Pareti rejects the goo

Pareti rejects the goo is the scene in which Joe Pareti finally confronts Goo as more than a disease or shapeless nuisance: it is a developing organism that has fashioned itself around its desire for form and has come to love him. Its telephone voice turns their past into a courtship story, but Pareti refuses that story and tells Goo that he has never loved it. The call ends in silence and a dial tone. Back at the hotel, his lovelessness seems to register across the room’s objects; then a mirror becomes not merely something he looks at, but a way of looking out into an altered world.

The Telephone and the Recovered Past

The exchange unfolds through a telephone speaking in a silken voice. Goo tells Pareti that it has tried to please him and recalls taking forms that he barely noticed: first a pretty dogwood, then a newspaper carrying something written about him. Those remembered transformations make its appeal more than a declaration of affection. Goo presents its changing shape as a series of attempts to get Pareti’s attention, while he has treated each form as unremarkable or failed to read its message.

Goo next recalls their meetings out on the warm sea. By its account, it was young and silly, tried to hide, and was lifted out of the water and brought close to Pareti. It describes him as patient and kind, and remembers trying to wriggle up a pole handle to kiss his fingers. The details recast an encounter that Pareti does not recognize, or does not accept, as the beginning of an intimate relationship. Goo calls itself his screwin’ goo, treating the nickname as evidence of shared familiarity; it also admits that it had tried other men before him. The remembered tenderness and the phone’s present-day speech together give the organism a personal history, although that history is voiced here through Goo’s account.

A Form Still in Progress

As the exchange becomes more bewildering, Pareti grasps that Goo has been underestimated. He recognizes it as a young organism, mute but not unintelligent, driven by the powerful desire to have a form. The passage describes Goo as evolving, then leaves the question of what it is evolving into open. Its changes are not presented simply as disguises: they are attempts to discover an identity through shapes that have so far failed to satisfy it.

Goo asks Pareti what he would like it to become. He timidly suggests a girl. Goo answers that it has tried that several times, along with being a collie and a horse, but says those forms felt wrong and were badly done. It offers other possibilities, including a rug or underwear. Its willingness to keep proposing shapes makes the conversation sound, at once, like a plea for acceptance and a practical negotiation over identity. Pareti briefly goes along with the question, then recoils, recognizing how readily the exchange’s lunacy can draw him in.

Rejection and the End of the Call

Pareti’s refusal becomes explicit and increasingly harsh. He says that he does not love Goo, calls it gray, ugly goo, and tells it that he hates it and wants it to love something like itself. Goo answers that nothing else is like it and that Pareti is the one it loves. The reply sharpens the mismatch: Goo presents its singularity as a reason its attachment has nowhere else to go, while Pareti treats that same singularity as part of what repels him.

When Goo warns him not to say that he never loved it, Pareti insists that he never did and says he only used it. He tells Goo that its love nauseates him. There is no reconciliation or softened answer. After waiting for a response, Pareti hears only an ominous, surly silence, followed by the dial tone: the telephone has hung up. The abrupt end gives the refusal a consequence within the scene. Pareti has not persuaded Goo to change form or desire; their conversation simply ceases when Goo withdraws from the call.

The Hotel, the Mirror, and What Follows

Pareti returns to an embroidered hotel room cunningly constructed for the mechanical equivalents of love. The chair, bed, overhead lamp, and even the usually unobservant bureau register that he feels no love. The narration turns his emotional state into something that appears legible to the room’s furnishings: being unloved is characterized as maddening, while loving is treated as a mandate. This does not reverse Pareti’s refusal. Instead, the surrounding objects make the absence of love feel pervasive, as if the room were built to detect a condition that Pareti cannot or will not remedy.

Looking up, Pareti sees a gilded mirror. He remembers associations between mirrors and passage: Alice’s Looking-Glass Land, Orpheus’s descent into Perdition, and Cocteau’s description of mirrors as gateways to hell. He asks himself what a mirror is and answers that it is an eye waiting to be looked through. When he looks into it, he finds himself looking out. Five further eyes appear to him in mirrors on the bedroom walls, ceiling, bathroom, and hall, and through them he sees the room’s objects anew: a lovelorn couch, a furious standing lamp, a closet door stiff-backed and mute with rage.

This altered vision follows Pareti’s declaration of lovelessness, but the text does not explain the mirrors as a direct result of his rejection. It does make the transition consequential: the room’s furnishings, already presented as aware of his emotional condition, now appear to have distinct emotional states and a capacity to threaten. Pareti looks through the mirrors and pictures a man sitting on a chair while the chair bites his leg. The closing question, asking whether that is what people do, leaves the scene on the boundary between an uncanny perception and a newly unsettling account of ordinary human relations. The rejection closes Goo’s telephone appeal; the mirror sequence opens Pareti’s perception onto a world in which the objects around him no longer seem passive.