Pages 211–219

Late October Y.D.A.U. — Madame Psychosis on the air · first-time reader guide · all scenes

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

Same 4 November as the hat-lining bus loop (pp. 169–171), lunch hour, Pemulis's room: thirteen 50-mg tablets of DMZ displayed in the upturned yachting cap for Hal and Axford — "The Great White Shark of organo-synthesized hallucinogens" — with lore, sale fantasias, and one flashback to the acquisition itself, a dumbshow negotiation in a Cambridge junk-and-cartridge shop run by two armed Canadians. Then, fence-side on a raw 11/5 evening, the three calendar-engineer a window to actually take the stuff. A lot of tournament names fly by; the scheduling matters less than the reasoning being used to justify it.

Terms, in order of appearance

Sierpinski gasket (p. 213) — real fractal: a triangle built of ever-smaller triangles, self-repeating at every scale; hand-drawn, enormous, on Pemulis's wall.
titration (p. 213) — real pharmacology: working out dose against effect; "The literature's mute on the titration."
Leavenworth (p. 214) — real: the Army's Kansas prison, site of the drug's defining anecdote.
Ethel Merman (p. 214) — real: the brass-lunged Broadway belter; hence Axford's phone-code suggestion, "Ethel."
Nuck (p. 216) — the book's slur for Canadian; Pemulis's contempt is doing the negotiating.
E.W.D. (p. 216) — Empire Waste Displacement, whose land barges and dumpsters have haunted the background since the Erdedy scene (pp. 25, 27); the catapult itself glossed p. 121.
Jr. Davis / Jr. Wightman (p. 217) — real competitions: Davis Cup and Wightman Cup are national team tennis events; these are the junior squads.
WhataBurger Invitational (p. 217) — the Thanksgiving junior tournament in Tucson; the same one named on p. 16.

After you read: three things

1. Everything known about DMZ is a warning, and they hear an invitation. The lore: CIA-era test subjects "written off as casualties of peace"; the Leavenworth soldier whose massive dose "picked his mind up and carried it off somewhere and put it down someplace and forgot where," leaving him doing an eerily perfect Ethel-Merman-impression voice. From this the trio derives a "duty, almost, to the spirits of inquiry and good trade practice" to sample it themselves. Watch the rationalization run; nobody contradicts it.

2. Hal hears himself (pp. 213–215, 218). His one condition is scholarly — a physical med-library check that the compound is organic and nonaddictive — but he proposes two or three tablets "knowing he sounds greedy," and arranges them into a little heart-shaped E.T.A. hilltop. Later, forecasting the aftermath, he claims hallucinogens leave him "a kind of pale sweet aura, a luminescence." "Halation, Axford observed" — the word Rader defined on p. 96, a halo on film around a light source; endnote 76, on where Hal's glow comes from, is the flip most worth making in this scene.

3. The sellers didn't know what they had (pp. 215–216). The flashback: "reputed former Canadian insurgents," small arms slung, mirrors multiplying Pemulis's head-waggle into "a kind of group psychomotor seizure," and 650 mg of the continent's scarcest compound sold for trinket prices — "like fucking Nucksters." After p. 144's tally of Canadian cells, note how casually that world and the students' pocket-money economy just touched.

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