Whenever Avril parts ficus leaves to check, Mario’s still hunched pigeon-toed and cocked in the same RCA-Victorish posture, with the little horizontal forehead-crease that means he’s either listening or thinking hard.
‘The multiple amputee. The prosthetically malmatched. The snaggle-toothed, wattled, weak-chinned, and walrus-cheeked. The palate-clefted. The really large-pored. The excessively but not necessarily lycanthropically hirsute. The pin-headed. The convulsively Tourettic. The Parkinsonianly tremulous. The stunted and gnarled. The teratoid of overall visage. The twisted and hunched and humped and halitotic. The in any way asymmetrical. The rodential- and saurian- and equine-looking.’
‘Hey Hal?’
The tri-nostriled. The invaginate of mouth and eye. Those with those dark loose bags under their eyes that hang halfway down their faces. Those with Cushing’s Disease. Those who look like they have Down Syndrome even though they don’t have Down Syndrome. You decide. You be the judge. It says You are welcome regardless of severity. Severity is in the eye of the sufferer, it says. Pain is pain. Crow’s feet. Birthmark. Rhinoplasty that didn’t take. Mole. Overbite. A bad-hair year.’
The WYYY student engineer in his sulcus contemplates the moon, which looks sort of like a full moon that somebody’s bashed in a little bit with a hammer. Madame Psychosis asks rhetorically whether the circular’s left anyone out. The engineer finishes his Fizzy and makes ready to descend again for the hour’s close, his skin turned toward the terrible cerebral chill off the Charles, which is windy and blue. Sometimes Madame Psychosis takes one random call to start ‘60 +/—.’ Tonight the one caller she ends by taking has a cultured stutter and invites M.P. and the YYY community to consider the fact that the moon, which of course as any sot knows revolves around the earth, does not itself revolve. Is this true? He says it is. That it just stays there, hidden and disclosed by our round shadow’s rhythms, but never revolving. That it never turns its face away.
The little Heathkit can’t receive signals inside the Cerebrum’s subdural stairwells, during descent, but the student engineer can anticipate she’ll make no direct reply. Her sign-off is more dead air. She almost reminds the engineer of certain types in high school whom everyone adored because you sensed it made no difference to them whether you adored them. It had sure made a difference to the engineer, though, who hadn’t been invited to even one graduation party, with his inhaler and skin.
The dessert Avril serves when Hal’s over is Mrs. Clarke’s infamous high-protein-gelatin squares, available in bright red or bright green, sort of like Jell-O on steroids. Mario’s wild for them. C.T. clears the table and loads the dishwasher, since he didn’t cook, and Hal gets into his coat at like OlOlh. Mario’s still listening to the WYYY nightly sign-off, which takes a while because they not only list the station’s kilowattage specs but go through proofs for the formulae by which the specs are derived. C.T. always drops at least one plate out in the kitchen and then bellows. Avril always brings some hell-Jell-O squares in to Mario and adopts a mock-dry tone and tells Hal it’s been reasonably nice to see him outside les bâtiments sanctifies. The whole thing to Hal sometimes gets ritualistic and almost hallucinatory, the postprandial farewell routine. Hal stands under the big framed poster of Metropolis and whumps his gloves together casually and tells Mario there’s no reason for him to leave too; Hal’s going to blast down the hill for a bit. Avril and Mario always smile and Avril asks casually what his plans are.
Hal always whumps his gloves together and smiles up at her and says ‘Make trouble.’
And Avril always puts on a sort of mock-stern expression and says ‘Do not, under any circumstances, have fun,’ which Mario still always finds clutch-your-stomach funny, every time, week after week.
Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House is the sixth of seven exterior Units on the grounds of an Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital complex that, from the height of an ATHSCME 2100 industrial displacement fan or Enfield Tennis Academy’s hilltop, resembles seven moons orbiting a dead planet. The hospital building itself, a VA facility of iron-colored brick and steep slate roofs, is closed and cordoned, bright pine boards nailed across every possible access and aperture, with really stern government signs about trespassing. Enfield Marine was built during either WWII or Korea, when there were ample casualties and much convalescence. About the only people who use the Enfield Marine complex in a VA-related way now seem to be wild-eyed old Vietnam veterans in fatigue jackets de-sleeved to make vests, or else drastically old Korea vets who are now senile or terminally alcoholic or both.
The hospital building itself stripped of equipment and copper wire, defunct, Enfield Marine stays solvent by maintaining several smaller buildings on the complex’s grounds — buildings the size of like prosperous homes, which used to house VA doctors and support staff — and leasing them to different state-related health agencies and services. Each building has a Unit-number that increases with the Unit’s distance from the defunct hospital and with its proximity, along a rutted cement roadlet that extends back from the hospital’s parking lot, to a steep ravine that overlooks a particularly unpleasant part of Brighton MA’s Commonwealth Avenue and its Green Line train tracks.
Unit #l, right by the lot in the hospital’s afternoon shadow, is leased by some agency that seems to employ only guys who wear turtlenecks; the place counsels wild-eyed Vietnam vets for certain very-delayed stress disorders, and dispenses various pacifying medications. Unit#2, right next door, is a methadone clinic overseen by the same MA Division of Substance Abuse Services that licenses Ennet House. Customers for the services of Units #1 and #2 arrive around sunup and form long lines. The customers for Unit #l tend to congregate in like-minded groups of three or four and gesture a lot and look wild-eyed and generally pissed-off in some broad geopolitical way. The customers for the methadone clinic tend to arrive looking even angrier, as a rule, and their early-morning eyes tend to bulge and flutter like the eyes of the choked, but they do not congregate, rather stand or lean along #2’s long walkway’s railing, arms crossed, alone, brooding, solo acts, standoffish — 50 or 60 people all managing to form a line on a narrow walkway waiting for the same small building to unlock its narrow front door and yet still managing to appear alone and stand-offish is a strange sight, and if Don Gately had ever once seen a ballet he would, as an Ennet House resident, from his sunup smoking station on the fire escape outside the Five-Man bedroom upstairs, have seen the movements and postures necessary to maintain this isolation-in-union as balletic.