IJ study archive

Scene 124: gompert day billowing shape

Scene
124
Pages
648–651
When
13 Nov YDAU (2009), 0245h — 'the hours that are truly wee'
Where
Ennet House living room, lights mostly out, the old jumpy-picture D.E.C. viewer on; Eugenio M. in the office on Dream Dutyin: Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital complex › Ennet House Drug & Alcohol Recovery House
POV
3rd person omniscient-ish house POV; body is Day's first-person testimony with Gompert's antiphonal completions

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 13)

Summary

At 0245h two nights after the Lenz/Gately street fight, the Ennet House insomniacs — Kate Gompert folded forehead-to-foot on the couch, Geoffrey Day in velour bathrobe and dress shoes, Erdedy chain-smoking, Green asleep and crying out from nightmares — sit before the only thing InterLace disseminates at that hour, the grotesque Mr. Bouncety-Bounce. Day, the house's resident ironist, tells Gompert in dead earnest about the summer afternoon when a resonance between his violin and a window fan summoned "a large dark billowing shape" out of a corner of his mind — total horror distilled, shapeless, like the sail or wing-piece of something too large to be seen in totality — which he re-summoned by returning to the room, and which then visited him at will for a year and once more at Brown, where a near-stranger sat up with him all night like "the piece of string by which I hung suspended over hell itself." Gompert, who has lived inside It for years, keeps finishing his sentences — the first time anyone in the book has spoken her language back to her. Day's conclusion: hell means the feelings associated with that shape, he understood from that day why people kill themselves, and "There is no way it could feel worse."

What to notice

The hidden engine: the string-boy story enacts itself in the telling. What Day describes — a near-stranger in the small hours who "didn't try to comfort me", spoke little, just sat — is exactly what he and Gompert are doing on this couch right now, neither looking at the other, and the scene never says so. Read Gompert's body as the graph of being understood: forehead on foot when he starts, "about halfway up" by the dormitory window, and at "the corner it came up out of" she "is now looking at him", forehead carrying "a major red impression-spot from her ankle-bone" — recognition arriving as posture before it is ever named, and leaving an actual mark. Her sarcasm dies in stages too: "Like you really care" is met not with reassurance but with the Identify-don't-compare distinction in civilian clothes: "It isn't a question of caring or not caring". And notice the room's counter-voices: Green's nightmare cries interleave with the testimony, "Oh God please" landing one line before "There is no way it could feel worse." — legible to the reader, who knows his Polynesian history, as a fourth account of hell that nobody awake can hear — while the narrator fusses, deadpan, that Mr. Bouncety-Bounce's head "is in no way mushroom-shaped".

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 648: dissolve in from scene 123 — the last Marathe/Steeply lines ("Not even cravings so much. Emptier than that... 'Misplaced.' 'Lost.' 'Misplaced.' 'As you wish.'") run without seam into the 13 NOVEMBER header (see Connections).
  • p. 648: staging — Dream Duty, the no-cartridges-after-0000h rule; the sleep actuarials of sobriety (cocaine-addicts sleep by month two, alcoholics by month four, "pot- and tranq-addicts can pretty much forget about sleep for the first year"); 0200-0400 InterLace NNE downloads leave only four straight redisseminations of 'The Mr. Bouncety-Bounce Daily Program,' the diapered rubber-infant-masked figure "not a soothing or pleasant figure at all, for the sleepless adult"; Gompert's forehead-on-foot posture every night since Wednesday's free-for-all; the House "still reeling and spiritually palsied."
  • p. 649: "Like you really care." / "It isn't a question of caring or not caring... I meant only that I identify to an extent"; Day's boyhood — violin, a dream, roundabout routes to school past keep-away bullies; the exhaust fan's invariant vibration plus a certain set of practiced notes sets up a resonance "that made something happen in my head."
  • pp. 649-650: "a large dark billowing shape came billowing out of some corner in my mind... It was all horror everywhere, distilled and given form"; he drops the violin and runs; Gompert: "But it was inside you, though."
  • p. 650: scab-picking return to the room re-summons it instantly — "a bit like a sail, or a small part of the wing of something far too large to be seen in totality. It was total psychic horror: death, decay, dissolution, cold empty black malevolent lonely voided space"; Gompert's interjections sharpen ("Was it triangular?... Alcoholics Anomalous"); Erdedy's incongruous "His head's shaped like a mushroom"; the year of visitations at age ~10; the Brown recurrence — "I thought I'd have to hurl myself out of my dormitory's window"; Gompert's head comes halfway up: "You like despised yourself for waking it up."
  • p. 650: the string-boy paragraph — a boy he hardly knew sat up with him all night, didn't converse, didn't comfort; "on that night he seemed to be the piece of string by which I hung suspended over hell itself."
  • pp. 650-651: Green cries out in R.E.M. ("For God's sake no Mr. Ho don't light it!", "Not the nuts Jesus God not the nutsss," "Oh God please"); the room's "dreamy and almost surreal atmosphere" — the capering 130-kilo infant, two people conversing while staring into space, the blurps of Gene M.'s game.
  • p. 651: never come back in over twenty years, "But I've not forgotten"; the worst times since were "a day at the foot-masseur's" by comparison; hell properly understood = not the black sail but "the associated feelings"; Gompert now looking at him, face "different"; "I understood on an intuitive level why people killed themselves. If I had to go for any length of time with that feeling I'd surely kill myself"; final line: "There is no way it could feel worse."

