IJ study archive

Scene 156: marathe kate ryles

Scene
156
Pages
774–782
When
14 Nov YDAU (2009), night — after Marathe's day locating the Entertainment's performer and his phone call of betrayal
Where
Ryle's Inman Square Club of Jazz, Cambridge — the bar, in the quiet hours after the musicin: Inman Square / "Little Lisbon", Cambridge
POV
none/dialogue — unattributed two-voice exchange (Marathe and Kate Gompert over drinks)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 10)

Summary

Kate Gompert — mugged on the street (Poor Tony's purse-snatch), purseless, off Ennet House grounds, and drinking Kahlua and milk for the first time in her life — falls into conversation at Ryle's jazz club with a wheelchaired stranger who "calls himself Rémy" and claims to be Swiss. Marathe, who has spent the day locating the woman he thinks his friends will kill and has just used the bar's phone to betray his cell, tells Kate (who he says strongly resembles his dying wife) the story of his life as a parable of pain, choice, and love: legless and suicidally depressed in his "Swiss" early twenties while stronger neighbor-nations despoiled his homeland "on paper," he was freed from the cage of his pain in the one unthinking instant he released his brake and careened downhill to sweep a terror-frozen woman from the path of an invader's truck — a woman who proved to have been born without a skull. He married her, he insists, not from passion but from chosen necessity: the choice chains him, "but the chains are of my choice." Kate, getting steadily drunker, Identifies, heckles, and finally rejects the whole account as low self-esteem and Settling For Less. Marathe closes with a hypothetical that is not hypothetical: what if he could lead her just three streets from here and show her something promising more pleasure than she has ever felt and the end of all sorrow — what would she reply? The scene ends on his unanswered "Yes?"

