Disability and Deformity

Schtitt talks, Mario listens, generally. Mario is basically a born listener. One of the positives to being visibly damaged is that people can sometimes forget you’re there, even when they’re interfacing with you. You almost get to eavesdrop. It’s almost like they’re like: If nobody’s really in there, there’s nothing to be shy about. That’s why bullshit often tends to drop away around damaged listeners, deep beliefs revealed, diary-type private reveries indulged out loud; and, listening, the beaming and bradykinetic boy gets to forge an interpersonal connection he knows only he can truly feel, here.

At which point U.S.S. Millicent stopped them in an unprickly thicket of what later turned out to be poison sumac and turned with a strange glint in the one eye that wasn’t in pine-shadow and crushed Mario’s large head to the area just below her breasts and said she needed to confess that Mario’s eyelashes and vest with extendable police lock he used for staying upright in one place had for quite some time now driven her right around the bend with sensual feeling.

Mario’s face was so squashed against the U.S.S. Millicent’s thorax that he had to contort his mouth way out to the left to breathe. […] U.S.S.M.K. was trying to undo Mario’s corduroys but was frustrated by the complex system of snaps and fasteners at the bottom of his police lock’s Velcro vest, which overlapped his trouser’s own fasteners

‘The leukodermatic. The xanthodantic. The maxillofacially swollen. Those with distorted orbits of all kinds. Get out from under the sun’s cove-lighting is what this says. Come in from the spectral rain.’ […] ‘All ye peronic or teratoidal. The phrenologically malformed. The suppuratively lesioned. The endocrinologically malodorous of whatever ilk. Run don’t walk on down. The acervulus-nosed. The radically -ectomied. The morbidly diaphoretic with a hankie in every pocket. The chronically granulomatous. The ones it says here the ones the cruel call Two-Baggers—one bag for your head, one bag for the observer’s head in case your bag falls off. The hated and dateless and shunned, who keep to the shadows. Those who undress only in front of their pets. The quote aesthetically challenged. Leave your lazarettes and oubliettes, I’m reading this right here, your closets and cellars and TP Tableaux, find Nurturing and Support and the Inner Resources to face your own unblinking sight, is what this goes on to say, a bit overheatedly maybe. Is it our place to say. It says here Hugs Not Ughs. It says Come don the veil of the type and token. Come learn to love what’s hidden inside. To hold and cherish. The almost unbelievably thick-ankled. The kyphotic and lordotic. The irremediably cellulitic. It says Progress Not Perfection. It says Never Perfection. The fatally pulchritudinous: Welcome. The Actaeonizing, side by side with the Medusoid. The papuled, the macular, the albinic. Medusas and odalisques both: Come find common ground. All meeting rooms windowless. That’s in ital: all meeting rooms windowless.’

and people looking at her like you look at the blind, naked gazes, not knowing she could see everything at all times. She likes the wet walk for this, everything milky and halated through her veil’s damp linen, the brick sidewalks of Charles St. unchipped and impersonally crowded, her legs on autopilot, she a perceptual engine

She had in a way done as they’d made Jim do near the end and admitted powerlessness over this cage, this unfree show, weeping, literally clutching her heart, smoking first the Chore Boy-scrap she’d used to trap the vapors and form a smokable resin, then bits of the carpet and the acetate panties she’d filtered the solution through hours earlier, weeping and veilless and yarn-haired, like some grotesque clown, in all four mirrors of her little room’s walls.

The Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed was unofficially founded in London in B.S. 1940 in London U.K. by the cross-eyed, palate-clefted, and wildly carbuncular wife of a junior member of the House of Commons, a lady whom Sir Winston Churchill, P.M.U.K., having had several glasses of port plus a toddy at a reception for an American Lend-Lease administrator, had addressed in a fashion wholly inappropriate to social intercourse between civilized gentlemen and ladies. Unwittingly all but authoring the Union designed to afford the scopophobic empathic fellowship and the genesis of sturdy inner resources through shame-free and unconstrained concealment, W. Churchill—when the lady, no person’s doormat, informed him with prim asperity that he appeared to be woefully inebriated—made the anecdotally famous reply that while, yes, yea verily, he was indeed inebriated, he would the following A.M. be once again sober, while she, dear lady, would tomorrow still be hideously and improbably deformed.

She is the only veiled woman here, […] and she is given a certain wide social berth, allowed to delay and orbit and stand unengaged at the fringes of shifting groups, obliquely glanced at, veil going concave at each inbreath, […] ignoring the foreign academic who wishes to know where she works with that veil, turning from him, rudely, brain heaving in its bone-box, memorizing every detail like collecting empty shells, sipping cloudy juice under neatly lifted corners of veil, now looking at instead of through the translucent cloth, the Improbably Deformed’s equivalent of closing the eyes in concentration on sound, letting the Very Last Party wash over her, passed gracefully by different mingling guests and once or twice almost touched, seeing only inrushing and then billowing white, listening to different mingling voices the way the unveiled young taste wine.

The twirler induced in heterosexual males what U.H.I.D. later told her was termed the Actaeon Complex, which is a kind of deep phylogenic fear of transhuman beauty.

He had to be more or less scraped out, Mario, like the meat of an oyster from a womb to whose sides he’d been found spiderishly clinging, tiny and unobtrusive, attached by cords of sinew at both feet and a hand, the other fist stuck to his face by the same material. He was a complete surprise and terribly premature, and withered, and he spent the next many weeks waggling his withered and contractured arms up at the Pyrex ceilings of incubators, being fed by tubes and monitored by wires and cupped in sterile palms, his head cradled by a thumb.

This is probably also the place to mention Hal’s older brother Mario’s khaki-colored skin, an odd dead gray-green that in its corticate texture and together with his atrophic in-curled arms and arachnodactylism gave him, particularly from a middle-distance, an almost uncannily reptilian/dinosaurian look. The fingers being not only mucronate and talonesque but nonprehensile, which is what made Mario’s knifework untenable at table.

People who’re somehow burned at birth, withered or ablated way past anything like what might be fair, they either curl up in their fire, or else they rise. Withered saurian homodontic Mario floats, for Hal.

it was Hal, not she, who, when the veiled legate from the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed showed up at the E.T.A. driveway’s portcullis to discuss with Mario issues of blind inclusion v. visual estrangement, of the openness of concealment the veil might afford him, it was Hal, even as Mario laughed and half-bowed, it was Hal, brandishing his Dunlop stick, who told the guy to go peddle his linen someplace else.

There’s maybe half a dozen or so other veiled people in the White Flag hall tonight; a decent percentage of people in the 11-Step Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed are also in 12-Step fellowships for other issues besides hideous deformity. Most of the room’s veiled AAs are women, though there is this one male veiled U.H.I.D. guy that’s an active White Flagger, Tommy S. or F., who years ago nodded out on a stuffed acrylic couch with a bottle of Rémy and a lit Tiparillo—the guy now wears U.H.I.D. veils and a whole spectrum of silk turtlenecks and assorted hats and classy lambskin driving gloves. Gately’s had the U.H.I.D.-and-veil philosophy explained to him in passing a couple times but still doesn’t much get it, it seems like a gesture of shame and concealment, still, to him, the veil.

that summer the smiling quiet foster father even bought, had found somewhere, a cheesy rubber Raquel Welch full-head pull-on mask, with hair, and would now nightly come in in the dark and lift Its limp soft head up and struggle and lug to get the mask on and the relevant holes aligned for air, and then would diddle his way to extremity and cry out ‘RAQUEL!’ and then but he would just clamber out and off and leave the dark bedroom smiling and sated and lots of times leave the mask still on It

and how the infant emerged all dry and hard like a constipated turdlet, with no protective moisture and no afterbirth-material following it out, and how the emerged infant was tiny and dry and all withered and the color of strong tea, and dead, and also had no face, had in utero developed no eyes or nostrils and just a little lipless hyphen of a mouth, and its limbs were malformed and arachnodactylic, and there had been some sort of translucent reptilian like webbing between its mucronate digits

She held and swaddled the dead thing just as if it were alive instead of dead, and she began to carry it around with her wherever she went, just as she imagined devoted mothers carry their babies with them everywhere they go, the faceless infant’s corpse completely veiled and hidden in a little pink blanket the addicted expectant mother’d let herself buy at Woolworth’s at seven months

There are maybe about six or nine A.F.R. here in the drafty back room, silent as ever, seated with motionless wheels, flannel blankets obscuring an absence of the legs, also of course flannel-shirted, masked in synthetic-blend heraldic-flag irises with flaming transperçant stems at the chin and slits for eyes and round utter holes for mouths—all except for one particular of the A.F.R., in an unpretentious sportcoat and tie and the worst mask of all, a plain yellow polyresin circle with an obscenely simple smily-face in thin black lines

A few legless thick-armed men climb the shelves by hand and hang up near the drop-ceiling by special climbing equipment and suction-cups fitted to their stumps, brown arms busy in the upper shelving, dismantling and searching upside-down like obscene industrious bugs.

‘It’s the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed. The veil is a sort of fellowship caparison.’ […] ‘There’s a brief ceremony. It’s a bit like giving out chips over at the Better Late Than Never meeting, for Varying Lengths. The new U.H.I.D.s stand and receive the veil and don the veil and stand there and recite that the veil they’ve donned is a Type and a Symbol, and that they are choosing freely to be bound to wear it always—a day at a time—both in light and darkness, both in solitude and before others’ gaze, and as with strangers so with familiar friends, even Daddies. That no mortal eye will see it withdrawn. That they hereby declare openly that they wish to hide from all sight. Unquote.’

‘In other words you hide your hiding. And you do this out of shame, Don: you’re ashamed of the fact that you want to hide from sight. You’re ashamed of your uncontrolled craving for shadow. U.H.I.D.’s First Step is admission of powerlessness over the need to hide. U.H.I.D. allows members to be open about their essential need for concealment. In other words we don the veil. We don the veil and wear the veil proudly and stand very straight and walk briskly wherever we wish, veiled and hidden, and but now completely up-front and unashamed about the fact that how we appear to others affects us deeply, about the fact that we want to be shielded from all sight. U.H.I.D. supports us in our decision to hide openly.’

‘Don, I’m perfect. I’m so beautiful I drive anybody with a nervous system out of their fucking mind. Once they’ve seen me they can’t think of anything else and don’t want to look at anything else and stop carrying out normal responsibilities and believe that if they can only have me right there with them at all times everything will be all right. Everything. Like I’m the solution to their deep slavering need to be jowl to cheek with perfection.’ […] ‘I am so beautiful I am deformed.’ […] ‘I am deformed with beauty.’

A sociopathic and mentally retarded Lance Corporal at Leavenworth, strapped down with electrode appliqués and headset-recorder, was able to report that the thing apparently opens with an engaging and high-quality cinematic shot of a veiled woman going through a large building’s revolving doors and catching a glimpse of someone else in the revolving doors, somebody the sight of whom makes her veil billow, before the subject’s mental and spiritual energies abruptly declined to a point where even near-lethal voltages through the electrodes couldn’t divert his attention from the Entertainment.

Lenz regales how at that Halloween Party with the necklace of birds there’d been allegedly a Concavity-refugee infant there, at the party […] a normal-size and unferal infant but totally without a skull, lying in a kind of raised platform or dais by the fireplace with its shapeless and deskulled head-region supported and, like (shuddering), contained in a sort of lidless plastic box, and its eyes were sunk way down in its face, which was the consistency of like quicksand, the face, and its nose concave and its mouth hanging out over either side of the boneless face, and the total head had like conformed to the inside of the containing box it was contained in, the head, and appeared roughly square in overall outline, the head, and the woman with the lei of gull-heads and other persons in costumes had ingested hallucinogens and drank mescal and ate the little worms in the mescal and had performed circled rituals around the box and platform around 2355h., worshipping the infant, or as they termed it simply The Infant, as if there were only One.

He gets a serious burn on his pelvis leaning against a hot steel stove talking to Mrs. Clarke. His hip is swaddled in bandages under Orin’s old corduroys, and there’s a sucking sound of salve when he walks, late at night, unable to sleep. The birth-related disability that wasn’t even definitively diagnosed until Mario was six and had let Orin tattoo his shoulder with the red coil of an immersion heater is called Familial Dysautonomia, a neurological deficit whereby he can’t feel physical pain very well. A lot of the E.T.A.s kid him about they should have such problems, and even Hal’s sometimes felt a twinge of envy about it, but the defect is a serious hassle and actually very dangerous, see for instance the burnt pelvis, which wasn’t even discovered until Mrs. Clarke thought she smelled her eggplant overcooking.

