IJ study archive

Scene 157: hal confession mario

Scene
157
Pages
782–785
When
night of 11-12 Nov YDAU (2009), continuing scene 155 toward dawn (~40 hours into Hal's abstinence)
Where
Hal and Mario's room, E.T.A. — darkness thinning toward sunrise, dialogue onlyin: E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. subdormitories
POV
none/dialogue — unattributed two-voice exchange (Hal and Mario)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 14)

Summary

The night-dialogue of scene 155 reaches its destination: when Mario says simply "I'm sorry if you're sad, Hal. You seem sad," Hal answers with the flat, complete confession — he smokes high-resin Bob Hope in secret, alone, down in the Pump Room, and hides it with Visine, toothpaste, and Irish Spring. He lays out the real shape of the urine crisis: it's Pemulis the administration wants gone (the Port Washington dosing, the Visine-bottle urine sales), Hal is suspected only of "moral paralysis" on I-Day, and the thirty days Pemulis extracted from the urologist were secretly for Hal — whose fat-soluble cannabinoids may not clear even in a month. Hal inventories what discovery would destroy: his year in 18's, the inevitability of the Shoe, E.T.A.'s public standing and with it Himself's memory, and above all the Moms — not the smoking but the secrecy "will kill her dead." Forty hours in, he is already "bats inside," dreaming horror-shows, feeling "a way more than Hal-sized hole" opening that he expects to widen daily until he flies apart. When he finally asks Mario, point blank, what he should do, Mario answers that he just did it — telling the truth was the thing.

What to notice

The scene is voices in the dark — no narration, no attributions — and it opens with Mario reading his brother by silhouette: "When you're on your back you don't have a shadow." Notice what unlocks the confession: not a question but a plain statement of sympathy, which Hal answers with logistics — brand names of concealment (Visine, mint toothpaste, Irish Spring) before any feeling. Then count Mario's "Hey Hal?"s — eight of them, nearly all rolled over by the next installment of Hal's worry-inventory; Mario spends the whole scene trying to land one question ("What are you going to do?") while Hal answers everything except that. And Mario's interjections that look like non sequiturs are all exact: "Mrs. Clarke told Bridget the human brain is high in fat" is the scene's grimmest joke made innocently — the fat-soluble Hope is stored precisely where Hal lives — and it's Mario, not Hal, who notices the sun "thinking about coming up" in the window. Notice too that Hal's entire inventory of dread is other people's damage — Pemulis's Shoe, Himself's memory, the Moms — with not one sentence about wanting to stop; the confession is complete and the motive still isn't recovery. The last line of the scene is Mario's, a question — "Do you see what I mean?" — left hanging without an answer; whether Hal can see it is the remainder of his plot.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 782: Mario tracks Hal's posture by shadow; "I'm sorry if you're sad, Hal. You seem sad."; the confession — high-resin Bob Hope in secret in the Pump Room off the secondary maintenance tunnel, Visine/mint toothpaste/Irish Spring, "Only Pemulis knows the true extent."
  • pp. 782-783: the real target — "I'm not the one C.T. and the Moms want gone": Pemulis publicly dosed a devout Mormon opponent at Port Washington; Visine bottles of pre-adolescent urine "classed as a Pemulis production"; Hal "immune to expulsion anyway, obviously, as the Moms's relative," his and Axford's urine mere "context of objectivity"; "It's Pemulis they want... the Shoe by the end of the term. I don't know whether Pemulis knows this or not."
  • p. 783: the test's severity — not the usual steroid/'drine screen but full-spectrum: gas chromatography, electron bombardment, mass-fragment spectrometry, "The kind the Show uses"; Pemulis's performance replayed — the downwind hypothetical, the poppy-seed bagel, a lie of "weary earnestness" instead of his rococo norm; the leverage of the looming Moment lady making scandal inopportune; "O.N.A.N.T.A. doesn't want to catch anybody, really."
  • p. 783: the ingenious layer — the urologist believed the thirty days were for Pemulis, who "could pass a urine test hanging upside down in a high wind" (the catheterization technique; Tenuates as "the Indy-type car of 'drines").
  • pp. 783-784: "the thirty days was actually for me... He did it for me, and I'm not even the one they want"; the regimen — cranberry juice, Calli tea, vinegar in water; the catch: "The Bob Hope I smoke and hide, Boo, it's fat-soluble. It stays in there, in the body's fat." (Mario: "Mrs. Clarke told Bridget the human brain is high in fat.")
  • p. 784: the consequence cascade — dirty urine before O.N.A.N.T.A. means C.T. must give even Hal the Shoe; "And what about Himself's memory?"; E.T.A. publicly hurt, the Moment lady "lumbering around looking for family linen"; and the Moms — "Not so much the Hope. The secrecy of it... Something terrible will happen if she finds out I hid it from her."
  • p. 784: the month ahead — total abstinence through the WhataBurger ("justify my seed") and possibly being "offered up to Wayne at the Fundraiser," Mario's birthday in two weeks, the SATs in December taken "in abrupt withdrawal"; Mario's encouragement ("Everybody's betting you get a perfect score") lands exactly wrong.
  • pp. 784-785: Hal turns on Mario's unhurtability — "Be a fucking human being for once, Boo... You can get mad at somebody and it doesn't mean they'll go away. You don't have to put on a Moms-act of total trust and forgiveness. One liar's enough."; Mario, unbudged: "I feel like you're the only one who knows when it's right to tell. I can't know for you, so why should I be hurt."; "Jesus it's like talking to a big poster of some smily-faced guy. Are you in there?"
  • p. 785: dawn at the window; "It's been like forty hours without Bob Hope and already I'm bats inside... I feel like I'm stuck halfway down a chimney"; Pemulis meanwhile fully functional, poring over the library's resources on whether his WhataBurger DMZ is detectable (n.321); "I feel a hole. It's going to be a huge hole, in a month. A way more than Hal-sized hole... I'll fly apart in the Lung, or at Tucson at 200 degrees in front of all these people who knew Himself and think I'm different. Whom I've lied to, and liked it."
  • p. 785: "And it'll kill her... It will kill her dead, Booboo, I'm afraid."; Hal up on his elbow, "just two big aprick ears right here," asking Mario what to do; Mario's answer — "I think you just did it. What you should do. I think you just did... Do you see what I mean?"

