As of the Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment (2009) – Boston, MA
We get another account of teleputer technology and some of the medical conditions that arise when over 50% of a city’s population works from home at a desk. From the disorders caused by so much sitting, we see the rise of a booming home exercise video market. And we learn that 1/3rd of those who actually go into an office could work from home if they so chose. The narrative observes that complaining about these major changes in culture would be tantamount to complaining about the weather. This is the culture now, and that’s that. We also learn of a rising tension in the ONAN that compels people to get outside as much as possible. They come outside to look at anything, from car wrecks to insurgent attacks. They just stand there and watch. Technology and American choice-making has created a nation of spectators.
One particular event that draws spectators is the annual cleaning of the “Public Gardens’ man-made duck pond” each November in Boston, MA. The pond is drained, long shiny trucks appear, and a large crowd forms around the spectacle. This year, Rodney Tine watches from the “eighth floor of the State House Annex on Beacon and Joy Sts.” Apparently, James O. Incandenza came to watch every year, when he was alive. As Tine watches, Unspecified Services operatives sit behind him in a meeting. Steeply is present.
At the same time, the grad student engineer from “60 Minutes More or Less” is trying to “give his bad skin some quality UV and a good chill’s chap…on the Public Gardens’ far hillside.” There are only homeless men and frisbee throwers on the hill with the engineer. After a few moments, a van with a handicapped license plate appears and waits at the curb at the bottom of the hill. We learn that the engineer no longer goes to the roof of the student union to listen to the “60 Minutes” time-slot because he has to maintain mic levels with no one in the booth doing the show. Strangely, another white van appears above the student engineer at the top of the hill and we learn that Molly Notkin came by WYYY a few days ago and told the engineer that Madame Psychosis was in treatment. Now, a ramp appears from the side of the van uphill and a man in a wheelchair comes wheeling down it. He speeds down the hill. His chair is equipped with what looks like a snow plow that he uses to scoop up the student engineer; he finishes his journey down the hill and they disappear into the van with the handicapped plates still waiting below. Both vans now disappear.
11 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, MA
ETA is at dinner in the cafeteria. Steeply is here. We learn that Stice and Hal had a match today and that The Darkness nearly upset Hal, only losing because he did not yet believe he could beat the upperclassman. People whisper about the match, but Stice ignores them. We learn that Stice grew up in Partridge, KS and enjoys regaling his fellow ETAs with stories of his parents’ rocky romance. It seems they met playing a bar game where contestants would put their forearms together and place a lit cigarette between them until one of them could not take the pain and jerked away, thereby losing the game. Neither of the Stices jerked away and they fell in love. Since then they have divorced and remarried several times. Their relationship has ups and downs, obviously; these ups and downs are also experienced by their children.
At the upperclassmen’s table, Troeltsch and Pemulis argue about whether ETA uses powdered milk. Troeltsch feels strongly they do; Pemulis feels very much the other way. Troeltsch claims that he had powdered milk at home when he was younger and knows what it looks like. Pemulis asserts that they have seen them put the bags in the machine, which would mean they have to mix the milk and then put it in bags, a complicated process merely to imitate liquid milk. The narrative notes the mysterious movement of the giant squeegees that hang on the wall of the cafeteria. The milk discussion continues. Troeltsch combines his claims about the milk with the mysterious tripod, Stice’s moving bed, and the ball machine appearing in the females’ sauna in order to imply that all is not well at ETA.
