Scene 099: man from glad mattress

• p. 491: section header WINTER, B.S. 1963, SEPULVEDA CA; Jim, reading Bazin over lunch, is summoned; the father in full Glad whites, rigid white wig, orange makeup, kneeling on the stripped mattress compressing it "like emergency compression of a heart patient's chest"; "Eureka" — the squeak isolated; the mother smokes at the window.
• p. 492: "Areas that gibber and squeak... Boiling hordes of gibbering squeaking ravenous rapacious rats"; the Man from Glad job introduced (Glad Flaccid Plastic Receptacle Co., Zanesville, Ohio).
• p. 493: the father's loose-bolts theory; "Synchronicity surrounds me. Concord... Great minds think alike"; aside: a great uncle accidentally electrocuted by his own field series generator; cost anxiety — frames cheap, mattresses "fucking outrageous"; the 55° lawn, the dig at the mother's era of running the finances.
• p. 494: the Man from Glad career paragraph — the mock car interior, emergency radio summonses to portable-food-storage problems, the vaguely medical all-white authority, fan mail "bordering on the disturbing" read aloud late at night over a nightcap; Jim's paralysis over where to put the empty tomato-juice tumbler ("For Christ's sake Jim just put the thing down").
• p. 495: the mattress lift — the father's side rises past 90° and breaks over Jim "like the crest of a breaking wave"; Jim visualizes the mattress as hypotenuse of a right dihedral triangle whose legs are himself and the box spring; jockeying the floppy King-Size; the father's "old competitive-tennis injury"; the mattress flops onto the steel reading lamps, wrenching one cube upward with "a painful squeaking sound."
• p. 496: the mattress won't lean in the uncarpeted hall and slumps into "an extremely concave slumped angle," springs "possibly damaged by the deforming concavity"; "Fuck it"; the father walks across the mattress in his boots, leaving four smeared handprints on the wall; the rigid box spring, by contrast, stands fine; the back-clap that long ago made Jim get an athletic cranial strap for his glasses.
• p. 497: the exposed frame — exoskeletal, frail, casters sunk in carpet; the long sunstruck stillness (Jim imagines the room sheeted and unoccupied for years); the rectangle of dust grown on the carpet "the way a mold will take root... bad cottage cheese"; entombed objects (flyswatter, magazine, sock); a sour fungal smell.
• p. 498: the father's mood "surrounded him like a field"; his habit of musing by moving lightweight objects with his foot; "Under what presidential administration was this room last deep-cleaned"; Jim volunteers that his own bed squeaks too — "I think I kind of like it... it's become almost comforting. At this juncture."
• p. 499: "Oh, we hear your bed, don't you worry... You so much as turn over in bed up there? We hear it down here"; the mother dispatched for the vacuum ("If you can… if you can remember where it is!").
• p. 500: the father, squatting and rocking "like a ship in high seas," points at a "bolt" that is only a stalactite of clotted dust, finger trembling; then leans over the frame and is "taken ill" — vomits into the dust rectangle ("It was not too uncommon for my father to be taken ill shortly after coming home from work to relax"); Jim discreetly inspects a caster's carriage-head bolts and rules out the father's theory.
• pp. 500-501: a loud crack — the father faints face-down across the frame, breaking it in half; the wig detached scalp-up in the dust-and-vomit; "The stomach material appeared to be mostly gastric blood until I recalled the tomato juice"; Jim's cold realization that his imagined dihedral triangle "had not in fact even been a closed figure."
• p. 501: Jim steps carefully between his unconscious father's legs — "Excuse me" — and helps his mother relay the heavy Regina vacuum's parts over the slumped mattress; "Thanks," she says in passing.
• p. 502: Jim flees the vacuum's sound (it frightens him "in the same irrational way it seemed a bed's squeak frightened my father"); his room: shelves of prisms, lenses, tennis trophies, a scale-model magneto, still-posters from Powell's Peeping Tom; the running swan dive onto his high old bed, trying to make it squeak.
• pp. 502-503: his arm fells the standing lamp, which shears the brass knob off the closet door; the knob rolls around its own sheared bolt — a cycloid on a sphere, L'Hôpital's Brachistochrone solution complicated into first-order differentials; "somersaults with one hand nailed to the floor"; "This was how I first became interested in the possibilities of annulation."

Backward

• The dust grown like mold on the hidden carpet (p. 497) rhymes with child Hal's eaten basement mold (scene 002, pp. 10-11) — the Incandenza uncanny growing in the home's unexamined spaces.
• Companion to scene 049 (pp. 157-169): the same father, three years earlier, delivering the "Son, you're a body, son" / "Head is body" Brando/tennis monologue to ten-year-old Jim; the tennis injury and bad knees recur here (pp. 495, 499).

Forward

• The book's splice here is thematically pointed: the scene-098 serial immediately before names JOI optics-man and "an important Annulateur," and the very next words are JOI's own account of how annulation began.
• n.24's Valuable Coupon Has Been Removed (Y.T.M.P., Poor Yorick; Cosgrove Watt as the father) is JOI's own film of this memory — "a boy helps his alcoholic-delusional father and disassociated mother dismantle their bed to search for rodents" — minted the same Subsidized year the memoir was published.
• The Man from Glad → Year of Glad: the father shilled for the company whose subsidy names the novel's terminal year (2010) — the year voiceless Hal performs for authority figures (scene 001); also JOI's later commercial-optics money (n.24).
• The squeak motif is handed directly to scene 102: Pemulis's bobbing chair makes a "rapid rodential squeaking" that gives Hal the howling fantods (p. 509) — same rodent adjective as the father's rats (p. 492); also Tavis's squeaky desk casters (p. 519) and Hal's squeaking ankle (p. 514). Inherited phobia as family signature.
• The vacuum-fear and squeak-fear pairing (p. 502) — transmitted irrational dread, anticipating Hal's inherited horrors and JOI's own filmography of anxiety (n.24).
• The open-figure realization (pp. 500-501) — geometry failing to close — prefigures JOI's annular obsessions and the novel's own refusal to close its circle inside the covers.
• n.208 frames the whole scene as published text by one of the "Seventeen Pioneers of DT-Cycle Lithiumized Annular Fusion" — i.e., the memoir is itself an artifact of the optics/fusion C.V. that runs through n.24 and the Marathe/Steeply serial's dossier on the auteur (pp. 489-491, scene 098).