Unsure how to be supportive, for a while the Flaggers try to cheer Gately up by telling him CPR jokes. ‘CPR’ is their term for Al-Anon, which is known to Boston AAs as the ‘Church of Perpetual Revenge.’
‘What’s an Al-Anon Relapse?’ asks Glenn K.
‘It is a twinge of compassion,’ says Jack J., who has a kind of a facial tic.
‘But what is an Al-Anon Salute?’ Jack J. asks back.
The three all pause, and then Jack J. puts the back of his hand to his brow and flutters his lashes martyrishly at the drop-ceiling. They all three of them laugh. They have no clue that if Gately actually laughs he’ll tear his shoulder’s sutures. One side of Jack J.’s face goes in and out of a tortured grimace that doesn’t affect the other side of his face one bit, something that’s always given Gately the fantods. Bud O. is waggling his finger disapprovingly at Glenn K., to signify an Al-Anon Handshake. Glenn K. gives a lengthy impression of an Al-Anon mom watching her alcoholic kid marching in some parade and getting more and more outraged at how everybody’s out of step except her kid. Gately closes his eyes and moves his chest up and down a few times in a dumbshow of polite laughter, so they’ll think they’ve cheered him up and screw. The little thoracic movements make his dextral regions make him want to bite the side of his hand in pain. It’s like a big wooden spoon keeps pushing him just under the surface of sleep and then spooning him up for something huge to taste him, again and again.
19 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
After Rémy Marathe and Ossowiecke, and Balbalis also, they all reported back negatively for all signs of this veiled performer, M. Fortier and Marathe threw into an effect this finally most drastic of the operations for the locating of the Master Entertainment. This was to acquire members of the immediate family of the auteur, perhaps in public.
Marathe was charged with this operation’s details, for M. Broullîme was now thrust into technical trouble-killing on the furthering field-tests of viewer willingness; for one of the newly acquired test-subjects — this was an eccentrically dressed and extremely irritating without-home man of the streets in a white wig appropriated with large bags filled of foreign cook-ware and extremely small-in-size ladies’ undergarments — was discovered to have been being severing and pushing beneath the room of storage’s closed door the severed digits of the second of the newly acquired test-subjects — this was a mis-dressed and severely weakened or addicted man dressed in the clothing of a gauche woman, carrying multiple purses of suspicious nature — rather than his own digits, marring the statistics of Broullîme’s field-experiment to such the extent that M. Fortier was forced to consider whether to allow Broullîme to conduct a lethal technical interview of the wigged substituter of digits for reasons of anger only. Substantially, a technical interview of more importance was to be conducted in the city Phoenix far across the U.S. to the south, a city’s name Fortier had amusement from, and departed before incoming weather to attend Mile. Luria P---in this conducting, leaving the trusted Rémy Marathe to charge details of the preliminary acquisition.
Marathe, who had made his decision and call, did what he could. A direct assault upon the Academy of Tennis itself was impossible. A.F.R.s fear nothing in this hemisphere except tall and steep hillsides. Their attack must not be direct. Thus the preliminary was to acquire and replace the tennis children of Quebec, known by the A.F.R. to be even then en route to U.S.A. soil for gala competition with the tennis children of this Academy. Marathe selected young Balbalis, the one still with both the legs — albeit paralyzed and stickishly withered, them — to lead the A.F.R. field-detail which must intercept the provincial players. Marathe, he stayed at the Cambridge shop of the Antitois, withdrawing frequently to the jazz nights nearby of Ryle’s restaurant. Balbalis drove the modified van of Dodge north into the increasingly heavy snowstorm. They bypassed the Pongo checkpoint at Methuen MA. They would place a large mirror in the deserted road and delude the tennis bus that it must leave the road to avoid impact; its own headlights would delude it. An old F.L.Q. trick. Two teams in the van’s back assembled the mirror’s components. Balbalis would not allow to stop for this assembly; the snowfall was worse in the Convexity because of the fans to the south. What used to be Montpelier in Vermont lay between E.W.D. grids but took bad fallout from the region of Champlain and was unoccupied and ghostly white with snow. Balbalis permitted at Montpelier a brief stop for final assembly and for those who were incontinent to change their bags. Balbalis pressed hard to the former place of St. Johnsbury, where the mirror was installed across the southbound lanes of the U.S. Interstate #91. Balbalis did not complain that there were no tracks in the snow of the road to be followed. He never complained. They arrived well early just south of the checkpoint at which Provincial Autoroute #55 became the Interstate #91. There was a brief period of the tension when it appeared that the night-vision attachment for the binoculars had been misplaced. Balbalis remained cool and it was located. The plan was to intercept the travelling team of players and allow A.F.R.s to arrive at the place in their stead. Marathe promised to conceive an excellent ruse to explain the wheelchairs and adult beards of the false players. There was no smoking in the van while they waited for the children tennis players of their country to appear at the checkpoint. The bus was forced to remain at the checkpoint for several minutes. The bus was large and chartered and appeared warm within. Above its windshield its lit rectangle of destination displayed the English word for charter. If the bus survived the swerve from the highway’s mirror and was operational after the crash of swerving, Balbalis would drive this bus. There was one brief argument over who would be required to drive the van, for Balbalis refused to leave the van behind them even if the bus was operational. If the bus was not operational, no more than six junior children as survivors could be accommodated in the van. The rest would be allowed to die for leur rai pays. Balbalis, he showed no preference one or the other way.
Gately dreamed he was with Ennet House resident Joelle van Dyne in a Southern motel whose restaurant’s authoritarian sign said simply EAT, in the U.S. South, in high summer, brutally hot, the foliage outside the room’s broken windowscreen a parched khaki, the air glassy with heat, the ceiling fan rotating at a second-hand’s rate, the room’s bed a lavish four-poster, tall and squishy, the bedspread nubbly, Gately supine with his side on fire while newcomer Joelle v.D. raises her veil slightly to lick the sweat off his lids and temples, whispering so the veil flutters around and fans him, promising him a P.M. of near-terminal pleasures, undressing at the foot of the old tall bed, slowly, her loose light clothes moist with sweat and falling easily to the bare floor, and an incredible female body, an inhuman body, the sort of body Gately’s only ever seen with a staple in its navel, a body like something you’d win in a raffle; and a fifth post forms on the four-poster, so to speak, which erect post’s long-dormant height obscures the nude newcomer’s figure; and then when she moves around out of the pulsing shadow to lean in close and press her inhuman body’s face right up intimately close to his, she removes the veil, and on top of this body to die for is the unveiled historical likeness of fucking Winston Churchill, complete with cigar and jowls and bulldog scowl, and the ghastliness of the shock makes the rest of Gately’s body go rigid, the pain of which wakes him with a jolted attempt to sit up that itself causes such a blast of pain that he half passes back out again and lies there with rolling eyes and a round mouth.