Poor Tony Krause
Poor Tony Krause is the gender-dysphoric transvestite heroin addict of the Harvard Square boosting crews (the fur, the feather boa, the auburn wig, the red leather coat), a doctor's son turned street-figure. His material clusters at two poles: a scattered backstory (a Watertown obstetrician father who disowned him, a life on the street since he was seventeen) and a catastrophic YDAU descent that the novel renders as some of its most harrowing set-pieces. The timeline keeps his signature material verbatim: the drug-deal hotshot that kills his crewmate Bobby C; his theft of the woman's purse containing the artificial heart and the manhunt that follows; his connection to the Québecois Antitoi brothers; the public grand-mal withdrawal seizure on the Gray Line; the friendless hiding and starvation; the mugging of Kate Gompert; and the terminal A.F.R. capture where a fellow captive maims his fingers as an Entertainment-test sabotage. Where the book leaves his fate open — the 19 Nov A.F.R. field-experiment is the last we see of him — the timeline leaves it open too.
Appears with
Arc
Poor Tony's timeline is a decline staged as a stripping: the book introduces him already translated — a Watertown obstetrician's son turned Harvard Square street-figure, on the needle since seventeen, ritually mourned as dead by his own father in the Year of the Whopper (1, 2) — and then spends YDAU removing, one at a time, everything the translation ran on. His whole economy was charm: "someone kind had always found him charming, if things got dire enough to have to rent out his charms" (1). The events are the ledger of that account going empty. The Wo hotshot (4) costs him the crew — he reads the trap, silently lets Bobby C boot first, then informs, and is marked for de-mapping by the survivor. The heart-boost (5) costs him the Square: the book's blackest emblem, a dying woman chasing her own stolen heart through a crowd that smiles knowingly at what it takes for a lovers' quarrel — and Poor Tony smashing the still-beating prosthesis behind his own blowergrate. (The machine he destroys is, by the archive's closed loop, the very Jarvik model Marathe is betraying his cell to buy — the two timelines touch without either man knowing.) By autumn the couriers are dead, shipped, or hospitalized, and the charm economy is gone: "wholly friend- and connectionless," he does for the first time what he has dodged since seventeen — Withdraw (6).
The seizure sequence (6-8) is the timeline's center and one of the novel's most sustained anatomies of withdrawal: time itself going monstrous in a library men's room (the Old Cold Bird; time as the thing moving through him), then the Gray Line grand mal — the respectables edging away, the heels drumming Zuckung Zuckung Zuckung, and the terminal hallucination in which his convulsing body and his obstetrician father's delivery room fuse, the crowd yelling PUSH: the disowned son thrust back through his father's profession into the world, attended by no one. What follows is crueler for being small: the "notoriously deceptive" post-seizure well-being (9), the fragile hauteur of a man who wants to arrive at his last refuge with "liquid assets" rather than a snivel — which is the entire motive for the mugging (11), Kate Gompert whip-swung into a lightpost so that Poor Tony can pay a social call. Matty Pemulis's window-glimpse (10) gives the outside verdict: godawful, grave-ready, recognizable only by the coat and boa — the costume outliving the person.
The end is a closed circle the text leaves open. The Antitoi debt that made the shop his "place of very last resort" (3) was earned as a decoy for Québecois insurgents; when he flees down their alley (12) the shop already belongs to the A.F.R., and the timeline's last sight of him (13) is from the Assassins' side: a "mis-dressed" captive with multiple purses of suspicious nature, an expendable viewer in the digit-per-viewing Entertainment experiment, his fingers severed and slid under a door by Randy Lenz in his stead. From decoy for the cause to test-meat for it; from renting out his charms to having his digits spent as another man's currency. Whether he survives the storage room the novel does not say — no scene returns to him, and the one possible red-coat glimpse elsewhere in the book is both inferential and, in the story, earlier. Fate open, as written.
Timeline (13 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)
Consolidated unresolved date/identity puzzles; as printed throughout.
- Wo hotshot dating (4): scene 040 stamps it "24/25 Dec YDPAH" (Dec 2008); scene 069's Nov-YDAU narration recalls it as "that horrid thing with Wo and Bobby C last winter" and dates his consequent hiding "since last Xmas" — consistent (last Christmas from Nov 2009 = Dec 2008), not a clash. Noted for the story's ordering, which puts the hotshot BEFORE the July-YDAU heart theft.
- Heart-theft dating (5): scene 069 dates the theft "the black July day" and his Harvard-Square banishment "since 29 July"; the Moment article that reports it (scene 045) is datelined 10 Aug YDAU. The ~29 July theft and ~10 Aug report are consistent (report ~two weeks after). No clash; the "second North American citizen to receive a Jarvik IX" framing and the 4-block chase/death are the article's, as printed.
- yrstruly = Emil Minty (scene 040): the scene-040 first-person narrator ("yrstruly," who spells Equus Reese "Eckwus") is identified as Emil Minty by Carlisle (sec. 72); scene 069 confirms "Emil still had him marked for de-mapping." Recorded from Carlisle's identification, not re-derived here.
- Roy Tony ≠ Poor Tony: per the archive's catalog, the Brighton-Projects figure "Roy Tony" in scene 040 is a DIFFERENT person from Poor Tony Krause — flagged to prevent index collision.
- Antitoi-refuge timeline tension (9/12/13): Poor Tony flees to the Antitoi shop as his "place of very last resort" on 14 Nov (scenes 133/144), but by then the A.F.R. have already commandeered "the Cambridge shop of the Antitois" as their operations center (scene 163; the brothers are killed in the A.F.R. raid covered from the A.F.R. side in Marathe's timeline (event 17), scenes 145/147 — out of this roster). The text never explicitly narrates Poor Tony reaching the shop or being seized; his appearance as an A.F.R. test-subject by 19 Nov (13) plausibly follows from his fleeing straight into the A.F.R.-held Antitoi premises. INFERRED, flagged, not stated.
- Possible unnamed 148 sighting (inferred): scene 148 (Lenz POV) also passes "a sexless figure lying back... its shoes two different shoes, its hair a clotted mass around its face... chanting softly... 'Pretty, pretty, pretty'" in the same alley — the "two different shoes" match Poor Tony, who broke one heel on his pivot in scene 144, so this collapsed figure is plausibly Poor Tony post-chase. UNNAMED in the text; recorded as an inferred possible sighting only, covered under event 12.
- Fate open (13): the last attestation is Poor Tony's A.F.R. captivity, being digit-maimed as Lenz's test-substitute (scene 163, 19 Nov); the novel does not resolve whether he survives, and no later scene in this roster returns to him. Recorded open per the fate rule, POV-flagged (A.F.R./Marathe-focalized, Poor Tony reported).
- A possible earlier cameo, unconfirmed: the archive records a Carlisle inference (C12) that one of scene 185's red-coat "transvestals" at the Fackelmann finale is "presumably" Poor Tony — "flagged, never stated." In-world, the Fackelmann finale is Gately's using-days memory (Bobby C is alive and presiding there), so it PRECEDES event 4's Dec-YDPAH hotshot despite its late page placement. Consistent with the red-leather-fags crew of events 3-4; inferential, unconfirmed, not entered as an event.