Pages 87–93

30 April Y.D.A.U. — Marathe and Steeply · first-time reader guide · all scenes

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

A shale outcropping halfway up a mountainside above Tucson, Arizona, at sunset on April 30 — the same Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment header as Erdedy, Kate Gompert, and the attaché. Two men meet covertly: Rémy Marathe, a Québécois separatist in a wheelchair, machine pistol under his lap-blanket, and Hugh Steeply, a U.S. intelligence field-operative disguised — hugely, badly — as a woman. Both are first appearances; you haven't missed an introduction. And the prose does sound off ("the city Tucson"): it leans French because it sits close to Marathe's head — deliberate, not a misprint.

Terms, in order of appearance

fauteuil de rollent (p. 88) — French: wheelchair. Endnote 37 is the single word "Wheelchair"; that is the whole note.
Bröckengespenst (p. 88) — real optical effect: a low sun casts your shadow gigantic over the land below; endnote 38: Gespenst means specter, wraith.
Unspecified Services / O.U.S. (pp. 88–89) — Steeply's U.S. intelligence office; "B.S.S." (p. 89) is the separatists' mocking French name for it.
A.F.R. / Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents (p. 89) — Marathe's cell; M. Fortier its leader; endnote 39 introduces both — worth the flip.
InterLace pulse (p. 89) — the normal on-grid channel for cartridges (the attaché's setup, pp. 33–34); this copy came by physical mail instead.
samizdat (p. 91) — real Russian word for banned writing self-copied and passed hand to hand; Steeply applies it to the film.
"Personnes Qui On Doit" list (p. 91) — an Ottawa watch list; its full name appeared once before, on p. 64.
Rodney Tine / "Rod the God" (pp. 92–93) — Chief of Unspecified Services; credited architect of O.N.A.N. and of "Reconfiguration," a continental rearrangement this scene only names.
doubling / tripling (p. 92) — spy terms for layered betrayal; endnote 41 defines both in a line.

After you read: three things

1. One long sentence sets the floor. Mid-p. 89, between pratfalls, the narrator states it plainly: Marathe is not pretending to betray his cell — he has truly betrayed it, for his wife's medical care, while letting his superiors believe he only pretends to. Endnote 40 diagrams the hall of mirrors, and who would kill him for what. Flip for it; every line the two men trade afterward stands on that floor.

2. You already know the "razzle-dazzle." The incident Steeply came to ask about — a cartridge arriving by ordinary mail and everyone who looks at it stopping — is the Boston apartment you've been revisiting since p. 33 (pp. 33–37, 42, 54, 78–79, 87). Here the thing in the viewer finally gets names — "the Entertainment" (p. 89), "the samizdat" (p. 91) — and a count: "twenty-three human beings lost for all time" (p. 92). You know the inside of the story they're circling from outside.

3. Two names arrive without introductions — you've had them already. The unnamed "widow of the auteur" (p. 91) — a filmmaker's wife, a Québecer from L'Islet county, years on an Ottawa watch list — sounds a lot like the watch-listed academic you met on p. 64, whose husband was buried in L'Islet County on p. 65. And M. DuPlessis (p. 92), dropped mid-parenthesis: that's the name from the pp. 55–60 burglary. The scene never stops to explain either one; the placing is yours to do.

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