Broullîme
Broullîme is the A.F.R.'s scientist. A senior member of Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents — the Québécois wheelchair-assassin cell hunting a duplicable Master of the lethal Entertainment — he is named, with M. Fortier, as one of Rémy Marathe's "A.F.R. superiors" — and elsewhere counted among Marathe's "comrades-on-wheels" — and he is specifically the kind of mind Marathe measures himself against: the narration says Marathe "had not the capacity for abstractions of his A.F.R. superiors Fortier and Broullîme." Everything the book shows him doing is applied technique: he fits the volunteer Tassigny with EEG wires for the cell's first supervised viewing, estimates to the hour how long the film's captured victims have left, verifies a prisoner's statements "to within +/− (.35) of assurance," and lectures during long stakeouts on the sweat-chemistry of grave mental illness.
His defining act is the orthopedic-saw experiment. Once the A.F.R. secures a copy of the Entertainment and begins acquiring test-Subjects, Broullîme rolls himself blindfolded into the storage room, informs the strapped-down Subject that every further replay of the film now costs one digit from his extremities — and hands him the saw. The goal is a statistical matrix relating (n), the number of viewings, to (t), the time taken to sever a digit for the next one: proof that the film's pull is "incapable of satiation," that "the ninth digit of extremities had to come off as quickly and willingly as the second." The text's own gloss on him is his best one-line character note in the book: "expertise in combination with skepticism de coeur" — he designs the cruelty competently while privately doubting the premise.
By the last we see of the experiment it has curdled: a wig-wearing new Subject is caught feeding a second Subject's severed digits under the door instead of his own, marring the statistics so badly that Fortier weighs letting Broullîme conduct a lethal "technical interview" of the saboteur "for reasons of anger only." The scientist's matrix ends in fouled data and contemplated murder-by-temper — the cell's instrument of reason revealed as one more instrument.
The name is unstable on the page — mostly "Broullîme," sometimes "Brullîme" (both forms inside a single sentence-run in scene 163), and once, in Steeply's mouth, "your own Dr. Brullent or whomever." This page carries every form as printed and keeps the identifications at their honest strength (see Dating notes).
Appears with
Arc
Broullîme is the A.F.R.'s instrument of reason, and the book builds him with unusual economy: two desert-scene references establish the category (the superior whose "capacity for abstractions" Marathe knows he doesn't have), and then the November sequence shows what the category does when the cell finally holds the thing it has been hunting. What it does is science. EEG leads on a volunteer, survival estimates to the hour, an informant verified to a stated confidence interval, a lecture on the sweat-chemistry of madness to pass a stakeout — every appearance is the same gesture, the reduction of something human and terrible to a measurable quantity.
The saw experiment is where that gesture meets the novel's central object, and it is worth saying plainly what the matrix is: an attempt to prove, with statistical assurance, the book's own thesis about terminal entertainment — that the appetite has no floor, that "the ninth digit of extremities had to come off as quickly and willingly as the second." Broullîme is the one character who treats the Entertainment not as temptation, weapon, or grief-artifact but as a dose-response problem; his blindfold is the experiment's whole ethic in one image, the researcher shielding himself from the phenomenon he prices in other men's fingers. And the text gives him exactly one interior note, fused to his job description: "expertise in combination with skepticism de coeur." He doubts the premise and runs the protocol anyway — which makes him the precise inverse of Marathe, his oldest comrade from the train-crossing days, who believes and cannot act, who has "lost the belly" and quadruples in secret while Broullîme's never-dramatized doubt changes nothing at all.
The book's last word on him is deflation. By 19 November the experiment is fouled — a wigged street-man gaming the digit-count with another captive's fingers — and the cell's scientist is reduced to "technical trouble-killing" while Fortier weighs lending him out for a lethal interview justified by nothing but anger. The data are marred, the method is farce, and the violence the matrix was supposed to dignify stands suddenly undressed. A supporting figure, firmly: he exists to make the A.F.R.'s fanaticism look, for a few pages, like rigor — and to show how thin the look is.
Timeline (9 events)
Key to the timeline
Events are ordered by when they happen in the story, not by where they fall in the book's pages.
★ marks a pivotal event — one that carries this character's arc. Unmarked events add texture around it.
Where an event says how it is known, that basis is one of: narrated (the narration states it), recalled (a character's own memory), reported (secondhand or testimony), claimed (asserted by someone with a stake), or disputed (conflicting versions). Conflicting details are quoted as the book has them rather than resolved.
Dating notes (apparatus)
- Two dated clusters. All Broullîme material sits in two runs: (a) the 30 Apr–1 May YDAU Marathe–Steeply desert parley (038, 088, 098), where he is only named or relayed; (b) the November YDAU Antitoi/field-test sequence (145, 147, 149, 153, 163 + n303), where he acts. Book order and date order coincide throughout.
- Header "?" marks carried as printed. Scenes 145 ("?/9-11 Nov YDAU") and 147 ("?/12-14 Nov YDAU") open their date fields with the digest's own modeled-uncertainty mark; reproduced, not resolved.
- n303 is anchor-derived, not self-dated. The note has no dateline; its call-site sits at scene 147's "the found copy was Read-Only" clause, so event 5 rides 147's ?/12-14 Nov window and says so.
- Event 9 is narrated, off-page. "Thrust into technical trouble-killing" is a state report inside the Fortier/Marathe planning frame; Broullîme performs no staged on-page beat in 163. The archive's indexes count 163 among the scenes he is present in — left as they stand, flagged here as a borderline presence call.
- Name-form ledger (every form carried as printed; not harmonized):
- "Broullîme" — dominant form: 038, 088, 145, 147 (throughout), 149, 153, n303, and once in 163. VOCAB's canonical form.
- "Brullîme" — 098 (Marathe's dialogue, "M. Brullîme") and 163 twice ("Brullîme’s field-experiment," "allow Brullîme"). Scene 163 prints BOTH forms inside one continuous sentence-run about the same field-test referent — near-certain same-person evidence, but an inference from co-occurrence, not a stated equation; carried flagged at that strength. (The Carlisle reference layer's C07 note reads the forms as one person — corroboration, not the basis.)
- "Dr. Brullent" — Steeply's spoken form, 098 only, hedged by Steeply's own "or whomever." That Brullent = Broullîme is an INFERENCE from the name echo, the same conversation's "M. Brullîme," and the described function (the cell's Entertainment-testing specialist); Steeply is also the book's habitual mangler of Québecois names. Held as probable, not certain.
- The 147 "Subject" whereabouts clause is carried in the source text's own terms. Whose whereabouts the radio engineer's statements concerned is the source text's capital-S "Subject," un-identified in the cited span; this page does not resolve it.
- The two 163 test-subjects are identified only on other pages. The wigged digit-substituter and the mis-dressed second Subject carry reader-level identifications (Randy Lenz; Poor Tony Krause) on the Randy Lenz and Poor Tony pages, argued there from the descriptions; this page keeps 163's descriptions as printed and cross-refers. See also the Rémy Marathe and M. Fortier pages for the same November operations from their sides.
- "diabétique" as printed (147, of Joubet); not anglicized in the quoted layer.
- Name forms: "M. Broullîme" / "Broullîme" (038, 088, 145, 147, 149, 153, 163, n303), "M. Brullîme" / "Brullîme" (098, 163), "Dr. Brullent" (098, Steeply, flagged).