Scene 109: lenz coked monologue green

• p. 553: dateline WEDNESDAY 11 NOVEMBER; Lenz as "Andy Warhol with a tan," Green's creaking off-the-rack leather jacket; the Pepito story ("you better... kill me with the first shot man or you won't get another one"); Green: "I don't know."
• pp. 553-554: the November P.M. ("The rising moon looks like it doesn't feel very well"); Green "broken by life... regrouping"; Lenz's "hangnail of fear" about liking somebody — liking someone is dropping something and waiting impotent for it to hit; the meatloaf "dark and hard from disuse"; where do you look with your eyes when you tell somebody you like them.
• p. 554: 1610h — RIJID hairspray in the face of a one-eyed House stray in the men's head; "the result: unsatisfying"; the diarrhea/shower-on-C farce with Glynn pounding ("who's flailing the whale in there").
• pp. 554-555: the spurning-anxiety spiral (Saturday Night Lively aisles, the White Flag sandwich, towels in the hall); if high, "zero problem" — so the Bing becomes "medicinal support... Lenz will use cocaine in the very interests of sobriety and growth itself"; foil from the industrial roll Don G. keeps under the Ennet sink, ~a gram from the stash in the "Principles of Natural Lectures" (his garble).
• p. 555: the Handicapped-head ritual at 2109h — lines off the toilet tank, the collection-dollar rolled and then forensically "anileated," the mirror nostril-check; sauntering out "like butter wouldn't soften anywhere on his body."
• p. 556: hiding the hemispasm with sunglasses and pretend-coughs; a near-whole pack smoked in 34 minutes, three gaspers going at once in the Nonsmoking rows; "insousistent aplomb."
• pp. 556-557: the night-noise aria — dumpster-divers, the Redemption Center sharing a storefront with Liquor World, the ATHSCMEs "pointing out true plumb north," Lenz observing to Green "how myriadly ironic" the keeping of Gentle's Clean Up Our Urban Cities promise has been; "The State Bird of Massachusetts... is the police siren. To Project and to Swerve."; "Sometimes the end of the scream is at the sound of the start of the scream"; his mother's laugh "like she was being eaten alive."
• p. 557: the miscalculated hydrolysis [n.232] — instead of sangfroid, a "huge hydrolystic compulsion" to share "each datum of the case of R. Lenz"; the stepfather (Amtrak conductor, the pocketwatch, the rolled Track and Flange); the obese late mother, arms out to dramatize; "He breathes between about every third or fourth fact."
• pp. 557-558: confabulated book plots; Green's face "sort of crumples blankly" at late mothers (unnoticed); the regenerated fingertip and his "energois de vivre"; the dreaded Estuarial crocodile; "dysfunction" analyzed; the saliva-vendor akido kill on Boylston ("The Old One-Two"), the solemn vow while "running like hell... for the Auditorium T-Stop."
• pp. 558-559: the dead-gull-necklace Halloween party; the recurving safari-hat dream; the slo-mo akido demo on the 400 block of W. Beacon c. 2202h; the unburdenable frozen-clock (1830) nightmare; Green doesn't dream; toupee adjusted in a dark InterLace window, Euro-style nose-blow.
• p. 559: the orthodontist-dealer's party [n.233] and The Infant — skull-less, face "the consistency of like quicksand," head conformed square to its lidless plastic box, ritually worshipped "as if there were only One"; Green calls out the time every two minutes when the B.B.S.B. sign is obscured; AA's "fucking question it's a cult" rant ("cableyarrow"); claimed in vitro memories; cult horror stories of Ennet graduates dismissed as naïve — segueing into scene 111's cult catalogue.

Backward

• The mother's laugh "like she was being eaten alive" rhymes with Lenz's whole predation program (scene 105) — the scene's one un-confabulated-sounding datum.
• Gentle's Xero-Lube celebrity endorsement and Clean Up Our Urban Cities (pp. 556, 558) tie the street-level squalor back to the ONANtiad satire (scenes 081ff).

Forward

• Direct continuation of scene 105's setup; interrupted by scene 110's E.T.A. splice and resumed as scene 111; the whole night funnels into scene 116 (pp. 575-589): the Nucks' dog, and then Gately's gunfight (pp. 601ff).
• Same evening as scene 112: while Lenz performs out here, Gately's snippet-interface back at the House includes Yolanda's complaint that unmasks Lenz's "sponsorship" (stay on his south side, buy a digital watch — this scene's compass-and-clock compulsions weaponized on a newcomer).
• Green's crumple at "late mothers" is unpacked in his own flashback (pp. 577-580, scene 116ff): the exploding novelty-can death of his mother — Lenz is jackhammering on the exact wound.
• The Infant (p. 559) reprises in Lenz's Concavity cult-lore (scene 111, p. ~562, "as if there were only One") and resonates with Mme. Marathe, born without a skull (pp. 529, 752ff), and the Concavity's deformed-births mythology (disability-deformity master-thread).

• p. 554: "Deciding to go ahead and think somebody's a stand-up guy: it's like you drop something... all you can do is brace and wince. It kind of enrages Lenz to like somebody." — the scene's emotional core; anchor passage for communication-solipsism.
• pp. 554-555: "where do you look with your eyes when you tell somebody you like them and mean what you say?" — sincerity's stage-fright, in a killer's head.
• p. 555: "Lenz will use cocaine in the very interests of sobriety and growth itself." — Denial's syllogism, complete; essential addiction-recovery extraction.
• pp. 556-557: the night-noises catalogue ("the snick of a million urban lighters," p. 556 / "The State Bird of Massachusetts... is the police siren. To Project and to Swerve." p. 557; the "No middle distance with sirens" reflection belongs to the earlier walk, scene 105, p. 543) — set-piece urban nocturne.
• p. 557: "Sometimes the end of the scream is at the sound of the start of the scream... Lenz's own mother's laugh had sounded like she was being eaten alive."
• p. 559: The Infant paragraph ("worshipping the infant, or as they termed it simply The Infant, as if there were only One") — body-horror folklore bridging to scene 111 and the Concavity mythos.