Scene 117: mario night walk ennet

• p. 589: Insomnia worsening as the hiatus enters its third week; Miss Diagnosis's Pig-Latin Revelation of John; WODS's narcotized Carpenters makes things worse; "It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know." Madame Psychosis "often spoke on the show as if she were talking exclusively to one person or character who was very important to her".
• p. 589: The pelvis burn against Mrs. Clarke's stove (discovered only by eggplant-smell); Familial Dysautonomia defined — can't feel pain; diagnosed at six after Orin's immersion-heater-coil tattoo; "even Hal's sometimes felt a twinge of envy," but see the burn; n.242: the deficit is why he dangles fearlessly from Schtitt's transom filming all-court play.
• pp. 589-590: HmH nights on the air mattress by the violet plant-light; the upstairs scream that could be Avril laughing or Avril screaming — her night terrors; Mario's hour-plus conversational prayers ("he's not crazy... Hal's established"); Hal asking when he'll come back to their room, "which made Mario feel good."
• p. 590: The Hal-worry: Mario used to "preverbally know in his stomach generally where Hal was," and now he can't — "like when you've lost something important in a dream and you can't even remember what it was"; "Mario never changes," so the difference is Hal.
• p. 590: The walk taken without telling the Moms (n.243: she never articulates her worry, so Mario worries about her worrying); the E.M. grounds' yellow lamplight (n.244: he and his uncle C.T. both dislike fluorescent light); the damaged people through the windows — "he can feel his heart going out into the world through them, which is good for insomnia."
• pp. 590-591: Why Mario likes Ennet House: crowded, noisy, no plastic on the furniture, nobody comments on a disability, "the people cry in front of each other," "once he heard somebody say God with a straight face and nobody looked at them."
• p. 591: Post-Curfew window-walking; "Give it here"; "So get dentures"; then the upstairs window by the wheelchair ramp — billowing flag curtain, half-scraped bumper sticker reading ONE DAY A — playing a tape of "Sixty Minutes More or Less with Madame Psychosis," one of the old YPW ones "when she'd sometimes talk all hour and had an accent."
• pp. 591-592: A made-up female in fur coat and tall shoes clicks past up the ramp (smells very good, looks unwell); Mario plots the etiquette of asking to borrow tapes — Hal will know the term for private tapes of broadcast things; apostrophe ("speaking to someone who isn't there... is valid art," per the Moms); why he loved the early shows: "someone sad read[ing] out loud from yellow letters she'd taken out of a shoebox on a rainy P.M., stuff about heartbreak and people you loved dying and U.S. woe, stuff that was real."
• p. 592: The thesis: "It is increasingly hard to find valid art that is about stuff that is real in this way"; everyone over about Kent Blott's age gets embarrassed by really real stuff — "some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn't happy"; the Dial-a-Prayer-for-atheists joke at lunch (rings and rings, no answer) — a good one, Mario got it, but his was the only happy laugh; Lyle's replies were over his head, and Hal, embarrassed, called him Booboo "and acted like he'd wet himself."
• pp. 592-593: Residents drift in for Curfew, scowling to hide shyness; one young stranger helps Mario disengage his police lock — "Just that little bit of help that makes the difference"; sudden bone-deep sleepiness; the openings musics unchanged from the beginning of Madame Psychosis's career, "what sounds so unacceptable without her there."
• p. 593: The list uphill (his forward lean "perfect for walking up hills"); last sight through Pat's protruding office window: "a wide square-headed boy bent over something he's writing at the Headmistress's black desk, licking a pencil-end... like a slow boy over a class theme at Rindge and Latin Special."

Backward

• Dial C for Concupiscence (E.M. Security guards as JOI's Boston police, p. 590) is in the filmography (scenes/scene n024).

Forward

• The flag-curtained window taping Madame Psychosis is Joelle van Dyne's room — Mario's beloved radio voice has been living at the bottom of his hill since 8 Nov (n.134 ruling); neither knows. His "very tall" mental image of her, and the intuition the taper is female, sit a few meters from the fact. The Mario-Joelle convergence looks backward, not forward: Joelle's scene-150 memory (pp. 743-747, scene 150) shows they already met, at the last pre-Subsidized Thanksgiving in the Headmaster's House — the near-miss here is between two people with a shared past neither can see through the window.
• The square-headed boy at Pat's desk is Don Gately doing the Log — this scene dovetails seam-to-seam into scene 118 (Staffer duties, same ~2300h), and the clicking made-up female on the ramp is plausibly the brand-new Court-Ordered Ruth van Cleve, whose Intake Gately processes there (p. 595).
• Madame Psychosis's hiatus: her show and Mario's devotion established pp. 181-193 (scene 053) and the Miss Diagnosis substitution begins at p. 450 (scene 093); the hiatus follows Joelle's 7-8 Nov freebase OD at Molly Notkin's (scene 062; Notkin's deposition is scene 159).
• Mario's night terrors / Avril material extends the HmH living-room arrangement of scene 102 (pp. 508-527); the immersion-heater tattoo and Orin's childhood cruelty-affection echo the family back-story scenes (cf. scene 154's Mario-Avril interface, two hours earlier this same night — "their interface" referenced here, p. 590).
• "Valid art that is about stuff that is real" restates Mario's puppet-film aesthetics (I-Day pageant, scenes 081ff) and anticipates the wraith's figurant lament (pp. 834ff) — sincerity as the Incandenza counter-tradition to irony.
• The Ngs' Father and Son Grocery and the yellow A.M. tea (p. 593) fix the walk in its Ennet-orbit geography; the unnamed resident's small kindness with the police lock prefigures the House's gift-economy of "little bits of help."

• p. 589: "It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know." — broadcast-era intimacy; pairs with Orin's TV nostalgia in scene 119.
• p. 590: "He used to be able to sort of preverbally know in his stomach generally where Hal was... and now he can't anymore. Feel it." — the Hal-decline registered somatically; key communication-solipsism extraction.
• p. 591: "people are crying and making noise and getting less unhappy, and once he heard somebody say God with a straight face" — Ennet House as sincerity preserve.
• p. 592: "It is increasingly hard to find valid art that is about stuff that is real in this way... some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes" — the novel's irony thesis in Mario's voice; essential anthology passage for irony-sincerity.
• p. 592: the Dial-a-Prayer-for-atheists joke and the two kinds of laughter — irony's social machinery in one lunch-table beat.
• p. 593: "a wide square-headed boy bent over something he's writing... like a slow boy over a class theme" — Gately seen through Mario's eyes; the book's two innocents framed in one window.