Page 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 one-page interpolation with no characters at all, dropped into the middle of the Tucson mountainside conversation (which resumes right after). The register swerves twice — nature-documentary, then public-safety brochure — to describe a herd of feral hamsters thundering across the yellow plains of "what used to be Vermont." It's a joke page that happens to carry the book's biggest geography lesson so far; nothing here is skippable filler.

Terms, in order of appearance

Great Concavity (p. 93) — name-dropped without explanation on pp. 59 and 67; here you finally see it: ex-Vermont-and-Maine territory, poisoned, walled, "now property of Canada."
uremic; fulvous; pedalferrous (p. 93) — real words: urine-hued; tawny yellow; of iron-and-aluminum-rich soil.
Experialist migration (p. 93) — experialist: Schtitt's word from p. 83, a nation that exports rather than acquires; evidently people once moved out of these territories en masse.
subsidized Year of the Whopper (p. 93) — another branded year-name; "subsidized" is the closest the book has yet come to explaining the naming system.
Ward and June (p. 93) — the Cleaver parents from Leave It to Beaver, the real 1950s sitcom.
annularly (p. 93) — ring-like, in cycles; an adjective the book keeps using (p. 65's "post-annular") and has not yet explained.
teratogenic (p. 93) — real word: causing birth defects.
ATHSCME (p. 93) — the industrial air-displacement company whose fans have appeared at E.T.A. (p. 52) and been audible from a sickbed (p. 61); here their fans guard a national border.
NNY (p. 93) — as in "Rome NNY," "Glens Falls NNY"; the abbreviation is all the scene gives.

After you read: three things

1. Read the brochure for its facts. Under "Feral hamsters are not pets. They mean business." sits hard map data: southern plains denuded, central-Maine forests "annularly overfertilized" into monstrous green, protective anodized-Lucite walls with giant fans holding back "teratogenic Concavity clouds," and safe passage south only. The silly voice is the delivery system for the novel's landscape.

2. "All these territories are now property of Canada" — four words, own paragraph. The burglary scene's dossier talk (p. 59) described separatists enraged by the U.S.A.'s "Experialistic 'gift' or 'return'" of territory to Canada — "an intolerable blow to Canadian sovereignty, honor, and hygiene." This page is that gift, seen from the ground. One oddity worth noticing and not resolving: p. 59 called it the Great Convexity; this page says Great Concavity. The book hasn't explained the flip.

3. The scale joke runs on names. A catastrophe visible from Boston and Montreal descends from two pets set loose by one boy — hamsters named Ward and June, sitcom America's model parents — and the boy, now at college, "has forgotten that his hamsters were named Ward and June." The narrator hands you the exact fact its own character lost, then assures you the hamsters wear "that implacable-herd expression," as if you'd know it. That mock-familiar omniscience is the page's engine.

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