The narrative then mentions the women Hal’s brother preys upon, a practice he picked up after “the girl Orin had been wildly in love with and Himself had compulsively used in films had been disfigured.” This is clearly JvD. We then get a catalog of who among the upper class boys have had sex. Hal apparently has no interest whatsoever in sex. He thinks about how he should have lost his match with Stice earlier today. And Hal also thinks about handing in clean urine in a month and about the fact that he will no longer be taking substances. Stice remains distracted by his moving bed and objects more generally. Hal and Troeltsch go over to Ingersol, who has arrived back from the hospital in a cast. Returning to sex, we learn that Keith Freer thinks most of the female ETAs are lesbians. Stice stares into his salad bowl and tries to mentally move a cherry tomato with his mind. He thinks about the excellence of his play out on the courts today, when it seemed as if his hits defied physics. Hal had looked like he was falling apart on the court, which is repeatedly connected with the post-Interdependence Day events in CT’s office by the others at the table. Hal and Mario know the milk has been powdered since CT took over.
1 May, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) – Outcropping in the Tortalita Mountains, Tucson, AZ
We rejoin Steeply and Marathe. Steeply tells Marathe that his father became obsessed with the broadcast television program M*A*S*H when Steeply was a teenager. He says it started simply with an attachment to the show. His father liked to have dinner on Thursdays in front of the television and watch the show as he ate, which his wife found endearing. Eventually, the show entered syndication and Steeply’s father became obsessed with seeing all the reruns every time they ran, in addition to the new episodes still being produced. He even began taking a television to work. As Steeply talks about his father, he asks if the AFR knows that Steeply’s father worked for a “heating-oil distributorship.” He wants to insure Marathe has more and more to put in his report to the AFR so he can shore up the appearance that he is in fact gaining information from the Office of Unspecified Services, rather than vice versa. Steeply, continuing his story, tells how his father started making notes on the show. He kept a notebook that was hidden whenever he was not holding it. The father’s obsession grew and grew, the family always adjusting to new changes and suffering for them.
After a while, Steeply’s father began quoting lines from the show that he saw as apposite to his conversations. The family’s kitchen became a mess tent, the den a swamp. His father then began recording the show off the TV and organizing his tapes in complicated systems that were unconnected to when the shows were originally aired. Steeply’s mom one day found letters in the trash addressed to Major Burns, one of M*A*S*H‘s characters. And the old man’s theories about the show grew more and more complex: “One theory involved the fact, which the old man found extremely significant, that the historical Korean Police Action of the UN lasted only roughly two-odd years, but that M*A*S*H itself was by then into something like its seventh year of new episodes.” Letters began to appear at the house, returned from the fictional addresses his father had mailed them to. Then Steeply’s father stopped going to work, refusing to leave his den as he continued to watch and rewatch the show. Finally, just before his 60th birthday, he died of a heart problem in his recliner, watching Alan Alda suffer from a sleepwalking disorder. Steeply uses the story to describe how his friend Hank Hoyne looked after viewing the samizdat. Hank’s and his father’s eyes both looked like they were opposite of inanimate, they seemed “stuck in some way…pulled apart in different directions. As if there was something he’d forgotten…Misplaced. Lost.”
13 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) - Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, Enfield, MA
0245 hours: Gompert, Day, Erdedy and Green are watching cartridges in Ennet House’s living room. We learn the house is still “spiritually reeling” from the confrontation between Gately and the Canadians that Lenz provoked. Day and Gompert talk, she says that Day doesn’t actually care about something they have been talking about while Day tries to describe something from his childhood. He had played the violin when he was young. One day, he played a note that combined with the nearby sound of a running fan and, Day says, “it was as if a large dark billowing shape came billowing out of some corner in my mind.” He says, “It was total horror.” Day put down the violin and left the room, but soon returned and made the sound again, only to have the shape reappear. After that, the shape began appearing on its own. Gompert becomes interested in what Day is saying because she is beginning to relate to his story. Day says of an episode he had in college that, “Some boy I hardly knew in the room below mine heard me staggering around whimpering at the top of my lungs. He came up and sat up with me until it went away. It took most of the night. We didn’t converse; he didn’t try to comfort me.” He says that since that night he understands hell. Gompert is fully relating now. Day finishes by saying, “From that day, whether I could articulate it satisfactorily or not, I understood on an intuitive level why people killed themselves.”