Pages 126–127
Two micro-sections, each under its own 30 APRIL — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT header: the mountainside serial again, same night, same two men. The agenda items are small — why the A.F.R. centers its operations in Boston, whether copies of the Entertainment even exist, why Steeply is never fielded as himself — but the installment's real content is interior: one sentence about Marathe's wife, and one confession about his memory. The second section is just two lines long; that's not a misprint.
Terms, in order of appearance
- Convexity (p. 126) — the walled territory p. 93's brochure called the Great Concavity; Marathe, a Québecer, says Convexity.
- F.L.Q. (p. 126) — another, rowdier Québec-separatist outfit; endnote 47 sketches it. (A real F.L.Q. existed in 1960s–70s Québec.)
- les salles de danser; Val d'Or (p. 126) — French: dance halls; a real Québec mining town.
- ventricular restenosis (p. 126) — the heart disease Marathe's wife is dying of; endnote 48 is worth the flip — note when the disease became common.
- eidetic (p. 127) — possessing near-photographic recall.
- murated (p. 127) — from Latin murus: walled.
After you read: three things
1. Nine words carry the whole serial's weight. Mid-tradecraft, without transition: "Marathe's wife was dying slowly of ventricular restenosis. He thought: die twice." The phrase is Steeply's own, from p. 106 — Tine "would die twice" for Luria — now applied silently to the one attachment Marathe actually chose. And endnote 48 makes the disease itself political: rare before Interdependence, linked to dioxin. The territory his cause fights over is what's killing her.
2. An antidote enters the book — strictly as rumor and poker chip. The film's director "supposedly made" an anti-Entertainment "to counter the lethality"; U.S.O.U.S. suspects the promise of it is an F.L.Q. bargaining device, and Marathe grants only "craziness of rumors." Notice that neither side discusses a cure as a cure: it's leverage or it's nothing. That's all the scene establishes — a rumor, and the uses a rumor has.
3. Watch the watching, then the two-line coda. Each man reads the other's technique: Steeply's preening-delay interviewer's device, the not-yet-feminine thumb-flick, the fingernail protocol Marathe has known since youth. Marathe is filing "every word and gesture" for Fortier — the man he's betraying — while the A.F.R. believes him eidetic, which he privately knows is false: he "could remember several incidents of crucial observations he had failed to later recall." Then the odd second section: a new date-header, and only the report that Marathe called the U.S.A. "Your walled nation" or "Your murated nation" — like an observation filed late, by a memory that just told you it drops things.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.