And across the little street that’s crammed with cars everybody has to move at 0000h. is Ennet’s House, where the Headmistress has a disability and had had a wheelchair ramp installed and has twice invited Mario in during the day for a Caffeine-Free Millennial Fizzy, and Mario likes the place: it’s crowded and noisy and none of the furniture has protective plastic wrap, but nobody notices anybody else or comments on a disability and the Headmistress is kind to the people and the people cry in front of each other.

Joelle v.D. in her terry robe and gauze veil and still clutching a toothbrush has climbed out onto the little balcony outside the 5-Woman’s window and into a skinny ailanthus beside it and is coming down, showing about two meters of spectacularly undeformed thigh, shouting Gately’s name by the first name, which he likes. […] It occurs to Ken Erdedy, looking up into the oak past his upraised hands, that this deformed veiled girl likes Don Gately in an extracurricular way, it would seem.

Q.v. also the wheelchair that now all of a sudden shoots down the hillside’s van’s ramp as a madly squeaking brass-colored blur, a snowplow-like scoop-type thing welded to it and out front skimming the ground and throwing off chaff from the swath of grass it’s mowing, moving terrifically fast, brakes unapplied, the legless figure up on burly stumps in the chair fleur-de-lis-with-sword-stem-masked and bent far forward for a skier’s pure speed […] the madly squeaking wheelchair aloft over hillside moguls and coming back down and up again

Something has taken the tight ratchet in Joelle’s belly and turned it three turns to the good. It’s the first time she’s felt sure she wants to keep straight no matter what it means facing. No matter if Don Gately takes Demerol or goes to jail or rejects her if she can’t show him the face. It’s the first time in a long time—tonight, 11/14—Joelle’s even considered possibly showing somebody the face.

The nation U.S.A. treated wheelchaired persons with the solicitude that the weak substitute for respect. As if he were a sickly child, Fortier. Buses knelt, smooth ramps flanked steps, attendants pushed him aboard flights in full solicitous view of those standing upon legs. Fortier owned attachable legs of flesh-tone polymer resins whose interior circuitry was responsive to large-bundle neural stimuli from his stumps, which with metal crutches whose bracelets locked to his wrists allowed a sort of swirling parody of perambulation. But Fortier, he rarely wore the prostheses, not in U.S.A., and never for public transit. He preferred the condescension, the pretense of institutional ‘sensitivity’ to his ‘right’ of the ‘equal access’; it honed the edge of his senses of purpose. Like all of them, Fortier was willing to sacrifice.

The authority made a spire of her fingers beneath her chin and gazed at Marathe’s cocked head with a face of respect and sympathy but not solicitude, also which made snapping her neck with one hand seem a sad choice for Marathe.

‘She had no skull, this woman. Later I am learning she had been among the first Swiss children of southwestern Switzerland to become born without a skull, from the toxicities in association of our enemy’s invasion on paper. Without the confinement of the metal hat the head hung from the shoulders like the half-filled balloon or empty bag, the eyes and oral cavity greatly distended from this hanging, and sounds exiting this cavity which were difficult to listen.’

‘But still, something about her moved you to fall madly in love. Her gratitude and humility and acceptance and that kind of quiet dignity really horribly handic—birth-defected people usually have.’ ‘It was not mad. I had already chosen. 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.’

‘My wife’s wedding helmet was of the finest nickel mined and molded by friends in the nickel mines of southwest Switzerland. Each of us, we were rolled down the aisle in special conveyings. Hers with special pans and drains, for the fluids. It was the happiest day ever for me, since the train. The cleric asked did I choose this woman. There was a long time of silence. My whole very being came to a knifelike point in that instant, Katherine, my hand holding tenderly the hook of my wife.’

—That the by all reports exceptionally attractive Madame Psychosis had suffered an irreparable facial trauma on the same Thanksgiving Day that her mother had killed herself with a kitchen-appliance, leaving her (Madame Psychosis) hideously and improbably deformed, and that her membership in the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed’s 13-Step self-help organization was no kind of metaphor or ruse.

—That, right on the hysterical cusp where internalized rage can so easily shift to externalized rage, the mother had hurled the low-pH flask at the Daddy, who’d reflexively ducked; and that the rotter, one Orin, right behind, a former tennis champion with superb upper-body reflexes, had instinctively ducked also, leaving Madame Psychosis—dazed and bradykinetic from the sudden venting of so many high-pressure repressive family systems—open for a direct facial hit, resulting in the traumatic deformity.

Mrs. Waite is played by veiled U.H.I.D. House resident Joelle van D., except without her veil, and what’s more without any clothes, as in starkers, gorgeous, with that same incredible body as in the other one except here this time with the face not of a jowly British P.M. but of a total female angel, not sexy so much as angelic, like all the world’s light had gotten together and arranged itself into the shape of a face. Or something. It looks like somebody, Joelle’s face, but Gately can’t for the life of him place who, and it’s not just the distraction of the inhumanly gorgeous naked bod below, because the dream is not like a sex-dream.

What was disconcerting was that when her head was down the veil hung loose at the same vertical angle as when her head was up, only now it was perfectly smooth and untextured, a smooth white screen with nothing behind it. […] When Joelle’s head came back up, the reassuring little hills and valleys of veiled features reappeared behind the screen.

‘When he talked about this thing as a quote perfect entertainment, terminally compelling—it was always ironic—he was having a sly little jab at me. I used to go around saying the veil was to disguise lethal perfection, that I was too lethally beautiful for people to stand. It was a kind of joke I’d gotten from one of his entertainments, the Medusa-Odalisk thing. That even in U.H.I.D. I hid by hiddenness, in denial about the deformity itself. So Jim took a failed piece and told me it was too perfect to release—it’d paralyze people.

An hysterical rumor that the Québec players had been spotted coming down a ramp out of a charter-bus in the main lot and were by all appearances not the Québec J.D.C. and -W.C. squads but some sort of Special-Olympicish Québec adult wheelchair-tennis contingent—this rumor flew wildly around the locker room and then died out when a couple of the sub-14’s who burned nervous energy by scampering around checking rumors scampered out and up the stairs to check the rumor and failed to return.

and Mario, being alone and only fourteen and largely clueless about anti-stem defensive strategies outside T-stations, had had no one worldly or adult along with him there to explain to him why the request of men with outstretched hands for a simple handshake or High Five shouldn’t automatically be honored and granted, and Mario had extended his clawlike hand and touched and heartily shaken Loach’s own fuliginous hand, which led through a convoluted but kind of heartwarming and faith-reaffirming series of circumstances to B. Loach, even w/o an official B.A., being given an Asst. Trainer’s job at E.T.A.

The E.M. cops call Unit #5 ‘The Shed,’ they say, because its residents don’t seem housed there so much as more like stored there. The E.M. cops pronounce stored ‘stew-wad.’ The chronic catatonics themselves they refer to as ‘objay darts,’ which is something else Don G. over in #6 has never understood.

like veiled Joelle van Dyne, who entered the House just today, 11/8, Interdependence Day, after the E.R. physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital who last night had pumped her full of Inderal and nitro had looked upon her unveiled face and been deeply affected, and had taken a special interest

‘It is, for example, largely conceded that Les Assassins’ confinement to their epithetic wheelchairs can be traced to rural southwestern pre-Experialist Quebec’s infamous “Le Jeu du Prochain Train,” and that the A.F.R.’s Root Cult itself was comprised largely or perhaps even entirely of veteran devotees and practitioners of this savage, nihilistic, and mettle testing jeu pour-meme.

‘The game’s object is to jump last and land still fully limbed upon the opposite embankment. […] A player caught beneath a wheel and run over is frequently spread out along a hundred red meters or more of reddened track, and is transported home in a number of ceremonial asbestos and nickel mining shovels provided by the Jeu’s older and frequently dismembered directeurs. […] ‘As happens more often, purportedly, a boy who has dived more than half way across the tracks when he is struck and hit, loses one or more legs——either there on the spot, if lucky, or later, under surgical gas and orthopedic saws applied to what are customarily violently angled masses of unrecognizably contuded meat.’

Mario didn’t drill and couldn’t play, and needed all the sleep he could get. […] Mario thrashed and sat up in bed, a small hunched shape with a big head against the gray light of the window.

his black-veiled, ethnically Arab wife wordlessly attends him, loosening any constrictive clothing, adjusting the room’s lighting, fitting the complexly molded dinner tray over his head so that his shoulders support the tray and allow it to project into space just below his chin […] the medical attaché’s wife, like all the veiled wives and companions of the Prince’s legatees, has a complimentary goodwill account.

Eighteen in May, Mario Incandenza’s designated function around Enfield Tennis Academy is filmic: sometimes during A.M. drills or P.M. matches he’ll be assigned by Coach Schtitt et al. to set up an old camcorder or whatever video stuff’s to hand on a tripod and record a certain area of court, videotaping different kids’ strokes, footwork, certain tics and hitches in serves or running volleys, so the staff can show the tapes to the kids instructionally, letting the kids see on the screen exactly what a coach or prorector’s talking about.

it’s usually eighteen-year-old Mario Incandenza who gets to ride along in the sidecar, carefully braced and strapped, the wind blowing his thin hair straight back off his oversized head, beaming and waving his claw at people he knows. It’s possibly odd that the leptosomatic Mario I., so damaged he can’t even grip a stick, much less flail at a moving ball with one, is the one kid at E.T.A. whose company Schtitt seeks out, is in fact pretty much the one person with whom Schtitt speaks candidly, lets his pedagogical hair down.

Mario thinks of a steel pole raised to double its designed height and clips his shoulder on the green steel edge of a dumpster, pirouetting halfway to the cement before Schtitt darts in to catch him, and it almost looks like they’re doing a dance-floor dip

Three passing Allstonian street-kids mock and make fun of Mario’s appearance behind the pair’s backs. Some of Mario’s thinking-faces are almost orgasmic: fluttery and slack.

Marathe sat alone and blanket-lapped in his customized fauteuil de rollent on a kind of outcropping or shelf about halfway up, waiting, amusing himself with his shadow. […] so that the spokes of his chair’s rear wheels cast over two whole counties below gigantic asterisk-shadows, whose fine black radial lines he could cause to move by playing slightly with the wheels’ rubber rims; and his head’s shadow brought to much of the suburb West Tucson a premature dusk.

But once Marathe had committed not just to pretend to betray his Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents in order to secure advanced medical care for the medical needs of his wife, but to in truth do this—betray, perfidiously: now pretending only to M. Fortier and his A.F.R. superiors that he was merely pretending to feed some betraying information to B.S.S. —once this decision, Marathe was without all power, served now at the pleasures of the power of Steeply and the B.S.S. of Hugh Steeply: and now they spoke mostly the U.S.A. English of Steeply’s preference.

Marathe rose slightly on his stumps in the chair, showing some emotions at this Steeply. […] Marathe leaned again forward on his stumps. ‘Make amusement all you wish. But choose with care. You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice. […]’

‘But sure. The fanatically patriotic Wheelchair Assassins of southern Québec scorn this type of interpersonal sentiment between people.’

The U.S.S. Millicent Kent stowed a tennis ball in each hip pocket and took Mario’s claw and said here to walk this way and she’d show him real quick, and get his like feedback on the issue, and plus have a witness when they got back and she told people about it. […] With the girl supporting him with one hand and beating an easement through the brush with the other they proceeded deeper into the thicket on the lip.

His wheelchair squeaked very slightly whenever he moved.

pursuing her active schedule with the extraordinary prosthesis portably installed in a stylish Etienne Aigner purse. The heart’s ventricular tubes ran up to shunts in the woman’s arms and ferried life-giving blood back and forth between her living, active body and the extraordinary heart in her purse. […] the victimized woman staggered frantically past in the wake of the fleet transvestite, shouting for help for her stolen heart.

That the prosthetic crime victim gave spirited chase for over four blocks before collapsing onto her empty chest is testimony to the impressive capacity of the Jarvik IX replacement procedure, was the anonymous comment of a public medical official reached for comment by Moment.

Even with high-end TPs’ high-def viewer-screens, consumers perceived something essentially blurred and moist-looking about their phone-faces, a shiny pallid indefiniteness that struck them as not just unflattering but somehow evasive, furtive, untrustworthy, unlikable. […] The proposed solution to what the telecommunications industry’s psychological consultants termed Video-Physiognomic Dysphoria (or VPD) was, of course, the advent of High-Definition Masking

The high-def masks, when not in use, simply hung on a small hook on the side of a TP’s phone-console, admittedly looking maybe a bit surreal and discomfiting when detached and hanging there empty and wrinkled, and sometimes there were potentially awkward mistaken-identity snafus involving multi-user family or company phones and the hurried selection and attachment of the wrong mask taken from some long row of empty hanging masks

His smile, below the Bolex camera strapped to his large but sort of withered-looking head, is constant and broad as he films the line’s serpentine movement against glass shelves full of prizes.

She is hidden from all view by a jointed trip-tych screen of cream chiffon that glows red and green in the lights of the phone bank and the cueing panel’s dials and frames her silhouette. Her silhouette is cleanly limned against the screen, sitting cross-legged in its insectile microphonic headset, smoking.

‘Obesity,’ she says. ‘Obesity with hypogonadism. Also morbid obesity. Nodular leprosy with leonine facies.’ […] She says ‘The acromegalic and hyperkeratosistic. The enuretic, this year of all years. The spasmodically torticollic.’

‘Those with saddle-noses. Those with atrophic limbs. And yes chemists and pure-math majors also those with atrophic necks. Scleredema adultorum. Them that seep, the serodermatotic. Come one come all, this circular says. The hydrocephalic. The tabescent and chachetic and anorexic. The Brag’s-Diseased, in their heavy red rinds of flesh. The dermally wine-stained or carbuncular or steatocryptotic or God forbid all three. Marin-Amat Syndrome, you say? Come on down. The psoriatic. The exzematically shunned. And the scrofulodermic. Bell-shaped steatopygiacs, in your special slacks. Afflictees of Pityriasis Rosea. It says here Come all ye hateful. Blessed are the poor in body, for they.’

Madame Psychosis has done U.H.I.D. stuff before, once or twice. He is listening to her read four levels below the Oblangated Recess that becomes the heating shaft’s nubbin of spine, ad-lib-style reading from one of the PR-circulars of the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed, an agnostic-style 12-step support-group deal for what it calls the ‘aesthetically challenged.’

Mario sits on the low little van der Rohe–knockoff coffee table with bowed legs (the table) with his head cocked right up next the speaker and his claws in his lap. His toes tend to point inward when he sits.

Whenever Avril parts ficus leaves to check, Mario’s still hunched pigeon-toed and cocked in the same RCA-Victorish posture, with the little horizontal forehead-crease that means he’s either listening or thinking hard.

‘The multiple amputee. The prosthetically malmatched. The snaggletoothed, wattled, weak-chinned, and walrus-cheeked. The palate-clefted. The really large-pored. The excessively but not necessarily lycanthropically hirsute. The pin-headed. The convulsively Tourettic. The Parkinsonianly tremulous. The stunted and gnarled. The teratoid of overall visage. The twisted and hunched and humped and halitotic. The in any way asymmetrical. The rodential- and saurian- and equine-looking.’

‘The tri-nostriled. The invaginate of mouth and eye. Those with those dark loose bags under their eyes that hang halfway down their faces. Those with Cushing’s Disease. Those who look like they have Down Syndrome even though they don’t have Down Syndrome. You decide. You be the judge. It says You are welcome regardless of severity. Severity is in the eye of the sufferer, it says. Pain is pain. Crow’s feet. Birthmark. Rhinoplasty that didn’t take. Mole. Overbite. A bad-hair year.’

#4’s residents wear jammies 24/7, the diapers underneath giving them a lumpy and toddlerish aspect. The patients are frequently visible at #4’s windows, in jammies, splayed and open-mouthed, sometimes shrieking, sometimes just mutely open-mouthed, splayed against the windows. They give everybody at Ennet House the howling fantods. One ancient retired Air Force nurse does nothing but scream ‘Help!’ for hours at a time from a second-story window.

Unit #5, kittycorner across the little street from Ennet House, is for catatonics and various vegetablish, fetal-positioned mental patients subcontracted to a Commonwealth outreach agency by overcrowded LTIs. […] But in nice weather, when its more portable inmates are carried out and placed in the front lawn to take the air, standing there propped-up and staring, they present a tableau it took Gately some time to get used to. A couple newer residents got discharged late in Gately’s treatment for tossing firecrackers into the crowd of catatonics on the lawn to see if they could get them to jump around or display affect.

On warm nights, one long-limbed bespectacled lady who seems more autistic than catatonic tends to wander out of The Shed wrapped in a bedsheet and lay her hands on the thin shiny bark of a silver maple in #5’s lawn, stands there touching the tree until she’s missed at bedcheck and retrieved; and since Gately graduated treatment and took the offer of a live-in Staffer’s job at Ennet House he sometimes wakes up […] and watches the catatonic touching the tree in her sheet and glasses, illuminated by Comm. Ave.’s neon or the weird sodium light that spills down from the snooty tennis prep school overhead on its hill, he’ll watch her standing there and feel an odd chilled empathy he tries not to associate with watching his mother pass out on some piece of living-room chintz.

sitting by herself under what used to be her window, the daughter of a low-pH chemist and homemaker from western Kentucky, a lot of fun to be with, normally, if you can get over the disconcerting veil.

She and poor Molly Notkin are just the same, Joelle reflects, seated alone, watching doctoral candidates taste wine—sisters, sororal twins. With her fear of direct light, Notkin. And the disguises and whiskers are simply veiled veils. […] The whole and the partial. The damaged and the intact. The deformed and the paralyzingly beautiful. The insane and the attendant. The hidden and the blindingly open. The performer and the audience. No Zen-type One, always rather Two, one upside-down in a convex lens.

and she gets asked about the deal with the veil with a lack of delicacy she rather prefers.

A sooty wheelchaired man with a dead white face below a NOTRE RAI PAYS cap silently extends a hand for coins—a puffed red cut across that businesslike palm is half-healed and almost visibly closing. It looks like a dent in dough. Joelle gives him a folded U.S. twenty and likes that he says nothing.

The rain’s wet veil blurs things like Jim had designed his neonatal lens to blur things in imitation of a neonatal retina, everything recognizable and yet without outline. A blur that’s more deforming than fuzzy.

Jim’s eldest, Orin—punter extraordinaire, dodger of flung acid extraordinaire—had once shown Joelle van Dyne his childhood collection of husks of the Lemon Pledge that the school’s players used to keep the sun off. Different-sized legs and portions of legs, well-muscled arms, a battery of five-holed masks hung on nails from an upright fiberboard sheet. Not all the husks had names below them.

the figure a man in a wheelchair, in a coat and tie, his lap blanketed and no legs below, his well-fed face artistically reddened with some terrible joy, his smile’s arc of the extreme curvature that exists between mirth and fury, his ecstasy terrible to see, his head hairless and plastic and cast back, his eyes on the blue harlequin-patches of the post-storm sky, looking straight up, or having a seizure, or ecstatic, his arms also up and out in a gesture of submission or triumph or thanks, his oddly thick right hand the receptacle for the black spine of the case of some new film cartridge being advertised for distribution, the cartridge stuck like a tongue out of a slot in his (lineless) palm

For a while, after the acid, after first Orin left and then Jim came and made her sit through that filmed apology-scene and then vanished and then came back but only to—only four years seven months six days past—to leave, for a while, after taking the veil, for a while she liked to get really high and clean. Joelle did.

he’d had occasion to see one or two of these linen veils before, around, like what she wore, and was interested and rendered curious. He pronounced all four syllables of interested, which Joelle, from Kentucky, enjoyed. If he might be so bold, he said, tipping his hat. Joelle had engaged with him completely, which was extremely rare, even off the air.

Churchill, doubtless under weighty emotional pressures during this period in history, had then proceeded to extinguish his cigar in the lady’s sherry and to place a finger-bowl napkin delicately over the ruined features of her flaming visage. The laminated non-photo U.H.I.D. membership card Joelle showed the interested old black gentleman related all this data and more in a point-size so tiny the card looked somehow both blank and defaced.

Notkin secures Joelle’s veil for her during removal of the beaded coat and poncho, then lifts the veil slightly in a practiced two-finger gesture to deliver a double-cheek kiss that is sour with cigarettes and wine—Joelle never smokes when veiled—asking how Joelle got here and then without waiting for an answer offering her that odd kind of British-Columbian apple juice they’d found they both liked so

A good muddy juice fills Joelle’s mouth with spit that’s as good as the juice, and her linen veil is drying and beginning once again comfortingly to flutter with her breath, and, perched alone and glanced at covertly by persons who don’t know they know her voice, she feels the desire to raise the veil before a mirror, to refine some of her purse’s untouched Material, raise the veil and set free the encaged rapacious thing inside to breathe the only uncloth’d gas it can stomach; she feels ghastly and sad; she looks like death, her mascara’s all over the place; no one can tell.

His damaged grinning boy Joelle never got to know because Orin had disliked him often carried the case with the lenses, grinning like somebody squinting into bright light. That insufferable child actor Smothergill used to contort his face at the boy and he’d just laugh, which sent Smothergill into tantrums that Miriam Prickett would resolve in the bathroom somehow.

She is watching herself with unselfconscious fascination in the only serviceable mirror here outside the bathroom. This absence of shame at the self-obsession. Is she Canadian? Mirror-cult? Not possibly a U.H.I.D.: the bearing’s all wrong.

Would she kill somebody else to get out of the cage? Was the allegedly fatally entertaining and scopophiliac thing Jim alleges he made out of her unveiled face here at the start of Y.T.S.D.B. a cage or really a door? […] Did she kill him, somehow, just inclining veilless over that lens?

Joelle applauds the Xtatic woman as well, because they are, Joelle admits freely, the paps, they are attractive, which in the Union is designated Compelling Within Compatible Relative Limits; Joelle has no problem seeing beauty approved, within compatible relative limits

The ’base frees and condenses, compresses the whole experience to the implosion of one terrible shattering spike in the graph, an afflated orgasm of the heart that makes her feel, truly, attractive, sheltered by limits, deveiled and loved, observed and alone and sufficient and female, full, as if watched for an instant by God.

She undoes the four pins and removes the veil from her head and places it on the counter with the rest of the Material. […] When the tube gets too hot to hold she takes and folds her veil and uses it as a kind of oven-mitt over the fingers of her left hand, careful (from habit and experience) not to let the bottom corners get close enough to the flame to brown.

the light sharp bitter tint of a heated sky’s blue that’s left her uprightly fetal with chin on knees in yet another North American bathroom, deveiled, too pretty for words, maybe the Prettiest Girl Of All Time (Prettiest G.O.A.T.) […] pulls her face up to face the unclean medicine-cabinet mirror, twin roses of flame still hanging in the glass’s corner, hair of the flame she’s eaten now trailing like the legs of wasps through the air of the glass she uses to locate the de-faced veil and what’s inside it

But none of these handicapped guys were old. And they were all awfully burly for guys in wheelchairs. And three in an hour’s kind of stretching it, I was thinking. […] And but so the point is I decamp the trailer like x number of hours later, and the guy’s still there, mired in gravel. And in the distance I could swear he’s got on some kind of domino-mask. And now everywhere I go the last several days there seems to be a statistically improbable number of wheelchaired figures around, lurking, somehow just a little too nonchalantly.

Burt F. Smith is also in there, way down by himself at the table’s far end, trying to saw at a waffle with a knife and fork attached to the stumps of his wrists with Velcro bands. […] Burt F.S. got mugged and beaten half to death in Cambridge on Xmas Eve of last year, and left there to like freeze there, in an alley, in a storm, and ended up losing his hands and feet.

Watching Burt F. Smith smoke a Benson & Hedges by holding it between his stumps with his elbows out like a guy with pruning shears is an adventure in fucking pathos as far as Gately’s concerned. And Geoffrey Day cracks wise about There But for Grace. And forget about what it’s like trying to watch Burt F. Smith try and light a match.

Doony Glynn’s been observed telling Burt F.S. things like that there’s some new guy coming into the Disabled Room off Pat’s office with Burt F.S. who’s without not only hands and feet but arms and legs and even a head and who communicates by farting in Morris Code. This sally earned Glynn three days Full-House Restriction and a week’s extra Chore for what Johnette Foltz described in the Log as ‘XSive Cruetly.’

It wasn’t the entire attraction, but she really was almost grotesquely lovely. […] The twirler was so pretty that not even the senior B.U. football Terriers could summon the saliva to speak to her at Athletic mixers. In fact she was almost universally shunned.

Anyway, Mario II’s incomplete gestation and arachnoidal birth left the kid with some lifelong character-building physical challenges. Size was one, he being in sixth grade about the size of a toddler and at 18+ in a range somewhere between elf and jockey. There was the matter of the withered-looking and bradyauxetic arms, which just as in a hair-raising case of Volkmann’s contracture curled out in front of his thorax in magiscule S’s and were usable for rudimentary knifeless eating and slapping at doorknobs until they sort of turned just enough and doors could be kicked open and forming a pretend lens-frame to scout scenes through, plus maybe tossing tennis balls very short distances to players who wanted them, but not for much else, though the arms were impressively—almost familial-dysautonomically—pain-resistant, and could be pinched, punctured, singed, and even compressed in a basement optical-device-securing viselike thing by Mario’s older brother Orin without effect or complaint.

Bradypedestrianism-wise, Mario had not so much club feet as more like block feet: not only flat but perfectly square, good for kicking knob-fumbled doors open with but too short to be conventionally employed as feet: together with the lordosis in his lower spine, they force Mario to move in the sort of lurchy half-stumble of a vaudeville inebriate, body tilted way forward as if into a wind, right on the edge of pitching face-first onto the ground, which as a child he did fairly often, whether given a bit of a shove from behind by his older brother Orin or no.

it was in fact not Mario’s real eyelid—that had been sacrificed when the fist stuck to his face like a tongue to cold metal had been peeled away, at nativity—but an extremely advanced blepharoprosthesis of dermal fibropolymer studded with horsehair lashes that curved out into space well beyond the reach of his other lid’s lashes and together with the lazy lid-action itself gave even Mario’s most neutral expression the character of an oddly friendly pirate’s squint. Together with the involuntarily constant smile.

Or that he’s slow, Hal’s brother is, technically, Stanford-Binet-wise, slow, the Brandeis C.D.C. found—but not, verifiably not, retarded or cognitively damaged or bradyphrenic, more like refracted, almost, ever so slightly epistemically bent, a pole poked into mental water and just a little off and just taking a little bit longer, in the manner of all refracted things.

that Mario’s life there is by all appearances kind of a sad and left-out-type existence, the only physically challenged minor in residence, unable even to grip a regulation stick or stand unaided behind a boundaried space.

occasionally tottering out for a bright-red plastic bottle of something called Big Red Soda Water and taking it to the apparently mute veiled graduate-intern down the motel’s hall

When required to stand upright and still, like when videotaping an E.T.A.’s service motion or manning the light meters on the set of a high-contrast chiaroscuro art film, Mario in his forward list is supported by a NNYC-apartment-door-style police lock, a .7-meter steel pole that extends from a special Velcroed vest and angles about 40° down and out to a slotted piece of lead blocking (a bitch to carry, in that complicated pack) placed by someone understanding and prehensile on the ground before him.

the Bolex H64 required no digital prehensility because it fit over Mario’s oversized face like a tri-plated scuba mask and was controlled by a sewing-machine-adapted foot treadle, and but even then it took some serious getting used to, and Mario’s earliest pieces of digital juvenilia are marred/enhanced by this palsied, pointing-every-which-way quality of like home movies shot at a dead run.

there was almost nobody at E.T.A. or its Enfield-Brighton environs who did not treat Mario M. Incandenza with the casual gentility of somebody who doesn’t pity you or admire you so much as just vaguely prefer it when you’re around. And Mario—despite rectilinear feet and cumbersome police lock the most prodigious walker-and-recorder in three districts—hit the unsheltered area streets daily at a very slow pace, a halting constitutional, sometimes w/ head-mounted Bolex and sometimes not, and took citizens’ kindness and cruelty the same way, with a kind of extra-inclined half-bow that mocked his own canted posture without pity or cringe.

Avril remembers Mario still wanting Hal to help him with bathing and dressing at thirteen—an age when most un-challenged kids are ashamed of the very space their sound pink bodies take up—and wanting the help for Hal’s sake, not his own.

Part of this new Joelle girl’s pull for Ken Erdedy isn’t just the sexual thing of her body, which he finds made way sexier by the way the overlarge blue coffee-stained sweater tries to downplay the body thing without being so hubristic as to try to hide it—sloppy sexiness pulls Erdedy in like a well-groomed moth to a lit window—but it’s also the veil, wondering what horrific contrast to the body’s allure lies swollen or askew under that veil; it gives the pull a perverse sideways slant that makes it even more distracting

Gately looks at a rectangular blue-selvaged expanse of clean linen whose gentle rises barely allude to any features below […] and his own heart grips him like an infant rattling the bars of its playpen, and he feels a greasy wave of an old and almost unfamiliar panic, and for a second it seems inevitable that at some point in his life he’s going to get high again and be back in the cage all over again, because for a second the blank white veil levelled at him seems a screen on which might well be projected a casual and impressive black and yellow smily-face, grinning, and he feels all the muscles in his own face loosen and descend kneeward

trying to concentrate on receiving the Message instead of brooding on that odd old dark moment of aphasiac terror with this veiled like psuedo-intellectual-type girl who was probably just in some sort of complex Denial, or on whatever doubtlessly grim place he feels like he knows that smooth echoless slightly Southern voice from.

the biological daughter had, from birth, been totally paralyzed and retarded and catatonic, and the foster mother in the household was—as Joelle V. put it later to Gately—crazy as a Fucking Mud-Bug, and was in total Denial about her biological daughter’s being a vegetable, and not only insisted on treating the invertebrate biological daughter like a valid member of the chordate phylum but also insisted that the father and the adopted daughter also treat It as normal and undamaged, and made the adopted daughter share a bedroom with It, bring It along to slumber parties (the speaker uses the term It for the invertebrate sister, and also to tell the truth uses the phrase ‘drag It along’ rather than ‘bring It along,’ which Gately wisely doesn’t dwell over)

at whatever place she’d dragged It along to It would lie in a heap, drooling and incontinent under exquisite mother-bought fashions specially altered for atrophy and top-shelf Lancôme cosmetics that looked just lurid on It, and with only the whites of Its eyes showing, with fluid dribbling from Its mouth and elsewhere, and making unspeakable gurgly noises, completely pale and moist and stagnant

also required daily that It be hoisted by the adopted daughter from Its never-mentioned wheelchair and held under Its arms and lowered so as to approximate the same knelt devotion to the photo, and while It gurgled and Its head lolled the speaker had gazed at the photo with a nameless revulsion each morning

in the vanity’s lights only Its eyes’ whites showed, and while Its utter catatonia and paralysis prevented the contraction of Its luridly rouged face’s circumoral muscles into any conventional human facial-type expression, nevertheless some hideously mobile and expressive layer in the moist regions below real people’s expressive facial layer, some slow-twitch layer unique to It, had blindly contracted, somehow, to gather the blank soft cheese of Its face into the sort of pinched gasping look of neurologic concentration that marks a carnal bliss beyond smiles or sighs. […] the exact same expression on the face of a catatonic who’d just been incestuously diddled, an expression at once reverent and greedy on a face connected by dead hair to the slack and flapping rubber visage of an old sex goddess’s empty face.

(that new Joelle girl’s veil’s billowing in and out with her breath, Gately sees, just like it also was during the last speaker’s description of the statue’s orgasm in the catatonic’s dysfunctional Catholic mother’s devotional photo)

passersby on the South Boston streets began to reel away white-faced as the girl passed by, stretch-marked and brown-toothed and lashless (lashes lost in a Substance-accident; fire hazard and dental dysplasia go with the freebase terrain)

and the speaker was medically informed by somebody with a clipboard from D.S.S. that the infant had been involuntarily toxified to death somewhere along in its development toward becoming a boy

just a couple overexposed meters of Clipperton, head down and hunched on a low orange bleacher, bony-shouldered, in no shirt and untied Nikes, his Gothic-scripted case in his lap, his elbows on his knees and his hands spidered across both cheeks, staring down between his feet and trying not to smile as a withered-toddler-sized and forward-listing Mario stands beside him, supported by his portable police lock, holding a light-meter and something else too halated to make out on the tape, open very wide for a homodontic laugh at something funny Clipperton has apparently just let slip.

The feature of complete unswallowability about M. Steeply as a U.S.A. female journalist—even a massive and unfortunate-looking U.S.A. female journalist—was his feet. These were broad and yellow-nailed, hairy and trollesque, the ugliest feet Marathe had observed anywhere south of 60° N, and the ugliest supposedly female feet of his experience. […] Marathe found the four-limbed American’s high-heeled feet compellingly grotesque, like loaves of soft processed U.S.A. bread being slowly squeezed and mangled by the footwear’s straps.

The received wisdom among Québecois anti-O.N.A.N. cells was that there was something latent and sadistic in the Bureau des Services sans Spécificité’s assignments of fictional personae for its field-operatives—casting men as women, women as longshoremen or Orthodox rabbinicals, heterosexual men as homosexual men, Caucasians as Negroes or caricaturesque Haitians and Dominicans, healthy males as degenerative-nerve-disease-sufferers, healthy women operatives as hydrocephalic boys or epileptic public-relations executives, nondeformed U.S.O.U.S. personnel made not only to pretend but sometimes to actually suffer actual deformity, all for the realism of their field-personae.

People in the competitive jr. tennis community somehow regarded it as healthy that Mario Incandenza’s perfectly even smile never faltered even through tears at Clipperton’s funeral. […] It took the bradykinetic Mario all night and two bottles of Ajax Plus to clean the room with his tiny contractured arms and square feet; the 18’s girls in the rooms on either side could hear him falling around in there and picking himself up, again and again

She’d come to Ennet House in an electric wheelchair at thirty-two and been unable to communicate except via like Morse-Code blinks or something for the first six months, […] The right side of her face was still pulled way over in this sort of rictus […] her right arm had atrophied into a kind of semi-claw […] and Pat walked with a dignified but godawful lurch, dragging a terribly thin right leg in black leather pants behind her like something hanging on to her that she was trying to get away from.

‘The MK-Ultra surgeries.’ Steeply laughed without mirth. ‘Or off-the-record amputations for daring young train-cultists, no?’

the weirdly-familiar-but-Southernish-sounding girl Joelle van D. with the past-believing bod and the linen face announcing she was a vegetarian and would ‘rather eat a bug’ than even get downwind of a boiled frank

The figure in the wheelchair still labors at his wheels, but appears, queerly, still to be where he was before, in front of the Portuguese grocery. Moving closer to the pane, so that his face’s transparent image fills the glass and he can now see clearly beyond it, Lucien sees that what it is is it’s a different figure in a different wheelchair from the one before, this new figure’s face also downcasted and queerly masked, laboring around the sidewalk’s jagged holes; and that not too far behind this seated figure is yet another figure in a wheelchair, coming this way; […] Lucien can see the variegated glints of passing low-chassis headlights off a whole long single-file column of polished metal wheels stolidly turning, being turned by swarthy hands in fingerless wheelchair-gloves.

—except but now how can a door’s upper hinge loudly squeak when the door is tightly closed and the bolt driven home with the solid snick of a .44 bullet slipping home in a revolver’s chamber?— […] But Lucien now hears whole systems of squeaks, slow and soft but not stealthy squeaks, the squeaks of weighted wheelchairs moving slow, implacable, calm and businesslike and yet menacing, moving with the indifference of things at the very top of the food-chain

there are great quiet numbers of persons in wheelchairs moving in the room with him, in the shoproom, moving calmly into position behind waist-high glass counters full of wacky notions. The street outside is flanked on both sidewalks by defiles of wheelchaired, blanket-lapped persons whose faces are obscured by what look like large and snow-dotted leaves […] Wheelchair Assassins. Lucien has been taught the glyph of a profiled wheelchair with an enormous bone-crossed skull below.

They, Them, Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, A.F.R.s, the ones who come always in the twilight, implacably squeaking, and cannot be reasoned with or bargained with, feel no pity or remorse, or fear (except a rumored fear of steep hills), and now they’re all in here all over the shoproom like faceless rats, the devil’s own hamsters, moving with placid squeaks just beyond view of the shop’s mirrored peripheries, regally serene

the cleric-collared A.F.R. driving the broom home now to half its length, up on his stumps to get downward leverage

bursting then through the wool and puncturing tile and floor at a police-lock’s canted angle to hold him upright on his knees, completely skewered

Rémy Marathe’s resting pulse rate was very low: no legs to require blood from the heart. He very rarely felt phantom pains, and then only in the stump of the left. All A.F.R.s have enormous arms, particularly upper arms.

‘It was down at the far end of the table at supper. He was telling Ken and me how he had a counselor when he was in Juvenile in Jamaica Plain, he had this counselor he said she had this condition where each leg was shorter than the other.’ […] ‘He was having us on. He said the point was an AA point, that it defied sense and explaining and you just had to accept it on faith. That creepy Randy guy with the white wig was backing him up with a very straight face. McDade said she walked like a metronome. He was making fun of us, but I still thought it was funny.’

‘Well Mr. Gately what people don’t get about being hideously or improbably deformed is that the urge to hide is offset by a gigantic sense of shame about your urge to hide. You’re at a graduate wine-tasting party and improbably deformed and you’re the object of stares that the people try to conceal because they’re ashamed of wanting to stare, and you want nothing more than to hide from the covert stares, to erase your difference, to crawl under the tablecloth or put your face under your arm, or you pray for a power failure and for this kind of utter liberating equalizing darkness to descend so you can be reduced to nothing but a voice among other voices, invisible, equal, no different, hidden.’

‘What you do is you hide your deep need to hide, and you do this out of the need to appear to other people as if you have the strength not to care how you appear to others. You stick your hideous face right in there into the wine-tasting crowd’s visual meatgrinder, you smile so wide it hurts and put out your hand and are extra gregarious and outgoing and exert yourself to appear totally unaware of the facial struggles of people who are trying not to wince or stare or give away the fact that they can see that you’re hideously, improbably deformed. You feign acceptance of your deformity. You take your desire to hide and conceal it under a mask of acceptance.’

‘Which is fine, U.H.I.D. would say, to illustrate the U.H.I.D. take versus an apparently more AA take. U.H.I.D.’d say it’s fine to feel inadequate and ashamed because you’re not as bright as some others, but that the cycle becomes annular and insidious if you begin to be ashamed of the fact that being unbright shames you, if you try to hide the fact that you feel mentally inadequate, and so go around making jokes about your own dullness and acting as if it didn’t bother you at all, pretending you didn’t care whether others perceived you as unbright or not.’

‘But a lot of the forms of self-hatred there is no veil for. U.H.I.D.’s taught a lot of us to be grateful that there’s at least a veil for our form.’ ‘So the veil’s a way to not hide it.’ ‘To hide openly, is more like it.’

Lenz tells Green how once he was at a Halloween party where a hydrocephalic woman wore a necklace made of dead gulls.

Or like e.g. of a suicidal Nuck cult of Nucks that worshipped a form of Russian Roulette that involved jumping in front of trains and seeing which Nuck could come the closest to the train’s front without getting demapped.

the idea of infants the size of prehistoric beasts roaming the overfertilized east Concavity quadrants, leaving enormous scat-piles and keening for the abortive parents who’d left or lost them in the general geopolitical shuffle of mass migration and really fast packing, or, as some of your more Limbaugh-era-type cultists sharingly believe, originating from abortions hastily disposed of in barrels in ditches that got breached and mixed ghastly contents with other barrels that reanimated the abortive feti and brought them to a kind of repelsive oversized B-cartridge life thundering around due north of where yrstruly and Green strolled through the urban grid.

Of one local underground stelliform offshoot from the Bob Hope–worshipping Rastafarians who smoked enormous doobsters and wove their negroid hair into clusters of wet cigars like the Rastafarians but instead of Rastafarians these post-Rastas worshipped the Infant and every New Year donned tie-dyed parkas and cardboard snowshoes and ventured northward, trailing smoke, past the walls and fans of Checkpoint Pongo into the former areas of VT and NH, seeking The Infant they called it, as if there were only One, and toting paraphernalia for performing a cultish ritual referred to in oblique tones only as Propitiating The Infant, whole posses of these stelliform pot-head reggae-swaying Infant-cultists disappearing forever off the human race’s radar every winter, never heard or smelled again, regarded by fellow cultists as martyrs and/or lambs, possibly too addled by blimp-sized doobsters to find their way back out of the Concavity and freezing to death, or en-swarmed by herds of feral pets, or shot by property-value-conscious insects, or… (face plum-colored, finally breathing) worse.

It was strange upon strange; it was almost as if the legless and pathologically shy punting-groupies were somehow afraid of Moment’s Junoesque Ms. Steeply—Orin had seen his last wheelchair the day before she came up, and now (he realized, driving) it was only hours after she’d left that they were now back, with their shy ruses. […] it kertwanged on him that the handicapped man at the hotel room’s door had had a wheelchair, that it was the first wheelchair he’d seen since Hal’d hit him with his theory, and that the legless surveyer had had (stranger) the same Swiss accent as the hand-model.

Lenz details how the vegetarian new Joel girl’s veil is because of this condition people get where she’s got only one eye that’s right in the middle of her forehead, from birth, like a seahorse, and asks Green not even to think of asking how he knows this fact.

A first-floor light in the house across Brainerd lights up and backlights a figure in a sort of suit and metal wheelchair sitting right up next to the window in the sideways way of wheelchairs that want to get right up next to something, scanning the street and Nuck-swarmed yard. […] Another wheelchaired form has appeared just behind and to the right of the first seated backlit form across the street, and they’re both in a position to see Green up against the tree with his hand to his ear so it looks like he’s maybe receiving communiqués from some kind of earpiece.

And, though one perk of Familial Dysautonomia is a relative physical fearlessness, Mario keeps to a pretty limited area during insomniacal strolls, out of deference to Avril’s worry. This is one reason why he consents to be hung way out into space from Schtitt’s transom for filming all-court play, held only by some prorector with a firm grip on the back of his lock’s vest, which the players looking up at Mario’s forward ski-jump posture off the crow’s nest find incredibly terrifying and audacious and ballsy, and Avril won’t even leave HmH during all-court filmings.

And a lot of the people in the different brick houses are damaged or askew and lean hard to one side or are twisted into themselves, through the windows, and he can feel his heart going out into the world through them, which is good for insomnia.

A hard east wind blows Mario’s thin hair straight back off his head. His standing angle is 50°. A female girl in a little fur coat and uncomfortable-looking bluejeans and tall shoes clicks past on the sidewalk and goes up the ramp into Ennet’s back door without indicating she saw somebody with a really big head standing braced by a police lock on the lawn outside the kitchen window.

what was unpleasant was that Mario was the only one at the big table whose laugh was a happy laugh; everybody else sort of looked down like they were laughing at somebody with a disability.

McDade was using his finger and pushing the tip of his nose up so that his nostrils faced straight out at everybody. He was looking piggishly around and asking if people knew any people where their nose looked like this right here, and some people said yes, sure, why. […] When Pat’s phone rings and Gately leaves, McDade’s squunching his upper lip up in his hand and asking people about acquaintance with cleft palates.

The man in the hall at the door was handicapped, challenged, in a wheelchair, looking up at him from well below peephole-range, bushy-haired and mostly nose and looking up into the swell of Orin’s pectorals, making no attempt to see around him into the room. One of the disabled. Orin looked down and felt both let down and almost touched. […] No shins or extremities, however withery, extended below the wheelchair’s blanket’s hem. The guy was like totally legless. Orin’s rising heart went out.

The skyscraper-gawking aspect was only when the man’s gaze went higher than Orin’s neck. They were not shy or indirect or even the eyes of someone in any way disabled, was what struck Orin later as odd—besides the Swiss accent, the absence of a signature-ruse, the Subject’s patience with the wait and the absence of gasping when O. pulled the covers abruptly back, later.

She leans down and in, so Gately can see up at what looks like a regular human female chin and makeupless lower lip under the veil’s billowing hem. ‘Whom should we call?’ she asks him.

Her kimono smells good. Her voice has a Staff-like authority. The scene out here has changed: Gately’s down, Madame Psychosis is in charge.

‘I knew I knew you,’ Gately says to Joelle, whose veil remains inscrutable.

Besides the HANDICAPPED license plate, the only exceptional things about the van now idling at the curb far below are the tinted windows and the fact that the van is spotless and twinkly with wax to about halfway up its panelled side, but above that line dirty and rust-saucered and shamefully neglected-looking.

Almost all the personal wee-hour inquiries are from listeners somehow bent, misshapen, speech-defective, vacantly grinning, damaged in some way. The type whose spectacles have been repaired with electrician’s tape. Shyly inquiring. Apologies for bothering someone they can clearly see is not even there. […] One hideous little inquirer had had a hat with a lens on it and seemed about to fall forward into the engineer’s lap. His attendant wanting some address where they might send something supportive and floral.

This was after the girl Orin had been wildly in love with and Himself had compulsively used in films had been disfigured. Orin kept a record of Subjects that was sort of a cross between a chart and a journal. He used to come home and leave it out just pleading to be read.

It’s a good thing you can’t see what you look like, though.

The brisk click of his heels on pavement, boa semi-formally loose on his shoulders and down beneath each arm, hand holding red leather collar closed at the throat, head up and staying that way on its own, steady eyes meeting with blasé dignity the eyes of whoever passes. The dignity of a man risen by will from the ashes of Withdrawal and now on the upswing and with places to go and potentially considerate Canadians to see. A charming and potentially once again in the not-too-distant future gorgeous creature with the renewed wherewithal to now meet the eyes of Inman Sq. pedestrians veering sharply away from the residual smells of men’s room stall and subway vomit, the ashes from which he’s been rescued and risen once again, feeling righter than rain.

Blood Sister eventually takes on a burn-scarred, deeply troubled adolescent punker-type Toronto girl who is sullen and, yes, reasonably tough, but is also vulnerable and emotionally tormented (the girl’s pink shiny burn-scarred face tends to writhe in misery whenever she thinks Blood Sister’s not looking) by the terrible depredations she’s endured as a result of her rapacious and unshakable addiction to crank cocaine […]

Plus there’s the row of standing men—there’s a certain hard-faced type of male in Boston fellowships who refuses ever to sit for meetings—standing behind the back row, legs set wide and arms crossed and talking to each other out the sides of their mouths, and she can tell the standing men are looking at her bare knees over her shoulder, making little comments about the knees and the veil.

The secret to sprinting in high heels, Poor Tony Krause knew, was to run on one’s toes, inclined way forward, with so much forward momentum that one stayed well up on her toes and the heels never came into play. Evidently the wretched Creature behind him knew this trade-secret too.

But now the black Creature had closed to within mm., and now it had real hold of the boa as they careered breathing at full speed on their toes, and Krause unlooped the thing from his neck with a flourish and sacrificed the boa to the Thing, but the loathsome Creature’s hand came right back, clutching at the air just over his leather collar, its ragged breath in his ear, cursing him.

Poor Tony hurdled a queerly placed cardboard display for something wheelchaired and heard the Creature vault it also and land lightly on its toes.

he and Marathe had counselled all along that the F.L.Q. displays of the Entertainment and the wheelchaired man were probably the hoax, instilling of terror only. The fact of the displays which featured wheelchairs, a smack to the testicles of A.F.R.—this was ignored.

As she lies on her side beside Kate Gompert’s empty bunk, her veil’s selvage tucked secure between pillow and jaw, and Charlotte Treat also asleep across the lit room, Joelle dreams that Don Gately, unhurt and mid-South-accented, is ministering to her teeth.

But two were lost—Joubet the red-bearded workhorse, who loved to pop wheelies, and young Desjardins, so filled with the idealism and so young as to be still feeling the phantom pains in his stumps.

An expensive source in the Subject’s former department of the M.I.T. University had reported the Entertainment’s probable performer’s last known employment—the small Cambridge radio station which Marathe and Beausoleil had pronounced Weee—where she had donned the defacing veil of O.N.A.N.ite deformity.

Rémy Marathe sat veiled and blanket-lapped in the much crowded living room evening of this Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, the last demi-maison on his portion of the list for this day. […] A damaged woman, also in a fauteuil de rollent like Marathe, slumped inutile next to the cartridge’s viewer, while a male person of advanced pallor mimed the kicks and thrusts of martial arts at her motionless head, trying to force the woman to twitch or cry out. Also a man without hands and feet trying to negotiate the stairway.

Another young girl seemed to remove her eye from her head and placed it in her mouth. No other in the room wore the veil of the Entertainment’s performer’s organization U.H.I.D.

He noted that none of the room’s persons appeared to regard the cheesecloth veil he wore over his face as unusual or curious or to be questioned.

To whomever approached, Marathe carefully recited the introductory lines he and M. Fortier quickly had developed: ‘Good night, I am addicted and deformed, seeking residential treatment for addiction, desperately.’

Marathe had once, as a child, with legs, bent himself over and overturned a decaying log in the forests of the Lac de Deux Montaignes region of his four-limbed childhood, before Le Culte du Prochain Train.

Marathe kept his hands calmly in his lap, his machine pistol holstered securely to his right stump beneath the blanket.

‘Physically challenged foreign person with unpronounceable name!’ the authority called with the clipboard.

Marathe rolled up to the person in authority as slowly as possible, hunched deep into the sportcoat and pathetically tacking. With significance, the large and clipboarded woman seemed without faze at the veil of U.H.I.D. Marathe extended a large hand in greeting which he made tremble.

Orin had said she was the third-neatnikest person he knew after his Moms and a former player he’d played with with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, a dual diagnosis with which the U.H.I.D. membership was rife.

Hal and Orin looked vaguely alike. Avril directed every fourth comment to Joelle, to include her. Orin’s brother Mario was stunted and complexly deformed. There was a spotless doggie-dish under the table, but no dog, and no mention was ever made of a dog.

Mario, reaching for the salad, fell out of his chair, and was helped up by one of the tennis players amid much hilarity. Mario’s deformities seemed wide-ranging and hard to name. Joelle decided he looked like a cross between a puppet and one of the big-headed carnivores from Spielberg’s old special-effects orgies about reptiles. […] Deformed Mario’s broad smile was so constant you could have hung things from the corners of it.

Marathe stifled a shudder and pulled up his blanket slightly, hunching to minimalize the musculature of health of his upper torso, also.

‘Disabled, also. Also deformed,’ Marathe said, shrugging stoically, inclining his veil at the dark carpet. The woman was examining his O.I.N.S. documents with the pursed mouth and face for poker of O.N.A.N. authorities in all places. One of her hands was twisted in the manner of a claw. ‘We all come in with issues, Henry,’ she said.

The woman said ‘And we’ve been Disabled-Accessible since the beginning. One of only a handful of Houses in the metro area that are fully equipped to take disabled clients, I assume they told you down at Chit Chat.’ […] ‘… why I got to come here in the first place. Which I came in in a chair, too, originally, by the way.’ She teetered back out from the cabinet with a folder of Manila. ‘At the time I declared up and down I was too disabled to kneel and pray, to give you an idea of where I was at.’ She laughed gaily.

The authority spoke also: ‘Not to mention U.H.I.D. members, you might want to know.’ Gesturing then at the veil of Marathe neither was mentioning. […] ‘In fact we have a U.H.I.D. member in early residency right now.’ Marathe blinked twice more. He said ‘I am deformed, me.’ ‘She might be able to help you adjust, identify. Be good for her, too.’

‘The legs—I do an overdose in Berne, which is in my home of Switzerland, while alone, and I fall down face-down while my legs, they remain how you say tangle, tangled in the chair on which occurred this injection, fix. A stupid. I lie down without conscious or to move for many days, and my legs, they—comment-on-dit?—they are sleepy, lose the circulating, suffer gangrene, become infectious.’ Marathe sniffed while stoically shrugging. ‘As well the nose and mouth, from facial squishing of lying face-down in a position without conscious for days. I die almost. All is amputated, for my life.

Marathe’s sidearm sat in its holster under the seat of him, hidden by the plaid-colored blanket of his lap. […] Marathe’s fauteuil could travel 45 kph on a level surface over short distance.

The woman had a ripe spot of sympathique for the disableds, Marathe could see.

Or calculating also whether to telephone […] the 24-hour costless prefix of M./Mlle. Steeply and convey the very same information instead, finally, first, […] placing bets on O.N.A.N. and against Fortier, casting his lots finally with one side only, conveying his restenotic wife and entertainment-hungry children down from St.-Remi d’Amherst’s Convexity-ravaged wastes to live with him the rest of their lives down here among U.S.A.’s confusion of choices, demanding hidden protection from Steeply and high-income medical care for the heart- and head-difficulties of beloved Gertraude.

‘Can I ask you how it is being in that thing?’ ‘Thing?’ ‘You know. Don’t play dumb and embarrass me.’ ‘A wheelchair is a thing which: you prefer it or do not prefer, it is no distance. Difference. You are in the chair even if you do not prefer it. So it is better to prefer, no?’

‘My people, we do not hit the bottoms of women. I am, shall we say, Swiss. My legs, they were lost in the teenage years being struck by a train.’ […] ‘I am in early twenty years, without the legs. Many of my friends also: without legs.’ […] ‘It is, for me, who I am weak, so painful to be without legs in the early twenty years. One feels grotesque to people; one’s freedom is restricted. I have no chances now for jobs in the mines of Switzerland.’

I think of death. I do nothing but frequently drink, roll around the despoiled countryside, sometimes dodging falling projectiles of invasion, thinking of death, bemoaning the depredation of the Swiss land, in great pain. But it is myself I bemoan. I have pain. I have no legs.’ […] ‘And us, our Swiss countryside is very hilly. The fauteuil, it is hard to push up many hills, then one is braking with all the might to keep from flying out of control on the downhill.’

‘My story it was one day at the top of a hill I had drunkenly labored for many minutes to roll to the crest, and looking out over the downhill slope I see a small hunched woman in what I am thinking is a metal hat far below at the bottom, attempting the crossing of the Swiss Provincial Autoroute at the bottom, in the middle of the Provincial Autoroute, this woman, standing and staring in the terror at one of the hated long and shiny many-wheeled trucks of our paper invaders, bearing down upon her at high speeds in the hurry to come despoil part of the Swiss land.’ […] ‘She is standing transfixed with horror of the truck—identically as I had been motionless and transfixed by horror inside me, unable to move

‘But the great gift of this time today at the hilltop above the Provincial Autoroute is I do not think of me. I do not know this woman or love her, but without thinking I release my brake and I am careening down the downhill, almost wipe-outing numerous places on the bumps and rocks of the hill’s slope, and as we say in Switzerland I schüssch at enough speed to reach my wife and sweep her up into the chair and roll across the Provincial Autoroute into the embanking ahead just ahead of the nose of the truck, which had not slowed.’

‘There was for this woman in the embanking no possible choosing. Without the containing helmet all energies in her were committed to the shaping of the oral cavity in a shape that allowed breathing, which was a task of great enormity, for her head it had also neither muscles nor nerves.

‘There was the trouble of the digestive tracking. There were seizures also. There were progressive decays of circulation and vessel, which calls itself restenosis. There were the more than standard accepted amounts of eyes and cavities in many different stages of development upon different parts of the body. There were the fugue states and rages and frequency of coma. She had wandered away from a public institution of Swiss charitable care. Worst for choosing to love was the cerebro-and-spinal fluids which dribbled at all times from her distending oral cavity.’

‘I tried to leave the soft-head and cerebro-spinally incontinent woman, m’épouse au future, behind at the hôpital of grave nature and to wheel off into my new life of uncaged acceptance and choice. […] But I had travelled no more than several revolutions of the fauteuil when the old despair of before choosing this no-skull creature rose up once again inside me. Within several revolutions there was no point again and no legs, and only fear of the pain that made me not choose. Pain rolled me backwards to this woman, my wife.’

‘I have been knowing since the wedding night her death was coming. Her restenosis of the heart, it is irreversible. Now my Gertraude, she has been in a comatose and vegetating state for almost one year. This coma has no exit, it is said. The advanced Jaarvik IX Exterior Artificial Heart is said by the public-aid cardiologists of Switzerland to be her chance for life. With it they say my wife can live for many more years in a comatose and vegetated state.’

it features Madame Psychosis as some kind of maternal instantiation of the archetypal figure Death, sitting naked, corporeally gorgeous, ravishing, hugely pregnant, her hideously deformed face either veiled or blanked out by undulating computer-generated squares of color or anamorphosized into unrecognizability as any kind of face by the camera’s apparently very strange and novel lens

Apparently issues were complicated by the fact that Madame Psychosis emerged from puberty as an almost freakishly beautiful young woman, especially in a part of the United States where poor nutrition and indifference to dentition and hygiene made physical beauty an extremely rare and sort of discomfiting condition […]

—That she’d said maybe it was her, she, the mother, who was the monster, which if so she was tired of hiding it and appearing falsely before God and man. —That whereupon she’d reeled from her place and hurdled three pointers and run down to the Daddy’s acid-lab in the cellar, to disfigure herself with acid.

Later somebody who was either Joelle van D. or a St. E’s nurse in a U.H.I.D. veil was running a cold washcloth over his face. His face was so big it took some time to cover it all. It seemed too tender a touch on the cloth for a nurse, but then Gately heard the clink of I.V. bottles being changed or R.N.ishly messed with somewhere overhead behind him.

Then at some later point Joelle van Dyne was sitting in a chair just outside the railing of the bed, veiled, wearing sweatpants and a sweater that was starting to unravel, in a pink-bordered veil, not saying anything, probably looking at him, probably thinking he was unconscious with his eyes open, or delirious with Noxzema. […] The girl’s silence and the blankness of her veil frightened him after a while, and he wished he could ask her to come back later.

once hit his wife so hard in the blackout that made him Come In he broke her nose and bent it over flat against her face, which he asked her never to have repaired, as a daily visual reminder of the depths drink sunk him to, so Mrs. O. had gone around with her nose bent over flat against her left cheek—Bud O.’d tagged her with a left cross—until U.H.I.D. referred her to Al-Anon, which eventually nurtured and supported Mrs. O. into eventually telling Bud O. to take a flying fuck to the moon and getting her nose realigned back out front and leaving him for a male Al-Anon in Birkenstock sandals.

for one of the newly acquired test-subjects […] was discovered to have been being severing and pushing beneath the room of storage’s closed door the severed digits of the second of the newly acquired test-subjects […] rather than his own digits, marring the statistics of Brullîme’s field-experiment

A direct assault upon the Academy of Tennis itself was impossible. A.F.R.s fear nothing in this hemisphere except tall and steep hillsides. Their attack must not be direct.

Marathe selected young Balbalis, the one still with both the legs—albeit paralyzed and stickishly withered, them—to lead the A.F.R. field-detail which must intercept the provincial players.

Balbalis permitted at Montpelier a brief stop for final assembly and for those who were incontinent to change their bags.

The plan was to intercept the travelling team of players and allow A.F.R.s to arrive at the place in their stead. Marathe promised to conceive an excellent ruse to explain the wheelchairs and adult beards of the false players.

newcomer Joelle v.D. raises her veil slightly to lick the sweat off his lids and temples, whispering so the veil flutters around and fans him, promising him a P.M. of near-terminal pleasures […] and then when she moves around out of the pulsing shadow to lean in close and press her inhuman body’s face right up intimately close to his, she removes the veil, and on top of this body to die for is the unveiled historical likeness of fucking Winston Churchill, complete with cigar and jowls and bulldog scowl, and the ghastliness of the shock makes the rest of Gately’s body go rigid

until near the end it’s as if he’s seeing her through a kind of cloud of light, a milky filter that’s the same as the wobbly blur through which a baby sees a parental face bending over its crib

She describes the newest male resident’s weird limbo-injury posture, and the way Johnette Foltz has to cut up this Dave guy’s supper and drop it into his open mouth bit by bit like a bird with a chick. Lifting her face to the ceiling makes the linen veil conform to the features of the face below, mouth open wide in imitation of a chick.

Most compelling, visually, Wayne had had a deep diagonal furrow in his face, extending from right eyebrow to left lip-corner—Joelle traces the length and angle with a ragged-nailed finger across her veil—splaying his nose and upper lip and rendering him so violently cross-eyed he seemed to address both corners of the front row at the same time.

The projective mental union of Gately and Joelle (‘M.P.’) van Dyne keeps foundering on the vision of Gately knee-dandling a kid in a huge blue- or pink-bordered veil, however. Or tenderly removing the spongy clamps of Joelle’s veil in moonlight on their honeymoon in Atlantic City and discovering just like one eye in the middle of her forehead or a horrific Churchill-face or something.

To avoid the mirror AA hauls out in front of them. […] Plus let’s not even mention the mirror-and-vulnerability issues of a newcomer that has to wear a U.H.I.D veil.

he returned with a new bride the Moms had known nothing about, an American widow named Elizabeth Tavis, who in the stilted Vermont wedding photo seems almost certainly to have been a dwarf—the huge square head, the relative length of the trunk compared to the legs, the sunken nasal bridge and protruding eyes, the stunted phocomelic arms around squire Mondragon’s right thigh, one khaki-colored cheek pressed affectionately against his belt-buckle.

Her smile in the wedding photo is homodontic. According to Orin, though, C.T. and the Moms claim Mrs. T. was not a true homodont the way—for instance—Mario is a true homodont. Every single one of Mario’s teeth is a second bicuspid. So it was all rather up in the air.

‘Not exactly. Not exactly veiled.’

Orin had liked also to recreate for us the spooky kyphotic hunch of Himself’s mother, in her wheelchair, beckoning him closer with a claw, the way she seemed always caved in over and around her chest as if she’d been speared there. […] When the nurse was off, a small silver bell was apparently hung from an arm of the old lady’s wheelchair, to be rung when she could not breathe. A cheery silver tinkle announcing asphyxiation upstairs.

Peterson-allusions notwithstanding, I wondered about some hazy connection between this passion for hiddenness and the fact that Himself had made so many films titled Cage, and that the amateur player he became so attached to was the veiled girl, Orin’s love.

It took forever to get from Comm. Ave. down to Enfield Marine in her clogs and skirt in the snow, and melt soaked the veil and made it adhere to the features below. She’d been close to removing the veil to get away from the outside-linebacker of a federal lady anyway. She looked now just like a linen-pale version of what she really looked like. But there was no one about in the snow.

She figured if she could speak with Pat M. Pat M. might be prevailed upon to put her in quarantine with Clenette and Yolanda, not let in no law. She could tell Pat about the wheelchairs, try to convince her to dismantle the ramp.

And they laugh and shout out ‘You definitely are’ as he stands there rocking the podium slightly, blurred a bit through the linen, smearing one side of his face with a laborer’s hand as he tries to think what to say.

Then a small but univocal cheer went up from some of the players when Otis P. Lord appeared at the door, his cadaverous dad escorting him, O.P.L. out of post-op and pale but looking his old self, with just a thin little choker-width bandage of gauze around his neck from the monitor’s removal and an odd ellipse of dry red skin around his mouth and nostrils.

She stood looking at him, her arms crossed, smoking, exhaling greenly through her nose, then looked down to confer with another face, seeming to float at about waist-level, that belonged to the shy and handicapped fan who O.’d realized had shared the Subject’s Swiss accent.

documentary on Essex County Sheriff’s Dept. and Massachusetts Department of Social Services’ expedition to track, verify, capture, or propitiate the outsized feral infant alleged to have crushed, gummed, or picked up and dropped over a dozen residents of Lowell in January, Y.T.M.P.

a claustrophobic water-ski instructor (Johnson), struggling with his romantic conscience after his fiancée’s (‘Psychosis’’s) face is grotesquely mangled by an outboard propeller, becomes trapped in an overcrowded hospital elevator

is drawn to a sinister Mexican ranch where Oedipally aggrieved gunslingers are ritually blinded by a mysterious veiled nun (‘Psychosis’)

Marathe’s superior in the A.F.R., the leader of the Wheelchair Assassins’ U.S.A. cell, and the former boyhood friend of Rémy Marathe’s late older brothers, both struck and killed by trains. […] Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, a.k.a. Wheelchair Assassins, pretty much Québec’s most dreaded and rapacious anti-O.N.A.N. terrorist cell.

The ‘thing of important’ seems to be that Marathe’s A.F.R. superiors believe he only is pretending to betray them in order to secure advanced U.S. cardiac-prosthetic technology for his wife; but that in fact he really is betraying them (the superiors, his country)—probably actually for that medical tech—and is thus only pretending only to pretend.

Her deal is apparently that she’s almost psychotically terrified of the possibility that she might be either blind or paralyzed or both. So e.g. she keeps her eyes shut tight 24/7/365 out of the reasoning that as long as she keeps her eyes shut tight she can find hope in the possibility that if she was to open them she’d be able to see, they say; but that if she were ever to actually open her eyes and actually not be able to see, she reasons, she’s lost that precious like margin of hope that she’s maybe not blind.

the terrifying thing is that the common unifying symptom of most of The Shed’s objay darts is a terror so terrifying it makes the object of the terror come true, somehow

‘[…] And what’s up with the lurking figures with wheelchairs?’ […] ‘And you’re being evasive about the dread about the disabled. The like rolling stalkers.’

‘I haven’t seen wheel one in days. I’m thinking possibly this was a kind of very shy sort of fan club of people without legs that look up to me—’ ‘Grotesque entendre, O.’ ‘—as, like, the ultimate leg. They use different ruses to follow me around and never come close or say anything because they’re really shy because they don’t have legs. So now my mind’s resting easier.’

Himself and the Moms got plenty familiar with these sorts of congenital-challenge terms and many more, re Mario, particularly the variations on the medical root brady, from the Greek bradys meaning slow, such as bradylexia (w/an online forum reading), bradyphenia (practical-problem-solving-type thinking), nocturnal bradypnea (dangerously slow breathing during sleep sometimes, which is why Mario uses four pillows minimum), bradypedestrianism (obvious), and especially bradykinesia, an almost gerontologic lentissimo about most of Mario’s movements, an exaggerated slowness that both resembles and permits extremely close slow attention to whatever’s being done.

… also overshot the spot to include that Mario’s a homodont: all his teeth are bicuspids and identical, front and back, not unlike a porpoise; it’s a source of unending struggle for Ted Schacht, who tends to avoid Mario because whenever he’s around him he has to fight the urge to have him open up and submit to scrutiny, which Schacht can well imagine would hurt his feelings: nobody wants to be an object of clinical interest like that.

Whether the girl’s hideous facial burn-scars are the result of a freebase accident is never made explicit in the film. Bernadette Longley says she kind of hopes that’s the case, because otherwise the scars would function as symbols of some deeper and more spiritual wound/hideousness, and the symbolic equation of facial with moral deformity strikes everybody over thirteen in the room as terribly gooey and heavy and stock.

‘Almost as little of irreproachable scholarly definitiveness is known about the infamous Separatist “Wheelchair Assassins” (Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents or A.F.R.s) of southwestern Quebec as is accepted as axiomatic about the herds of oversized “Feral Infants” allegedly reputed to inhabit the periodically overinhabitable forested sections of the eastern Reconfiguration.’

‘… that the prenominate oversized infants reputedly do exist, are anomalous and huge, grow but do not develop, feed on the abundance of annularly available edibles the overgrowth periods in the region represent, do deposit titanically outsized scat, and presumably do crawl thunderously about, occasionally sallying south of murated retention lines and into populated areas of New New England.’ […] ‘The massive, feral infants, formed by toxicity and sustained by annulation, however, are, from the vulgate perspective of this Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster, essentially passive icons of the Experialist gestalt.

The legless Quebecker Wheelchair Assassins, although legless and confined to wheelchairs, nevertheless contrive to have situated large reflective devices across odd-numbered United States highways for the purpose of disorienting and endangering northbound Americans […] and, perhaps most infamously, derive their cell’s own sobriquet in the vox populi——“Wheelchair Assassins”——from the active practice of assassinating prominent Canadian officials

The night’s heavily travelled crossing’s schedule of trains is known to Le Jeu du Prochain Train’s episcopate of les directeurs de jeu——older, post-adolescent boys, veterans of previous les jeux, many of them legless and in wheelchairs or——for the sons of asbestos miners, many orphaned and desperately poor——on crude rolling boards.

‘The first in a round to quail and jump walks home from there, alone under the moon, disgraced and ashamed. […] ‘But even the first to quail and jump has jumped. Far beyond prohibited, not to jump at all is regarded as impossible. To “perdre son coeur ” and not jump at all is outside le Jeu’s limit. The possibility simply does not exist. It is unthinkable.

‘… that several among the La Culte du Prochain Train’s survivors and organizational directorate went on to found and comprise Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents is beyond sociohistorical dispute […] the viciousness and brinksmanship of “Le Prochain Train”’s Root Cult’s disabled heirs.

Or a face writhing in involuntary disgust at Don G.’s own armlessness and hook, maybe.

Wardine back all beat up and cut up. Big stripes of cut all up and down Wardine back, pink stripes and around the stripes the skin like the skin on folks lips be like.

She was the kind of fatally pretty and nubile wraithlike figure who glides through the sweaty junior-high corridors of every nocturnal emitter’s dreamscape.

he and Mildred Bonk and tiny incontinent Harriet Bonk-Green lived just off the Allston Spur in a shiny housetrailer with another frightening couple and with Tommy Doocey, the infamous harelipped pot-and-sundries dealer who kept several large snakes in unclean uncovered aquaria, which smelled, which Tommy Doocey didn’t notice because his upper lip completely covered his nostrils and all he could smell was lip.

the doctor, who’d had all discomfort at being stared at by patients trained right out of him when he’d rotated through the paralysis/-plegia wards upstairs, was able to look directly back at her with a kind of bland compassion, the expression of someone who was compassionate but was not, of course, feeling what she was feeling, and who honored her subjective feelings by not even trying to pretend that he was.

This should not be rendered in exposition like this, but Mario Incandenza has a severely limited range of verbatim recall.

They respectively walked and tottered, ice-cream-bound, Mario moving like the one of them who was truly old, mind off his stride because he was trying to think hard about what Schtitt believed. Mario’s thinking-hard expression resembles what for another person would be the sort of comically distorted face made to amuse an infant.

One of the false breasts (surely false: surely they would not go as far as the hormonal, Marathe thought) nearly touched the chins of Steeply when his looking down produced his double chins. […] His shrugging, with his hands on the prosthesis, appeared not at all Gallic.

Mario said he was pretty sure that Australia was a continent. Walking, he came up to around the bottom of U.S.S. Millicent’s ribcage.

Mario has trouble on any kind of declined grade.

It had been six years since she’d laid an eyeball on her Old Man, but to the best of her recall he was almost three meters tall and morbidly obese, which had been why every mirror and bathtub in the house had been double-width.

In the dining room he’d moved all the furniture over to the side of, in front of the really wide mirror, in a grotesquely tiny and bulging violet leotard, capering. […] Obscene mottled hirsute flesh had pooched and spilled out over every centimeter of the leotard’s perimeter, she recalled.

(Q=Québecois, E=Environmental, S=Separatist, V=Violent, VV=Extremely Violent) —Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents (Q, S, VV)

I mean my God. Gately and Diehl had to pull the fork out of my hand and the tabletop both. To give you an idea. Of the savagery. […] I’m sitting there attached to the table by tines.

My head it is crazy from this fearing of no power. I am now hope for power, Mrs. Pat.

I don’t have a septum no more. My septum’s been like fucking dissolved by coke. See? You see anything like a septum when I lift up like that?

‘Attractive paraplegic female seeks same; object:’

‘Nor are excluded the utterly noseless, nor the hideously wall- and cross-eyed, nor either the ergotic of St. Anthony, the leprous, the varicelliformally eruptive or even the sarcoma’d of Kaposi.’

It had sure made a difference to the engineer, though, who hadn’t been invited to even one graduation party, with his inhaler and skin.

Pemulis looks all around behind them in the empty room. ‘This, Incster, Axhandle, is the incredibly potent DMZ. The Great White Shark of organo-synthesized hallucinogens. ‘The gargantuan feral infant of—’ Hal says ‘We get the picture.’

PUTATIVE CURRICULUM VITAE OF HELEN P. STEEPLY, 36, 1.93 M., 104 KG., A.B., M.J.A.

A foreign academic with an almost Franciscan bald spot has the swirling limp of someone with a prosthesis—hired by M.I.T. after her time.

The idea that she’ll never see Molly Notkin or the cerebral Union or her U.H.I.D. support-brothers and -sisters or the YYY engineer or Uncle Bud on a roof or her stepmother in the Locked Ward or her poor personal Daddy again is sentimental and banal.

Past Minty, down at the dining-room table’s end, Burt F.S.’s still coughing, still hunched over, his face a dusky purple, and Nell G. is behind him pounding him on the back so that it keeps sending him forward over his ashtray, and he’s waving one stump vaguely over his shoulder to try and signal her to quit.

His head inflated hugely and creaked as it stretched, inflating. Then the pain (seizures hurt, is what few civilians have occasion to know) was the sharp end of a hammer. There was a squeak and rush of release inside his skull and something shot from him into the air.

Mario sometimes finds younger E.T.A.s referred to him by Lyle on really ticklish matters of injury and incapacity and character and rallying-what-remains, and never much knows what to say. […] Players at Denny’s, when they all get to go to Denny’s, almost vie to see who gets to cut up the cutupable parts of Mario’s under-12-size Kilobreakfast.

Marathe’s chair squeaked slightly as his weight shifted. ‘Always with you this freedom! For your walled-up country, always to shout “Freedom! Freedom!” as if it were obvious to all people what it wants to mean, this word.

Tiny Ewell, in a blue suit and laser chronometer and tiny shoes whose shine you could read by, is sharing a dirty aluminum ashtray with Nell Gunther, who has a glass eye which she amuses herself by usually wearing so the pupil and iris face in and the dead white and tiny manufacturer’s specifications on the back of the eye face out.

this whole parodic pseudo-ONANtiad scenario is actually a puppet-à-clef-type allusion to the dark legend of one Eric Clipperton and the Clipperton Brigade. […] He’d just sort of seepily risen, some sort of human radon, from someplace low and unknown, whence he lent the cliché ‘Win or Die in the Attempt’ grotesquely literal new levels of sense.

Causing the chair to squeak, Marathe again rotated two fingers of a hand in the air, which for Québecers signifies impatience. […] The other hand was with the Sterling UL machine pistol beneath the blanket.

Stavros Lobokulas’s great ambition—which he goes on about regularly to Gately when they’re cleaning the same barracks—Stavros’s dream is to utilize his unique combination of entrepreneurial drives and janitorial savvy and flairs for creative billing and finding desperate recovering halfway-house guys who’ll scrub shit for next to nothing, to pile up enough $ to open a women’s shoe store in some mobilely upward part of Boston where the women are healthy and upscale and have good feet and can afford to take care of their feet. […] Because what is there to really say about ambitious career-dreams involving feet?

Johnette Foltz is the other live-in Staffer, though between ultra-rabid Commitment-activity in NA and a somehow damaged NA fiancé she spends a lot of time pushing around places in a wicker wheelchair, she’s around Ennet House less and less now

During his residency, she’d gone personally with Gately on most of his bigger court-dates, driving him up to the North Shore in the killer Aventura with its Handicapped plates—she because of the neurological right-leg thing literally had a lead foot, and drove all the time like a maniac, and Gately had usually almost wet himself on Rte. 1

Through the door’s window, passing headlights illumine a disabled person in a wheelchair laboring along the rutted walk outside the Portuguese grocery opposite Antitoi Entertainent’s storefront.

The leader leans forward in the graceful way people who always sit can lean, revealing wiry hair and a small and strangely banal bald-spot

The chair gave small squeaks when he shifted his weight upon it.

Glynn had thin hair and an invariant three-day growth of gray stubble and diverticulitis that made him stoop somewhat over, and remaining physique-type issues from a load of bricks falling on his head from a Workers Comp scam gone rye that included crossed eyes that Lenz overheard the veiled girl Joe L. tell Clenette Henderson and Didi Neaves the man was so cross-eyed he could stand in the middle of the week and see both Sundays.

a Wednesday night on which the alight cat ran (as alight cats will, like hell) but ran after Lenz, seemingly, leaping the same fences Lenz hurdled and staying on his tail and […] illuminating Lenz to the scopophobic view of passing homes until it finally decided to drop to the ground and expire and smolder thereupon—Lenz considered this his only really close call

Lenz tells how once in the Back Bay on Boylston outside Bonwit’s a pushy prosthesis-vendor gave him a hard time about a glass-eye item of jewelry and got his issues’ juices flowing and then down the prosthesis-vendor line another vendor simply would not take No of any sort about a bottle of A.D.A.-Approved Xero-Lube Saliva Substitute

Under a streetlamp on Faneuil St. off W. Beacon, Randy Lenz shares a vulnerable personal thing and tilts his head back to show Bruce Green where his septum used to be.

Bruce Green’s aunt with her center-parted hair visibly graying under the pillbox hat and face obscured for three Ohio months behind the black mesh veil that fluttered from the pillbox hat, clutching little Bruce’s head to her underwired bosom day after day until his blank face was smooshed in on one side….

He has to get out Pat’s Week-At-A-Glance book and print out her next day’s appointments on a sheet of paper in block letters, because Pat finds her own palsied handwriting impossible to read.

It’s the bottom eye, grotesquely, that rolls up at Gately. […] Glynn’s got a real severe adtorsion, and the bottom eye is rolled up at Gately with a terrible delirious glitter, the top eye rolling around like a cow’s eye.

the sound of Joelle v.D.’s veiled head in an upstairs window that isn’t the 5-Women room’s shouting something down to Gately as he appears in the street

a couple of the more mobile catatonics appear on the porch of the Shed across the little street, staring at the spect-op

coprolaliac Touretters on downtown corners, all drawing liquid crowds. […] Street vendors are back. Homeless vets and twisted figures in wheelchairs with hand-lettered signs outlining entitlement. Jugglers, freaks, magicians, mimes, charismatic preachers with portable PAs.

Steeply gave small indications of paying attention to the small squeaks as Marathe turned his chair slightly this way and that way, achieving different angles of sight on his small shadow. […] Every change of his postures brought small squeaks of leather and metal.

So intent was Poor Tony Krause on the logistics and implications of the possible purses dangled as if by God right before him […] that he never saw his old former crewmate Mad Matty Pemulis, a sure source of compassion, looking up and out and down and back up, aghast in recognition of what Poor Tony has come through the corridor to resemble.

In doorways by shops are incomplete persons in wheelchairs with creative receptacles where limbs should be and hand-lettered invitations to help them.

he’d given it his best, and for the most part impressively; and he had been sent Away, Alone, and at least now could openly hide. R. Lenz lived by his wits out here, deeply disguised, on the amonymous streets of N. Cambridge and Somerville, never sleeping, ever moving, hiding in bright-lit and public plain sight, the last place They would think to find him.

There were two ways of going, and Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents were prepared to pursue both these. Less better was the indirect route: surveillance and infiltrating the surviving associates of the Entertainment’s auteur, its actress and rumored performer, relatives—if necessary, taking them and subjecting them to technical interview, leading with hope to the original auteur’s cartridge of the Entertainment.

Poor Tony’s father used to come home to 412 Mount Auburn Street Watertown at the completion of a long day of cesareans and sit in a chair in the darkening kitchen, scratching at his head where his mask’s green strings had dug into the head.

The Americans’ field-operative, jutting with prostheses, had been clinging to this person like a bad odor.

Fortier had been able to see the admitted addicts of Phoenix House holding a gathering in the room of living outside the office door: no person among them wore a veil of facial concealment, and so c’est ça.

‘The Swiss, we are a quiet people, and reserved. In addition, I am deformed.’

There’s 26 here, counting the one without feet on the stairs.

The addicted patient limped and leaned far to a side, though was attractive in the blond stereotype of the U.S.A. image-culture.

The authority figure liked to comb at the bright hair with her claw of the deformed hand.

Joelle had this weird fear that Gompert, who made Joelle extremely nervous at the best of times, would come home and walk in and find Joelle cleaning with her hair in a kerchief and veil damply clinging.

‘Can you let the people in from the shed when they come for Mrs. Lopate?’

Seeing the deep intake of veil which his inhaling caused for one moment only, the authority expressed surprise of the face and said ‘But you did know Ennet’s a working house. Residents have a month to find work, normally.’

‘Boo, I think I no longer believe in monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants or vampires or whatever. 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. The ones who give nothing away.’

—That the Daddy, the rotter of a son, and finally a shock-slowed Madame Psychosis had all run down the stairs after the mother and hit the cellar just as the mother had removed the stopper of a Pyrex flask with an enormous half-eaten-away skull on the side, which along with the flaming scarlet piece of litmus paper afloat inside signified an incredibly low-pH and corrosive type of acid.

—That, despite the little rotter’s professions of self-recrimination for allowing the deformity to take place and claim that the swirling systems of guilt and horror and denial-informed forgiveness made a committed relationship with Madame Psychosis increasingly untenable, it didn’t take an expert in character-disorders and weaknesses to figure out why the fellow’d given Madame Psychosis the boot within months of the traumatic deformity, now did it.

Thrust said he summoned every Oreida of self-control sobriety’d blessed him with and had quietly taken Lenz out of the office into the special Disabled Bedroom next door and over the sound of Burt F. Smith coughing up little pieces of lung in his sleep he said he’d real controlledly given Lenz the choice of voluntarily resigning his Ennet residency on the spot or submitting to a spot-urine and a room-search and everything like that […]

The Shed staff are still rolling the catatonic lady’s wheelchair over from the Shed to the House on scheduled A.M.’s, and Thrust says Johnette had to write up Minty and Diehl for putting one of those gag-arrows that are curved in the middle and look like there’s an arrow through your head over the catatonic lady’s paralyzed head yesterday and leaving her slumped by the TP like that all day.

all he could seem to do was pant real hard, as if the air was like totally missing his vocal box, or like his vocal box was totally demapped from nerve-damage in his shoulder and now just sort of hung there all withered and dry like an old hornet nest while air rushed out Gately’s throat all around it.

Mrs. Waite herself had swollen veiny ankles and little white bits of that dried paste at the corners of her mouth and about a million newspapers stacked and mildewing all over the kitchen, and the old lady basically radiated whatever mixture of unpleasantness and vulnerability it was that made you want to be cruel to people.

the apparently real nondream Joelle van D. is leaning over the bed’s crib-railing, wetting Gately’s big forehead and horror-rounded lips with a cool cloth, wearing sweatpants and a sort of loose brocaded hulpil whose lavender almost matches the selvage on her clean veil. […] Her veil this morning has a springy light-purple around the border, and the hair framing the veil seems a darker red, duskier, than when she’d first come into the House and refused meat.

It was all right; Gately’s own way of keeping it at arm’s length at the start had involved an actual arm. He pictured her laughing as he tells her that, the veil billowing mightily in and out.

Joelle’s head is down, looking down at the open album from overhead. Her veil hangs loose and blank again, so close he could reach his left hand up and lift it if he wanted.

Gately’d always found Demerol with a slight Talwin kicker such a smooth and orderly buzz. A somehow deliciously symmetrical buzz: the mind floats easy in the exact center of a brain that floats cushioned in a warm skull that itself sits perfectly centered on a cushion of soft air some neckless distance above the shoulders, and inside all is a somnolent hum. Chest rises and falls on its own, far away. The easy squeak of your head’s blood is like bedsprings in the friendly distance.

She’d come out of the St. E.’s doors and turned right for the quick walk back up to Ennet and a grotesquely huge woman whose hose bulged with stubble and whose face and head were four times larger than the largest woman Joelle had ever seen had grabbed her arm at the elbow and said she was sorry to be the one to tell her but that unbeknownst to her she was in almost mind-boggling danger. It took rather a while for Joelle to look her up and down. ‘This is supposed to be news?’

The palsied and megawealthy Mrs. Warshaver with her pair of designer canes.

Child-sized but severely palsied hand turns pages of incunabular manuscripts in mathematics, alchemy, religion, and bogus political autobiography, each page comprising some articulation or defense of intolerance and hatred.

Wheelchair.

‘Orin. Happy Inter-Day Eve. E Unibus Pluram and so on. Still dodging the disabled?’

The soon to be all-too-well-known and dread-inspiring Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents of the E.W.D.-receptacle-festooned Papineau region of southwestern Québec.

until the day the father is crushed into aspic in a freak accident on the Jamaica Way and all opportunities for transgenerational instruction are forever lost, and the son never learns how to be a handy homeowner himself, […] and feels terribly inadequate (the son), not only because he is not handy but because this handiness seemed to him to have represented to his father everything that was independent and manly and non-Disabled in an American male.

I saw parent after unimpeachable parent who raised kids who were (a) emotionally retarded or (b) lethally self-indulgent or (c) chronically depressed or (d) borderline psychotic or (e) consumed with narcissistic self-loathing or (f) neurotically driven/addicted or (g) variously psychosomatically Disabled or (h) some conjunctive permutation of (a)… (g).

The Cults of the Unwavering I: A Field Guide to Cults of Currency Speculation, Melanin, Fitness, Bioflavinoids, Spectation, Assassination, Stasis, Property, Agoraphobia, Repute, Celebrity, Acraphobia, Performance, Amway, Fame, Infamy, Deformity, Scopophobia, Syntax, Consumer Technology, Scopophilia, Presleyism, Hunterism, Inner Children, Eros, Xenophobia, Surgical Enhancement, Motivational Rhetoric, Chronic Pain, Solipsism, Survivalism, Preterition, Anti-Abortionism, Kevorkianism, Allergy, Albinism, Sport, Chiliasm, and Telentertainment in pre-O.N.A.N. North America

(though never unveiled)