What to notice

The book cuts from one untagged two-voice night dialogue straight into another — the brothers' dark room, then this bar, no narrator in either — and the pairing is the point: Hal had a listener who couldn't be lied to; Marathe gets one who can't hear the truth. So he tells it all in plain words — the day spent locating "someone I think my friends will kill", the phone call of betrayal, even "the A.F.R., my companions" said outright — and the cover fable leaks by design: Mont Papineau, Trois Rivières, "the many moose of Switzerland". A Switzerland with moose, logging-trucks, and paper invasions isn't trying very hard, because a drunk, concussed, suicidal stranger is the one confessor as safe as a veil; after the waiting room, where a madman told the disguised spy the truth about himself, the pattern completes — now the spy tells his truth to someone equally unable to receive it. Their argument is fought as a genre war: Kate heckles the story toward romantic comedy — "Is the madly-in-love part coming up?" — demanding eyes-meeting, knees-buckling passion, while Marathe keeps refusing the genre, so that the American model of love (a thing that happens to you) and his (a thing you chain yourself to) collide entirely as interruptions. And listen to the closing offer's vocabulary: never again "sorrow or pity or the pain of the chains and cage of never choosing" — he pitches the Entertainment in the exact language of his own hilltop deliverance, the counterfeit exit dressed as the true one, offered to the book's foremost expert in psychic pain. Her last two turns are silences, and the scene ends inside his question mark.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 774: Kate's opening — "Can I ask you how it is being in that thing?"; Marathe's chair-philosophy ("You are in the chair even if you do not prefer it. So it is better to prefer, no?"); Kate's situation: in the House for drugs, never more than a beer in her life, came in only to vomit after being mugged; "I call myself Rémy."
  • pp. 774-775: Kahlua and milk as "novocaine of the soul"; Marathe: "When I drink I have many drinks. This is how it is for my people"; Kate's mother's drunk father who "drove into concrete and wiped out his entire family"; the venue named — Ryle's Inman Square Club of Jazz; "My wife is dying at home in my native province."
  • p. 775: the Big Book's car-salesman story — "the insanity of the first one," the drink hidden in a glass of milk — which Kate re-enacts as a joke by ordering Kahlua and milk; Marathe: "Out of a blue place, in one flashing instant."
  • pp. 775-776: Kate was "walking along soberly deciding how to kill myself" before the mugging; Marathe's confession hidden in plain hearing: "I am spending a day to find someone I think my friends will kill, all the time I am awaiting the chance to betray my friends, and I come here and telephone to betray them and I see this bruised person who strongly resembles my wife."
  • p. 776: the story begins under Swiss cover — "I am, shall we say, Swiss"; legs lost in the teenage years "being struck by a train"; many friends also legless; his father dead when his Kenbeck pacemaker met a misdialed cellular call from Trois Rivières; Kate's counterpoint: her father's emotional abandonment to Portland "which is in Oregon" with his therapist.
  • pp. 776-778: the allegorized A.F.R./Québec history — the strong hated neighbors committing "paper atrocities," invasion passed off "as in the Anschluss of Hitler" as gifts of alliance; legless friends rolling off to fight while Marathe, in too much pain to care, sees no point in choosing to fight; Kate: "You're depressed is what you are"; the moribund years — rolling the despoiled countryside drunk, twice unable to roll off a hill, dodging the very vehicles he hoped would hit him; "I feel I am chained in a cage of the self, from the pain."
  • p. 778: Kate's full Identification — "The billowing shaped black sailing wing" (her depression's shape, cf. pp. 649ff).
  • pp. 778-779: the hilltop — far below, a small hunched woman in a metal hat transfixed mid-Autoroute before an invader's truck "like one of the many moose of Switzerland"; "the great gift of this time today at the hilltop... is I do not think of me"; he releases the brake, schüsses down, sweeps her up ahead of the truck's nose; Kate: "You pulled yourself out of a clinical depression by being a freaking hero."
  • p. 779: the correction — "It was this frozen with the terror woman, she saved my life... In one instant and without thought I was allowed to choose something as more important than my thinking of my life"; the chains of the cage broken "at the top of Switzerland's Mont Papineau" (a Québec name leaking through the cover).
  • pp. 779-780: the dented helmet knocked away — "She had no skull, this woman": among the first children of the southwest born skull-less "from the toxicities in association of our enemy's invasion on paper," head hanging "like the half-filled balloon or empty bag"; Kate's romantic-comedy interjections repeatedly flattened; "The unclamping of the brakes of the fauteuil and schüssching to the Autoroute — this was the love. I had chosen loving her above my lost legs and this half a self."
  • p. 780: the catalogue of "the other troubles" — digestive tracking, seizures, restenosis, supernumerary "eyes and cavities... upon different parts of the body," fugues, rages, comas, the dribbling cerebro-spinal fluid; she had wandered off from a charitable institution; "Garçon!"
  • pp. 780-781: he tried to wheel away into "my new life of uncaged acceptance and choice" — and within "several revolutions of the fauteuil" the old despair returned; "Pain rolled me backwards to this woman, my wife"; Kate: "It's like the clinical depression was a shotgun nudging you down the wedding aisle."
  • p. 781: the wedding — nickel helmet mined and molded by friends, both spouses rolled down the aisle, hers with pans and drains; "My whole very being came to a knifelike point in that instant... my hand holding tenderly the hook of my wife"; "my Gertraude" named — comatose nearly a year, restenosis irreversible, the Jaarvik IX Exterior Artificial Heart her chance to live on "in a comatose and vegetated state"; "It is for her I betray my friends and cell" — and he says "the A.F.R., my companions" outright (Kate doesn't register it); "this choice, Katherine: I made it. It chains me, but the chains are of my choice. The other chains: no. The others were the chains of not choosing."
  • pp. 781-782: Kate's verdict — "that's not love: that's low self-esteem and self-abuse and Settling For Less"; her drunken doubling vision; Brad Anderson and her two awful sexual experiences; Marathe's closing thought-experiment: "what if I were to claim we might leave and I could lead you only three streets from here and show you something with this promise: you would feel more good feeling and pleasure than ever before for you: you would never again feel sorrow or pity..."; "If my claim, it was true, you would say yes, Katherine, no?... Yes?"

Themes in this scene

  • Depression and Anhedonia: Kate's clinical depression (the billowing black wing, the suicide walk) meets Marathe's own account of moribund years "chained in a cage of the self" — the book's two great theorists of psychic pain comparing notes without either knowing who the other is.
  • Entertainment and the Self: the final offer is the Entertainment's pitch distilled — terminal pleasure as the cure for pain — set against Marathe's whole counter-argument that pleasure-seeking is "this pleasure of not choosing"; his mountainside thesis (choose what you die for) dramatized as autobiography.
  • Addiction and Recovery: Kate's first drinks re-enact the Big Book's glass-of-milk "insanity of the first one" almost liturgically; "novocaine of the soul" is the addict's eternal discovery that relief works, at first.
  • Nationalism and O.N.A.N.: Québec/A.F.R. history smuggled in as "Switzerland" — paper atrocities, faux-alliance annexation, leaders subverted to deny the invasion, toxic birth-defects in the affected region — the Reconfiguration's grievances in fable form.
  • Disability and Deformity: the fauteuil, the legless cohort, and Gertraude — skull-less, multi-eyed, leaking — the Concavity's deformed births made the object of a love defined as choice rather than attraction (cf. U.H.I.D.'s veiling ethic).

