Pages 317–321
Back to the shale outcropping above Tucson: Rémy Marathe (wheelchair, machine pistol under the lap-blanket) and Hugh Steeply (U.S. operative, badly disguised as a woman), the covert conversation you've been returning to since pp. 87–93, now deep into the night of 30 April / 1 May. Nothing happens but talk — this installment is the argument itself, four pages of it — and the prose still leans French because it sits close to Marathe's head; that's deliberate. If the dateline feels off, it should: the rest of the book has been circling early November, and this ledge sits months earlier in the year.
Terms, in order of appearance
- l'aine des Etats Unis (p. 318) — French: the groin of the United States.
- samizdat (p. 318) — Russian: banned work self-copied and passed along; the two men's word for the Entertainment since p. 91.
- B.S.S. (p. 319) — the separatists' mocking name for Steeply's Office of Unspecified Services (since p. 89).
- F.L.Q. / les Fils (p. 319) — the F.L.Q. is real Québec-terrorist history (the 1970 October Crisis); the book salts real cells among invented ones.
- redemised (p. 319) — legal-flavored coinage from "demise": deeded back, returned.
- Guillaume DuPlessis (p. 319) — the name from the pp. 55–60 burglary, credited on p. 92 and here as the cells' late strategist.
- Sans-Christe (p. 319) — French-ish epithet: "without-Christ" Gentle.
- lume / nacreous (p. 320) — glow; pearly like mother-of-pearl: the city's starless dome.
After you read: three things
1. Marathe's premise comes first; the argument stands on it. The Entertainment "is a U.S.A. production... Made by an American man in the U.S.A. The appetite for the appeal of it: this also is U.S.A." (p. 318) — not a Canadian weapon but a home diagnosis, which is why he can say "You cannot kill what is already dead" (p. 319) and mean the exact way and time of death "no longer matters." You read this thesis's miniature six pages ago: the Schenectady driver who saw the impending headlights "as Grace" and floored it (p. 312).
2. Slow down at p. 320. The scene's dense center distinguishes freedom-from (no one constrains you) and freedom-to (someone taught you how to choose), and lands it with the parable of the rich father who cries "Freedom!" while his child eats only candy. The temples speech just before it — "now there is no shelter. And no map for finding the shelter of a temple" — is the same argument in older language. Steeply's rebuttals ("Cuba with snow"; "Human beings are not children") are real rebuttals; the scene doesn't referee.
3. Watch the dialogue eat itself. Steeply twice answers speeches Marathe hasn't made — "And now here we go. Now you will say..." (p. 320) — until Marathe names the move: "You speak to yourself, inventing sides... I am not even here, possibly, for listening to" (p. 321). Then the closing line notes that neither man has any idea how he'll get up or down from the shelf in the dark. The deflation is the scene's own comment on four pages of geopolitics.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.