Themes in this scene

  • Depression and Anhedonia: the book's second great clinical testimony after Kate's own (scene 024) — Day's billowing shape is It seen from outside survivable distance; his taxonomy (hell = the associated feelings; suicide as escape from a feeling with "no way it could feel worse") independently confirms Kate's psychotic-depression phenomenology.
  • Communication and Solipsism: a paradox-scene — "It isn't like a real interface or conversation," both stare into space, Day addresses nobody in particular — and yet Gompert's antiphonal completions ("Time in the shadow of the wing of the thing too big to see, rising") are the truest mutual understanding she's offered anywhere in the novel; the string-boy is its model: presence without conversation as what actually holds someone over hell.
  • Addiction and Recovery: Ennet House nocturne — the sober-sleep actuarials, Dream Duty, Erdedy's substitute cigarettes, the no-couch rule, the House spiritually palsied by the Gately catastrophe; recovery as a room where this conversation can finally occur.
  • Irony and Sincerity: Day, hitherto the House's professional ironist and AA-debunker (scene 066; n.90), speaks "quietly" and without defenses; Gompert's sarcasm ("Like you really care," "Alcoholics Anomalous") erodes line by line into participation — the scene enacts irony's surrender to single-entendre testimony.
  • Entertainment and the Self: the only available entertainment is Mr. Bouncety-Bounce, a grotesque adult-unsoothing infant — spectation at its most abject backdrops a conversation that does what the viewer screen can't; and the scene arrives via dissolve from the Entertainment-victims' "stuck" eyes (scene 123), equating their vacancy with the depressive void.
  • Dreams: the dreamt material is Green's — crying out from R.E.M. nightmares in quoted detail ("For God's sake no Mr. Ho don't light it!", "Not the nuts Jesus God not the nutsss," pp. 650-651), a fourth account of hell nobody awake can hear — staged against Dream Duty and the sleep actuarials of sobriety (p. 648); Day's billowing shape, by contrast, came while fully awake, and the scene brackets his waking horror with real dreams on either side.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • The 123→124 dissolve (deliberate, Wallace's seam): this scene opens with ~5 dialogue lines (p. 648, "Not even cravings so much..." through "'As you wish.'") that grammatically conclude Marathe and Steeply's exchange about the Entertainment-victims' trapped eyes — shared tissue with scene 123. The dissolve makes the two conversations one continuous meditation: emptiness "as if there was something he'd forgotten. Misplaced. Lost." slides directly into Day's "cold empty black malevolent lonely voided space." Digested on the 123 side as well.
  • Kate Gompert's psych-ward interview (scene 024, pp. 68-78): It, the billowing thing, wanting "to stop feeling this way" — Day's shape is the same referent; her question "Was it triangular?" reaches back to her own attempts to give It geometry.
  • Green's nightmare cries ("Mr. Ho," "the nuts") reach back to scene 116 (pp. 575-589), where his repressed childhood surfaces mid-walk: the fatal Mauna Loa macadamia-nut can of his fifth Christmas (p. 578) and the Don Ho / Sol Hoopi music that drags him up Brainerd Rd. (pp. 583-586); the Doocey/Bonk trailer milieu itself is scenes 009-010 — trauma re-running nightly, the House's own redissemination.
  • Erdedy — introduced mid-relapse-logic (scene 004), last seen in the Lenz-fight crowd (scene 120, pp. 601-619) after the NA hug (scene 100) — has "started to smoke cigarettes": substitution economics of early sobriety.
  • "Wednesday's free-for-all unpleasantness with Lenz and Gately in the streetlet" (p. 648) = scene 120 (pp. 601-619), the night of 11-12 Nov: Green's taped broken nose and the House's spiritual palsy are its immediate aftermath; Gately is meanwhile in trauma care.

Forward

  • Day's earlier appearances: arrival and Gately-baiting in the living room (scene 066, pp. 270-281) and the Denial cross-examination of Gately's log (n.90; see scene n090) — the ironist credentials this scene quietly retires; Day also authored the A.F.R. Wild Conceits article Struck plagiarizes (n.304).
  • The string-boy's wordless all-night vigil prefigures/echoes the AA technology of Identification and the Crocodiles' sit-with-it ethos (scenes 074/092), and anticipates the wordless company around Gately's hospital bed.

Notable passages (6)
  • p. 648: the sleep actuarials ("Abstinent pot- and tranq-addicts can pretty much forget about sleep for the first year") — institutional knowledge in the house-omniscient voice.
  • p. 649: "a large dark billowing shape came billowing out of some corner in my mind" — the central image; the book's most precise non-Kate rendering of psychotic depression.
  • p. 650: "It was total psychic horror: death, decay, dissolution, cold empty black malevolent lonely voided space." — Day's full naming of It; the book's depression-anhedonia thread at full strength.
  • p. 650: "he seemed to be the piece of string by which I hung suspended over hell itself" — the string-boy; the novel's quietest statement of what one person can be for another.
  • p. 651: "They did not mean the black sail. They meant the associated feelings." — hell defined; pairs with Kate's scene-024 "I didn't want to especially hurt myself... I wanted to stop feeling this way."
  • p. 651: "There is no way it could feel worse." — closing line; cf. Gately's coming discovery that you can live second by second inside exactly that.

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