Mario Incandenza's handshake ends the Challenge

pivotal · UNDATED (~Y.T.M.P.-Y.T.S.D.B., before JOI's death — strained; see Dating notes)

• When: UNDATED — during a JOI film shoot at the Back Bay co-op, with JOI alive and filming; Mario is "only fourteen"
• What: Toward the end of the ninth month, fourteen-year-old Mario Incandenza — dispatched from the Back Bay co-op where his father was filming actors dressed as God and the Devil playing Tarot poker for the soul of Cosgrove Watt, sent to buy a roll of subway tokens and routed by a dumpster-fire to Park Street — takes Loach's and the other stemmers' outstretched hands and appeals for a touch at face value, and answers them all with a warm handshake, "which only the more severely intoxicated stemmers didn't recoil from the profferer of, plus Loach": even the men begging for touch flinch from it when it's offered. Clueless about anti-stem defensive strategy, Mario simply does the human thing nobody else would. It leads, "through a convoluted but kind of heartwarming and faith-reaffirming series of circumstances," to Loach being given an Assistant Trainer's job at E.T.A. despite having no B.A. (Mario's side of the beat lives in Mario's timeline, event 63.)