IJ study archive

Scene 136: kate ruth prospect trek

Scene
136
Pages
698–700
When
Sat 14 Nov YDAU (2009), ~2200-2215h, after the Clean and Serene NA meeting
Where
Prospect St. just south of Inman Square, Cambridge, walking toward Central Sq. / the Red Linein: Inman Square / "Little Lisbon", Cambridge
POV
Kate Gompert (3rd person, psychotically depressed free-indirect)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 9)

Summary

Kate Gompert, four nights sleepless and deep in It, escorts brand-new resident Ruth van Cleve — just off three-day House Restriction — back from N. Cambridge's chair-throwing Clean and Serene NA group, a ghastly late-night hike with 75 minutes to Curfew. Ruth, a Braintree Ice addict with teased big hair that looks like it grew her head, yammers listener-independently into Kate's ear; her oral narrative emerges: remanded by D.S.S. and Family Court after abandoning her newborn in an alley swaddled in expired WalMart circulars with her own ID bracelet still on its wrist, the baby now tapering off in-utero addictions in an incubator, the father awaiting sentencing for "operating a pharmaceutical company without a license." Kate's entire spiritual energy goes into the marvel of locomotion without volition — left foot, right foot — while passersby's heads float disconnected across darkened shop windows. One of the floating heads she does not see is Poor Tony Krause's, several steps behind, matching their serpentine course and eyeing their flimsy string purses.

What to notice

The prose has Kate's illness. Both women get their full names — Ruth van Cleve, Kate Gompert — nearly every time they appear, sentence after sentence with hardly a pronoun, the narration refusing the small economies a healthy attention would make; even the images arrive flatly self-glossed, explained a second time in duller words, the way a mind processes when nothing comes in connected. The street flickers in sympathy with the man behind them: the sodium lights keep going off and on "with a stuttered hum", some connection loose somewhere — the block wearing Poor Tony's misfiring post-seizure neurology a page before his head joins the glide of window-reflections. And the trap is engineered out of the symptom itself: the depersonalized floating heads Kate's It produces are exactly the perceptual field in which one more head can drift up behind her unregistered — phenomenology converted directly into plot. For the reader this is the third pass over the same stretch of sidewalk, after Matty's restaurant window and Poor Tony's own hungry survey, and the only consciousness that ever assembles all three is yours: each walker is sealed inside a head, and the suspense is made entirely of that sealing.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 698: dateline 14 NOVEMBER YDAU; Ruth's first day off new-resident Restriction, allowed out only with a Staff-judged-safe senior resident; the pair on Prospect a little after 2200h.
  • pp. 698-699: Ruth van Cleve rendered — kilos underweight, brass lipstick, decades-stale big hair, "the late-stage Ice addict's concave long-jawed insectile look" [n.284: Ice = crude combustible methedrine]; Joelle's crack that the hair grew her head; Kate's boat-tack slump; stuttering sodium streetlights; the undead and stem-artists crowding the sidewalk edges; heads floating unconnected across darkened windows; wheelchaired incomplete persons with "creative receptacles where limbs should be."
  • p. 699: Ruth's history surfaces — the newborn in the Braintree alley, the unshrewdly attached hospital bracelet, the incubator and Clonidine taper [n.285: must be R.v.C.'s catachresis — Clonidine is adult-strength anti-hypertensive], substances Kate "can only speculate about" [n.286: Kate's never done stimulants — addict classes rarely cross, though every class drinks]; the father's licensing problem.
  • p. 699: Kate's locomotion-without-volition marvel — "she puts her left foot in front of her right foot..."; Latino males sexually checking out Ruth, whose manner broadcasts "she's all about sexuality and sex" despite the haggishness.
  • pp. 699-700: NA-vs-AA logistics — Saturday-night Ennet House roof spitting-distance from countless AA venues, but the nearest Saturday NA is N. Cambridge's Clean and Serene ("infamous for cross-talk and chair-throwing"), purposely late-running against the Saturday jones; the ghastly route home (Prospect → Central → Red Line → Park St. → "the maddening Green Line B Train forever west"); 75 minutes to Curfew; Ruth's chatter the most listener-independent thing Kate's heard since Lenz "got invited to ingest Substances and abuse animals elsewhere."
  • p. 700: cones of epileptic streetlight; Ruth asking where to pick up a good toothbrush cheap; Kate focused wholly on left foot, right foot; among the floating heads she does not see — "the gaunt and spectral hollow-eyed head of Poor Tony Krause," several steps behind, eyeing string purses he imagines hold more than train-fare and NA Newcomers' keychains.

