IJ study archive

Scene 155: hal mario liars

Scene
155
Pages
769–774
When
night of 11-12 Nov YDAU (2009), pre-dawn, after Mario has moved back into the room
Where
Hal and Mario's room, E.T.A. — total darkness, dialogue onlyin: E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. subdormitories
POV
none/dialogue — unattributed two-voice exchange (Hal and Mario in their beds)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 8)

Summary

In the dark of their shared room in the small hours after 11 Nov, Hal and Mario hold one of their signature counterpoint conversations — two monologues braided together, each brother faithfully answering a different conversation. Hal, rattled by a dream of his teeth rotting to shale and of being billed for someone else's teeth, keeps circling Orin: the dog S. Johnson, Orin's lie to Avril about its death, and Orin's "really pathological intensity" of lying growing up. Mario, who has moved his sleeping bag back in, counters with happy total-recall memories — the Moms smuggling the dog into the Hayden in a blind-dog harness, Orin barking into the dog's telephone — and with simple declarations of love. Hal recounts Pemulis's brass-faced virtuoso performance extracting thirty days' grace from the O.N.A.N.T.A. urologist, then unspools a field guide to types of liars: the dominator, the flutterer, the digresser, the kamikaze, the rococo over-elaborator, and the reformed over-elaborator who now lies tersely. He ends at his new definition of monstrosity: at seventeen the only real monsters are the liars who give nothing away — "Inscrutable. Brass-faced." — and that they walk among us and teach our children.

What to notice

Mario gets the scene's whole epistemology into one small question — "Is it dark or is it me?" — and Hal, who needles everyone, answers him straight. What follows runs on two mnemonic systems sharing one childhood: Hal's memory is forensic, retaining the lie and the coercion ("The Indian Rub-Burns I remember far too well") and losing the rest ("Jesus, Boo, I don't remember any of that"), while Mario's is curated by pleasure — "a phenomenal memory for things I remember that I liked" — so the barking-phone story arrives as evidence for the prosecution and as treasured comedy at once, without either brother noticing they disagree about what it was. The taxonomy, meanwhile, performs what it catalogues: Hal is over-elaborating — establishing subtypes, pedantically re-casing his own grammar mid-flight ("The person to whom they're lying.", pure Moms, the same reflex that corrected Mario's if to whether one scene earlier) — and burying the single live disclosure, why thirty days matters, in extraneous data "like a tiny bug through a windowscreen". He can't even solicit the question directly, only pre-narrate it: "You probably think I'm wondering why you don't ask me", then "You can ask, if you like", then "You might think I'm wondering why you aren't asking me" — three passes at a confession that won't arrive until the next dark-room session. And when Hal reaches for the brass-mask image, Mario replies in his own medium, a loved voice quoted off the radio — Madame Psychosis reading Eve Arden: "The importance of a mask is to increase your circulation" — the found line saying, more economically than the whole field guide, what masks are for and what they cost.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 769: "The dark had a distanceless shape"; Mario's "Skkkkk"; Hal's wicked awful dream ("Thank you Sir may I have another" in his sleep); Schacht's snoring felt in the midsection; Mario has moved his bag back in; he's found somebody with tapes of old Madame Psychosis broadcasts "for until the return," and needs Hal to teach him how to ask a stranger to borrow them.
  • pp. 769-770: the dream — teeth dry-rotting into shale, jettisoned fragments, pricing dentures; then naked in a flame-retardant chair receiving mail bills for somebody else's teeth that the carrier won't acknowledge aren't his.
  • p. 770: Mario reports last night's all-night "where is Hal" inquiries — even the Moms asked, "and I was surprised at that because of how she makes it a big point never to check up"; Hal raises S. Johnson; Mario's Hayden memory — Avril in sunglasses faking blindness to smuggle the dog into Himself's Kinds of Light opening (n.320: the Hayden = M.I.T.'s main library), Himself thinking it "a good one on the Hayden."
  • pp. 770-771: the phone left out by the Volvo with its antenna up so Avril could call and let it ring beside the tied-up dog ("he was thought about and cared about from afar"); Orin answering it, barking into it, hanging up — then threatening Indian Rub-Burns unless Hal and Mario played dumb when Avril asked about the bark.
  • p. 771: Hal: "I keep thinking about Orin and how he stood there and lied to her about S. Johnson's map getting eliminated"; "Orin lied with a really pathological intensity, growing up"; Mario: "He made us laugh really hard a lot of times, though. I miss him." Hal: "I don't know whether I miss him or not"; Family Trivia.
  • pp. 771-772: the urine story Mario won't ask about — the urologist marched them to the administrative loo to watch the urine "go in"; "The key datum is that the O.N.A.N.T.A. guy didn't actually extract urine samples from us... as the Moms no doubt knows quite well, don't kid yourself, from C.T."; the deal: thirty days — Fundraiser, WhataBurger, Thanksgiving Break — then Pemulis, Axford, and Hal "pee like racehorses."
  • p. 772: Pemulis "showed some serious brass under pressure... played the O.N.A.N.T.A. man like a fine instrument"; Mario on the dorm fans at night: "it's like somebody big far away goes like: it'sOKit'sOKit'sOKit'sOK, over and over. From very far away."
  • pp. 772-773: Hal probes how someone of Mario's "Panglossian constitution" detects lies — maybe whatever's said to Mario "reverses its spin and hits you true, however mendaciously it comes off the other person's stick"; "Jesus, it's just like talking to the Moms with you sometimes, Boo." / "Except with you I can feel you mean it."
  • pp. 773-774: the field guide to liars — the still, dominating type; the fluttery self-deprecating type; the digression-burier ("a tiny bug through a windowscreen"); the Kamikaze-style liar whose retraction sells the real lie; the rococo over-elaborator ("Pemulis was like that, I always thought, til his performance over the urinal"); and Hal's new-minted subtype, the reformed over-elaborator who now lies tersely, "seeming somehow bored."
  • p. 774: Mario quotes Madame Psychosis quoting an Eve Arden beauty brochure: "The importance of a mask is to increase your circulation"; Mario admits "I can't ever tell... I'm the type that'd buy land, I think"; Hal's monsters speech — no more faces in the floor or feral infants; the only real monsters are liars with no tells; "But then how do you know they're monsters, then?" / "That's the monstrosity right there"; "That they walk among us. Teach our children. Inscrutable. Brass-faced."

