… (3c) I cannot help you too much with the facts surrounding Dr. Incandenza’s suicide. I know that he erased his own cartography in a grisly way. I was told that in the year leading up to his death Dr. Incandenza was abusing ethyl alcohol on a daily basis and was working on a whole new genre of film-cartridge that Orin at the time claimed was driving Dr. Inc insane.
… (3e) The supposed cause of their separation is that Dr. Incandenza began using her in his work more and more extensively and eventually asked her to perform in the prenominate completely radical new type of filmed entertainment that supposedly was driving him to a breakdown. They supposedly became close, James and Jo-Ellen, though Orin in my judgment is not a reliable source of information about their relationship.
The only other apposite fact I have — and I have this not from Orin but from an innocent female relative of mine who was (briefly) in a position to interface with our punter in an intimate and unguarded way impossible between hetero males — is that some incident occurred in the Incandenzas’ Volvo involving one of the windows and a word — all I am given is that O. reports that in the days prior to Dr. Incandenza’s felo de se, a so-called “word” appeared on a “fogged” “window” of Mrs. Inc’s pale yellow Volvo, and the word cast a conjugal pall in all sorts of directions. This is it.
… (5) The “vailed warning” (typo?) you refer to in my postal response to you is simply that you have to take what Orin says in a fairly high-sodium way. I am not sure I would stand and point at Orin as an example of a classic pathological liar, but you have only to watch him in certain kinds of action to see that there can be such a thing as sincerity with a motive. I have no idea what your relationship with Orin is or what your feelings are — and if Orin wishes it I am afraid I can predict your feelings for him will be strong — so I shall just tell you that for instance at E.T.A. I saw Orin in bars or at post-tournament dances go up to a young lady he would like to pick up and use this fail-safe cross-sectional pick-up Strategy that involved an opening like “Tell me what sort of man you prefer, and then I’ll affect the demeanor of that man.” Which in a way of course is being almost pathologically open and sincere about the whole picking-up enterprise, but also has this quality of Look-At-Me-Being-So-Totally-Open-And-Sincere-I-Rise-Above-The-Whole-Disingenuous-Posing-Process-Of-Attracting-Someone-,-And — I-Transcend-The-Common-Disingenuity-In-A-Bar-Herd-In-A-Particularly-Hip-And-Witty-Self-Aware-Way-,-And-If-You-Will-Let-Me-Pick-You-Up-I-Will-Not-Only-Keep — Being — This — Wittily, — Transcendently — Open — , - But — Will — Bring-You — Into — This — World-Of-Social-Falsehood-Transcendence, which of course he cannot do because the whole openness-demeanor thing is itself a purposive social falsehood; it is a pose of poselessness; Orin Incandenza is the least open man I know. Spend a little time with Orin’s Uncle Charles a.k.a. “Gretel the Cross-Sectioned Dairy Cow” Tavis if you want to see real openness in motion, and you will see that genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette’s syndrome.
It is not that Orin Incandenza is a liar, but that I think he has come to regard the truth as constructed instead of reported. He came by this idea educationally, is all I will add. He studied for almost eighteen years at the feet of the most consummate mind-fucker I have ever met, and even now he remains so flummoxed he thinks the way to escape that person’s influence is through renunciation and hatred of that person. Defining yourself in opposition to something is still being anaclitic on that thing, isn’t it? I certainly think so. And men who believe they hate what they really fear they need are of limited interest, I find.
… Again I will remind you that Orin and I are on the outs a bit at the moment, so some of my judgments may be temporarily short on charity.
One reason Orin is not a straight-out liar is that Orin is not a particularly skillful liar. The few times I saw him try consciously to lie were pathetic. This is one reason why his juvenile recreational-chemical phase passed so quickly compared to some of our colleagues at E.T.A. If you are going to do serious drugs while you are still a minor and under your parents’ roof, you are going to have to — lie often and lie well. Orin was a strangely stupid liar. I am recalling there was one afternoon on Mrs. Clarke’s day off when Mrs. Inc had to go off and overfunction somewhere and Orin was supposed to baby-sit Mario and Hal, who were at the kind of crazed-toddler age where they would hurt themselves if they were not closely supervised, and I was over, and Orin and I decided to dart up to the loft over the Weston house’s garage to smoke a bit of Bob Hope, which is to say high-resin marijuana, and in the loft, high, wandered disastrously into the sort of pseudophilosophical mental labyrinth that Bob Hope-smokers are always wandering into and getting trapped in and wasting huge amounts of time3 inside
a. This tendency to involuted abstraction is sometimes called “Marijuana Thinking”; and by the way, the so-called “Amotivational Syndrome” consequent to massive Bob Hope-consumption is a misnomer, for it is not that Bob Hope-smokers lose interest in practical functioning, but rather Marijuana-Think themselves into labyrinths of reflexive abstraction that seem to cast doubt on the very possibility of practical functioning, and the mental labor of finding one’s way out consumes all available attention and makes the Bob Hope-smoker look physically torpid and apathetic and amoti-vated sitting there, when really he is trying to claw his way out of a labyrinth. Note that the overwhelming hunger (the so-called “munchies”) that accompanies cannabis intoxication may be a natural defense mechanism against this kind of loss of practical function, since there is no more practical function anywhere than foraging for food.
an intellectual room they cannot negotiate their way out of, and by the time we hadn’t resolved the abstract problem that had put us into the labyrinth but just as always had gotten so hungry we abandoned it and stumbled out and down the loft’s wooden ladder, the sun was all the way on the other side of the sky over Wayland and Sudbury, and the whole afternoon had passed without Hal and Mario having received any protective supervision; and Hal and Mario somehow survived the afternoon, but when Mrs. Incan-denza returned that night she asked Orin what we and the supervised toddlers had done all afternoon and Orin lied that we had all been right here, respectively playing and supervising, and Mrs. Incandenza expressed puzzlement to Orin because she said she had tried to call the house several times that afternoon but was unable to get through, and Orin replied that while supervising he had herded the toddlers carefully into rooms with phone-jacks and made calls and had been on the phone several times for Jong periods of time for this that or the other thing, was why she had been unable to get through, at which Mrs. Incandenza (who is extremely tall) had blinked several times and looked very confused and said that but the phone had not been busy, it had just rung and rung and rung. At a juncture like this, men and boys get separated in terms of prevarication, I submit. And all Orin could come up with was a steady gaze as he said, as if from the Rose Garden: “I have no response to that.” Which incredibly stupid response he and I found very funny for weeks afterward, especially since Mrs. Incandenza never punished and refused to act as if she believed lying was even a possibility as far as her children were concerned, and treated an exploded lie as an insoluble cosmic mystery instead of an exploded lie.