Themes in this scene

  • Depression and Anhedonia: the essay of scene 135 walked on legs — Kate inside It, navigating without location, the perceptual field reduced to disconnected floating heads and one foot in front of the other; "her whole self" sustained by mechanics, not will.
  • Addiction and Recovery: recovery's unglamorous logistics — escort rules, Restriction, Curfew math, splinter-fellowship meeting deserts (cf. n.291 in scene 139), the Saturday-night jones — and in Ruth a portrait of where the disease delivers mothers and infants.
  • Communication and Solipsism: Ruth's listener-interest-independent yammer against Kate's total inward absorption — two women side by side, zero contact; the unseen stalker completing the figure of mutual blindness.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Lenz's exit euphemism ("invited to ingest Substances and abuse animals elsewhere") cross-references the Lenz catastrophe (scenes 116/120) and Day's coda (scene 134).
  • The wheelchaired "incomplete persons... with hand-lettered invitations" in doorways (p. 699) — street-level echo of the book's wheelchair iconography (U.H.I.D./A.F.R. registers), here just Boston destitution; imagery, not plot.

Forward

  • Third panel of this converging-streets set: Matty watches the pair and PT pass the Man o' War (scene 131, pp. 683-684 — there just "two underweight interracial girls" plodding past); PT fixes on their purses (scene 133, pp. 691-692, where the inventory sharpens: the talker and the stolid plodder in formidable running shoes); the snatch itself, Ruth's purse and the chase, follows at pp. 714ff (scene 141).
  • Kate's It is specified in scene 135 (pp. 695-698) and her intake interview (pp. 68-78, scene 024); the four sleepless nights and secret-marijuana Withdrawal framing carry forward to her bar encounter with Rémy Marathe (pp. 774-782).
  • Joelle's quoted crack about Ruth's hair places Joelle in the House's daily texture even as she's off at St. E.'s this same night (scene 139, "tonight, 11/14").

Notable passages (7)
  • pp. 698-699: Ruth van Cleve's full-body description ("it almost looked like Ruth van Cleve's hair grew her head instead of the other way around") — the late-stage Ice portrait.
  • p. 699: "she puts her left foot in front of her right foot and then her right foot in front of her left foot, and she's moving forward, her whole self" — locomotion without volition; depression-anhedonia extraction.
  • p. 699: heads "that seem to float across each window unconnected to anything. As in disconnected floating heads." — Kate's perceptual It-field, and the device by which Poor Tony enters unseen.
  • p. 700: "One of the heads she does not see... is the gaunt and spectral hollow-eyed head of Poor Tony Krause" — the trap closing; bridge to p. 714ff.

Endnotes digested here

  • n.284 (p. 1053): Ice — crude, cheap combustible methedrine, favored by the gasoline-sniffing/glue-bag "addictive class."
  • n.285 (p. 1053): Clonidine is an adult-strength anti-hypertensive — Ruth's incubator claim "has got to be a mispronunciation or catachresis"; the infant would have to be N.F.L.-sized.
  • n.286 (p. 1053): Kate has never done Ice/crack/coke — addicts fall into classes (downs-people vs. stimulant-fiends) that rarely cross; "pretty much every class of addicts drinks, though."

What links here Timeline events here (10) · Connected from (8) · Passages quoted here (20) · Motifs (4)

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs