Scene n234: orin steeply interview

• p. 1038: Header: "TRANSCRIPT-FRAGMENTS FROM INTERVIEW SERIES FOR PUTATIVE MOMENT MAGAZINE SOFT PROFILE" on punter "O. J. Incandenza," by "putative... soft-profile writer Helen Steeply," November Y.D.A.U. — the apparatus itself flags the cover story as cover ("putative" twice).
• p. 1038: Orin's ground rules — won't discuss why he doesn't talk to the Moms, nor "The Mad Stork's adventures in the mental-health community" — both immediately violated at length; opening flirtation ("no matter how lovely you're looking in that pantsuit").
• p. 1038: "Insane is just like a catch-term": the JOI capsule — last five years he built E.T.A. (national-caliber staff, U.S.T.A. sanction, multi-Grid funding, endowment), invented no-fog window glass and sold it to Mitsubishi, managed his patent revenues, made documentaries and a dozen art-films still generating doctoral theses — while drinking himself blind daily, shaking naked under a blanket for two hours, and impersonating health-care professionals during DT-delusions; "he put his head in the microwave."
• p. 1038: Found Drama fallout (the n.145 joke's aftermath): the New Yorker film critic ("the guy who replaced the guy who replaced Rafferty") had praised Found Drama in print as drama advanced "three or four leaps in one visionary leap"; when JOI "couldn't keep a straight face anymore and spilled the beans on NPR radio during a 'Fresh Air' dramaturgy-panel," the critic vanished from print for a year and returned with a vendetta — source of the "planet's most psychotic psyche working out its shit right there on the screen" line.
• p. 1039: On Avril: "Do I trust her I do not... Do I think she's irretrievably bats?" — deflected to Rusk (doctorates "in both Gender and Deviance"). The functioning criterion: Avril "careers through the day turboed and in fifth gear" — Deaning, full teaching load, accreditation, prescriptive-linguistics books every 36 months, videophonic conference attendance (she never leaves the Grounds).
• p. 1039: The Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts: co-founded with "cherished academic friends, also bats"; M.G.M. squads dun supermarket managers over 10 ITEMS OR LESS. The Orange Crush campaign — "CRUSH: WITH A TASTE THAT'S ALL IT'S OWN," possessive IT'S — the year before JOI's death: five weeks shuttling to NNY City, two ugly Madison Avenue rallies, acting as her own attorney, never sleeping, living on cigarettes and huge late-night salads.
• p. 1039: Avril's agoraphobia (her line: urban noise): glass-slipper-one hasn't left the Grounds in years; Volvo up on blocks since Orin's B.U. days; exception — JOI's funeral, which was off the grounds.
• p. 1039: Avril has had O.C.D. "since early on out in Weston," undiagnosed only because it doesn't impair function; contrast case Marlon Bain, Orin's ex-doubles partner — washing/checking rituals, T-square on the racquet strings, couldn't pass a doorway without feeling its frame and then distrusting his check; carried bodily out of locker rooms; sweatiest human alive (sweat began after his parents died in "a grotesque freak accident"); JOI cast him in Death in Scarsdale (cf. n.24's filmography entry). Schtitt's mentor's doctrine "you are what you walk between" — "Traversion is character."
• pp. 1039-1040: Orin notices his own speech being infected ("Jesus I'm thinking usage again... The whole topic starts to infect me. It takes me days to clean myself out of it") — the Moms as contagion, mid-paragraph flirtation intrusions ("It takes a certain type of woman to look that good in a pantsuit... I've always—").
• p. 1040: Bain's life ground to a halt (three hours to shower, two to get out the shower door, cotton gloves over washed-raw hands his last E.T.A. summer); Avril, by contrast, is "compulsively efficient and practical about her compulsions": no doors or doorways on HmH's first floor (rooms split by angles, partitions, plants), Prussian bathroom-schedule, and — sub-footnote a (e-text [*27]) — a wall of monitors in her HmH study for obsessively checking the oven/plants/towel fringes by camera; the sub-footnote warns "This may be a lie — no one else at E.T.A. knows anything else about there having been any cameras." Lockable doors upstairs "in service of other compulsions. The Moms's. You can go ahead and ask her what I mean" (the adultery insinuation, unredacted).
• p. 1040: The children as efficiently-scheduled obsessions: Avril keeps "Hal's skull lashed tight to hers without being so overt about it that Hallie has any idea"; "He lives for applause from exactly two hands. He's still performing for her, syntax- and vocabulary-wise, at seventeen, the same way he did when he was ten. The kid is so shut down talking to him is like throwing a stone in a pond. The kid has no idea he even knows something's wrong." Mario: worshipped as "some kind of secular martyr to the mess she'd made of her adult life," under a front of laissez-faire.
• p. 1040: Refusal beat: won't discuss JOI's death or Avril's stability on the record because Hal will read the Moment piece and "read it to Booboo" — they need to come to terms "with it" themselves (Orin fussing over "terms with, terms about" even here).
• pp. 1040-1041: "the Moms is unredeemably fucking bats"; the clichés riff — JOI "always used to say clichés earned their status as clichés because they were so obviously true" (attributed to "a former acquaintance"; cf. the AA cliché-that-works doctrine).
