Pages 33–37

Y.D.A.U. — the Medical Attaché sits down to watch · first-time reader guide · all scenes

When you've finished these pages: three things worth a second look, at the bottom.

1 April again — a second April Fools' Day, in a different named year: this is the Erdedy year, and it sits a few weeks before the 9 May phone call you just read. Everything else is new: the medical attaché, a Canadian-born, half-Arab ear-nose-throat specialist attached to the Saudi Minister of Home Entertainment's legation in Boston, narrated in a deadpan clinical present tense that is itself part of the joke. He is a first appearance, and no one you've met shows up. Sent home early on his wife's weekly tennis night, he finds the apartment empty, nothing docked to watch, and the day's mail on the sideboard.

Terms, in order of appearance

medical attaché (p. 33) — diplomacy: a specialist officer attached to a mission; the phrase's one prior appearance was in the p. 30 rant.
InterLace TelEntertainment (p. 33) — full name of the cartridge firm; Erdedy's rentals came from an InterLace outlet (p. 19).
Libertine Statue (p. 33) — the Statue of Liberty, as this narration renders her; libertine: dissolute.
Rub’ al Khali (p. 33) — real: the Empty Quarter, Arabia's great desert.
Candida albicans (p. 34) — real yeast; chronic mouth-and-sinus infections, here fed by an all-chocolate royal diet.
Töblerone (p. 34) — Toblerone, real Swiss chocolate bar, wearing an extra umlaut.
DeBakey (p. 34) — Michael DeBakey, real celebrity heart surgeon; hence "the DeBakey of maxillofacial yeast."
Pir Valayat (p. 34) — real Sufi teacher (Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan); the attaché's devoutly chemical-free tradition.
kif (p. 34) — North African term for cannabis.
Pulse-Matrix (p. 35) — InterLace's on-demand transmission service; ordering from it is so involved his wife handles it.
O.N.A.N. (p. 36) — the bare form of p. 3's O.N.A.N.C.A.A.; it franks the postage here, and is still unexplained.

After you read: three things

1. The year-names finally get their gloss, sidelong. The legation finds "the promotional subsidy of the North American calendar hilariously vulgar" (p. 33): the headers you've been reading are sponsorships — years sold to products — and the Libertine Statue wears "some type of enormous adult-design diaper" (p. 33) to match this year's sponsor. It takes foreign eyes to state plainly what no American narrator has bothered to explain.

2. The ritual is the man. Bib ironed, dinner tray molded over his head so his eyes never leave the viewer, a recliner that converts to a bed mid-sleep, a wordless attending wife: his whole evening is engineered so that watching requires nothing of him at all (p. 34). The scene spends most of its length on this apparatus; read it as the character portrait it is, and notice that tonight is the one night the apparatus is down.

3. The package is wrong in enumerated ways — and he does the enumerating. Plain brown, unlabelled, suburban-Phoenix postmark, "HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!" and a crude smiley where a return address belongs (p. 36); he himself notes his anniversary is in October and legation mail carries diplomatic seals. He'll "scan just enough of its contents to determine whether it is irritating or of an irrelevant nature" (p. 37). Then five pages of habitual tense — he wants, he is permitted — end on one specific clock reading: "the TP’s viewer’s digital display reads 1927h." (p. 37).

Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.