Pages 321–342
Interdependence Day — Sunday 8 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment — on E.T.A.'s East Courts 6–9. A dozen of the younger kids play Eschaton: a global-thermonuclear-war game where 400 dead tennis balls are 5-megaton warheads, laundry marks the strategic targets, four courts stand for the whole earth, and thirteen-year-old calculus prodigy Otis P. Lord administers it all from a rolling food cart. Hal, Pemulis, Axford, Troeltsch, and Struck spectate, variously chemically altered, from the Gatorade pavilion; behind West House a mint-green sedan idles, unexplained, the whole time. Twenty-two pages, thick with game jargon and math — and a heads-up: it ends with real children really hurt.
Terms, in order of appearance
- Gaudeamus igitur (p. 321) — real student hymn, "So let us rejoice, while we are young"; the section header's Latin.
- Eschaton (p. 321) — real theology term, from Greek: the end of all things.
- Mean-Value Theorem (p. 323) — real calculus; endnote 123 is a whole dictated lecture on it — worth the flip (see thing 3).
- Rand McNally (p. 323) — real map publisher; the hanging classroom map the courts reproduce.
- MIRV (p. 324) — real Cold War acronym: one missile, multiple warheads; here a knotted jockstrap of balls.
- DEFCON (p. 325) — real U.S. defense-readiness scale; the game's numbering escalates upward.
- thanatoptic (p. 327) — coined from thanatopsis, "a contemplation of death."
- enfilade (p. 327) — military: raking fire along the length of a line.
- strontium-90 (p. 328) — real fallout isotope; Lord's damage math runs on real physics.
- Tenuate (p. 329) — real prescription diet-pill stimulant, from Pemulis's p. 214 shopping trip.
- duBois (p. 332) — Boston slang: a marijuana cigarette (as around p. 75).
- éminence grise (p. 333) — French, "gray eminence": the unofficial power behind a throne; Pemulis's Eschaton role.
After you read: three things
1. Map versus territory is the whole machine. The game runs "almost parodically adult" (p. 327) until the season's first snow falls and J. J. Penn asks whether snow alters blast parameters — drawing Pemulis's scream: "It's snowing on the goddamn map, not the territory, you dick!" (p. 333). Then Ingersoll reasons his way to firing a warhead at a player's head (pp. 335–36), and Lord can't find a players-aren't-targets rule in any file because, Pemulis argues, it's "preaxiomatic" (pp. 337–38). Representation collapses into real blood in about ten minutes; every step of the collapse gets argued out loud.
2. Two sentences about Hal, both buried. Mid-paragraph, mid-brawl-buildup: Hal takes the passed cigarette and smokes "in public without even thinking about it or having consciously decided to" (p. 332) — the boy whose whole habit since pp. 49–54 has been elaborate secrecy. And in the last beat, "Hal feels at his own face to see whether he is wincing" (pp. 342–43) — checking from outside what his own face is doing, which sounds a lot like the trouble you watched from inside in the book's opening chapter (pp. 3–14).
3. Read the endnotes as you go; the narration is rigged. Endnote 127 lets slip that the account's embellishments are "Inc amusing himself"; endnote 123's math lecture arrives dictated by Pemulis, complete with somebody's editorial [sic]s; endnote 130 corrects the narrator's own quotation of Pemulis. Who is actually writing this chapter, and with whose annotations, is answered down in the notes and nowhere in the text.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.