Endnotes (digested)

  • n.321 is a narrative note (Hal and Pemulis research the DMZ; quitting logistics) with its own full digest — see scene n321; cited here at p. 785 for Pemulis's library research into the DMZ's G.C./M.S. detectability.

Themes in this scene

  • Addiction and Recovery: a textbook First-Step moment performed entirely outside any program — admission of secret use, the pharmacology of detection, and instant onset of withdrawal phenomenology ("bats inside," the chimney, the hole); Hal quitting for consequences rather than recovery, the distinction the Ennet House chapters insist on.
  • Communication and Solipsism: the confession only becomes possible in the dark, sideways, to the one listener who cannot be alienated; "Are you in there?" aimed at Mario reverses scene 001's "I am in here" — Hal accusing another of his own condition.
  • Family and Hamlet: the family system as stakes — exposure measured not in personal cost but in damage to Himself's memory and to the Moms, for whom the secrecy (the breach of the trust-ideology) is the lethal part; "One liar's enough."
  • Depression and Anhedonia: the "way more than Hal-sized hole" names what the marijuana was filling; the flying-apart forecast is the anhedonia of the late-November Hal chapters (pp. 851ff) announced in advance.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Direct continuation of scene 155 (same night, same beds; the liar taxonomy there is the wind-up to confessing himself the liar here); Mario's question to Avril in scene 154 ("more himself than normal" sadness) was about exactly this Hal.
  • The Pump Room secrecy apparatus: established pp. 49-54 (Hal's underground ritual) and n.3ff; "Only Pemulis knows the true extent" cf. their urine commerce (pp. 152-156) and the Tenuate line (n.5.a; scene 013).
  • Port Washington dosing of the Mormon opponent: the aftermath — the opponent gone lethargic and publicly disgraced at the mixer — is scene 067's bus-ride material (pp. 281-282; n.125); the Visine-bottle urine trade pp. 152-153.
  • Mario's closing verdict ("I think you just did it") is the book's sincerity ethic in one line — telling the truth as the act itself, cf. the AA chapters' truth-discipline — Ferocious Francis on Identifying, asking "to try to really hear or die trying" (pp. 365ff, scene 074).

Forward

  • The thirty-day deal and the O.N.A.N.T.A. urologist: scene 155 pp. 771-772 gives the bathroom performance; n.324 (scene n324) carries the 17 Nov aftermath; "I'm almost positive they're going to give Pemulis the Shoe" is confirmed in n.332 (scene n332), where Pemulis's fate actually resolves.
  • Pemulis's DMZ-detectability research (n.321 digest) is the live fuse under the WhataBurger plan and under every theory of what happens to Hal between November and the Year of Glad.
  • "Stuck halfway down a chimney" and the hole/flying-apart imagery read forward to Hal's anhedonia meditation (pp. 692-698, scene 135), his floor-bound viewing days (pp. 896-902, scene 170; pp. 906-911, scene 172), and terminal Hal; "It will kill her dead" echoes his p. 957, scene 179 worry-economy around Avril.
  • Hal seeking help follows within days: scene 158 (pp. 785-787) — the knock at Ennet House's door for an NA meeting schedule — and the Inner-Infant fiasco of scene 160 (pp. 795-808).

Notable passages (6)
  • p. 782: "I smoke high-resin Bob Hope in secret by myself down in the Pump Room... Only Pemulis knows the true extent." — the confession verbatim; anchor passage for addiction-recovery.
  • p. 783: "Booboo, the thirty days was actually for me, and Mike let me stand there with my Unit out and not say anything while he sold the urologist land... He did it for me, and I'm not even the one they want." — Pemulis's loyalty at its apex, days before his expulsion.
  • p. 784: "Not so much the Hope. The secrecy of it. That I hid it from her. That she'll feel I had to hide it from her." — the Avril-economy of concealment; family-hamlet keystone.
  • pp. 784-785: "Be a fucking human being for once, Boo... One liar's enough." / "I feel like you're the only one who knows when it's right to tell." — the brothers' two ethics colliding.
  • p. 785: "I feel a hole. It's going to be a huge hole, in a month. A way more than Hal-sized hole." — the scene's center; the addiction-shaped vacancy that the rest of Hal's plot falls into.
  • p. 785: "I think you just did it. What you should do. I think you just did." — Mario's answer; single-entendre wisdom.

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