The animal-cruelty escalation — his private "substance": rats, then bagged cats, then the knife on dogs

pivotal · autumn YDAU (~Oct into Nov)

• When: autumn YDAU, escalating over weeks (~United Nations Day 24 Oct, "near Halloween," into November)
• What: Walking home alone from meetings, Lenz finds "his own dark way to deal with the well-known Rage and Powerlessness issues" — a private substitute Substance. The escalation: first braining rats with a chunk of concrete behind the Svelte Nail Co. ("There," he says at the moment of resolution); then trapping urban cats in Hefty bags (upgraded to fiber-reinforced SteelSaks doubled with pipe-cleaners) and watching the bag "assume shapes," then swinging the bag against a pole; then, after a flaming-cat close call with a Caldor kerosene bottle, moving "up to the Browning X444 Serrated" — cutting dogs' throats in their own yards, baited with Gately's meatloaf, always circling behind first "because the bleeding is far-reaching." He also put a fallen nestling down the kitchen garbage disposal. His nightly interval of choice is 2216h.–2226h. The narration sources his one moment of self-recognition: William James on "that latent process of unconscious preparation often preceding a sudden awakening to the fact that the mischief is irretrievably done" is "the line that actually snapped Lenz to what he was up to when he chanced to read it" — in the same huge large-print Principles of Psychology, found behind a bookshelf along the Ennet living room's north wall, that houses his coke bunker (event 5), "a volume that's come to mean a great deal to Lenz" (n224 p. 1036).