Page 223
One page, no scene: a titled list, dropped without comment into the middle of Joelle's day — "CHRONOLOGY OF ORGANIZATION OF NORTH AMERICAN NATIONS' REVENUE-ENHANCING SUBSIDIZED TIME™, BY YEAR," followed by nine year-names in order, Year of the Whopper through Year of Glad. This is the skeleton key you've been owed for 220 pages: the sponsored year-headers you've been reading under finally get a sequence. Thirty seconds to read; worth a minute to actually collate.
Terms, in order of appearance
- Subsidized Time (p. 223) — the system the title implies: corporations buy naming rights to calendar years; "Revenue-Enhancing" and the ™ are doing the satire.
- the sponsors (p. 223) — all real products: Burger King's Whopper, Tucks hemorrhoid pads, the Dove ice-cream bar, Perdue chicken, Maytag dishwashers, Depend adult diapers, Glad trash bags. Only the Yushityu motherboard is invented.
- (sic) (p. 223) — year (6)'s official name is so long and mangled the list itself apologizes; it's the same Yushityu year from p. 171's title block.
After you read: three things
1. Do the collation. Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment — where Erdedy, the urine-day farce, Pemulis's DMZ, Ennet House, and Joelle's walk all live — is year (8) of nine. The Year of Glad, year (9), you have already seen: it's the header on p. 3, Hal's Tucson interview that opens the novel. Which means nearly everything you've been reading happens before the book's first scene, most of it exactly one year before. The book's scrambled time now has a spine.
2. Read the list as a portrait of the era. A calendar sold off as ad inventory, and what buys it: a burger, medicated pads, a diet-size ice-cream bar, a branded chicken, a dishwasher, dairy products generally, adult undergarments, trash bags. The years literally answer to consumables — several of them products for containing or disposing of what bodies and households excrete. The Whopper opens the era; Glad — a bag for waste — closes it.
3. Flip to endnote 78. Even the last year on the list isn't finished being sold: "Year of Glad" is, per the note, a naming contract still pending ratification — due 15 December, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, i.e., about five weeks after the pages you're currently in. You, holding p. 3's header in memory, are in the rare position of knowing how a bureaucratic subplot comes out before the book's characters do.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.