‘Look here then who’s that in there? Is someone in there? Do open up. I’m on one foot then the other out here. I say Notkin someone’s been in here locked in and, well, sounding unwell, amid rather a queer scent.’
— and is knelt vomiting over the lip of the cool blue tub, gouges on the tub’s lip revealing sandy white gritty stuff below the lacquer and porcelain, vomiting muddy juice and blue smoke and dots of mercuric red into the claw-footed trough, and can hear again and seems to see, against the fire of her closed lids’ blood, bladed vessels aloft in the night to monitor flow, searchlit helicopters, fat fingers of blue light from one sky, searching.
Enfield MA is one of the stranger little facts that make up the idea that is metro Boston, because it is a township composed almost entirely of medical, corporate, and spiritual facilities. A kind of arm-shape extending north from Commonwealth Avenue and separating Brighton into Upper and Lower, its elbow nudging East Newton’s ribs and its fist sunk into Allston, Enfield’s broad municipal tax-base includes St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Franciscan Children’s Hospital, The Universal Bleacher Co., the Provident Nursing Home, Shuco-Mist Medical Pressure Systems Inc., the Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital Complex, the Svelte Nail Co., half the metro Boston turbine and generating stations of Sunstrand Power and Light (the part that gets taxed is in incorporated Allston), corporate headquarters for ‘The ATHSCME Family of Air-Displacement Effectuators’ (meaning they make really big fans), the Enfield Tennis Academy, St. John of God Hospital, Hanneman Orthopedic Hospital, the Leisure Time Ice Company, a Dicalced monastery, the combined St. John’s Seminary and offices for the RCC’s Boston Archdiocese (partly in Upper Brighton; neither half taxed), convent headquarters of The Sisters for Africa, the National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation, the Dr. George Roebling Runyon Memorial Institute for Po-diatric Research, regional shiny-truck, land-barge, and catapult facilities for the O.N.A.N.-subsidized Empire Waste Displacement Co. (what the Qué-becois call les trebuchets noirs, spectacular block-long catapults that make a sound like a giant stamping foot as they fling great twine-bundled waste-vehicles into the subannular regions of the Great Concavity at a parabolic altitude exceeding 5 km.; the devices’ slings are of alloy-belted elastic and their huge cupped vehicle-receptacles like catcher’s mitts from hell, a half dozen or so of the catapults in this like blimp-hangarish thing with a selectively slide-backable roof, taking up a good six square blocks of Enfield’s brachiform incursion into the Allston Spur, occasional school tours tolerated but not encouraged), and so on. W/ the whole flexed Enfield limb sleeved in a perimeter layer of light residential and mercantile properties. The Enfield Tennis Academy occupies probably now the nicest site in En-field, some ten years after balding and shaving flat the top of the big abrupt hill that constitutes a kind of raised cyst on the township’s elbow, the better part of 75 hectares of broad lawns and cloverleafing paths and topologically cutting-edge erections, 32 asphalt tennis courts and sixteen Har-Tru composition tennis courts and extensive underground maintenance and storage and athletic-training facilities and briers and calliopsis and pines mixed artfully in on the inclines with deciduous trees, the E.T.A. hilltop overlooking on one side, east, historic Commonwealth Avenue’s acclivated migration out of the squalor of Lower Brighton — liquor stores and Laundromats and bars and palisades of somber and guano-dappled tenement facades, the huge and brooding Brighton Project high-rises with three-story-high orange I.D.-numerals on the sides, plus liquor stores, and pale men in leather and whole gangs of pale children in leather on the corners and Greek-owned pizza places with yellow walls and dirty corner markets owned by Orientals who try like heck to keep their sidewalks clean but can t, even with hoses, plus the quarter-hourly trundle and ding of the Green Line train’s labor up the Ave.’s long rise to Boston College — into the spiky elegance of B.C. and the broad gentrification of Newton out to the west, where the haze-haloed Boston sun drops behind the last node in the four-km. sine wave that is collectively called the historic April Marathon’s ‘Heartbreak Hill,’ the sun always setting fifteen minutes to the nanosecond after deLint turns on the courts’ high-tower lights. To I think it must be the southwest, E.T.A. overlooks the steely gray tangle of Sunstrand’s transformers and high-voltage grids and coaxial chokers strung with beads of ceramic insulators, with not one Sunstrand smokestack anywhere in sight but a monstrous mega-ohm insulator-cluster at the terminus of a string of signs trailing in from the northeast, each sign talking with many 0’s about how many annular-generated amps are waiting underground for anyone who digs or in any way dicks around, with hair-raising nonverbal stick-figure symbols of somebody with a shovel going up like a Kleenex in the fireplace. There are smokestacks in the visual background slightly south of Sunstrand, though, from the E.W.D. hangars, each stack with a monstrous ATHSCME 2100-Series A.D.E. (fan) bolted behind it and blowing due north with an insistent high-pitched fury that is somehow soothing, aurally, at E.T.A.’s distance and height. From both the north and northeast tree-lines E.T.A. looks down its hill’s steepest, best-planted decline into the complexly decaying grounds of Enfield Marine.
5 NOVEMBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
The transparent phone sounded from somewhere under the hill of bedding[82] as Hal was on the edge of the bed with one leg up and his chin on its knee, clipping his nails into a wastebasket that sat several meters away in the middle of the room. It took four rings to find the receiver in the bedding and pull the antenna out.
‘Mmmyellow.’
‘Mr. Incredenza, this is the Enfield Raw Sewage Commission, and quite frankly we’ve had enough shit out of you.’
‘Hello Orin.’
‘How hangs it, kid.’
‘God, please no, please O., not more Separatism questions.’
‘Relax. Never crossed my mind. Social call. Shoot the breeze.’
‘Interesting you should call just now. Because I’m clipping my toenails into a wastebasket several meters away.’
‘Jesus, you know how I hate the sound of nail clippers.’
‘Except I’m shooting seventy-plus percent. The little fragments of clipping. It’s uncanny. I keep wanting to go out in the hall and get somebody in here to see it. But I don’t want to break the spell.’
‘The fragile magic-spell feel of those intervals where it feels you just can’t miss.’
‘It’s definitely one of those can’t-miss intervals. It’s just like that magical feeling on those rare days out there playing. Playing out of your head, de-Lint calls it. Loach calls it The Zone. Being in The Zone. Those days when you feel perfectly calibrated.’
‘Coordinated as God.’
‘Some groove in the shape of the air of the day guides everything down and in.’
‘When you feel like you couldn’t miss if you tried to.’
‘I’m so far away the wastebasket’s mouth looks more like a slot than a circle. And yet in they go, ka-chíng ka-ching. There went another one. Even the misses are near-misses, caroms off the rim.’
‘I’m sitting here with the leg in a whirlpool in the bathroom of a Norwegian deep-tissue therapist’s ranch-style house 1100 meters up in the Superstition mountains. Mesa-Scottsdale in flames far below. The bathroom’s redwood-panelled and overlooks a precipice. The sunlight’s the color of the bronze.’
‘But you never know when the magic will descend on you. You never know when the grooves will open up. And once the magic descends you don’t want to change even the smallest detail. You don’t know what concordance of factors and variables yields that calibrated can’t-miss feeling, and you don’t want to soil the magic by trying to figure it out, but you don’t want to change your grip, your stick, your side of the court, your angle of incidence to the sun. Your heart’s in your throat every time you change sides of the court.’