Endnotes (digested)

  • n.320 (p. 1063): the Hayden = "Main library, M.I.T., East Cambridge" — the Kinds of Light opening was a library screening.

Themes in this scene

  • Communication and Solipsism: the brothers run parallel monologues that only intermittently touch — yet it's the book's warmest failed communication; Mario's ellipses ("…") absorb everything Hal can't say directly.
  • Family and Hamlet: the family's official ideology of trust dissected from below — Avril's never-checking-up belied, Orin's pathological lying, coerced childhood cover-ups (the bark, the Rub-Burns), the dog Avril loved with displaced ferocity.
  • Irony and Sincerity: Hal's connoisseur's taxonomy of mendacity against Mario's spin-reversing credulity ("it becomes sort of true in transit") — the novel's clearest statement that Mario's sincerity is not naïveté but a different physics.
  • Addiction and Recovery: the thirty-day urine reprieve is set up here as pure logistics and bravado; its real meaning (Hal's secret habit, abrupt withdrawal) detonates in scene 157.
  • Dreams: the teeth-dream's second movement, recounted to Mario in the dark — the rot into shale now compounded by being naked in a flame-retardant chair, billed for "somebody else's teeth" by a mail carrier who won't acknowledge the error (pp. 769-770); inherited guilt arriving in dream-logic, paying for concealments not originally his.
  • Memory and Forgetting: the brothers' memory contrast run head-to-head — Mario's "phenomenal memory for things I remember that I liked" against Hal's forensic retention of coercion ("The Indian Rub-Burns I remember far too well") and loss of the rest ("Jesus, Boo, I don't remember any of that," pp. 770-771); one childhood, two mnemonic systems, neither brother noticing they disagree about what it was.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Hal's teeth-dream extends the day's literal tooth trouble (Zegarelli visit, scene 154 p. 762) and Himself's horrible bridgework (p. 763); teeth as Incandenza inheritance.

Forward

  • Continuous with scene 154 (Mario's question to Avril about hidden sadness — asked because of this night's roommate) and resumed directly in scene 157 (pp. 782-785), where Hal stops talking about liars in the abstract and confesses.
  • S. Johnson's death and Orin's lie: the dog dragged to death behind the Volvo is detailed in Marlon Bain's correspondence, n.269 (see scene n269); Orin re-asserts the hit-and-run lie to Steeply in n.110 (see scene n110, p. 1015).
  • "Brass mask" / "Brass-faced" (pp. 772, 774): the epithet lands on Pemulis here and is echoed verbatim in Notkin's "brass-faced falsehood" under interrogation (scene 159, p. 789) — the book quietly tagging its accomplished liars.
  • The monsters-with-no-tells speech ("Teach our children") reads forward to Avril — the scene's prime candidate for the undetectable liar — and back to Hal's childhood face-in-the-floor nightmare (pp. 61-63, scene 019).
  • Mario hunting tapes of old Madame Psychosis "for until the return" continues his devotion thread (the radio show's loss, pp. 589-593) and dovetails with Joelle's absence (in Ennet House; her CA-meeting evening is scene 139, her whereabouts the subject of scene 159).
  • The WhataBurger Invitational and Pemulis's DMZ plan (n.321, see scene 157) are both loaded here; Mario's "Maybe if we call him he'll come to the WhataBurger" (p. 773) foreshadows the gathering the book never reaches except in Gately's dream and Hal's YG memory.

Notable passages (5)
  • pp. 769-770: the teeth dream ("bills... for somebody else's teeth, not my teeth, and I can't seem to get the mail carrier to acknowledge this") — inherited guilt in dream-logic; anthology candidate for family-hamlet.
  • p. 771: "she said how S. Johnson knew her unique personal ring on the phone and would hear the ring and know that he was thought about and cared about from afar" — Avril's love at maximum technological remove; devastating in context.
  • p. 772: Mario on the fans — "it'sOKit'sOKit'sOKit'sOK, over and over. From very far away." — the gentlest line in the book about needing comfort from anywhere.
  • p. 773: "Flies through the air toward you and reverses its spin and hits you true, however mendaciously it comes off the other person's stick." — lying rendered in tennis physics; key irony-sincerity extraction.
  • p. 774: "I think at seventeen now I believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there's simply no way to tell... That they walk among us. Teach our children. Inscrutable. Brass-faced." — the scene's destination; reread after every Avril scene.

What links here Timeline events here (16) · Connected from (7) · Passages quoted here (35) · Motifs (3)

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs