The garage monologue: the body doctrine, the greatness prophecy, "A machine in the ghost"

pivotal · Winter B.S. 1960, Tucson AZ

• When: "WINTER B.S. 1960—TUCSON AZ"; the morning of ten-year-old Jim's would-be first tennis lesson, rain-checked to "this weekend" as the flask empties
• What: His one extended presence in the novel, and it is all voice: a garage-door lesson that becomes a twelve-page monologue at his silent, weeping, ten-year-old son ("almost five-eleven, a possible pituitary freak," bow-tied, bespectacled, clutching a refractive-indices guide). The doctrine: treat every object as a body and every body as a machine — the garage door, the broiler, the 1956 Mercury Montclair ("It’s a machine. It will do what it’s made for and do it perfectly, but only when stimulated by someone who’s made it his business to know its tricks and seams, as a body."), the torn-open tennis ball ("the ultimate body," "Perfectly round. Even distribution of mass. But empty inside, utterly, a vacuum."), the silver flask unscrewed with due care, the boy himself ("Son, you’re a body, son.... Head is body."). Inside it: the Brando theory (event 3), the widow-killing errand ("Latrodectus mactans, Jim. Widow.... Make it say ‘K.’"), the prophecy ("You will overshadow and obliterate me... on the day you first beat me I may well weep."), the retold 1933 fall (event 2), the California announcement (event 7), the fear ("I’m just afraid of having a tombstone that says HERE LIES A PROMISING OLD MAN"; "I’m so scared of dying without ever being really seen."), and the closing endearment on the boy's initials: "That’s my J.O.I. of a guy of a joy of boy." The one phrase the whole archive keys on is his: today the boy becomes "A machine in the ghost, to quote a phrase." — the Ryle/Koestler formula inverted, machine and ghost switched, in a drunk failed actor's mouth. [Attribution note: first-person dramatic monologue; the son never audibly speaks; the speaker drinks the flask empty as he talks. As printed.]