• p. 1041: Two one-liners Orin will say: "I never once saw the two of them fight, not once in eighteen domestic and Academy years" — and "The late Stork was the victim of the most monstrous practical joke ever played, in my opinion, is all I'll say" (unglossed; reads as Avril's serial infidelity-under-perfect-politeness, but the line is left deliberately open).
• p. 1041: Orin offers "one antidote" — sub-footnote b (e-text [*28]): "sic." — for anecdote; the malaprop itself demonstrates the usage-infection. The truly crazy person's "real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy. In military science this is called Psy-Ops, for your info" (Orin lecturing an actual intelligence officer on Psy-Ops).
• p. 1041: Setting the Weston scene, with Orin's age sliding mid-telling (twelve → ten → thirteen): NAFTA-era, "Information Turnpike," broadcast TV, "The Academy wasn't even a twinkle in anybody's eye"; JOI "would disappear periodically when money came in. I think he kept going back up to Lyle in Ontario" (pre-E.T.A. Lyle datum). Avril's Green Babies garden mania; zucchini never picked, left to rot; her father "a millionaire potato-baron-type farmer, in Québec."
• p. 1041: Mid-story flirtation eruption ("Are those earrings electric, or is it you?"); then — answering an elided 'Q.' evidently about where JOI is buried — "In the Moms's family plot. St.-Quelquechose Quebec or something. Never been there. His will said only not anywhere near his own dad's plot. Right near Maine. Heart of the Concavity. The Moms's home town's wiped off the map. Bad ecocycles, real machete-country." (Load-bearing: JOI's head/grave is IN the Concavity — the datum under Gately's and Hal's shared grave-digging vision.)
• pp. 1041-1042: The Rototiller tableau: early March, Avril dragged by the rented machine "like the stride of someone walking an untrained St. Bernard"; her secret petroleum phobia managed by orchestrating eager 13-year-old Orin into pouring the gas himself; two pairs of work-gloves, surgery bags over espadrilles, Fukoama microfiltration mask; Orin ahead on "preemptive rock- and clod-removal."
• p. 1042: Hal, ~4, descends from the deck in fuzzy red pajamas and Nice-Day smiley-face slippers, gravely holding out "a rhombusoid patch of fungus. Big old patch of house-mold" — nasal green, black-speckled, hairy, orange-flecked, from a furnace corner the flamethrower missed — and, Orin realizes with horror, "strangely incomplete. As in it dawns on me right then chewed on, Helen," hairy residue impacted in the kid's teeth.
• pp. 1042-1043: "Be there with me, Helen. Feel the sort of Wagnerish clouds gather" — Hal's own retrospective line quoted: as a kid you felt "the whole cosmos was just this side of fulminating into boiling clouds of elemental gas," held together "only through heroic exercise of will and ingenuity on the part of the Moms." Rototiller shut down (it "diesels a little and farts some blue smoke"); post-racket quiet, one tentative bird-chirp.
• p. 1043: Avril, hardwired-mom, reaches for whatever her baby holds out — "The one sort of case where she wouldn't check before reaching" — then stops at the string border, squinting through dusty glasses. Hal steps forward, "arm up and out in a kind of like Nazi salute. He goes 'I ate this.'" Avril begs his pardon.
• p. 1043: "Her four horsemen: enclosure, communicational imprecision, and untidiness... The fourth horseman stays hidden, of course, like in all quality eschatologies, the unturned card, under wraps till actual game-time." (Only three named; the fourth is withheld from the reader too.) Hal repeats "I ate this," clinically grim, "like the mold's some audit it's his job to show her."
• p. 1043: Orin hands Steeply the Bain lead: Marlon K. Bain, Saprogenic Greetings Inc., BPL-Waltham Bldg., 1214 Totten Pond Road, Waltham — greeting-card company just bought by "a huge novelty concern"; Bain lives in one room (the converted Children's Reading Room of the old Waltham Public Library), "learned from the Moms how to minimize doorways to traverse," is O.C.D.-phobic about e-mail, snail-mail only, and "It'd also be good if you could avoid mentioning the number 2 to him." Inexhaustible on the Moms; please don't ask him about Orin's foibles. (Direct setup for n.269.)
• pp. 1043-1044: Orin succumbing on tape: "all I can see and all I want is to please you... Is this just good journalism, Helen?" — then the "strange bond" speech ("tears down all my normal personal-life boundaries and makes me open totally to you... Does this all sound like some kind of line?"), met by transcript silence ('…').
• p. 1044: The climax, returned to after the digression: "'Help! My son ate this! My son has eaten this! Help!' she kept screaming," holding the mold-rhombus up like a torch, "running in tight little right-faces just inside this perfect box of string"; Orin and Hal staggering back at "our first taste of apocalypse, a corner of the universe suddenly peeled back to reveal what seethed out there just beyond tidiness. What lay just north of order." At the glass door: JOI "palms out and thumbs together to make a frame," Mario at his knee with face squished against the glass, "fucking Booboo also trying to make that frame with his hands" — until neighbor Mr. Reehagen ("so-called 'friends' with her") came over "and finally had to hook up the hose."
• p. 1044: Lettered sub-footnotes: a — the HmH cameras "may be a lie"; b — "sic." (on "antidote").

