IVIV20: Wedged under the door when he got back, 350-351 #2

[Paul Nightingale]

As Ch20 opens the action is, we infer, continuous: "... when he got home"
(351). We discover another visit in Doc's absence, this time Farley having
left film images of "the shindig at Channel View Estates"; we recall that,
at the time, Doc "[lost] an unknown amount of his day" and regained
consciousness to see "the evilly twinkling face of Detective Lieutenant
Bigfoot Bjornsen, LAPD" (22).

The line juxtaposes Doc's attitude, his suspicions (on 8: "... he'd probably
try to pop me for the whole thing") to a more formal labelling, one that
gives Bigfoot status, and we have already seen that Doc himself is sensitive
to his own lack of status. On 1 he informs both Shasta and the reader that
he "now" has an office; later, speaking to Aunt Reet, he has a dig at his
brother, "the one with the life" (112). On 350 Denis interrupts Doc
speculating about Bigfoot's "weird twisted cop karma", a sequence of
unanswered, indeed unanswerable, questions that recalls an earlier passage
on 95-96: here, Doc is trying to figure the plot, "overthinking myself into
brainfreeze" (96), and "Fritz handing back a smouldering roach" prefigures
the contribution made by Denis at the end of Ch19.

The reference to Farley takes us back to 9.2 on 141-142. As the narrative
got under way it was possible to track the passing days, even if the
narrative lost no opportunity to undermine this apparent concession to
realism. Nonetheless, the meeting with Farley took place on day 10 of the
novel; if we give any credence at all to the dating this means it has taken
Farley the better part of a month to provide the enlargements. (Of course,
"when he got back" is a tad ambiguous: we return to this later.)

Back on 141: "It was weird to Doc watching now, weird beyond easy imagining,
that somewhere inside the place, invisible, he was lying unconscious, that
with an X-Ray Specs attachment of some kind he could be looking at himself".
And so to 351: "Doc got out his lens and gazed into each image till one by
one they began to float apart into little blobs of color". The closer you
get, the less any of it seems to make sense, not least if the effects of the
"smouldering joint" (350) have yet to wear off.

Ch19 ended with Bigfoot's modernist quest to put together the pieces, his
pursuit of the "wholesome blond California family" (349) ongoing as Doc now
loses himself in the "glittering mosaic of doubt" (351), a postmodernist
refusal of such closure.

However, we haven't forgotten that Ch19 begins with Doc's awareness that he
wouldn't necessarily know if Bigfoot has following him: "One of many basic
things he had failed to learn about Bigfoot ..." etc (343; and cf his "isn't
it strange" speech, top of 33). So how should we take that chapter's ending:
"Doc saw a beat-up El Camino which could only be Bigfoot's ..." etc (350).
Even though the car "sound[s] different" he suppresses any doubt ("Bigfoot
must've ..." etc) in order that the narrative can invoke this particular
view of Bigfoot courtesy of Doc's pov.