The compulsions: "what time is it," the need to be north, the pulse-checks, the grandiosity

pivotal · autumn YDAU, ongoing

• When: ongoing through his Ennet House residency, autumn YDAU (catalogued 11 Nov and across the fall)
• What: Lenz's signature texture, catalogued by the narration and by Gately: an obsessive need to be north (and if possible northeast) of everything — plotting the northernmost car-seat with a compass and napkin; a fear of disks and of all timepieces; a constant taking of his own pulse on the inside of his wrists; and a relentless, needling "what time is it" demand (three times in half an hour off Geoffrey Day). He self-conceptualizes as a "hiply sexy artist-intellectual" — puts "free lance script writer" for Occupation, once held books upside-down in the corner for a week, and hauls a giant Medical Dictionary around. He is "seedily handsome in the way of pimps and low-level coke dealers," a knife-owner (the tell: a hairless patch on one forearm). At the White Flag Commitment he is "doubtless at the pay phone in the northeast corner," his phone-and-north compulsions merged. The compulsion-catalog is durable enough to serve as his police description: hospitalized, intubated and unable to speak, Gately struggles to identify the fugitive to Ferocious Francis in block caps — illegible, "cuneiform," but the book's tersest portrait of him (scene 169).