His mom’s special couch for TV was nubbly red chintz, and when she shifted from seated upright to lying on her side with her arm between her head and the little protective doily on the couch’s armrest and the glass held tilting on the little space her breasts left at the cushion’s edge, it was a sign she was going under. Gately at like ten or eleven used to pretend to listen and watch TV on the floor but really be dividing his attention between how close his Mom was to unconsciousness and how much Stolichnaya was left in the bottle. She would only drink Stolichnaya, which she called her Comrade in Arms and said Nothing but the Comrade would do. After she went under for the evening and he’d carefully taken the tilted glass out of her hand, Don’d take the bottle and mix the first couple vodkas with Diet Coke and drink a couple of those until it lost its fire, then drink it straight. This was like a routine. Then he’d put the near-empty bottle back next to her glass with its vegetables darkening in the undrunk vodka, and she’d wake up on the couch in the morning with no idea she hadn’t drank the whole thing. Gately was careful to always leave her enough for a wake-up swallow. But this gesture of leaving some, Gately’s now realized, wasn’t just filial kindness on his part: if she didn’t have the wake-up swallow she wouldn’t get off the red couch all day, and then there would be no new bottle that night.
This was at age ten or eleven, as he now recalls. Most of the furniture was wrapped in plastic. The carpet was burnt-orange shag that the landlord kept saying he was going to take up and go to wood floors. The M.P. worked nights or else most nights went out, and then she’d take the plastic off the couch.
Why the couch had little protective doilies on the arms when it usually had a plastic cover on it Gately cannot recall or explain.
For a while in Beverly they had Nimitz the kitty.
This all came burpling greasily up into memory in the space of two or three weeks in May, and now more stuff steadily like dribbles up, for Gately to Touch.
Sober, she’d called him Bimmy or Bim because that’s what she heard his little friends call him. She didn’t know the neighborhood cognomen came from an acronym for ‘Big Indestructible Moron.’ His head had been huge, as a child. Out of all proportion, though with nothing especially Estonian about it, that he could see. He’d been very sensitive about it, the head, but never told her not to call him Bim. When she was drunk and conscious she called him her Doshka or Dochka or like that. Sometimes, well in the bag himself, when he turned off the uncabled set and covered her with the af-ghan, easing the mostly empty Stoly bottle back onto the little TV Guide table by the bowl of darkening chopped peppers, his unconscious Mom would groan and titter and call him her Doshka and good sir knight and last and only love, and ask him not to hit her anymore.
In June he Got In Touch with memories that their front steps in Beverly were a pocked cement painted red even in the pocks. Their mailbox was part of a whole tract-housing complex’s honeycomb of mailboxes on a like small pole, brushed-steel and gray with a postal eagle on it. You needed a little key to get your mail out, and for a long time he thought the sign on it said ‘US MAIL,’ as in us instead of U.S. His mom’s hair had been dry blond-white with dark roots that never lengthened or went away. No one tells you when they tell you you have cirrhosis that eventually you’ll all of a sudden start choking on your own blood. This is called a cirrhotic hemorrhage. Your liver won’t process any more of your blood and it quote shunts the blood and it goes up your throat in a high-pressure jet, is what they told him, is why he’d first thought the M.P.’d come back and cut his Mom or stabbed her, when he first came in, after football, his last season, at age seventeen. She’d been Diagnosed for years. She’d go to Meetings[179] for a few weeks, then drink on the couch, silent, telling him if the phone rang she wasn’t home. After a few weeks of this she’d spend a whole day weeping, beating at herself as if on fire. Then she’d go back to Meetings for a while. Eventually her face began to swell and make her eyes piggy and her big breasts pointed at the floor and she turned the deep yellow of quality squash. This was all part of the Diagnosis. At first Gately just couldn’t go out to the Long-Term place, couldn’t see her out there. Couldn’t deal. Then after some time passed he couldn’t go because he couldn’t face her and try and explain why he hadn’t come before now. Ten-plus years have gone like that. Gately hadn’t probably consciously thought of her once for three years, before getting straight.
Right after their neighbor Mrs. Waite got found by the meter-guy dead, so he must have been nine, when his Mom was first Diagnosed, Gately had gotten the Diagnosis mixed up in his head with King Arthur. He’d ride a mop-handle horse and brandish a trashcan-lid and a batteryless plastic Light-Saber and tell the neighborhood kids he was Sir Osis of Thuliver, most fearsomely loyal and fierce of Arthur’s vessels. Since the summer now, when he mops Shattuck Shelter floors, he hears the Clopaclopaclop he used to make with his big square tongue as Sir Osis, then, riding.
And his dreams late that night, after the Braintree/Bob Death Commitment, seem to set him under a sort of sea, at terrific depths, the water all around him silent and dim and the same temperature he is.
VERY LATE OCTOBER Y.D.A.U
Hal Incandenza had this horrible new recurring dream where he was losing his teeth, where his teeth had become like shale and splintered when he tried to chew, and fragmented and melted into grit in his mouth; in the dream he was going around squeezing a ball and spitting fragments and grit, getting more and more hungry and scared. Everything in there loosened by a great oral rot that the nightmare’s Teddy Schacht wouldn’t even look at, saying he was late for his next appointment, everyone Hal saw seeing Hal’s crumbling teeth and looking at their watch and making vague excuses, a general atmosphere of the splintering teeth being a symptom of something way more dire and distasteful that no one wanted to confront him about. He was pricing dentures when he woke. It was about an hour before dawn drills. His keys were on the floor by the bed with his College Board prep books. Mario’s great iron bed was empty and made up tight, all five pillows neatly stacked. Mario’d been spending the last few nights over at HmH, sleeping on an air mattress in the living room in front of Tavis’s Tatsuoka receiver, listening to WYYY-109 into the wee hours, weirdly agitated about Madame Psychosis’s unannounced sabbatical from the ‘60 Minutes +/-’ midnight thing where she’d been an unvarying M-F presence for several years, it seemed like. WYYY had been evasive and unforthcoming about the whole thing. For two days some alto grad student had tried to fill in, billing herself as Miss Diagnosis, reading Horkheimer and Adorno against a background of Partridge Family slowed down to a narcotized slur. At no time had anyone of managerial pitch or timbre mentioned Madame Psychosis or what her story was or her date of expected return. Hal’d told Mario that the silence was a positive sign, that if she’d left the air for good the station would have had to say something. Hal, Coach Schtitt, and the Moms had all remarked Mario’s odd mood. Mario was usually next to impossible to agitate.[180]