The reeling House's insomniacs and the billowing shape; the anhedonia/It essay

texture · 13 Nov YDAU (2009), 0245h; + narratorial essay

• When: 13 Nov YDAU (2009), 0245h (scene 124); scene 135 is a narratorial essay of YDAU
• What: The House as the book's stage for its depression material — and the institution's psychic wake after the fracas: two nights on, "the whole House is still reeling and spiritually palsied" (124). At 0245h the Ennet House insomniacs — Kate Gompert folded on the couch, Geoffrey Day in bathrobe, Erdedy chain-smoking, Green asleep with his broken nose cross-hatched in white tape — sit before the grotesque Mr. Bouncety-Bounce; Day tells Gompert in dead earnest about "a large dark billowing shape" that once came out of a corner of his mind, and Gompert, who has lived inside It for years, keeps finishing his sentences. The novel's central essay (scene 135) grounds this, distinguishing anhedonia ("a kind of emotional novocaine": "The world becomes a map of the world") from It, the psychotic depression Gompert lives — "a hell for one" — and delivers the narrator's verdict on the House's own monitoring apparatus: the no-Suicide contract "some well-meaning Substance-abuse halfway house" makes such a person sign is "simply absurd" (135; the machinery of event 14 measured against what it monitors). Day's verdict: "There is no way it could feel worse."