Backward

• Found Drama: the hoax genre is cataloged in n.24 (scene n024) and the joke explained in n.145; n.234 contains the fallout — the burned New Yorker critic and JOI's NPR "Fresh Air" confession. Verified: that is all the Found Drama content here; the explanation itself is indeed n.145, not n.234.
• Avril's never-leaving-the-Grounds, videophony-only conferencing connects to the videophony essay (pp. 144-151, scene 047) and to her O.C.D. portraiture throughout the E.T.A. scenes (Mrs. Clarke's kitchen, HmH's doorless first floor); "you are what you walk between" is Schtitt's mentor via Orin.
• Lyle-in-Ontario, pre-E.T.A., receiving JOI "when money came in," is a rare datum on Lyle's origin (the-body-tennis guru thread, scenes 036/039ff).

Forward

• Main-text anchor: the n.234 superscript falls at pp. 531-601, amid the Orin-and-"Helen" Phoenix profile material; this note is that thread's actual content.
• The mold incident is the novel's twice-told primal scene: Hal's own one-page memory of it is scene 002 (pp. 10-11), where the same "I ate this" / "Help! My son ate this!" appear from inside Hal's head; n.234 gives the wide shot — Orin's age, the Rototiller, the string border, JOI and Mario framing it through glass. Resonance (not authorial certainty): Hal-ingests-mold rhymes forward with the fungus-derived DMZ (Pemulis's lozenges, pp. 481-482 provenance) and Hal's YG collapse.
• Direct setup for n.269: Orin supplies Bain's full Saprogenic Greetings address and the warning about the number 2; n.269 is the resulting Steeply–Bain correspondence. Bain's sweat/O.C.D. backstory here is the reader's primer for that note.
• JOI's grave "in the Moms's family plot... Heart of the Concavity" (p. 1041) is the geographic key to Gately's fever-dream/Hal's report of digging up Himself's head (Hal's "John Wayne... and I dig up my father's head" is in the pp. 16-17 frame, scene 003; Gately's side recurs in the late hospital material) — and to the A.F.R./U.S.O.U.S. hunt for the Master copy "vaulted sui testator" (n.24, p. 993).
• Avril's Québec origins (potato-baron father, hometown lost to the Concavity) link to her L'Islet-county backstory and the family's U.S.-Canada fault line (Molly Notkin's account, scene 159, pp. 787-795; Marathe/Steeply geopolitics).
• Orin's on-tape seduction-being-seduced ("all I want is to please you"; the "strange bond" speech) is the Subject-machinery (scenes 006, 012, 021) run in reverse by a professional; it ends late in the book with the A.F.R.'s glass-and-roaches abduction of Orin ("Do it to her!", ~pp. 971-972).
• "Clichés earned their status as clichés because they were so obviously true" — JOI anticipating the Ennet House/AA banality-that-works doctrine (irony-sincerity spine; Gately's White Flag material).

• p. 1038: "Insane is just like a catch-term..." — the full functioning-alcoholic-genius paragraph; best single capsule of JOI's last years and the microwave suicide as Orin processes it (fathers-sons, addiction).
• p. 1038: "third-degree burned by the whole Found Drama scam... spilled the beans on NPR" — the hoax's critical-world aftermath (film-optics, irony-sincerity).
• p. 1039: "CRUSH: WITH A TASTE THAT'S ALL IT'S OWN... the M.G.M. squad lost their minds" — the Militant Grammarians set piece (language-grammar).
• p. 1040: "He lives for applause from exactly two hands... like throwing a stone in a pond. The kid has no idea he even knows something's wrong." — Orin's diagnosis of Hal, the book's communication-solipsism thesis from outside (communication-solipsism, family-hamlet).
• p. 1041: "The late Stork was the victim of the most monstrous practical joke ever played" — unglossed, load-bearing ambiguity (family-hamlet).
• p. 1041: "In the Moms's family plot... Right near Maine. Heart of the Concavity." — the burial datum (annularity/nationalism-onan, the head-digging frame).
• p. 1043: "Hallie takes one step forward, arm up and out in a kind of like Nazi salute. He goes 'I ate this.'" — the primal scene's pivot (family-hamlet).
• p. 1043: "Her four horsemen: enclosure, communicational imprecision, and untidiness... The fourth horseman stays hidden... under wraps till actual game-time." (family-hamlet, maps-territory adjacent).
• p. 1044: "'Help! My son ate this!'... our first taste of apocalypse, a corner of the universe suddenly peeled back to reveal what seethed out there just beyond tidiness. What lay just north of order." — with JOI/Mario making hand-frames through the glass (family-hamlet, film-optics).