The mugging: the walk to Inman Square with Ruth van Cleve, and the lightpost

pivotal · 14 Nov YDAU, ~2200h

• When: 14 Nov YDAU, ~2200h, Prospect St. just south of Inman Square, Cambridge
• What: Psychotically depressed and unslept for four nights, Kate escorts the newer, "excruciating," nonstop-talking resident Ruth van Cleve to a late NA meeting near Inman Square, noticing she can move forward "without any sort of conscious moving-forward-type volitions," heads floating disembodied in the dark shop windows. Trailing them is Poor Tony Krause, post-seizure and out of Cambridge City Hospital, eyeing their thin purse-straps (scene 133). A third lens (scene 131): from inside the Man o' War Grille, Matty Pemulis watches the two unnamed girls cross the front glass, then Poor Tony "passing across the Grille's window, his eyes either on or looking right through the two skinny girls plodding ahead of him." Krause snatches both purses; Ruth's strap breaks but Kate's macramé strap holds, and she is whip-swung by his momentum into a rust-pocked curbside lightpost — a concussion, an eye swelling shut, everything tinged violet, a nausea she fights not to vomit — then set upon by a reeking "witness" street-bum demanding change. Ruth and the thief recede up Prospect, both shrieking for help; Kate is left alone and purseless.