At 0015h., 2 April, the medical attache’s wife is just leaving the Mount Auburn Total Fitness Center, having played five six-game pro-sets in her little Mideast-diplomatic-wife-tennis-circle’s weekly round-robin, then hung around the special Silver-Key-Members’ Lounge with the other ladies, unwrapping her face and hair and playing Narjees[11] and all smoking kif and making extremely delicate and oblique fun of their husbands’ sexual idiosyncrasies, laughing softly with their hands over their mouths. The medical attache, at their apartment, is still viewing the unlabelled cartridge, which he has rewound to the beginning several times and then configured for a recursive loop. He sits there, attached to a congealed supper, watching, at 0020h., having now wet both his pants and the special recliner.
Eighteen in May, Mario Incandenza’s designated function around Enfield Tennis Academy is filmic: sometimes during A.M. drills or P.M. matches he’ll be assigned by Coach Schtitt et al. to set up an old camcorder or whatever video stuff’s to hand on a tripod and record a certain area of court, videotaping different kids’ strokes, footwork, certain tics and hitches in serves or running volleys, so the staff can show the tapes to the kids instructionally, letting the kids see on the screen exactly what a coach or prorector’s talking about. The reason being it’s a lot easier to fix something if you can see it.
AUTUMN — YEAR OF DAIRY PRODUCTS FROM THE AMERICAN HEARTLAND
Drug addicts driven to crime to finance their drug addiction are not often inclined toward violent crime. Violence requires all different kinds of energy, and most drug addicts like to expend their energy not on their professional crime but on what their professional crime lets them afford. Drug addicts are often burglars, therefore. One reason why the home of someone whose home has been burglarized feels violated and unclean is that there have probably been drug addicts in there. Don Gately was a twenty-seven-year-old oral narcotics addict (favoring Demerol and Talwin[12]), and a more or less professional burglar; and he was, himself, unclean and violated. But he was a gifted burglar, when he burgled — though the size of a young dinosaur, with a massive and almost perfectly square head he used to amuse his friends when drunk by letting them open and close elevator doors on, he was, at his professional zenith, smart, sneaky, quiet, quick, possessed of good taste and reliable transportation — with a kind of ferocious jolliness in his attitude toward his livelihood.
As an active drug addict, Gately was distinguished by his ferocious and jolly elan. He kept his big square chin up and his smile wide, but he bowed neither toward nor away from any man. He took zero in the way of shit and was a cheery but implacable exponent of the Don’t-Get-Mad-Get-Even school. Like for instance once, after he’d done a really unpleasant three-month bit in Revere Holding on nothing more than a remorseless North Shore Assistant District Attorney’s circumstantial suspicion, finally getting out after 92 days when his P.D. got the charges dismissed on a right-to-speedy brief, Gately and a trusted associate[13] paid a semiprofessional visit to the private home of this Assistant D.A. whose zeal and warrant had cost Gately a nasty impromptu detox on the floor of his little holding-cell. Also a believer in the Revenge-Is-Tastier-Chilled dictum, Gately had waited patiently until the ‘Eye On People’ section of the Globe mentioned the A.D.A. and his wife’s presence at some celebrity charity sailing thing out in Mar-blehead. Gately and the associate went that night to the A.D.A.’s private home in the upscale Wonderland Valley section of Revere, killed the power to the home with a straight shunt in the meter’s inflow, then clipped just the ground wire on the home’s pricey HBT alarm, so that the alarm’d sound after ten or so minutes and create the impression that the perps had somehow bungled the alarm and been scared off in the middle of the act. Later that night, when Revere’s and Marblehead’s Finest summoned them home, the A.D.A. and his wife found themselves minus a coin collection and two antique shotguns and nothing more. Quite a few other valuables were stacked on the floor of the living room off the foyer like the perps hadn’t had time to get them out of the house. Everything else in the burglarized home looked undisturbed. The A.D.A. was a jaded pro: he walked around touching the brim of his hat[14] and reconstructed probable events: the perps looked like they’d bungled disabling the alarm all the way and had got scared off by the thing’s siren when the alarm’s pricey HBT alternate ground kicked in at 300 v. The A.D.A. soothed his wife’s sense of violation and uncleanliness. He calmly insisted on sleeping there in their home that very night; no hoteclass="underline" it was like crucial to get right back on the emotional horse, in cases like this, he insisted. And then the next day the A.D.A. worked out the insurance and reported the shotguns to a buddy at A.T.F.[15] and his wife calmed down and life went on.
About a month later, an envelope arrived in the A.D.A.’s home’s exquisite wrought-iron mailbox. In the envelope were a standard American Dental Association glossy brochure on the importance of daily oral hygiene — available at like any dentist’s office anywhere — and two high-pixel Polaroid snapshots, one of big Don Gately and one of his associate, each in a Halloween mask denoting a clown’s great good professional cheer, each with his pants down and bent over and each with the enhanced-focus handle of one of the couple’s toothbrushes protruding from his bottom.
Don Gately had sense enough never to work the North Shore again after that. But he ended up in hideous trouble anyway, A.D.A.-wise. It was either bad luck or kismet or so forth. It was because of a cold, a plain old human rhinovirus. And not even Don Gately’s cold, is what made him finally stop and question his kismet.