Page 97
One paragraph, back on the mountainside above Tucson: Marathe and Steeply again, the evening of 30 April, now at full dusk. Nothing is said and nothing happens — the temperature falls, the last sun-spikes probe between the peaks, the sky goes violet. It reads like a held establishing shot spliced into the middle of the locker-room afternoon, and that's exactly what it is. This is the third installment of the desert conversation (pp. 87–93, then 93–95), which by now has a rhythm: talk, then a silence the scenery fills.
Terms, in order of appearance
- digitate (p. 97) — real word: finger-shaped, in fingerlike projections.
- Tortolitas (p. 97) — the real mountain range northwest of Tucson, last seen swallowing the sun on p. 94.
After you read: three things
1. The two threads being braided are not simultaneous. The desert conversation is one continuous evening — 30 April, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (p. 88 onward). The locker room this paragraph interrupts is 3 November of the same year (p. 95). The book is cutting between an April dusk and a November afternoon as if crosscutting live footage; the alternation is a page-rhythm, not a clock. Keeping the two calendars separate now saves real confusion later in the evening's installments.
2. The cut turns on a pun. The locker-room quiz on the facing page was "Analogs v. digitals" (p. 96); the first image here is the "digitate spikes of the radial blades of the sun." Digital to digitate — the scene-change is hinged on one word shifting meaning. Once you see the book doing this, you'll catch it doing it elsewhere.
3. Continuity lives in the body, not the dialogue. Steeply is still hissing over the arm he scratched on his entrance pratfall back on p. 89 — the wound quietly carried across three installments. Around it, the paragraph is pure sensorium through Marathe: "many million floral pores begin slowly to open, hopeful of dew," small nocturnal rustlings without location, violet sky. The gentlest sentence in the whole desert serial sits here, in a scene with no information in it at all.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.