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Kate's mugging is Poor Tony Krause's purse-snatch from Kate and Ruth van Cleve (pp. 698-700, 714-716, 719-721, scenes 136/141/144); this scene picks her up bruised, purseless, and off House grounds the same stretch of days.
  • Mont Papineau, Trois Rivières, the train, legless friends: the "Swiss" fable is le Jeu du Prochain Train and A.F.R. history (n.304 — see scene n304) under one-letter-thin cover.
  • Marathe's chains/cage of pain vocabulary mirrors Avril's engulfment/imprisonment lecture two scenes earlier (scene 154, pp. 765-767) and Kate's own ward testimony (pp. 68-78); his "choose something as more important than my thinking of my life" restates the temple/fanatic speech to Steeply (pp. 105-109).
  • The Jaarvik IX artificial heart recalls the Clipperton-era "heart" grotesques and, more directly, the C.T./heart-transplant joke network around Lyle; the pacemaker-death of Marathe's father retells the freak-accident motif from the Steeply serial (told there too).
  • Closed loop: the Jaarvik IX Gertraude needs is the same artificial heart of Steeply's Moment article (scene 045) — the woman whose purse-borne "Jarvik" heart a purse-snatcher ran off with ("Stop her! She stole my heart!"), the snatcher being Poor Tony — who has just robbed Kate Gompert, Marathe's interlocutor here. Spelling variance Jarvik/Jaarvik both authorial, as printed.
  • Kate's "It'll be about your eyes meet across someplace and both your knees give out" — the passion model of love — is exactly the model Marathe diagnoses in U.S. culture in the mountainside debates: choosing not to choose; the scene is those debates restaged with a genuinely dying American.

Forward

  • "I am spending a day to find someone I think my friends will kill" — Joelle van Dyne, whom Marathe (in his Swiss-attaché disguise) has located at Ennet House; "I... telephone to betray them" = his tip to U.S.O.U.S., which bears on Steeply's subsequent moves and the interrogations of scene 159 and pp. 938ff. Marathe first presents himself at Ennet House as a prospective resident in scene 149 (pp. 729ff) and is offered a bed there in scene 153 (pp. 752-755) — an offer he is left only weighing; by 19 Nov he is quartered at the Antitois' shop (pp. 845-846).
  • The wife's backstory expands the mountainside serial: Marathe's quadruple-agency "to secure advanced medical care for the medical needs of his wife" (p. 89) — the wife later specified as "skull-deprived and heart-defective" Gertraud (p. 529) — is established with Steeply pp. 88-97 and n.90's B.S.S. file context. Spelling here: "my Gertraude" (p. 781); 'Gertraud' at p. 529 — both authorial (the archive records both; n.304 contains no wife material despite older claims).

Notable passages (7)
  • p. 774: "You are in the chair even if you do not prefer it. So it is better to prefer, no?" — Marathe's entire ethics in one chair-sized aphorism.
  • p. 775: "This is like novocaine of the soul." — Kate's first-drink epiphany; prime addiction-recovery extraction.
  • p. 776: "I am spending a day to find someone I think my friends will kill, all the time I am awaiting the chance to betray my friends..." — the plot's hinge confessed aloud to a drunk stranger who can't hear it.
  • p. 778: "I feel I am chained in a cage of the self, from the pain. Unable to care or choose anything outside it." — depression as cage; pairs with Avril p. 767 and Kate pp. 695ff.
  • p. 779: "It was this frozen with the terror woman, she saved my life... she allowed this will without thinking." — the rescue inverted; the book's most explicit statement that escape from self comes only through unreflective choice of another.
  • p. 781: "It chains me, but the chains are of my choice. The other chains: no. The others were the chains of not choosing." — the scene's thesis; master passage for entertainment-self/free-will.
  • p. 782: "I could lead you only three streets from here and show you something with this promise..." — the Entertainment offered, conditionally, to a suicidally depressed woman; chilling unanswered "Yes?"

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