to remember even to blink… It's clear she's been punished enough… what a tragic adventure this is, that none of them signed up for." — the scene's closing benediction; ties AA reception to the Entertainment's deadly inverse.